To The Motion Picture Production Code on its 75th Birthday

When we look on the pre-Code years (from roughly 1929 to July 1, 1934), we see an American cinema in which actresses are as important or more important than actors, in which love and sex are presented with a certain blithe insightfulness and maturity. Then comes the wrench—and from then on nothing is the same...

...The Code's founders hoped to foster a wholesome culture. All they fostered was a repressed culture, one with neurotic emanations slipping through the cracks. Look at the Marilyn Monroe persona and those of her imitators in the 1950s—the image of woman as oversexed child. For that matter, look at the much more palatable gamine image of Audrey Hepburn in that same decade, the image of woman as asexual child. These are sex symbols for a guilty, prurient, and uncomfortable culture, one nothing like the pre-censorship film culture of the late 1920s and early 1930s...