The History of Sex in Cinema

Part Two: Compounding the Sin

The representation of true love on America's silver screen was never more spiritual than the treacly version offered prior to the First World War. Simpering little girls with ribbons in their hair were constantly being led to the altar by upright young men who had just succeeded, generally by fisticuffs rather than mental agility, in foiling the mustachioed villain who dared to leer in her direction. Marriage invariably meant housekeeping and children, and the occasional male interloper who intruded upon this idyllic existence was promptly and righteously repudiated. More often, in that innocent age, it was The Other Woman who tried to break up a marriage; and the word coined to describe her was "vamp." High priestess of this sultry and exotic cult was a raven-haired, square-jawed beauty with great piercing dark eyes (she was extremely nearsighted), Theda Bara.

The young lady's real name was Theodosia Goodman, and she hailed from Cleveland, Ohio. Developing stage ambitions, she went to New York, where she applied for screen work with Frank Powell, a director for the William Fox producing company; and he selected her to play the leading role in A Fool There Was, made late in 1914. The movie was based on a then-current stage play inspired by Rudyard Kipling's poem The Vampire, which in turn had been inspired by a Burne-Jones painting. It was the saga of a wanton who used all of her female wiles to lure respectable citizens from the bosom of their family to her own. For her, men were not merely playthings; they were creatures to be conquered, subdued into abject slavery to her every whim, and cast aside only after the final shred of self-respect had been stripped away. Typically vulpine is the ludicrous scene from A Fool There Was in which one of her victims threatens her with a pistol. Laughing scornfully, she beats away the weapon with a rose. The hapless wretch then uses it on himself—the pistol, not the rose—while his erstwhile mistress shrugs and strolls past his lifeless form. When the picture appeared in 1915, it was an immediate box-office sensation, and Theda Bara became famous overnight.

But the Circe who lured men to their doom had begun her evolution a bit earlier: The Danes claimed that they had invented vamps in 1910 and that they had dubbed their predatory femme fatales "vampires"—in Danish, of course. A star of these Danish films, Betty Nansen, actually went to California in 1915 to compete with the home-grown product. The American originator of the vampire woman was Alice Hollister, who played her with sanguinary relish in a film called, not coincidentally, The Vampire in 1913, and again in a similar scenery chewer, The Destroyer. Theda Bara, however, was said to represent "the whole art of vampirism," and it is true that with her arrival the entire country became suddenly vampire-stricken in an understandable reaction to the cloyingly pure, eternally virginal Mary Pickfords, Lillian Gishes and Mae Marshes of the day, who were just too good to be true. American men, taught to protect Sis and worship Mom, had already developed a double standard of womanhood, both of which were somewhat larger than life. On the one hand there was the "nice girl" father had married; and on the other, the knowing "woman of the world," the "bad girl" who might be bedded but never wedded. When they turned up on the screen, they were inevitably distorted still further, but at least the vamp could be enjoyed vicariously. Theda Bara provided deliciously illicit but socially acceptable titillation in no less than 40 films, most of them produced between 1915 and 1920.

Her screen name was the invention of Frank Powell, her first director—an exotic contraction of her own first name and the last name of one of her relatives, Barranger. Her screen image, however, was largely the creation of two canny publicity men, John Goldfrap and Al Selig, who assumed—apparently with some reason—that American men were nothing if not naïve. Her face they described as "the wickedest in the world, dark-brooding, beautiful and heartless." They let the newspapers in on the incidental intelligence that the letters of her name, rearranged, spelled out "Arab Death." They further claimed that she was born in the shadow of Egyptian pyramids, forbidden fruit of the sinful love of a French Algerian artist and an Arabian wench whose lineage could be traced all the way back to the Pharaohs. As a young girl, it was said, she had been entrusted to the care of desert nomads, from whom she was stolen by a troupe of murderous Arabian wrestlers. She was constantly being posed by Goldfrap and Selig in gossamer Eastern veils, peering into crystal balls, or hovering over skulls and bones. She was said to possess occult powers, and her past naturally included a litter of wrecked male hearts. Never before had a screen player been the subject of so intensive a build-up in the press, nor an off-screen character so patently contrived to coincide with an onscreen personality. Thus Theda Bara, though no great shakes as an actress, had at least the distinction of becoming the screen's first manufactured star.

It was a role she played to the tips of her mandarin fingernails. Stopping off in Chicago for some publicity interviews en route to Fox' new studio in Hollywood, she held court in a parlor of the Blackstone Hotel, a room redraped in red and black for the occasion, and pungent with the heavy aroma of burning incense. She turned up swathed in funereal garb, her face chalky white, her manner languid. After giving polite whispered answers to the awed reporters, and after the last was ushered from her presence, she was heard to gasp out, "Give me air!" and the windows of the room were flung wide open.

Vamp followers were soon following in her cloven footsteps. Valeska Suratt, a vamp on the stage, shrewdly transferred her predatory predilections to the screen. Another, Virginia Pearson, gotten up in much the same drag as Bara—slinky gowns, turban headdress, serpentine jewelry—soon starred in The Kiss of a Vampire. Louise Glaum made public appearances in a leopard coat purchased, so the releases said, "in an Oriental market place."

The vamps appeared for the most part in stories of domestic intrigue. They were wicked, taunting, irresistible wantons, and their helpless prey were rich, respectable, married men. The motivation of their roles was simplicity itself: They were evil to the core. But the curious thing about these pictures was the ease with which the vamp could induce her intended victim to abandon wife and family and plunge into a life of debauchery, more often intimated than explicit. This, and the public's ready acceptance of these witches' potboilers, spoke volumes on the state of domestic bliss just prior to World War I. Further, the men in these pictures rarely struggled to escape from the silken net so diabolically spun for them; and if they did escape, it was invariably through some outside force—a brother-in-law, for example, who manages to bring the errant husband to his senses for the sake of his bedridden sister. But the husbands obviously preferred hedonistic abandonment to conjugal virtue; and so did the audience. For most movie audiences in that age of innocence, it was their first taste of sin on the screen, and the demarcations between the innocents and the sinful ones were made easily recognizable: The vamps were brunette, and the heroines were blonde. (Strangely enough, after World War II the hair-color characteristics were reversed, with blonde hair considered the sexier.)

In Europe, meanwhile, the vamp myth also flourished. After cropping up in Denmark, as has been mentioned, the seeds sprouted farther south in Italy, and grew into a star figure called the "diva," a term which, where movies were concerned, translated into "sex goddess." Such commanding "divas" as Lyda Borelli and Francesca Bertini were considerably more closely allied in their roles to the 19th Century femme fatales of the popular novel than to the press-agent-created Theda Bara, and they embodied far more mortal passions. Borelli, for instance, played roles resplendent not only with gestures but also with blatant eroticism. She represented smoldering, all-consuming love—by which she was burned as well as her adoring male slave. Usually bedecked in silks and feathers, she roused an immediate desire to tear these draperies away. In La Donna Nuda (1914) she made the simplest housewifely task—including the beating of eggs—seem an obscene invitation.

The equally popular Bertini heaved with what purported to be panting sensuality on divans and pantherskins. In La Luxure she caused a man who had wronged her to literally the of unsated hunger for her—after being subjected to a series of erotic hallucinations in which she enticingly disported herself before him. Even though modestly gowned in these steamily seductive scenes, she managed to convey brazenly the voracity of her own sexual appetite. In one scene from the aforementioned picture she is seen writhing in frustration on the grass beside a husband who is too old to keep up with her marathon sexual demands. In another, after the merciful demise of this unfortunate gentleman, she squirms in sensuous admiration (though still dressed in widow's weeds) of a dashing young count among the mourners. Another Italian seductress, Pina Menichelli, was the embodiment of antimasculine cruelty. Feverishly she sowed evil and unhappiness all about her. Pressagents said of this woman's malevolent glance that one day her own adored little dog looked soulfully into her eyes and immediately perished.

• • •

Actually, the Europeans—French and Italian film makers in particular—did a good deal more than simply spice up the programs in the years before World War I. While the American studios were still grinding out one and two-reelers, pictures began to be imported from abroad that ran anywhere from an hour to over two hours.

Films like the 1912 Italian extravaganza Quo Vadis?, two hours long, bypassed the nickelodeons completely, playing instead on a road-show basis at legitimate theaters all over the country. As a result, the movies began to attract a new class of customer: nothing less than the comfortable middle class. Inspired by the longer films from abroad, American directors pressed beyond the arbitrary two-reel limit, and these longer films began to play in new and fancier movie houses with names like "Bluebird," "Idle Hour" and "Bijou Dream." Almost automatically, the standards of films made after 1912 were adjusted to reflect the stuffier morality of the new-found patrons.

With startling swiftness, the accustomed backgrounds of slum sweatshops, pawnshops and grogshops, characteristic of films made for the former predominantly working-class audience, gave way to the overstuffed, antimacassared sofas and potted palms of the well to do (at least, as imagined by parvenu producers all too recently recruited from the fur and glove industries). In their haste to acquire respectability, film makers not only shunned their own humble origins—they actively turned against them. In a typical film, a rich young girl, disobeying her mother's wishes for her happiness, brushed off a suitably prosperous suitor—and met tragedy when she ran off with a penniless but persuasive music teacher. The moral was plain: Different economic classes simply do not mix—certainly not romantically.

A stock formula for treating sex respectably on the screen quickly emerged: Show it, then condemn it. The pioneer in exploring and exploiting this profitable hypocrisy was George Loane Tucker, a director for Universal's I. M. P. productions. In 1913 he became imbued with the urge to make a movie about white slavery and police efforts to curb it. Vice investigations into the white-slave traffic had made sensational headlines in several American cities during the early years of the century. But when Tucker took his idea to Carl Laemmle, president of Universal, he met opposition on the grounds that it was against company policy to handle multireel movies. Laemmle also thought that the $5000 budget requested by Tucker was unnecessarily exorbitant.

Tucker proceeded with his project anyway. Continuing to turn out two-reel potboilers for the studio, he made Traffic in Souls a scene at a time during spare moments. When it finally opened in New York in November 1913, the picture was advertised as follows:

Traffic in Souls—The sensational motion-picture dramatization based on the Rockefeller White Slavery Report and on the investigation of the Vice Trust. ... A $200,000 spectacle in 700 scenes with 800 players, showing the traps cunningly laid for young girls by vice agents ...

The rest, as they say, is history. Thirty thousand spectators saw the film in its first week, paying the then almost unheard-of price of 25 cents per ticket. Soon, 28 theaters were showing the picture in the metropolitan area alone, and it eventually took in nearly half a million dollars. A cycle of white-slavery films was immediately under way. The story ideas were not burdened with originality. The plot pattern of Traffic in Souls was usually followed with minor variations: A country lass comes to town, is accosted at the railway station by a smooth stranger who, abetted by an unscrupulous cab driver, convinces her that he can obtain better accommodations for her money than she would be able to find alone. Her new abode turns out to be sumptuous indeed, but the tariff, alas, is higher than she had thought—nothing less than a life of shame. But for the intervention of the New York City vice squad, the heroine of Traffic in Souls would have wound up aboard a vice vessel bound for South American brothels. (continued on page 177)Sex in Cinema(Continued from page 138) A similar film, The Inside of the White Slave Traffic, distinguished itself as the first movie to employ testimonials from a respectable "authority" in order to forestall censorship. Naturally, the motives for making such films were of the purest; and prominent citizens were drafted to endorse this disinterested and high-minded type of public service. When Damaged Goods, the best of the cycle, opened on Broadway, the first showing was accompanied by a "live" lecture from a doctor on "civilization by syphilization," in line with the picture's graphic warnings about the dangers of venereal disease.

The dodge worked, up to a point, but the law of diminishing returns inevitably went into operation—and with it, the censors. In 1916, after New York's Department of Licenses damned no less than five "vice films"—Sex Lure, It May Be Your Daughter, War's Women, Protect Your Daughter and Twilight Sleep—the bottom dropped out of the market. But birth control and the ethics of surgical abortion had become topics for parlor talk, opening up rich new sexual gold mines for the film makers. Motherhood was one of the first to deal with the "evils" of contraceptives, and the users of such vile devices were depicted as roasting in a cinematic hell filled with off-screen smoke pots. When it occurred to an exhibitor that the title might have a bit too Pollyannish a ring, he wisely changed it to The Doctor and Your Wife; it did much better business. Another moral-studded drama, this one about abortion, was piteously titled Where Are My Children? It dealt harshly with a number of sybaritic society women who refused to bear children. As the film opens, we see them repairing in their motorcars to the office of an abortionist without the knowledge of their husbands. When a district attorney hauls the unscrupulous doctor into court, he discovers, of course, that his own wife is among the doctor's clients. The wife repents, but it is too late. She can only cry out, "Where are my children?" But the callous public soon lost interest in these clinical pictures, too—probably because it discovered that the films had nothing to say about the matter that they could not hear in church.

The producers responded by addressing their scrutiny and castigation to the morals of "the younger generation." One of these films, Flaming Youth, was to give its name to the generation that was beginning to show signs of kicking over the traces of a morality inherited intact from the Victorian era.

• • •

Of outright nudity, however, there was precious little in the American-made films prior to World War I. Certainly, the vamps revealed little of what men were presumably willing to sacrifice so much for. As Ogden Nash put it:

... to lure a bishop from his crosier She needed no pectoral exposure, But trapped the prelate passing by With her melting mouth and haremeye.

A gob of lipstick and mascara Was weapon enough for Theda

Bara ...

Actually, Miss Bara went considerably further than most of her contemporaries in displaying her more visible charms—but not in the vamp films. Under the pretext of historicity, in such later films as Salome and Cleopatra she wore costumes that would be considered daring even by today's permissive standards. As "the serpent of the Nile," for example, she sported an appropriately serpentine bra that lovingly encircled her breasts while leaving the nipples bare. And in Salome, a few loops of pearls provided less than ample coverage for her more than ample bosom.

A few years earlier, the country had begun to acquire a taste for shapely legs and arms from Mack Sennett's "madcap bathing beauties" who, though somewhat overdressed for the seashore—and rarely venturing into the water—cavorted through a long series of slapstick comedies. Their debut came in 1914 when Sennett noticed that an unknown but decidedly attractive girl had made the front pages of the newspapers, complete with pictures, while a major story about President Wilson had been retegated to an inside page. He concluded that it was because her knees were showing in the photograph, and immediately sent out a call for pretty girls with pretty knees, and ordered them into bathing suits designed to reveal the essential contours of the owner. Then he turned them loose among his pie-heaving comedians. "When the studio received hundreds of letters of protest from women's clubs, I knew I had done the right thing," he later confided. The bathing girls ran into repeated accusations that they corrupted morals: but they remained, next to the Keystone Cops, the most salable item of merchandise manufactured by Sennett's remarkable fun factory.

A more complete view of the female form became available in The Daughter of the Gods, a movie that featured Annette Kellerman, a beautiful diving champion and exponent of physical culture who preferred to appear, as Variety put it, "sans habillement on every possible occasion." Pioneering the one-piece bathing suit, Miss Kellerman had earned a fortune diving into glass tanks on vaudeville stages. Now, for the sake of her art, she doffed her swimming togs and launched into a series of pictures calculated to emphasize the aesthetic of the epidermis. Her career, though cut short by a tragic accident, inspired a number of bathing-beauty spectaculars which proved so popular during the War years that beach scenes were interpolated with enthusiastic but complete irrelevance into all kinds of films. Women were clearly emerging from beneath their Victorian wraps in both real and reel life.

Meanwhile, of course, self- and stateappointed watchdogs over the young were proliferating. During the days of the nickelodeons, the age-old excuse of the morality-minded reformers had been that it was necessary "to protect the young" from their corrupting influence. (Even then there were those who wondered, perhaps hopefully, if it were possible for anyone to be corrupted for a nickel.) Movie parlors were suspected on principle, along with such shady institutions as the pool hall. Though the films often did bear slightly risqué titles, they were as chaste and simple-minded as nursery rhymes. Nevertheless, the first state censorship law was bulled through in Pennsylvania in 1911. Kansas and Ohio followed in 1913. As movies grew longer and more fertile in invention, as their impact on American society increased, so did the insistence on censorship and controls. So strong was the tide that in 1915 Congress was presented with a plan for a Federal motion-picture commission, obviously designed to be the first step toward a national censorship.

Leading the cry for reform and restraint was the International Reform Bureau, under the direction of the relentless Reverend Wilbur Fisk Crafts. After crusading fiercely against opium, alcohol and sex, Crafts found even bigger game in the cinema. Moving to Washington, he lobbied for years to win the legislation that would, in his words, "rescue the motion picture from the hands of the Devil and 500 un-Christian Jews." Against such attacks, the movie industry's defenses were woefully inadequate. In 1909, to avert a wholesale crackdown on New York exhibitors, a National Board of Censorship was hastily formed, largely financed by the producers themselves. Although it grew into a national organization within the next few years, the Board was unable to contain the vociferous proponents of outside-the-industry censorship. In 1915, as we mentioned in our first installment, it was reorganized as the National Board of Review, but limited its activities to viewing and classifying pictures as to "audience suitability"—in which form it continues to exist to this day.

What little the film producers and exhibitors did to combat censorship was dictated far less by a defense of their artistic freedom than of their pocketbooks. The arrival of the feature film and, with it, the star system, had sent production costs skyrocketing. With an increase in the length of films came an increase in the cost of censorship to the producers, for the fees charged by the numerous state and local censorship boards were based on so much per thousand feet of film inspected. Not only did the producers bear the cost of censorship; they had, in addition, to lay out considerable cash for the retakes and redding demanded by the censorship boards, or to conceal their scissoring. Some films required complete revamping before the censor deemed them acceptable.

The Pennsylvania Board was particularly noted for the inordinate extent of its whitewashing excisions and revisions. In the auditorium of an old Philadelphia church fitted up for the work, six screens were placed side by side on a long wall and simultaneously serviced by six projectors, before which the salaried board of three censorship workers viewed between 10,000,000 and 20,000,000 feet of film a year, keeping a sharp lookout for any scenes and subjects which they had agreed in advance to disapprove. Thanks to this supreme self-sacrifice, they "protected" the public from exposure to, in their words, "pandering, procuration, prostitution, white slavery, strumpets and houses of ill fame; the seduction of women, habit-forming drugs, nudity, knifings, abortions, birth control, light treatment of the Church, fornication and adultery, honeymoon scenes, drunkenness, gunplay, sensual kissing and lovemaking, lewd dancing, men and women in bed together, venereal disease, lingerie displays."

After scissoring out all of the above—and more—the Board would then adopt what it termed a "constructive attitude" and help the producer sew together the mutilated carcass of his picture. Ellis Paxon Oberholtzer, who worked on the Pennsylvania Board, proudly explained to all those who would emulate him how the transformation could be accom plished. "Such material as is at hand," he wrote, "should be utilized." He recommended that scenes be cut and rearranged, and mentioned the good work that could be done by changing titles and captions. By such methods, he enthused, the following cinematic transfigurations could be effected: "A man living with a mistress finds himself married to her. A bastard is legitimized. Whole relationships throughout the story are changed." Oberholtzer, upon coming across a deserted, unmarried mother in a film, would transform her into a blushing bride whose new husband had been inconveniently shipped abroad.

The forces gathering in opposition to censorship, meanwhile, were delivered a stunning blow when, in 1915, an Ohio distributor, fighting back against a township's local ban on one of his films, carried his appeal to the United States Supreme Court. Arguing that such action constituted a "prior restraint" in direct contradiction to the guarantees of freedom of the press and freedom of speech afforded by the Constitution, the lawyers sought redress under the First Amendment. The Court found otherwise, ruling that motion pictures were mere spectacles "capable of evil," particularly because of their attractiveness and manner of exhibition. "Besides, there are some things that should not have pictorial representation in public places and to all audiences. ... The exhibition of motion pictures," the Court concluded, "is a business pure and simple, originated and conducted for profit, like other spectacles, not to be regarded, nor intended to be regarded ... as a part of the press of the country or as organs of public opinion."

This historic decision, which was to stand unchallenged until the celebrated case of The Miracle in 1952, immediately opened the floodgates to state censorship. Within a few years of this ruling, Maryland, Virginia, Florida, Massachusetts and New York had enacted their own censorship legislation. New York's law, typical of those passed elsewhere, provided that a film could be licensed for exhibition—"unless such film or a part thereof is obscene, indecent, immoral, inhuman, sacrilegious or is of such character that its exhibition would tend to corrupt morals or incite to crime." To determine what pictures were wholly free of these undesirable, if somewhat amorphous, qualities was the task of a panel of state-appointed film reviewers, none of whom was required to take an examination that inquired into his own morals and habits. But the sound of their scissors was heard throughout the land.

• • •

It was about this time, happily, that George Bernard Shaw, noting the sanctimonious moral character of the movies he saw, complained: "The danger of the cinema is not the danger of immorality, but of morality. ... People who, like myself, frequent the cinemas, testify to their desolating romantic morality. There is no comedy, no wit, no criticism of morals by ridicule or otherwise, no exposure of the unpleasant consequences of romantic sentimentality and reckless tomfoolery in real life, nothing that could give a disagreeable shock to the stupid or shake the self-complacency of the smug. The leveling down has been thoroughly accomplished."

Britain had introduced film censorship in 1912. Actually, the British Board of Film Censors was set up by the movie industry itself "in consultation" with the government. Agitation for controls began when an American-made religious film, From the Manger to the Cross, portrayed the Saviour in human form—a kind of presentation that was deemed sacrilegious in Anglican England. Also officially frowned upon was cruelty to animals, or any kind of film violence. English censorship was notably more relaxed about the question of sex on the screen, but perhaps this was because there was so little of it in English films in the first place.

France, which had led the way in film pornography, undertook its censorship of movies for quite another reason. The start came in 1909, after the newsreel filming of four criminals under the knife of Mother Guillotine. The persistent cameraman, after failing to receive permission to record the execution, somehow managed to "sneak" his shots. The government promptly impounded the film, then, with characteristic Gallic ingenuity, passed a law to make the seizure legal. Upon this basis, the whole structure of French censorship was built. In 1916 the law was amended to provide for a commission of five members to examine and control the exhibition of films and issue certificates for their showing. The commission, however, was not empowered to interfere with the prefects of the various departments of the country, who had been authorized to prohibit "the cinema representation of crimes, capital executions and, in general, all scenes of an immoral and scandalous nature." French films were, for the most part, oddly chaste after the law was passed and remained so until well after World War I.

By 1910, Sweden had a growing and active film industry. Accordingly, official censorship was instituted in 1911, aimed primarily at toning down violence and brutality on the screen. Local police were allowed to handle the matter; whereupon, curiously, one small-town police commissioner became famous throughout the land for his habit of censoring pictures in which china was smashed. Presumably, he felt that such goings-on set a bad example for serving maids. Less whimsically, but no less effectively, Denmark and Norway brought in censorship in 1913.

It might be observed that this worldwide rise of censorship just prior to World War I corresponded with a growing awareness of the graphic and expressive potentialities of the cinematic medium. The fundamental contradictions and hypocrisies of the various social and moral structures within each country were suddenly—and nakedly—exposed. It was as if the authorities actually feared that conventional morality would topple, that long-established customs and manners would crumble should the movies be permitted to pursue their course unchecked. Censorship, they obviously felt, was the one way to preserve the status quo. It was a tribute of sorts to the power of a medium that was just beginning to find its artistic legs.

Among those who joined the anticensorship forces of this time was D. W. Griffith, the pioneering director whose The Birth of a Nation had roused a raging controversy in 1915, mainly because of what struck the North as its pro-Southern bias. Griffith had portrayed the rise of the Ku Klux Klan after the Civil War with apparent sympathy, and he had indulged his own Southern origins to the extent of portraying Negroes in decidedly stereotyped terms. One famous scene had to do with a mulatto character called Lynch who lures a white girl to his house and offers to make her "the queen of the black empire." Naturally, the heroine, played by Lillian Gish, recoils in horror at this suggestion, upon which the maddened mulatto attempts to make use of her for his "savage appetites," only to be frustrated by the arrival of some heroic members of the K. K. K. In another scene, a Negro renegade pursues Mae Marsh for miles through a forest and up to the edge of a cliff. Although the title reads, "I just want to kiss you, Missy," it seemed obvious that both Miss Marsh and the audience knew better. As the soldier draws closer, the girl flings herself to her death on the rocks below.

Griffith's notions about sex and the "dishonor" it could bring to a woman were no more enlightened than those of most of his contemporaries; but at the same time he felt it incumbent upon himself to fight the censure of his film, in which both press and pulpit joined. He published at his own expense a pamphlet called The Rise and Fall of Free Speech in America, a naïve but effective defense of the screen's right to deal with controversial subjects. The complexities of the censorship problem deepened when liberals, who deplored the bias in the film, found themselves allied with the bluenoses on the issue of control of the screen.

Yet Griffith, along with practically everyone else in the film industry, tacitly approved what was tantamount to screen censorship when the United States entered the War in 1917. Such dramas as Pershing's Crusaders demonstrated the avidity of America's soldiers to save civilization from the barbaric "Huns." Meanwhile, George Creel, chairman of the semiofficial Committee on Public Information, set up after war was declared, put a ban on those movies so ill-advised as to have incorporated a "peace" message before American entry into the War. War Brides, for example, dealing with the purported unwillingness of the German people to participate in the Kaiser's War, was immediately suppressed. Creel's job was defined as "selling the War to America," but it also included film censorship.

Sensing big box office, the movie companies did their bit to "sell" the War with films such as The Little American, directed by Cecil B. De Mille. In it, Mary Pickford, then the most popular female star in the world, played a French spy captured by the Germans. Learning of the savage rape of another prisoner, she asked a Prussian colonel why this had been allowed to happen. "My men must have their relaxation," he sneered in captioned reply. At the invitation of the British government Griffith produced two patriotic films in England, Hearts of the World and The Great Love. The former also featured Lillian Gish as a French girl trapped by the invading Boche, commanded by the bullet-headed Erich von Stroheim. Miss Gish played a virtual repeat of her scene with Lynch the mulatto—only this time her would-be rapist was a German officer. In the flood of anti-German pictures during the War years and immediately after, virtually every leading lady played at least one scene in which she quaked in mortal danger of being ravished by a leering Hun.

Another kind of movie actively encouraged by the Government was the sex-education film, designed to purvey information on venereal disease to the troops, or to warn them against the evils of masturbation (The Solitary Sin). In one of the former type, an encounter with a street-corner slut was shown leading straight to a hospital bed, where doctors stared glumly at the wreck of an American fighting man, ruined not only for the trenches but for a respectable married life after the War. Captions underlined preventive methods in the event that, despite the warnings, a soldier still strayed. The Solitary Sin showed a soldier collapsing while training, then revealed that his physical deterioration was the result of a vile nocturnal habit. The captions suggested that appropriate sports and healthful activities, as well as religious dedication, were all helpful in overcoming the dreadful temptation. After the War, the Johns Hopkins Psychological Laboratory studied the effects of these films on young people, and reported that when exhibited to boys and young men alone such films "showed no ill effects on them"; but when shown to mixed groups of boys and girls, there appeared a "strong tendency toward flippant discussion and innuendo." The report made it clear that such a tendency was regarded as deleterious.

• • •

By the end of the War, the American film enjoyed world-wide acceptance—and not merely because the vicissitudes of war had virtually eliminated European competition. America's opulence, America's optimism and, above all, America's stars, lent glamor and romance to a world that otherwise lived in daily touch with holocaust. And with the appearance of motion-picture-company listings on Wall Street's "big board" early in 1919, the emergence of the movie as a marketable commodity and its acceptance as primarily a middle-class entertainment was complete. Even before the War was over, there were film makers who sensed that the public was tiring of patriotic pictures featuring hordes of rapacious Huns and maidenheads in distress. The only question was, which way would audiences jump? Cannily, Cecil B. De Mille released in quick succession four quite different pictures, then waited for the box office to supply the answer. The indicator clearly pointed to sex. One of the four, Old Wives for New, whose story centered about the conspicuous and scandalous absence of marital bliss in an upper-class household, proved the winner hands down. Its open discussion of divorce (and its subplot, in which an aging roué is murdered by one of his several ladyfriends) was titillating enough to get the film banned in a number of cities. And it was the first picture to feature what subsequently became a De Mille trademark—the Byzantine bathroom.

While much of America was still using outhouses, De Mille, according to his brother William, "made of the bathroom a delightful resort ... a mystic place dedicated to Venus, and the art of bathing was shown as a lovely ceremony rather than a merely sanitary duty. Undressing was not just the taking off of clothes; it was a progressive revelation of entrancing beauty; a study in diminishing draperies." Brother William may have seen more in the movies than actually met the eye, for the draperies, seen today, do not diminish to any notable degree. Empresses were forever stepping from tubs into king-sized towels or silken robes which transformed what might have been the moment of total revelation into the tantalizing frustration of neatly calculated concealment. Nevertheless, along the way were gauzy, semitransparent chemises, and yards and yards of filmy, form-clinging nightgowns, usually worn by Gloria Swanson, which spurred new fashions in feminine nightwear. And the luxurious bedchambers in which Miss Swanson dressed and undressed hinted that they were useful for more than slumber. What C. B. had discovered was glamor, and the American movie wasted no time in pursuing the theme, with De Mille himself at the head of the pack.

He quickly made films such as Don't Change Your Husband, For Better, for Worse, Why Change Your Wife? and Male and Female. The titles usually promised more than the films actually delivered, and such transgressions as occurred in De Mille movies were thoroughly paid for by the end of the picture. De Mille later incorporated this sure-fire blend of sex and moral piety into his Biblical epics, instinctively or perhaps cynically aware of the chinks in America's puritan armor.

More startling, and no less successful, were the films that Erich von Stroheim made immediately after World War I: Blind Husbands, The Devil's Pass Keys and Foolish Wives. Heel clicking and quirt flicking in innumerable War movies, the Austrian-born Von Stroheim had also acted as military advisor and assistant director on many of the same pictures. Now ready for a higher destiny, he was able to sell Carl Laemmle not only a script he had written, but also himself as both director and star, playing the villainous Lieutenant Von Steuben, who plots to seduce the wife of an American doctor on a holiday in the Dolomites. What Von Stroheim tried to suggest in this trio of films, all of which he wrote and directed, was that American women were particularly susceptible to European lady-killers, because their money-grubbing husbands paid altogether too much attention to business and not nearly enough to monkey business. He was not moralizing à la De Mille, but merely stating a fact. And though the hand-kissing Continental seducer was rarely successful, and invariably came to a bad end, he was never a totally unsympathetic character. The public's ready acceptance of these films provided yet another hint that Victorianism was fast losing its grip.

Actually, love itself was being redefined in the movies of the immediate post-War period. Formerly reserved for the exclusive enjoyment of the young, virtuous and unmarried, love was becoming a divertisement to which husbands and wives might also devote themselves—though not necessarily with each other. Boy still met girl in the new films, "but they were considerably older boys and girls than the adolescent screen was used to," as Arthur Mayer and Richard Griffith put it in a book called The Movies. New ideals and images of womanhood emerged to eclipse the golden curls and girlish naïveté of such dimpled darlings as Mary Pickford and Mary Miles Minter. Now came Gloria Swanson—svelte, seductive, sophisticated, sensuous. Now came such worldly creatures as Norma Talmadge and Florence Vidor—women voluptuously unabashed in their appetite for love and luxury.

The Jazz Age was about to begin. New axioms about sex were current; and a favorite saying at War's end was, "If you can't be good, be careful." Divorce was no longer merely discussed, and in one popular film, The Horror of Mary Black, a persuasive case was made for a long-suffering heroine's abandonment of her unloving and unfaithful mate. Many began to view this accelerating evolution of social and sexual mores with considerable alarm—as an ominous process of moral disintegration rather than of maturation; and they turned the full fury of their fears on the film industry. In 1919, though hardly more than seven years old, Hollywood was described in Congress as a hotbed of "debauchery, riotous living, drunkenness, ribaldry, dissipation and free love." This ripe description seemed an overstatement at the time, but a succession of shocking scandals was soon to spur a remorseless new bluenose crusade to shackle the big business that movies had become.

This is the second in a series of articles on "The History of Sex in Cinema." In the next installment, authors Knight and Alpert chronicle "The Sinful Twenties," the age of the flapper and the sheik, when Clara Bow and Rudolph Valentino became the sex symbols of the jazz age and the superstars of the scandal-ridden movie capital—amid a rising chorus of pious condemnation from the self-proclaimed watchdogs of "decency."