Hayes Code, Women in Movies

This post was inspired by this Krystalline Apostate post that mentions the the Hayes Code. There's something of a hidden story there that I feel the urge to talk about, so I shall!

What was happening in cinema during the early years was that a lot of the income was being derived from white, middle-class women who stayed at home. Well, since it doesn't actually take eight hours to keep the house clean and cook dinner for the "man of the house", after they got the kids off to school they often had several hours in the middle of the day with, functionally, nothing to do. And this was before not only the proliferation of TV but also radio. But every neighborhood had a cinema. So a large number of movies were being produced directed at the housewife audience with the values, scripts and stars that would appeal to that audience.

The sort of movie I'm talking about was The Sheik by George Melford starring Rudolph Valentino and Agnes Ayres. It's the story of an English noblewoman who doesn't want to get married because she's fearful of losing her independence (played by Ayres), but on a trip to the Algerian desert she's kidnapped by a sheik (played by Valentino). During the course of the movie, the woman falls in love with the sheik, who learns to treat her as an equal. The movie is orientalist crap, and in our day and age the very idea of a backwoods Muslim warlord treating a woman with respect and dignity is absurd, but women loved it. That housewife matinee movie crowd saw it as many times as fourteen year old boys would see the first Star Wars movie.

The male establishment . . . did not like it. It was about a woman who saw marriage as a burden, who eventually falls in love with a sand nigger. The very orientalism I detest they feared -- the notion that "out there" were men willing to treat women as equals. And not just The Sheik, either. These movies were filled with independent women taking lovers, and dismissing them, being in charge of their sexual destiny, rejecting the traditional roles that society was forcing on them. Obviously, this had to be put to a stop, which is what ultimately lead to the creation of the Hayes Code.

The Hayes Code did everything in it's power to destroy the movie culture in America. Initially, it was simply ignored. But the big distributors got together and eventually demanded certification as a precondition of distribution. And then there was a whole generation of movie makers and audiences that simply refuses to submit to the code peacefully and pushed, pushed, pushed against it -- so you have all these movies that still had powerful female leads (and actresses) such as Bette Davis. By the fifties and sixties, however, there was almost no movie being made where women were allowed to have powerful roles. Women, as important characters in movies, had been almost eliminated. Entertainment Tonight's list of the 100 greatest movies is illustrative in this regard. The top ten movies are The Godfather, Citizen Kane, Casablanca, Chinatown, Raging Bull, La Dolce Vita, The Godfather Part 2, Gone with the Wind, Some Like It Hot, and Singing in the Rain. The ones with female roles that aren't merely love interests are Casablanca (where the female lead is a Resistance fighter) and Gone With the Wind (Scarlett O'Hara, duh). The Godfather movies, Citizen Kane and Raging Bull functionally lack a female presence at all, in Chinatown the women are dilettantes and victims. In La Dolce Vita, Some Like It Hot and Singing in the Rain they're merely the love interests of the male characters. Most of the top one hundred movies follow this pattern, and it is noteworthy that the movies that do include women as something other than love interests are almost all from the fifties and earlier. Like I said, by the sixties, women as serious people had been virtually removed from cinema.

As a writer, I think this is a shameful episode in American literary and cinematic history. It deeply offends me that the forced removal of powerful women from cinema is virtually unnoticed by . . . virtually anyone at all, not to mention the deep damage this has done to American cinema as the rules of the Hayes Code functionally forced women into passive roles.