Sex, Censorship and the Silver Screen - Season 1 (1996)

After the end of the Second World War, public attitudes began to change but the Hays Office and the League of Decency still held considerable sway. When the much-loved Ingrid Berman announced she was going to leave her husband to live with Roberto Rossellini, she was the subject of a fierce campaign of character assassination and even denounced on the floor of the US Senate. A Supreme Court ruling in 1952 granting films the same freedom of speech protection as other arts opens the door. It starts with European films being shown in art house theaters but it's the works...

In 1956 New York State banned a nudist colony documentary entitled The Garden of Eden. On appeal however, the courts ruled that nudity in and of itself was not obscene. Independent film makers were becoming bolder and films like Russ Meyer's L'immoral M. Teas (1959) began to appear. In main stream Hollywood, little changed but European films continued to evolve. La victime (1961) with Dirk Bogarde dealt with homosexuality in a serious way and was the first film where a man said 'I love you' to another man. Other European films like La dolce vita (1960) and those of the the French New Wave directors continued to explore new themes. Le prêteur sur gages (1964) by ...

By the 1970s, Americans were undergoing fundamental societal changes. Many US communities banned films such as Orange mécanique (1971) and Ce plaisir qu'on dit charnel (1971). 'Stanley Kubrick (I)' re-edited Orange mécanique (1971) as a result. The film Deep Throat was controversial and popular and was at the vanguard of the the rise of pornographic films. Under the new MPAA rating system, an X rating soon became associated with pornographic films and Le dernier Tango à Paris (1972) (Last Tango in Paris) was the last major studio release to carry an X rating and it wasn't until 1990 that a new adult film category, NC-17, was created. In June 1973, the U.S. Supreme Court ...