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Break on through

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Richard Schickel is a film critic for Time and the author, most recently, of "Elia Kazan: A Biography."

“NO girl was ever ruined by a book.” Or, we may safely propose, by a movie. The old saw -- or is it an apercu? -- remains an unimprovable one-line retort to the censorious. But, Raymond J. Haberski Jr. asks, what about 100 books, 100 films? At what moment does a plethora of the snarky constitute a clear and present danger to the virtuous? Or, for that matter, to our notions of what constitutes a good society?

The author believes he has identified that tipping point. It occurred in the New York film culture of the 1960s, when all sorts of bad things appeared: “Baby Doll,” which arrived ahead of the rest, in 1956, was famously denounced from the pulpit by Francis Cardinal Spellman; lugubriously sexualized imports, like “I Am Curious (Yellow),” went almost directly from the boat to the courtroom; Jack Smith’s “Flaming Creatures” and Andy Warhol’s “Chelsea Girls” titillated the chattering classes; and Amos Vogel and Jonas Mekas played transgressive “independent” films at various age-restricted, but still police-raidable, venues around town.

Whereupon the deluge descended: Prior censorship of Hollywood movies was replaced by the current ratings system; the nation’s most powerful critic, Bosley Crowther of the New York Times, was unhorsed for his failure to comprehend the sublimity of “Bonnie and Clyde”; and the Catholic Legion of Decency -- the hammer that Hollywood had most feared -- folded up its lace curtains and tottered offstage.

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Haberski is onto something. I was around for much of that excitement -- if you define excitement as being invited to discuss freedom of the screen in church basements for $100 a session -- at the beginning of my career as a movie reviewer, and I must say it was kinda fun. Rarely have so many heated and self-aggrandizing words been wasted on so many ephemeral (and often downright ludicrous) cultural objects. It is at least dauntless -- maybe the word I want is “quaint” -- of Haberski to waste more verbiage on this topic.

Dubious verbiage, I must say. He, for example, waxes nostalgic about the Legion of Decency and the Production Code, both the creations of a psychotically prudish movie trade paper publisher named Martin Quigley, implying that the imposition of genteel Victorian standards somehow tests and hones creativity instead of suppressing it. He does not, however, notice several defects in that position: that Quigley and his creatures had arrogated to themselves spokesmanship for a Catholic minority that did not necessarily agree with their standards, and then imposed them on the hapless American majority under the guise of “guiding” their taste; that the Production Code’s chief was the rabidly anti-Semitic Joseph Breen, who, in the years prior to World War II, not only insisted that married Americans universally sleep in twin beds but also forbade all anti-fascist film projects; that the imbecile restrictions imposed on screen content for about 30 years intensified the explosive response of the 1960s film culture.

But wait, there’s more, if not worse: The unlikely hero of Haberski’s work is, yes, Crowther. I do not gainsay the valuable work the Times’ critic did in defending movies as disparate as “The Bicycle Thief” and “The Miracle” from the censors. He was a liberal and humane man. Unfortunately, he was also possessed of the most viscous prose style in criticism, which perfectly conveyed the limits of his aesthetic. He was OK with earnest Hollywood efforts that deplored racism, for example, and he came to optimistic, inspiring conclusions. But to watch poor Bos struggle with, say, a film by Godard or Bergman was to witness an anguish of incomprehension.

“Bonnie and Clyde” was the great test case. Bos attacked it several times -- on its lack of historical accuracy and, naturally, for its violence. But this was no foreign film, doomed to the art-house margins. It was a major studio film with major stars and, eventually, a major audience. Which says nothing of its neo-New Wave style, its appreciation of the innocence and victimization of its major characters and, of course, its self-conscious analogizing of their violent fate with the bloodshed in Vietnam. And this says nothing of the film’s cheek and sexiness. Put simply, it was more of an aesthetic challenge than a moral one -- and Bos totally funked it. Out he went, to everyone’s relief. Haberski has unearthed a consoling letter I sent Crowther when he was canned and, to my slight embarrassment, reprints much of it here. But I had been raised to respect my elders and, our disputes aside, quite liked the not-so-old gentleman.

But that’s beside the point. The real issue was the widespread belief that movies, as a mass art, required closer censorship than other arts. The censors argued, ludicrously, that they were protecting a completely mythical creature, the innocent child who might somehow wander into a theater and, in effect, see Mommy and Daddy doing it. Might have happened, I suppose. But so what? Children see and hear all sorts of things we’d prefer they didn’t. The censors also argued that the public in general was similarly innocent -- as if it didn’t read reviews or hear the buzz and was thus in constant danger of finding itself in knickers-twisting confrontations with movies that did not star Doris Day.

In a way, film is a self-censoring medium. The danger of an innocent seeing “Flaming Creatures” is too remote to bother about. That may, indeed, be largely true of “Bonnie and Clyde.” Being a senescent grown-up is always a perilous business; it’s supposed to be. The point Crowther and his kind missed was the aesthetic one -- that this era’s movies were offering new ways of seeing and depicting reality that self-consciously stressed the medium’s unique, largely visual, narrative potential as opposed to those it had borrowed from the novel and the stage: Godardian jump-cuts all around, and, yes, an emphasis on the movies’ inherently voyeuristic capacities. They are always -- or ideally should be -- hiding in the bushes and peering into unshaded windows.

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Haberski acknowledges the need to read movies in a new way. But his critical heart isn’t in it. And, to borrow that old 1960s word, he’s irrelevant as well. Since the creative burst of the 1960s and ‘70s, the movies have mostly settled back into dismal routine. The European cinema is as staid as anything MGM ever produced, the American film is almost universally pitched to teenage dimwits and the nation’s pornography addiction is chronic and more alarming than anything Quigley ever wet-dreamed. In the 1960s, we realized a different dream, one in which a medium, formerly viewed with contempt by the guardians of high culture and with dismay by the guardians of moral purity, briefly found its own voice (and audience). Supported by the impassioned New York critical community, a way was found to challenge prissy movie convention through essentially aesthetic means -- and to hell with the indefinable “community standards” and what film critic Andrew Sarris immortally called “creeping Crowtherism.” God, it was great to be part of that, and Haberski at least reminds me of how much I miss those heady days. *

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