Joe Breen's Oscar.

The article focuses on Joe Breen who won the fourth honorary Oscar Award at the twenty-sixth Academy Awards ceremony held on March 25,1954. He was awarded for his conscientious, open-minded, and dignified management of the Motion Picture Production Code. Breen had served almost twenty-one years as the head of the Production Code Administration (PCA), the body that censored all films shown in the theatres of the U.S. Breen had cultivated a reputation that bore little resemblance to open-minded and dignified. As a chief enforcer and interpreter of the Production Code, Breen was capable of being high handed and capricious. Breen was totally dedicated to enforcing both the spirit and the letter of the code and was also capable of quoting passages in the Code that did not exist. For many film historians, the image of Joe Breen is that of a belligerent, profane and sanctimonious bigot. Although he presented himself to Hollywood as a self-confident and indefatigable defender of the Code, private correspondence of Breen reveals a very different picture.