Frankly, We Must Give a Darn : The Arts: Look at what censors almost did to our movie immortals; then picture what they’d do to tomorrow’s classics.

The talk on Capitol Hill about funding cuts or censorship for works of art deemed “offensive” has brought forth a lot of angry words. And a lot of literary allusions. I’ve heard references to Orwell, Huxley, and (though they’re more historical than literary) Cotton Mather and Torquemada. Perhaps it’s just my background in film, but what comes to mind when I think about this controversy is “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.”

The motion picture is the only art form ever subjected to sweeping censorship in this country. As such, the experience of film under the reign of the censors tells us something about what can happen when an art form decides, for whatever reason, to censor itself.

Until about 25 years ago, few Americans regarded motion pictures as legitimate art; after all, movies weren’t made in ancient Greece or Renaissance Italy, and you watched them in commercial theaters, not museums. When President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the legislation that resulted in the creation of the American Film Institute, he called film “this 20th-Century art form,” but it’s fair to say that, despite the work of Ford, Hitchcock and Welles, to most Americans a movie was just entertainment for a Saturday night.

It followed that, to the public mind, if film wasn’t art, it wasn’t entitled to the degree of creative protection afforded to the other arts. People who would have protested--or snickered--at attempts to place a fig leaf on Michelangelo’s “David” didn’t protest when censors routinely changed the dialogue, images and even the subject matter of motion pictures.

The censorship was the responsibility of the so-called Hays Office, which judged every film made in America for conformity to a code drawn up in 1927 by the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (its president was Will H. Hays, a former postmaster-general).

The code set rigid limits on which subjects, behavior, activities, words and body parts might be permitted on-screen. Among the prohibitions: profanity (right down to “damn” and “hell”), venereal disease and (my favorite) “excessive and lustful kissing.” Sex, even the implied possibility of sex, was a no-no, to the point that generations of Americans probably grew up thinking that all married couples slept in twin beds.

Attempts to enforce the code spawned battles between film-makers and censors that havepassed into motion-picture legend.

David O. Selznick had to fight to use damn in Rhett Butler’s parting words to Scarlett O’Hara (and paid a $5,000 fine for that privilege).

The girl centaurs who had been guilelessly bare-chested in Disney’s original designs for “Fantasia” were, in the final film, discreetly clad in flowery brassieres.

In “Casablanca,” the censors diligently attacked every hint of a sexual relationship between Rick and Ilse. If they’d had their way, Humphrey Bogart’s line, “We’ll always have Paris,” would have been followed by Ingrid Bergman saying “Oh? What happened in Paris?” They also did their best to tame the unscrupulous, libidinous Inspector Renault, described in a Hays Office memo as “an immoral man who engaged himself in seducing women to whom he grants visas.” That Renault’s immorality plays a key role in the story was, of course, immaterial to the Hays Office.

The censors left their mark on “Rear Window,” in which James Stewart, confined to a wheelchair in his apartment, spies on his neighbors through binoculars. The censors insisted that the neighbors’ lives be far less interesting than Alfred Hitchcock intended.

They sniffed with alarm at Frank Capra’s “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington”: “The generally unflattering portrayal of our system . . . might well lead to the picture being considered, both here and abroad, as a covert attack on the democratic form of government.”

And they objected to “The Best Years of Our Lives”: “The scene where the sergeant and his wife sleep together on the night of his return . . . seems to be unduly intimate.” A man comes home after years of fighting World War II and is accused of undue intimacy!

“Life with Father” ran for 3,200 performances on Broadway, and there’s no recorded instance of an audience member objecting to the line, “I’m going to be baptized, dammit!” The Hays Office regarded the movie audience as “larger and less sophisticated” than theatergoers, and the “dammit” provoked a battle royal.

In his book, “The Censorship Papers,” author Gerald Gardner gives hundreds of examples of how censors changed, or tried to change, films that we now regard as classics. But there aren’t any examples of the might-have-beens, films that today might be recognized as great if they had been created as originally conceived, and not cut to suit an arbitrary moral standard. The censors watered down, cut up and denatured thousands of films. Which one of them, if left alone, might have been another “Casablanca”? A “Citizen Kane”?

Much of the code seemed specifically designed to ward off any contemplation of life’s evils. The fact that these evils were legitimate subjects of drama was unimportant to the censors; the public must be protected from seeing them on-screen.

The question in my mind is, did we really need that much protection? How much damage would have been done by breasts on a Disney centaur? How many people were corrupted by Rhett Butler’s last line to Scarlett?

And how many good films were never made because the film-makers didn’t want to take on the production code?

Which brings me back to “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.” One of the taboos of the code was miscegenation: an absolute ban on any film treatment of, as the code put it, “sex relationships between the white and black races.”

In 1967, the year after the code finally fell, “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” a film about an inter-racial love affair, earned 10 Academy Award nominations and became one of the most popular films of all time.

The censors had “protected” us from “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” for 40 years. Do we really want them protecting us from other works of art for the next 40?