The History of Sex Cinema

If our troops overseas during World War Two did much dreaming about the girl back home, it was in spite of, not because of, the movies they saw. Throughout the War years, films dominated their lives. GIs were trained by them, indoctrinated by them and learned from them the dangers of V. D. From Stateside camps right up to the front lines, they had available to them the latest Hollywood releases in vast profusion. Stars and starlets entertained them in U. S. O. shows. They even learned to shoot their M-Is by practicing on mock-up targets bearing the likeness of Betty Grable. The platinumed Miss Grable, the favorite pinup girl of the War years, typified the new style in sex symbols--curvaceous, longlegged and bosomy. Rita Hayworth, Lana Turner, Jane Russell, Carole Landis (dubbed the "ping" girl, for some reason) and, in a vest-pocket edition, Veronica Lake shared both the Grable attributes and the Grable popularity. These were definitely not "girl next door" types; and while some psychologists, such as Martha Wolfenstein and Nathan Leites, have maintained that what the Wartime heroine actually represented was home and mother, most GIs found it far pleasanter to fantasize them-selves as Errol Flynns rescuing these gorgeous creatures from their Nazi or Nipponese persecutors in eager anticipation of their grateful reward. If thereupon they had turned out to be mother, or even the girl next door, the disappointment might well have been unbearable.

In one way or another, the War profoundly influenced the American films of the Forties, introducing new themes, new types and, above all, new attitudes toward sex. Indeed, well before America's official participation in it, while the country officially still maintained its traditional isolationist posture, the process was already beginning. The prudish nice-Nellyism of brassieres for the little centaurettes who cavorted to Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony in Walt Disney's Fantasia --a touch that the Hays Office insisted upon --was thoroughly derided when the film appeared late in 1940. Meanwhile, the sweater--an article of feminine apparel popularized by Lana Turner--had become so all-pervasive that in April of 1940 Joseph I. Breen, the administrator of the industry's Production Code, warned that in the future "any 'sweater shots' in which the breasts are clearly outlined will be rejected." An International Ladies Garment Workers Union knitwear local protested that his ukase "struck at the economic security of 50,000 workers," but it was soon evident that they had little to fear. The ruling was honored more in the breach than in the observance.

Dialog, too, had suddenly grown racier. Despite Clark Gable's historic and hotly contested "damn" in his last line from Gone with the Wind, the Hays Office stubbornly maintained its long list of forbidden words --augmented in 1941 by such late starters as "alley cat," "broad" and "hot" (applied to a woman), "goose" and "fairy" (in a sexual sense), "tomcat" (applied to a man), "nuts" (except when meaning "crazy") and "buzzard" (too similar in sound to "bastard"). But scriptwriters were getting their points across without breaking the rules--just bending the spirit of the Code. In They Drive by Night, for example, truck driver George Raft surveys the "classy chassis" of waitress Ann Sheridan and offers to "finance it." "Who do you think you're kidding?" Miss Sheridan replies. "Why, you couldn't even pay for the headlights." Later, she invites Raft up to her apartment for a cup of coffee. "No, no coffee," Raft says slyly. But he follows her up to her apartment anyway. The Legion of Decency responded by putting the film on its "Morally objectionable in part" list--along with many other "A" productions of the period, including Gone with the Wind; but the exhibitors, through their trade publications, were openly asking the producers to "let down the bars" and to "cook up some spicier dishes" to attract a public that had been shrinking steadily throughout the late Thirties.

As war drew nearer, the studios began to discover that they could meet such demands with greater impunity. In a 1940 survey of civil liberties in the United States entitled In the Shadow of War, the ever-watchful American Civil Liberties Union reported that censorship of motion pictures, plays, books and radio had declined sharply, and added, "Since most of the censorship is based upon so-called moral grounds, it indicates an increasing tolerance of themes which a few years ago aroused hostility and official interference." Clearly, as the Depression rolled away, not just the exhibitors but the public at large was chafing against the artificially maintained moral standards of the Thirties. Significantly, Breen himself, offered the position of production head at RKO studios, in May of 1941 temporarily relinquished the job of trying to police an industry with antiquated and ineffectual ground rules. Actually, many felt that he had been laughed out of office by public reaction to his anti-"sweater girl" manifesto.

Breen's departure did not mean that suddenly, miraculously, the studios were given a green light to ignore their Code's strictures, however. The Code still prevailed; but a few more liberties could now be taken within its framework. Shortly before Breen's resignation, RKO released a version of Sidney Howard's 1925 Pulitzer Prize-winning play, They Knew What They Wanted, suitably sanitized to Code specifications. In the stage version, the young wife of an elderly vintner has an affair with a virile field hand; the husband learns the worst, but forgives the girl and takes her back. In the film, however, which co-starred Charles Laugh ton and Carole Lombard, not only is the couple not married (thus eliminating any Code problems with adultery), but it is made clear that the infidelity was definitely not of the lady's choosing. Even so, the picture has her going off, at the end, hopeful that perhaps sometime in the future the wedding bells will ring out.

Stuck with a strikingly similar situation shortly after Breen's resignation, MGM treated it with considerably more freedom--at least until the Legion of Decency stepped in. Two-Faced Woman, Greta Garbo's last picture, was originally to have been the story of an off-again, on-again love affair in which Garbo, playing an unglamorous ski instructress, poses as her sexy, madcap twin sister, presumably the kind of girl that sophisticated Melvyn Douglas really wanted to marry. To avoid Code complications, the film had the skiing Garbo married to Douglas in the first reel. But this still posed something of a problem toward the end of the picture, when Douglas pursues a wispily clad Garbo--the invented twin--from parlor to bedroom with infidelity clearly uppermost in his mind. A Legion condemnation quickly took the film out of circulation until a scene could be inserted in which Douglas--and the audience--is informed via telephone that the supposed twin is really his wife, which made the whole pursuit perfectly proper, but utterly pointless. Indicative of the widening gap between what could get past the Code and what the Legion might approve was the Legion's rating of Life Begins for Andy Hardy as "Morally unobjectionable for adults"--but not for the kiddies. Specifically, what the Legion objected to was a sequence in which our hero Learns About Women from pert, pretty Patricia Dane, a telephone operator who invites young Andy up to her apartment for an evening of unspecified "fun." While the Code's administrators may have relaxed a bit, clearly the Legion of Decency's minions had no such intention.

Many other films in those halcyon, pre-War days either skirted the Code or openly flouted it. Generally, after some cutting and reshooting, they ended up with a Code Seal--but also with a "B" or even a "C" rating from the Legion. Thus, Carole Landis' abbreviated costume as she roamed the forest primeval in leather bra and loincloth in Hal Roach's One Million B. C. encountered much the same opposition that greeted Jane's similarly utilitarian mode of attire in the early Tarzan pictures--yet it appeared on the screen. Strange Cargo, a steamy Clark Gable-Joan Crawford co-starrer set in a tropical penal colony, was passed by the Code but condemned by the Legion--until Metro eliminated so many of the torrid love scenes that the plot made no sense whatsoever. The Primrose Path, in which Ginger Rogers played the daughter of a roistering and unrepentant prostitute, had even rougher sledding. Based on Victoria Lincoln's best-selling novel February Hill (albeit considerably toned down in its intimations of the mother's profession), the film won a Code Seal but was barred by local censors in a number of cities as "obscene and indecent." (Ironically, the picture now plays in those same communities without the slightest protest--via TV.) Turnabout, a Thorne Smith comedy in which a married couple switch identities, occupations, voices and attire, was essentially a sleazy exploitation of smoking-car humor, al-though this rare venture into transvestism was generally regarded as more tasteless than indecent. It drew a "B" from the Legion; as did Universal's film adaptation of the Rodgers and Hart musical The Boys from Syracuse, based on Shakespeare's A Comedy of Errors, even though Shakespeare's contrived marital mix-ups were barely hinted at.

But the picture that threw the censors into a tizzy all over the country, and for a time threatened the very existence of the industry's Production Code, was Howard Hughes' inept, rambunctious, aggressively sexy Western The Outlaw. Not released until 1943, it had been intermittently in production--whenever Hughes could find the time--since early in 1940; the Breen Office received its first inklings of what he was up to in December of that year. Without yet having seen one foot of film, which was based solely on Jules Furthman's script, Breen let loose a barrage of cautionary memos. For one sequence, he advised that the leading lady wear a bathrobe over the nightgown indicated in the text. He questioned whether a rape scene could be handled with "good taste." In another note, he pointed out that "Care will be needed in this scene with Billy pulling Rio down on the bed and kissing her, to avoid sex suggestiveness"--along with some 20 other similar items.

In his book The Face on the Cutting Room Floor, author Murray Schumach describes as typical of the skirmishing between Breen and Hughes a contretemps that arose over a single line of dialog. Rio (played by Jane Russell) has been asked by her lover, Doc Holliday (Walter Huston), to look after the wounded Billy the Kid (Jack Buetel)-- "and keep him warm." Rio, even though she was raped by Billy earlier in the film, complies by climbing into bed with him after Doc rides off on Billy's horse. When Doc returns and expresses his disapproval of this particular form of physical therapy, Billy points out that Doc has had the use of his horse in the interim, adding, "A fair exchange is no robbery." For this line, Hughes had substituted, "You borrowed from me. I borrow from you"--to which Breen objected. His counterproposal was--unaccountably --"Tit for tat," to which Hughes delightedly acceded. But now Will Hays objected; and the final line to appear in the script was Hughes' "You borrowed from me ..." For the end of the picture, the Breen Office felt it might be a wholesome touch if Billy and Rio were married before riding off together into the sunset. Again, after a considerable exchange of heated memos, Hughes won his point--although later, after the film was in release, he threw a sop to the pressure groups by clubbing in a line of dialog suggesting that the two had been married by "that stranger on a white horse." Neither the audience nor anyone in the film had the slightest idea who "that stranger" might be.

Squabbles over the script, however, were insignificant compared with Breen's rage when, in March of 1941, he screened the complete film for the first time. In the more than six years that he had been administering the Production Code, he stated, he had never seen anything like Jane Russell. And there was plenty to see. Although Miss Russell was naturally well endowed, Hughes had contrived to emphasize her charms by himself inventing a cantilevering bra that encircled her more-than-ample breasts, giving them at once contour, prominence and maximum exposure. To capitalize on his invention, he dressed her in revealing blouses that draped low off the shoulders, and in men's shirts that buttoned well below the bosom. Throughout the film, he called for bits of business that required her to bend over--peering into mirrors, stooping to pick things off the floor, kissing the supine Billy; and always the camera was strategically placed for maximum mammary exposure as the blouse or shirt billowed open. In one of the scenes excised by Breen, it was claimed that one could see clear down to her navel. For Breen, who had spent the greater part of the Thirties holding the line against cleavage, such revelations were more than he could countenance. He shot an angry letter off to Will Hays, his superior in the New York office of the Motion Picture Association, that read in part, "I have never seen anything quite so unacceptable as the shots of the breasts of the character of Rio.... Throughout almost half the picture, the girl's breasts, which are quite large and prominent, are shockingly uncovered." For weeks he stoutly refused to consider giving The Outlaw a Seal of Approval without extensive reshooting. But Breen was even then on his way out: and within a few weeks of his departure, the Seal was granted. In all, only 40 feet of film had been eliminated, and Hughes permitted a few dialog changes.

But Hughes did not immediately capitalize on the notoriety his picture had already achieved: with the outbreak of war a few months later, his tool and aircraft interests monopolized all of his attention. Not until February of 1943 could he spare enough time to debut his film--and even then only long enough to arrange a single booking in a San Francisco theater. Its general release was not to come until three years later, in 1946, when Hughes was finally free to give it what he considered a proper personal send-off. The ensuing ballyhoo campaign (of which more later) was one of the noisiest in movie history. Although at the outbreak of the War no one had yet seen The Outlaw, the fan magazines, the Sunday supplements, the ad campaigns and the publicity had all contrived to create an image of Jane Russell as the ultimate in sexuality. Sight unseen, she became a favorite Wartime pinup.

• • •

Within hours of their induction into the Army, most GIs were treated to a free movie show, the first of many official training and informational film entertainments they were to enjoy under Army auspices. Generally, the first program included a short on military courtesy, one on the Articles of War, and a classic half-hour documentary entitled Sex Hygiene. Although directed by the venerable John Ford, Sex Hygiene featured none of his strapping cowboys or vengeful Indians. Instead, this sober-- and sobering--little film presented in graphically dramatic terms a straightforward preachment against the dangers of venereal disease. In it, an enlisted man on the town for a night gets hooked by a hooker. When the medics discover that he has a "dose," they seize the occasion to inform him--and the rest of the Army --just what he may be in for. Films, photos and slides depict advanced cases of syphilis--the unsightly sores, the physical deformities, the ghastly brain damage. Then, no less graphically, the treatments begin. For many of the inductees, it was clearly a tossup which was worse--the ravages of the disease or the treatment for it. At every showing, scores of prospective warriors fainted dead away as the long needles went to work on screen. Needless to say, the film left a lasting impression. Even today, almost a quarter of a century later, veterans can recall the youthful GI mounting the stairs of a seedy hotel for his moment of joy, pausing at the threshold of the prostitute's room to deposit his burning cigarette on the banister outside, then the quick fade as he enters, hastily unbuttoning his tunic. Some may even remember that when he re-emerged and picked up his cigarette again, it was still burning and scarcely any ash had accumulated. Were these few seconds of pleasure, the film seemed to ask, worth the price of a lifetime of agony? (In case the answer was yes, the Army thoughtfully supplied free condoms with its passes for town.)

The Army's Wartime movies, many of them made under the supervision of Colonel Frank Capra, set new standards for documentary realism. Capra. the director of such happy hits of the Thirties as It Happened One Night and Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, was one of the many Hollywood film makers to offer their talents to the War Department's several motion-picture services. Charged with preparing a series of "orientation" (read (continued on page 149)Sex in Cinema(continued from page 128) "propaganda") films on Why We Fight, he did not hesitate to show the nature of the enemy--Germany, Japan and Italy-- in all its bestiality. Using for the most part captured footage (although occasionally snippets from feature films were slipped in), they graphically showed the Nazis' brutal persecution of the Jews and fascist atrocities in China, Poland and Russia. Perhaps the strongest of the lot was The Battle of Russia, directed by Anatole Litvak, which included shots of girls raped and mutilated by the Germans, nude corpses of women and children frozen in the Russian winter, and a behind-the-lines Nazi brothel stocked with captive Russian girls. Symptomatic of the leeway found in these films was a scene from San Pietro, John Huston's masterful account of a battle in the Italian campaign. As the peasants return to their shattered village after the fighting is over, he shows a trio of women breast feeding their babies, oblivious to the passing GIs. Such a sequence would have had to be cut from any Hollywood film of the period; under no circumstances would the Code have permitted the exposure of breasts--at least, not the breasts of white women.

On the home front, meanwhile, Hollywood began turning out Service-connected pictures that blended a modicum of hokey patriotism with a maximum of hokey sex; So Proudly We Hail, Four Jills in a Jeep and Keep Your Powder Dry are examples. In all of them, the girls looked as if they had been fitted for their GI uniforms by Adrian, and Max Factor himself had accompanied them right up to the front lines. Unlike Errol Flynn, who went through the War with an artful smudge on his cheek, his female counterparts rarely had so much as a hair out of place. Naturally, they had to look their best for "our boys overseas." This attitude was perhaps best expressed in Four Jills in a Jeep, in which Kay Francis, Carole Landis, Martha Raye and Mitzi Mayfair celebrated in celluloid their own courage and fortitude in entertaining our troops in Britain and North Africa during the dark days of 1942. To the accompaniment of Jimmy Dorsey's band, and assisted by innumerable guest stars, they managed to imply that if they had not been there doing their bit for the U. S. O.--singing, dancing and, in Miss Landis' case, mainly breathing deeply--we might have lost the entire North African campaign.

Another interesting item, immoderately cheered by critics and public alike at the time of its appearance, was So Proudly We Hail, a film made to honor the nurses who served so heroically in Bataan and Corregidor. While there was no doubting its sincerity (it would have been difficult, at that stage of the War, to be otherwise), the script nevertheless contrived to cook up standard peacetime romances for each of its stars, Claudette Colbert, Veronica Lake and Paulette Goddard; then used the Japs, lusting for white women, as the trigger to tragedy. One had the impression that the defense of Bataan was essentially a defense of the girls' honor. At the film's climax, Veronica Lake, a little troublemaker up to that point, learns that the Japanese army is closing in and the situation is hopeless. Tucking a live grenade into her bosom, she walks bravely toward the enemy and blows them--and, of course, herself--to bits. (As they watched this scene, the GIs were less respectful than the home-front audiences. At the moment of Miss Lake's disintegration, someone invariably sang out, "I know the part I want!" or words to that effect.)

During the War years, perhaps the sole Hollywood film maker to treat sex-- and patriotism, motherhood and just about every other sacred cow available-- with a healthy irreverence and a caustic wit was writer-director Preston Sturges. His 1944 comedy The Miracle of Morgan's Creek offered a blistering but hilarious commentary on free-and-easy Wartime marriages, and also on the absurd elevation of the male for his role as conceiver. In it, teenaged Trudy Kocken-locker (Betty Hutton) finds herself the morning after a "kiss-the-boys-goodbye" dance dimly remembering that at some point in the proceedings she had gotten married to a tall dark GI with curly hair whose name she recalls even more dimly --"Private Ratziwatski, or was it Zitziki-witzky?" Whatever his name, the troops have moved out, leaving an impregnated Trudy in urgent need of a husband. Norval Jones (Eddie Bracken), a 4-F, gladly volunteers for the job--and ends up charged with abduction, impersonating a soldier, impairing the morals of a minor, resisting arrest, and numerous other offenses to law, order and decency. All of this gets squared away, however, when Trudy comes through with, instead of just one baby, sextuplets--and all boys. Although the missing Ratziwatski (or was it Zitzikiwitzky?) was responsible, Norval gets the credit, and for his reward is made a colonel in the state militia. As James Agee commented about Miracle at the time, "The Hays Office has been either hypnotized into a liberality for which it should be thanked, or has been raped in its sleep."

Chances are it was the latter, for when Warner Bros. was in production on To Have and Have Not a few months later, Mr. Hays kept both eyes on the project-- as indeed did the Offices of War Information and the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs, although for different reasons. Remotely (perhaps ten percent) based on Hemingway's tale of a hard-bitten gunrunner plying his trade between Key West and Havana in the early Thirties, the novel's sexiness was watered down (by scriptwriters William Faulkner and Jules Furthman) at the behest of the Production Code, and the locale was changed from Cuba to Vichy-held Martinique at the suggestion of the Inter-American Affairs people. To Have and Have Not may have been short on Hemingway but, thanks to newcomer Lauren Bacall, it was long on sex appeal. Tawny, leggy, not to mention (as the Warner publicity department put it) "sizzling, slinky, husky, sultry," the 20-ycar-old former fashion model and usherette teamed with Humphrey Bogart to project a new image of the femme fatale. Bacall had none of the conventional curves, either fore or aft, but clearly she had "been around." She not only knew all the answers, she knew the questions before they were asked. Not since the palmiest days of Mae West had the screen presented such a forthright and direct approach to sex. "If you want anything, just whistle," she tells Bogey on their first encounter at a bar, in a voice that reminded one critic of "a chorus by Kid Ory." After a somewhat tentative kiss from Bogart, she informs him, "It's even better when you help." Throwing him what came to be known as The Look, she says, "I'm hard to get--all you have to do is ask me." There was an appealing toughness about the girl, a mixture of aggression and acquiescence that set males--even so casehardened a male as Humphrey Bogart--atingle. Inevitably, she found herself compared with half a dozen other actresses, including Dietrich, Bankhead, Harlow, Garbo and Veronica Lake; but her compounding of these disparate personalities produced a unique, feline, intriguingly single-minded screen character. Sensing this, director Howard Hawks wisely gave Bacall her head in her first picture, urging her to handle the scenes as she would in real life. One of the film's best sequences resulted from this--the one in which, after prolonged kisses with Bogart in a cheap hotel bedroom, the girl prepares to retire to her own quarters. As originally written, the sequence was to fade out just after she walks out of his room and closes the door. "At this point in the shooting," according to Time magazine, "Miss Bacall complained: 'God, I'm dumb.' 'Why?' asked Hawks. 'Well, if I had any sense, I'd go back in after that guy.' " Hawks agreed, and the scene now fades as she walks back from the door toward him.

• • •

For the American motion-picture industry, World War Two produced a bonanza of unprecedented proportions. Both wages and employment shot up as the home front was mobilized for the War effort. For the first time since the Twenties, people knew what it felt like to have spending money. People needed relaxation: there was a lot to forget. Hollywood obliged by turning out a bumper crop of star-spangled musicals and escapist comedies. And many wanted some vicarious identification with the War being waged in such hitherto-unheard-of places as Wake Island, Guadalcanal and El Alamein. Hollywood obliged again, with everything from Service-connected comedies to hoked-up melodramas featuring--or, as they used to put it, "dedicated to"--the various Armed Forces fighting around the world. Unfortunately, the Armed Forces were far too busy to fight back.

As box-office attendance surged to new heights (estimated at over 90,000,000 per week), the studios stepped up their production programs accordingly. The accent fell on quantity, not on quality, and on action rather than subtlety. As a bonus, the War also afforded producers readily identifiable new villains ripe for exploitations. Lustful Japs and sadistic Nazis inspired an unbridled violence unprecedented on the American screen, even in the gangster pictures of the Thirties. Sanctified by the War and proffered in the name of patriotism, film after film delineated the agonies of concentration- and prison-camp life, the flagellations and mutilations visited upon Allied airmen, survivors of Correg-idor or members of the underground during the Occupation who were seized by the Nazis. Young girls were flogged in Hitler's Children: American airmen who had fallen into Japanese hands were tortured, then decapitated (off screen) in The Purple Henri: French Resistance workers were beaten, burned and mutilated horribly by their German captors in The Cross of Lorraine. Significantly, in November 1941, the Hays Office had launched a campaign to reduce the amount of violence on the screen, particularly in Westerns. "Even in Westerns," Hays ordered, "killings must be reduced to a necessary minimum." After December 7 of that year, however, such admonitions lost their validity. War granted the studios an open license to kill, and they used it with enthusiasm. Innumerable War films had as their climax the American hero--usually Errol Flynn, John Wayne, Robert Taylor or Humphrey Bogart--mowing down entire battalions of advancing Germans or Japs, spraying them with lead from machine guns fired from the hip. There was a positive exhilaration in these mass murders--and not merely because the killers were on our side.

But the movies had declared war on Germany and Japan long before Pearl Harbor. Edward G. Robinson abandoned his gangland activities and joined the FBI to track down German agents in Confessions of a Nazi Spy (1939). Chaplin's The Great Dictator (1940) was a forthright attack on both Hitler and fascism, while Hitchcock's Foreign Correspondent (1940) ended with a stern warning from bomb-torn London that America should "ring itself with steel." Nazi planes attacked defenseless John Wayne in The Long Voyage Home (1940), and shortly thereafter, in A Yank in the Raf (1941), Tyrone Power was flying for the British. War in the East was noted in films such as They Met in Bombay and Burma Convoy (both 1941). In all of them, the enemy was the same --lustful Japs and sadistic Nazis.

As Gershon Legman has pointed out in his singularly well-documented study Love and Death, there is a strong inverse relationship between sex and violence. Where sex is repressed, be it physically or on the artistic level, he points out, it quickly reasserts itself in other forms--perversion, homosexuality, sadism or savagery. In time of war, de-spite such Hemingwayesque romances as those featuring a clean-cut officer and a love-hungry nurse, or those more ribald Captain Flagg-Sergeant Quirt affairs with rollicking French farm girls, most soldiers (and their Stateside girlfriends as well) led lives of quiet deprivation. No Love, No Nothin', that popular ballad of World War Two, may have been a slight exaggeration of the case; but most psychologists are quick to draw the distinction between a roll in the hay and a slow, maturing relationship between a man and a woman. It was of the leavening influence of the latter that war deprived the soldier.

Meanwhile, however, the movies continued to tickle his libido with Esther Williams' aqueous charms, Rita Hay-worth's copious curves and Betty Grable's well-publicized legs. The movies themselves were, for the most part, 99 and 44/100 percent purer than Ivory soap; the earlier liberalizing trend had been promptly reversed when Joseph Breen, after a frustrating year as production manager of RKO, returned to his Production Code command post late in 1942. When Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls was filmed in 1943, for example, the famous sleeping bag that Gary Cooper shared with Ingrid Bergman might as well have been a laundry bag for all its erotic implications. So cautiously photographed was their lovemaking under the stars that one could never tell from moment to moment whether Cooper or Bergman--or both, or neither--was inside it. Nor had the Legion of Decency altered its position. Lady of Burlesque, based on Gypsy Rose Lee's best-selling G-String Murders, was charged with offering "double-meaning lines, salacious dances and situations, and indecent costumes presented against the background of a sensuous form of entertainment." At the Legion's insistence, the film was hauled back for extensive trimming and the dubbing in of new dialog for some of the more offensive lines. But even so, much of the appeal of such films was still their eroticism, however veiled or mutilated; and the fantasies they invited, deprived of natural outlets, sought gratification in sights of violence--or in deeds of violence.

Inevitably, however, as the War dragged on, the public grew increasingly apathetic toward war pictures. Hollywood, in its first hot flush of patriotism, had literally flooded the screens with them. In a film Daily poll taken as early as September 1943, when theater owners were queried, "Do you believe that too many war stories are reaching the screen?," 56 percent answered in the affirmative--and added that they had the waning box-office records on such pictures to prove it. By the spring of 1944, war stories had all but disappeared from the sound stages. "Possibly as a breathing spell from war," The New York Times reported, "Hollywood, temporarily at least, has all but shelved martial projects in favor of screams in the night.... Every studio has at least one such picture in production, and others coming to a witching boil." At first, these tended to be psychological horror stories --Gaslight, Phantom Lady, Hangover Square, The Uninvited --in which the normal-seeming but thoroughly psychopathic hero visits a series of cruel and unusual punishments upon his unsuspecting ladylove. It was as if the Gestapo had begun to insinuate itself into our domestic life. In Tomorrow the World, this implication is made specific: Fredric March, playing a liberal professor, takes in an orphaned German boy and soon discovers that he has nursed a Nazi viper to his breast: Thanks to his earlier Nazi indoctrination, the boy is able to alienate March from his Jewish fiancee and all but ruin not only their impending marriage but their lives.

Very quickly, however, psychological horror was being blended with physical violence as Gestapo-like terrors were visited upon private citizens, and particularly upon private eyes. Marking the transition was a film called Cornered, starring Dick Powell, that appeared late in 1945. In it, the quondam crooner-- "rougher, tougher and more terrific," as the ads put it--played an ex-R.C.A.F. pilot who swears to track down the Nazis who murdered his wife. A loner, like all private eyes, he falls into enemy hands and is subjected to all the beatings and brutalities popularized by the Wartime melodramas. In this new cycle, the studios had found a way to project the violence and sadism of their anti-Nazi films onto the peacetime scene. Very quickly the Nazis of Cornered gave way to crooks, gangsters, rich perverts or criminal masterminds whose devious manipulations cast deep shadows of suspicion over the innocent until the private-eye hero, invariably bloodied but never bowed, could batter his way through the maze.

Cornered, of course, was not without precedent. Humphrey Bogart had made one of the most memorable of all private-eye films, The Maltese Falcon, as early as 1941; and two years after that, tight-lipped Alan Ladd got a toe hold on his career as the trench-coated professional killer in This Gun for Hire. Powell himself had already turned from duets with Ruby Keeler to Raymond Chandler gun duels in Murder, My Sweet (1944); but the screen did not begin to throng with detectives, and their shadowy adversaries, until the War was almost over, mainly because the nefarious Nipponese and sadistic SS men were available in such abundant supply.

Typical of the new, post-War cycle of detective pictures was Howard Hawks' The Big Sleep, which starred Bogart (opposite Bacall) in one of his most effective roles, as Raymond Chandler's tough-talking shamus, Philip Marlowe. The plot almost defies description: certainly it defies rational analysis. Occasionally, one can discern who did what to whom, but rarely why. Actually, there was one death that not even the people who made the film were ever quite sure whether to treat as a murder or a suicide. What is clear is that one of millionaire General Sternwood's daughters had posed for pornographic pictures while under the influence of narcotics, and that the other, played by Miss Bacall, had nymphomaniacal tendencies and a shady alliance with a big-time gambler. After that, it was just a matter of keeping up with the falling bodies. A curious sidelight to the film--and, indeed, to most of the pictures in the private-eye genre during the Forties--is that the hero himself shows little interest in sex. No matter how many delectable creatures force themselves upon him, he remains grimly intent on earning his "$25 a day plus expenses." The kiss at the final fade-out, if there was a kiss at all, was as perfunctory and ritualistic as that bestowed upon the heroines of the old Western movies. Nevertheless, in The Big Sleep, as one critic accurately observed, "a sullen atmosphere of sex saturates the film"---and no small part of it was due to the voltage generated by Bogey and his sultry "Baby" in their many scenes together.

In this respect, The Big Sleep proved an exception. True to the Legman formula, the more violence these films featured, the less attention they gave to sex. In Laura, one of the best of the genre, Dana Andrews believes for more than half the picture that he has fallen in love with a corpse. Even when Laura finally does materialize, the ensuing action is dominated by the foppish, epicene gossip writer played by Clifton Webb. Lady in the Lake, with Robert Montgomery this time as Chandler's Marlowe, goes a step further. It has no love interest whatsoever: and by using a subjective camera technique, in which the camera actually becomes Marlowe, it extends to the audience the vicarious pleasures of being shot at, socked on the jaw and beaten unconscious.

Alfred Hitchcock, with characteristic ingenuity, was one of the few to find a way to inject sex into the private-eye-counterspy genre. In Notorious, he substituted for outright brutality an aura of dread menace as Ingrid Bergman insinuated herself into the Rio hide-out of Nazi agent Claude Rains at the behest of American agent Cary Grant. While the early footage understandably faltered in establishing the fresh-faced Miss Bergman as a Washington callgirl, Hitchcock's triumph was the creation of the longest nonstop kissing sequence ever committed to film. Thumbing his nose at the Production Code, which had arbitrarily established 30 seconds of osculation as a maximum, he had Bergman nibbling away at Grant during an urgent telephone call with his boss. The scene played almost three minutes.

Hitchcock (with a notable assist from screenwriter Ben Hecht) actually went a great deal further. Although the Code specifically stated that "impure love must not be presented as attractive and beautiful," no one for a moment was led to imagine that Cary Grant and Miss Bergman simply held hands after he answered that telephone. Audiences were growing up, and so were the film makers. Where, in the past, any hint of promiscuity was immediately followed by remorse and, preferably, the untimely death of one or both of the parties involved, in Notorious, Bergman ended up with Grant--a fate considerably better than death, any way you look at it. The very fact that the film went on to make a great deal of money was a sign that the times were changing, that the public was not shocked, outraged or visibly distressed that two very attractive people enjoyed (in a physical sense) each other's company.

Actually, as the War drew to a close, thumbing one's nose at the Production Code became an increasingly popular pastime at the studios. Terror sold tickets, true; and this potentiality was exploited not only in the private-eye films but in such grisly thrillers as Brute Force and The Killers, in which the mayhem included cold-blooded shootings and a particularly spectacular murder as a gang of convicts in Brute Force went after a stool pigeon with a blowtorch. But sex, too--especially the showgirl displays featured in star-spangled Wartime musicals--was clamoring for attention. Even before the War had ended, the writer-director team of Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder had begun working on an adaptation of James M. Cain's Double Indemnity, a steamy novel in which an insurance salesman has an adulterous affair with a woman who uses him to murder her husband so that they can live on the insurance money. Joseph Breen had rejected the story out of hand when it first appeared. "The story is in violation of provisions of the Production Code," he wrote at the time to Louis B. Mayer, "and, as such, is almost certain to result in a picture which we would be compelled to reject if, and when, such a picture is presented for approval." But when Brackett and Wilder finally submitted their script, it passed with only minor alterations. What they had done was to have the insurance man, conscience-stricken, kill his ladyfriend and then, having been shot by her, record his full confession into a dictaphone. The adultery remained, however; and seldom has a temptress been made more lasciviously seductive than Barbara Stanwyck in the film. She used her sex knowingly, as a means to a selfish end. A bed or a sofa was to her what he desk is to a businessman--a place where deals are made. And even though both paid dearly for their crime, in keeping with the Hays Office tenets, audiences saw an adulterous relationship in progress, not merely as something to be atoned for.

Double Indemnity was both a critical and a box-office success; and as the Hays Office feared, it emboldened other producers to move into previously forbidden areas. Early in 1946, Universal released Scarlet Street, a remake of Jean Renoir's La Chienne, a film that had not even been permitted entry into this country a dozen years earlier. In the new version, Edward G. Robinson plays a bank cashier who is also a Sunday painter, married to a dour woman who "doesn't understand him." Falling in love with a pretty hustler, Joan Bennett, he sets her up in a Greenwich Village apartment and stores his paintings on the premises, stealing money from both his wife and his bank to do so. Her boyfriend (or pimp), Dan Duryea, arranges for the paintings to be sold in a 57th Street gallery--in her name. Because he loves her, Robinson is willing to go along with the caper. But when, unexpectedly freed of His wife, he proposes to the girl and she laughs him off, he stabs her to death with an ice pick. Duryea is executed for the killing, and Robinson is fired from his bank for embezzlement; and for the remainder of the picture he tries in vain to confess his crimes to the police, who insist on regarding him as some kind of crank. "Indecent and immoral," cried the New York censor, rejecting the film in toto. Ultimately, it was released after the icepick stabs had been reduced from seven to one and a line of Duryea's altered. But the adultery remained: Sex was beginning to break free of the censors.

It broke even freer when, a few months later, Gilda went into release. To most Americans, it seemed an oddly plotted but effective starring vehicle for Rita Hay-worth, the thinking man's Betty Grable, in which Glenn Ford, impervious to her unabashed advances, appoints himself guardian of her virtue for his employer and her "benefactor," George Macready. Although there was every indication that she had been a prostitute (or nearly one) when Ford first met her, when she sang Put the Blame on Maine, Boys as accompaniment to a travesty of a striptease in furs, a clinging black-satin dress and long black gloves, all traces of the murky plot went out the window. La Hayworth was never more sensual, never more appealing. But in Paris Gilda was, incredibly, hailed as "the best film, by far, on homosexuality"--many of the French critics insisted on interpreting the story as a battle between Hayworth and Macready for the affections of Glenn Ford! Whichever way the film was read, however, it was a clear triumph for Hayworth--frankly erotic.

Just about the same time that Gilda appeared, Howard Hughes brought back his still-controversial The Outlaw, this time for national distribution. Although originally passed by the Production Code, the film was reintroduced with such a lurid ad campaign that Breen took the unprecedented action of withdrawing the Code's Seal of Approval, charging that Hughes had not "submitted for approval to the [Motion Picture] Association all advertising and publicity matter used in connection with the advertisement and exploitation of The Outlaw." Which was perfectly true. Hughes realized it would be a complete waste of time to seek approval for catch phrases such as "How Would You Like to Tussle with Russell?" or "What Are the Two Great Reasons for Jane Russell's Rise to Stardom?"--not to mention his omnipresent lithos of his bosomy star sprawled across a haystack, nibbling provocatively on a bit of straw. Nevertheless, he sued the Motion Picture Association (headed by Eric Johnston since Hays' retirement in 1945), charging conspiracy in restraint of trade. Losing the suit, he arranged to open his film around the country in theaters that did not require a Seal, often renting them outright for the purpose. Despite a Legion condemnation, despite Catholic boycotts and Protestant protests, the picture packed them in. If nothing else, The Outlaw furnished vivid proof that millions of post-War moviegoers were no longer willing to live by the Code.

Actually, within the industry itself, many producers were growing restive over Code restrictions. Early in 1947, for example, 20th Century-Fox announced its intention of filming Kathleen Win-sor's runaway best seller, Forever Amber. Breen protested, but in vain, then stipulated that Fox could make the picture but would have to change the title. Fox went ahead with the production to the tune of over $5,000,000--obviously with no intention of changing the title. Even so, with a wary eye on the Code Administration, the script restricted Miss Winsor's 17th Century hussy to only four lovers (compared with twelve in the book), and added a spoken prolog to explain that Amber was a thoroughly reprehensible woman and suitably punished for her sinful ways. Even though, as critic James Agee noted, Linda Darnell, as Amber, "is never kissed hard enough to jar an eyelash loose, and it comes as a mild shock when she suddenly announces her pregnancy"; nevertheless, the film immediately roused the ire of the Legion of Decency. "A glorification of immorality and licentiousness," the Legion stormed in giving it a "C" classification. And Cardinal Spellman, in New York, warned his parishioners to stay away. In Philadelphia, Catholics were urged to boycott for a year any theater that might play it. Despite its Code Seal, when similar objections were raised around the country, Fox withdrew its prints, made cuts and added moralizing dialog in a successful effort to persuade the Legion to change its classification from "C" to "B."

Similar outcries attended the release of David O. Selznick's sex-charged, blood-saturated potboiler Duel in the Sun. Clearly influenced by the box-office response to The Outlaw, Selznick assembled a top-flight cast and crew to inflate what had first been envisioned as an ordinary Western into a $6,000,000 super-spectacular or, as Selznick preferred to misname it, "the picture of a thousand memorable moments." The precise nature of those "moments" is perhaps best suggested by the film industry's descriptive, though unofficial title for it--Lust in the Dust. Jennifer Jones, lushly beautiful as the adopted half-caste daughter of a cattle baron with a ranch only slightly smaller than Texas, has caught the eye of both his sons, Joseph Cotten and Gregory Peck--a task simplified by her addiction to nude bathing in a nearby pond and to wearing Jane Russell-type shirts and blouses. Her protracted love-hate relationship with Peck involves attempted fratricide, rape, suicide and a grand finale in which the two of them ultimately kill each other in a gun duel fought beneath a blood-red Technicolor sun. Mortally wounded herself, the girl crawls over rock and sand to plant a final kiss upon her dead lover's lips. This bit of necrophilia produced almost as much shock among professional defenders of the public's morals as Miss Jones' revealing costumes, the bathing sequence and the rape. The Legion awarded an excised version of the film a "B" rating, despite their objections to its "immodestly suggestive sequences" and its "glorification of illicit love." Duel in the Sun became one of the industry's all-time top-grossing films.

The point is that all of these films, even including The Outlaw, went into distribution with the Code's blessing. The industry's own self-censorship machinery, drastic as it once was, had begun to relax, unlike the Legion and other national pressure groups. Undoubtedly, much of this was due to the War. As film makers flocked back to the studios after their exposure to combat, suffering and death, alter many of them had become involved in the problems of capturing the look of the real world for their Wartime documentaries, the sugar-coated fables and Production Code formulae no longer made sense. They found Breen not only silly and old-fashioned but prurient, looking for dirt in every scene and situation put on film. Many of Hollywood's most responsible producers were beginning to wonder if the Production Code game was worth the candle. Samuel Goldwyn, one of the industry's staunchest advocates of "decency" on the screen, summed up the situation in his characteristic malapropos fashion when, speaking of the Code, he told a group of theater men, "I think it is about time we all joined to do something about this awful milestone around the neck of the motion-picture industry."

Not only had the film makers been to war; so had their audiences. And now they were clamoring for something a bit more substantial than the bittersweet romances and hyped-up heroics that had glutted the screen for almost four long years. Small wonder that the public responded with enthusiasm to such realistically drawn melodramas as the private-eye films, such semidocumentaries as Boomerang and Naked City, or to the frank sexuality of Jane Russell, Rita Hayworth and Jennifer Jones. The wraps were coming off, and neither the condemnation of the Legion nor the pressure of the pressure groups could wholly prevent it. As for the Production Code, at best it was fighting a delaying action, with breakthroughs whenever a producer was bold enough, or ingenious enough, to try one.

Symptomatic of this new era was the re-emergence, shortly after World War Two, of the bitch heroine, In a sense, the success of Double Indemnity made this predictable. But also, in a sense, the Production Code made her inevitable. If audiences were eager for greater realism on the screen, and if the Code saw to it that no nice girl swore, wore revealing cos-tumes or enjoyed pre- or extramarital relations, then clearly this left quite a large area open for the bad girl to maneuver in. Suddenly, in films such as Leave Her to Heaven, The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, The Postman Always Kings Twice, Dead Reckoning and Mildred Pierce, the bad girl advanced from a secondary character to screen center. She dominated not only the story but the men in the story, generally using her sex as the whip that brought them to heel. And not coincidentally, the actresses who played her included some of the biggest then in the business--Barbara Stanwyck, Lana Turner, Gene Tierney, Lizabeth Scott, Joan Crawford and the perdurable Bette Davis. One can never forget Davis, as the cheating wife in Beyond the Forest, slashing lipstick over her ravaged face at the climax of that film, preparing once more to barter her sex for one last fling in the big city 50 miles away; or Ava Gardner, as the slinky demimondaine who euchres Burt Lancaster into a life of crime in The Killers.

How did these sexy witches slip past the Johnston Office? Gershon Legman, writing of their literary counterparts, suggests a partial explanation. In his essay on "The Bitch Heroine," he observes: "Understand that the bitch heroine has no sex. She thinks she has a great deal of sex, in which error her creators and consumers foolishly accompany her.... Inevitably she is described as ravishing and beautiful. Her breasts and genitals are commented upon in highly calorific terms. But in actual fact she is dead from the neck down." If in the literary world the bitch heroine could rise triumphant over the bodies of broken men, however, the moviemakers saw to it that she invariably paid a full and bitter price for her willful behavior. In keeping with the Code's "law of compensating values"--a law that since it was postulated has ingeniously permitted producers to have their cake and eat it, too--she generally ended up not merely dead from the neck down, but dead all over. While she lived, though, she flaunted a semblance of sex that no Code-abiding heroine could rival, much less surpass; and her mounting popularity posed a threat to the Code itself.

What further undermined the supremacy of the Code was the wholesale importation of foreign films in the years after World War Two. Released by distributors who were independent of the Motion Picture Association, they went into a growing chain of art houses across the country that operated free of any pledge to show only Code-approved pictures. (When the chips were down, early in the Fifties, an extraordinary number of pledged theater owners blithely ignored their Code commitment in order to get their hands on profitable product, both domestic and foreign.) Although the full story of the impact of the foreign films on the American market is the subject of our next installment, one aspect of it remains for this. As the Code was weakened or ignored, the Legion of Decency, the American Legion and similar pressure groups, as well as local censor bodies, became correspondingly more active in attacking those new concepts of morality that were beginning to make their way into the movie houses, but which remained anathema to them. In 1947 the American Legion waged a vigorous and altogether successful campaign to drive Charlie Chaplin's mordant and bitterly antimilitarist Monsieur Verdoux from the screen. The Legion professed to be shocked by its "immoral" treatment of the Bluebeard theme; but its leaflets and placards left no doubt that, through his film, the Legion was striking at the "un-American" Chaplin himself. Having tasted first blood, the American Legion remained eagerly on the alert for more. The Legion of Decency also redoubled its efforts at this time. Father Patrick J. Masterson, executive secretary of the Legion of Decency, reported in August 1949 that "the percentage of films containing objectionable materials has increased from more than 15 percent in 1945-1946 to better than 25 percent today." Partly, he admitted, this was due to the influx of foreign films, of which his organization had found 52 percent objectionable since the previous November. "But," he went on, "domestic production is also deteriorating, with almost 20 percent of today's domestic films considered to contain substantially morally objectionable elements. This is the highest figure in the history of the Legion." Local censorship had reached the point where, as Betty Davis put it, "Anyone who attempts to do something that hasn't been previously tested and approved soon finds out that you can't do tills, because Mr. Binford [the notorious chief of censorship in Memphis, Tennessee] or somebody else won't approve."

Although the American film industry had always been strangely reticent about standing up for its rights in the courts, studio backs began to stiffen when Southern censors sought to bar such films as Pinky, Lost Boundaries and a Hal Roach Our Gang comedy--all antisegregation-ist, at least by implication--from local screens. Industry lawyers appealed and won, establishing a precedent that was to be pursued far more vigorously by the distributors of foreign films in the Fifties. But the final blow to the Code itself came from the most unexpected of sources--television. A dark cloud on the movie horizon at the end of the War, by the end of the decade TV had swallowed up better than half of Hollywood's weekly customers. As the moviemakers turned to the Fifties, they realized that as a matter of sheer survival, they would have to create new kinds of entertainment for the big screens that people could not possibly find on their small screens in the living room. For most producers, this meant but one thing--a greater emphasis on sex than television would tolerate. And if they had to defy their own Production Code to do it, many film makers were prepared-- even eager--to face that contingency.

patriotic pinups snared the Screen with anti-axis Sadism, then post-war american movies began defying the code with more explicit sexuality

In their next installment of "The History of Sex in Cinema," authors Knight and Alpert turn their attention to the films of the Forties in Europe, where Wartime Nazi censorship suppressed sex in cinema--except for anti-Semitic propaganda purposes--until the Liberation, which emboldened Europe's film makers to erotic realism.