ty (by gangsters and especially by police), they were to avoid depicting any kind of sexual promiscuity (unwedded, extramarital, or perverted), and they were to avoid making any illegal or immoral life seem possible or pleasant (goodby to the gangsters who lived well until the law gunned them down) (Mast, 1976: 265).
The result was the creation of a bowdlerized American cinema for more than thirty years, in which not only such words as "sex," "God," "hell" and "damn," but even words such as "nuts," "guts," and "louse" were forbidden: "Ironically, the code, which Hollywood adopted for business reasons in 1934, perished some thirty years later for the same reasons. The very words and deeds that cramped sales in the 1930s spurred them in the 1960s" (Mast, 1976: 265).
The breakdown of self-censorship in the 1960s had mostly to do with violence, as such highly-popular films as Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde and Sam Peckinpah&apos
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