The History of Sex in Cinema

"The Trouble With Sound," a film historian once observed, "was not that movies talked, but that no one could understand them." In the 30-odd years of silent pictures, film makers had evolved storytelling techniques that were universally understood, and discovered themes that could be universally enjoyed. But the arrival of sound, which swept the studios of the world in 1929 and 1930, brought all of this to an abrupt halt. Attempts at "dubbing" foreign films into English--matching American voices to the lip movements on the screen--failed dismally, as Paramount learned to its chagrin with its "American version" of Germany's The Blue Angel. Audiences wanted the real thing or nothing. And, at least for the majority of America's movie-going public, subtitles were no more satisfactory: They went to the "talkies" to listen and to look, not to read captions. Almost overnight, the market for foreign films all but disappeared. No longer could the producer of a European epic anticipate a first night on Broadway. In the United States, imports were relegated to a handful of art theaters and to a scattering of "language houses," as they were called, that catered to the various ethnic groups concentrated in certain cities and communities.

For a time, the major American companies sought to counter what looked like a dead loss of important overseas revenue by shooting in rapid succession several versions of the same film, rushing in a Spanish-speaking cast--or French, or German--to redo the shot just completed, using the same sets, props, lights and often the same director. Paramount, with studios in France, pursued this policy with greater avidity, and with greater economy, than any of its competitors, turning out as many as 14 or 15 versions of some of its pictures. But the process was costly, cumbersome and ultimately unprofitable. What foreign audiences wanted was Hollywood's stars and Hollywood's glamor, not just its settings and its plots. In Europe, dubbing quickly became a fact of life. After a few initial--and no more successful--experiments with multiple casts, European film makers were soon forced to recognize that the great international market was no longer theirs. But if sound imposed upon them the necessity to make films that would be popular primarily in their own countries, at the same time it eliminated the need to cater to the tastes, and circumvent the censors, of other countries. Thus during the Thirties, it was primarily in the art houses that Americans were able to peek over the walls and see what was happening culturally--and sexually-- to their neighbors across the Atlantic.

Not that this was ever accomplished with absolute freedom. Quite apart from the various state and local censor boards that have traditionally tended to view with special suspicion any picture made abroad, the U. S. Bureau of Customs has since World War One maintained a discreet but extremely effective censorship of its own. Charged with barring from our shores, and screens, any filmic displays of either nudity or "immorality," Customs officials examine quite literally every foot of film imported into the United States--and have the authority to turn back, without appeal, whatever falls short of their standards, or to demand the elimination of any offending footage before admitting the picture into this country. Perhaps the most famous film of the Thirties to incur their departmental wrath was the Czechoslovakian Ecstasy, directed in 1933 by Gustav Machaty, and introducing the beauteous Hedy Lamarr (then known as Hedi Keisler). Because this debut included not only such well-publicized scenes as one in which the star swims completely nude in a sylvan lake, then dashes headlong through the shrubbery when her solitude is invaded by a hand-some young horseman, but also a long passage of lovemaking in which the camera closely scrutinizes her face as she registers the supreme ecstasy of sexual fulfillment, the film was banned outright for more than three years. Indeed, it gained entry only after an ingenious distributor agreed to all the cuts demanded by Customs, then engaged a cameraman to go off to New Jersey with a young-lady and shoot modest new footage that could be inserted at the appropriate moments. This whitewashed bastardized version was shown on Broadway as My Ecstasy--and promptly condemned by the Legion of Decency.

In more recent, more lenient years, the original footage has been restored--and in view of the exposure that today is practically indigenous to a Brigitte Bardot or Jeanne Moreau picture, it is a bit difficult to see what the fuss was all about. The scenes of nudity are not only fairly brief, but tastefully, even poetically handled. Author Parker Tyler, who has included Ecstasy among his 75 Classics of the Foreign Film, remarks that Machaty handles the camera "somewhat like a voyeur, but more like an aesthete thrilled body and soul by having stumbled on a lady who has just undressed for a dip in the water." Certainly, despite its eager reception by the American exploitation market, it is not at all a picture made to titillate the sensation seekers. In it. Miss Lamarr plays (with an intensity that had disappeared completely by the time she reached Hollywood a few years later) the disconsolate young wife of an elderly man whose ardent years are well behind him. When the girl succumbs to the charms of a passing stranger, the husband, on learning of the affair, commits suicide. All of this is told with heavy symbolism--much rearing of horses and rain on the windowpanes--but also with an eye for natural beauty that won for Machaty the Golden Lion at the 1934 Venice Film Festival. Nevertheless, even after the Customs Bureau finally admitted the film, most states banned it. And the Supreme Court, in a test case, upheld their right to do so.

Because Ecstasy became a cause cèlèbre, it helped to spotlight the widening gap between European movie morality and Hollywood's--a gap accentuated by the ever-watchful National Legion of Decency. The fact is, of course, that the United States has seen but a fraction of the films produced abroad, the merest tip of the iceberg. Nor are the Customs people solely to blame--although, since they have never made public their excisions, it is impossible to ascertain precisely the extent of their responsibility. But foreign films, particularly in the Thirties, were distributed here primarily by small entrepreneurs who invested their own money in acquiring the rights to those pictures they thought they could profitably sell in this country. Naturally, this meant that they had to take into consideration not only the artistic merits of any film they wished to handle, but also its chances for being passed by the various state and municipal censorship boards--and the National Legion of Decency. From 1934 on, a "Condemned" rating by the Legion automatically meant a drastic reduction in the number of theaters that would book the picture--and trouble for those that did. Thus, for one reason or another, many an important European film of the Thirties was never seen in this country; while of those that were, a number had undergone such major surgery as to render them almost unintelligible. The Pennsylvania censors, for example, demanded so many cuts in The Blue Angel that the distributor ultimately decided to skip that state altogether.

In the unsettling early years of sound, producers in France, Germany and England, as in Hollywood, turned out vast quantities of pictures made solely for whatever was the local equivalent of the fast buck. Titles like Night of the Garter and To Brighton with Gloria all too accurately convey the peep-show approach of many of the early British talkies. At the same time, Germany was enjoying another of its frequent flare-ups of pseudomedical films--such as Fiend in the Blood, which preached the dangers of venereal disease so graphically that members of the audience passed out at every performance. In France, meanwhile, there were grim exposé films like Faubourg Montmartre, depicting the low life and times of streetwalkers and dope addicts in that popular quarter; and musicals like Paris Béguin and Arthur, both of them generously sprinkled with nudes. (French critics at the time pointed to an odd discrepancy: Nudes were permitted in the Parisian music-hall revues, but only so long as they posed and remained stationary; in the films, on the other hand, they could move, dance and even enter (continued on page 167)Sex In Cinema(continued from page 140) into the story line. The critics were not complaining, of course. They just felt that the music halls were being unjustly discriminated against.)

But it was a cause for acute regret when films by such masters as Jean Renoir, Abel Gance, Marcel Pagnol and Jean Benoit-Lévy failed to reach these shores--or if they did, arrived in such a mutilated form that their very coherence as well as artistry was destroyed. Barred completely was Jean Renoir's La Chienne (The Bitch), the story of a middle-aged bank clerk who falls in love with a prostitute, defaults large sums to keep her in luxury, then murders her when he discovers that she has been cheating on him with her pimp. (The picture was remade in Hollywood by Fritz. Lang almost 15 years later--and considerably toned down--as Scarlet Street, with Edward G. Robinson in the role originally portrayed by Michel Simon.) Also barred, or at least not bought, was the famed Marius trilogy of Marcel Pagnol. Filmed in the early Thirties under the author's supervision, its three stories involve seduction, illegitimacy, a hero who abandons his pregnant girlfriend, and a heroine who makes a marriage of convenience with an elderly man--all shown with such warmth, humor, affection and under-standing as to eliminate all grounds for condemning the characters involved. Since Hollywood's Production Code has always made a fetish of not only condemning but punishing wrongdoers, the films did not appear in the United States until almost 15 years later, well after World War Two. And before Benoit-Lévy's poignant 1933 masterpiece. La Maternelle, could be shown in the United States, the censors demanded the excision of a sequence in which the mother, a prostitute, picks up a man in a café, then holds hands with him under the table as her little daughter looks on. It wasn't the pickup that the censors wanted eliminated--just the hand-holding.

In 1931, Abel Gance. hailed throughout Europe as "the Griffith of France." made La Fin du Monde (The End of the World), an ominous depiction of the social and political havoc wreaked by a scientist's prediction that a wayward comet was soon to crash upon us, Gance wanted to suggest that everyone--scientists, politicians, rich men and pool--ran amuck on learning the grim tidings, with the Church presented as the sole source of strength and salvation. The Church scenes remained but the tomorrow-we-die orgies of the rich were completely eliminated for domestic distribution. (Actually. Gance was always big on orgies. His 1935 version of Lucrezia Borgia, for example, was replete with High Renaissance voluptuaries at their favorite pursuits--nude bathing en masse, followed by vast banquets, followed by more fun and games. The fun included a shot of one of the revelers biting the bare breast of his inamorata: while for games, Gance offered perhaps the most explicit rape scenes ever put on film. At one point, a noble is seen in the very act of mounting his trembling prey. Needless to add, such shots had vanished from the film by the time it arrived here two years later. Without them, most audiences agreed with the critic who found Lucrezia Borgia "a dreary and unsatisfactory entertainment.")

A more unpredictable victim of censorial wrath was the movie version of Guy de Maupassant's droll Le Rosier de Madame Husson, a minor classic of French worldliness and wit--the story of a young clerk of such supreme chastity that he wins the rosière (an annual award for virtue, usually given to a young woman) when no other virgin can be found in his village that year. But the clerk's innocence was less the reflection of unusual moral probity than of an unfortunate lack of opportunity. Getting a little tight at the banquet in his honor, he begins to eye the girls, and winds up spending the night--and his prize money--in the local brothel. When he is discovered there next morning, the towns-people are thoroughly scandalized. And so, apparently, were the American censors. The story's film incarnation (somewhat unfortunately titled He, the Virgin Man for American distribution), which marked the first film appearance of Fernandel as the virtuous clerk, was chopped by the censors by almost two reels--to a running time of less than an hour.

Club de Femmes, a witty, slightly naughty comedy written and directed by the French novelist Jacques Deval, was subjected to similar censorial surgery a few years later. The operation was a success, as the saying goes, but the patient died. The "club" of the title was a sort of luxurious Y. W. C. A. residence hotel, where young women in Paris were presumably protected by the management against predatory males. In a series of interlocking vignettes, however, one girl smuggles a man into her room: another fights against her Lesbian impulses: another acts as a procuress. By the time the New York censors had finished with it, the smuggled man had been transformed into the girl's husband: the Lesbian was merely displaying sisterly affection and concern; and the procuress was doing some unspecified but legitimate work for a man named Maurice.

What aficionados of foreign films resented during the Thirties was not the snipping out of a few feet, or even a few hundred feet. A glimpse of bosom, a bit of furtive fondling, a snatch of erotic dancing, a line of racy dialog, the prolonged close-up of a kiss--their presence in a picture was seldom crucial. La Kermesse Héroïque (Carnival in Flanders) survived despite the elimination of a motivating flashback in which a burgomaster vividly recalls the rape and plunder of his town by an invading Spanish army. Mayerling remained the most. affecting and stylish love story of the Thirties even though a few scenes depicting the hotel-room orgy of some young aristocrats were pruned away. Chances are that if such shots had been left in the prints, they would not have sold a single extra ticket--any more than their elimination saved a single soul.

But American art-house patrons were genuinely distressed to find that films since recognized as true classics were being cut by the censors far more ruthlessly than domestic potboilers. Indeed, one of the justifications offered by the New York State Censor Board for its very existence back in the early Thirties was the control and/or exclusion of "dirty foreign films." (It should be noted that because of the high concentration of art houses in New York, the decisions of its Censor Board become in effect national. The distributor of a picture cuts his negative to their specifications. Other states may then demand further cuts: but what was eliminated for New York is never put back for Pennsylvania or California.) The fact that such films as M. Mädchen in Uniform, La Maternelle and Carnival in Flanders were not only made specifically for adult audiences, but were being shown in the United States primarily to adults in theaters virtually dedicated to the presentation of pictures of a certain level of artistry and sophistication, meant little to the censors. And many Americans were painfully aware that their country was being forced to assume a secondary position in matters of intellectual and cultural achievement.

For despite the claims of apologists for Hollywood at this time we were seeing only the cream of the European studios--which, of course, was true--the fact is that their cream was so rich that our own best was skimmed milk by comparison. There were several reasons for this, of which perhaps the most important was the absence abroad of the censor's restraining hand. Most of the European countries--indeed, most of the countries of the world--began during the Twenties and Thirties to restrict movie attendance to adults only. The actual minimum age varied from country to country, but it was usually 14, 16 or 18. Certain films might be approved for children, at the censor's discretion: but in general, European censorship was primarily concerned with keeping undue violence and unwelcome political ideologies off the screen, not sex. As a result, adult themes cropped up regularly in foreign films, handled with a boldness and maturity unprecedented in the motion-picture medium. Also important was the stress that the Europeans placed upon writers. Unlike the Hollywood studios, where the scenarist has traditionally been low man on the creative totem pole, the European producers courted writers, encouraging them to work closely with the director, or even to take over the direction of their own works. Marcel Pagnol has already been mentioned in this regard, and to him might be added the protean Sacha Guitry and Jean Coctéau, and in England, H. G. Wells and G. B. Shaw. Completely symptomatic was the case of the French novelist Jacques Deval, whose Marie Galante was filmed in Hollywood by Fox in 1934. When Deval learned that his Marie was no longer a prostitute, and that Fox had substantially changed his story line "for decency reasons," he not only sued the company, but thereupon started to film his own stories in France--among them, Club de Femmes. For a variety of reasons, then, the European film makers had moved into areas untouched by American producers. And art-house audiences, largely confined to the intelligentsia of perhaps half a dozen major cities, were amazed and delighted to find that the movies actually could handle adult themes with intelligence and grace.

Precisely because these were films on adult themes, many of them touched on sexual problems--often of a somewhat exotic or esoteric nature. Among the early arrivals was Mädchen in Uniform, a delicate, sensitive and meaningful study of an incipient Lesbian. Filmed in Germany in 1931, it portrayed life in a repressive, Prussian-style girls' boarding school, shortly before World War One, where daughters of army officers were trained to become the well-disciplined mothers of well-disciplined soldiers. The story, which centers about the tragic love of Manuela, one of the girls, for a beautiful and sympathetic teacher, threw the New York censors for a loop, and they banned it out of hand. Three months later, after the case was appealed by its would-be distributor, the board reversed itself--but ordered more cuts in the film than for any other picture that year. Thus a film that attempted to deal honestly, searchingly and compassionately with both an emotional problem and the society that produced it was equated with the sleaziest fare from the most mercenary fly-by-night producers--and actually suffered more in the process. Ironically, even in this mutilated form, Mädchen in Uniform was voted the best film of 1932 by the New York film critics. (What is even more ironic, the prints of Mädchen now in circulation still retain the cuts made by the New York censors over 30 years ago.)

A few months later, in March of 1933, New York's hard-working censors were again confronted by a movie of unmistakable sincerity, artistry, maturity--and controversy: M, filmed by Fritz Lang in Germany in 1931, introducing young Peter Lorre as a pervert, a pudgy, effeminate youth with an uncontrollable lust for little girls. When his outrages finally alerted the police, they looked for the child-murderer in the underworld--and the underworld, out of self-protection, organized a search of its own, tracked down the wretched man, hauled him before their own kangaroo court and condemned him to death (from which he was saved at the last minute by the law). Although the film has all the pace and excitement of the best gangster pictures, M never degenerates into sheer melodrama--simply because the Lorre character is drawn with such deep understanding of the complexities of a pathologic personality. Heavy-lidded and full-lipped, he is obviously driven by compulsions that he can neither comprehend nor control. He whistles a few notes from Grieg's ominous Hall of the Mountain King and, almost like a robot, sets off in soft-footed pursuit of the child who has caught his fancy. The outrages are never seen; the murders are always suggested. But their horror is mirrored in Lorre's protuberant eyes, exudes dankly from his very pores; and long before the kangaroo court begins to investigate what kind of monster it has captured, Lorre distends his features before a mirror, frantically asking himself the same question. He got small help from the New York censors. Among the ordered eliminations was a scene in which a psychologist is aiding the police to form some impression of the killer they are searching for; the censors objected to the psychologist's phrase that the pattern of the murders "registers the strongly sexual pathology of this person."

Strikingly similar to M in many ways was G. W. Pabst's Die Dreigroschenoper (The Three Penny Opera), also filmed in Germany in 1931. Based closely on the popular Kurt Weill-Berthold Brecht musical satire, the picture captured not only the spirited political commentary of the original, but accentuated its late-19th Century atmosphere of an underworld populated by cutthroats, usurers, crooked politicians, prostitutes and pimps. Particularly memorable was the brothel where Mack the Knife hid out from the police--a Victorian nightmare of overstuffed furniture and overstuffed whores, both reeking a fetid sexuality that somehow pervaded the entire film.

Although corruption oozed from every last frame of this bitterly cynical film, the over-all effect was not unappealing (rather like Weill's durable score, which was at once abrasive and attractive). Nevertheless, until only a few years ago, The Three Penny Opera had been seen in this country by the merest handful of people in the most private screenings, Legal difficulties accounted for much of this exclusivity; but it is pertinent to note that when, almost 20 years ago, the Museum of Modern Art Film Library had found the one existing print in the United States woefully incomplete, it imported other prints from archives in France, Czechoslovakia and England. In every instance, the prints had been heavily censored. And in every instance, different scenes had been eliminated--save one; no version retained the acid, vengeful Pirate Song--a whore's dream of getting even with society. As interpreted by the youthful Lotte Lenya--the ravaged look already in her eyes, disenchantment already in her voice--it is a chilling declaration of hatred for every man who ever lived.

With the arrival of Hitler and his Third Reich in 1933, such bold penetrations of social and psychological phenomena came quickly to an end. Under the supervision of Dr. Goebbels, the German fiction film for a time tried unsuccessfully to transmute Nazi dogma into drama, then reconciled itself to a long series of harmless, pointless military comedies, waltz-filled romances and adventure stories. If sex came upon the scene at all, as in Herbert Maisch's elaborate operetta Boccaccio (1936), it was heavily cloaked in the rich robes of the past. Of outright nudity there was none--apart from the sexless nudes, male and female, who in the opening reel of Leni Riefenstahl's Olympia carry the divine fire from Mt. Olympus to the Berlin stadium to start the 1936 games. Not until the notorious Adventures of Baron Munchausen in 1941 did sex reassert itself on the German screen--but that was in another era, when every Nazi soldier went into combat, it seemed, armed with a pocketful of feelthy postcards.

It is not at all coincidental that the Soviet films of the Thirties were equally devoid of any significant sexual content. As part of the first Five Year Plan, from 1930 to 1935, a program of intensive "kinefication" was introduced in the Soviet Union--more projectors, more theaters, more pictures; and the films were shaped specifically to serve the aims and needs of the Communist Party. What was useful, from an ideological viewpoint, was not interpersonal relationships, but the relationship of a man to his job, his Party and his country. Thus, in Chapayev (1934) a young soldier might playfully fondle the breast of the buxom wench he is instructing to fire a machine gun; but the girl promptly slaps his hand away, and they quickly get back to business. Girls in Soviet films--even in the several musicals that appeared during the Thirties--were either good Comrades or good buddies, or both; but their one great passion seemed to be for distributing leaflets.

If for a time there was somewhat more liveliness on the British screen, it was due to the success of a single picture: Alexander Korda's bawdy, irreverent Private Life of Henry VIII, in 1933. Prior to Henry, the British film industry, chronically hard-pressed for cash, had confined its attention largely to low-budgeted transcripts of West End teacup melodramas and slightly risqué farces. Korda, an irrepressible Hungarian, rounded up ample funds and the best technicians available, along with Charles Laughton to play the title role, and a bevy of the most beautiful girls in the British studios--Merle Oberon, Wendy Barrie, Binnie Barnes and Elsa Lanchester among them--to portray Henry's six wives. The resultant romp, far closer to the spirit of early Lubitsch than early Tudor, promptly broke all box-office records for British films. The first British movie to play the Radio City Music Hall, it was actually one of the few imports of the Thirties to penetrate beyond America's minuscule art-house circuit. One reason, of course, was Laughton's maknificently lusty performance as the lecherous monarch. Another reason, perhaps, was the public's awareness that the lecherous monarch was a pretty lusty performer in the bedroom.

Inspired by this success, Korda and his cohorts in the British studios sought to repeat the formula with the "private lives" of everyone they could think of--Catherine the Great, Don Juan. Rembrandt, Queen Elizabeth. Nell Gwyn. even good old Queen Victoria. Made with both eyes fixed on the rich but conservative American market, they soon became overly expensive and overly circumspect. Nell Gwyn, for example, was provided with a quite inaccurate prolog in which the late Charles II's favorite mistress is piously dispossessed from the hovel in which she has had to live since her benefactor's death. In actual fact. Nell was sumptuously provided for, as per Charles' deathbed request, for the rest of her days. But Will Hays and his friends at the Legion of Decency would have considered that an unfitting reward for a life of sin, so the British producer Herbert Wilcox compliantly rewrote history in order to ensure a wider American distribution for his film. But American moviegoers, to their credit, were singularly unimpressed. Not only were the accents so strange as to be almost unintelligible in the U. S. hinterlands, but the historical figures themselves lacked the built-in significance and respect that they held for the British. When a spindle-shanked, septuagenarian George Arliss strode into a ballroom as Wellington in The Iron Duke (1935), the court ladies fainted away at his manly magnetism. This may have been perfectly understandable in England, where both Wellington and Arliss were held in considerable awe, but it merely produced gales of laughter in American movie houses. Despite the presence of such costly international stars as Marlene Dietrich, Elisabeth Bergner, Gertrude Lawrence, Douglas Fairbanks, Laurence Olivier and Charles Laughton in these biographical epics, the policy of producing elaborate spectacles for the American market proved disastrous to the British studios within a few years. Without Henry's robust humor and well-formed wenches, they proffered nothing that the Hollywood studios could not do better--and in a basic English that everyone could understand.

As the Thirties wore on, it became increasingly apparent that the films coming from France were by far the most original, the most mature, the most humanistic--and the most provocative. This was all the more remarkable since nowhere else in Europe had the Depression so completely disrupted the studios and stemmed the flow of production. But as the noted French historian Georges Sadoul has pointed out, it was precisely because of this that directors were granted an unprecedented freedom in their choice of themes and in their cinematic handling of them. The industry had fallen into the hands of the promoters, men who cared about films only as an easy way to make big money and to meet beautiful women. Any responsible director or writer who turned up with a practicable script stood a reasonable chance of having it produced--although his chances of getting his fair share of the eventual profits were considerably less good. But while the promoters were in the saddle financially, the directors were the sole artistic arbiters, and men like Jean Renoir, Jacques Feyder, Julien Duvivier and Marcel Carné took full advantage of it. Before the decade was over, they had made the names of Jean Gabin, Charles Boyer, Michèle Morgan and Danielle Darrieux almost as familiar as that of any top Hollywood star, and the French film a synonym for cinematic art.

What French films of the Thirties had in abundance was a sense of living people on the screen--not types, not automatons or mannequins, but men and women of flesh, blood and passion, the cinematic descendants of Balzac and Zola. One recognized them as the true products of a society. They were not larger than life; they were life itself with all the contradictions and compulsions laid bare. When they loved, it was as if some primordial force had been released into the blood stream, a drive that could be thwarted by neither law nor logic. When they sinned--which happened fairly often in these films--it was because some star-crossing fate, whether out of mischief or malice, had raised an insurmountable roadblock across the unalterable course of their love. Love was often depicted as a thing of great beauty and tenderness, the one ray of light in cruel, gray world; but often as not it led to despair or death. If any single image could conjure up the mood of all these films, it would be that of Jean Gabin crouching on the bed of a dingy hotel room in one of the great films of the Thirties, Le Jour Se Lève (Daybreak)--withdrawn, resigned, pulling on one last cigarette before the dawn when he will shoot himself rather than submit to arrest for the murder of his fiancée's seducer. He is a true figure of contemporary tragedy, a man of decent, even poetic, instincts that force him to break the laws of a world he never made.

Of course, not all French films of this era were quite so grim. Indeed, one of the great comedies of all time, Carnival in Flanders, came from this same period. Directed by Jacques Feyder, it gave a decidedly Gallic twist to the old Lysistrata story. The good women of a 17th Century Flemish town, learning that a Spanish army is advancing upon them, decide to greet the foe with a semblance of hospitality, arguing that this will avert the sack, pillage and rape that traditionally accompanied such visitations. While their menfolk cower and hide, the ladies set out tables of food and wine, and vie with one another in offering the handsomer officers all the comforts of home--including the ultimate act of hospitality. The plan works to perfection; and even though many of the husbands are perfectly aware that they are being cuckolded in their own beds by their all-too-willing wives, they know that under the circumstances it would be folly to protest. The grateful conquerors, in parting, offer not only gifts but the remission of a year's taxes. As a result, the thrifty burghers look upon their wives with a new respect--but also with more than a little suspicion. There are worlds of worldliness in the film's final shot. As the Spaniards ride away, the burgomaster asks his handsome wife, Françoise Rosay, if she had been good the night before. "Eh," she says noncommittally. From the way she smooths her corsets and smiles after the departing grandees, it is clear that she must have been very good, indeed.

Curiously, after enjoying an international success, this high-spirited satire quickly fell from favor as Nazi forces occupied country after country in Europe. Its theme, which at first was interpreted as an illustration of how much can be accomplished when people work together toward a common goal, suddenly acquired the coloration of a clever apologia for collaboration--a point that Dr. Goebbels recognized long before the critics: He awarded it a special prize in 1935 as one of the year's most important pictures. Actually, this theme of the efficacy of sexually concerted action dominated many of the French films of the mid-Thirties, often with the woman depicted as an oversexed serpent in a brotherlovely paradise. Typical was Julien Duvivier's La Belle équipe (They Were Five), in which five young fellows suddenly win a lottery, pool their resources and decide to open an inn. Viviane Romance, the sultriest French actress of the period, falls in with the group and shares her charms with all of them, flouncing about in a filmy negligee whose straps seem specially designed to slip from her shoulders. When she decides that, of the lot, Jean Gabin is the boy most likely to succeed, she sets her snares specifically for him. Rather than lose the friendship of his companions, however, Gabin chucks her out. At that time, work and brotherhood came first. This was seen again, although merely as a subtheme, in Renoir's La Grande Illusion (1937), where Gabin, escaping from a German prison camp with a Jewish companion, is boarded and, before long, bedded by an attractive German farm woman. The three could probably have spent the duration in a comfortable ménage à; trois; instead, patriotism calls both men back to their homeland and military service.

More and more, as the Thirties wore on, Gabin became identified as the archetypical hero of French films. Through his screen characters one can almost sense the ebb and flow of the French political scene as the optimism of They Were Five gave way to the bitter realism of La Grande Illusion, and that, in turn, to the ultimate despair and disillusion of Le Jour Se Lève. But first, in a last grasping after a vanishing romanticism, there came Duvivier's Pépé Le Moko in 1937, with Gabin as a hunted criminal who is safe only so long as he stays within the shadowy confines of the casbah in Algiers. He gives up all, however--including a mistress--for the love of beautiful Mireille Balin, the diamond-laden ladyfriend of an elderly French industrialist. Tricked by a wily police commissioner into leaving the casbah and his concubine, he rushes to keep a shipboard tryst with the girl. The police close in, and as the boat pulls away from the dock, his beloved standing alone on the afterdeck, Gabin slashes his wrist with a pocketknife. (When the film was remade a few years later in Hollywood as Algiers, it starred Charles Boyer in Gabin's role, with Hedy Lamarr as his lost love. Boyer's Continental charm and lush sensuality were no doubt closer to Hollywood's ideal of a romantic thief than Gabin's thin-lipped, hard-bitten, proletarian face.)

Running through all of these films is the recognition that love, and sex, are a healthy, necessary part of life. Not only are they accepted, but their absence is actually looked upon with suspicion. Typical is the incident--barely longer than a moment--in one of the films of this period in which the young hero has arrived for the first time in Paris and taken a room in a shabby hotel. A few days later the concierge, a very proper woman, informs the young man, "If monsieur would like to entertain a young lady in his room, why ..." and she shrugs encouragingly. When the young fellow does not reply, she shrugs again, "And if monsieur's tastes lie in other directions ..." Clearly, in the eyes of this very respectable lady, the only form of perversion would be no sex at all.

It was this attitude that kept bringing the French films into conflict with the American censors. Such calm acceptance of the facts of life was, as the New York State Board of Regents liked to put it. "low, obscene and degrading." It was for this reason that they delayed the release of Marcel Pagnol's lusty La Femme du Boulanger (The Baker's Wife), in which a middle-aged baker, magnificently played by the great Raimu, awakes one morning to learn that his young wife has run off with a lusty stranger. While the two are enjoying their dolce far niente on a nearby island, the baker gets roaring drunk, then refuses to bake any more bread until his wife has returned. In desperation, the villagers commission their local priest to negotiate with the lovers. When the good padre comes upon them making love in a cave, the startled young man, his crucifix dangling on his bare chest, runs off into the woods, and the wife returns to her husband. What the censors objected to (and the Legion of Decency condemned) was the fact that the goodhearted baker took her back with unabashed joy and--even worse--that the wife suffered nothing after her romantic escapade, least of all remorse. Still clinging to a puritanical code, the censors wanted not merely contrition but retribution after such amorous dalliance.

The issue was fully joined when, in 1939, the New York Regents sought to ban Pagnol's Régain (Harvest), based on Jean Giono's prize-winning novel. In this earthy, pastoral rhapsody, brimming with visual beauty, a scissors grinder (Fernandel) and his wife come to a remote village in France whose last inhabitant is gradually going to seed with his land. The woman, attracted by the peasant, resolves to stay with him; and their love gives him new reason to sow the fields and rebuild his life. Since there is no priest, there is no marriage, even though the woman has become pregnant. This, apparently, is what shocked the censors, who refused to license it for exhibition in New York. But, as B. R. Crisler noted in The New York Times, "Of all the motion pictures we have ever seen, Harvest is the one we should choose as being the most profoundly moral, the most noble and most eloquent defense of the monogamous ideal." Armed with such endorsements, a courageous distributor forced the censor board to reconsider. Three months later the film was released without a single cut.

Perhaps the most startling exposé of the censor mind at work, however, was to be found in a strange, provocative French import, also in 1939, titled The Puritan. Its hero, Jean-Louis Barrault, is a religious fanatic, profoundly convinced that all sex is sinful. Falling in love for the first time, he kills the girl--partly out of jealousy, partly in mortal dread of committing fornication. To justify the murder to himself, he seeks out the company of prostitutes, abusing them in his drunken fanaticism. Tracked down by the police, he breaks under the strain of their questioning and reveals himself as a half-crazed psychotic who fancies himself an avenging angel who punishes others for the weaknesses he fears in himself. Small wonder that censors everywhere leaped upon it. Adapted from a Liam O'Flaherty novel (although in tone decidedly more Gallic than Gaelic), the film was banned in Ireland. The ban was upheld by the U. S. Customs authorities, and the picture was refused licenses in six states--and condemned, of course, by the Legion of Decency. In Barrault's trenchant performance, censors could recognize themselves mirrored all too clearly.

Naturally, not all the films from France during the decade were up to this level of artistry and honesty, but the films that continued to flow from Europe during the Thirties gradually raised the aesthetic and intellectual sights of American audiences, critics and film makers. Although rarely shown in more than a dozen theaters in the entire country, and subject at all times to the most stringent forms of censorship, they provided convincing proof to all who cared about the medium that artistic freedom was somehow bound up with artistic film making. Not coincidentally, it was the rapid proliferation of the art houses in the United States during the decade after World War Two that led to the series of Supreme Court decisions that ultimately broke the censors' strangle hold on all movies.

Part Seven: The Thirties--Europe's Decade of Unbuttoned Erotica

This is the seventh in a series of articles on "The History of Sex in Cinema." In the next installment, authors Knight and Alpert dolly in for revealing close-ups of the legendary love goddesses and matinee idols of the Thirties: Harlow, Gable, Garbo, Boyer, Dietrich, Cooper, Lamarr, Lamour--and the inimitable Mae West, to name a few.