The Bussing Issue : Kissing, Then and Now

Something has happened to kissing in the movies and, I would guess, in real life, too, since all our manners and morals are taken from the movies.

When I was young, and a rather active kisser, one simply placed one’s lips on those of one’s inamorata, or target, and held them there for a moment or two, the amount of pressure and the length of time depending on one’s earnestness and ultimate intentions.

One then withdrew and appraised one’s reactions, as well as those of one’s partner. If there was a certain breathlessness, a kind of swirling of the senses, a warmth that spread to one’s loins and toes, then it was a serious kiss, and it was up to the young woman, or girl, as we called them then, whether she wanted to do it again and risk even further complications.

Sometimes a kiss was merely a brief touching of the lips, a brushing, with no pressure and no lingering, and even this light contact could produce literally staggering results.

Do you remember those old movies in which Cary Grant would kiss Rosalind Russell, for the first time, briefly and tenderly, and Miss Russell would push herself away, crossing her eyes, gasping for breath and reeling slightly, like an animal stunned by a tranquilizing dart; and everyone in the audience would know, along with Miss Russell, that something important had happened?

Even such forceful he- men as Clark Gable and Errol Flynn kissed their ladies rather lightly, leaving it to their mysterious male magnetism, or electricity, or whatever it was, to soften, stimulate and seduce them.

Sometimes the male showed his physical superiority by clutching the female in his arms and bending her over backward, so that she was supposedly helpless, as he planted his mesmerizing kiss on her flattened lips.

All these heroines had to do, if they wished to resist, was bite their oppressor on his lower lip; but somehow that never occurred to them. Or perhaps there is some essence in a kiss, like the poison extruded by certain insects and reptiles, that momentarily paralyzes its victims.

But that kind of kissing is gone, as dead as the Hays Production Code, which once forbade movies to show the inside of a woman’s thigh, much less her naked breast, and even dictated that a man and a woman could not be shown in bed together unless they were married and had their night clothes on, and the beds were twins.

Alas, that sort of kiss, in which closed lips were pressed together, has gone from the screen, except between cousins and closer relatives. It has been replaced by what is known as the open-mouth kiss. We know it is called an “open-mouth kiss” because “lustful and open-mouth kissing” was banned by the Hays Office in 1930.

In the open-mouth kiss, the man and woman meet with mouths wide open, as if they were licking candied apples. Now and then one sees a tongue arching out toward the opposite opening, in which it is at once enclosed. One has no doubt that this practice is reciprocal, and that the tongue thus extruded quickly retreats to allow the entry of its opposite number.

In a really all-out open-mouth kiss, the two lovers (can anyone doubt that that is what they are, or soon will be?) resemble creatures of the primeval swamp attempting to swallow one another.

Mind, I am not against this sort of exercise. I’m sure it is effective in arousing both partners and allows them to dispense with a lot of sparring and idle conversation.

Indeed, we had a milder version of the open-mouth kiss when I was in high school. It was known as a French kiss. In this amorous adventure, one partner darted the tip of his tongue into the other’s mouth, and vice versa. Their lips appeared to remain closed, however, and a casual observer would not have guessed that a tantalizing exchange of tongues was taking place. But the French kiss was not universally practiced, and a girl who permitted it, or, worse, initiated it, was regarded as fast, if not lost.

Movies were so pure, however, that even the French kiss was not permitted, so far as we knew. But I have learned from “The Book of Kisses” (Dembner Books), by Danny Biederman, that actresses of that era were always complaining about the illegal kissing of their leading men. Evidently some of our heroes ignored the Hays Office rules.

As late as 1950, according to Biederman, Kathryn Grayson complained that Mario Lanza “not only kept trying to stuff his tongue down my throat, but he kept eating garlic for lunch,” and Olivia de Havilland complained that, in “My Cousin Rachel,” Richard Burton “had his tongue down my mouth right there in front of the camera.”

I guess those fellows were just ahead of their times.