One can think of Golden Age Comic Book Superheroes as Breen Office pre-approved but Golden Age Film Noir as Breen Office pre-disapproved.
During WWII, Hollywood was not taken over by Allied government censors , contrary to expectations.
Instead Hollywood (Breen Office) censorship methods simply took over the Allied governments.
The bright uplift that Joseph Breen always strived for within the small - virtual - world of major Hollywood films became something Allied governments tried to fairy dust over all of their nations' activities.
Allied war efforts certainly killed many neutral and occupied nation civilians - hundreds of thousands of them in total.
But you would never see the Allied propaganda efforts boast about these deaths in the way the Axis did about their complete destruction of civilian Lidice's entire population and houses.
But Allied newspapers and books remained surprisingly free to comment about everything but immediate military operations .
As a result , the front pages (& Hollywood 'war' movies/comic books) had huge but empty war stories , all about Breen Office uplift and how the fiercely determined Allies were united in seeking a quick end to all forms of discrimination.
But those newspapers' same back pages had plenty of tiny but fact-filled items on examples of Home Front profiteering, slackers and racists.
By 1943, this dissonance had led many left leaning film people to start turning out film noirs that hinted at this moral disconnect....
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Why My Urgency ?
- Michael Marshall
- Nova Scotia
- Histories of WWII all start with the presumption that it was a war raged between humans and human ideologies, with Nature’s climate and geography as side issues easily surmounted.My blog, on the contrary will only accept that it was conflict between humans and their ideology that STARTED the war but that it was the barriers thrown up by Mother Nature (geography & climate) that turned it into a war that lasted between 6 to 15 years and expanded to thoroughly involve all the world’s oceans and continents. High Modernity may have started the war convinced that Nature had been conquered and was about to be soon replaced by human Synthetic Autarky and that only human Tiger tanks and human Typhoon planes were to be feared. But by the end, more and more people had lost their naive faith in Scientism and were beginning to accept that humanity was thoroughly entangled with both the Nature of plants, animals & microbes as well as the Nature of so called “lesser” humanity. By 1965, the world was definitely entering the Age of Entanglement. Billions still believed - at least in part -with the promises of High Modernity but intellectually & emotionally, it was no longer dominant...
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