Censoring Hollywood: Youth, Moral Panic and Crime/Gangster Movies of the 1930s.

POPULAR culture; CULTURE; INTELLECTUAL life; PRESSURE groups; INCOME; CULTURAL industries

Language of the most disgusting kind is uttered, and plans of robberies, no doubt, concocted, claimed a letter to a London newspaper in 1838, urging suppression of the penny theatre nuisance or cheap and unlicensed stage entertainments put on for wage-earning children and adolescents among makeshift urban surroundings. The writer added, echoing charges made eighty years later against the silent cinema, boys and girls are not only tempted to pilfer from shops, but even to rob their parents that they might have the means of attending these receptacles of vice. To properly understand how exaggerated fears such as the above, out of all proportion to the actual threat offered, emerge over a lengthy time span, forms of cultural production need to be studied in relation to other cultural practices and to social and historical structures. Moral panic implies that public concern is in excess of what is appropriate if concern were directly proportional to objective harm. The role of individuals, pressure groups and bureaucratic agencies, often involved in a complex and shifting pattern of alliances, support interest group interpretations of panicky social crusades over popular culture that supposedly incited juvenile crime, among other iniquities, but only within an historical climate of underlying fears and social anxieties.