2. A History of Censorship of the American Film

ARTHUR LENNIG

THE SILENT FILM

BACK in 1893, the midway of the Chicago World’s Fair featured a belly dancer named Fatima who proved a sensation with her exotic skills of undulation. Although science and industry had erected monuments to technological progress, they could not quite equal the peculiar effect Fatima had on her gaping spectators. She vibrated her hips sideways, she pumped them back and forth, she twirled them around. The lady—“Hardly a lady!” the blue-noses sniffed—showed most graphically what a thousand-year-old tradition of eroticism could do for a tired and depleted Sultan with a hundred competing wives.

Fatima from the East created in America’s midsection more than just a glow. She was “something to behold!” and therefore it seemed good business to capture her provocative and aphrodisiacal ambiance on film. The unquestionably moving image that resulted provoked one of the earliest instances of motion picture censorship. Her gyrations appeared in two versions. The uncensored one showed her heavily clothed body writhing about; the other showed the same action as through a fence darkly, with two white grids obscuring her movements both top and bottom. The effect was a bit like finding lint in the keyhole.

Although Fatima was not as natural a wonder as Niagara, which had recently been recorded on film, audiences preferred her slides and slips to Niagara’s falls. In short, the public expressed considerable interest in the many manifestations of that old three-letter word: Sex. At the same time, officialdom expressed considerable interest in denying them that golden opportunity. Censorship was already extending its tentacles into the film industry.

Feminine pulchritude did not necessarily have to emanate from the East. The servants׳ quarters would also do. In the mid-nineties, a twenty-two-foot Biograph film for a peep show had the title: How Bridget Served the Salad Undressed. A maid misinterprets an order and, according to the catalog, “Brings in the salad in a state of dishabille hardly allowable in polite society.”¹ What was “hardly allowable” in the 1890s probably had the girl swathed in enough material to form the main sail of the Santa Maria. Still, the film hinted of naughtiness, as did such early peep show and movie titles as The Kiss, Love in a Hammock, Trapeze Disrobing Act, and Peeping Tom in the Dressing Room. If Bridget had really come in “nekkid,” the police—after taking a good look themselves—would have raided the penny arcade immediately. All the natural wonders of the world could be shown with the new magical invention except for the one that apparently many people wanted to see: the nude human body. The public instinctively knew what some learned critics refuse to recognize: that movies at least partially appeal to the audience’s latent voyeurism. For this reason, it is the medium that has been plagued—and, ironically, aided—the most by censorship.

The basic issues of censorship were cogently argued in the seventeenth century by John Milton. His Areopagitica stated that a cloistered virtue is no virtue at all, and that it is, by no means, a personal triumph over vice but merely the prevention of its realization. His persuasive reasoning notwithstanding, most societies have seen fit to limit freedom of expression. In the history of the United States, this limitation has applied more to sexual mores than to political and religious beliefs. Divergent attitudes, though hardly appreciated, have been tolerated. Revolutionaries, white supremicists, anarchists, fascists, communists, and monarchists, as well as Papists, Zionists, Mormons, Quakers, and all kinds of religious sects have all been allowed their say, along with various degrees of harassment. But sex was not to be discussed publicly or written about in any detail. It was not so long ago that Margaret Sanger was arrested for dispensing birth control information.

How did such official repression come about? Laws always somehow reflect the mores of a people. And the general attitude toward sex in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was simply that it should not be mentioned. In America such evasiveness and prudery was a direct carry-over from Victorian England and has been referred to, at least by the literary fraternity, as the “genteel tradition.” This attitude was a far cry from the directness of the Elizabethan age and such lines as “the bawdy hand of time is on the prick of noon” from Romeo and Juliet; Hamlet’s laying his head in Ophelia’s lap and announcing, “That’s a fair thought to lie between maids’ legs”; and even such puns as “firk you” in some Shake-spearean comedies. Such license was stopped in 1642 after Cromwell and his Puritans closed the theaters in an attempt to legislate morality. When Cromwell went the way of most rabid reformers—out—King Charles returned from France and assumed the crown. He brought with him continental sophistication and supported the amusing and occasionally salacious Restoration plays.

In 1697, Jeremy Collier, a British clergyman who occasionally went to the theater, convinced himself—and later others—that “nothing has gone further in Debauching the Age” than the plays of his time and wrote A Short View of the Profaneness and Immorality of the English Stage. The already existing censorship of political matters and of outright obscenity was not sufficient. Collier advocated a “moral” censorship. He examined in depth the content of plays and wished to remove anything that disagreed with his own sense of propriety. The purpose of theater was not to entertain or to reflect life: “The Business of Plays is to recommend Vertue, and discontenance Vice. . . .” He was convinced that the theater of his day was in “the Enemies’ Hand, and under a very dangerous Management.”²The reverend moralist had a fine nose for evil and could sense its presence in almost every stage production. He was not only opposed to jokes or insults levelled against his holy profession, he was also allergic to any risqué dialogue. “Such licentious Discourse tends to no point but to stain the Imagination, to awaken Folly, and to weaken the Defences of Vertue.³” He concluded that “the Stage is faulty to a scandalous Degree of Nauseousness and Aggravation.”⁴ Despite many rebuttals, Collier won the day and the English theater cleansed itself, and as a result became considerably duller.

Although the eighteenth century attempted to be an age of reason and modeled itself artistically after the classical period, personal behavior still remained relatively unrefined. Alexander Pope, annoyed at a fellow critic, slipped him an emetic and described his discomforture with great glee. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, however, a sense of propriety began to intrude. Bodily functions, and in particular sex, were no longer mentionable. Most poets, except for Byron, were perfectly “safe” for any youngster. Novelists too became far more discreet. The lustiness of Fielding’s Tom Jones could not be found in nineteenth century English and American novels. Pressures of society plus the self-imposed limitations by publishers kept most writers in line.

One of America’s leading critics and novelists, William Dean Howells, although a progressive for his time, could not escape the Victorian Zeitgeist and seriously contended that books should take into consideration the pure mind of an innocent young girl and should not, under any circumstances, bring a blush to her virginal cheeks. What was going on under that long dress and those heavy bloomers and what shocking fantasies were flickering through her mind would not be revealed until Freud pulled away the fourth wall of the sacrosanct bedroom and peeled back those rumpled sheets.

The laws and customs of American society in the late 1800s and early 1900s reflected Victorian attitudes to such an extent that not only new outspoken works but often older ones were trimmed to preserve morality. Even Shakespeare was not spared, at least in popular editions. He remained whole in other versions, but the obscurity of his language was considered a sufficient shield and no one seemed to explain his off-color meanings. Scholarly tomes that otherwise examined every line and word of the bard were curiously silent with passages touching upon sexual matters, such as Ophelia’s lines: “Young men will do’t, if they come to’t; By Cock, they are to blame.”

Although censorship affected the written word—the definition of obscenity was a broad one—books and articles were far more free than the medium of the movies. This increased concern was due to a number of factors: (1) cinema affected a lot of impressionable people; (2) it catered to the lower classes who in particular needed strict guidance; (3) it was a medium that was yet to be considered “art”; and (4) it was too graphic and immediate about life itself. The unwritten rule is that the closer to life an art form comes, the more it must suffer from checks.

Since cinema was explicitly realistic, considered by almost everybody to be only entertainment and not by any means worthy of the protection of freedom of speech, the movies incurred the suspicion and ultimately the wrath of the censors. Nor was their concern wrong. An erotic drawing will never have quite the same lustful power as an equally erotic photograph, for the latter has the real flesh of a specific person. In contrast, the artist’s pencil or brush can somehow raise the most sordid details into an artificial and therefore aesthetic realm. Thus the tourist had a right to be disappointed when he bought a Parisian vendor’s packet of “feelthy pictures" only to find out they were reproductions of nude paintings. He saw just as much flesh as he had hoped for, but he felt cheated (and had a right to feel cheated) for the poses and the aesthetic control of the artist ruined the more basic appeal of the body as lust object. As a result of this difference, the artist could paint and exhibit a nude far more easily than a photographer could exhibit an equally explicit photograph. And even the still photograph, because it was not as “alive” and therefore further removed from reality, was still more abstract (and therefore less dangerous and corruptive) than a motion picture of the same subject matter.

Although from its very beginning the motion picture was involved with stag films, these productions were only for a specialized clientele and were not shown to the general public any more than photos of a like nature were readily available. What caused the growth of film censorship in the U.S. and interested the first censors was, of course, the product being shown in local theaters—the official product stamped with the approval of society as a whole—and the effect of that subject matter on what was correctly presumed to be a more impressionable and less mentally gifted public: the motion picture audience.

As nickelodeons spread across the country during the first decade of the century, legislators, educators, and various civic groups in New York, Chicago, and other cities felt that the movies—that peripatetic and ubiquitous sideshow— were taking people out of the churches, libraries, art galleries, and concert halls. Dimwitted dime-novel readers and budding Horatio Algers were hampering their reading skills and possibly foregoing gainful enterprise to wile away their formative years watching movies about philandering husbands, mischievous maids, female acrobats, wild Indians, and train robbers. Pulpits, auditoriums, and city halls around the nation thundered and echoed with moral indignation against the new disease which threatened to ruin the eyesight, blight the mind, and corrupt the morals of millions of the young.

By 1907 newspapers like the Chicago Tribune were condemning the nickelodeons as ministering to “the lowest passions of children. . . . Proper to suppress them at once. . . . influence wholly vicious. . . . They cannot be defended. They are hopelessly bad.”⁵

That same year in Chicago the police were given the authority to preview movies to determine whether they were fit for public showing. In 1909, under pressure from organizations such as the Children’s Society, the mayor of New York temporarily shut down all the nickelodeons and movie houses in the city. To prevent similar actions an organization of influential New Yorkers, the People’s Institute, working in cooperation with certain producers and segments of the budding movie industry, formed a self-appointed review committee, the National Board of Censorship of Motion Pictures, which later became the National Board of Review. Within a few years some variety of local censorship existed in a number of states.

Despite these pressures, producers continued to offer movies focusing on crime or risqué subjects—but they were careful to see that the movies had “moral” endings. After a life of crime the villain was always apprehended, and after a life of pleasure the rake or woman of loose virtue must die some horrible death. Although technically the “bad” characters received retribution, in the audience’s eyes, identification, and sheer affection, these characters were usually the real heroes. And this approach, of course, has remained the same for decades.

In 1913 a movie called Traffic in Souls played to packed houses because of its exposé of white slavery. People went to see it not because of its indictment of sin, but to get at least a vicarious thrill. Although this film encountered a large amount of litigation, it was allowed to play in many places. At that time laws were not consistent, and whether or not a film was shown depended on the whims of local officials around the country. The protection the movies should have had under the First Amendment was denied in 1915, in an Ohio law case involving a local distributor versus a town censorship board. When it was appealed, the United States Supreme Court decided that the movies were “a business, pure and simple, originated and conducted for profit” and that they were therefore unworthy of constitutional protection. This decision, which encouraged the passage of censorship laws in additional states, was not overturned until 1952.

But the noose that was being tied around the movies would take a long time to tighten. In 1916 D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance was able to present some temple maidens relatively unclothed—the breasts of one girl were exposed. (When the film was later revived in 1942, the New York Censor Board decided that scene had to be cut. In fact, Intolerance could not possibly have been made after 1934, when the stringent Hollywood Code took effect.) In the film Griffith castigated the “Uplifters,” a group of reformers opposed to drinking, dancing, and the joys of the flesh. One remarkable scene shows the do-gooders closing a brothel. The “girls” trounce out to a paddy wagon as the masculine, middle-aged, and unattractive women uplifters watch. Also observing the exodus are two men in the uplifters’ employ who effeminately smirk. Only women who can’t get a man and male homosexuals would favor the closing of brothels, implies Griffith. This kind of outspokenness would become impossible during Hollywood’s later years of tight censorship.

In addition to Griffith’s temple maidens, movie audiences during the silent period were also treated to such sights as Annette Kellerman in the buff in Daughter of the Gods (1916), Theda Bara in Cleopatra (1917), Gloria Swanson bathing in Male and Female (1919), and Betty Blythe in Queen of Sheba (1921). Valentino in Blood and Sand (1922) and Erich von Stroheim in Foolish Wives(1922) conveyed a strong sensuality. Although the screen was relatively free from major interference at this time, the state censors around the country often encroached on more subtle matters and exerted a strong sense of provincialism, by generally discouraging controversial topics and more mature treatments of sex and by insisting that the films reflect a simplified morality. These first censors sat humorlessly through all of the Hollywood products and snipped indiscriminately, without any consideration as to whether the films were artistic, sincere, or merely junk.

In the first decade the nickelodeons had been replaced by larger, more elaborate movie theaters and palaces, which were drawing in a new audience from the middle class. The postwar years saw the attitudes of middle class America swiftly change, aided by such factors as a widespread cynicism (the war had demonstrated that man obviously was no longer on an inevitable path to progress), increased material prosperity, the mobility of the automobile, and the influence of Freud who had suggested that the Id was the prime mover behind human behavior. Science had agreed that evolution was a fact—except perhaps in Tennessee after the Scopes trial—and began to analyze modes of behavior, concluding that morality was relative rather than absolute. Paradoxically as the tension between the old Victorian standards and new modes of life began to be felt in the twenties, the local censors and various reform groups became more insistent that the movies reflect proper standards of morality.

Pressures, however, were not levelled just at the movies. The stage too had its Savonarola, a remarkably clear echo of Jeremy Collier of over two hundred years before. His name was John S. Sumner, the Secretary of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice. During the postwar years, he was an out-spoken opponent of anything that seemed conducive to sin and had a strong nose for sniffing out the salacious. He was appalled by the change in American life, but directed most of his ire against the New York stage, Broadway to him being the Devil’s own highway. Long incensed at the steady progression of evil on the boards, Sumner issued this purple pronunciamento in 1923, entitled “The Sewer on the Stage”: “Our muddle-headed producers are substituting mental sewers for those physical, and they find customers who desire to inhale the aroma of noxious mental products.” He goes on to blame the newspapers. “If they would stop pussy-footing and would come out openly and tell their readers that the Messrs. Panderer are producing an unclean and demoralizing show at the Cess- pool Theatre, there would soon be an end of such nefarious activities.”

Sumner goes on to lament that at a matinee performance of “one of these degenerate brain children” at least 50 percent of the audience were girls between sixteen and twenty years of age. He shivers to think of the effect. Representing the Puritan ethic in extremis, Sumner felt, “that with the increase of leisure among women, as among men, immorality will increase, because idle hands and Satan’s work are as closely related today as ever. Attendant conditions of our present day civilization have left millions of people with insufficient honest work to occupy their time. The hardest problem for some of these people to solve is what to do next. Girls and young married women are largely in this unfortunate class. They must be educated in methods of properly utilizing this new freedom from what they disdainfully call drudgery.”⁶ He concluded simply that theatre managers “should be clubbed into a sense of decency.” Fulminate as he did, Sumner could not stop Broadway from proceeding on its merrily indecent way. But he and his kind eventually had better success with the films.

The conflict between movies and the growing censorship forces came to a head in 1921. A general outcry was raised throughout the country against the transformation of young women from God-fearing maidens who valued their virginity into hedonists who exposed their legs, bobbed their hair, went unchaperoned, and indulged in gross familiarities in parked cars. Hollywood seemed to be the leading exemplifier of this kind of evil. In the world depicted on the screen almost everyone appeared to be rich, spoiled, young, and brash; every man had a bevy of girls; every woman a host of lovers. As a matter of fact, the films in the twenties were by no means so “modern” and dangerous. For the most part the girls were still good, and the heroes, except in Erich von Stroheim’s pictures, were generally unsullied by desire or corruption. Most American films of this period were remarkably proper, and only seemed to be sinks of iniquity in the perspective of the Puritan-Victorian tradition. To many of the screen’s more vocal critics, however, Hollywood continually and irresponsibly offended the Protestant ethic of hard work, just rewards, and deserved but muted pleasure. Such hedonism had to be stopped.

Unfortunately, Hollywood in 1921 proved quite vulnerable. There were some juicy scandals, in particular, the still unsolved shooting of director William Desmond Taylor and comedian Fatty Arbuckle’s alleged rape of a girl named Virginia Rappe, who died of some scandalous internal ailment. Her death roused every woman’s club from its tea cups, YMCA leaders out of their crowded showers, and ministers from their thundering imprecations, to cry out against the Sodom and Gomorrah of Hollywood. A chorus of righteousness rose up from all the lecterns, single beds, and local reading rooms: “Stop these fiends of decadence.”

The movies suffered in silence—in more than one way—as the opposition readied its forces. The General Federation of Women’s Clubs, the International Reform Federation, The Lord’s Day Alliance, New York Christian Endeavor members, The Central Conference of American Rabbis, as well as specific church groups such as Baptists, Episcopalians, Methodists, Presbyterians, and, of course, Roman Catholics, all fulminated against the evils. In 1919, The General Federation of Women’s Clubs found over 20 percent of the movies objectionable.⁷ And by 1921 this situation had not changed. Most crusaders demanded federal control of the movies. Although The National Board of Review, which had been founded earlier, was used as a standard for censorship and many states followed its recommendations, many people felt that the Board was far too lenient toward sin. Various states including New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Kansas, and cities like Chicago had created their own censorship boards. Some repressive laws were challenged as a violation of the First Amendment, but the Supreme Court upheld them.

The Hollywood scandals of 1921 had created a ground swell of revulsion against the motion picture industry. To forestall further proliferation of censorship boards and the threat of a federal board, the industry offered to reform itself. It drew upon the traditional American opposition to governmental interference and the general fear that the Federal board would soon grow beyond its bounds. Many newspapers, though decrying the sins of the movies, while, of course, writing up those sins in sensational articles, were leary of federal censorship, fearing for their own freedoms.

To short-circuit the growing indignation, Hollywood formed the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA) in 1922 and hired Will Hays to be its Czar of Morality. At the time, Hays was in President Harding’s cabinet and had a lot of personal prestige. This elder of the church was able to placate the moral vigilantes while at the same time fending off their more repressive attempts. Hays in the ensuing years oscillated between satisfying the producers and the public. He was probably a necessary evil, although the first Code that he administered in the twenties partially constrained the freedom of the screen. The list of “Don’ts” and “Be Carefuls” that his office eventually sent to the studios disapproved of people drinking liquor, forbade the ridicule of any religion, and banned the use of ministers as villains or as comic characters. The Code also established that crime could not be shown sympathetically, nor should specific details be explicitly described. But its main concern was sex. Besides stating that “the sanctity of the institution of marriage and the home should be upheld,” it advised that “low forms of sex relationship” be avoided. Adultery, the age-old preoccupation of a number of people, “must not be explicitly treated or justified, or presented attractively.” Scenes of passion should not be presented in a way to “stimulate the lower and baser element” nor should seduction or rape be “the proper subject for comedy.”

Hays, thanks to his aura of respectability, was immediately effective. In November 1922, a referendum in Massachusetts for censorship was defeated two to one, a far better result than the victory of the censors in New York of the previous year.

Hays suggested and then ordered that the studios not make films from certain risqué plays and novels which were being produced and printed, but which might offend the sensibilities of the American public. Although his control was strong in the beginning, Hays bowed to the bolder producers who tried to go as far as they could. Typically, ninety minutes of sin on the screen was followed by five minutes of redemption, which, at least technically, satisfied the Code. But reformers were still annoyed at the movies, and pressures started again for more and more control.

Meantime, the transformation of America was still taking place, and the movies also changed with their audience. The films of the twenties picked up a certain continental sophistication, and the naive farm boys and innocent young girls of Griffith quickly became passé. Many of the more daring films, such as those of Lubitsch or von Stroheim, were almost censorproof; innuendo and unexplicit references made clear to alert audiences what was going on without being too obvious about it. More than once the censors themselves missed the implications of some of the charming little tidbits offered on the screen. Perhaps the slyest director (and actor) of them all was Erich von Stroheim. Whether seducing a woman at the foot of a cross as in Blind Husbands, sniffing his middle finger and later raping a retarded girl in Foolish Wives, or raising and lowering his sword in some kind of phallic obedience in The Wedding March, he created a world that only a knowing audience could really appreciate.

But this new continental approach was not unreservedly liked, even by the sophisticated press, though it was a step forward in many ways. As one newspaper article said:

These new plays [the films of Lubitsch, von Stroheim, and others] of suggestion, innuendo, and sidelong glances are unearthly clever. Everyone loves them for a change. They give us all a pleased feeling of being highly intelligent. But they don’t touch the heart.

They reflect the feelings of an old civilization which has learned, with bitterness, that nothing matters very much, that life is only a cruel jest; that if the villain ravishes the poor “gell”—well, the chances are a thousand to one she wouldn’t have stayed pure, anyhow—so what’s the difference!⁸

In contrast, the article praises the films of D. W. Griffith, which did touch the heart, but such praise did not compensate for their declining appeal at the box office.

Even Griffith did not escape censorship. Admittedly, he did not indulge in what he once referred to as “lingerie ads,” but censors took exception to his honest and therefore often controversial subject matter. Most film historians think that Griffith suffered from censorship only because of his and Thomas Dixon’s view of Reconstruction in The Birth of a Nation (1915). But his next film, Intolerance, incurred the wrath of a number of people, who blamed him for criticizing charities, prohibitionists accused him of being a “tool of the liquor interests,” and do-gooders were angry at his dubious Freudian conclusion, “When women cease to attract men they often turn to reform as a second choice.”

The rest of his films were innocuous enough, but the early censors kept after his choice of subject matter and his occasionally too realistic treatment of violence. In Hearts of The World (1918), a shot of blood spurting out of the chest of a bayoneted French soldier was eliminated. In Way Down East (1920), Lillian Gish’s labor pains were too realistically depicted and were cut. The White Rose(1923) was banned in a few states because of its story about a hypocritical clergyman who seduces an orphan girl (Mae Marsh) and unknowingly leaves her pregnant. There was too much violence in America (1924), according to the New York censor. Griffith’s sympathy for the Germans in Isn’t Life Wonderful (1924) was not politic and after the film’s first showing the too-German-sounding “Hans” became “Paul,” and the Germans became Polish refugees. Even his last film The Struggle (1931), suffered a number of cuts.

Perhaps C. B. DeMille best caught the flavor of the postwar period, and in fact helped create it, by his sophisticated showmanship. Although DeMille is often thought of as the stager of great spectacles, his works in the teens and twen- ties were not, except for Joan the Woman (1917), The Ten Commandments(1923), and King of Kings (1927), of such large canvas. His films were modish, almost as up-to-date as the daily newspapers. In Old Wives For New (1918) a marriage falters because a wife loses interest in making herself attractive to her husband. In Dont Change Your Husband (1919), the male was the slovenly one. In Why Change Your Wife? (1920), DeMille continued to examine the domestic scene. These box office successes were not films which examined the poor or the rural folk à la Griffith. DeMille was interested in the rich or almost rich. He didn’t care about idealized emotion or about the faithfulness of his actors to real life. He was interested in showmanship. The ladies of the audience and some of the more appreciative men wanted to see what was almost a fashion show. The audience witnessed all kinds of high falutin׳ conduct and fancy dresses—scenes and costumes that would satisfy the fantasies of his popcorn audience. The men looked at the pretty stars in the beautiful dresses and said, “Wow.” The girls looked at the same dresses and went home to try to copy them.

When Gloria Swanson went for her morning bath in Male and Female, the movies left realism and entered instead a fantasy world that few people then or now could take quite seriously, but a world that somehow they still wanted to see. Certainly it paid off at the box office. Compare the simple, primitive one-room apartment of the modern story of Intolerance to the sumptuous bathroom in Male and Female. The audience was teased and titillated by Gloria approaching her sunken bathtub with two handmaidens to remove her dressing robe as she immerses herself in the water, just cheating us of the opportunity to observe her forbidden flesh. The task of washing off grime and sweat was elevated into a kind of pagan ritual. This was no longer “takin׳ a bath” but an obeisance to Eros. The audience with its collective jaw hanging open watches a beautiful woman in an unbelievably luxurious bathroom caressed by sparkling water, then rinsed in rose water and dried with towels held by her attendants. From a point of dramaturgy this scene ostensibly tried to show how spoiled she was, but its effect on the audience was different. It made an exotic rite out of a necessity and brought light into the darkened world of people who had only prosaic bathtubs at home. (In 1923 von Stroheim filmed a sardonic analogue to this scene. The rakish hero of The Merry-Go-Round is about to take a bath in an elaborate tub. The valet measures the temperature and makes sure that everything is entirely satisfactory for his master. Meantime, the hero’s dog jumps in the tub. The valet shoos him out and the master unknowingly steps into the same water, a grotesque parody of high living.) DeMille created teases and presented the perfect essence of what has ever since been called “Hollywood.”

Gloria Swanson, Pola Negri, and others may have been big stars dressed to kill from the bottom of their manicured toes to the top of their plumes, but they were not the only leading ladies. Mary Pickford remained popular with her portrayal of poor waifs and Lillian Gish continued to suffer in The Scarlet Letter and The Wind. The “woikin goil” still appeared, but she never made the literal and figurative splash that her high living sisters did. Seventh Heaven (1927) is more sentimentalized, cloying, and confectionized than anything Griffith ever presented, yet it was an outstanding success. Much of the same audience paid to see these almost diametrically opposed types of heroines. The dressed-to-kill upperclass type became one kind of wish fulfillment; the poor-but-eventually-growing-financially-comfortable-and-sometimes-even-rich-type became the other.

Although censorship had grown in strength during the twenties, it by no means had the thorough control that it would achieve after 1934. There were still a few ways of evading a strict interpretation of the rules administered by the Hays Office. Only after 1934 was the machinery of complete control perfected. By that time censorship problems were less obvious, because the censorship was enforced before the film was made or released and thus overt cases were not as frequent. Studios quickly found that there was no purpose in shooting a scene that could not be used or in producing a film that could not be shown. In the twenties films could still be blessed by Hays and the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association and yet be damned by local boards. Of 579 features released in 1928, for example, only 42 escaped some kind of cutting throughout the country.⁹

While the modifications were often minor, mere kibitzing, in some cases they were major and thus detrimental to the film. In the German picture Variety (imported in 1926), a serious and well made work, the censor’s efforts were catastrophic. In the first reel the motivation of the tragedy was clearly established. A carnival worker (Emil Jannings) longs to return to the circus as a trapeze performer. Both he and his wife had once been star acrobats but a severe fall ruined their career. After a while the trouper succumbs to a younger girl and allows her to tear him away from his wife and child. Director E. A. Dupont took care to show that the big fellow’s attachment for the other woman represented more than illicit love; she is a means by which he can again resume his career as an acrobat. In Censored: The Private Life of The Movies, the fate of this film at the hands of the American censors was described:

Thus, when he has left his wife and child and been at once a servant, trainer, and lover to the girl, you can understand his killing the man who takes her from him. . . . No healthy normal man or woman could have detected the slightest note of vulgarity in its portrayal. It was human, earthy tragedy. Yet the censors in every state, with the exception of New York and a few cities, cut it almost to pieces. They cut out the first reel entirely, thus destroying the motivation of the tragedy, implying that the acrobat was married to his Eura- sian temptress. From the treatment given Variety you can easily understand why it is almost impossible to produce a great movie in this country. There is no such word in the censors’ vocabulary as “taste".¹⁰

Sadly, Variety is known in America only in this cut version, even though the missing footage exists in the Library of Congress and could easily be restored to current prints.

Censors not only worried about men living with their mistresses, they also worried about the tightness of their trousers. In Drums of Love, a film made by D. W. Griffith in 1927-28, the censor ordered:

Cut scenes showing hero in tight trousers bowing and standing at top of stairway. Cut view of him walking (still in tight trousers).¹¹

The heights (or depths) of absurdity were reached when the Maryland censors ordered two scenes cut from Murnau’s masterpiece, Sunrise: one, a “scene of a woman and man reclining” and two, a “scene of a woman wriggling and dancing and a man embracing her.” Both were intended to show the sensual interest a farmer had in a woman of the city and how in his passion he is tempted to drown his wife, but apparently these two episodes were seen as corruptive.¹²

In The Unholy Three (1925) for example, Lon Chaney, portraying a ventriloquist at a circus, has a girl friend (Mae Busch) who picks the pockets of visitors to the carnival and gives all her proceeds to Chaney. That the two are living together in sin is hinted at financially, but not sexually, except for one rather mild kiss. Later when Chaney and a strong man and a midget start a life of crime, the girl falls in love with a clerk in the pet store they are using as a front. The clerk is completely asexual; this seemingly impotent creature wears glasses, has a mild manner, and is stupidly credulous—a most unsatisfactory replacement for the more virile and imaginative Chaney. That she could leave him for such a milquetoast seems unbelievable, but the reasons are obvious: Chaney, though interesting, is “bad”; the clerk, though dull, is “good.” If she were to leave Chaney for another man with sexual potential, she would appear cheap, but leaving him for such a nothing makes her decision a moral one with no hint of the flesh in it to sully her decision. As can readily be seen, censorship caused the major issues of life to be sidestepped. Instead of providing serious conflicts with the tormenting panoply of choices that the world baits us with, films offered simple stories without moral ambiguities.

And so the twenties proceeded, refracted comfortably in a medium that was not allowed to depart substantially from the moral limitations imposed upon it. Some films questioned the old values, but none was allowed to go straightforwardly against them. As a result, the roaring twenties were mostly a mindless roar, but the sound of the Depression, at least for a few years, would make a different noise. And so would the talkies. The collapse of the economy brought about a new cynicism, and allowed innuendo and even more explicit language to be presented to the public.

THE SOUND FILM

Despite the growing freedom in the first few years of sound, the screen was still somewhat hampered by censorship. Unable to depict stories of moral ambiguity and unable to touch upon some of the realities of sex, the American screen specialized in various kinds of teases. In one of the first musicals, The Broadway Melody (released in February 1929), the maturity of the screen at that time can be readily observed. Two sisters come to New York to do a song and dance routine. One sister has a boyfriend, a rather ineffectual fellow who sings and even composes. In the course of the film the other sister finds herself attracted to him and, even worse, he returns the interest. Although they both attempt to repress their inclinations, they finally get together and marry, and even invite the single sister to live with them! Sex in this film seems to be little more than a brief hug and kiss. Any real indications of the frustrations of the principals and the realities of the Broadway world are skirted over.⁴

And what else is skirted over is skirts. Whenever the director can, he shows the girls in their underwear. They are constantly drawing baths, changing clothes, and marching around in abbreviated costumes. Even the hero, in a completely bland scene, stands around in his undershorts arguing with the girl. The tone of the film reminds one of some five-year-old children trying to be naughty. Unaware of sex, the best they can do is show people briefly clad. This is Hollywood’s puerile sexuality at its most absurd.

The films in the following four years from 1930 to 1934 dealt more honestly with certain facts of life. These facts were not explicit in a visual sense—there was no nudity, for example—but at least they accepted the fact that people lived together without benefit of matrimony and had desires. In Ernst Lubitsch’s Trouble in Paradise (1932), one of the most brilliant and witty films ever made, there is no question that the male lead (Herbert Marshall) and the female crook (Miriam Hopkins) are living together.

The thirties were the morning after the binge of the twenties. The glow of the candlelit night that had transfused a mundane world into beauty vanished in the harsh glare of dawn. The collapse of the prosperity and fun of the twenties into the seriousness of the Depression destroyed the confidence of the people in moral as well as in economic values. The films reflected this disillusionment. A plethora of malevolent gangsters, monsters both supernatural and natural, trimlegged chorus girls, and smart, clever, and disrespectful Broadway-like dialogue filled the screens. The soft-focus romanticism of the silent screen came into sharp and uncompromising clarity. In Footlight Parade (1933), there are an alimonyhungry wife, crooked partners, a designing female, a disloyal colleague, and a general air of dog-eat-dog ambition. Even the heroine, Joan Blondell, is not a clinging vine but a no-nonsense secretary who is shrewd and clever in her own right. Other films of the time are equally realistic not only in their content but in their titles: Smart Money (1931, a sympathetic story of a Greek gambler),Gold Diggers of Broadway (1933, a musical), She Done Him Wrong (1933, Mae West exuding sexuality), and even Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1932, showing that sex should not be repressed). The innocent maiden did not entirely disappear, but she was far less in evidence. The new girl knew about sex, knew its price, and sometimes she accepted the payment.

As the Depression tightened its grip upon the country, the movies came in for more and more condemnation. Despite the complaints, profits were not adversely affected at first. In fact, the movies seemed to be the one industry untouched by the collapsed economy. The reasons for the good earnings reports were two-fold. One, people wanted to be diverted from their own grim prospects and thus flocked to the movies to escape themselves. Two, they also found the talking pictures a fascinating phenomenon. It was almost a new medium, a medium that was changing and in certain ways definitely improving every day. If the art of the film grew quickly, so did the indignation about the content. The moralists became more and more discontent. Some of the nation’s problems, they felt, came from the disregard of the people for the good, solid, moral values. The Depression was the result of the decadence and erosion of ideals that were so rampant during the twenties. If the nation were to survive, the emphasis would have to be shifted from sex and crime and criticism of established institutions to more healthy and uplifting subject matter. In short, the mouth of this new and obstreperous medium would have to be washed out with soap.

How was this cleansing act to be performed? It would be aided by the pubcation in May, 1933, of a book called Our Movie Made Children, which surprisingly turned out to be a best seller. It authoritatively declared what a malign influence the cinema had on the youth of the nation of which one third was ill-housed, ill-clad, and ill-fed, and unfortunately aisa ill-advised by a Hollywood lacking morality and taste. The book pointed out that of a sample 115 pictures, 59 contained murders that were either attempted or committed. Furthermore, 71 violent deaths occurred in 54 of the pictures.¹³ Such an influence did not bode well for the youth of a nation. The book graphically and logically pointed out just how effective films were in shaping the attitudes of audiences. The medium’s influence was proved to be immense, a fact that the moralists made good use of when they asked for further restraints.

The book did not blame just the talking pictures. It cited the effect that the 1925 The Phantom of the Opera had had on audiences:

Children would scream all over the theatre; many of them would dash out and mothers would leave the theatre with frightened and hysterical children clinging to them. . . . And at times the children would vomit as a result of their emotional condition.

According to one trained nurse, The Phantom of the Opera caused “eleven faintings and one miscarriage” in a single day. Four of the eleven who fainted were men. The average was three or four faintings a day during the run of the picture.¹⁴

But the horror films were not what the moralists were worried about. They did not put up a fuss about Dracula or Frankenstein or the later sequels. They said they were concerned with the values of the whole society and how those values were being eroded for box office success. But their main interest was sex. The authors of Our Movie Made Children complained about the disappearance of the once innocent heroines: “Virtue may have been at a premium once—but apparently it slumped along with the other leading stocks.”¹⁵

During the teens and early twenties women tended to be of two kinds: the good maiden and the evil vamp. But this polarization faded and in its stead came the new woman, essentially still an innocent, but acting like a vamp. Like Joan Crawford in Our Dancing Daughters (1928), she flirted and radiated sex, but she held herself back. The new breed of woman may have been more realistic, but she also helped influence the behavior of millions of girls who, in turn, affected the reality which Hollywood was supposedly reflecting. In short, there was feedback. As a result, the decade of the twenties wrought a behavioral change in women which was absolutely unprecedented in world history. New modes of conduct snowballed into a revolutionary avalanche and the New Girl emerged.

In Our Movie Made Children there were also complaints about Hollywood’s preoccupation with love and courtship. Although marriage was the end goal, the connubial state was seldom depicted. In real life over 60 percent of the males were married, but in the movies only about 15 percent had succumbed to the noble institution.¹⁶ Love became the be-all and end־all and marriages concluded most films. Such a criticism did not take into account that many novels and plays also concerned themselves with the same situation. Of course the movies depicted love. Their fantasy world was the perfect place to deposit its delightful but often temporary presence.

Films, the book complained, not only placed a false emphasis on the transient joys of love, they also instructed young people in the art of love-making (at least in its beginning stages). As one boy who copied John Gilbert’s ardent style put it:

I place the blame not on my inability to imitate what I have seen on the screen, but on someone else’s inability to imitate Greta Garbo’s receptive qualities.¹⁷

But if our embryonic John Gilbert lacked an adequate partner, so did many a young Garbo long for a Gilbert. Each was faced with a formidable problem: to find a mate as attractive, romantic, and polished as the great profiles on the screen, an impossible quest in a prosaic universe plagued by alarm clocks, pimples, and financial worries.

Our Movie Made Children’s examination of the sociological and psychological effects of the movies demonstrated with statistical and seemingly scientific information how powerful an effect movie-going had on audiences. Its evidence might have been weathered had not the Depression finally affected the industry. Profits were good in 1930 and 1931, but by 1932 and 1933 disaster struck. Warner Brothers, which had shown a fourteen million dollar profit in 1929, lost that same amount in 1932. Fox in 1932 was sixteen million in the hole, Universal one and a half million, RKO over ten million in 1932 and over four million in 1933. Paramount did the worst of all. After an eighteen million dollar profit in 1930, it plunged to a fifteen million deficit in 1932, and then went into bankruptcy. The only two studios which showed a profit were MGM and poverty-row Columbia.

In the meantime, certain groups in the United States were growing more adamant about the kinds of morals that films were promulgating. The most powerful and vocal body was the Roman Catholic Church. “An admission to an Indecent Movie is a ticket to Hell” said placards wielded by some parochial children.¹⁸In October 1933, a high church official spoke to an annual convention of Catholic Charities in New York:

Catholics are called by God, the Pope, the Bishops and the priests to a united and vigorous campaign for the purification of the cinema, which has become a deadly menace to morals.¹⁹

Martin Quigley, who edited two powerful movie trade magazines, and Joseph Breen, a layman in the church, decided to create a Legion of Decency in an attempt to force the eight major studios to conform to their standards. Thus in 1933 the church set up its own censorship organization to pass upon the virtues and vices of individual films. Ironically, Americans who were just escaping from the punitive pressures of prohibition were now to be faced with another encroachment on their freedoms. The Legion of Decency threatened to order their ten million members to boycott Hollywood’s films. The sunny colony of ulcerated moguls looked up fearfully from their red-inked financial reports, considered the problem, and capitulated. Rather than suffer the box office losses threatened by the church, Hollywood finally decided to cooperate with the Legion and to allow its scripts to be tailored to meet the church’s new demands.

A new Motion Picture Code had been adopted at Hays’ suggestion in 1930, but it had not been taken seriously by the studios. To guarantee its enforcement a Production Code Administration, headed by Joseph Breen who had helped write the Code, was established four years later in Hollywood and the Code itself was amplified. Financed by the studios, the Production Code Administration was authorized to grant a “Seal of Approval” only to movies that adhered to its guidelines. Any movie without the Seal, according to studio agreement, would not be distributed or exhibited in any theatres.

This Code was established by the industry in 1934 as a self-regulating device not only to prevent the loss of Catholic audiences but to forestall the possibility of more state censorship boards and perhaps even Federal regulation. The guidelines adopted by the MPPA were very similar to the Legion of Decency’s standards. The Code was not concerned with art but morals. It stated that pictures would not be produced which would “lower the moral standards of those who see it.” Only “correct standards” of life could be shown. Words like lustful, lecherous, brutal, indecent ran through the document as if they were definite entities rather than subjective terms. “The treatment of bedrooms must be governed by good taste and delicacy.” Nobody could swear by saying God, Lord, Jesus Christ, Hell, S.O.В., damn, Gawd or any other earthly or heavenly expressions. Adultery could not be “explicitly treated or justified or presented attractively.” The Code proceeded to spell out many other matters to be avoided, such as methods of crime, drug traffic, drinking of liquor unless basic to the plot, excessive kissing, sexual perversion, white slavery, miscegenation, and subjects reflecting on the integrity of the government and its officials. Two of these forbidden matters were not really the concern of the Catholics, but were added to satisfy other pressure groups. The limitation against excessive drinking was included to make the Drys happy, although it was seldom enforced. The other was miscegenation which was included to pacify the South’s deep neurosis on the subject.

This new code sounded straitlaced, and indeed it was. Some people in the industry felt that it would easily be violated, but that proved not to be the case. Scripts had to be submitted before production to Breen’s Production Code Administration office which approved or rejected them. Then the film, made from the approved script, was submitted for further checking to be sure that no impurities crept in during shooting. This method of precensorship was a quiet and painless way of laundering the product before the public would ever have been in a position to take sides in a borderline case. When the Code was ratified by the MPPA, Hollywood gave up its own freedom, although ostensibly to itself, since the Code was supposedly administered by its own people. Industry spokesmen neglected to say outright that the church’s demands and the Code were almost synonymous.

The Legion had three categories of film classification: A, B, and C. The A rating explained that a film was entirely pure, the В that there were certain dangers, and С that it was condemned and must not be seen. Although the С rating had temporarily been applied to a few films made by the major studios, no film was actually issued with a С rating for many years and thus there were at first no causes célèbres. The producers were too afraid to sustain a Roman Catholic boycott and so each condemned film was reedited or reshot to escape its supposed economic damnation. As a result, the Legion was loo percent effective with films issued by major studios and 97 percent effective with overall American production. The church’s official attitude towards the new art can be seen in Pope Pius XI’s statement in 1936:

The cinema speaks not to individuals but to multitudes and does so in circumstances, time, place and surroundings which are the most apt to arouse unusual enthusiasm for good as well as for bad and to conduct that collective exaltation which, as experience teaches us, may assume the most morbid form.

A motion picture is viewed by people who are seated in a dark theatre and whose faculties, mental, physical and often spiritual, are relaxed. . . .²⁰

The Legion of Decency’s code and the MPPA Code were repressive and narrow-minded in the worst way, reflecting the most parochial and puerile attitudes of the audiences they were trying to shield. Films had been relatively lusty, hard-hitting, and biting during the early thirties, as exemplified by the humor and cynicism of The Dark Horse in which a nincompoop gets nominated for governor; the bawdy implications and satire of the Marx Brothers; criticism of the popular press and the depiction of a sleazy, unfrocked cleric (Boris Karloff) in Five Star Final; the indictment of injustice in I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang; the affirmation of the sex drive in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; the incisive humor of Footlight Parade; the open implications of sex by Mae West in She Done Him Wrong; the sophisticated milieu of Sternberg’s Morocco in which Dietrich appears in a man’s tuxedo and kisses a girl on the lips; and the high style of comedy in Lubitsch’s Trouble in Paradise. All of these films would have had to be modified if made after the Code. These pictures were intelligent and honest and by no means “immoral” by the standards of Western civilization of the last few centuries, but in the early thirties they seemed to the censorious to glow with unrelieved sin, salaciousness, and cynicism, and to be foul exudations upon the pure landscape of America.

With the bite, thrust, and wit of films hampered by the 1934 Code, moviemakers tried to imply as much as they could. How much could they slip across before the censorship board would rap their fingers? A man and a woman sleeping together outside of the bonds of matrimony had to be broached so subtly that the very fact was unclear. Audiences always had to infer. In short, every reference or innuendo had to be scrubbed and cold-showered. The man-about-town who comes back to his bachelor apartment every night at three or four o’clock in the morning hardly gets a chance to kiss his female guest before something interferes to keep her not only unsullied but, as the film implies, in a permanently virginal state. Such plots eventually had the hero sleeping in the bathtub or, more comfortably, on the couch while the girl lay ensconced in a boudoir barricaded as if Vandals and Goths stood at the door. Admittedly such plots could be found in pre-Code films, but the possibility of more blissful joys in the wee hours of the morning had been at least hinted at. The Code could best be summed up, at least sexually, by “Bedrooms are for sleeping.”

But sex was not the only concern of the Code. It also worried about the treatment of the clergy, avoided references to drugs, and omitted homosexuals (the Franklin Pangborn type of sissy often appeared but did not ooh or ah if he portrayed a tailor measuring an inner seam). The Code placed some restrictions upon treatments of crime and violence, stating, for example, “Brutal killings are not to be presented in detail.” Nevertheless, the Code was more lenient on violence than sex.

Some American intellectuals berated the low state of cinematic realism and honesty and from the mid-thirties on through the sixties blamed censorship for the failure of the American cinema to grow up. They felt that the Code was far too strict and that the Legion of Decency was even less reasonable. The Legion with its concern for morals frequently recommended mediocre films and disapproved the more intelligent ones that broached subjects offensive to its sense of propriety. The Legion also wielded what was in effect a veto power on any American film. The prospect of its condemned rating so frightened the producer that he invariably reçut or reshot the picture.

Garbo’s last film, Two-Faced Woman, had the famous actress play a ski instructor whom Melvyn Douglas, a big-time publisher, marries because of her unsophisticated nature. Once back in New York, however, he starts to backslide. Garbo goes to New York and pretends she is her own twin sister, a sophisticated vamp. Douglas falls for her, not knowing that she and his wife are the same person, and tries to make love to her. This was too shocking for the Legion, for the film implied that men are capable of sleeping with women other than their wives. Whatever comedy value the film had was lost when the studio was compelled to insert in the middle of the film a scene showing the husband telephone his wife and thus discover that she and the twin were one and the same. The plot thereafter made little sense, and whatever wit and fun that were in it fizzled badly.

The Legion’s narrow interpretation of screen morality was even more obvious in its judgments on foreign films (which were made, of course, without the benefit of the Code). The Legion condemned a number of foreign films, such as The Blue Angel, La Ronde, and Miss Julie, that were and still are considered masterpieces. Although The Outlaw with Jane Russell had caused considerable censorship trouble and its director Howard Hughes had raised questions about the Code’s legality, it was a controversial Italian film titled The Miracle that was largely responsible for permanently weakening the power both of the Legion and of the Hollywood Code.

THE CONTEMPORARY FILM

The bridle of censorship was kept upon the cinematic steed for close to two decades with hardly a protest until The Miracle started what eventually turned out to be a stampede. Roberto Rossellini made this short film in 1948 about a Catholic peasant, played by Anna Magnani, who believes that her child was fathered by St. Joseph. When The Miracle came to New York in 1950, it was approved by the state censor and shown in a New York art theater in December. There was at first little reaction, but soon the Catholic leaders heard of it and exerted pressure on the theater. When that didn’t work, the City Commissioner of Licenses was prevailed upon to stop its presentation. A brief court action rescinded the Commissioner’s ruling. Pressure then shifted upstate to the Censorship Board. Telegrams, letters, and personal contacts by the Catholic hierarchy caused the board to revoke its former approval. The case was then brought to the United States Supreme Court which decided that the law invoked against the film violated the Fourteenth Amendment as prior restraint, interfered with the separation between church and state, and employed the term sacrilegious too vaguely. In May 1952, the Supreme Court decided against prior restraint and affirmed, at long last, that film was entitled to the same guarantees of freedom as the press.

As a result of the Supreme Court decision the first breaches in the imposing fortress of censorship were made in the fifties. Although the movies had won their constitutional freedom at long last, they exercised that freedom rather gingerly at first because of the strong economic and civil pressures of the church. In 1951 Elia Kazan’s film of Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire suffered a number of cuts because of the Legion. When Kazan did another Tennessee Williams script, Baby Doll, in 1956, he had control of the final cut. When he wouldn’t knuckle under to the Legion, Cardinal Spellman, Archbishop of New York, ordered all Catholics within his archdiocese to avoid the film under “pain of sin.” In Albany, Bishop Scully, long connected with the Legion, tried to coerce the Strand, a local theater, not to show the film. When the theater refused, the Bishop not only forbade Catholics to see the film but punished the Strand by ordering Catholics not to patronize that theater for six months. Earlier, in 1953, the Bishop and veterans groups quietly forced another Albany theater (the Delaware) to discontinue showing Limelight because it was made by Chaplin, whose sex life and politics were objectionable to the church. In the fifties and even up to the early sixties the Legion still had its strength in heavily Catholic areas, but it could no longer exert the same kind of pressures it once had on the studios.

The Code, too, weakened as a repressive force after such films as The Pawnbroker (1965) and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf (1967) were given seals. At long last great screen artists were allowed the same freedoms that the novelists had earlier won. They would be able to refer to all the actualities of motivation and to depict the whole range of human conduct. But most of the great artists—such as Lubitsch, Sternberg, Mamoulian, and James Whale—had either retired or died by the sixties, and the kind of audiences that once would have appreciated wit and style and sophistication had also either died or no longer went to the movies. If the old masters had vanished, new ones, it was hoped, would soon develop, although the ratio of artists to hacks and opportunists has never been impressive.

The freedom from silence which ushered in the thirties was equalled by the freedom from censorship in the sixties. The results were not, however, equally impressive cinematically. The movies were no longer a basic part of American culture. Television had usurped that role. Entertainment had shifted from the theaters to the home, and society as a whole had shed many of its old values and moved into a different atmosphere. Socially, morally, and economically, the sixties turned out to be twentieth century America’s most revolutionary decade, far more so even than the twenties. Within ten years whole areas of thought and behavior had changed.

The movie world also experienced serious changes. The star system virtually disappeared. New faces cropped up, enjoyed great popularity for one or two films, but passed from view when they did not guarantee high returns at the box office. Hollywood, so long dominant, further declined as the movie-making capital of the world. Union demands raised costs to astronomical heights and property taxes made studio lots too expensive to maintain. With more portable equipment, smaller crews, and cheaper foreign labor, Hollywood films were made almost every place but Hollywood. The glamorous panache disappeared and film output declined. Large budgeted productions vanished in the sea of the red ink they left behind. Major firms like MGM teetered and tottered and other important studios were bought up or merged. Suddenly, the aging studio executives realized that what they once thought was sure-fire entertainment no longer appealed. Somehow there was a new crowd out there, one that apparently did not care about stories with a beginning, a middle, and an end, didn’t mind average-looking leading men (Dustin Hoffman), and rather homely women (Barbra Streisand). Furthermore, that new crowd saw films not in large downtown theaters (many of which had been turned into parking lots) but in small theaters seating a couple of hundred, or in drive-ins where various rites of initiation were sanctified by wafts of rancid popcorn. The movie audience shrank, production budgets shrank, and even some industry egos shrank. Of the films made, only a handful were real money-makers; most of the others failed. People definitely went out to see a particular film, not just to “go to the movies.”

Hollywood had to try to offer something more enticing than the free TV at home. In the fifties it had tried large screens (later dropped because films in CinemaScope could not play easily on the television tube), color films (but TV got color too), and stereophonic sound, but audiences continued to decrease. One way of gaining larger attendance was to offer new and shocking subject matter, something that could not possibly be shown in the living room. Hollywood’s defiance of its own Code and the Legion was caused partly by the realization that the screen needed freedom to entice customers and that the risk of offending some groups was equalled and surpassed by the advantage of pleasing others.

The new freedom, however, had its own particular limitations. Ethnic humor (and slurs) were unofficially banned. The lazy, good-for-nothing Negro, the Irish cop with his brogue, the Jewish peddler, the Italian gangster, and many other stereotypes disappeared. But if this kind of freedom was hindered, other kinds opened. The hero (he was not really a hero any more, just a male lead) could sleep with a woman without being married to her, and she could sleep with him and conceivably have slept with some other men before and not be compelled to die under the wheels of a train or to waste away from some dread disease. Boys and girls and men and women could do on the screen what they often did in real life. As most of the old taboos disappeared, film finally became capable of touching upon any subject it chose.

Unfortunately, problems beyond mere youthful romance, that is, subject matter that might appeal to older people, were not often treated on the screen for the simple reason that there were not many mature people in theaters to support the films. Thus the subject of a woman over forty trying to find meaning to her life (such as in the 1926 picture, Dancing Mothers) could now be made with no censorship problems, but no young audience would have empathy with the woman’s problem. Thus the new freedom for filmmakers had to contend with a new limitation: the narrowness of its audience’s interests. Many good scripts were now rejected, and those that were accepted often had to have sensationalism added (either of sex or violence or often both) in order to have “contemporary” appeal at the box office.

The films that best reflected the problems and desires of young people became the box office winners, such titles as The Graduate (1967) and Easy Rider(1969). The Graduate echoed young people’s resentment of the establishment, and Easy Rider showed their urge for wandering and their paranoid fears of being destroyed by a hostile society. While many films took an “anti” approach, few were willing to handle the lives of people past twenty-five. Contrary to what the screen illustrated, reality for most people after college did not consist of seeking a new sex partner, engaging in violence, racing motorcycles, surfing, or wandering around the world. Instead life was often composed of a rusting car, fraying furniture, bulging waistlines, “why Johnny can’t read,” crabgrass, and a sullen horizon of fractured dreams. Such matters were frequently the real reality, but the screen avoided this kind of subject matter even more than did the films of previous decades. Yet many people took the screen’s four-letter words, explicit action, and the frequent presence of ugliness and unpleasantness, as reality, not realizing that such unlovely details could be almost as spurious as the glamorized world of the movies’ past.

The changes in movie entertainment did not occur overnight. The transition was slow but seemingly inevitable between the rigors of the Code and today’s complete permissiveness. The Supreme Court and economic pressures had caused the transformation. The Miracle had been supposedly sacrilegious, but obscenity became the next legal hurdle. This was not a problem confined solely to film. Literature first fought the battle. In 1957 in Roth vs.the United States, the Supreme Court decided that while obscenity was “utterly without redeeming social value" and not protected by the First Amendment, explicit sex—if encased in a work of value—was not necessarily obscene. The test, the Court said, was “whether to the average person, applying contemporary community standards, the dominant theme of the material taken as a whole appeals to prurient interest.”

In the next few years, however, the Court began reversing obscenity convictions, finding that even the most doubtful works had some “redeeming” value and thus that fewer and fewer works were “obscene.” Then in 1967 the Court confessed its own confusion and more or less retired from the field except when the material was being “pandered,” when it was going to juveniles, and when it was “thrust” upon the public. It was during the middle sixties that nudist films began to be shown with the obligatory volleyball game in which genitalia could be glimpsed by the quick-of-eye.

As a result of these legal decisions, more sensational sex films like I’ a Woman began to appear in neighborhood theaters. This Swedish movie about a nymphomaniac contained somewhat explicit language and was soft-core; the film showed the heroine’s breasts and implied the sex act but avoided glimpses of the “privates” in action. The immense amount of money this film took in prompted further imports and encouraged producers in Europe and importers in America to top the previous film by further explicitness.

In October 1969, another Swedish film, The Language of Love, was seized by American customs as “obscene.” The distributors, Chevron Pictures, piously claimed that their film “is a lecture and it has educational value.” Although Chevron had never previously expressed interest in “educational” pictures, it now took its self-appointed and profitable mission seriously and innocently wondered why anyone should be offended at their pedagogical aims.

In The Language of Love a panel of experts discussed sex and a number of couples demonstrated various positions.²¹ This film contained hard-core elements that were supposedly sanctified by the learned panel. For a thorough evening of arousal audiences had to tune out but view in. Once these graphic sexual elements were presented, it was only a matter of time before more sex and less talk began to get by. Finally film viewers would have to live without the benefit of the learned voices and derive the educational message from the bouncing images alone. Viewers managed quite well.

Another Swedish film, I Am Curious—Yellow, made history in 1969, attracting lines around the block in New York City and other cities because of several explicit and widely-publicized sexual sequences. I Am Curious—Yellow came in for a large share of litigation, which, of course, only swelled its fame. The various communities which declared it obscene lost in the higher courts. In November 1969, a Superior Court justice in Massachusetts declared the film obscene but a month later Boston permanently lost its previous fame as a city of blue noses. The Federal Court there ruled that state authorities “cannot prosecute theater operators for showing the film.”²²

American independent filmmakers immediately tried to equal and then to surpass the imported productions. The major Hollywood studios—those that still remained—decided that they too would cash in on the public’s seemingly insatiable interest in sex. Hollywood was certainly adept at the subject, but it had been confined to exploiting breasts in tight-fitting sweaters and showing off bodies in bathing suits. In the days of the Code the girl might slip into the bathroom, dodge coyly behind the shower curtain, and parade around in her bra and panties. Hollywood decided that the audience would like to see her take the shower.

When the courts ruled in favor of total permissiveness on the screen, the motion picture industry began to worry that local laws would be invoked and that distributors and exhibitors would be mired down in expensive and timeconsuming litigation in various cities and towns throughout the United States. “Contributing to the delinquency of minors” was a valid and seemingly incontestable law. To forestall the institution of new kinds of censorship, either state or federal, Hollywood invented a rating system which took effect on November 1,1968. It would forewarn people as to whether a film was general entertainment or whether it contained explicit sexual material. A year later, in 1969, a leader of the exhibitors agreed that the new system was “the only vehicle which has stemmed an all-consuming tidal wave of anti-pornography, anti-violence restrictive legislation and concomitant censorship.”²³

The MPAA rating system had been created by the types of films being offered. Explicit sexual behavior obviously was not considered wise fare for children, and rather than lose the whole market the industry decided to lose just a part of it and hoped that limiting a film to adults with an X rating would bring in those customers who had become displeased with Hollywood’s tame depiction of the world.

The 1968 rating system had a G (for general audience), M (for mature ones), R (for people over 18), and X (for those over 21). In 1970 the M was changed to GP (general patronage), since the M scared away too many people. In the following years other modifications were made. The GP was changed to PG (parental guidance), the R was opened to people under 17 if accompanied by parent or guardian, and the X opened to those over 17 and closed to everyone under that. Thus within five years the producers and exhibitors managed to erode the classifications so that the lucrative 17-21 year bracket could go to the theaters. Ironically even some films with a PG rating, and thus acceptable for all audiences, could not even have been made during the years of the old Code. In fact, some now rated PG might have landed the theater owner in jail a decade before.

By 1970 Hollywood took full advantage of its freedom: anal rape in Myra Breckenridge; frontal nudity both male and female in many regular studio feature films; fornication with a pig in Futz and with a chicken in End of the Road; explicit language, first referring to female genitalia as “the big C” in The Arrangement and then all four letters in Quiet Days in Clichy and Carnal Knowledge; and nudging ads, “It puts you in the cockpit” for The Stewardesses.

Unfortunately, the principles of the rating system were not always so strictly observed by the rating board members or the studios. The categories were soon haggled into relative meaninglessness. Each company tried to inject sex into its film and then, when the MPAA gave it an “adult” rating, the company complained that such a rating would hurt at the boxoffice. For example, in 1971 MGM was upset about the R rating for Ryan s Daughter, appealed, and won a GP without cutting anything. A GP film had not earlier been interpreted so freely, for the film contained some nudity that, at least in previous years, would not have been considered necessary to the emotional and narrative needs of the film. In other cases the rating board, while officially disavowing censorship, has functioned like a censor by encouraging studios and directors to make cuts in their films to avoid an X rating and possible loss of box office revenue.

Deep Throat, a hard-core pornographic film, was one of the most notorious and thus profitable films of 1972. Known more discreetly in some advertisements as just plain Throat, the film depicts the adventures and travails of a maiden whose organ of sexual pleasure has developed near her larynx. To satisfy herself, and incidentally to give pleasure to her male acquaintances, she performs what years ago used to be called “an unnatural act.”

The film not only saw magnificent box office returns but also considerable litigation as well. When it came to trial in late 1972 various defense witnesses spoke of its “very amusing premise,” its satirical intent, and its ability “to expand viewers’ sexual horizons.” But the New York judge who had listened to all the explanations, studied the testimony, and witnessed the film was not convinced. In a thirty-five-page opinion he decided that Deep Throat was “indisputably and irredeemably” obscene. He referred to it as a “feast of carrion and squalor,” a “nadir of decadence,” and “brazenly explicit.” The judge concluded that “This is one throat that deserves to be cut.” The World Theater in New York, where the film had been playing since June 1972, stopped exhibiting the film in March and put on its marquee: “Judge Cuts Throat, World Mourns.”²⁴

Life became even more complicated for the movie industry when the Supreme Court in June 1973 decided that pornography could no longer be judged nationally, but that the question whether a work was obscene or not depended on the standards of the community where it was offered. The Court stated that the standards of Maine or Mississippi might be different from those acceptable in Las Vegas or New York. As a result, some films are protected by the First Amendment in some states, but not in others. Unfortunately, the first major film to be prosecuted for obscenity after this decision was not an out-and-out porno movie but Carnal Knowledge, a film that had explicit language, some explicit action, and also a mature theme. In 1974 the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the Georgia conviction of Carnal Knowledge, implying that the film was not obscene enough to lose its First Amendment protection, even though it might have shocked the community standards of Georgia.

The problem of censorship and obscenity in films has by no means been solved. Variety, as befits a trade paper, has invariably favored freedom from censorship, but even it acknowledges that “reasonable people of all political persuasions find hardcore pornography appalling.”²⁵ Some reasonable people, however, do not find it appalling and argue that nothing should be prevented on the screen.

But sex is not the only thing being explicitly portrayed in contemporary movies; another is violence. Audiences had been kept from seeing too many gory details in the thirties and forties by the Code. The horror, gangster, and western films had violent action, but gross examples of sadism were avoided. In Dracula(1931), the vampire leans over to bite the throat; he does not lap up the blood nor does the heroine heave her bosom with orgasmic delight. The murders and carnage in earlier films were either referred to suggestively or kept in discreet long shot. Eyes did not bulge out and tongues protrude in strangulations, as in Hitchcock’s Frenzy or The Godfather. The classic aesthetic distance of the ancient Greeks, who omitted violence from their stages, has now been eliminated. Oedipus blinded himself off stage, whereas today we would see the pins go into his eyes and the bloody aftermath of his empty sockets.

Censors, when faced with the problem of violence versus sex, have usually adhered to the unwritten motto: better slay than lay. They preferred that people make war rather than love, for the one, though sometimes fatal, was considered less dangerous—and in some cases advantageous—to the preservation of society. It was considered morally better that a nation lose its men in fighting than lose its women in debauchery. That violence could also be a kind of debauchery was not admitted, despite the views of many people that too much brutality brutalizes, just as too much hard-core porn may demean.

As audiences once enjoyed the mindless but often beautiful films of the thirties, so we tend to endure the mindless but often ugly films of today. The new permissiveness of the screen did not quite reveal the green pastures the intelligent public had so patiently awaited. Andrew Sarris, critic for The Village Voice, confessed his own mixed feelings about the new era:

I mean long live the sexual revolution and freedom of expression and all that. But why don’t I feel happier now that all the tabus, topless and bottomless, are being shattered on the screen? Heaven knows I have always followed the crowd in gazing at the slightest intimation of forbidden fleshiness. More often than not I’ve drifted down into the quasi-criminal depths of depravity in search of mysteries society hypocritically deplored. I have always been against all censorship, but, as I have always suspected, all the freedom in the world need not necessarily inspire aesthetic excellence, and aesthetic excellence is the name of my game. . . .²⁶

Many people defend explicit sexual content in films as if it were performing some great aesthetic service. In some cases it has. The Silence, for instance, and more recently Carnal Knowledge, conveyed points that would have been thor- oughly impossible under the old Code. But for every effective use of the new freedom, there are dozen of abuses.

Despite the arguments of experts that no one can prove that films with graphic sex or violence have a harmful effect on viewers, there seems little doubt that films do have some effect on society and that all of us live with such effects. Either censorship is brought back (with all its old problems) or the consequences of complete freedom (with all its new problems) will confront us in the future. The question of how society will function when all the checks that a few thousand years of civilization have imposed (however repressive, unjust, and hypocritical) are weakened has yet to be answered. Perhaps there is an ecology of the human spirit. If so, can there not only be destruction of physical resources but the destruction of psychic ones as well? Can society, like the earth itself, become so polluted that it can no longer cleanse itself? Such an apocalyptic vision may seem too hysterical, for mankind usually manages to find a way through its troubles. At least it has up to now. But in the present situation the way isn’t going to be easy.