Good Riddance to the X, but Woes Remain : Film: There should be explanations for R and NC-17 ratings and maybe for PG as well.

When the current movie rating system was adopted in late 1968, one of the cries of alarm was that it would “open the floodgates of filth.”

A lot of dubious material did indeed come along. But so did “Midnight Cowboy,” “Save the Tiger,” “Last Tango in Paris” and dozens of other films that could not possibly have been made under the censorious terms of the old Hays Code but that entertained us without the distorting glaze of an imposed, last-reel morality which portrayed life as it might be rather than as it is.

The cry about floodgates of filth is being raised again in the land and, as before, there may well be more exploitative films from the schlock producers who will exploit any system ever devised.

But one viewer’s filth is another viewer’s candor, and in the end public taste will be the arbiter, sorting out the legitimate usages from the cynical debris. After the wide excitements attending “I Am Curious Yellow,” for example, the allure of nudity per se, frontal or otherwise, fell off sharply. The appeal of the hard stuff descended to a hard-core audience, which now largely gets its kicks on VHS.

At long last the X is gone, taking all its leering connotations with it, and good riddance. But you have the feeling, occasionally, that the ratings are shadowed by Joe Bftsplk, or whatever the Al Capp character was called. One solution begets new problems.

The provocative question now is why Jack Valenti & Co. have decided to explain the R ratings but not the NC-17 ratings. It should be the other way around. More exactly, there should be explanations for both R and NC-17 and, while they’re at it, maybe for PG as well.

The new rating and the new policy of giving explanations represented a very good chance to address a chief complaint about the system: that X tarred the serious work, like Philip Kaufman’s “Henry & June,” with the same brush as strictly exploitative fare.

The explanations, however telegraphic, would at the very least sort out the eroticism of “Henry & June” from the violence of other films. Why explain R but not NC-17? It makes no sense at all.

What is uncomfortably true is that the society, officially at least, is still more up-tight about sexuality than about violence. It was said a quarter-century ago that we censored sex from European films and they censored violence from ours, and that they were right and we were wrong. It is still true, and a reflection of a violent society, as all our statistics show.

Yet what also seems true is that parents--at whom the ratings are presumably directed--are increasingly concerned about the screen violence their children are exposed to, and less concerned about the honest treatment of human love. The argument then as now is that violence is negative social behavior; love is, generally speaking, positive behavior.

Without getting into straight aesthetic value judgments--this is a good film, that a bad one--the ratings system could go a long way toward identifying films that parents might, or might not, find to their potential liking, for themselves or their teen-agers.

The argument that explanations of NC-17 are unneeded because the under-17’s can’t get into the theaters anyway will not, of course, quite hold water. Enforcement at the box office is going to be at least as porous as it has been for R and X. The more information is at hand for everybody, the better. (The pressure for more information on the why of a given rating has existed for a long time, and a test in the Midwest a few years ago was successful but not followed up.)

What is paradoxical is the demand from some observers that the ratings system should be more judgmental and more censorious. The raters are on difficult ground at best, trying to measure intensities of sexuality and violence without passing judgment on the legitimacy of the filmmakers’ intentions. The system’s own function has been advisory and, so far as humanly possible, objective, and so it had better stay.

Now Dr. Valenti has treated an old sore point, the spot marked by X. But quite apart from the noisy alarums about the floodgates of filth, the treatment is incomplete.