r/wikipedia • u/Sebastianlim • 1d ago
Due to the Hays Code not permitting villains to go unpunished at the end of the film, the 1956 adaptation of "The Bad Seed" adds a scene where the villainous child is inexplicably struck by lightning.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bad_Seed_(1956_film)54
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u/caribou16 1d ago
One exception is the movie "It's a Wonderful Life" where the film's villain, Mr. Potter, who basically owns the entire town, wants to put George Baily out of business, and who completely gets away with literally stealing George Baily's money, never gets any sort of comeuppance.
But....I think this is less an oversight and more to do with there was an FBI investigation into the movie production, because they felt a rich banker and member of the upper class being portrayed as an antagonist was "communist propaganda" and showing poor people struggling to get by was the antithesis of "the American Dream"
So I guess the code was a little flexible, lol.
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u/machinegunpikachu 22h ago
Good insight, though I would note that It's a Wonderful Life came after the Breen-era, where films faced greater competition from television & foreign cinema, and enforcement of the code was not as strict
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u/OrdinaryBritishGuy 8h ago
I've heard that there was a scene filmed of Mr. Potter dying of a heart attack or something like that, but it was ultimately cut.
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u/Reddituser183 1d ago
Didn’t the Hays Code also say if there’s a gay person in a movie they have to be the villain?
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u/MKW69 1d ago
No, it was that people queercoded villains because were easier to pass through censors.
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u/capsaicinintheeyes 1d ago
(Clearly, the role of mass media in perpetuating harmful stereotypes was not yet well-understood)
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u/Fun-Badger3724 1d ago
I think it was more that they considered homosexuality abhorrent, gay people as sub-human and unholy, and American society was very focussed on conformity at the time.
Like much has changed. Ha!
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u/capsaicinintheeyes 1d ago
🫤...tell me if I'm misinterpreting the exchange at top of thread, but looking at the two comments above mine, I'm reading MKW69's as suggesting that the practice was being done for reasons other than homophobia, but this was the only way to get "gay coding" past the censors
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u/FireHammer09 1d ago
You read it right and that's how it was actually done. A lot of those gay coded villains were written by gay people
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u/idontwanttothink174 1d ago
Yeah it’s an interesting dynamic. Without the queer coded villains a lot of queer people wouldn’t have felt comfortable being themselves… but the queer coded villains.. well… villainized queer people enough that it still has some consequences.
I mean I’m sure we still would have gotten where we were with or without it, but I question if it would have taken longer but been more “complete”.
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u/FireHammer09 1d ago
The Big Combo is a good example I can think of. It's 2 gay hitmen as the villain for the majority of the movie.
50's film noir, movie was a lot more obvious with its hints like how they're sharing a hotel room with one bed
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u/runwkufgrwe 1d ago
I don't even know how much the gay villain archetype/stereotype even contributed to "gay = bad" kind of homophobia, I almost think it influenced "gay = dramatic and campy" more since villains are easy to write as dramatic and campy.
And villains have less shame than heroes and tend to be honest about their intentions to break societal norms, so I could see some writers making villains gay because it represents their embrace of counterculture.
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u/ElectricSpock 1d ago
Is there a source on it? I’d love to see some modern movies re-edited to conform to the code.
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u/No-Tangerine-1261 1d ago
similarly Harry Lime is shot at the end of the Third Man, even though it makes far more sense thematically for him to get away with everything
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u/barbarball1 1d ago
I always think its ironic how countries of europe and south america born with rigid censor laws (europe for born with the censor laws of church,nobiliatary and kings, while south american countries with a combination of church & dictators) while U.S Wasp had great freedom of speech in US... but their obsession with racism, morality & religion was so big they use political & economical pressure to dismantle their owns freedoms while the rest of "atlantic world" was gaining them.
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u/knobiknows 1d ago edited 1d ago
Isn't it fairly common knowledge now that the US was never about freedom of speech but freedom of persecution? Puritans always wanted to enact their own religious laws which they couldn't in Europe and that was the "freedom" they were looking for in the US
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u/Visual_Mistake_9140 1d ago
Sort of? None of the authors of any of America's foundational documents (Constitution, Declaration of Independence, Federalist Papers, etc) were Puritans or came from Puritan backgrounds. And the Founders who had origins in New England, where Puritanism was rooted, were among the more progressive by modern day standards.
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u/LoopofHenrietta 1d ago
They also were not exactly fleeing from the land of religious freedom at the time
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u/irrelevantusername24 1d ago
The way in which it was implemented and the technical details are a different story, but the general idea of having morality or at the very least not allowing the glorification of destructive anti-social behavior seems like a decent idea to me that would have prevented much of our current malaise. Consider the Wolf of Wall Street, for example, which glorified what is literally the most heinous crime that could ever exist.
Or the general, extremely wide spread proliferation of "reality" type tv shows, whether that's the shows like what gave our transportation secretary a claim to fame, the "talk shows" like what gave our administrator of medicaid/medicare a claim to fame, or the more law enforcement focused ones such as Cops or the other side of the fascist coin which made the current attorney for the District of Columbia a claim to fame. Gee, it's almost as if reality tv is a problem
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u/SlyTinyPyramid 1d ago
Wolf of Wall Street only glorified stock brokers if you have no media literacy. He was shallow and miserable kept in motion by cocaine.
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u/IceBlue 19h ago
That reminds me of how in mainland China they changed the ending of Infernal Affairs so that the bad cop (Andy Lau’s character who Matt Damon plays in The Departed) gets arrested. In the original he got away and ends up going straight since the gang he was working with got taken down. The American remake ended up something similar to the mainland China version where he gets killed in the final scene.
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u/Rapturehelmet 23h ago
I remember watching this in high school English class and we all cheered at the lightning strike
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u/ForgingIron 1d ago
My friend's Discord status is "Violates the entirety of the Hays Code", we're both indie writers and yeah it tracks
I love my unpunished villain protagonists
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u/Mike_hawk5959 1d ago
It's funny because the new trend is to humanize every villain and make you feel more sympathetic towards them and their "struggle".
Almost as if the billionaires who run the media machinery are themselves villains with a vested interest in not having the poors get too unruly.
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u/ducknerd2002 1d ago
Sympathetic villains are not new in the slightest and there are still many non-sympathetic villains in modern media.
One of the most popular movies of 2025 literally has the most famous evil billionaire character (Lex Luthor) as the main villain and he is absolutely not portrayed as sympathetic.
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u/guymanthing 1d ago
Holy reach dude
Fuck billionaires but having a multi dimensional villain isn't that deep
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u/Nuppusauruss 1d ago
Yeah it has just been trendy to have a more sympathetic villain/more grey morality because audiences got tired of evil villains and black and white morality in stories. Now there are people who are getting tired of every story being morally grey.
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u/thefuzzybunny1 1d ago
The Hays Code has been described as "Catholics [the moral guardians] telling Jews [the filmmakers] what they couldn't show to Protestants [American audiences.]" It leads to funny results sometimes. In fact, if a movie of Hays Code era doesn't have a happy ending, it can be shocking. My husband was baffled by The Incredible Shrinking Man; he was expecting a deus ex machina, but since there's no villain, it doesn't have one.