Censoring Hollywood: Sex and Violence in Film and on the Cutting Room Floor

225 Pages·2012·2.175 MB·English

by  Malone, Aubrey

Censoring Hollywood
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Censoring
Hollywood
Sex and Violence
in Film and on the
Cutting Room Floor
A M
UBREY ALONE
McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Jefferson, North Carolina, and London
LIBRARYOFCONGRESSCATALOGUING-IN-PUBLICATIONDATA
Dillon-Malone, A. (Aubrey)
Censoring Hollywood : sex and violence in film and on the
cutting room floor / Aubrey Malone.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-7864-6465-4
softcover : 50# alkaline paper
1. Motion pictures—Censorship—United States—History—
20th century. I. Title.
PN1995.62D57 2011
363.310973—dc23 2011033394
BRITISHLIBRARYCATALOGUINGDATAAREAVAILABLE
© 2011Aubrey Malone. All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form
or by any means, electronic or mechanical, i ncluding photocopying
or recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system,
without p ermission in writing from the publisher.
On the cover: Sharon Stone and Michael Douglas in the ¡992 film
Basic Instinct(TriStar/Photofest)
Front cover by TG Design
Manufactured in the United States of America
McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments vi
Preface 1
1. Sinema 7
2. West and the Rest 46
3. Decades of Revolt 75
4. The Liberal Ethos 112
5. Nothing Succeeds Like Excess 151
6. After the Deluge 181
Chapter Notes 193
Bibliography 203
Index 209
v
Acknowledgments
I wish to thank Jeffrey Taplin for his tireless efforts in putting this text
into an electronic format, for chopping and changing it in its various incar-
nations, for being as patient as he has always been with my demanding requests.
Jeffrey has also processed the text, transforming it from the often indecipherable
cut-and-paste tangle that technophobes like myself tend to specialize in.
I am exceedingly grateful to my brother Keith for furnishing me with
so many books and movies from his inexhaustible library to help me write
this, and to my wife Mary for being there for me through all the long hours
of its composition. She was, as always, unstinting with her time and practical
advice, not to mention those endless cups of tea which kept me awake in the
small hours of the morning.
Thank you to the legendary Patrick McGilligan for his much appreciated
encouragement when the book was at the teething stage. Also to Jim Burr of
the University of Texas Press and Malcolm Henson and Dania Aldeek for
their close reading of the text and very astute inputs.
I am indebted to the staff of three libraries in Dublin—Raheny, Coolock
and Donaghmede—for locating rare and out-of-print books for me, and to
the staff of Easons, Waterstones and Hodges & Figgis for their often thankless
labors in similar vein.
A special thank you to Margot Davis for running my book and film
reviews in the late lamented Modern Woman over the years. Also to Jeremy
Addis, Peter Costello, Garry O’Sullivan, Michael Kelly, Paul Keenan, Roisin
Fulham, Phil Murphy, Des Duggan and John Low for similar favors. And to
my agent Darin Jewell for being as obliging as ever in his exertions.
Last but not least, Roberta Mitchell, the wife of esteemed McFarland
author Charles Mitchell, has been a godsend in tracking down a set of all-
but-inaccessible movies for me with her especial enthusiasm and good cheer.
vi
Preface
I’ve been fascinated by the vexed subject of film censorship for almost
as long as I’ve been going to films. In these pages I explore the history of the
topic from its heady origins to its virtual invisibility today. I’ve read over a
varied selection of books dealing either directly or indirectly with it, and these
are referenced both in my notes and bibliography for any readers wishing to
pursue their own research.
My research hasn’t been so much the books I’ve read as the films I’ve
seen. I feel this is where any writer should begin, if not end.
My book, with a first chapter titled “Sinema,” begins at the start of the
20th century, at a time when sex and violence were taboo on the screen, and
those who engaged in anything to do with either suffered dearly on celluloid.
Two decades later an era of gay abandon was ushered in as the Roaring Twen-
ties blew away the cobwebs, notwithstanding the efforts of Will Hays, a former
postmaster elevated to the rank of Moral Guardian of the American Nation,
to stem the tide of licentiousness in an era that predated the notorious Pro-
duction Code.
Afterwards came Prohibition, the Depression and the Wall Street crash.
In 1934 the erstwhile silent majority of conservative Catholics mobilized them-
selves to spearhead the formation of the Legion of Decency, a self-regulatory
body endorsed by the higher echelons of Hollywood to ensure that its movies
would find favor among the prudish and sensitive alike, and thereby guarantee
the survival of an industry threatened both by economic meltdown and quasi-
religious fervor.
Alongside Hays sat the redoubtable Joseph Breen, a man who seemed to
have a personal vendetta against a woman he saw as the greatest threat to
public morality, i.e., Mae West, who’s the main subject of Chapter 2, “West
and the Rest.” West was a colorful damsel flying the flag for sexual permis-
siveness at a time when women weren’t supposed to even know about promis-
1
2 Preface
cuous behavior, let alone engage in it. A diehard Catholic, Breen cashed the
repressive check Hays wrote but couldn’t deliver on, waving his big stick in
a manner that made sure the liberal flourishes of the pre–Code era were rad-
ically curtailed.
Breen and his cohorts Martin Quigley and Geoffrey Shurlock, as well as
the clerical duo of Fathers Little and Lord, engaged in a war of attrition with
stars and directors who tried to push the envelope, resulting in ruthless dele-
tions of crucial scenes. Their rationale may seem comical to us today but was
hardly so at the time the decisions were being made. Their efforts meant that
the forties and fifties were decades of ringfencing, horse-trading, and jockeying
for position on the Tinseltown totem pole as the definition of what was allow-
able became ever more tenuous.
The name Will Hays doesn’t roll as familiarly off the tongue as that of
his arch-nemesis Otto Preminger. We know Billy Wilder better than we do
Joseph Breen, and Federico Fellini better than Jason Joy. But the men behind
the scenes—in fact, the men cuttingthe scenes—wielded their axes mercilessly,
and many directors quaked in their boots when they met them because they
knew their livelihood depended on the decisions they made. Releasing a film
without a Seal of Approval was at one time tantamount to career suicide.
Chapter 3 discusses the seismic changes of the forties and fifties. In 1951
The Miraclecreated a storm of global proportions, forcing society to re-think
its appraisal of what was allowable within the constraints of an outmoded
mindset. The Miracle was condemned for blasphemy; an appeal by its dis-
tributor Joseph Burstyn rendered this short film palatable for general view-
ing.
The rest, I suppose, is history. Afterwards things could never be the
same. For many, the legal reversal was seen as the death knell of Hollywood’s
“Golden Age.”
Many other debates raged during the fifties while the power of the Legion
waned, as did the almost fundamentalist zeitgeist of its apologists. A brave
new world was dawning, and a whole generation of indie directors queuing
up to demolish the sacred cows of yore. The very rationale of censorship was
now being questioned with a brace of movies that inverted (some would say
perverted) what went before.
With this in mind, I pay particular attention in my text to seminal movies
like The Moon Is Blue, Baby Doll, Alfie, The Pawnbroker, Who’s Afraid of Vir-
ginia Woolf?and Bonnie and Clydefor their groundbreaking contributions to
outmoded attitudes and laws.
Preface 3
In Chapter 4 I describe how the whole censorial edifice came tumbling
down in 1966 when a mode of classification replaced the old system of films
being deemed worthy of being seen or not, depending on whether they
received the coveted Seals. Now almost everything was shown, and almost
everyone could witness what was formerly regarded as reprehensible, depend-
ing on their age or who was accompanying them to the movie theater.
Chapter 5 introduces us to some of the betes noir of modern cinema,
people like Stanley Kubrick and Ken Russell who gave censors such as John
Trevelyan many headaches as he sought to pacify the public and still allow
auteurs like these men the exposure they deserved, albeit in truncated form.
I have used the final chapter to amalgamate many of the themes discussed in
previous ones, including the age-old debate of how the actions we see on the
screen can influence real-life behavior.
So where does all this leave us now? Today we can go down to our local
Wal-Mart and pick up a DVD of something like 9 Songs—arguably the most
sexually explicit mainstream movie of our time—for a few bucks. Is this
progress? Hard cases make bad laws, we’re told, and if we remove censorship
totally from the voyeuristic equation, we’re entering an area of moral anarchy.
But we still need to raise a toast to the Premingers and Wilders who put their
heads above the parapet at a time of national repressiveness, risking their rep-
utations and careers by doing so. If films like 9 Songs are the legacy of that
fight, we can hardly blame these men for it.
Pauline Kael once said that the history of the American cinema could
be summed up in two words: “kiss” and “kill.” She might have added that
many great masterpieces would have gone unmade were it not for the freedoms
accorded to the film industry to explore the psychic fall-out occasioned by
such urges. It’s with this thought in mind that we should relish the freedoms
gained by the gallant pioneers who revolted against a sanitized form of life
embedded in the heart of an era where every cause had a predictable effect
and every crime a predictable punishment. Life was never like that, so why
should films be?
Those opposed to that viewpoint would argue that today, “anything
goes” in the cinema, which means that subtlety suffers. There aren’t many of
us old enough to remember when a kiss could only last a few seconds—and
then on a closed mouth. Or when married couples had to sleep in separate
beds, and live like monks.
As a child I left the cinema during the kissing scenes to get my popcorn,
or whatever other substances I ingested to get me through such longueurs. In