[78-L] ^Hays Office query off topic

[Jeff Sultanof]

Donna,

After "The Moon is Blue," the other movie that took the code on and won
during the fifties was "Man With the Golden Arm." Preminger was always
pushing the envelope.

Jeff Sultanof

BTW, I find it slightly amusing that "Psycho," a film made in 1960, has been
rated 'R' by the MPAA.

On Tue, Aug 2, 2011 at 8:50 PM, Donna Halper <dlh at donnahalper.com> wrote:

> On 8/2/2011 6:51 PM, Michael Biel wrote:
> >
> > Hays retired in 1945, so when he died is moot.  However, he was
> > succeeded by Eric Johnston who himself died in 1963, leaving the office
> > vacant until Jack Valenti took over in May 1966.  But I am not sure that
> > the bed rule had not been relaxed by then anyway.  It was no longer the
> > 1930s.  The rule was still in force on TV but even by then it probably
> > was becoming looser.
> >
> On radio, stations had been complaining to the FCC from the mid-1930s
> onward to loosen the rules that forbade even mild oaths like "damn"  As
> for the movies, little by little, similar battles were waged-- there was
> the famous fight over Jane Russell's cleavage in "The Outlaw," circa
> 1943, for example.  There were also assorted "B" movies that showed
> (alleged) drug use and assorted examples of debauchery in the early
> 1950s-- their producers defended them as educational-- they were
> supposed to warn impressionable youth about the dangers of drugs.
>
> The Hays Office (later run by arch-conservative Joseph Breen) was at the
> height of power in the 30s and even the 40s, spurred on by the Catholic
> Church, which put the Legion of Decency in place to exert pressure on
> movies (and sometimes radio shows) considered indecent. But after the
> Howard Hughes controversy in 1943, I think it was the film "The Moon is
> Blue" in 1953 that was the defining moment for when the line began to
> really move and the censors began losing their grip on movie morality.
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