Days of Hays: Bring Back Movie Censors, Readers Say

My reflections on the absurdities of censorship that strangled the movie industry from 1934 to 1968 have met with little applause.

Most readers, it seems, would like to have censorship back. They argue that great movies were made when the Hays Office reigned and that movies today are mostly salacious trash.

As I pointed out, such movies as “Casablanca” and “The African Queen” were great because producers found ways to circumvent the censors. In some cases, that may have required an art greater than that expended on today’s R-rated movies.

After all, it took superb writing and acting to suggest that a married couple were having sex when they had to be fully clothed and were restricted to twin beds.

Thomas W. Graham complains that contemporary movies do not depict our society more realistically than severely censored movies did. “How often,” he asks, “are birth control methods shown or implied prior to the need for their use? Rarely, if ever.”

He has a point. Libidinous couples are routinely shown sinking into a sexual embrace without having taken any contraceptive precautions. That bit of business is left out, I suspect, for the same reason that people never wait for their change in restaurants. They want to get on with it.

In the era of censorship, of course, there was no need to show the niceties of contraception since there was no sex. It seems to me that the advocates of birth control (of whom I am one) would insist that the movies take advantage of their greater freedom to spread contraceptive knowledge.

Graham complains that contemporary movies, despite their freedom, aren’t realistic. “Television and motion pictures show a world where single men, as a matter of routine and with little or no effort, continuously meet single, beautiful women who do not have boyfriends. In fact, the biggest problems facing single men on TV sitcoms is that men have more beautiful girlfriends than they know what to do with. Is this the real world? Not for anyone I know.”

I have always had the impression that there were enough of the opposite sex to go around--at least for casual relationships. The complaint I hear is that women can’t find men they want to marry. Of course the solution to that problem is the subject of most movies--censored or not.

In a letter to the editor, Frank Goble says, “Like Jack Smith, I grew up during the ‘bad’ old days of censorship. Those were also the days when divorce, rape, child abuse, single-parent welfare, venereal disease, AIDS and drugs were not nearly as serious as they are today. Could there be a connection?”

If, indeed, those social ills are more prevalent today, I doubt that the movies can be blamed. Movies reflect social changes as well as produce them.

I am taken to task by two readers for my murky recollections of two old movies. Jim Beaver points out that in “‘The Postman Always Rings Twice,” the adulterous Lana Turner dies in an automobile accident, not in the surf, as I remembered. Her innocent lover, John Garfield, is convicted of her murder.

A reader I can’t identify, since, unfortunately, I have mislaid his letter, complains angrily that Katharine Hepburn could not have “emerged” transformed from Humphrey Bogart’s cabin in “The African Queen.” Being a barge, he points out, “The African Queen” couldn’t have had a cabin.

He is right. Bogart slept in a hollow in the deck, like a cockpit, about three feet deep. Hepburn is not shown emerging even from this. Awakening in the morning, Bogart surreptitiously peeks at Hepburn making tea on deck, then pretends sleep. It is obvious from his self-consciousness and Hepburn’s euphoria that something has happened in the night. Of course we never see it. It is suggested only by Hepburn’s inspired performance.

My description of that performance brings this strange complaint from Dallas Williams. “OK, but it appears that the feminists have cowed you again, Jack, else why didn’t you credit what must have been an inspired performance by Allnut (Bogart)?”

Bogart’s performance was excellent, throughout. However, in the morning-after scene it took little guile for him to blink and then feign sleep. It had not been, after all, the first time for him. Hepburn, meanwhile, is shining, transported. She spills tea. She gazes at the reclining Bogart with blossoming love. She wakes him. Then she asks him what his first name is. He says “Charlie.”

“Charlie,” she says, savoring it. “Charlie. . . . That’s a nice name.”

That is conclusive evidence. Something has happened to her. And she has put one over on the Hays Office.

I don’t think they could do it better today with nudity and heavy breathing.