Chapter 2: Narrative

Essay: Movies and Morality

Over the years, movies have been censored for many reasons, from supposed blasphemy or controversial political content to extreme sexuality or intense violence. The history of film censorship in the United States can be divided into three main eras: pre-code (1930–34), the Production Code (1934–68), and the rating system (1968–present).

Clara Bow, the "It" Girl of the flapper era who always got her man, in John Francis Dillon's Call Her Savage(1932)

The first important legal ruling regarding movie morality was the 1915 United States Supreme Court decision in Mutual Film Corporation v. Industrial Commission of Ohio. The Court ruled that movies, as a commercial enterprise, did not enjoy freedom of speech or freedom of the press. After that ruling, state, county, city, and town boards could restrict particular films as threats to local moral standards. As a consequence, Hollywood film distributors faced local authorities who would edit out parts of expensive distribution prints before sending them to the next town. Frustrated by these chaotic and sporadic forms of censorship, Hollywood eventually decided to police itself and created the Motion Picture Production Code, a guide that outlawed various types of content and language deemed objectionable. Although it was adopted in 1930, the Production Code wasn't strictly enforced until July of 1934. Thus, the "pre-code" films of the early 1930s are noticeably more risqué than the films that followed for the next thirty years.

Seminude spectacle in Cecil B. DeMille's The Sign of the Cross (1932)

Pre-Code Films: 1930-34

Freaks (1932)

In 1931, MGM was the most sophisticated and glossy Hollywood film studio, known for its musicals, adult dramas, and beautiful stars. Universal was most famous for its horror films, including Tod Browning's then-recent Dracula. The popularity of horror films prompted MGM producer Irving Thalberg to ask Browning and screenwriter Willis Goldbeck to come up with something more horrific than Dracula. Browning and Goldbeck adapted Tod Robbins's novel Spurs, changing the title to Freaks.

Set in the world of a traveling circus, Freaks used actual sideshow performers for much of its cast. Now a cult film celebrated for its oddness and its courageous casting, Freaks was strongly criticized at the time and suffered from what we might call public censorship: the film so disgusted critics and filmgoers and those in the film industry that MGM withdrew it from circulation.

The cast of Freaks	Another publicity still of the cast
Prince Randian, the human torso, depicted in a publicity still
Part of the promotional campaign	Olga Baclanova as Cleopatra—"One of us . . . one of us . . . one of us"

It is revealing to note that the two most commercially successful films to deal with massive physical deformities, David Lynch's The Elephant Man (1980) and Peter Bogdanovich's Mask (1985), used "normal" actors in heavy makeup and were roundly praised for their heroic depictions of the grossly deformed. Freaks, though, was so far ahead of its time that its time (in the mainstream) hasn't yet come.

The Production Code: 1934-68

The General Principles of the Production Code:

1. No picture shall be produced which will lower the moral standards of those who see it. Hence the sympathy of the audience should never be thrown to the side of crime, wrongdoing, evil or sin.

2. Correct standards of life, subject only to the requirements of drama and entertainment, shall be presented.

3. Law, natural or human, shall not be ridiculed, nor shall sympathy be created for its violation.

A number of "Particular Applications" were also listed. For example, profanity and ridicule of religion were banned outright; prostitution and adultery could not be treated explicitly; and such less objectionable content as "surgical operations" and "branding of people and animals" were to be treated carefully.

Throughout the filmmaking process, filmmakers and Production Code enforcers would negotiate large and small aspects of a film's content. Since no film could be released in the United States without Production Code approval, Production Code arbiters had the final word.

The Outlaw (1943)

Howard Hughes's The Outlaw infamously celebrated lead actor Jane Russell's cleavage and ultimately forced Joseph Breen, head of the Production Code Administration, to resign. Breen resented battling the powerful Hughes and fumed:

I have never seen anything quite so unacceptable as the shots of the breasts of the character Rio. This is the young girl whom Mr. Hughes recently picked up and who has never before, according to my information, appeared on the motion picture screen. Throughout almost half the picture the girl's breasts, which are quite large and prominent, are shockingly emphasized and, in almost every instance, are very substantially uncovered. (Leff and Simmons 111–12)

Much of the controversy surrounding The Outlaw derived from elements not found in the film itself. The film's brash and iconoclastic independent producer/owner Howard Hughes loudly challenged many American institutions over the years, and his exploitive publicity campaign for the film—represented by the publicity stills and poster below—was actually naughtier than the film itself. When Hughes re-released The Outlaw after World War II, the advertising campaign included such famous double-entendres as the rhetorical question "What are the two great reasons for Jane Russell's rise to stardom?

The Rating System: 1968-2003

In 1952, the United States Supreme Court ruled in Burstyn v. Wilson that motion pictures enjoyed protection of expression under the free speech and free press aspects of the First and Fourteenth Amendments. As social values continued to liberalize in the 1950s and 1960s, filmmakers were able to more successfully challenge the old-fashioned strictures of the Production Code.

The transition from the Production Code to the rating system reflects more than just changes in American social values; it also reflects changes in the way films were exhibited. In the 1930s, 1940s, and early 1950s, families routinely went out each week to see movies: moviegoing was a collective, community affair. As television took over the role of America's largest mass medium in the late 1950s and 1960s, Hollywood became less interested in marketing all of its product as "family entertainment." The promise of the rating system was that films could now be rated in terms of their appropriate audiences, with the "G" rating serving as the signal that a film was appropriate for the general "family audience" filmmakers had almost exclusively targeted in the previous decades. (For the full Voluntary Movie Rating System, see Fig. A.6 in the appendix, "Overview of Hollywood Production Systems.")

With the end of the Production Code, a seeming cultural relaxation toward film content, and widespread access to movies of all kinds through cable television, video, and DVD, film censorship might seem a thing of the past. "Censorship" may take less obvious forms, however, as when a major retailer decides not to sell a certain film or demands a less explicit version of the film for its stores. In addition, Hollywood's freewheeling treatment of sex and violence does not necessarily amount to a free and open treatment of religion, politics, sex, and so on. Self-censorship operates in many forms, and films often fail to get the "green light" for reasons other than artistic or economic.

Deep Throat (1972)

Gerard Damiano's Deep Throat, the first X-rated film to be seen by substantial numbers of mainstream filmgoers, concerns a promiscuous but sexually unsatisfied woman who discovers that her clitoris is at the back of her throat.

Made for $24,000, the film eventually grossed $25 million, but not before the film had been challenged in many state and federal venues. Film scholar Dawn B. Sova recounts the most extensive legal challenge to the film, which came from Assistant United States Attorney Larry Parrish. Parrish filed conspiracy charges against the film, arguing that anyone connected to it—from actors to distributors to projectionists—should be prosecuted. Sova describes the lengths to which Parrish went in his campaign against the film:

To achieve his end, Parrish indicted Harry Reems, who played the doctor in the film, as well as 11 other people and five corporations, and identified 98 co-conspirators, including theater employees such as the ticket taker at a theater in Vermont, a lighting technician in Miami, projectionists at various sites where the film was exhibited and others associated peripherally with the film. Two-and-a-half years after completing his one day of work on the film and receiving his pay of $100, Harry Reems was awakened in the middle of the night in New York City by agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, who arrested him. He was indicted on Parrish's charge that he was part of the nationwide conspiracy to transport across state lines "an obscene, lewd, lascivious, and filthy motion picture." Federal District Judge Harry W. Wellford refused to accept the defense of First Amendment protection.
. . . The jury viewed the movie and voted to convict the defendants. When Reems tried to appeal, several lawyers refused to represent him.
. . . Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz eventually took the case and the convictions were overturned. (96–97)

A Clockwork Orange (1971)

In adapting Anthony Burgess's novel for film, writer/director Stanley Kubrick essentially took cinematic violence and aggressive sexuality outside the familiar film genres associated with them—action films, murder mysteries, and crime dramas. The idiosyncratic A Clockwork Orange is part art film, part futuristic dystopia, and wholly Kubrickian in its perfectionist attention to visual and aural style.

The film is set in a futuristic but recognizable Britain, where gangs of youths terrorize the populace, robbing, beating, and raping.

Alex and his gang of "droogs" at the local milk bar	Alex and his gang interrupt another gang's rape
Alex has quick sex with two girls he picked up at the record shop	Home invasion, assault, rape
Alex fantasizes with help from the Old Testament

Alex (Malcolm McDowell), a gang leader, is eventually caught, convicted of murder, and sent to prison. There, he volunteers for a government program that offers to reform him by conditioning him to feel sickened at the thought of sex or violence.

Alex in prison	Alex agrees to conditioning that will get him an early release from prison
Alex now conditioned to be physically nauseated at the thought of sex or violence

"Cured," Alex is released and is attacked by his own gang and other gangs he once abused. When word of the government program leaks out, the public rejects it and Alex is subsequently returned to his old self and celebrated by government officials and the press.

Alex back to fantasizing in the old way-the last image of the film

Originally rated X in the United States, the film was banned in Britain for many years and could be seen only at late-night clandestine screenings (Kubrick supposedly encouraged the film's ban in Britain, because he was concerned that it would incite copycat crimes). In the United States, many film critics decried the film, none more so than the highly respected Pauline Kael, whose review of the film was as scathing as any she had ever written:

Literal-minded in its sex and brutality, Teutonic in its humor, Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange might be the work of a strict and exacting German professor who set out to make a porno-violent sci-fi comedy. Is there anything sadder—and ultimately repellent—than a clean-minded pornographer? The numerous rapes and beatings have no ferocity and no sensuality; they're frigidly, pedantically calculated, and because there is no motivating emotion, the viewer may experience them as an indignity and wish to leave. . . . The trick of making the attacked less human than their attackers, so you feel no sympathy for them, is, I think, symptomatic of a new attitude in movies. This attitude says there's no moral difference. Stanley Kubrick has assumed the deformed, self-righteous perspective of a vicious young punk who says, "Everything's rotten. Why shouldn't I do what I want? They're worse than I am." . . . I can't accept that Kubrick is merely reflecting this post-assassinations, post-Manson mood; I think he's catering to it. I think he wants to dig it. . . . Kubrick has removed many of the obstacles to our identifying with Alex; the Alex of the book has had his personal habits cleaned up a bit—his fondness for squishing small animals under his tires, his taste for ten-year-old girls, his beating up of other prisoners, and so on. . . . The movie's confusing—and, finally, corrupt—morality is not, however, what makes it such an abhorrent viewing experience. It is offensive long before one perceives where it is heading, because it has no shadings. Kubrick, a director with an arctic spirit, is determined to be pornographic, and he has no talent for it. . . . At the movies, we are gradually being conditioned to accept violence as a sensual pleasure. The directors used to say they were showing us the real face and how ugly it was in order to sensitize us to its horrors. You don't have to be very keen to see that they are now in fact de-sensitizing us. . . . How can people go on talking about the dazzling brilliance of movies and not notice that the directors are sucking up to the thugs in the audience? (373–78)

While Kael and other critics denounced A Clockwork Orange, it nonetheless did well commercially, was nominated for four Academy Awards, and has become more respected over the years. Writing in 1999, film critic James Berardinelli describes the film as a social commentary:

Many have watched A Clockwork Orange without understanding what it all means. And for those who take everything presented on screen in a straightforward manner, a certain amount of confusion will result. But, like Terry Gilliam's Brazil, George Orwell's 1984, and other futuristic political satires, A Clockwork Orange is meant to be understood as part allegory, part black comedy, and part drama. . . . A Clockwork Orange has a universal message. Admittedly, it's one that many would prefer not to hear, but to deny the importance of its central themes or to dismiss the movie as a descent into debauchery is to ignore both an artistic achievement and a cautionary tale.

FOR FURTHER READING

Berardinelli, James. "Film Review of A Clockwork Orange."

Kael, Pauline. Deeper into Movies. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1973.

Leff, Leonard and Jerold L. Simmons. The Dame in the Kimono: Hollywood, Censorship, and the Production Code from the 1920s to the 1960s. New York: Anchor Books, 1990.

Sova, Dawn B. Forbidden Films: Censorship Histories of 125 Motion Pictures. New York: Checkmark Books, 2001.

Vieira, Mark A. Sin in Soft Focus: Pre-Code Hollywood. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1999.