If your childhood and adolescence were like mine, you saw quite a few movies.
For me, in those days, that meant going out to a theater, a place like the old Paramount at Newton Corner where I remember seeing Mickey Rooney as an irrepressible teenager in one of his 13 Andy Hardy films. in I saw at least one other film, now forgotten, in the long-demolished Watertown Square theater known by local kids as the Flea House.

Of all the films I went to see in those growing–up days, three have left the most distinct and lasting impressions: “Yankee Doodle Dandy,” the wartime patriotic classic that featured the marvelous dancing and singing of Jimmy Cagney; “Fantasia,” the beautifully imaginative animated extravaganza of Walt Disney; and “The Great Dictator” in which Charlie Chaplin skillfully and hilariously skewered Adolf Hitler.

Like virtually all other kids, I had precious little sense of the history behind film making. However, as a member of a Catholic family, I was familiar with the Legion of Decency, a watchdog agency established by the church in 1933 to judge the morality of movies.

Probably my youth exempted me from standing up during a Sunday Mass and promising to follow the rulings of the Legion, as adults in many places were expected to do.

Like all movie-goers of the later 1930s and the 1940s, I was seeing films whose creation had been shaped by the “Code to Govern the Making of Motion and Talking Pictures.” In effect from 1934 on, this set of regulations was adopted by the industry largely in response to the threat of censorship by the federal government.

Now, many decades later, I have become more fully aware of the history behind this move to regulation and of its effects. Thanks to the article “When Hollywood Dared” by Geoffrey O’Brien, published in the New York Review of Books of July 2nd, I now know something about the problematic aspects of this history.

In drawing up the code that would govern movies until 1968, Hollywood turned to two prominent Catholics. A Jesuit, Daniel Lord, and a layman, Martin Quigley, were chosen to draft the new code. Those same two men had helped create the Legion of Decency, which rated films according to a narrow and rigid code of morality.

You might have expected film moguls to have selected for guidance a more representative group, including people from Protestant churches. It seems to me astounding for the movie industry to have taken its direction from members of this one faith, especially at a time of widespread anti-Catholic feeling in America.

A friend who was born in 1912 (and saw silent films and the early talkies when they first came out) explains why. That kind of Catholic fundamentalism, he tells me, corresponded to the mind-set of many Protestant churches in the thirties. As a result Protestants did not mind leadership coming from Catholics in this instance.

As a boy, I had no knowledge of the Production Code controls over the films I saw. It never occurred to me that the films focusing on romance, for instance, were subject to this kind of censorship. True, they did not show men and women in blatant sexual situations, but I took this as normal. This caution would seem to have reflected the sexual mores of most Americans.

In the period between the birth of talkies in 1927 and the coming of the Code in 1934, American films had continued to evidence some traits that had been characteristic of the silent films. Geoffrey O’Brien cites a “directness and intensity ─ a wide-awakeness” that he finds astonishing.

The same critic holds that some of the free-wheeling talkies that appeared before the 1934 Code displayed cultural values that were different from the values that prevailed later.

Among the specific elements he cites are “verbal byplay,” “dead-on glimpses of prison corridors and newspaper offices and city streets,” and “a mood of erotic impudence.”

They showed nudity, gay characters, interracial love, and sexually independent women ─ all of which would have been banned later on. The Code, after all, barred entertainment that smacked of disregard for society’s mainline values.

Those films, incidentally, are now available in DVD collections. One such is called “Pre-Code Hollywood Collection” and another is labeled “Forbidden Hollywood Collection.”

Thanks to O’Brien I now wish to see some of the early talkies. I want to test his thesis that later films lost something important by Hollywood’s agreeing to a rigid code of censorship

Were the movies of that earlier era more creative than those that came later?
And was American culture influenced toward social and moral rigidity as a result of the Code?

It could be significant for those of us in later life who reflect on our growing up to discover the impact that Hollywood decisions, made long ago, may have had upon our lives.