censorship, (1)

98

Blackout

cious insurance claims investigator Barton Kęyes (Edward G. Robinson) ac-tivates a kind of detective framework, solving the case. Cain’s sordid story scared off screenwriters; not even Wilder’s longtime collaborator Charles Brackett would take on the adaptation, and Cain was unavailable.⁵ Wilder turned to a first-time screenwriter and industry outsider, hard-boiled writer Raymond Chandler. But finding a writer was a less daunting problem than overcoming the PCA’s opposition.

Double Indemnity pushed the envelope of the Motion Picture Produc-tion Codę of 1930 to its limit and paved the way for dark, controversial films to be produced in the futurę; when Joseph Breen approved, and condoned, the film, this initial Cain adaptation set the stage and the tonę for how Hollywood film noir could successfully maneuver around the Codę. The PCA had been known in the industry as the Hays Office, after Will Hays, presi-dent of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MP-PDA) sińce 1922. The MPPDA first began to monitor Scripts on the West Coast on a regular basis in 1929 and adopted the Production Codę, authored by Father Daniel Lord and Motion Picture Herald publisher Martin Quigley (with input from Hays, Col. Jason Joy, and industry executives) as its morał blueprint for Hollywood films in 1930. The Motion Picture Production Codę of 1930 was loosely enforced until 1934, as can be seen by the content of early 1930S films. But when the National Catholic Legion of Decency threatened to boycott indecent Hollywood films in the spring of 1934, Hays established the Production Codę Administration and hired Joseph Breen to begin enforcing industry self-censorship. This system of self-regulation was intended to prevent direct government censorship, as well as to appease the Legion. Threats of Legion boycotts came at a financially crucial time for the industry, during the Great Depression in the spring of 1934. Breen’s appoint-ment as head of the PCA was part of an agreement among the “Big Five” vertically integrated major Hollywood studios not to exhibit films without the PCA Seal of approval in their lucrative first-run theaters,⁶ which, along with a $25,000 fine imposed on studios that released unapproved films, en-sured censorship enforcement by the end of 1934.

At that point in Hollywood history the Production Codę (as a result of Breen’s vigorous enforcement) wielded considerable power. “The respon-sible heads of the studios are a cowardly lot,” Breen reportedly told Hays. Film Weekly called Hays “a mere Hindenberg” and Breen “the Hitler of Hollywood.” By 1935 he “cashiered properties, rewrote screenplays, supervised directors, and edited films ... The Codę was the Word, the gospel accord-ing to Breen.”⁷ Breen had his own definitive idea of Double Indemnity when MGM originally submitted it for production in 1935. In Cain’s words, “The

Hays office knocked it in the head. I didn’t see its letter, but was tóld it was an uncompromising ban of the story in toto, one of those things that be-gin ‘under no circumstances’ and wind up ‘way, shape or form.’ ” Cain be-lieved that the PCA’s “main objection” was that the story was a “ ‘blueprint’ for murder,” showing “wayward persons how to kill for profit.”⁸ The colli-sion between the censorship restrictions of the Production Codę and Cairfs crime-and-passion tale almost prevented Double Indemnity from being adapted. In a February 1944 interview for the Daily News Cain explained how he completed writing Double Indemnity in 1935. His unpublished story was based on one of the most sensational American tabloid press incidents of the 1920S: the brutal 1927 New York murder of Albert Snyder by his wife, Ruth, and her lover, Judd Grey, for insurance money.⁹ Cain mimeographed his dramatization and sent the first copy to producer LawrenceWeingarten at MGM, who, according to Cain, had expressed interest. Weingarten called Cain the day after he received Double Indemnity to inąuire about the price. “By now five studios were interested, not inaependents, but the big ones ... Warners, Columbia, Paramount and Twentieth Century-Fox” in addition to MGM.¹⁰

Cain’s opportunity to sell Double Indemnity—and the studios’ interest in producing it—was blocked when Breen read it and launched his unam-biguous rejection on October 10,1935. Breen’s response (sent to John Ham-mell at Paramount, David O. Selznick at MGM, Jack Warner at Warner Bros., Nicholas Schenck at MGM/Loew’s Distributing, and Frances Man-son at Columbia Reading Department) stated that so many aspects of Cain’s story violated the Production Codę that he was “compelled to reject” any consideration of it for studio production. He objected to the “details of the vicious cold-blooded murder shown,” the “illicit, adult sex relationship” of the lovers that drives the story, its “violent people,” and the criminaPs “con-fession to the [insurance] agent who withholds information”—all in all characterizing the story as “a gross miscarriage of justice.” Breen took par-ticular issue with the insurance agent’s “arranging the escape of the two murderers from the country” and the culmination of “the two committing suicide” in Cain’s original story. Overall, Breen concluded, the “Iow tonę and sordid flavor” of Cain’s story was “thoroughly unacceptable.”¹¹

Not surprisingly, Breen’s letter threw cold water on the hot project. (Since Paramount was emerging from receivership, Wilder waknot yet di-recting, and Weingarten’s The Bishop Misbehaves flopped at MGM by the end of 1935; it may, in retrospect, have been just as well that Double Indemnity was not produced that year.) Nunnally Johnson, however, a Staff writer whom Darryl Zanuck had brought to 20th Century-Fox in 1935, was still