MPAA censorship makes some old movie characters appear Crazy
Under the Motion Picture Production Code, the censorship regime that controlled film content from the 1930s to the 1960s, a lot of books and plays that were popular because they were scandalous were bought by Hollywood and then had their scandalous plot-lines edited into incoherence.
In both versions of THE CHILDREN'S HOUR we are left perplexed by why the one girl commits suicide. It seems quite an over-reaction. Only if we read between the lines and realize that Shirley McClaine (in the 1960s version) is being outed as a lesbian (and really is in love with Audrey Hepburn) does the plot begin to make sense.
There's a great 1940s film about murdering gay men (teh gay could not even be alluded to in a code film) that was rewritten to be about an anti-semite... a brutish and insecure anti-semite in the army (Robert Ryan) who goes murderously nuts when a culturally refined "jew" in a bar picks up up a beautiful and naive young man from Ryan's platoon (who is artistically inclined and may be confused as to whether or not he is "jewish"
and takes him back to his tastefully furnished bachelor apartment for some tea and sympathy. Very confusing film!
Another one has Elizabeth Taylor (I think it was) going to pieces when she realizes that her fiance doesn't desire her sexually because he is a "momma's boy," too devoted to his overbearing mother to find women attractive. I am guessing that whatever scandalous bestseller it was based on didn't explain things quite that way.
Anyway, one that recent events had me thinking about is PEYTON PLACE. I never read the book but it is easy to deduce the actual plot from the movie. A girl is impregnated by her father. The town doctor (Lloyd Nolan), as an act of compassion, performs an abortion. Later, someone may be wrongfully convicted of murder but they only way the doctor can save the accused would be to reveal that he performed an illegal abortion. Big moral dilemma!
But in the movie he doesn't perform an abortion. The girl has a miscarriage, and the doctor doesn't report it to the state vital records office to spare the girl the embarrassment of having her father on the death certificate as the child's father.
So later in the film we have a doctor wrestling with whether or not to let an innocent person go to the gallows because saving them would require that he admit to failing to file some paperwork! His motivations appear... odd. "I could go to jail for twenty years!" Really? For failing to report a miscarriage?
But it is interesting to see a very sympathetic character in a circa 1960 film who performed an abortion in a case of rape/incest for moral and compassionate reasons, where the matter is presented as a legitimate moral dilemma. Even back then there was a sense that some abortions were obvious necessities, but one of those things that doctors did on the QT as part of their general god-playing social role.
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She's married to Marlon Brando, but is having an affair because he's "impotent." But that doesn't stop him from ogling a young solider who likes riding in the nude and watching Liz while she sleeps (some kind of attempt to "cure" himself?).
Ironically, the gay Montgomery Clift was supposed to play Marlon's role, but he died of a heart attack.
rocktivity
