In a time when we read too often about school libraries removing controversial books from their shelves, and school systems trying to prevent students from reading certain authors or books, it behooves us to look at one of the most bizarre attempts at censorship in American history.
With the advent of commercial films, in the early 1900s, there were immediate demands from religious groups for government regulation of the film industry. In 1909 a National Board of Censorship, representing various Protestant denominations, formally called for the regulation of film. The powerful Women’s Christian Temperance Union followed shortly, labeling films addictive and capable of inducing immoral behavior through their glorification of sex and violence. This, and other outside pressures, forced the film industry to police itself with the creation of the Motion Picture Association of America and its production code.
Enter the Legion of Decency. This was a Catholic organization that, despite the MPAA, operated from the 1930s to 1980. It published a list of movies it called on other Catholics to boycott. In its initial stage it acquired the signatures of 10 million American Catholics who pledged not to see the movies on this ‘banned’ list. The Legion did not call for government regulation because they were confident they could handle this matter themselves; and they did. There is a good chance that one of your favorite films from the 1930s through 1970s was at least partially cut up – a film like Casablanca, for instance, endured edits to please the Legion.
Hollywood was considered a shady, profit-driven place that would produce films that could influence young people to do anti-social things, but this now seems little more than paranoia and, the censorship that ensued, an over-reaction. The significance of an artistic factor in a serious film overrides any alleged ‘damage’ a film might cause. (As you can see below, some harmful things did, however, happen after some folks watched certain films.) Sometimes the best films are examinations of ‘evil’ in which the evil must, obviously, be depicted, and since evil folks do not consider themselves evil, they may be depicted in a way some others might feel to be ‘cool’ and which may lead some to emulate them.
Below is a brief selection of now classic films which were judged to contribute to the moral deterioration of the USA by the Legion. It took about 50 years before this nonsense petered out.
Pink Flamingos (Waters, 1972) – I scanned through the Book of Leviticus just now, and there’s nothing explicit about not eating dog poop. Perhaps this film was banned due to the man having sex with a chicken. I’m pretty sure the Bible frowns on that. Indeed, John Waters offered much to outrage a Bible-thumper – some consider this to be THE most disgusting film ever. Divine is the matriarch of a benign disgusting family that goes to war against a malevolent disgusting family – each trying to out-disgust the other. Waters even provided barf bags to folks who attended the screenings. Interestingly, after Divine ate dog crap for the film, he called a hospital and said, “I’m worried, my child just ate some dog crap…what should I do?” The doctor allegedly said, “Oh, don’t worry. This happens all the time.”
The Legion felt that unusual sexual acts might get socially accepted once folks learned that people were doing these things and the social order wasn’t falling apart (what a shame there isn’t a sexual act that can beneficially transform the social order). Waters, however, was just goofing around. The film did not incite rampant transvestite dog poop consumption. The film showed that even frivolous and semi perverse entertainment was no real threat to our society.
Spartacus (Kubrick, 1960) – Our moral guardians seemed to feel that a group of slaves overthrowing their masters might imply something commie-pinko during this dangerous phase of the Cold War, and so several battle scenes of slaves beating masters were sliced from the film. There was also a scene in which a male character is in a bath with another guy and says that sometimes he likes eating oysters, other times snails. That was considered an unacceptable double entendre implying bisexuality.
Howard Fast (whose book was the source of the script by Dalton Trumbo) deliberately portrayed Spartacus as a type of Christ before Christ and the League seemed to feel that people might begin to think a ‘messiah’ should really be more of a socially activistic fightin’ man than a passive turning-water-into-wine sort of guy.
The Exorcist (Friedkin, 1973) – Ok, so the little girl sticks the crucifix where the sun don’t shine. OK, she’s possessed! What else are a legion of demons supposed to do if you give them one of those things!? And then there’s all the nasty verbal attacks like when the girl tells the priest that his mom has become a sex expert in hell. Well, this is a type of realism as well. Is the devil supposed to insult people like the French guy in Monty Python and the Holy Grail – “Your mother is a hamster and your father smells of elderberry!”
The Legion seemed concerned that the film would lead folks to self-diagnose themselves as possessed and expect the church to do something. Also, the old priest and all his prayers can’t get that thing out of the little girl. Did the Legion feel this made its God look like a wimp?
Taxi Driver (Scorsese, 1975) – I am guessing some Legion folks pointed to Taxi Driver as a legitimization of their role. Just a few years after its release John Hinckley Jr. said he was inspired by this film to attempt to assassinate Ronald Reagan, but he was also schizoid. In the film Travis Bickle is negatively affected by the moral turpitude around him in New York City and this engenders a vigilante attitude.
Scorsese seemed to have created his own thought experiment about one way that people often respond to social ills. The moral response often engendered by evil is of evil itself and not THE moral response we need to eliminate evil. Bickle becomes a hero in the Apple regardless.
The Wicker Man (Hardy, 1973) – In the history of the Church, the fiercest battle was against the magical practices of the countryside. This is why the Pope once attacked the Harry Potter novels – the Church really hates ‘magic’. Christianity is an urban-based religion that promotes and reinforces the ethical and social values of city folks. Paul avoided the countryside because the grasp of magic was so strong. So a remote, rural English village ‘regresses’ back to the old religion. A righteous, Christian city cop goes to investigate claims of child abuse there, only to find he is the next ‘virgin’ to be sacrificed for a good crop harvest next year.
The Legion wondered: What if we all went back to the old ways and lived in harmony with nature and established a happy society where nobody went hungry and community mattered more than individuality, instead of the wonderfully competitive, stress-inducing, earth-destroying, consumer-based utopia that we now possess?
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (Leone, 1967) – Blondie and Tuco form a partnership based on mutual exploitation. There is nary a scene of the milk of human kindness in the entire film. The film is an epic experiment along Hobbesian lines. Altruism does not exist and what seems to exist instead makes one wonder whether that type of life is even worth living.
This film is so nihilistic in a cool and funny way, that the Legion probably believed it impugned all real human values as fraudulent and potentially would encourage a type of self-centered, callous approach to life. It was just another thought experiment pointing to one aspect of human nature that needs to be examined.
M (Lang, 1931) – A serial child murderer terrorizes a city to the point where the police become ubiquitous, thus harming the profits of the major organized crime syndicate. – They utilize their resources to catch the murderer so that the police may go back to their slovenly ways and ‘civilized’ crime may continue to thrive.
The criminals put the murderer on trial among themselves, questioning the criminal justice system itself. Like Tolstoy in the novel Resurrection, the film implies that we are all sinners and criminals – so what moral right do we have to judge others? If we have no moral right to judge, what is the basis of our justice?
Breathless (Godard, 1960) – Michel (Jean-Paul Belmondo) models himself after Humphrey Bogart. So he is playing the type of person the Legion has feared all along – the young man influenced by film to become a criminal. In the film he casually and gratuitously kills a police officer and takes up with Patricia (Jean Seberg) on his way to escape the law in Italy. The guy without morals, however, is betrayed (why wouldn’t he be?) confirming the Biblical lesson the Legion should have been aware of: if you live by the sword, you will die by the sword.
Rosemary’s Baby (Polanski, 1968) – The Legion seemed to feel that this film mocked the story of the Annunciation and Birth of Jesus to Mary. Also, there’s that scene where some characters are watching news about the Pope’s upcoming visit at Yankee Stadium…Roman: No Pope ever visits a city where the newspapers are on strike. Minnie: I heard he’s gonna postpone and wait til it’s over. Guy: Well, that’s show-biz. Roman: That’s exactly what it is. All the costumes or rituals, all religions.
I Am Curious (Blue/Yellow) (Sjöman, 1967) – These Swedish films were also banned by the US Government. In the film Lena Nyman plays a young Swedish woman who wishes to learn why poverty, racism, economic exploitation, educational inequality, mindless competition, the Vietnam War and other evils exist. Through her journey we occasionally see her naked and engaged in sex because she’s interested in this stuff too.
The US government was more irritated with the attacks against it for Vietnam, racism, inequality, capitalist exploitation etc. than the little bit of nudity. At this time Sweden was one of the countries offering sanctuary to American young men who refused to fight in Vietnam. The attention the US government and the League brought to this film allowed it to become one of the most profitable foreign films ever when it was allowed to enter the country.
A Clockwork Orange (Kubrick, 1971) – In England a 17 year-old girl was gang-raped shortly after the film was released by boys who sang “Singin’ in the Rain”. Kubrick literally pulled the film from the UK after harmful events continued happening. Yet, Alex and his “droogs” seemed to be Anthony Burgess’ attempt to understand those unconstrained by feelings of sympathy or mercy who felt they had license to commit any crime that came to mind (think of Vlad Putin and his “droogs”).
How does a just and fair society deal with these kinds of folks? What are our methods of individual criminal reform based on? How effective or morally justifiable are aversive conditioning treatments? The Legion claimed that Kubrick had romanticized the violence and sex and had made it attractive to young people, but the insouciance of the criminals was necessary to present the real horror of thoughtless, gratuitous crime.
Los Olvidados (Buñuel, 1950) – This film is a type of A Clockwork Orange set in Mexico before A Clockwork Orange, dealing with a gang of young men who are driven to criminal acts. Unlike Kubrick, Buñuel attempts to show how potent one’s environment is in molding a person’s future. Buñuel stated that he wanted to focus on what causes some children to become cold-hearted criminals. The film shows that when one is born into poverty and brutality one is forced to rise to a higher level of aggression as a survival mechanism. This is a film that clearly calls for economic and social reform to eliminate crime. It evokes the quote by St. Vincent DePaul, “I cannot save anyone’s soul unless my society becomes capable of producing souls in the first place.”
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Previously Published on tasteofcinema.com and is republished on Medium.
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Photo credit: Shutterstock
