By Tom deignan

THIS Friday, the controversial Hollywood blockbuster The Da Vinci Code starring Tom Hanks opens across the U.S. For weeks the movie has been in the headlines, generating angry charges that the film based on Dan Brown’s best-selling novel is deeply anti-Catholic.

According to the book and movie, Jesus married the former prostitute Mary Magdalene. They had children and even have descendants who live in the present world.

As the May 16 Washington Post noted, “Calls for boycotts and bans of the highly anticipated Vatican thriller are getting louder.”

Last month, the same article notes, the second-ranking official in the Vatican’s Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith said Catholics should “should boycott The Da Vinci Code and speak out against it and reject its lies against the church.”

These days, of course, such comments tend to generate more publicity — and thus, more curiosity — about the movie in question. Therefore, it’s easy to forget that not too long ago movie boycotts were big business for the Catholic Church.

And when it came to that business, Irish Americans played central roles.

For a certain generation of Irish Americans, movies were deemed either sinful or wholesome by the church’s Legion of Decency. Viewing films which fell into the sinful category was a big no-no.

But this was not just a matter of prude Irish Catholics trying to suppress sexually charged material. A big part of the early Hollywood boycott debate also dealt with anti-Irish stereotypes.

A movie such as the 1920s tenement comedy The Callahans and The Murphys depicted the Irish in a terrible light. Soon afterwards, efforts were made to clean up the big screen not just of smutty material, but also offensive ethnic stereotypes as well.

It was in the 1930s when the debate over morality in Hollywood reached a fever pitch. Two Irishmen were at the center of this debate.

The first was Jimmy Cagney, whose 1931 Irish gangster film The Public Enemy remains influential. In the early 1930s, many were angry at films such as The Public Enemy. They feared Cagney (as well as Edward G. Robinson in Little Caesar, and Paul Muni in Scarface) made criminal life so attractive he might corrupt American values.

That’s where Joseph Breen, the Production Code and the Legion of Decency came in.

“On or about July 1934 American cinema changed,” Thomas Doherty writes in his excellent 1999 book Pre-Code Hollywood. (Doherty, incidentally, is the son of an Irish immigrant.)

“During that month, the Production Code Administration, popularly known as the Hays office, began to regulate the content of Hollywood motion pictures. For the next 30 years, cinematic space was a patrolled landscape.”

Will Hays was the public face of “the code,” but Irish American Joseph Breen was arguably more influential.

While the code today is seen as mere censorship, the issue was more complex. For one, the Legion of Decency was an entirely separate body, a Catholic Church pressure group whose members sometimes advocated boycotting all films.

Some Hollywood executives (many of whom were Jewish, which raised tensions between Jews and Irish Catholics) saw Breen as the person who could clean up films in a way which would bring thousands of boycotting Irish Catholics back into movie houses.

Indeed, the code was also a response to anti-Irish films. The code explicitly states that no ethnic group or religion could be mocked in motion pictures. (This was more or less ignored when African Americans were involved.)

Doherty writes, “If Breen’s severe brand of Irish Catholicism motivated his desire to fumigate Hollywood, his intricate knowledge of film grammar and the production process allowed him to enforce his dictates. Unlike most censors, Breen knew the art he bowdlerized.”

Even those who dislike film censorship have been forced to pose this question — if Breen and the code were mere censors, how can you explain that Hollywood films were of such high quality before the code broke down in the early 1960s?

So, this weekend, when The Da Vinci Code makes millions, it may be interesting to think about the good or bad old days when a movie boycott really meant something.

(Contact Sidewalks at tomdeignan@earthlink.net.)