on, which believed it spoke for the moral values of the American public, and the movie industry, which foughtoften rather meeklyfor freedom of the screen.From the mid-1930s until Otto Premingers release of The Moon Is Blue in 1953, no Hollywood studio seriously challenged the right of the priests to censor their films. From 1953 until the establishment of the current ratings system, only a handful of independent producers, foreign or domestic, refused to submit their films to Legion censors. The Catholics thought that strict control over the content of the movies would prevent the movies a new, popular and powerful recreation from changing the positive values of Anglo-Saxon ideals was adopted by progressive reformers.What Daniel Lord drafted as a Catholic movie code emerged a fascinating combination of Catholic theology, conservative politics, and pop psychologyan amalgam that would control the content of Hollywood films for the next three decades. Lord and his colleagues shared a common objective with Protestant film reformers: they all wanted entertainment films to emphasize that the church, the government, and the family were the cornerstones of an orderly society; that success and happiness resulted from respecting and working within this system. Entertainment films should reinforce religious teachings that deviant behavior, whether criminal or sexual, cost violators the love and comforts of home, the intimacy of family, the solace of religion, and the protection of law. Films should be twentieth-century morality plays that illustrated proper behavior to the masses. Therefore, the basic premise behind the code was that no picture should lower the moral standards of those who see it. Recognizing that evil and sin were legitimately part of drama, the code stressed that no film should create a feeling of sympathy for the criminal, the adulterer, the immoralist, or the corrupter. No film should be so constructed as to leave the questio...
