Alfred Hitchcock and the Censors

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• The Master of Suspense battled with censorship for most of his long career
• He learned how to lead British censors in a merry dance to fulfil his wishes
• Well-practised in the fine art of deception by the time he arrived in the US
• Ultra-strict Production Code Administration still caused huge headaches
• Boundary-pushing Hitchcock’s true artistic vision was often compromised
• Ironically, censorship finally slackened by the very end of his iconic career
• It was largely due to his helping invent the slasher film genre with Psycho

Note: this is part of an ongoing series of 150-odd Hitchcock articles; any dead links are to those not yet published. Subscribe to the email list to be notified when new ones appear.

Through collaboration and clashes with Hollywood’s Production Code censors, Alfred Hitchcock—born a hundred years ago—developed the art of suggestion into powerful cinema.

In the 1930s, in a drab, unmarked building in the West End of London, the British Board of Film Censors scoured new motion pictures for “anything repulsive and objectionable to the good taste and better feelings of the English audiences.” Good taste was in the eye of the beholder—literally the eye, as director Alfred Hitchcock understood. The chief British censor wore glasses with one opaque lens, Hitchcock once recalled, and whenever an “offending piece of film approached, I said, ‘Mr. Wilkinson…’ He turned his head toward me, and the objectionable scene went by on the screen without his seeing it.”

Born one hundred years ago this month [August 1999], Hitchcock loved to kid the censors, yet he worked hard to avoid crossing them, especially one: Joseph Breen, director of the American movie industry’s internal censorship agency, the Production Code Administration. Hitchcock was usually successful, too, since he, like Breen, preferred the subtle to the explicit, the suggested to the shown. Inevitably, the censors left fingerprints on his films. His special gift, though, was to make those “prints” go by on the screen without our seeing them.

Breen met Hitchcock on Rebecca, the director’s first American picture, released in 1940. Based on the novel by Daphne du Maurier, this story of a naïve young woman (Joan Fontaine) who marries a brooding English aristocrat (Laurence Olivier) looked inoffensive. Breen had read the treatment of the story, however, and red-penciled the conclusion. Olivier had secretly killed his first wife, the glamorous Rebecca; much later, after her body washes up on shore, a coroner’s inquest rules hers an accidental death and thus frees her husband to pursue life with his second wife. Impossible, Breen told Hitchcock. Ever the willing script doctor, Breen suggested to the studio that Rebecca, while arguing with her husband, trip and kill herself in falling.

Hitchcock was amused to learn that the American censors could so resemble their British cousins. The producer of Rebecca, on the other hand, was irate. Here was “the story of a man who has murdered his wife,” David O. Selznick told his business partner, “and it now becomes the story of a man who buried a wife who was killed accidentally!” Aware that his long-standing ill will toward the censors could worsen matters, Selznick asked Hitchcock to visit the “Production Code boys,” as the moguls called Breen and company. Perhaps a fresh face and some English wit could charm them.

Hitchcock was persuasive but Breen immovable: Rebecca would die accidentally. Hitchcock nonetheless returned to Selznick International with several dispensations. The censors had fretted about a doctor Rebecca visited, apparently an abortionist. Hitchcock assured Breen that the doctor would be a doctor—period. Hitchcock set the scene in a dingy area of London, though, and gave the doctor neither nurse nor office staff. The audience—especially those who had read the novel—could draw its own conclusions about the doctor’s specialty and the reason that Rebecca consulted him. Breen had also told the studio that Rebecca’s devoted housekeeper, the spectral Mrs. Danvers, could have no “unnatural” attachment to her former mistress. Hitchcock made promises, then had Judith Anderson (Danvers) handle Rebecca’s lingerie and sheer négligées as though they were the woman who once wore them. Audiences could again draw their own conclusions.

The implicit, the inferred, the hinted at—Breen championed these, as did Hitchcock, who strove to make his screenplays and films censor-proof. He nonetheless freely used stories of his alleged clashes with the censors as fodder to promote his films. Six months before the release of Rebecca, when the studio was still wrangling over the cause of Rebecca’s death, a journalist asked whether it would be necessary to kill him (meaning the Olivier character) at the end of the picture. Hitchcock responded: “You mean Breen? I don’t think so.”

Sex, violence, and politics were standard agenda items at the meetings Breen and the Hollywood producers held daily in their screening rooms. The last, politics, touched Hitchcock only infrequently, in part because when working under the British censors he had honed the art of the circumspect. His second American film, for instance, was about an American journalist in Europe in 1938. In Foreign Correspondent the director urged American readiness—but never indicated the reason for it. Breen blessed the picture, which went into release sixteen months before the United States entered the war. During World War II almost all Hollywood features had a political text or subtext. Hitchcock’s Saboteur and Lifeboat were patriotic and thus, for the censors, praiseworthy. Even Shadow of a Doubt, with Joseph Cotten as an avuncular serial killer, passed muster with only minimal concerns about how foreign audiences might react to the portrayal of a pathological criminal.

Notorious, written toward the end of the war, was released in 1946. Remembered now for its love story, this romantic thriller also had a political dimension. The characterization of an American government agent (Cary Grant) hunting down Nazis abroad worried both the U.S. government and its unofficial servant, Joe Breen. Grant (and America) must not violate Brazil’s “national sovereignty,” the regulators warned, and Rio de Janeiro must not be depicted as “a hotbed and rendezvous of Nazis and Nazi sympathizers.” As meticulous—and apprehensive—as ever, the censors added that Hitchcock should also avoid “derogatory references to Brazilian food.”

Hitchcock made Grant a vanilla-flavored G-man and the Nazis almost equally generic. The erasures hardly mattered; after all, who would even notice the political background when Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman were making love? Breen asked himself that question then, leaving politics aside, sent Hitchcock more cautionary notes on the film. Bergman’s character—a young woman with a reputation as an international playgirl and the daughter of a convicted Nazi spy—becomes Grant’s “mole,” the woman who goes underground to seduce and wed a Nazi. She was a wanton, almost a prostitute, Breen said. Moreover, in “contrast with her immoral characterization,” there was also “an almost complete absence of what might be called ‘compensating moral values.'” Add them, he ordered.

Screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz once summarized the notion of compensating moral values. “The villain can lay anybody he wants, have as much fun as he wants cheating and stealing, getting rich and whipping the servants,” said Mankiewicz, “but you have to shoot him in the end.” More than one hack director had thrown a favorite character under the wheels of a train merely to get the Production Code office off the studio’s back. Overseeing the scripting of Notorious, Selznick told Hitchcock to “put up a good fight, otherwise we will be left with milk and water, and I think most of [Breen’s] criticism from the sex angle is nonsense and is clearly not consistent with the Lauren Bacall character and what he passed in it in To Have and to Have Not.”

Hitchcock trimmed enough of the script’s references to Bergman’s checkered sexual past to allay the censors’ fears. Then, too, the censors trusted Hitchcock to tame the most controversial content. Meanwhile, as Breen and company awaited the final cut, Hitchcock was making Notorious his most sensual picture. Bergman had agreed to spy for the Americans because, apparently, she had fallen for Agent Grant. The more she expresses her desire for him, the more alluring she becomes. And the more alluring she becomes, the more he represses his desire for her. It is an excruciatingly wonderful sort of foreplay, and the climax (one of several in the film) is the kissing they share in a Rio apartment, challenging the censors’ resistance to “lustful and prolonged kissing.”

In one of the most erotic scenes in motion pictures of any period, Hitchcock holds the camera—in closeup—on Bergman and Grant as they move toward the door. The dialogue is bland, but not the punctuation: the sighs, the liquid breathing, the friction of lips, his and hers, brushing softly, again and again, against each other. Breen approved because there were many kisses, not one, prolonged. Still, the passion of these characters threatened to curl the edges of the screen.

Bending the Code
Hitchcock’s masterpieces were Notorious, Rear Window, Psycho, and Vertigo. Only the last was spared censorship problems. The 1954 release of Rear Window coincided with Breen’s retirement and the appointment of his successor and longtime first lieutenant. Geoff Shurlock would be more liberal-minded than Breen, and necessarily so. After the assaults of the postwar years, especially those from film noir, which flouted many of the Production Code’s rules, the censors began to bend to keep from breaking. Rear Window would begin with a bend and a break.

James Stewart, immobilized by a badly broken leg, amuses himself by idly watching the comings and goings of his neighbors in a Greenwich Village apartment complex. Panning the courtyard in the opening reel, the camera pauses before a young woman in black panties and no top—clearly “unacceptable” to the Production Code agency. “We feel that this gives the entire section the flavor of a peep show.”

In the early 1950s, pronouncements like that were almost boilerplate. The Moon Is Blue, according to Breen, took “seduction, illicit sex, chastity and virginity” lightly, while the costumes in The French Line were “intentionally designed to give a bosom peep-show.” Hitchcock was no sideshow producer, however: Rear Window was, among other things, an entertaining debate about “peep show ethics.” One admirable character reproaches Stewart for spying on his neighbors, while another (Stewart’s friend, a cop) reminds him of apartment dwellers’ legal right to privacy. By the end of the film, however, Stewart’s peeping has led to the arrest of a killer. Watching, peering, spying—these may serve a public good, the film appears to say, even as
they afford a private pleasure. Making us as well as Stewart voyeurs would reinforce the theme, which made Hitchcock loathe to lose his all-but-naked young woman.

“I am sure you know we cannot approve,” Breen told Hitchcock. “She should be wearing at least a full slip.” Hitchcock went about his business, no doubt aware that Shurlock would probably succeed Breen before the censors’ final review. In that final cut sent to the Production Code office, the leggy (and panty-clad) character called “Miss Torso” fastens the snaps on the 1950s version of a training bra; when the snap fails to hold, the bra falls to the floor and she stoops to pick it up. Her back is to the camera, so only her kitchen wall “sees” her breasts. Breen might have blinked. Not Shurlock, who let the director turn us, like Jimmy Stewart, into Peeping Toms.

Rather than leer, Rear Window winks at us. Later, for instance, an unwed Grace Kelly opens her tiny Mark Cross overnight case, draws out her gossamer nightclothes, and announces to an unwed Jimmy Stewart that she intends to spend the night. Those ten seconds generate more heat than Jane Russell does in ten reels of The French Line. Hitchcock continued to tease when Stewart’s cop friend looks at Lisa’s overnight case. He raises an eyebrow, but Stewart merely smiles a knowing smile—not only at his friend but the censors, ever the best audience for Hitchcock’s witty, discreet approach to screen sex.

The decade of Rear Window also brought forth Elvis, Lolita, and Playboy. It was a different world, one that led to sea changes in motion picture censorship. The Legion of Decency, the film regulation arm of the Catholic Church, was rethinking its C for Condemned rating to allow for more “adult” Hollywood fare, while the studios pushed their own censors, the Production Code Administration, to revise their guidelines. Much of the discussion centered on sex, but Hitchcock expanded it—viscerally—to include violence.

Psycho was sexy. “Bed? Only playground that beats Las Vegas,” a Texas tycoon tells one character in the first act of the screenplay. Matters hardly improve at the Bates Motel. The relationship between the owner and his mother is incestuous. And then there is the shower murder. Shurlock cautioned Paramount that Hitchcock must use “the utmost care” in scenes in the bathroom, especially shots of Marion Crane’s naked body. Having read the script—but not seen the sequence—the Production Code director was not concerned about the murder. He nonetheless recommended that it be shot and edited so that the studio could eliminate “excess footage” for screenings in Britain, Australia, and Scandinavia. Confidence in Hitchcock meanwhile led the censors—with the usual caveats—to approve the script.

From the very beginning of Psycho, Hitchcock announced that he would stretch the bounds of cinema. The first scene, which the camera enters through a hotel window, shows Marion (Janet Leigh) and her lover in bed together—he stripped to the waist, she wearing a brassiere and half slip. The shower sequence is even more shocking. It is at once violent and realistic, due in part to the authenticity of the set decoration. (The motel bathroom contains a toilet, which, thanks to Production Code enforcement, had not been seen on screen for almost thirty years.) During production, members of the crew bet that the stabbing would never pass the censors. Only one shot—less than one second long—would finally show knife against flesh, and then only denting rather than penetrating the flesh; in 1960, though, the murder may have been the most brutal ever filmed.

With Psycho, Hitchcock did what only a few directors, Sam Peckinpah among them, have since done: he made violence both an elemental and an aesthetic experience. So successful was he that, after screening the finished picture, Production Code reviewers gave only a few quibbles about a few shots, concentrating only on “costume.”

Apparently as a sop, Hitchcock had cut an overhead shot of Marion’s body draped limp over the tub with her buttocks exposed. The screenwriter found it a heartbreaking shot, “poetic and so hurtful.” Several other troublesome shots remained. Three of the five censors were convinced they had seen flashes of Marion naked during the assault. Two disagreed, and Shurlock sided with the majority. “Please take out the nudity,” he told Hitchcock. Two days later, the director returned the print—unchanged—to the Production Code office. As Stephen Rebello reports in his book on the making of Psycho, the censors exchanged positions: Three now saw no nudity, two saw it. The three were right: Hitchcock’s shrewd editing had made viewers only think they saw exposed flesh. As finally the censors realized, Hitchcock’s was a textbook lesson in the creation of illusion.

• Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho (1990, excerpt) – Stephen Rebello, basis for Hitchcock (2012)

Less Is More
Hitchcock had an amicable relationship with the Production Code office. After all, the Production Code was less
concerned with content per se than its treatment—the treatment of crimes, the treatment of scenes of passion,
the treatment of repellent subjects. And Hitchcock’s treatment, his vaunted touch, lessened the burden of the
censors; in turn, the censors rewarded the director with more latitude than many of his peers enjoyed. Now,
decades later, Hitchcock’s and the Production Code’s cinema of indirectness contains a lesson for contemporary moviemakers. Showing and telling all—the modus operandi of many writers and directors since the late 1960s, when the Production Code Administration turned into the Classification and Ratings Administration—goes only so far. As the Production Code boys and directors like Hitchcock always understood, less is more.

One more example? In North by Northwest (1959), in the last scene of the print reviewed by the Production Code office, Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint travel by Pullman train to New York. Grant pulls her up into his upper berth, and they fall back in a kiss and, eventually, we assume, more. Unacceptable, the censors ordered: The couple must be sitting up (or at least not lying down) at the fadeout. Hitchcock recalled that he had some outtakes of the train, including a shot of it speeding into a tunnel. In the finished picture, as Roger and Eve begin to fall back, he cuts to that train, in context looking boldly—and whimsically—phallic. The censors were pleased, Hitchcock was delighted, and audiences left the theater smiling.

In a 1969 interview* with The Times of London, musing on the end of the Hollywood studio era, Hitchcock wondered, “Are we missing some other stimulus that went with those earlier days?” For apologists of the Production Code, the answer was obvious.

*In the Hall of Mogul Kings, 23 June 1969, p. 33 – reprinted in Hitchcock on Hitchcock (1995)

This essay first appeared in World & I (August 1999). Also highly recommended:

• Hitchcock: Censorship Saboteur/Censored! – Brian Trenchard-Smith
• Hitchcock and the Censors (2019) – John Billheimer | interview/#2/#3/#4 | review

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This is part of a unique, in-depth series of 150-odd Hitchcock articles.