Give'Em Hell

There are many ways in which the moving picture industry could have reacted to the new liberalized code of censorship. After the Supreme Court decided the Miracle case, and after The Moon Is Blue ran successfully without Johnson Office clearance, motion pictures could have come upon a new era of mature, thoughtful production commensurate with the responsibility of new-found freedom. Fortunately, in the interest of maintaining a consistent front of juvenile sensationalism, moving pictures are headed back to the excesses that once made Hays censorship czar.

The amusing thing is that the new breaches of taste aren't even very daring. Much like little boys who have found that the use of "swear words" marks one as quite a sport, movies of no more than routine shoddiness now feature the word "hell" in their titles. The Johnson office, apparently chastened by legal fiat and public demand, puts up with this back-fence marquee scribbling and would presumably make allowances for some spicy content in the plots. But the Legion of Decency, which isn't for one moment fooled by all this talk of liberal standards and progressively adult entertainment, just won't tolerate more than surface rudeness. This is probably just as well because the depths of Hollywood's taste have not been plumbed since Francis X. Bushman was playing juvenile leads.

The whole mess began, as such things will, when a fine picture, Battleground, unhappily dedicated itself "to the bloody bastards of Bastogne." This recalled the days of World War II, when patriotism excused most anything. Taking its cue from a good movie, the next was dedicated to the principle that a heavily advertised epithet would be a sure attraction, particularly when surrounded by the glamor of topical heroism. So for weeks a bass voice, in thrilling tones, kept shouting "Retreat, Hell" over the radio to herald a really inferior war picture. After Retreat, Hell came the Miracle and The Moon Is Blue. Now Washington Street marquees bear a revolting resemblance to the walls of a grammar school locker room.

Most of the pictures seem to favor the sea as their excuse for swearing. Richard Widmark drove his submaraine to Hell and High Water, while Allan Ladd was frozen in Hell Below Zero. Currently, some Italians have been renamed Hell Raiders of the Deep (an earlier, more ingenuous Widmark was content with the term "frogman" in the same line of work). Ida Lupino has also released a bit of whimsy called, for little reason, Private Hell 36. These are not good films.

The really distressing part about this kindergarten naughtiness is that the pictures take themselves very seriously. Self-consciously trying to be daring, they inject bad taste into normal banality by using "hell" as a drawing card. This is especially obvious in the embarrassment that everyone seems to feel when a character swears in American movies. With the revival of Gone With the Wind came Rhett Butler's famous exit line, "Frankly, Scarlet, I don't give a damn." Coming as the final word of exasperation from a much put-upon hero, the sentence itself was quite inoffensive. But as the only such word in almost four hours of dialogue it had a terrific shock effect, and was hardly treated as a part of normal conversation. As a result, most of the children in the audience (some in their forties) smirked and tittered, finding it all pretty racy stuff, and incidentally shattering the mood of the picture's final scene.

A more flagrant example of self-consciousness was Frank Lovejoy's delivery of the title line in Retreat, Hell. Interrupting a flow of tepid badinage, the camera came in for a closeup of Lovejoy's most noble expression while the action stopped and he said his line, continuing: "we're just advancing in another direction." This over, the tedium picked up again as though never interrupted.

Even such a high calibre film as On the Waterfront goes overboard when swearing, drowning the tag end of the line, "what the he..." in the blast of an auto horn. Afterwards, when "Go to hell" was not only said but repeated (the priest, to whom it was said, evidently could no more credit his hearing than could the audience) there was the same embarrassed reaction as to Rhett Butler's line. Since stevedores and gangsters had managed without any naughty words during the rest of the picture, when they came it was with surprise.

Really, the only producer who has kept his sense in the rush to be daring was the cagey fellow who bought the rights to Audie Murphy's To Hell And Back. It showed foresight to withhold filming until now when, indeed, it can be told--Golly!