The Illusion of Depth

As we reach the Easter Break (and the end of Act I of our current film series) this feels like a good opportunity to take stock of our current position. As I'm sure you know by now, I have chosen to call this series Depression. Comedy. The first reason for this is the obvious one: the films I am showing are all comedies released during the Great Depression. But what I hope is becoming clear by now is that these particular comedies were something more than simply accidents of timing. These weren't merely funny films that happened to come out at a time when society was in crisis. These were exactly the films that everyone needed at that moment, and they gave their audiences a lifeline at a moment in history when everything was very dark indeed. After our recent screening of  Sullivan's Travels , it was pointed out to me that 1941 (the year of that film's release) was the same year in which Olivier Messiaen had composed his Quartet for the End of Time , written while he wa...

I have frequently spoken about the infamous Hays Office censorship code that was imposed on Hollywood in 1934, because it was to have an enormous impact on the way films were made for the next few decades. Most of the specifics of the production code came from ultra-conservative pressure groups who wanted to enforce their own conception of decency and "acceptable behaviour". The self-proclaimed Legion of Decency (originally called the Catholic Legion of Decency) was founded in 1934 by John T. McNicholas, the Archbishop of Cincinnati. There was surely no one more qualified to enforce the moral standards of the nation than a Catholic Archbishop from Cincinnati. Unsurprisingly, many of the restrictions that found their way into the production code were explicitly Catholic; especially when it came to the subject of sex . The Legion of Decency had very strong opinions about the notion of pregnancy out of wedlock, and so that of course became one of the most notably taboo plot dev...