Enough Already of Films Too Goody-Goody to Be True

Cardinal Roger Mahony’s endorsement of a new censorship code for movies and TV would severely alter my lifestyle if adopted by the industry.

With the church behind it, the code comes off as censorship, though its authors insist it’s voluntary.

Those who were not moviegoers during the reign of the Hays Office (1934 to 1966) cannot appreciate the freedoms exercised by today’s filmmakers. Most of the box-office hits simply could not have been made in Hays days.

The other night my wife and I saw “The Prince of Tides,” a movie hailed as one of the year’s best. It has lustful kissing and scenes that suggest adulterous intercourse; it has a violent triple rape; in one gratifying scene, at the dinner table, the Barbra Streisand character uses the taboo verb in accusing her violinist husband’s accompanist of making love with him; and a young woman attempts suicide.

That movie could not have been made under the Hays Code, nor under the code now recommended to the industry by the cardinal. I doubt that such graphic violations could be excused as necessary to the plot--though they are.

“The Prince of Tides” is undoubtedly a superior picture, but if it had been governed by the proposed code, its producers would probably have given us a remake of “The Wizard of Oz” (even though that supposedly squeaky-clean movie is loaded with sexual frustrations, metaphors and psychoses).

The other night my wife and I watched a video of “Cat Chaser,” a movie that could not even have been considered under the new code.

Moran, the hero, has a passionate affair with the wife of a refugee Dominican general who lives in Florida and has $2 million in getaway cash stashed under his marital bed. The lovemaking is just a hair short of pornography. In one scene, when her husband is threatening to slit her open with a knife, Kelly McGillis is seen in full frontal nudity. Finally, a larcenous ex-cop follows the general and his bodyguard to a rural house, thinking the general is running with the money. He forces the men to strip naked in the shower and guns them down with an automatic pistol. Then he realizes the wife has made off with the general’s 2 million bucks. He tracks her and Moran down and threatens to kill them for the money. Instead, Moran kills him.

I rented the video because it was based on a novel by Elmore Leonard, one of my favorite authors. I wasn’t disappointed.

My wife and I often watch sex and violence movies while we’re eating our microwave dinners off of TV trays. I tend to gorge on sex and violence because for so many years I was restricted to a diet of Hays-conditioned pap.

Rather often I watch old movies on the American Movie Classics channel. Some of them hold up pretty well, but the plots are goody-goody beyond belief. Most of them concern the efforts of Ginger Rogers or Doris Day to avoid being wronged by Cary Grant or some other charming lecher.

You know how it goes. Jimmy Stewart and Claudette Colbert meet cute. His raincoat zipper catches her sweater on a bus. They wind up having coffee together. Then they go to the zoo, then to Coney Island. They have fun, fun, fun. In the taxi taking her home, Stewart tries to slide an arm around her shoulders, and she says, “Don’t spoil everything.”

Sometimes clever directors got away with a suggestion of sin, often with a closed door. In “Indiscreet,” Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman give their ballet tickets to a couple of kids. They walk around romantic London at night. Grant takes her up to her apartment in the elevator. They look into each other’s eyes. She invites him in for coffee. The door closes behind them. The camera rests for several seconds on the closed door. We know that something significant is happening inside. But we haven’t seen any lustful kisses, no tangled naked legs among the sheets.

Are we going to go back to doing it with closed doors and wind blowing through the bedroom curtains? Must even married couples use twin beds, and keep at least one foot on the floor? May we not say damn when exasperated?

I regard censorship of movies as an intrusion on my rights as a patron of the arts. The public will censor movies by not watching those that offend it. That it doesn’t mind a little explicit sex is proved by the popularity of “Pretty Woman,” which is a fairy tale about a rich man who tries to buy a very human prostitute. I especially liked the scene where Julia Roberts is in the bathtub with Richard Gere and wraps her long legs around him.

Don’t spoil everything, Cardinal Mahony.