Phil,
Someone already mentioned Frank Miller's Censored Hollywood.
It's a very good, very readable, but pretty general history
of movies and censorship and/or regulation, as are Murray
Shumach's The Face on the Cutting Room Floor and Richard S.
Randall's Censorship of the Movies.
However, it sounds like you are interested in something more
tightly focused on the Hays Office. For that, there are
Gregory D. Black's Hollywood Censored: Morality Codes,
Catholics, and the Movies and Leonard J. Leff's and Jerold L.
Simmons's The Dame in the Kimono: Hollywood, Censorship,
& the Production Code from the 1920s to the 1960s. Both
draw extensively on Hays Office memos. I have both, but I've
only read the latter. Very good and, as might be expected
when one of the co-authors has written a book about
Hitchcock, deals a lot with crime movies (judging by only a
glance, the former seems to focus more on sex, as that seemed
to be a bigger concern of the Legion of Decency).
There is also Gerald Gardner's The Censorship Papers: Movie
Censorship Letters from the Hays Office 1934 to 1968. This is
broken down into 17 categories: Adventures, Musicals,
Westerns, etc. Under each heading are 2 to 5 movies, each of
which gets a brief paragraph of context before a couple of
pages of excerpts from actual Hays Office memos. The movies
in the Crime category are: The Maltese Falcon, The Postman
Always Rings Twice, Double Indemnity and Angels with Dirty
Faces; Thrillers: Rebecca, Notorious, Strangers on a Train,
Rear Window and The Birds -- what no one but Hitchcock made
thrillers?
Mark
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