Close Up (Jul-Dec 1930)

CLOSE UP with the fantastic probability of what might happen to an anti-semitic metropolis, like Vienna, if the Jews were suddenly expelled from the town, was submitted to the N.Y. State Board of Censors. Bettauer, it must be remembered, was assassinated by a fanatical ''Nordic" student for daring to think that a city would go to the dogs if the Jews were expelled. The film, in enlightened New York, was, at its first screening, rejected by the censors, and the matter had to be taken to the State Department of Education in Albany before it was finally allowed to be passed, but with so many eliminations of important titles (taken from Bettauer's book) that the whole thing was rendered quite innocuous. Potemkin, that startling Russian film-document founded on an incident which occurred in the Black Sea in 1905, off the coast of Odessa, which dealt with such conditions as would have made any sailor who still had a spark of manhood left in him revolt, was banned bv the Pennsylvania censors on the grounds " that it gave American sailors a blue-print as to how to conduct a mutinv." Surely peace-loving, anti-militaristic, safe-for-Democracy America cannot be in sympathv with the erstVN-hile czarist regime before the debacle of the Romanoffs in 1917 — yet, why was Mother, another Russian film, from a story by Gorki dealing with certain pogroms of 1905 which actually occurred, have been rejected completely ? A voung bov is arrested by the military police. His mother helps him to escape from prison. He is caught and shot. The mother hurls her maledictions at the institution which sanctioned the shooting of her onlv boy. What is " wrong " in that? The Village of Sin, an exposition of the old and new orders 254