12-13-2016, 11:40 AM
Another interesting excerpt:
In the Thirties and Forties Hollywood movies were never allowed to show a man and a woman in bed together -- not even if they were married in the picture -- not even if they were married in real life. If a scene had to be played in a bedroom, the couple appeared in that blight upon marital bliss: twin beds. In the same period, if a woman were to have an illicit affair in a film (which meant any relationship not blessed by matrimony), the audience could be certain that before the final scene she would suffer the severest possible consequences. That some romances outside holy wedlock end happily or do not end at all would appear to be facts of life the movies of 20 and 30 years ago preferred to ignore. And the worst profanity heard in a film during more than a decade of picture making was Clark Gable's parting shot, "Personally, my dear, I don't give a damn!" to Scarlett O'Hara at the end of Gone With the Wind. GWTW was the only motion picture of the time that was allowed a single hell or damn (the line never failed to produce a titter from surprised audiences), and we tend to forget for how short a while such common expletives have been permitted in dramatic shows on television.
In 1938 an issue of Life magazine was banned in a number of communities in the United States, because it included a picture story depicting the birth of a baby. That was just 25 years ago. And it has been less than ten since New York City censored the birth of a baby buffalo from one of Walt Disney's award-winning wildlife features. Today Ben Casey delivers a baby on home TV and nobody even blinks.
*****
I wonder if some of our younger members realize how repressed our culture was in the not so distant past.
In the Thirties and Forties Hollywood movies were never allowed to show a man and a woman in bed together -- not even if they were married in the picture -- not even if they were married in real life. If a scene had to be played in a bedroom, the couple appeared in that blight upon marital bliss: twin beds. In the same period, if a woman were to have an illicit affair in a film (which meant any relationship not blessed by matrimony), the audience could be certain that before the final scene she would suffer the severest possible consequences. That some romances outside holy wedlock end happily or do not end at all would appear to be facts of life the movies of 20 and 30 years ago preferred to ignore. And the worst profanity heard in a film during more than a decade of picture making was Clark Gable's parting shot, "Personally, my dear, I don't give a damn!" to Scarlett O'Hara at the end of Gone With the Wind. GWTW was the only motion picture of the time that was allowed a single hell or damn (the line never failed to produce a titter from surprised audiences), and we tend to forget for how short a while such common expletives have been permitted in dramatic shows on television.
In 1938 an issue of Life magazine was banned in a number of communities in the United States, because it included a picture story depicting the birth of a baby. That was just 25 years ago. And it has been less than ten since New York City censored the birth of a baby buffalo from one of Walt Disney's award-winning wildlife features. Today Ben Casey delivers a baby on home TV and nobody even blinks.
*****
I wonder if some of our younger members realize how repressed our culture was in the not so distant past.
JOHN ROBERTS: From time to time in the years to come, I hope you will be treated unfairly so that you will come to know the value of justice... I wish you bad luck, again, from time to time so that you will be conscious of the role of chance in life and understand that your success is not completely deserved and that the failure of others is not completely deserved either.
