Juvenile delinquency (1955)

80 JUVENILE DELINQUENCY I believe there is oppressino; need for a voluntary code with teetli in it, and an administration with the will and knoAv-how to enforce it and to regulate television programs. And I think here we have a key to the situation in which we find our motion pictures, because until and unless some control is achieved in television, movie pro- ducers with some apparent justification will continue to chafe against the reins of their own movie code and produce the kind of pictures we have been having in larger and larger numbers. Thus the vicious circle of competition on the lowest moral level may well continue. While questions of personal judgment and opinion naturally are involved, I would say that many recent movies have violated the rules of the Motion Picture Production Code, either in letter or spirit, and sometimes in both. And I would include in this the picture Son of Sinbad, a picture w^ithout any appearance of any purpose to entertain, except in the same way that burlesque and other similar forms of ex- hibitionism are held to entertain. This I fail to see on the screen at all and I fail to see how it got by the code. Not As a Stranger. This is a very excellent picture, think, about a young doctor, a young American fellow who is anxious to become a great doctor. He marries a woman, it is true, to get her money to get through medical college, and then later is drawn into some kind of mesalliances with an adventuress. But the study of the human types involved is interesting, vivid, and well done. Yet in one particular s])ot there is introduced a symbolical connection between the natural urges of 2 animals and the sexual urges of '2 human beings. It is done by a pattern known to film peo- ple as crosscutting. We first see the human characters coming together in obvious desire, and then we see the animals attempting to do so but separated by a gate. Eventually, cutting back and forth from this scene, which reaches a crescendo of emotional excitement, we see the man lean over the corral, release the latch, uniting the animals. Whereupon he closes in upon the female. As a revelation of fact, I think it brings nothing to us we are not all familiar with. I don't think it shocks us. I am not thinking pru- dishly, I am trying to think prudently. What does this convey to the young, impressionable mind? It clearly makes no distinction between humankind, which we believe to be governed and conditioned by reason and some conscience in these matters, and the lower animals whom nature and God have arranged shall be brought together purely by natural instinct. The inference to be drawn by youth then is that sex. being a powerful appetite, and in a particular case a youth feeling that urge shall indulge himself instinctively without exercising either his reason or his conscience or listening to his conscience. I think that is bad. But I think those things should not be passed by the code, and I think it violates the tenet in the code wherein it says that low forms of sexual behavior shall not be held to be the generally accepted thing. The Seven Year Itch. I tell you. I would scratch it if I could, because, while it may very well be filled with laughter and oppor- tunities for laughter by sophisticated people, I think it is generally bad influence, that we laugh at the Avrong things. There are certain things in mv book, there are certain things at which we do not laugh.