Paramount case was actually of greater consequence. The PCA's effective power came from the major companies' agreement that they would not exhibit any movie that did not have a seal; thus PCA approval was vital to a movie's profitability in the American domestic market. The divorcement of exhibition from production and distribution that followed the Paramount decision meant that the PCA could no longer enforce exclusion. In 1950 independent distributor Joseph Burstyn refused to make two minor cuts in Bicycle Thieves ( 1948) to accommodate Breen's PCA, and the movie, Which won the Best Foreign Film Oscar that year, was exhibited in first-run theatres without a seal. Three years later, United Artists refused to modify Otto Preminger's comedy The Moon Is Blue ( 1953) as Breen demanded. It became the first major company production to be exhibited without a seal, and was the fifteenth-highest grossing movie of 1953.
The PCA's authority had depended on vertical integration and the majors' oligopoly. Without constitutional sanction, a market censorship as rigid as Breen had imposed was no longer viable. As movie attendance declined in the 1950s, production and exhibition strategies changed so that fewer movies were targeted at an undifferentiated audience. A new genre of 'adult' movies emerged, often adapted from bestsellers and drawing audiences by their sensational treatment of serious social subject-matter that television would not handle. Movies such as The Man with the Golden Arm ( 1955) and Baby Doll ( 1956) led to revisions in the Production Code in 1954 and 1956, after which 'mature' subjects such as prostitution, drug addiction, and miscegenation could be shown if 'treated within the limits of good taste'. Concerns about the cinema's influence on behaviour persisted, however; one source of anxiety being the treatment of juvenile delinquency in movies like The Wild One ( 1953) and Blackboard Jungle ( 1955).
In 1954 Joe Breen retired as director of the PCA. He was replaced by his long-serving deputy, Geoffrey Shurlock, who would oversee the increasing liberalization of Code procedures and practices. Under Breen, the PCA had been among the most powerful influences on Hollywood production for more than twenty years, and although his personal control over the PCA's standards has often been exaggerated, the classical Hollywood of the studio system would have been unrecognizable without the determining market censorship the PCA exercised.
Hunnings, Neville March ( 1967), Film Censors and the Law.
Jacobs, Lea ( 1991), The Wages of Sin.
Koppes, Clayton R., and Black, Gregory D. ( 1987), Hollywood Goes to War.
Leff, Leonard J., and Simmons, Jerold L. ( 1990), The Dame in the Kimono.
Maltby, Richard ( 1993), "The Production Code and the Hays Office".
Moley, Raymond ( 1945), The Hays Office.
MARTIN MARKS
The history of music for sound films falls into two distinct periods: the first extending from 1925 to 1960, the second from 1960 to the present. In terms of style, there are great differences between them, owing to changing personnel, aesthetic goals, economic conditions, and production techniques. If the division is somewhat arbitrary, it does reflect the fact that certain approaches to film-scoring were consistently followed from the 1930s to the 1950s, only to be challenged and replaced by more 'modern' practices from the 1960s to the 1980s. Moreover, within the earlier period one finds three linked phases of development: wide-ranging experiment in the late 1920s and early 1930s, stylistic and technological standardization from the mid-1930s to the mid-1940s, and, in the decade and a half that followed, a steady broadening of film music's functional and expressive potential.
In the beginning was not the word but music, and initially it seemed as if feature sound films would be little different from silents, save for their fixed, synchronized accompaniments. The earliest example, Warner Bros.' Don Juan ( 1926), was given an orchestral score by two experienced hands, William Axt and David Mendoza of the Capitol Theater in New York, and like their previous scores this one was a compilation, intermixed with some original music. What set it apart was that it was recorded (in performance by the New York Philharmonic under Henry Hadley) and played back on discs coupled to projectors by means of the 'Vitaphone' process. Moreover, in place of the customary live performances that often preceded the presentation of important films, this première included a onehour programme of Vitaphone shorts, plus a brief filmed
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Questia, a part of Gale, Cengage Learning. www.questia.com
Publication information:
Book title: The Oxford History of World Cinema.
Contributors: Geoffrey Nowell-Smith - Editor.
Publisher: Oxford University Press.
Place of publication: Oxford.
Publication year: 1997.
Page number: 248.
This material is protected by copyright and, with the exception of fair use, may not be further copied, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means.
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