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Pierce which I am told has favorable Hays comment? What about Serenadę which with obvious changes could become an excellent picture? I’m getting sick of the Hays office and I’m not in the least bit amused at the jnoney it is costing me ... I am perfectly frank to say... It is not only the principle of the thing with me but the money.²¹

The relationship between money and “decency” remained a recurrent Hollywood theme. Paramount production records indicate a May 25,1943, let-ter from Jacob H. Karp of the legał department stating that the studio had purchased the story rights for Double Indemnity from Cain on May 15,1943, for $15,000. Interestingly, a March 1943 memo from William Dozier States that Paramount owned the story and assigned a fund to develop the film “produced under the supervision of Mr. Joseph Sistrom.” Yet “No writers have been assigned to datę.”²²

By 1943 James Cain was considered a leading hard-boiled fiction writer—as was Chandler, who cowrote the screen adaptation. The stature of hard-boiled literaturę had increased between 1935 and 1944—initially considered seedy during the 1930S but then promoted in the 1940S, grow-ing in popularity over the war years as paperbacks became available after 1939. Although the hard-boiled tradition, in which Cain and Chandler (along with Hammett) were key figures, flourished in American popular fiction during the Great Depression, this trend did not immediately catch on in the film industry. The Codę was a major deterrent. In this tradition of Depression-era tales Cain published The Postman Always Rings Twice (which MGM bought in 1934, the year of its publication, but could not pro-duce until late 1944-45, following Paramount’s Double Indemnity prece-dent). Cain then published Mildred Pierce in 1941. One reason for the ap-proval of Cain’s story involved the complications of enforcing the Codę during World War II; circumstances changed from 1935 to 1943—midway into the war.

Initially, the immoral content in Double Indemnity, Cain’s reputation as a racy writer, and Cain’s timing in attempting to adapt the story (just one year after Breen vigorously began enforcing the PCA Codę in 1934) con-tributed to Breen’s hostile response. Eight years later conditions were dif-ferent. Cain asserted in 1944 that producers “have got hep to the fact that plenty of real crime takes place every day and that it makes a good movie . . . The public is fed up with the old-fashioned melodramatic type of hokum.”²³ Certainly, there are significant industrial and cultural consider-ations for this change in the Code’s policy, some of which relate to wartime production circumstances. With the film industry booming during World

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War II, profits rosę from the early 1940S to peak in 1946, yet produćing films during the war reąuired a massive transformation of every sector of the industry, as severe shortages and problems due to wartime restrictions and government (and military) involvement complicated production. Concerns escalated about U.S. and Allied combat overseas by 1942, and Hollywood began to stabilize wartime operations in support of the war effort as American and Allied forces gained control in Europę and the Pacific in 1943.²⁴

Double Indemnity, in adeptly beginning its film narrative by stating the prewar datę of its story (July 16,1938), avoided OWI interference because its 1930S setting did not deal with issues immediate to the war or to the home front. Moreover, Paramount was the studio most resistant to federal (wartime propaganda) censorship. In March 1943 the New York Times re-ported that Paramount studio chief and Producers Association president Y. Frank Freeman “was the last holdout against cooperation with the OWI” in agreeing “to submit synopses of proposed pictures to the OWI on re-quest.”²⁵ By early 1943 Hollywood studios—with the exception of Paramount—submitted scripts to OWI on a regular basis. War-related news-reels also became morę graphic during this time. A February 6,1944, New York Times article, “Hollywood Turns To ‘Hate’ Films: Governrrtent Lifts Ban on Showing Jap Brutality,” cites the depiction of screen violence, previously banned, as condoned by the government’s wartime Office of Censorship for propaganda purposes.²⁶ This policy contradicted the Codę and preceded the April 1944 Hollywood preview of Double Indemnity. Moreover, Breens sojourn at RKO—providing a brief lapse in his rigorous administering of the PCA between 1941 and 1942—may well have affected his previous by-the-book approach to Codę enforcement and thus benefited the PCA and the industry in produćing a morę temperate censor in 1943 than in 1935.

Even rńore significant, however, was the government’s investigation into monopolistic practices by the film industry after 1938 and the signing of a consent decree in 1940 prohibiting distributors’ booking of films in blocks larger than five. By March 1941 Thomas Brady of the New York Times noted, “Hollywood Clears Decks for Consent Decree: Four Studios Revise Production Set-Ups to Meet the New Selling Terms.” Exhibition and distribution were the money lifeline of the industry. Four months later Douglas Churchill of the New York Times observed, “Hollywood Changes: Quietly the Major Studios Reorganize Executive Staffs to Meet a New Era.”²⁷ These preliminary steps toward antitrust legislation were initially preempted by the urgency of mobilizing Hollywood^ propaganda machinę with America^ entry into World War II. The government, however, reinstituted the Paramount Case in 1944—the year Double Indemnity was released. The New