About ten years before the birth of noir cinema, guidelines for cinematic content in America began being enforced. The Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association or MPPDA adopted a code which set forth a list of specific do’s and don’ts of the film industry (Medoff). The code was known for being exhaustingly repressive, forbidding almost anything that was deemed “bad” or anything subject to give audiences the wrong idea (Cook). The birth of noir during this era is fascinating because everything we know about noir is contradictory to this code’s repression of humanity’s darkness. This led to many arguments between producers and noir directors. Often, this dispute led to directors submitting to the producers and inserting what would …show more content…
(Nedeljkovich)
Noir was one of the most suppressed styles of film during this period, specifically in one of the earliest films that followed the style, The Letter. Set in Singapore, The Letter portrays betrayal, revenge, and fate. The story revolves around Leslie; her character clearly breaks some of the production code’s standards. Leslie’s internal conflict that leads her to killing her lover is the fact that he found an unmarried woman he loves and decided to marry her instead of continuing the affair with the married Leslie. During the opening scene, Leslie is seen firing six gunshots into her lover. This scene itself breaks the code’s rules, crime and any sort of murder was to be shown as little as possible in detail. In this scene, all but two of the six gun shots are shown on screen (Cook). With that being said, only one gunshot is shown with both Leslie and her lover in the image, the rest are depicted with a medium close up of Leslie firing the gun in what we are to assume is her lover. This technique of hiding the criminal action is characteristic of what directors had to do in order to satisfy the Production Code. Because the film relies on this specific crime to push the narrative,