The History of Sex in Cinema

By 1950, Hollywood had become painfully aware that it was no longer the principal purveyor of entertainment to the American public. That dubious honor now belonged to the burgeoning television industry, and it became crystal-clear to even the most myopic film tycoon that, as television antennas sprouted across the land, box-office takes from the cinemas were shrinking accordingly. For a time it appeared that the magic box in the parlor would provide some rival sexual titillation, too--at least until the new industry adopted regulatory practices of its own. Millions of early male viewers ogled the extensive cleavage of Dagmar and Faye Emerson, while housewives thrilled to the unctuous accents of a chap called The Continental, who invited female viewers to visit his luxurious bachelor apartment and sample the delightful preliminaries to what was, presumably, a vicarious seduction.

The reaction in Hollywood was at first dismay and then panic. Huge backlogs of old films were sold off in an effort to balance the financial statements, and when these appeared on the home screens, fewer people than ever were willing to pay hard cash for the not-too-dissimilar stuff in the theaters. The neighborhood moviehouse gave way to the drive-in, mainly because necking privileges were included in the price of admission. Hollywood cut back on its production, from an average of 400 feature films a year to fewer than 200. Some of the favorite stars of the Forties were given their walking papers in the Fifties and, when the studios virtually ceased their star-building programs, took to making monstrous monetary demands for their services. The post-War tax structure favored the independent contractor, whether a star, a producer, a writer or a director. Tax lawyers and agents became part of the Hollywood power establishment. Symbolically, the most lordly studio head of all, L. B. Mayer, was forced into retirement in 1951, signaling the demise of the studio system as it had flourished for 30 years.

A radical change in the content of motion pictures probably would have occurred in any event, for the industry Production Code, long the arbiter of cinema morality, clearly had lost its effectiveness by the end of the Forties. But now a rash of independent producers rose up to challenge the studio assembly-line procedures and, while more or less hand tooling their pictures, insisted on control of content, too. The Federal Government had already helped their cause when, in 1948, antitrust rulings were handed down--ending the practice of block booking (by which studios were able to foist whole-year schedules of as-yet-unproduced films on company-controlled exhibitors), divorcing exhibition from production and, almost incidentally, granting motion pictures a degree of freedom unknown since the Supreme Court in 1915 had ruled that they were not entitled to constitutional guarantees of free speech. When the Supreme Court gave its ruling on "divorcement" of theaters in 1948, Justice William O. Douglas wrote, in his majority opinion: "We have no doubt that moving pictures, like newspapers and radio, are included in the press whose freedom is guaranteed by the First Amendment."

No sooner had the new decade begun than the clamor for more "mature" film fare grew louder and shriller. One large target was the system of taboos embodied in the Production Code. Critic Gilbert Seldes, in his The Great Audience (1950), charged that Hollywood had hastened its own decline by alienating millions of Americans beyond the age of 30 through its insipid handling of love, sex, marriage and divorce. Sam Goldwyn, long a successful and ruggedly independent producer, joined the attack from within the industry. He attacked not only the Code but the combined forces of local, state and religious censorship. "Most of our pictures," he declared in language relatively free of Goldwynisms, "have little if any real substance. Our fear of what the censors will do keeps us from portraying life as it really is. We wind up with a lot of empty little fairy tales that do not have much relation to anything." The pious Code document withstood these assaults for the first half of the decade, but it became, so to speak, more negotiable. The sorely beset film industry was willing to try any nostrum to get audiences back into the theaters, and when it occurred to executives that "maturity" in pictures included more liberality in the treatment of sex, they were suddenly anxious to grow up.

Sunset Boulevard, made by the talented team of Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder and released early in 1950, helped set the new mood. Told against a then-contemporary Hollywood background, this mordant film resucitated that all-but-forgotten star of the Twenties, Gloria Swanson. In a role tailored to her age and still-svelte appearance, she appeared as a faded queen of the silent cinema who still nurses her illusions of glory. Trapped in her web of decayed grandeur and clammy sex is an unemployed young screenwriter who finds it temporarily advantageous to share the former star's sumptuous bed. With a sardonic wink at the Code's insistence on compensatory punishment for sin, Brackett and Wilder had the young man (William Holden) tell his sorry tale (as an off-screen narrator) while floating face down in the star's swimming pool, shot dead by her after he has dared to trample on her illusions. Later in the year, writer-director Joseph L. Mankiewicz took the Broadway theater apart with some of the most corrosive and brittle dialog yet to be heard on the American screen, in All About Eve. Mankiewicz showed a sweet-faced and supposedly "sincere" ingènue (Anne Baxter) using any means, sexual included, to claw her way to dramatic stardom and to supplant an established star who has lost her physical appeal (Bette Davis) in the same process. Sex unaccompanied by wiles or brains was symbolized, ironically, in the as-yet-unfamiliar person of Marilyn Monroe, who appeared as the mistress of an august but lecherous theater critic (George Sanders). The few lines she was given to speak were in a groove, however, that was later to become familiar to the world. During a fancy opening-night party, she asks a passing servant with a tray, "Oh, waiter, may I have a drink?" Sanders explains to her that the man she has addressed is not a waiter but a butler. "But I couldn't say, 'Oh, butler,'" Marilyn responds. "Suppose there was somebody named Butler at the party?" Sanders manfully consoles himself for her verbal ineptitude by concentrating on the entrancing cleft made by Marilyn's bosom as it overflows her tight white-satin evening dress.

That Hollywood was growing up--not without censorial pains--was made further apparent the next year by George Stevens' film rendering of Dreiser's cumbersome, powerful novel, An American Tragedy. Retitling the early-Twenties work A Place in the Sun and making it contemporary, Stevens managed to deal realistically with such once-ticklish subject matter as an illicit affair (between the late Montgomery Clift and Shelley Winters), an unwanted pregnancy, an attempt at abortion and a young man's unwillingness to give up his chances for love and success (embodied in a young society girl played by Elizabeth Taylor) by marrying the factory girl he has impregnated. While he is technically innocent of murder, the culpability for the pregnant girl's death by drowning is his. When he is sent to the electric chair, it is clearly society that is being indicted by Stevens for the tragedy. Shrewd editing and fluid directorial technique proved eloquent enough to convey the full impact of the theme even when the dialog became circumspect, as in the scene in which Shelley Winters sees a doctor in the hope he (text continued on page 171) will help her abort her pregnancy. It was the first time that any major studio--Paramount, in this case--had dealt with the subject. In contrast with the drabness of the girl's plight, Stevens used huge close-ups of Clift and Miss Taylor, amid scenes of luxury, to indicate their passionate yearning for each other.

This work by Stevens, regarded as an artistic triumph, encountered no censorial opposition. Such was not the case with A Streetcar Named Desire, released by Warner Bros. about the same time. Before its production, Joseph Breen, then the Code administrator, had warned against filming the successful play, filled as it was with the perversities of Tennessee Williams' sex-haunted world. When Warners ignored the warning and backed the production, Breen advised the producer, Charles Feldman, that the play's content, rife with intimations of homosexuality and nymphomania, and including an exceedingly violent rape scene, would require stringent revision. Homosexuality, he stated, was not mentionable in the American cinema, and the rape scene, in which the brutish Stanley Kowalski violates his sister-in-law Blanche DuBois, while his wife is having his child in a hospital--so crucial to the tragic story--would have to be toned down.

Elia Kazan, who had also directed the play, and Williams, as the screen adapter, were confident they could conform to the Code provisions--if they would give a little--while preserving the essential nature of the original. As one concession, Williams agreed to substitute the term "unmanliness" to indicate the homosexuality of Blanche's former husband; her own nymphomania stems from the shock of learning about his preference for men, and from his suicide. Williams also agreed to relinquish several "damns" and "hells" in the script. But he could not stomach Breen's incessant attacks on the all-important rape scene.

He wrote to Breen: "Streetcar is an extremely and peculiarly moral play, in the deepest and truest sense of the term ... The rape of Blanche by Stanley is a pivotal, integral truth in the play, without which the play loses its meaning ... the ravishment of the tender, the sensitive, the delicate, by the savage and brutal forces of modern society." Not only would the scene not be sacrificed, Williams insisted, but he and Kazan would fight with every means at their disposal to protect the integrity of the work. The Face on the Cutting Room Floor, by Murray Schumach, from which the above letter excerpt is borrowed, details Breen's seeming capitulation to Williams and Kazan and then his subsequent petty hacking away at other items in the script that he deemed objectionable. But finally the film was completed and was revealed to be a signal Hollywood achievement, aided in great measure by Marlon Brando's magnetic performance as Stanley Kowalski and Vivien Leigh's as the tremulous Blanche. Kim Hunter's portrayal of Stella, Kowalski's wife, revealed a young woman willing to pardon a husband's crudity in return for the evident physical satisfactions he provided; it proved to be of Academy Award caliber. Such was the stature of the original play that Code interference was not altogether ruinous, although most critics agreed that the Broadway version had been considerably franker.

But now entered the Catholic Legion of Decency, and it was largely owing to a letter written by Kazan to The New York Times in late 1951, and published in a Sunday edition, that the public was able to learn some astonishing facts about the devious workings of Catholic attempts at censorship and studio cooperation therein:

Warner Bros, and Charles K. Feldman, who jointly produced Streetcar, had shown courage in purchasing a fine and unusual play. They had been extremely cooperative and exceptionally generous throughout the making of the picture. ... By last summer the picture was finished. We had received the approval of the Breen Office, certifying that it conformed to the requirement of the picture industry's moral code. Previews were behind us. The last cuts had been agreed upon. Streetcar was booked into Radio City Music Hall, and I was in Hollywood once more, at work on another picture, for another studio.

Then I heard that Warners had canceled the booking. Then one day, quite by accident, I learned that the cutter who had worked with me on Streetcar had been sent to New York. I began to ask questions. After delays and evasions, which are significant only because of the nervousness they betrayed, I received reluctant answers. An executive of Warners was kind enough to explain to me, at least in part, what was going on: Warners had learned that the Legion of Decency was about to give the picture a C or "Condemned" rating. This would mean that people of the Roman Catholic faith would be instructed not to see it.

The studio's reaction was one of panic. They had a sizable investment in the picture, and they at once assumed that no Catholic would buy a ticket. They feared further that theaters showing the picture would be picketed, might be threatened with boycotts of as long as a year's duration if they dared to show it, that priests would be stationed in lobbies to take down the names of parishioners who attended. I was told that all these things had happened in Philadelphia when a picture with a C rating was shown there, and, further, that the rating was an invitation for every local censor board in the country to snipe at a picture, to require cuts or to ban it altogether.

... The Legion of Decency did not want to appear as censors. They simply view finished work and pronounce their verdict. As nearly as I could gather, Warners were begging to be told what changes might be made in order to avoid the dreaded rating, while the Legion repeated it was not theirs to censor, but only to say if the picture was decent for Catholic eyes and ears. But of course if a new version were submitted, they could not refuse to rule upon it ...

I decided to get to New York as fast as I could. Here I was introduced to a prominent Catholic layman, who informed me that he himself, giving time and thought and great care to the matter, had suggested the cuts in my picture. His presence was at the invitation of Warner Bros., and he had striven to bridge between the picture's artistic achievement ... and "the primacy of the moral order" as interpreted by himself, in conformity with the Legion's standards. There had been no overt involvement of the Legion, which had then passed the cut version.

Kazan had stumbled upon a method of cooperation between studio heads and the Legion of Decency that was hardly unique. In fact, as independent production gathered momentum in Hollywood and the studios were more and more relegated to the financing, distribution and publicity functions of motion-picture making, it became relatively common practice for the studios to write into their contracts with producers, clauses that made those producers responsible for both a Code Seal and no worse than a B rating from the Legion of Decency; otherwise, severe financial penalties would ensue Thus, in cases where a B rating was in doubt, it made good economic sense to call in Legion liaison people, after the "final" cut, to make certain that a B rating would be forthcoming and, if not, what sort of cutting would do the trick.

The suggested Catholic cuts in the case of Streetcar turned out to be relatively minor, taking away about four minutes from the "completed" film. According to Kazan, they ranged from "a trivial cut of three words, 'on the mouth' (following the words 'I would like to kiss you softly and sweetly') to a recutting of the wordless scene in which Stella comes down the stairway to Stanley after a quarrel." The recutting of this scene eliminated a piece of music as well, and it was explained to Kazan that both the close shots and the music made the girl's relationship to her husband "too carnal." Kazan could only rage impotently at the mutilations done to his film, and it was perhaps due to his effrontery in revealing to the influential New York Times readership the nature of the relationship between Hollywood and the Legion of Decency that he was later to incur, when he made Baby Doll, the full force of Catholic wrath.

• • •

It remained for Otto Preminger, the intransigent Viennese-born director and producer, to pose the first effective challenge of both Code and Legion power. Under the aegis of United Artists, a distribution firm that harbored a large clique of independent film makers, Preminger brought the long-running Broadway comedy The Moon Is Blue to the screen in 1953. The saucy little story had to do with a stage-struck newcomer to New York City (Maggie McNamara) encountering two competing would-be seducers (William Holden and David Niven) and blandly disarming both with her frank attitude toward sex, coupled with a firm resolve that any real action would first require a marriage license. By the end of the film, the sorely frustrated William Holden is willing to pay the price. On Broadway the F. Hugh Herbert play had been regarded as innocuous, but the same material on the screen was denied a Code Seal and branded with a C rating by the Legion. Preminger had decided to keep in the script (knowing, of course, that he would reap censorial disapproval and consequent publicity by so doing) dialog containing the words "seduce," "pregnant" and "professional virgin"--the last term aptly describing the type of girl played by Miss McNamara. The Code forbade the use of such words, said the Code administration, and therefore no Seal. The Legion had a more sweeping objection to the film, charging that it "seriously offends and tends to deny or ignore Christian standards of morality and decency, and dwells upon suggestiveness in situations and dialog."

United Artists, run by a lively and brainy group of directors that then included Arthur Krim and Max Youngstein, was aware that foreign films, much franker than American films on the whole, were intriguing the adult section of the American movie public as never before. They felt that this audience could hardly object to so innocuous a film as The Moon Is Blue. When Preminger decided to fight back, United Artists took the highly unusual step of releasing the film without a Seal. The Moon Is Blue went on to rack up an even greater gross than had originally been expected, although, if the customers had anticipated a bacchanalia on the screen, they were sadly disappointed. And Miss McNamara, attractive as she was, proved something less than a sex bomb. But as a result, both the Code and the Legion's C rating suffered some merited ridicule. Nearly ten years later, in 1962, the Motion Picture Association backtracked and gave The Moon Is Blue a Seal on the occasion of its rerelease. By then, there was much stronger sexual stuff on the screen for them to worry about.

In 1954, however, when Howard Hughes released The French Line, starring busty Jane Russell, there were still limits of sexual acceptability. The Code and the Legion again worked hand in hand. At issue this time was Miss Russell's celebrated bump-and-grind dance, made more vivid by a provocative costume with several peekaboo cutouts. Bosley Crowther reported in The New York Times that "There is no mistaking that the aim toward which the whole creation moves is merely that of calling attention to Miss Russell's avoirdupois." Miss Russell thought so, too. She complained to the press that her dance was made to appear indecent because of the camera focus upon her thighs and midsection during the dance. When, this time, several theater circuits refused to book The French Line, Hughes edited out some of the offending footage in order to qualify for a Seal. He got it in 1955, but by then the critical hatchet jobs on the preponderantly dull movie had already sent it into oblivion, and opponents of censorship felt that such shoddy material hardly merited a crusade on its behalf.

The expunging of footage likely to offend censors and Catholic Legionnaires was on occasion done without prior prodding. Young Stanley Kubrick, for example, hoping to make his mark in bold and independently financed moviemaking, included in Killer's Kiss, his second feature film, a more than ordinarily realistic bedroom sequence; but when United Artists bought the film for distribution, the sequence went the way of all such flesh. In the case of God's Little Acre, adapted from the gamy Erskine Caldwell novel, the potentially offending material was not even filmed. It was staged later for still-photo publicity uncoverage in which Aldo Ray, enacting a tableau from the novel's pages--not the scenario--literally tears a dress from Tina Louise's torso and rips it to shreds during a fit of sexual pique; but audiences saw no such thing in the laundered film. Nor were expectant moviegoers privileged to view Ava Gardner naked as the Duchess of Alba, Goya's celebrated lover and nude model in The Naked Maja. United Artists flacks seized the opportunity to promote both the film and the fine arts by reproducing the classic painting and sending it around as a postcard mailer. Officials of the Post Office Department, trained to equate nudity with obscenity, attempted (unsuccessfully) to bar the reproduction from the mails. During the Fifties, American moviemakers also began to turn out nude and non-nude versions of some of their movies, reversing the familiar now-you-see-it-now-you-don't ploy of foreign film producers: covering up their female stars for American audiences and unveiling them to the rest of the world. In either case, it was the American public that wound up with the "safe" version. One such picture, Cry Though, a story of Puerto Rican gang life in New York, featured John Saxon and Linda Cristal in some steamy bedroom doings. For domestic consumption, Miss Cristal was seen in a modest nightgown, but the export version of the same scene showed her in a transparent negligee, and totally topless in a horizontal clinch with Saxon. In the European version of The Angry Hills, a story of wartime Greece, Robert Mitchum is seen eying a barebreasted belly dancer in a smoky bistro. As shown in the United States, her undulating assets were demurely haltered. Similarly, in The Ambassador's Daughter, an American film shot on location in Paris, a night-club revue is shown; for the American public, the chorines were modestly brassiered, but for sophisticated Europeans they were shown topless.

If the American film industry through its M. P. A. A. continued to "reassure" the public that the letter and spirit of the Code would remain in force, its new mood of boldness was apparent in the kinds of stories bought for the screen. One notable choice was James Jones' lengthy, rutty novel, From Here to Eternity. Laced with four-letter words, uncompromising in its revelations of peacetime Army behavior in Hawaii, it explored the brothels of Honolulu and detailed a steamy affair between an enlisted man and the wife of his commanding officer. The majority of the nation's literary critics hailed the novel as a more earthy extension of the Hemingway tradition, and it soon reached the heights of best-sellerdom. But it gave offense, too, particularly to Life magazine, which harshly attacked it in an editorial headed "From Here to Obscenity." Columbia's hardheaded Harry Cohn, although hardly a judge of literary merit, nevertheless purchased the book for filming, and an able team comprised of producer Buddy Adler, screenwriter Dan Taradash and director Fred Zinneman went to work, with the aim of preserving the book's emotional force while conquering what were bound to be Breen Office objections. These came quickly.

Breen, first of all, was horrified by the affair between the enlisted man and his commander's wife, played by Bun Lancaster and Deborah Kerr. Breen informed Cohn that this section was handled "without any recognition of the immorality of their relationship. ... It will be necessary to have a strong voice for morality [in the script] by which their immoral relationship will be denounced and the proper moral evaluation of it expressed." Taradash went to discuss this point personally with Breen and, irritated to the verge of explosion, asked: "What do you want me to do? Have her walk around with a sign saying, 'I have sinned!'?" The compromise agreed upon, finally, was that Deborah Kerr would mention to Lancaster that their relationship was wrong, and that she would tell her unsavory officer husband that they deserved each other.

Taradash, backed up by Zinneman, refused to put more clothing on Miss Kerr during her willing seduction by Lancaster on the sands of Waikiki. Lancaster wore bathing trunks in the scene, while she wore a white bathing suit that looked fleshy in the evening light. To assuage the supposed shock to audience sensibilities, Breen thought it would be advisable for Miss Kerr or the rugged Lancaster to "put on a beach robe or some other type of clothing before going into an embrace." The position of Taradash and Zinneman was that wearing anything at all in an embrace of such passion would prove protective encumbrance enough. They won their point; and when, in the final print, the waves rolled in and crashed and foamed on the sands, there was little doubt for the audience that a grand climax had been reached by the two lovers.

Taradash later said, after having been forced into a series of compromises: "I suppose a screenwriter subconsciously adds a special protective layer to his mental and artistic soul when he undertakes the writing of such a film." As of 1953, when the film was released, screenwriters still had to resort to thinly veiled subterfuges to keep all but the deaf and blind from knowing what was really going on. Thus it was that Jones' Honolulu brothel, where a lonely soldier, Montgomery Clift, meets resident "hostess" Donna Reed, had to be converted into a "club" where soldiers could dance with hostesses and hire rooms upstairs for more intimate conversation. In the opinion of Breen, audiences would easily accept the validity of such an institution in the wide-open Honolulu of 1941, and would accept, too, the notion that any soldier would gladly use his hard-earned pittance to pay for a room where he could have a chat with a strange girl.

Subterfuges such as these not only occasioned amusement among the sophisticated and perhaps bewildered the innocent, but they certainly marred the realism of many a film. They could also provide a special sort of fun, however, when managed by a masterly hand such as Alfred Hitchcock's. That sly, portly director enjoyed hoodwinking the censors, and he reached the apogee of his merriment in To Catch a Thief, a colorful 1955 tale of Riviera intrigue and innuendo that starred the glamorous pair Grace Kelly and Cary Grant. Grant plays a suave, reformed cat burglar who must apprehend a slippery jewel robber in order to establish his own innocence; he is also intent on thawing out a very rich and seemingly icy American, played by Miss Kelly. Hitchcock first set his playful mood by having the duo enjoy a picnic lunch. "Do you want a breast or a leg?" Grace asks Cary, presumably referring to a hamper of chicken parts. Locking his gaze significantly to her own counterparts, Cary replies politely, "I'll leave the choice to you." Later he gets the opportunity to enjoy a fuller repast with Grace in her hotel suite. They are alone, Miss Kelly has thawed out delightfully, and they share a love seat. Outside, a fireworks display is lighting up the Riviera sky. As the two engage in ever-more-fervent embraces, Hitchcock intersperses cuts of the firefilled heavens. Finally, when it appears as though Grace and Cary are going to make out on the screen, Hitchcock focuses his camera on the most spectacular pyrotechnical burst of all. The screen is filled with the rocket's red glare, and the next we see of Grace and Cary, of course, is several hours later. Oddly, this tongue-in-cheek symbolism caused nary a murmur of complaint, although this may have been due to the fact that Geoffrey Shurlock, who had by then replaced Joseph Breen as Code administrator, was a more understanding censor.

During much of the Fifties, Hollywood continued to employ a virtual catalog of symbolistic effects, the assumption being that the knowing would grasp their meaning, while the naive would remain blissfully ignorant. The cut, the dissolve and the fade-out were useful for more than film punctuation. A screen hero had merely to look longingly into a girl's eyes; hers would melt submissively, and a fade-out would establish for the audience the resolution of the tender moment. David Lean, for example, used Hitchcock's fireworks motif, more seriously in this case, to show the consummation of an affair between Katharine Hepburn and Rossano Brazzi in Summertime. No less familiar were such pictorial devices as smoldering logs suddenly blazing up in a fireplace (entry achieved), waves crashing on a beach (climax, as in From Here to Eternity) and guttering candles (sexual completion). When, in Not as a Stranger, director Stanley Kramer caused a stallion to rear up and whinny as Robert Mitchum responded to the provocative glance of Gloria Grahame, audiences, long indoctrinated to such devices, knew that Mitchum was about to prove his potency to Miss Grahame in no uncertain terms. The subsequent fade-out, of course, only gave more emphasis to what was already laughably clear. "Kramer," said an associate of his, "could have shown Bob and Gloria in a bedroom, their clothes half off, but in this case he thought the stallion would be more artistic."

Not always was the symbolism consciously intended, according to Alfred Towne in Neurotica, a psychoanalytically oriented periodical of the early Fifties. "The Western film and its hero," he wrote, "is fast becoming America's number-one candidate for the cultural couch." He saw in the gun, the six-shooter, "a barefaced potency symbol," and the plots were "fantastic in their blatant homosexuality." The Western hero played by John Wayne, he went on, was a "perennial father surrogate." And he saw, too, "an ever-clarifying pattern of rejection of women," as revealed in the all-male patronage of frontier bars, the phallic whiskey bottles, the guns ever ready for action, the low status of the "bad" women in the saloons, which is to say, the sexually willing women, the worship of the "good," or sexually unwilling woman from Boston or Philadelphia. But Towne's perhaps overly Freudian view was based more on the Westerns of the Forties and the television series of the Fifties. In the face of TV competition, the Western, too, had begun to take on mature characteristics, and reached cinematic high points in such films as High Noon and Shane, in which the guns used were less phallic than social in their implications. (On the other hand, adult Westerns were in one case, at least, more adult for foreign audiences than for Americans. In The Indian Fighter, starring Kirk Douglas, an Indian maid, played by Elsa Martinelli, takes time out for a nude dip in the river. Americans saw the scene in a soft-focus long shot, but foreign screens featured the same sequence in eye-filling close-up.)

Ironically, as the sexual liberation of the screen advanced--less often by leaps and bounds, it must be admitted, than by little hops and skips--Hollywood became more repressive politically. A series of Congressional investigations during the late Forties and early Fifties into supposed Communist proclivities of the film capital resulted in studio black lists, all the more baneful because they were carefully guarded even from those they kept from pursuing their professional careers. Screenwriters, directors and stars (among them, Marsha Hunt and Lionel Stander) were banned from further Hollywood employment either because they had refused to cooperate with the committees or because they had been "named" by those who did. Some of Hollywood's most noted creative talents--writer-producer Carl Foreman and directors Joseph Losey and Jules Dassin--expatriated themselves and forged new careers abroad, while others, such as writers Ben Maddow and Dalton Trumbo, stayed at home and adopted pseudonyms, sometimes with the willing connivance of their producers. This shameful era in Hollywood history produced some rich contretemps, as when "Robert Rich" was given an Academy Award for the screenplay of The Brave One. No one appeared to claim the statuette, but it was widely bruited about that Dalton Trumbo, then on every studio black list, had written the prize-winning script. And when the enormously profitable The Bridge on the River Kwai was released in 1957, producer Sam Spiegel had the gall to claim that he had written the script with author Pierre Boulle, when actually Carl Foreman and Michael Wilson (both black-listed) had done the impressive job.

As independent production waxed and studio-sponsored film making waned, the large companies were enabled to enforce their timorous attitudes, both political and sexual, through their control over the financing and distribution aspects of the industry. Fear of economic reprisal, through boycott, censorship and Church condemnation, made the financial heads of the industry wary of any sudden breaching of the long-established patterns of movie behavior. Yet even in this powerful rearguard circle, there was recognition that times and morals were undergoing profound change. Late in 1955, the Motion Picture Association published a booklet, Movies and Self-Regulation, which stated: "Widely read and reputable magazines carry reports of social behavior that is greatly at variance with previously accepted standards. These ... articles ... are now part of the everyday reading habit of millions. It must be said as emphatically as possible that the U. S. motion-picture industry has strongly resisted the trend to break down accepted standards. We are not at the head of this parade, nor indeed in the middle of it. We are, in fact, far behind and are proud of it."

Not long after this prideful announcement, there was some discernible backtracking. Geoffrey Shurlock, who had replaced Breen as the Code administrator, promulgated a new concept for judging characters in movies whose behavior did not conform to "accepted moral standards." He informed the studios that henceforth severe punishment would not always be the lot of those who strayed from the straight and narrow. In some cases, according to Shurlock, it would be punishment enough for sinners to "suffer remorse." The new concept could be seen in action in Gaby, a 1956 MGM film that starred Leslie Caron as a girl who becomes sexually soiled after she assumes that her finacé was killed during the invasion of Normandy. She had refused to sleep with him before their marriage, but after the false news of his death, is moved to provide easy comfort for several lonely soldiers. In an older version of the same story, the girl committed suicide when she learned her finacé was safe after all. In Gaby, however, after suffering a dollop of Shurlock remorse, she married the returnee.

But Shurlock perhaps deliberately denied a Seal to Otto Preminger's screen version of The Man with the Golden Arm, which clearly flouted the Code injunction against the making of any picture dealing with drug addiction. On this occasion, the Code administration and the Legion of Decency took opposing positions. The Legion's B rating of the picture indicated that Catholic authorities were also taking cognizance of the change in the moral and social climate. Not only that; drug addiction and the narcotics traffic had become one of the nation's paramount social problems. Preminger's boldness was revealed less in the film than in the act of making it. Nelson Algren's fine novel had ended with the sad hero, Frankie Machine, unable to shake the monkey on his back. However, Frank Sinatra, as Frankie in the film, not only managed to end his dependency on the needle but got the luscious new star, Kim Novak, for his cold-turkey pains. The knit dress Miss Novak wore while sharing Frankie's dingy hotel room, her bosom swinging free of any hampering brassiere, was probably designed to act as a tonic and support to the sweating junkie during his agonies. United Artists again backed Otto Preminger, went ahead with the film's distribution and, to show its contempt for the puerile Code, left the M. P. A. A. Hastily, that association convened a special committee of studio production chiefs to consider changes in the Code, and late in 1956, a revised document appeared. The taboo on the depiction of the narcotics traffic was summarily removed. Other formerly forbidden topics got the green light, too, if accompanied by yellow caution signals. These included prostitution, abortion and miscegenation. Such ordinary profanity as "hell" and "damn" were allowed into the film vocabulary, if used with discretion. Darryl F. Zanuck, at Fox, hardly waited a moment before putting his rival story of drug addiction, A Hatful of Rain, into the production hopper.

The Supreme Court, meanwhile, was destroying much of the legal foundation upon which film censorship had been based. Hollywood, it is true, stayed mainly on the side lines during these key Court cases--most of them fought over foreign films--but eventually benefited from the refreshing atmosphere of liberalism. In a unanimous decision handed down in 1952, the Supreme Court did away with "sacrilege" as a basis for any state's banning of a film, thus permitting the showing of the Italian film The Miracle, and also declaring in its ruling that motion pictures were entitled to constitutional guarantees of free speech. Nevertheless, the Court seemed hesitant about ending the practice of film censorship in toto, aiming the above and subsequent decisions more at the vagueness of terminology in the various local and state statutes than at their hard core of repressiveness.

Thus, the Court cited only its previous ruling in The Miracle case when it reversed the New York State censors who had banned a French film, La Ronde, on the grounds that it was "immoral" and would "tend to corrupt morals." The New York State Court of Appeals had supported the state censorship board, stating, in addition, that La Ronde--a delightful film made by Max Ophuls from the classic Arthur Schnitzler stage piece--pandered to "base human emotions," and that it was a "breeding ground for sensuality, depravity, licentiousness and sexual immorality." Such terminology, according to the U. S. Supreme Court, was legally meaningless. Later, in 1959, the same body liberated a French version of Lady Chatterley's Lover, so that little but the dubious concept of obscenity was legally left to the state censors.

Not unexpectedly, state censorship withered and rotted on the vine. Ohio, in 1955, found its censorship statute to be illegal, in view of the Supreme Court rulings. Pennsylvania followed suit a year later, shortly to be joined by Massachusetts and Florida. Only four states--New York, Maryland, Kansas and Virginia--permitted film censorship to continue, but with greatly restricted latitude. New York State, generally a bellwether for the censoring flock, went so far in 1957 as to allow the showing of a nudist film, The Garden of Eden. The state's censors had banned it as "indecent." but the court of appeals found that it could not be banned lawfully, since it was not "obscene." Nudity itself, the court sensibly decided, was not "sexually impure or filthy." In 1959, the same film was cleared of charges not only of obscenity but of sexual suggestiveness by the Massachusetts supreme court. The film, detailing the innocent experiences of an elderly man, a young woman and a child in a nudist colony, had been shown in Fall River three years before and had been raided by the police. Several appeals later, Justice Arthur E. Whittemore, in his majority opinion for the state supreme court, wrote: "Members of the colony were shown in the nude, walking in the woods, bathing in the lake, lying on the shore and playing games. Except for several scenes in which men and women were shown naked to the waist, the pictorial representations of unclothed persons were views photographed from the rear.... We have no doubt that if this picture can be found obscene, it is only because it shows naked men and women together and in the presence of non nudists." The judge went on to say that such pictorial representation might be greatly offensive to many citizens, but, again, that offensiveness was not obsccenity. "There is nothing sexy or suggestive about it," he concluded. Rulings such as these created a curious double standard in the world of the nudie film--to be explored more fully in a later installment--in that exposure of buttocks and breasts was permissible, while the generative organs remained taboo. Despite the rulings, however, there was no wholesale lifting of the veil from girlish breasts and buttocks in American films of the Fifties--in marked contrast to the increasing exposure of the female form in European films of the same period. The growing permissiveness in Hollywood films tended to concentrate on negative, unattractive and unhappy expressions of the sexual drive. One might have thought that this very permissiveness would soon have led to the forthright display of nudity, but not so--thanks in large part to the abiding antisexuality of American society itself. Within this context, the perverse and horror-fringed sexuality of Tennessee Williams, for example, was allowable as long as restraints were exercised. Female nudity, however, was still viewed with special abhorrence by the forces of censorship, ever fearful that true erotic stimulation would incite audiences to unbridled licentiousness--despite the complete lack of evidence that anything of the kind would result. Even though previously outlawed themes and dialog were introduced with greater and greater frequency, the old moral values persisted in American films well into the Sixties.

Thus it was that captious local censorship continued to plague both Hollywood and foreign-film distributors. In Chicago, J. Ignatious Sheehan, a captain of police, operated as a censor with the support of five widows of police officers. When he refused to license, for a fee, the Frenchmade Game of Love, adapted from a famous Colette novel and dealing with the seduction of a 16-year-old boy by a woman more than twice his age, the resulting court case produced a revealing cross section of the captain's mentality. The opposing lawyer found that Sheehan had not continued his formal education beyond high school, that he seldom found time to open a book, that he attended neither the theater nor exhibits of art, and that, in fact, he had no special qualifications for judging the content or quality of motion pictures. The make-up of the Chicago board was changed soon after. In Atlanta, a lady censor, Mrs. Christine Gilliam, banned films and snipped away at others throughout the decade. During a network television interview on the subject of censorship, she remarked significantly: "I believe that the female figure unadorned is a sex symbol in our society, and I doubt very much if we want to arouse the sexual emotions of a mass audience all at one time in a theater." Such reasoning hardly endeared official censors to the public they supposedly represented, and, when forced out into the open, so limited were their moral horizons revealed to be and so psychologically suspect their prudery that censorship itself began to take on the connotation of a dirty word.

By the last half of the decade, the only major censorship force still operating with any degree of effectiveness was the Catholic Legion of Decency. Its rating system of A, B and C categories, as we have seen, acted as a brake on studio willingness to interpret the Code more liberally, most notably in the case of A Streetcar Named Desire. But sometimes it was not only to avoid the C condemnation that, as Judy Stone reported in Ramparts, the liberal Catholic monthly, "long letters went back and forth between producers and the Legion in which ideas and sentences were bargained over in negotiating sessions that did less than justice to the Legion's aim of safeguarding morality." The B, or "morally objectionable in part," rating could also damage a film's box-office chances, particularly in the case of a so-called "family film." Thus, when Fox embarked on its expensive production of the corn-fed Oklahoma!, it hardly expected to have this 1955 release branded with a B rating. At issue was the dream sequence in which the heroine, imagining herself to be a gambling-hall girl being pursued by the evil Jud, runs up a staircase. The Legion claimed the film made it implicit that she was running up to a brothel. Fox, still hoping for an A, or entirely clean bill of health, reshot the offending scene to indicate that the place--upstairs and down--was, indeed, a gambling hall. But no soap. The Legion now claimed the running girl was being pursued for lascivious purposes, and Oklahoma! had to make do with its B. Yet not all Catholics were docilely herded into houses showing only movies rated as innocuous. B- and C-rated movies came to connote raciness, consequently, and took on for many the enticing aura of forbidden fruit.

In 1956, the Legion made its most powerful effort to stem the tide of disobedience among Catholics, as well as to chasten Hollywood, with Elia Kazan and Tennessee Williams once more in the center of the storm. Under the aegis of Warner Bros., Kazan filmed the provocative Baby Doll from a short Williams play called Twenty-Seven Wagons Full of Cotton. Long before its release, the film was heralded by a huge billboard above the Victoria and Astor Theaters on Broadway. On this monster placard, running the entire length of a Manhattan block, was featured a full-color likeness of Carroll Baker, the Baby Doll of the title, reclining in a crib and sucking her thumb while clad only in a scanning slip. Miss Baker's sylphlike measurements were blown up for better scanning by the throngs to a lengthwise stretch of 145 feet and a height of 60 feet. For many weeks this gigantic symbol of child-woman sex tantalized the passing parade, vivid by day and illumined by night. As an advertising gimmick, the billboard was a stroke of near genius; but it undoubtedly also served as a goad to the smarting Legion of Decency, whose main offices were only a few short blocks away.

The film itself had been shot in New York, with location sequences done in the deep South, and had remained relatively free of studio pressures. In fact, Kazan at this time was promoting a rebellious movement away from the Hollywood production centers, in the hope of inspiring more outspoken realism in American film making. Already the movement had given birth to the Sidney Lumet--directed Twelve Angry Men and to Paddy Chayefsky's Marty, the latter directed by a refugee from television, Delbert Mann, and starring Ernest Borgnine as a lonely and love-starved Bronx butcher. Baby Doll was regarded as the chef-d'oeuvre of the movement. In addition to Miss Baker, playing a young bride who feels that her marriage to Archie Lee Meigham does not entitle him to his connubial rights until her 20th birthday has been reached, the film featured Karl Malden as Meigham and Eli Wallach as Vacarro, a cunning, handsome Sicilian who has been gradually gobbling up the independent cotton gins in his vicinity into his self-owned syndicate. Meigham, as the owner of an ancestral gin, still maintains his independence but is being put out of business by Vacarro. Driven to the verge of insane frustration by his wife's withholding of her charms and by his financial ruin, Meigham sets fire to Vacarro's syndicate gin, whereupon Vacarro determines to take his own revenge by seducing Baby Doll.

Two scenes in particular caused consternation among the Legion's committee of viewers. One, at the beginning of the film, shows Malden peeping at his delicious but still-virginal wife through a hole he has carved between his bedroom and hers. (Baby Doll sleeps in a crib not only out of retrogressive infantilism but because the department store has repossessed most of the furniture in Meigham's decayed mansion.) Even more unsettling to the Legion was a later scene in which Wallach is tête-à-tête with Baby Doll in a two-seater swing on Meigham's home grounds. The two are obviously up to something sexual, but just what is not made fully clear by Kazan's positioning of the camera. Wallach and Miss Baker are seen from the waist up; what happens from the waist down was left to the fervid speculations of the audience. These varied. There were those who swore that Wallach's hands were busy beneath Miss Baker's shift and that the scene must necessarily have ended--after the cut--with her total seduction. That Miss Baker was in the transports of erotic joy was left in little doubt. According to a critic for Films in Review, "Kazan shows us Carroll Baker panting and gasping with a sexual desire not hitherto depicted on the screen, but with dialog so rigged that it is impossible to know whether adultery actually occurred." Kazan's contention was--and certainly he was in a key position to know--that Vacarro merely tantalized Baby Doll.

Shurlock obviously accepted this contention, for a Code Seal was given Baby Doll, upon which the Catholic attack was mounted with full fury. Cardinal Spellman, of the New York archdiocese, just returned from a European tour, mounted the pulpit of St. Patrick's Cathedral during a solemn Sunday Mass and, after first voicing dismay over the recent Communist assault on the Hungarian people, announced that he was "further anguished by shocking news on the home front"--the news of Baby Doll's impending appearance in the nation's movie houses. "The revolting theme of this picture," he thundered, "and the brazen advertising promoting it constitute a contemptuous defiance of the natural law." All Catholics under his jurisdiction were ordered by him to stay away from the "evil" film on pain of sin.

Later it was revealed that the Cardinal had not yet seen the film at the time of his statement, a fact that caused considerable embarrassment to the Legion's cause. But he had. nevertheless, severely damaged Baby Doll's career at the box office--partly, perhaps, by the lack of Catholic patronage, and mainly because many exhibitors timidly decided not to test the Church's boycott powers and refrained from booking the film. Curiously, though, the Legion loosened its rating system after the Baby Doll incident. Ferment aimed at elasticizing Catholic moral rigidity toward the arts was taking place within the Church establishment itself. In 1957, the Legion announced some new categories. Its A rating was broken down into four subheadings and later used to give limited approval to such adult fare as Anatomy of a Murder, La Dolce Vita and Lolita. A-I was now morally unobjectionable for general patronage; A-II, morally unobjectionable for adults and adolescents; A-III, morally unobjectionable for adults; A-IV, morally unobjectionable for adults, with reservations. The B and C ratings were reserved for films blatant in their lack of "compensating moral values" and for those containing scenes of nudity. The Legion, in succeeding years, was to continue its revolution from within, eventually going so far as to change its name to The National Catholic Office for Motion Pictures. With the Legion in a sort of muttering retreat, with the Code revised, with American film makers less and less confined to the sound stages of Hollywood as they headed to the far places of the world in search of novelty and international success at the box office, the moral wraps were coming off with ever more rapidity and enthusiasm in American-made or -sponsored films. By the end of the Fifties, there were few remaining restrictions on the content of movies other than those self-dictated by reasons of taste or potential offensiveness.

• • •

In Hollywood, as the film industry slowly picked itself up and began to recover from the devastating blows dealt by television, a frenzied search for new stars was in progress. The most magnetic of these was Marilyn Monroe. On first emerging, however, Marilyn had to contend with the virtual abandonment by the studios of their star-building systems. In former days, the discovery of so ingratiating a mixture of sensuality and innocence would have resulted in three or four films within the year: but with business on the rocks and the divorcement of theaters a bitter fact, production schedules were severely cut back. In spite of this handicap, Marilyn flourished and became not only the decade's most charismatic and universally accepted sex symbol but one of the greatest of all time. The flame was ignited slowly, but it is not too much to say that it grew into a conflagration. The story of Marilyn Monroe, with its shockingly tragic ending, will be told more fully in a subsequent installment. She concerns us here primarily because of her revivifying effect on Hollywood in a time of near despair. She demonstrated that the public was ever ready to welcome new heroines and heroes of the screen, and she helped give impetus to a new crop of Hollywood hopefuls. As for Marilyn, after her first fantastic burst of success and public acclamation, she was less and less inclined to accept studio direction of her career and developed an independence of her own, thus leaving the way open for the discovery of new blonde bombshells. Among these were Jayne Mansfield, drafted as a substitute by Fox after Marilyn virtually went on strike; Mamie Van Doren, hired by Universal expressly to make up for that studio's lack of an MM; Kim Novak; and Carroll Baker, whose career suffered a reversal after her oral-erotic performance in Baby Doll.

Blondes, dumb or brainy, were not the only discoveries of the Fifties, by any means. In certain respects, although the blondes of the Fifties were a distinctly earthier variety than their counterparts of previous days, they could be regarded as belonging to an evolving Hollywood institution. Not so a male star such as Marlon Brando, whose evolution could be traced to the fertile imagination of Tennessee Williams; to the canny directorial ability of Elia Kazan; to a Stanislavsky-based system of acting training prevalent in New York; to his own vivid, explosive talent: and to a new and violent mood of rebelliousness among American youth.

Transferring his activities from the Broadway stage to Hollywood (first in The Men, as a paraplegic war veteran, then in A Streetcar Named Desire)--muttering, rampaging, seemingly guided only by his instincts, sometimes cruel, sometimes sullenly tender--Brando quickly became a symbol of what was termed the "shook-up generation." Emerging during a time of violence and uncertainty--the Korean War, the lowering of the Iron Curtain--he evoked extraordinary responses not only in American delinquents and European student existentialists but also in an older generation that condoned his unfettered behavior as a meaningful reaction to a sorry contemporary condition. So potent in their effects on Hollywood and so surprisingly well received were his slouching posture and simian scratchings that styles in leading men were refashioned. Established stars such as Gary Grant, James Stewart and Gary Cooper made way for him and moved up an age bracket. And behind Brando, as though waiting for the signal to be given, was a whole assortment of itchy young upstarts: James Dean, Sal Mineo and Elvis Presley, among others. Later followers such as Paul Newman and Rod Steiger (who first appeared in 1954 as Brando's brother in On the Waterfront) employed the Brando style, too, at first, then branched off into other acting directions.

The influence of the "Method" on Hollywood, particularly as interpreted by Elia Kazan and Lee Strasberg--who, bred in Broadway's Group Theater of the Thirties, helped form and direct the renowned and controversial Actors Studio in New York--had a direct bearing on the course of American film making. Oddly, the Method, designed primarily for actors and directors on the stage, proved most effective of all in films and on television. Actors trained in communicating with their own instincts as well as with a scriptwriter's lines were adept at creating an illusion of reality and behaving with a "natural" quality eminently well suited to the prevailing mood of realism. A generation of televisionbred writers and directors, also familiar with the Method--among them writers Paddy Chayefsky and Reginald Rose and directors Sidney Lumet, Delbert Mann and John Frankenheimer--moved into the film milieu and made their own impact. The "sweat-shirt" school of acting became dominant for a time in American moviemaking, until a negative reaction set in. Meanwhile, a whole new group of Method-trained movie stars was born, including such prestigious names as Anne Bancroft, Paul Newman. Eva Marie Saint. Ben Gazzara, Geraldine Page and Joanne Woodward. Miss Bancroft, it must be admitted, ran afoul of Hollywood casting in several films, and found herself, in Gorilla at Large (1954), playing a lady aerialist who swings tantalizingly over a gorilla's cage and eventually finds herself in his hairy arms. Retreating to Broadway, and winning acclaim, she emerged in far more challenging roles some years later.

Another of these stars, Bradford Dillman, was amazed, when he went to Hollywood in 1959, to come across an unnamed Hollywood practitioner of the Method developing variations not practiced at the home office in New York. "He'd get a boy and girl to strip to the waist while practicing a scene," Dillman confided to a reporter, "claiming it resulted in better emotional contact." The same teacher advised a female star who was to play a tart in a movie to pick up a sailor on the beach and sleep with him. The lady took his advice, and afterward she and the teacher reconstructed her experience in painstaking detail to see how it could best be applied to her movie role.

Almost mandatory in Method application was a prolonged familiarity with psychoanalysis. Soon Beverly Hills was honeycombed with psychiatrists' offices, and so heavily in demand were their services by actors that fees skyrocketed to previously unheard-of heights. If psychoanalysis did not always relieve the troubled psyches of stars and aspirants to stardom, it often enough did result in a lessening of inhibition, one result being that love scenes in American films grew noticeably more naturalistic. Even the bewitching Marilyn Monroe fell a fascinated victim of the Actors Studio and its Method, unveiling the first results of her indoctrination in Bus Stop, a tale of a pitiful bump-and-grinder picked up and befriended by a rodeo performer.

The results of the heady new acting doctrine were not always beneficial to films: the mumbling and scratching tended toward slowness of pace; but when well applied, they brought startling vividness to scenes and created almost terrifying convincingness. Brando himself virtually gave a course in the style in The Wild One, a 1954 Stanley Kramer film that portrayed Brando as the leader of an antisocial band of motorcycle-mounted hell raisers who, garbed in leather jackets, take over and terrorize a town until an aroused citizenry evicts the Nazilike delinquents. Brando perfectly expressed the origins of his behavior while being worked over by a group of outraged citizens. "My father could hit twice as hard," he taunted them.

Parents came in for perhaps more than their share of responsibility for the delinquency in many films of the Fifties. Both James Dean and Natalie Wood, for example, laid their rebelliousness in Rebel Without a Cause at their parents' doors, blaming the harmless middle-class conformists for their indulgence and lack of proper parental affection. Dean, somewhat Brandoesque as the leader of a group of misunderstood teenagers, sympathetically delineated a boy precociously given to drink, adept with a switchblade knife, and the winner of a game of "chicken," a dangerous diversion in which two young contestants aim their jalopies, in this case, at the edge of a cliff. First to jump from his careening car in justified panic is the loser and thenceforth "chicken" to his fellows. Natalie Wood, not yet the demi-semi-sex symbol she became later, acted as starter in the contest that killed Dean's rival. Teenage homosexuality was delicately hinted at in the same film; Sal Mineo seemed unhealthily attached to his hero, Dean. Soon Dean became even more of a teenage idol than his progenitor, Brando. Earlier, Elia Kazan had taken the youngster in charge for a principal role in East of Eden, adapted from the John Steinbeck best seller, in which Dean was seen as the son of a woman (Jo Van Fleet) who, after leaving her husband, becomes first a prostitute and then the madam of a bordello. Dean's last picture, Giant, cast him as a poor Texan who strikes oil and becomes vulgarly rich. In spite of the considerable range he revealed in these roles, young fans by the thousands wrote to compliment him on his ability to understand their strivings and rebellion. And when he was prematurely killed in California in his Porsche Spyder, teenagers all over the world went into deep shock and mourning.

The success of Dean and Brando sparked innumerable teenage-oriented films, ranging from such pseudo exposés as High School Confidential! to the far-out I Was a Teenage Werewolf, in which a teenager explained his beastly nighttime prowling to a sympathetic psychoanalyst. The most profitable (for the studios) teenage idol of all came along in the person of Elvis Presley, who first caught adolescent ears and eyes with his unique singing style, his guitar strumming and banging, and his patently copulatory torso gyrations. Conquering the record industry with his rock 'n' roll, Elvis marched upon Hollywood in 1956, appearing in such puerile efforts as Love Me Tender and Jailhouse Rock, and other stories of slender plot interspersed with Presley musical numbers, in which his bodily movements were toned down to conform to the restrictions imposed also upon female bump-and-grinders such as Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.

Certain producers in Hollywood, Ross Hunter among them, cannily realized that a host of potential filmgoers had remained immune to the Brando, Dean and Presley crazes, and took to developing a far, far different kind of star for employment in a rash of soap-operaish, opulently Technicolored tales and lushbudgeted comedies. Universal, a studio attempting to stick to its avowed formula of pap for the masses, almost cornered the market for fresh-faced newcomers, carefully building, among others, Tony Curtis, Rock Hudson and Sandra Dee, and refurbishing an older refugee from musicals, Doris Day. At other studios were to be found such lollipops as Tab Hunter, Troy Donahue and Pat Boone. If this group shared anything at all beyond a bland lack of expressiveness, it was their complete and utter sexlessness. And yet there were millions, young, middle-aged and old, who doted on them--obviously regressives who preferred the good old days of the movies. Ross Hunter also seized the chance to resuscitate the career of Lana Turner, whose reputation and box-officeability had been supposedly damaged by the scandal in which she became involved when her rebellious teenage daughter Cheryl stabbed to death her momma's rowdy lover, Johnny Stompanato. Starred in such saccharine tear jerkers as Imitation of Life--costumed, befurred and bejeweled gorgeously--Miss Turner demonstrated that star quality was not gone forever from Hollywood.

And there were many who jealously guarded their star status, changing as the times demanded. In 1953, the svelte Ava Gardner teamed with old star Clark Gable and new star Grace Kelly in Mogambo, a remake of the venerable Red Dust, to provide a caustic new brand of candor in dialog. Upon seeing an African bull elephant with ears wide and trunk aloft, she murmured to the ladylike Miss Kelly: "He reminds me of someone I know." Miss Gardner's sultry, shapely qualities were apotheosized in The Barefoot Contessa by Joseph L. Mankiewicz the following year. Mankiewicz' attack on the idle, feeble nobility hanging around southern European spas was symbolized by Miss Garadner's lusty--albeit plebeian--sexuality on the one hand, and on the other by the impotence of the rich Italian count who married her. More potent were Rossano Brazzi, spinster Katharine Hepburn's Italian inamorato in Summertime, and the poor Italian-American played by Montgomery Clift in Indiscretion of an American Wife, which starred Jennifer Jones as his eager lover, a wife on the loose--and on the make--during a tour of Italy; her indiscretions occurred mainly in an empty railroad car. Ingrid Bergman, back in the good graces of the public and the film industry, was deftly paired with Gary Grant by Stanley Donen in a frothy comedy called Indiscreet. Playing a celebrated actress who discovers that her handsome admirer and lover (Grant) is not married after all--he had lied about it in order to preserve his happy bachelorhood--she exclaimed: "How dare he make love to me and not be a married man?" But that remark was made in 1958. by which time the screen was free to indulge itself in humorous innuendo. Vet not altogether free. Much public amusement was occasioned by Happy Anniversary, a comedy that treated premarital intercourse with considerable levity. The Code administration threatened to withhold its Seal from the film unless something was done to indicate remorse by the now-married couple, whereupon a line of dialog was added and spoken by husband David Niven about wife Mitzi Gaynor: "I was wrong," said Niven, to no one in particular. "I never should have taken Alice to that hotel room before we were married." The line turned out to be the most provocative moment in the entire picture.

Some of the decade's most sophisticated and at times raucous comedy was provided by writer-director Billy Wilder. He spoofed the game of seduction in Love in the Afternoon (1957). a farce about a Parisian jeune fille (Audrey Hepburn) who matches wits with a formidably rich American roué (Gary Cooper). Frustrated by the fetching demoiselle, he is reduced to pursuing her beneath a table in his Ritz hotel suite. Audiences, however, did not take kindly to this match of a relative youngster with the then-50ish Cooper. Only Gary Grant managed to maintain his acceptability as a screen mate into sprightly and elegant middle age. Wilder, however, managed to hit practically all the comic buttons--and in so doing, brought true sexual sophistication to American screens--with the decade's best comedy by far, Some Like It Hot (1959), a rowdy riot that starred Tony Curtis (by then developed into a skillful actor and comedian). Jack Lemmon and the ever-more-gorgeous Marilyn Monroe. As jazz musicians fearing for their lives because they have inadvertently witnessed the Saint Valentine's Day massacre in gang-ridden Chicago, Curtis and Lemmon dress up in drag and join an all-girl orchestra headed for Florida by Pullman. Need it be said that Marilyn added jazz to the band? And Wilder seized every opportunity to throw the masquerading boys together with the blonde Sugar, played by Marilyn, including an upperberth episode in which Marilyn snuggles close to her new-found "girlfriend," Jack Lemmon. But masculinity comes firmly to the fore in Curtis, who sheds his drag to impersonate a millionaire yachtsman on a boat borrowed for an evening's intense wooing of Marilyn--a steamy episode that builds into one of the wildest and gamiest necking scenes ever put on film, with Marilyn's bosom all but falling from her skimpy bodice during the action. To cap it off, the real millionaire yachtsman (Joe E. Brown) falls madly in love with slinky-gowned, bewigged and berouged Lemmon, and insists on marriage. "But I'm a man!" Lemmon finally confesses, upon which the film ends with Joe E. Brown's immortal last line, "We can't all be perfect."

Scouring the best-seller lists for potential box-office dynamite, Fox seized upon Peyton Place, the most concupiscent (and probably worst-written) novel of the decade. Laundered and ironed into a lengthy soap opera in 1957, it proved a winner, perhaps because its title promised a good deal more than the film delivered. Lana Turner and Diane Varsi starred: featured were nude teenage bathing (off screen), rape, murder, suicide and alcoholism--but all depicted so genteelly that it might have been made for television, as eventually, in a still continuing series, it was. A Summer Place, another best seller of somewhat similar ilk, was made into a film about wayward teenagers and their wayward, irresponsible parents. As the teenagers, Sandra Dee and Troy Donahue take to each other like ducks to water, and progress from necking in the moonlight to high jinks in bed, upon which Miss Dee becomes pregnant. (American films of the Fifties made no mention of protective devices.) The solution found by the film to this dilemma was to have the kids leave school, go off to marry and live on an isolated Maine island. Typical of the confused moral situation in Hollywood was the film's attitude toward sex. One could gather from the dialog that sex was good, but that it could be bad, that neither young nor old should altogether restrain their physical feelings, but that they ought to watch out for possible unforeseen consequences. If any moral lesson at all emerged from the movie, it was that sex was good-bad. The kids in The Blackboard Jungle--adapted from the Evan Hunter best seller--were nastier and got into worse scrapes, and though the film was charged with casting a too sensational light on the rotting school systems of urban ghettos, later real-life events showed the film to be a reasonably responsible Hollywood foray into social criticism. One of the film's most vivid scenes had to do with the attempted rape of a schoolteacher by a creepy student--an incident, sad to say, not without parallel in actuality.

The Broadway stage was perennially ransacked for film fodder, too. The musical Pal Joey was transferred to the screen, with Frank Sinatra--his renovated career progressing toward its zenith--enacting the practicing heel; while fading Rita Hayworth played his rich keeper and Kim Novak the disconcertingly voluptuous "good" girl. But Pal Joey lacked the stinging impact of the stage version. Sinatra turned all goody goody at the end and walked off with Kim into a golden, altar-bound sunset. William Holden walked off with the same Kim in William Inge's Picnic, pleasantly retailored for Hollywood use by Dan Taradash. As directed by Joshua Logan, Picnic became a mellow, leisurely examination of Midwestern tribal and sexual folkways. Tennessee Williams, at his most prolific during the Fifties, had only to bring a piece to the stage to have it earmarked for film production. The film version of The Rose Tattoo, probably the least perverse of his sexual explorations of the South, starred Anna Magnani as a lusty Sicilian widow whose frustrations are at last relieved by a simpleton truck driver, played by Burt Lancaster. He, like the former husband, wears a curious symbol of potency on his chest--a rose tattoo. Another Williams play, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, was bought by MGM and turned into an altered cat. That is to say, the strong suggestion of homosexuality in the play was turned into a mild case of hero worship for an old friend on the part of the unwilling (to cohabit with his wife) Paul Newman. Thus it became somewhat difficult to comprehend why he avoided and reviled his delightful dish of a wife, Elizabeth Taylor, whose off-screen peccadilloes and misfortunes helped make her image even sexier on the screen. Nevertheless, the bedroom discussions between Newman and Taylor were violently vulgar, spitting displays of temper by a married couple. And Elizabeth Taylor, no longer the dewy-eyed innocent of A Place in the Sun, was now every bosomy, hippy inch a woman, panting and impatient for her husband's lovemaking.

Homosexuality was touched on no less gingerly in Tea and Sympathy, borrowed from another Broadway hit. The theme was still disallowed, technically, by the Code in 1956 (it was not until 1961 that a further revision of the document openly permitted its judicious use), and playwright Robert Anderson had to struggle with the Code and his conscience to produce a compromised script. On stage, the wife of a boys' school housemaster gave herself to a tormented student in order to save him from assuming he was a congenital homosexual. On screen, Deborah Kerr, as this generous and attractive woman, also gives herself to the boy, her motive being so that he will know "he's a man." Furthermore, two additional scenes were added to the screen version, at beginning and end. The boy has returned to his school for a class reunion, and the housemaster, now living alone, presents him with a letter written by the wife in which, during the picture's closing scene, she confesses that her adultery has ruined her husband's life. When the film opened at Radio City Music Hall, one New York critic suggested that patrons leave the theater before the letter was read by the boy (with Miss Kerr intoning the contents on the sound track).

Otto Preminger, by bringing the Broadway musical stage success Carmen Jones to the screen in 1954, proved that Negro performers could provide zesty sexiness when divorced from the stereotyped roles formerly given to them. Dorothy Dandridge, as "a slinky, hipswinging, main-drag beauty with a slangy, come-hither way with men" (Bosley Crowther in The New York Times), demonstrated that "Carmen could not be better acted without setting the theater on fire" (Otis L. Guernsey in the New York Herald Tribune). In the cast with her was handsome folk singer Harry Belafonte, who went on to further stardom, again with Miss Dandridge, in Island in the Sun, a tropical tale of racially mixed doings on a Caribbean island. But the most magnetic Negro star of all was Sidney Poitier, who could electrify audiences with his power in films that presented him as a Negro striving with dignity and fire for his inalienable rights as a human being.

The success of foreign films in the art houses, and the increasing need for the international box office--brought about by decreases in domestic earnings--focused Hollywood's attention on a new crop of intriguing Italian beauties, who found it to their advantage to take crash courses in English. Trapeze (1956), a mediocre film in the main, provided the Hollywood debut of Gina Lollobrigida--along with generous views of the Italian sexpot in trapeze tights that revealed her generous contours. Even more generously endowed was Sophia Loren, a startlingly statuesque product of poverty-stricken Naples, who was busily employed both here and abroad and, ever-developing as an actress, became one of the truly great international stars. During the Fifties, she was seen to her best advantage--physically speaking, that is--in Boy on a Dolphin. Diving for lost classical treasures in the Aegean Sea, she came up for air, thoroughly and breath-takingly soaked, in a skintight dress that revealed to the mass American audience what the art-house clientele already knew full well.

As censorship grew ever more lax, canny producers knew to what degree they could capitalize on the prevailing mood of acceptance, and no one knew this better than Otto Preminger. Released in 1959, his Anatomy of a Murder--based on the best-selling novel--was, in the words of Time magazine, "a courtroom melodrama that seems less concerned with murder than with anatomy." An Army lieutenant (Ben Gazzara) had killed a man who may or may not have raped his trampish wife (Lee Remick). Defense attorney James Stewart eventually proves the former possibility to be the truth, but not before he bombards the jury and the audience with such previously unheard (on the screen) medical terms as sperm, contraceptive, intercourse, spermatogenesis and sexual climax. Nor did he hesitate, at one point in the trial, to brandish the flimsy panties, ripped in the area of the crotch, that had been worn by Miss Remick. The horrified Chicago censors quickly banned the film, and just as quickly Preminger headed for the Federal courts. Behind the Chicago Censor Board charge that the language used during the courtroom scene was obscene, a link to the Roman Catholic attitude on birth control, particularly in a city known to be dominated by Catholic politicians and clergy, could be seen. Explicit sexual terminology, however, was common in court cases involving sexual offenses, and to judges long accustomed to their use in trials, they were unobjectionable. Preminger won his case and the ban was reversed.

For sheer bizarreness, no film made during the Fifties could match Suddenly, Last Summer, which came along at the tail end of 1959 and vastly titillated the paying public with revelations of homosexuality and (another first) cannibalism. Amazingly, this mess of morbidity--adapted from a short play by Tennessee Williams--won both Code administration approval and a special, but not censorial, classification from the Legion of Decency. Directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz, Elizabeth Taylor gave a remarkably effective performance as a seemingly psychotic heroine, and Katharine Hepburn was chilling as a mother who used her own attractiveness to procure boys for her homosexual son. As in the Williams play, much of the tale was wordily told in offstage and off-screen monologs; the cannibalistic climax was muted for screen purposes, but certainly clearly suggested for those who knew how to interpret the pictorial hints.

When the film did well at the box office, Sam Spiegel, its producer, put his tongue in his cheek and explained: "Why, it's a theme the masses can identify with." Be that as it may, he had indeed proved that the masses would leave their television sets--temporarily, at least--for the far bolder material now available on the screen. In the following decade, the necessity for any Code at all became the subject of severe examination and widening debate, and the feasibility of a system of classification that would demarcate "adult" films from the "family" variety was explored. Meanwhile, the American screen had encountered a degree of freedom unknown to it in previous decades. The door was open for virtually every shade of film expression--especially the sexual--and the studios lost no time in flinging it wide.

in a decade dominated by censorship battles, american moviemakers won the right to produce motion pictures with adult themes and dialog

In their next installment of "The History of Sex in Cinema," authors Knight and Alpert examine "The Foreign Films of the Fifties"--a decade dominated by the boldly original efforts of such protean moviemakers as Bergman, Fellini, Kurosawa and France's New Wavers to portray sexual relationships on screen with unprecedented frankness, maturity and understanding.