Variety (January 1954)

PICTURES Forty-eighth P^RtEfY Anniversary Wednesday January 6, 195| SADIE, SHEIKS AND (Sex On The Screen) SIRENS OPERATION EYEBALL By JERRY WALD ■ (Executive Producer, Columbia Pictures) . Hollywood, Sex not only helps make the world go around ( as-poets and composers have told us), but sex also keeps pix projectors revolving in theatres from Broadway to Burma. Sex, it is said, and not silver nitrate, is the chief ingredient of motion picture film. If . this is so, then onemiay well ask, How has Hollywood .^ndled sex? What is. essentially a very: difficult question has been given many easy answers. Nowhere is Hollywood more vulnerable than in the realm of sex and passion, and the attack upon the screen ! and upon movie makers dates back almost to the time when Thomas . Alva Edison turned his first crank handle. , ___CriJtLcs-olJJie_aQceen a te^apLLo for ' get that home audiences see as many jerry Wald stories of love, unrequited love, passion, marital contentment and sheer animal attraction in one week of television viewing as they are apt to get in three months of moviegoing; Yet despite this concentrated dose of sex at home, interrupted only by. special pleadings for cake mixes and beauty applications, the movie screen and the movie industry have been burdened with the onus of offending public morals in matters concerning sex. For almost all of its history, the movies have constituted an "open season” for the moralists, the watch* andwards, the Comstocks of American society. In 1896, two years after the first public exhibition of filin. two stage performers. May Irwin and John C. Rice, posed for a kiss interlude which delighted some and. shocked others. The kiss itself, was lifted from a scene in the plav in which the two performers were then appearing. "The Widow Jones,” and although there was no hue and outcry against the stage perf o.ntrance^tltere-w‘as-con^— siderabie agitation— about ..it up on the. screen,.. jand_pne_ Chicago newspaper editor referred to this friendly bliss as “no better than a lyric Of the stockyards." It sliould: have been obvious even to the earliest pioneers of this infant entertainment medium, that the movies were “in for it.” Even such eminent and. clear-thinking historians as Charles and Mary Beard joined the attackers of the silver screen, charging the movies with debasing the moral fibre of America: . | A Force for the Go, '! .It. is mv sincere conviction that during the past 50 years • the movies, in many respects, have seyveC o raise the level of public taste not only in the realm of lii physical appurtenances of daily living, but in the realm of ideas and ideals as well. It is also my belief that the movies have performed an exemplary service in the c ireful handling of. sex on the screen. There have been, of course, exceptions; but these, exceptions have been at a minimum and have earned the same degree of reproach from Hollywood, . which they earned at the hands of the public. The movies have mirrored the temper of the tiems in morals and mores, and, if anything, have actually anticipated the trend of attitudes toward sexual relationships. The movies have not created . moral values, nor debased them, nor undermined them. In an industry which has produced some 25,000 mature length pictures in 50-odd years of its history, it w uld be unusual, to say the least, to discover that a few n these have offended public morals and good taste, in.clud' by the. way. the' taste of Hollywood and serious film-makvcs as well. The attributed immorality or a-morality whicMThas been fastened upon the picture industry is no monopoly at all, when one considers the publishers and their comic books and lurid book jackets, and the theatrical producers and their revues, their burlesques and some of their threeact dramas. This consideration is not noted here as either a justification or ah apologia; the point is that pix have been more subject to censorship and scrutiny; films are more immediate to their audiences and therefore more vulnerable; movies deal with live images, and being more immediate are, generally, the first point, of attack. There has been justified and temperate criticism of the content of motion pictures, and in these instances producers and the industry have worked for improvement. There is no reason why the celebrated for infamous in its day ) Irwin-Rice kiss should have raised such a storm of protest except for the fact that it was a daring hovelty. Kissing had been evinced in’ .Shakespeare, in the robust Restoration Comedies, and even in the theatre of the Kembles and the Booths. Sex on the American screen, in fact, had a dry, puritanical aura to it for at least the first two decades of film history, and romance— was-best— expressed— in the pollyanna school of fingertip-touching romance. This was the period when the heroine inevitably had long, golden curls, wore a Wide-brimmed hat* and strolled into the sunset with “The Boy” to eternal happiness or its 1910 equivalent. American womanhood— girlhood would be more appropriate— was personified in the lovable roles which Mary Pickford portrayed to delighted audiences. Sex manifested itself generally in hand-holding and was never the central problem of any story. It was World War I which wrought almost overnight changes in the moral attitudes of the people of America. America had been canvassing for the politically emancipated woman since the Civil War and the Susan B. A nthonyXrusade for suffrage. The campaign for the Sexually em^^cipejted woman began when the boys came home from Paree, when the hemlines started to climb, and the cigaret holders began to appear. “The America of the beginning of the last decade (1920-30 ),” writes James Truslow Adams in "The Epic of .America” (1933), "was a very different one from that which had entered World War I. The idealism that had been rapidly making progress in accomplish* inenl under Roosevelt and' under Wilson in hi$ first. term had\ largely disappeared. A certain recklessness had taken . its place. ’ This recklessness was an aftermath of l he war, a moral backwash as some historians have called it, and the movies went about the business 6f reflecting the tenor of those days. There were two pictures which blasted away the two preceding trends— the age of innocence, and the saga of the vampire-^and these were “The Miracle Man” and Male, and Femaje,” both produced in 1919. “The Miracle Man w ith Thomas Meighan exploited the growing order of the gangster; “Male aind Female,*' . based on Barrie’s play, “Admirable . Crichton,” co-starring Meighan and Gloria Swanson (.who had had a rather short run as a vamp herself) dealt with the intimate love story of a lady of quality and her butler on a desert island. The story .flouted moral ' conventions, dealt in. sophisticated fashion With problems of illicit love, and was as open in its defiance pf the pre-war moral status quo as America's flourishing racketeering, as revolutionary as the new era of jazz, and as flaunting of traditions as the newly created Prohibition era drinkers. ' Cecil B. DeMille followed with Other pictures in the same vein, including “Don’t Change Your Husband,” “For Better or Worse,” and “Forbidden Fruit,” all stressing sex and moral emancipation. Naturally, he had imitators who tackled the same theme with varying degrees of taste and license. But the trend toward this new attitude toward sex on the screen had its counterpart in other phases of American life. “DeMille’s imitators,” Ruth Inglis writes "In ' “Freedom of the Movies” (Chicago U. Press, 1947), “were even less subtle, and pictures defying the old-fashioned canons of decency and morality, became as common as the contemporary novels and plays in similar vein.” | Nainby-Pabliun Pix j If American movies are to share; any kind of guilt at all, then conceivably it ihight be for perpetuating the girly-girly myth about American womanhood. Long after the “Down East” and the “Pollyanna” school of motion pictures had passed public vogue, there were producers and filmmakers who persisted in offering the public this pabluin-loaded view of the relationship between meh and women. As one looks back at pictures of that era, the sacrosanct era Of sex, one gets the feeling that unlikely children, dressed up in adults' clothes, were playing at lovemaking. The hero invariably chased the heroine -thrwigh-some-backlot sylvan glade and finally caught her ’neath a weeping willow; the heroine dropped her eyes when the hero went after fiiT-re warST Toss ; and~wRen he' forced himself to a point of proposal he dropped to one knee and rapped his chest manfully. The early Mary Pickford pictures and Charles Ray films Cupid-bow lips — when razzy, jazzy Clara Bow and ‘It’ burst upon the screen. American audiences awakened to sex by the aftermath of World War I were delighted with what they saw. * * * The flapper era offered moviegoers a new view of . the American woman as the rolled-stocking, hipflask-toting, bobbed-hair hoyden. The flapper era also made discussion about sex socially acceptable in quarters where it had never even been whispered before. But Clara Bow’s pictures and Sue Carol’s may have, asked questions about sex, but never attempted to answer them. “Sex is here to stay,” was a contemporary wisecrack. But no attempt was made to explain what sex was and how it Operated. “Sex is sin” has been a prevalent view in many parts of American life. In the early days of the screen, when sex exhibited itself on the screen, aside from the already referred to idyllic concept of fingertip-touching romance, it was portrayed as evil— the vampires, the illicit lovers, the cycle started by Cecil B. DeMille with his production “Male and Female.” The vampire school shocked its audience, but it was superficial. The flapper school was a shock, but it, too, was superficial. The fatal female, tribe— Garbo, Dietrich, Lamarr, Swanson— made the first hesitant steps toward exploring the anatomy of love. Interestingly enough the Garbo type, the, neurotic, introspective lover so well exemplified in the actress’ portrayal of “Anna Karenina” or “Camille,” had its beginning with that cycle which began with the great “Latin Lover”— Rudolph Valentino. Valentino was the male counterpart to the Bara vamp. Valentiho had many imitators and successors— Rod LaRocque, John Gilbert, Ricardo Cortez, Antonio Moreno, Gilbert Roland, Ramon Novarro— all men whose performances showed them to be practiced in the arts of love. Their counterparts were to be found in the “rough-em-up” school of lovers— James Cagney, Edward G. Robinson, Charles Bickford, Clark Gable; | Don’t Talk It to Death | When the movies were silent,!, if our hero wanted, to make known his love, he generally offered his lady a freshly plucked rose, and clasping his free had to his bosom/ gesticulated, expressions of adoration. She, on the other hand, bowed her head with benign satisfaction and . a carefully manufactured shyness which reflected propriety as well as acceptance. refined the art of silent love-making to something more subtle, more realistic and more natural. Although we might characterize her performance today as something overdone., by comparison with what had gone on before she was subtle. But sound was to prove very devilish, in its developments. One could hear "I love you” enunciated just so many times, before it grew wearisome. And the more talky these love sequences grew, the more annoyed were the paying customers. Human passion is not ah emotion which is discoursed about by the participants, as any man or woman in love will freely attest. . Movie* makers now faced the problem of reflecting proper sex mores, without talking audiences to death. Motion picture producers are men extremely sensitive to public reaction. No producer within my knowledge has ever knowingly sought to offend public sensibilities. No producer has ever knowingly made a picture which he even thought would flaunt public acceptance. Some producers have made pictures in advance of prevailing Hollywood notions on sex and morality;, but never in advance of public mores. The cardinal rifle of picture making is never to offend the innocent or frustrate the intelligent. Contrary to populai’ belief, the Motion Pictii re Producers’ Code is not • simply a guide to express prohibitions; it is a compendium of common sense and good taste. The critic who fancies himself a realist says Hollywood never treats the subject of illicit love, because of prohibitions of the Code. This is not true. The relationship between Deborah Kerr and -Burt •.•.Lancasterin “From Here toEternity^ -was,-first, adult; and, second, very natural. In the screen version Bvr Llilt I lull LlLDnLL (] ARCH OBOLERsrs I have been In Europe for many months. I have r«: turned to find my infant 3-D already buried and a Ireadv resurrected. I have come back to screens that have widened. I have returned to a most complicated motion __ : _. L . picture world of Unistrut curvaceous screens, Lenticular polaroids, intetlocks, Lucky Seven Magic-Vuers Nprd-bn-one-strlp, anamorphic lenses’ nPt to speak of front, back and sicks ways Altec speakers, quadruple, mac. nets on the soundheads, Ki tie vox Stancil and N.T.S., with Matty Fox in the .middle, and whose ratio, is on first? Gentlemen of science, promotion . and merchandising, enough is enough) I recently attended the Chicago ToA Arch oboier meeting and am still bleeding for lhe • • M r TOA-ers. There won’t be enough psy. clflatrists invented even in Russia to take care of thein. Between off-angle filters, and the bank*wori’t-16an-f»r-n<‘u/ projection-lenses, "and rental glasses weren’t sterilized, and Max next door won’t let them have the. back where ne ' sleeps so that the new screen can be spread out — well, as I said, enough is enough! So out of the wisdom that I have accumulated from a ' careful study, these months abroad, of the techniques of those ancient exhibitors and show business scientists., da Vinci and Michelangelo, I have a simple solution which solves all. It goes like this — since the new techniques of the motion picture business are having-difficulty adapting themselves to the public, why not adapt the public to the new techniques? . . ! We will start with true three-dimension. Since, by now, everybody knows that you can’t get true 3-D without glasses, let’s eliminate the glasses by polarizing the customers. John Dreyer, the eminent scientist of Blue Ash, Ohio, has excellent polarizing solutions which could be sprayed left eye, right eye into the customer’s optics as he enters... — .. _ — — . — , -— — . — — . With the problem of the glasses so neatly solved, let us . attack, with equal forthrightness, the matter of widescreens. How ridiculous to expect each exhibitor to have a variable masker which; almost reel to reel, shivers outward or inward to compensate for a palpitating picture ratio. If Cinemascope is here to stay the answer, again, lies not in the theatre but with the public. My solution for CinemaScope, then, is a simple operation which permits the squeezed CinemaScope picture to be projected un-unsqueezed on a normal screen, arid with the compensation for the squeezing taking place right 'in'" the viewer’s eyes. Can Get It for You Wholesale | I’ve consulted a local charlatan, well versed in wholesale operations of all sorts, and he tells me that, on a mass operation basis, an anarnorphic-type viewing lens can be inserted into the human eyeball, in plastic, at something under $5 per operation, including the towels. In. my “Cut-Up The Customer” solution to the motion picture industry's mechanical problems, I’ve also considered the problem of Cinerama. Cinerama is a special case, since the true wrap-arpund screen is really hard to engineer internally. • This now becomes a matter of eugenics; in other words, we must scientifically culture a “customeriens sapiens” , over a number of generations who is hereditarily able to resolve the Reeves-Waller wonder-flicker. I hear soft objections from Exhibitor Marc Wolf. My dear Mr. Wolf, if you think it is impossible to develop a human being with an eyeball that reaches back to his eardrums, consider what has been done with goldfish, Compare the miracle of the goggle-eyed, multifinned fantail, shining in-iridescent Technicolor, to the fish from 'which it originated — the flat, sepia-colored, mud-lurking carp. I say. that ainy thing that the goldfish can do we can do. Not quickly, not easily, but then, gentlemen, what comes easily in this life other than a stock contract at Republic for a pretty horse? If the exhibitors will join together and permit their genes to be the first used for this new treatment, I am sure! that within a few generations we will have customers with built-in Cinerama. of the Somerset Maughanv story, Rita Hayworth and A!do Ray as the celebrated Sadie and sergeant in “Sadie Thompson,” discuss sex and sex problems with an adult approach. Illicit love has been the central theme of literature -sinee-Biblieal-t-imesi— -l^c^screen-had-only-dared-to-louclu: upon it in a direct and realistic fashion within the past few years.. Certainly movie makers knew illicit love existed; the propriety of . exhibiting this theme on the screen was a question of timing. Do the participants in illicit love affairs always ppy for their sin? What is the norm of illicit love relationships? Dr. Kinsey has written two significant books! on the subject which have already received a wide acceptance. Certainly the behavior pattern' of men and women, as evinced in his statistical survey, is so basic and so deep within human personality itself, that even the most avid enemy of It'® . movies cannot blame the screen for Dr. Kinsey’s interesting findings. Dr. Kinsey’s, book, if it says nothing else, makes the point that based enrhis^findings Americans are indeed a grown-up and adult race of people. The movies, over the years, through the intrusio'n of adult themes, and adult handling of adult themes, have been saying the same thing. In the specific regard to illicit relationships the Code works no hardship on the producer making his picture within the framework of good taste and good sense. The Code, in fact, is thfe sum total of accepted moral hehavior, arid is entirely realistic in the handling of this theme. There is no inexorable rule that this sin necessarily be followed by punishment, but rather than repeiil* ance be the consequence, at least, of this infraction of our moral code. : We have moved from the silly in sexual matters to subtle; we have moved from the supercilious siren to Sadie. In short, we have moved from the siren to subtlet>> and everyone seems better off tor it— including-tho-indUo picture industry.