‘Sex and the Silver Screen’ Offers Entertaining Survey

Sex on the screen and attempts to censor it are quite literally as old as the movies. When, a century ago, May Irwin and John C. Rice performed an enthusiastic kissing scene from their hit play “The Widow Jones” for the cameras, the self-appointed guardians of public morality were outraged while audiences were delighted.

The battle between filmmakers and those who would censor them continues to this day, and this 100-year-old, doubtlessly endless struggle charges Frank Martin’s absorbing six-hour survey on Showtime, “Sex and the Silver Screen.”

Entertaining yet serious, Martin’s monumental documentary is a solid work of popular social history in which clips from movies of the American cinema’s key sexual icons are framed with other archival material.

There’s nary a talking head in the entire film: Martin has rounded up a veritable who’s who of Hollywood to speak the on-the-record remarks and observations of the various stars, filmmakers, motion picture industry leaders and critics--this reviewer included--over the decades.

Hosted elegantly by that most enduring of sex symbols, Raquel Welch, “Sex and the Silver Screen” has a narration spoken by Welch that is informative and, by and large, free from dubious assertions and conclusions. (It does give one pause, however, to be told that German Expression had little effect on Hollywood or that “Beatniks” were key to the success of art theaters.)

There’s one surprising oversight: Otto Preminger and his crucial, successful battle with the industry’s Production Code over his 1953 romantic comedy “The Moon Is Blue,” in which the heroine dared to use the word “virgin.” Yet on the whole Martin does a most thorough, insightful job, telling just enough about the Legion of Decency and the rigid, homophobic code, which belatedly gave way to the rating system in 1968 but not so much as to detract from a grand flow of glorious images.

You could wish that Martin had considered the relationship of sex and violence, and how violence, always more easily tolerated in a society with Puritanical roots, has so often been substituted for sex on the screen, but perhaps that’s a subject for another documentary.

(Pornographic films and sexploitation pix are almost as old as the movies, too, and Martin takes note of them in a discreet manner, but parental caution is nonetheless advised.)

Martin takes account of how the country’s changing mores were reflected on the screen, from silent vamp Theda Bara through Clara Bow, Rudolph Valentino, Jean Harlow, Clark Gable, Mae West, Marilyn Monroe, Brigitte Bardot--right up to the era of Sharon Stone. He concludes that there probably will always be someone out there protesting that there’s too much indecency on the screen.

* “Sex and the Silver Screen” premieres with a two-hour installment Sunday at 8 p.m. on Showtime. All six episodes will then be shown 10-11 p.m. on successive Fridays, beginning Sept. 27.