The wages of sin : censorship and the fallen woman film, 1928-1942 /

In suggesting a very limited scope of a few movies about women punished or rewarded for lapsing into sin, the title of this book is modest, even misleading. Here is a work of unexpected scope and thoughtfulness. True, few specific movies are analyzed--Anna Karenina, Stella Dallas, Back Street, Blonde Venus, Camille, I'm No Angel, Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise--but hints, insights, and alert scholarship provide a large context: stage melodrama, opera, novels (Hardy, Trollope, Collins, Eliot, Zola, Flaubert), Victorian concepts of womanhood, social mobility, and, of course, popular ideas of morality. There are a fine bibliography, footnotes, and filmography. Whether the sexually transgressing woman is punished or rewarded, " Once the machine of censorship got rolling, the rules of censorship dictated particular " (endings and motives, especially). Will the man have a key to an unmarried woman's apartment? Will the secretary have a mink coat? This is a book about the specifics of censorship during a 14-year period in the US. Better yet, this is a book about the principles of censorship. The tone is calm, the approach historical, the ideas--without exception--worth serious consideration in these current censorial times. College and university libraries. P. H. Stacy University of Hartford

Jacobs, an assistant professor of communication arts at the University of Wisconsin, presents a well-researched examination of the ways in which the Production Code strictures of Hollywood's depiction of sex contributed to the screen construction of female sexuality in the '30s. The author writes, ``Because industry self-regulation functioned as a sort of machine for registering and internalizing social conflict, it provides an extraordinarily fruitful means of contextualizing film analysis,'' i.e., grounding it firmly in history. The resulting book is happily devoid of the jargon that mars much recent academic film writing, but it's a bit dry all the same. Jacobs's most interesting discovery is that the Code actually worked as a sort of preemptive strike to placate state censor boards while still allowing filmmakers a little breathing room. She challenges the commonplace that pre-1935 films were uncensored and shows that Code administrators were ``always complicit to some degree with the aims of major film producers.'' However, the tentativeness of her conclusions leaves one with the sense that this is a work in progress. Photos not seen by PW. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved