20 Years Ago, Erotic Swedish Film Was Seized After Showing at Balboa Cinema : Anniversary: “I Am Curious (Yellow)” brought a new level of sexual explicitness to mainstream movie houses.

On Dec. 23, 1969, the Balboa Cinema audience for the first Orange County engagement of the infamous adult film “I Am Curious (Yellow)” included Municipal Judge J.E.T. (Ned) Rutter, representatives of the district attorney’s office and Newport Beach police. Not coincidentally, the run stopped there.

A sizable crowd for the aborted second daily screening at the Newport Beach movie house was turned away after police seized the print. The next day, the scene was replayed at the Stanton Theater (now Teatro Stanton, a Spanish-language cinema). Thus officials in Orange County joined a growing number in municipalities around the country striking out at the then-controversial Swedish film, which brought a new level of sexual explicitness to mainstream movie houses--and became an unprecedented film phenomenon in the process.

In Houston, a theater showing the film mysteriously burned to the ground. The film was banned in Denver, Phoenix and the entire state of Kansas. Although the film had been playing in Los Angeles since May, on Dec. 31, 1969, vice squads raided six city theaters and seized copies of the film.

When and where the film did get to play, it drew record crowds because the curious--most of whom presumably wouldn’t be caught dead at a traditional skin flick--were able to rationalize seeing a sexually explicit film that claimed artistic intentions.

“The message of the movie,” wrote Times film critic Charles Champlin at the time, “is that there is evidently nothing the movies cannot show and tell an adult audience: a general, not a fetishist or lonely-old-man audience.” For his own part, Champlin acknowledged the film as a “social phenomenon” but found it “very tedious indeed and not as incisive as (director Vilgot) Sjoman hoped it might be.”

Linda Williams, a UC Irvine film studies professor, writes in her newly published history of film pornography that “legitimate, but often not very respectable, movie houses” that showed “I Am Curious (Yellow)” and similar exploitation fare “became the testing ground and, ultimately, the outlet for hard-core material once exclusive to the illegal stags.”

The Balboa followed that pattern, spending some time in the ‘70s as an X-rated Pussycat Theater before being transformed into a repertory theater and later specializing in foreign and art films under the ownership of Landmark Theatres. The Balboa has no special plans to mark the anniversary of the “I Am Curious (Yellow)” raid, theater officials said.