BRNO LECTURE 6

Increasingly, the history of the American film industry is being rewritten as a history driven by
exhibition rather than production.  This change in orientation begins to reveal the industry as a
politically much more complex field than one determined solely by the representation of politics in
movies.

In February 1936, MGM purchased the screen rights to the Nobel Prize-winning author Sinclair
Lewis’s novel It Can’t Happen Here, about a fascist takeover of the United States, and then decided
not to produce a film version of it, allegedly as a result of pressure from, variously, the Hays
Office, the Republican party, and the German and Italian governments threatening a boycott.  MGM
insisted that they had made a purely business decision based on the likely expense of the
production.  Such decisions were not uncommon: the industry purchased more source material than it
could use, and to a degree the purchase of material that could not be produced was regarded as an
inevitable waste cost in a style industry.  Two years earlier, for instance, MGM had more quietly
made the same decision - under heavy pressure from the MPPDA - not to produce James M. Cain’s The
Postman Always Rings Twice, which they had purchased prior to publication.  In an important sense,
MGM’s account of their action was exactly correct; the company was weighing the loss of an
investment of $200,000 in script purchase and development against the almost certain exclusion from
the German and Italian markets for all the company’s products – and possibly all the industry’s
products, together with the loss of goodwill the production would engender – for a movie that, on
the strength of the box-office performance of other films with a political theme, was unlikely to
repay the financial risks involved.

However, the company’s decision over It Can’t Happen Here was categorized as an instance of the
industry demonstrating its timidity and bowing to political pressure.  The book’s author, Sinclair
Lewis protested that the MPPDA had decided

that a film cannot be made showing the horrors of fascism and extolling the advantages of Liberal
Democracy because Hitler and Mussolini might ban other Hollywood films from their countries if we
were so rash. ... Democracy is certainly on the defensive when two European dictators, without
opening their mouths or knowing anything about the issue, can shut down a American film.[1]

The industry discussed the matter in different terms.  Against Lewis’s assertion that “this
decision raises an extremely important and critical question concerning free speech and free
opinion in the United States,”[2] Terry Ramsaye, editor of Motion Picture Herald, suggested that it
“has all of the vast significance that would attach to a decision by ... Armour and Company to
discontinue a brand of ham.” Accurately predicting that because of the fame of the novel and the
eminence of its author the story would be inscribed into Hollywood’s history, Ramsaye observed,

Mr. Lewis sees Art, Expression, Thought, grabbed by the neck and throttled by a czar ... no less.
Human rights are crushed under heel.  A great medium is hamstrung.  Democratic America cringes
before Herr Hitler and the duce.

... It is probable that Mr. Lewis, and many, many others, do not understand the status of the
motion picture, in the eyes, or even minds, of his and our beloved and so infernally democratic
public.  If a reader of his works, for instance, take violent exception to the content, that reader
is merely annoyed with Mr. Lewis.  He is not outraged at Doubleday, Doran and Company, and at the
whole art of the printed word.  But the motion picture spectator, when he is annoyed, is annoyed
with “the damned movies” and likely as not the theatre where he saw the annoying picture. ... If
his publishers were continuously on a battlefront defending the book business from attempts at
punitive taxation, from measures of censorship, from measures addressed at nationalization of their
industry, they would perhaps at times weigh the possible effect of product of political implication
and influence.[3]

As if to underline Ramsaye’s final point, the next issue of the Herald contained a report on
proposed legislation affecting the industry introduced in the 13 state legislatures then in
session.  These legislatures had in front of them 48 measures affecting the industry, the great
majority of them hostile and many of them taxation measures directed at the exhibition sector.  The
same article also reported 14 measures before Congress, most of which were concerned with
prohibiting the industry’s distribution practices of block booking.  During March 1936 a
subcommittee of the House Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce held hearings on these
measures, one of five Congressional hearings on the industry held in the seven years between 1934
and 1941.  The situation in the state legislature that I have described also represents a norm of
the level of political activity affecting the industry.

The decision not to produce It Can’t Happen Here certainly was not politically neutral.  The
Classical Hollywood Cinema was a political institution, with an active engagement in politics at
both the federal and state levels, and, indeed, in international affairs, too.  But the
overwhelming majority of its political activity was immediately defensive in nature, undertaken, as
Ramsaye suggested, for the primary purpose of sustaining the profitability of the industry’s
enterprises.  Certainly the MPPDA warned MGM off It Can’t Happen Here because of the likely effect
on the company’s access to foreign markets; not simply the German and Italian markets but also the
British and French, and to the likelihood that some US censor boards would also reject it as not
being “good for the nation at large in these unsettled times.” Breen also told L.B Mayer that he
considered that there was a “general industry policy matter involved in ... whether or not the
industry as an industry is disposed to sponsor a picture of this nature.”[4] It was certain, he
thought, that a picture based on this material would be subject “to the most minute criticism on
all sides.” It would “result in enormous difficulty to your studio ... It is almost certain that
the picture will be rejected pretty generally throughout the world, and it is more than likely that
if it is permitted a permit for exhibition in this country, such permit will be obtained only after
considerable negotiations and conference with political censor boards everywhere.”[5]

Within the discourse of the industry this was an economic and not an ideological consideration:
throughout the 1930s the industry – certainly as represented by the MPPDA – voiced a commitment to
what Hays called “‘pure entertainment’ – entertainment unadulterated, unsullied by any infiltration
of ‘propaganda.’”[6]

“Propaganda” was only one of the pollutants that might affect the purity of entertainment; it
became more prominent in public attention in the second half of the 1930s because of the successful
machinations of the MPPDA in containing criticism of the representation of sex and crime in 1934.
In 1938, Hays argued that,

In a period in which propaganda has largely reduced the artistic and entertainment validity of the
screen in many other countries, it is pleasant to report that American motion pictures continue to
be free from any but the highest possible entertainment purpose. ... The distinction between motion
pictures with a message and self-serving propaganda is one determinable only through the process of
common sense.  ... Entertainment is the commodity for which the public pays at the box-office.
Propaganda disguised as entertainment would be neither honest salesmanship nor honest showmanship.
... The movie theatre can afford the soft impeachment that most pictures reflect no higher purpose
than to entertain, with “escapist” entertainment if you please.[7]

The “common sense” of the industry was embodied in the Production Code Administration: the case of
It Can’t Happen Here was an instance of its operation in regulating the quality of a consumable
commodity.  The difficulties the Association faced over film content in the late 1930s were largely
the results of its successes in imposing a definition of entertainment as recreation.  In the
period of Production Code Administration Director Joseph Breen’s greatest ascendancy over Hollywood
production, between 1934 and 1938, he made little distinction in his correspondence with the
studios between a decision under the Code, advice regarding the likely actions of state or foreign
censors, and the implementation of “industry policy” in response to pressure groups, foreign
governments and corporate interests.  Industry policy was, like self-regulation, designed to
prevent the movies becoming a subject of controversy or giving offense to powerful interests.
Breen defended his practice of linking this strategy with Code enforcement by arguing that the
studio executives supported his “vigorous” tone in urging eliminations of any kind on producers.

The studios have come, in recent years, to look to us for sound guidance on matters of political
censorship ... members of the Production Code Administration are regarded by producers, directors,
and their staffs, as “participants in the processes of production” whose experience is at the
disposal of the producing companies from the moment a story idea begins to germinate until the
picture finally leave the cutting room.

Since he saw the PCA as representing a national consensus on political issues as well as moral
ones, he denied that there was anything “sinister” in his rejecting material that characterized “a
member of the United States Senate as a ‘heavy’; or ... in which police officials are shown to be
dishonest; or ... in which lawyers, or doctors, or bankers, are indicted as a class.”[8]

In 1936, as part of the Association’s lobbying campaign to defeat federal block-booking proposals,
and by way of demonstrating the effectiveness of its self-regulation, the PCA prepared bound
volumes of some of its decisions, and circulated them among legislators.[9]  Against their
celebratory intent, these volumes substantiated the accusations of political liberals that
“self-regulation ... has degenerated into political censorship.”  It Can’t Happen Here was cited as
an example, as were PCA decisions over They Won’t Forget and two films dealing with the Spanish
Civil War, Last Train to Madrid and Blockade.  Breen was unrepentant in defending his rejection of
Clown in Congress because it “treats national politics in an unfavorable light,” or Stevedore
because

it deals with such an inflammatory subject.  Portraying as it does the unfair treatment of the
blacks by the whites, and touching upon the subject of an alleged attack by a black man on a white
woman, an attempted lynching of a negro. ... Surely the organized motion picture industry is
performing a useful public service when spokesmen for the Association insist that screen material
involving racial conflicts between whites and blacks be handled in such a way as to avoid fanning
the flame of race prejudice.  The film FURY proves conclusively that there is a way to handle
satisfactorily and with tremendous dramatic power the heinous crime of lynching without including
the racial angle.”

He justified such actions on two grounds.  One was pragmatic: he was cautioning producers against a
production that might prove financially profitable but also embarrass or endanger the industry as a
whole “by affording pressure groups ... a further opportunity to call for governmental
interference.  There was, he maintained,

nothing “sinister” about this.  People engaged in every line of endeavor are constantly forced to
choose between immediate advantage and the attainment or maintenance of fundamental objectives.
The reconciliation of this inevitable conflict is one of the chief functions of this or any other
worthwhile trade association.[10]

The other ground of Breen’s defense was that he saw the PCA as representing a national consensus on
political issues as well as on moral ones; indeed, he understood political issues primarily in
moral terms.  If a specifically Catholic sensibility emerged anywhere in the activity of the PCA,
it was in this equation of the moral and the political.  It was the overt anti-Communism of
official Catholicism, and its attitude toward Spain in particular, that led to the strongest
accusations of an excessive Catholic influence in the PCA.  Blockade, approved while Breen was on
vacation in Europe, was attacked by the Knights of Columbus as Communist propaganda in 1938.
Although Breen defended the film, he did so with little genuine conviction.  In December 1937 he
had proposed to contacts in the Vatican a plan to prohibit films involving “divorce and the
re-marriage of divorced persons,” and films in which “Communist propaganda” had been “injected.”
Breen proposed using the power of the foreign market, via Catholic pressure on government
censorship, to prohibit such films in enough countries as to render them unprofitable to the
producers.[11]  Breen was not alone in seeing the suppression of Communist propaganda was a moral,
not a political issue.  In the middle of the Blockade controversy, Martin Quigley, Breen’s
co-conspirator in the invention of the Legion of Decency, proposed an amendment to the Production
Code, that

No motion picture shall be produced which shall advocate or create sympathy for political theories
alien to, and subversive of, American institutions, nor any picture which perverts or tends to
pervert the theatre screen from its avowed purpose of entertainment to the function of political
controversy. (Quigley to Hays, July 11, 1938, MPA 1939 Production Code file)

But by mid-1938, the PCA was becoming controversial precisely because of its success in keeping
controversy from the screen, and Breen’s practice of linking Code, censorship and “industry policy”
issues together was itself becoming a threat to the industry.  The location of that threat was
identified by the MPPDA’s chief Washington lobbyist, Ray Norr, who argued that under Breen, the PCA
was seeking

to take on a vastly greater field than was ever intended by the industry’s purpose - which was to
adopt and maintain a moral code in the production of motion picture entertainment. ...
Self-regulation ... has degenerated into political censorship which has made it difficult for the
industry to respond to public demand for more vital entertainment. ... the object now is to limit
the jurisdiction of the Motion Picture Production Code in various respects.[12]

The immediate cause of this concern was  the anti-trust suit filed by the Department of Justice in
July 1938, which implicated the PCA in the majors’ restrictive practices, and alleged that through
the Code the majors exercised a practical censorship over the entire industry, restricting the
production of pictures treating controversial subjects and hindering the development of innovative
approaches to drama or narrative by companies that might use innovation as a way of challenging the
majors’ monopoly power.

Hays initiated an internal investigation into the extent of the jurisdiction of the PCA conducted
by his Executive Assistant Francis Harmon, which had the effect – perhaps also intended of reining
in Breen’s more grandiose ambitions. Harmon suggested that,

Very great care is needed on the part of the PCA to distinguish between its administrative
functions under the Code (with its penalty provisions) on the one hand, and its advisory functions
(without penalties) on the other. ... A reasonably clear and predictable definition of the extent
of the jurisdiction of the Production Code Administration, is urgently needed.

He classified groups of films, including newsreels, advertising, sponsored and government films, as
properly falling outside the authority of the PCA, as did questions other than a film’s conformity
“to standards of decency, morality and fairness embodied in the Production Code.”

If the film deals with a controversial subject, but is free from that which offends decency or is
listed in the Code as morally objectionable, then the sole remaining question to be decided by the
PCA should not be whether the film is “desirable” but whether the presentation deals fairly and
honestly, and without deliberate deception, with the subject matter.[13]

Quigley was horrified.  The changes proposed, he suggested, were “an invitation to disaster.”
Breen tried to argue that his critics had misunderstood the Production Code Administration when
they compared its operation to that of a court of a state censor board. He described the PCA as
having grown “out of the entire legislative history of the Association and the general industry
policies,” and its responsibilities as never having been “limited solely to the enforcement of the
Code”:

The members of the Production Code Administration recognize every day that they are vested with
authority voluntarily delegated by the member companies to the Association and subject to
termination any time member companies so decide. The relationship is actually much nearer to that
confidential, sympathetic attitude which exists between a lawyer and his client than that between
the judge on the bench and a litigant at the bar. ...... The fact that the suggestions and
recommendations of the Production Code Administration are so generally followed indicates that
today the members of the Production Code Administration are regarded by producers, directors, and
their staffs, as “participants in the processes of production” whose experience is at the disposal
of the producing companies from the moment a story idea begins to germinate until the picture
finally leave the cutting room.[14]

But the federal government’s redefinition of what constituted unreasonable restraint of trade in
the Paramount suit required the restriction of the PCA’s jurisdiction, in order not to embroil the
Association in a violation of the anti-trust laws, and demonstrated the practical political need
for the industry to encourage, or at least acquiesce in, the use of politically more controversial
content as a way of demonstrating that the “freedom of the screen” was not hampered by the
operations of the PCA.  This change was not occasioned by any clear public demand, but in order to
maintain a political quiescence that would protect its oligopoly structure.  Although PCA officials
continued to voice concern over whether such subjects as Confessions of a Nazi Spy constituted
appropriate screen entertainment, they were much more circumspect in expressing their opinions.

Where, in 1930-34, the dominant voices to which the Association was attempting to adjust film
content came from moral conservatives, most clearly orchestrated by the Catholic Church, by 1938-9
that voice had become much more marginal, and Quigley’s notion of an entertainment kept pure from
all political utterance was becoming increasingly difficult to sustain – less in practice than as a
principle for the MPPDA to adhere to.[15]

In January 1938 Breen had rejected a manuscript by Lewis Ransom Foster called “The Gentleman From
Montana,” on the grounds that it portrayed “the United States Senate as a body of politicians, who,
if not deliberately crooked, are completely controlled by lobbyists with special interests.” Such a
picture might well be considered, he thought, “both here, and more particularly abroad, as a covert
attack on the democratic form of government.”[16]  In January 1939, after the changes of policy
during 1938, Frank Capra submitted a screenplay based on the same source material, and received a
much more favourable reception:

It is a grand yarn that will do a great deal of good for all those who see it and, in my judgment,
it is particularly fortunate that this kind of story is to be made at this time.  Out of all
Senator Jeff’s difficulties there has been evolved the importance of a democracy and there is
splendidly emphasized the rich and glorious heritage which is ours and which comes when you have a
government “of the people, by the people, and for the people.”

Nevertheless, despite a in Washington, with all the Congress invited, the movie was very badly
received both by serving Senators, many of whom walked out, denouncing the film as an “outrage” and
an “insult,” and by the Washington press corps, who resented at being represented, once again, by
“an amiable drunk.”[17]  Press coverage of the reaction widely recorded the rumour that Senators
would take their revenge by passing anti-block-booking legislation. In the event, the furore over
the film died down after about a month, after New York and Los Angeles critics generally endorsed
the picture as “a comic celebration of the spirit, rather than the form, of American government.”

The movie that I am discussing, Black Legion, wasproduced at the beginning of the sequence of
events that I have described, released at the very end of 1936. I think that it is worth discussing
as a first instance of the concern for what New York Times reviewer Frank Nugent called “editorial
cinema.” Nugent, like many other of its reviewers, prainsed the picture extravagantly: the National
Board of Review named it as one of the best pictures of 1937, and Bogart as Best Actor. Much of the
enthusiasm for the picture came from its being based on events that had made newspaper headlines
during the summer of 1936, and its willingness to address the frightening consequences of those
issues directly. Frank Nugent wrote:

Beneath its fictional veneer, it is the quasi-documentary record of the growth and activities of
the hooded organization that terrorized the Midwest in 1935-36 cloaking its cowardice, bigotry,
selfishness, stupidity and brutality under the mantle of “100 per cent Americanism.” .... For this
is the unforgettable, the horrible thing about Black Legion—it did happen here! Thousands of our
illustrious Midwestern citizens did take an oath “in the name of God and the devil to exterminate
the anarchists, Communists, the Roman hierarchy and their abettors.” They did don their childish
regalia with its skull-and-cross-bones insignia, they did hold their secret conclaves and choose
their victims. And homes were burned and shops destroyed and men flogged and lynched as a
consequence. ... To see a picture that way is a harrowing experience; but it may be salutary, too.
...  The picture merits an attentive audience; I hope its message reaches that type of mind to
which the Michigan organization’s aims appealed.

Red Kann’s review in the trade paper Motion Picture Daily was equally enthusiastic:

While the foreword makes it very clear that what follows is based on no actual incidents or on fact
itself. for that matter, this will deceive no one who looks and, we hope, millions will for the
good it has a chance of doing. …The Black Legion” moves motion pictures one notch forward in the
recognition. eventually to come, that, although films may be designed chiefly to entertain, they
must also go beyond in the cause of social problems.[18]

In a second review, Nugent drew attention to the fact that while Black Legion

is one the most courageous, forthright and bitter editorials the screen has written ... we are
reminded, Hollywood halted production of ‘It Can’t Happen Here’. because Italy and Germany would
have taken offense at its anti-Fascist message; it destroyed the negative of “The Devil Is a Woman”
because of Spanish protest about its disrespectful treatment of Spain’s Civil Guard …  it
regretfully abandoned plans for a film of “Paths of Glory” upon learning that France we prefer to
have that incident of World War forgotten; it shelved “The Forty Days of Musa Dagh’ in Turkey’s
interest; it—but there’s no need to cite more cases.[19] …

As the reviews indicated, Black Legion’s story was closely based on press revelations about a
secret organisation called the Black Legion made in a criminal case in Michigan in 1936. The Black
Legion was founded in Ohio in the mid-1920s as an offshoot of the Ku Klux Klan. In the revived form
in which it existed in the early 1920s, the Klan was a large and politically significant
organisation across much of the country, particularly the South and Midwest, with at least three
million members at its height in 1924 – meaning that one of every three or four white, adult,
Protestant American males was a Klansman.  In this form, it was a nativist organisation, as firmly
anti-Catholic and anti-Semitic as it was anti-Negro. It collapsed rapidly in the later 1920s after
its leadership was revealed to be corruptly profiteering from the membership, and after the passage
of anti-immigration legislation. Its collapse led to the establishment of a number of comparable
organisations, of which the Black Legion was the most prominent. Although its members boasted a
membership of one million in Michigan, alone, it probably had about 100,000 members in the four
Midwest states of Michigan, Indiana, Ohio and Illinois. Its members were mainly working-class
Anglo-Saxon men, most of them migrants from the South working in unskilled jobs in steel or
automobile assembly plants, poorly educated, their nativism exaggerated by the economic conditions
of the Depression and their fears of losing their jobs to immigrant labour. A June 1936 New York
Times article described “the typical member of this organization dedicated to a doctrine of hate,
to a discipline of terror enforced by sheer brutality them,” as

a man who would be lost in any crowd in almost any urban slum in the country. … He is a man in the
middle thirties, lean of figure, bony-faced, with pointed features. Probably he was born on a small
farm in one of the Southern States, more often Tennessee, of parents who were descended from
American stock of long standing and of Anglo-Saxon antecedents. He went through grammar school, but
his education came to an end before he got his diploma. ... With his wife, who has borne him two
children, he has been living in one or another of the communities within an industrial city for
seven or eight years, but he has never come to reconcile himself to city life or industrial work.
... He is working now, on construction—unskilled labor—at the steel plant or in the assembly chain
in the automobile plant ...The monotony of repetitive processes sets something welling up within
him; he hates the machine that spares him from spending his strength and produces his pay check.
... ... He cherishes his family and fears for it. The trouble of getting a job and holding it for
his family’s sake during the depression is written indelibly on his mind and it conditions his most
trivial opinions.[20]

The Black Legion was, like the KKK, a secret organisation, notionally dedicated to upholding
“Protestantism, Americanism and Womanhood” and in reality operating as a protective organisation
finding and preserving its members’ jobs. It declared itself committed to the “extermination” of
“political Romanism [the Catholic Church], Judaism, Communism, and all ‘isms’ which our forefathers
came to this country to avoid.” Its rituals and costumes were even more bizarre than those of the
KKK.  The movie’s portrayal of the recruitment process, the oath, and the complete secrecy of the
organisation was essentially accurate:

[DEL: We regard as enemies to ourselves and our country all aliens, Negroes, Jews and cults and
creeds believing in racial equality or owing allegiance to any foreign potentate. These we will
fight without fear or favor as long as one foe of the American liberty is left alive.[DEL: [21]
:DEL] :DEL]

No man could apply for membership, but if sponsored by friends, was enticed to a meeting. There,
with a revolver at his heart, he was permitted to declare his willingness to “be torn limb from
limb and scattered to the carrion” if he betrayed a word of society secrets.”[22]

The New York Times described “the published ritual of this dread band” as reading “as if it had
been composed by Tom Sawyer to impress Huck Finn and Indian Joe.” [23] But the Black Legion engaged
in a variety of acts of nativist vigilantism and terrorism, including crimes often described as
lynchings.  Newspaper reports suggested that its members may have been responsible for as many as
57 murders, although members were only tried for five. More than fifty members of the Michigan
Black Legion in were convicted of various crimes, including arson, kidnapping, flogging, plotting
to kill different individuals, and plotting an armed uprising to take over the Federal Government.
Many acts of arson occurred against the homes of supposed Communists, or places at which Communists
met. They were involved, at least to some extent, in the anti-union violence perpetrated, as part
of company policy, by the major automobile manufacturers in Detroit, Ford and General Motors, and
between 1933 and 1935 the Black Legion bombed or burned a fair number of left-wing retreats,
meeting halls, and bookstores and shot two Communist labor organizers, all without police
interference.

Some of their more extravagant plans of which its members boasted included a plot to kill one
million Jews by planting mustard gas bombs in every American synagogue during Yom Kippur, another
plot to kill Jews in Detroit by putting typhoid germs in milk, and very vague plans to storm every
Army arsenal in the country on a given signal.  There was no real evidence that these were ever
anything more than fantasies, by the Black Legion’s deluded leadership, but they, and the secret
rituals and paraphernalia, gave rise to blood-curdling newspaper headlines for much of the summer
of 1936, when one of their real crimes, the murder of Charles Poole, a Catholic organiser for the
Works Progress Administration, who was married to a Protestant and falsely accused of beating his
wife. Because this crime had no connection to anti-union activities, it was investigated, and the
chief suspect, Dayton Dean, on whom the Bogart character is modelled, quickly confessed, naming his
fellow participants.  Poole’s murder took place on 13 May, Dean was arrested on 23 May, and
confessed on 26 May.  Twelve men were brought to trial in September, and eleven of them were
convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment on 29 September.

On 4 June, Warner Bros. announced that their production plans for the next season included a movie
called Black Legion. On 18 June, only just over a month after the murder and less than two weeks
since the arraignment, they submitted a treatment to the Production Code Administration, where
Breen advised them:

We regret to inform you that, because of certain elements in the material submitted to us, this
story, in its present form, is not acceptable from the point of view of the Production Code.

This decision is based upon the fact that it has been our policy not to approve stories which raise
and deal with the provocative and inflammatory subjects of racial and religious prejudice.  This
present treatment contains elements which are definitely calculated to raise this objection.

We are happy to say, however, that, exclusive of this matter, it is our opinion that this story is
basically satisfactory from the point of view of this office, and, with careful treatment, may be
made into a picture which will be acceptable from the point of view of the Production Code and open
to no reasonable objection.

In any acceptable treatment of this material, care must be taken to avoid showing objectionable
brutality or gruesomeness.

Great care must be taken with the handling of all scenes of violence and criminal flaunting of law
and order.[24]

A conference with Warners producer Robert Lord the next day “ended with the understanding that a
treatment would be made in which Mr. Lord would treat the subject as broadly and strongly as he
wished, so that we might test out the limit of the acceptability of the treatment of such subjects
as religious and racial prejudices.”[25]  The speed at which this progressed was noteworthy.  It
was perhaps in part driven by the studio’s knowledge that Columbia was also at work on a similar
project, based on the same incidents, which became Legion of Terror, released at the beginning of
November 1936, two months ahead of Black Legion. A third movie based on the same events, Nation
Aflame, written by Thomas Dixon, author of The Birth of a Nation, the movie held in part
responsible for the revival of the Ku Klux Klan, appeared from the independent production company
Treasure Pictures in April 1937.

Initially, studio head Hal Wallis and Lord planned Black Legion as a major production, possibly
starring Edward G. Robinson, and with an emphasis on the Legion’s anti-Semitism and
anti-Catholicism, suggesting strong parallels both to the events of Sinclair Lewis’ It Can’t Happen
Here, which MGM had decided not to make four months earlier in February 1936, and to the rise of
Nazism in Germany, and the possibility of the emergence of a native American fascism.  Fears of
such a phenomenon were quite explicitly expressed in the late 1930s.  There were a variety of
proto-fascist organisations and extreme right-wing movements, many of them small but as exotic as
the Black Legion, such as the California-based Silver Shirts.  Some estimates suggested that were
as many as 800 such organisations, and the House Committee on Un-American Activities, originally
established to investigate them referred to “at least 200” of them.

As disturbingly, anti-Semitism was endemic in at least some parts of American society. Surveys
conducted in the late 1930’s suggested that around 15 percent of Americans openly expressed
anti-Semitic views, while almost half of all Americans felt there was good reason for anti-Jewish
feeling.[26]  These figures provided evidence for the concern frequently expressed among Jewish
organizations that it was wiser to avoid overt condemnations of Nazism or overt defences of Jewry
on American film screens, in case they provoked a hostile reaction.  Several Jewish organisations
exerted significant pressure on the motion picture industry to avoid provocative representations,
and one Jewish leader, Rabbi William H. Fineshriber, claimed to have persuaded MGM and the PCA not
to make It Can’t Happen Here, “on the ground that the present atmosphere of the country is not
conducive to a sympathetic understanding of the Jewish Problem. ... during these highly critical
days for the Jewish people, here and elsewhere, we ought not to thrust the Jew and his problems too
much into the limelight ... there are times when to say nothing is better than to say something
favorable.”[27]  Whether such attitudes influenced Warners’ decision to omit the racial and
religious issues at the core of the original treatment, or whether this was a commercial decision,
I don’t know.

Warners’ publicity certainly did emphasise the factual origins of the story, including distributing
stories suggesting that the ending was rewritten on the day the verdict was returned in Detroit,
directly from newspaper reports. The Press book asserted that “Investigation clearly showed that
the Black Legion was founded on the prejudices, race-hatred and bigotry of half-baked mentalities,
herded together by glib organizers, who were making fortunes out of the sale of hooded gowns and
firearms.” It also encouraged exhibitors to connect the movie to the issues raised by the events by
recruiting editorials in the local newspaper and “civic-minded individuals and groups” to give
talks. At the same time, however, the movie conventionally declared itself to be fictitious, and a
number of changes were made late in the production to comply with the legal department’s concerns
to protect the studio from possible libel suits.  Two scenes were added to the movie – the scene
between the defence lawyer and the judge establishing that the lawyer knew nothing of the false
testimony, and the scene with the businessmen suggesting that the Black Legion was a racket – a
charge that in fact, seems not to have been true. Parts of the trial sequence, in which it was
suggested that some of the jury were members of the Black Legion, were also deleted.[28]

Motion Picture Herald played with the contradictions of the movie’s claims to be simultaneously
based on actual events and fictional:

It is not possible, you see, to say that the film closely parallels the facts because the film
pointedly declares that it does not.  And it isn’t possible to say that it does not, you see,
because it does. ... Probably it is possible, of course, to say to showmen that, if you would like
a picture that is what you would expect this picture to be if you weren’t told what it isn’t, then
this is the picture you would like.  [29]

Most reviews, as I have suggested, were much less equivocal, emphasising what Nugent called
“editorial cinema at its best—ruthless, direct, uncompromising. ... I hope the Midwest can take
it.” In his review, Graham Greene wrote that “the real horror is not in the black robes and skull
emblems, but in the knowledge that these hide the weak and commonplace faces you have met over the
counter and minding the next machine.”[30]

It is, I think, worth dwelling on this confrontational aspect of the movie, perhaps most evident in
the final sequence, where the shots of the convicted killers and their families emphasises, as
Greene and Nugent both suggested, their ordinariness; a feature that this movie shares with another
1936 movie about lynching, Fury, directed by Fritz Lang, praised by Joe Breen for discussing
lynching without mentioning race – or the fact that, as the Judge in Black Legion points out, that
some 6,000 lynchings had taken place in the US since 1890 – and, as the judge did not point out,
but others did, all but a handful of them crimes of racial hatred, not investigated by legal
authorities. In this respect, I think, Black Legion can be seen as much more confrontational –
certainly to any of its audience who had, for example, made up the quarter of the white Protestant
adult male population who had belonged to the Ku Klux Klan – than its avoidance of mentioning the
issues of racial or religious prejudice, and the suggestion that some political expression had been
censored or compromised, might suggest.

It is, on the other hand, also worth noting that while Warners’ Publicity called it a headline
picture, “another demonstration that actuality can beat fiction at its own game of providing
excitement,” the company’s understanding of what a headline picture might be was much broader than
most criticism now assumes.  When the studio announced on 4 June 1936 that it was making Black
Legion, it listed it as one title among seven “developed from important news stories of the last
several years.”  The others included China Clipper, about the new flying boats, Over the Wall,
based on a story by Warden Lewis Lawes story, Mountain Justice with Bette Davis – suggested by the
Maxwell case, in which a girl has killed her father, Sergeant Murphy on horseracing, Gold is Where
you Find It, and Draegerman Courage, based on a Canadian mine rescue.


In 1939, Lang argued that cinema was a ‘means of conveying social messages,’ depicting ‘people of
today and the things that interest them or imprison them’. He argued for stories ‘concerning the
pertinent problems that trouble American people today’, something that would require an
amelioration of the ‘rigorous censorship’ movies currently experienced and responding to that he
claimed was an audience desire for ‘profound and simulating’ movies. [31]

In Smedley’s analysis, Lang seeks to address the conflict in American society between populist
democracy and the rights and responsibilities of the individual for their actions.

‘Hollywood rarely bothers with themes bearing any relation to significant aspects of contemporary
life. When it does, in most cases, its approach is timid, uncertain, or misdirected. Fury is
direct, forthright and vehement’ (Nugent on Fury)

The movies’ fairly direct address, implied in the reviews, to a particular segment of the audience.

MPH References

14 August 1937 Klan sued WB over infringement of copyright of its insignia and defamation, asking
for $250 for each showing in 54 key cities and an additional $100,000 – total $113,500.

What the Picture did for Me entries varied. Some called it “first-class entertainment,” and
compared it to Fugitive – said it was not as gruesome as the ads suggested, and some complained
about the ads keeping customers away – these in June/July 1937.  One from Detroit read: “Could not
ask for a better picturization of the Black Legion, but apparently out customers have had enough of
the Black Legion from the papers.” [26 June 1937, p. 114] Others suggested it did not draw well,
usually because of anticipated violence.

10 April 1937, p. 95 reports on exploitation: newsboys distributing overprints of local paper
shouting “The Black legion strikes town tomorrow,” (N. Dak); exhibit of gallows and whipping post
[N.Mex]; sponsorship by superintendent of chools in commection with an Americanization class
(Lawrence, Mass); endorsement by the Delaware State Federation of Labor in Wilmington, Del.

Press book:  “Black Legion” will probably take rank alongside that other Warner “spot news” film of
several years ago, “I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang,” which was one of the most successful
pictures any studio ever turned out …


Letter, Breen to Hays, 2-27-37:

I find no indication, anywhere, of any plans to produce pictures dealing with oustanding social or
sociological questions similar to the story of The Black Legion, Black Fury or the Metro
production, Fury.  But these, it seems, come along hurriedly.  They seem to grow out of the
headlines of the newspapers.  A sinister force shows its head in Detroit, it appears to be
invidious and subtle, it receives great newspaper publicity - and Warners make a picture called
Black Legion.  The point here seems to be that there are no such pictures on our schedules for the
coming year.

________________________________

[1].          New York Times, February 16, 1936.  Quoted in Hamilton, 127.  Motion Picture Herald,
February 22, 1936, 16.

[2].          Lewis, press release, quoted in Motion Picture Herald, February 22, 1936, 16.

[3].          “Whose Business is the Motion Picture,” Motion Picture Herald, February 22, 1936,
15-6.

[4] Dec 18 Breen to Mayer, PCA file It Can’t Happen Here.

[5] Jan 31, 1936 Breen to Mayer, PCA file It Can’t Happen Here.

[6].          Thorp, 160.

[7].          Thorp, 161.

[8].          Breen, June 22, 1938, MPA 1939 Production Code file.

[9].          These bound volumes were titled the “Opinions of the Production Code Administration,”
but they were never published.  They were prepared by Charles R. Metzger, and are referred to by
Moley, p. 97, and by Vizzard, p. 10.  To some extent they represented an attempted codification of
precedent and case law in the PCA.

[10].         Breen, June 22, 1938.

[11].         Morris L. Ernst, The First Freedom (New York: Macmillan, 1946), p. 203; New York
Times, June 26, 1938; Thorp, p. 127; Memo attached to letter, Breen to Lord, December 5, 1937,
folder, Joe Breen, 1933-1942, Lord Papers.  For a discussion of the importance of the foreign
market in this period, see Vasey.

[12].         Norr to Harmon, January 1, 1939. X39-22.

[13].         “Jurisdiction of Production Code Administration,” MPA 1938 Production Code file.

[14].         Harmon, Memorandum Commenting Upon Document entitled ‘CODE, EXTRA-CODE, AND INDUSTRY
REGULATION IN MOTION PICTURES’: A Study of the Production Code and its Administration upon the Type
and Content of American Motion Pictures, and Certain Other Basic Industry Policies and Their
Current Application. June  22, 1938. X38-26

[15].         Quigley, January 10, 1939, quoted in Leff and Simmons, p. 65; Norr to Harmon, January
12, 1939, MPA 1939 Production Code file.

[16].         Breen, Letter to John Hammel at Paramount, and to Louis B. Mayer at MGM, 1-19-38.
PCA Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.

[17].         Donald J. Stirling to Hays, December 5 1939.  PCA Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.

[18] Pressbook

[19] Nugent reviews

[20] NYT 14 June “BL Members are Pictured as a Type”

[21] Amman, [497]

[22] TIME story 1 June 1936

[23] NYT Editorial 27 May

[24] Breen to Warner, 6-18-36, PCA Black Legion

[25] Memo, June 19, 1936, PCA Black Legion

[26] Lipset and Raab, 188-9

[27] Herman, p. 15

[28] Colgan.

[29] Showmen’s Reviews, p.44.  January 9, 1937.  MPH

[30] Night and Day (8 July 1937)

[31] Quoted Smedley, p. 2.