3. The Story Of Temple Drake
1933
Films based on controversial novels are bound to cause a stir even before production wraps up. In the case of The Story of Temple Drake, the source material—William Faulkner’s 1931 novel Sanctuary—pretty much guaranteed a backlash, for stories about rape frequently illicit negative emotions. In short, The Story of Temple Drake describes the tortured existence of Temple Drake (played by Miriam Hokins), a promiscuous Southern girl and the daughter of a Mississippi judge who is kidnapped, raped, and forced into prostitution by a backwoods gangster named Trigger (played by Jack La Rue). Later, in self-defense, Temple kills Trigger before fleeing back to the relative safety of her family’s home.
Although it has all the makings of a moralistic revenge tale, The Story of Temple Drake, which ends with Temple confessing to Trigger’s murder after being prompted by an idealistic young lawyer, actually sees Temple admitting that she enjoyed the rape. While The Story of Temple Drake is in reality somewhat cheerier than Faulkner’s novel (Sanctuary ends with thehanging of an innocent man and the complete spiritual defeat of the well-meaning lawyer Horace Benbow), this did not stop Will Hays from personallyplacing editorial pressure on the heads of Paramount Pictures. Because of this, and the fact that several cities in the US banned the film outright, The Story of Temple Drake, more than almost any other film, helped to inspire a more active Hays Code as Hollywood’s chief engine of censorship.
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