In the mid-Thirties Hollywood was only marginally aware that World War II was just around the corner and that an even graver threat, called television was about to rear it's unwelcome head after the war. Consequently, the convention of family cinema-going was perhaps for the last time a factor to be reckoned with in the film industry. It was Louis B. Mayer, a self-professed family man even amongst movie moguls, who once asked in a rhetorical fashion 'What will people say about Louis B. Mayer if he puts his name on a picture he's ashamed to let his family see?'
As television companies would discover at a later point, family viewing was big, big business; what's more it would mean that the film producers could comfortably keep on the right side of the rigorous requirements of the Hays Code and the strident demands of the Catholic Legion of Decency.
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| Father Spencer For Hire One way of dealing with the Catholic lobby was to have a priest emerge as a hero. In a most improbable piece of casting, Spencer Tracy portrayed said priest in the 1936 feature San Francisco - up to that point Tracy was notorious for being cast as convicts, connivers and gangsters. It was an omnipotent performance that earned Tracy his first golden boy nomination ans paved the pattern for his playing the saintly Father Flanagan in Boys Town (1938). |