Modern Screen (Jan - Nov 1940)

Breen's troubles are endless. Though a picture may have his okay, may have the okay of South American censors, sometimes it still brings down the wrath of Latin churches. Last year, after a movie showing Dorothy Lamour with too much anatomy and not enough sarong was released, placards were pasted on the doors of all churches in Argentine. They read: "Fathers and mothers — Recognize your responsibility. One single hour passed in the obscurity of a cinema that shows a bad reel, destroys in the soul of your children the work of a year accomplished by the church, the home and the school." To fight this, Breen has now advised Hollywood producers to grind out pictures exalting Latin heroes like Simon Bolivar and has increased his own vigilance over objectionable scripts. LJOWEVER, the thing that's converted * ■* Breen into an aspirin consumer has been the strict censorship of films outside the Americas. For, no matter how careful he is, there's always something wrong. To convince you, once and for all, that Breen has the toughest task in the colony, thumb over some of these foreign cuts: Egypt sliced a scene showing Jane Withers escaping from an orphanage. They said, "This might set a bad example for our school girls." Dr. Ahmed Bey, their head censor, also barred "British Agent," claiming it was propaganda for Communism. England, very touchy about dialogue, changed the line, "The fate some call worse than death" to the inane "The fate some call" in a Leslie Howard movie. And in "The Fighting 69th," they deleted the Lord's Prayer as recited by Pat O'Brien. Odd thing about England has been that, though they'll permit any amount of nudity and sex, they won't accept any cruelty to animals. An oriental problem child for Joe Breen has long been Japan. They barred one Jack Benny comedy because "its wisecracks are too low-brow for Japanese audiences." In "Knight Without Armour," with Marlene Dietrich, they slashed all scenes that might give moviegoers the idea that war wasn't noble. In the past year Tokyo censors ripped 8,000 feet of kisses out of Hollywood's passionate celluloid! After a long day of reading scripts, arguing with producers and actors, staring at new movies — Joe Breen is happy to reach his comfortable $60,000 home, to relax with his wife and four children and to chat with his neighbors, Fredric March and Frank Morgan. He does, however, carry censorship into his own home — the word "taboo" being taboo! Thus, my friends, are your movies made to behave. Joe Breen's power is limitless. He can tell off millionaires. He can even fly to foreign countries to plead with their heads on a debatable point. But there is one type of censorship he can't do a thing about. It came up not so long ago, when Breen received a cable from the little country of Estonia. It seemed they had banned something labeled "Double Wedding." 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