Betty Boop went from flapper to matron almost overnight, and the reason was not fashion or the law but Hollywood voluntarily strapping itself into a moral straitjacket. This episode traces the Motion Picture Production Code from the scandal-soaked 1920s, when nearly 100 censorship bills hit 37 state legislatures in 1921 alone, through the 1915 Supreme Court ruling that denied movies First Amendment protection, to the hiring of Presbyterian elder Will H. Hays at $100,000 a year to be the industry’s Screen Landis.

We explain how a Catholic layman and a Jesuit priest wrote the 1930 code, why the Great Depression pushed studios to ignore it during the pre-Code years, and how the Legion of Decency and Joseph Breen’s Production Code Administration finally gave it teeth in 1934 with a seal of approval that the studio-owned theaters enforced. We look at what Breen banned, how the code rewrote Hitchcock’s Rebecca, shaped Casablanca, and inspired the famous two-and-a-half-minute kiss in Notorious, and then follow the unraveling driven by the 1948 Paramount antitrust decision, television, foreign films, the 1952 Miracle Decision, and defiant releases like The Moon Is Blue and The Pawnbroker, until Jack Valenti replaced the code with ratings in 1968.

• The Fatty Arbuckle trial and the William Desmond Taylor murder that terrified middle America
• Father Daniel Lord’s argument that films bypass the intellect and go straight to emotion
• Compensating moral values: why crime could never pay on screen
• How shadows, cutaways, and double entendre made filmmakers more clever
• Why antitrust law and fear of television killed the code as much as changing morals did