Sagas Of Censorship

Newspapers Reveal What Movies Could Not

Dailies of the day ran lots of copy about movies being shackled by censorship. Was this gloat over Hollywood not enjoying same freedoms as the press? So many print accounts of what we couldn't see in pictures ... no wonder a public became so aware of machinations of the "Hays Office," an opponent to fun so pervasive as to be joked about in features and cartoons (see the Marx Bros.' At The Circus and much of Tex Avery). The above restriction on gunshots during the silent era may be purest nonsense --- anyway, it was new to me --- so I'll let own conclusions be drawn as to whether there really was such a rule in place. The naughty business with Louise Brooks at left could derive from her 1931 role in God's Gift To Women, or maybe something else wherein she had a modest talking part. I don't remember this portion in any surviving segment with Louise, so whatever censors took out in Kansas and Pennsylvania may yet remain lost. Such stills were perhaps designed for this sort of captioning, if not to actually represent action in a film, or for pages of Film Fun and other publications not so watchdogged by censors.