Today, TCM airs Mogambo, John Ford’s 1953 remake of Victor Fleming’s 1932 pre-code Red Dust. Despite the 21 year gap between the films, Clark Gable played the lead in both. A part of the justification for the remake was that they could go further with the story in 1953 than they had in 1932 which really wasn’t true anyway since the 1932 version, being a pre-code movie, probably had freer rein than the 1953 version to do what it wanted. Regardless, both movies were made long before actors casually used profanity on the screen, showed graphic gore, and got naked. Well, actually, after the seventies they kind of stopped doing that last one but you get the idea. Prior to the ratings system coming into play in the late sixties, when filmmakers were finally given the go ahead to say and do what they wanted without fear of a censor telling them they couldn’t, the movies had to walk a fine line between providing entertainment for adults while at the same time not actually doing or showing anything that might seem too, well, adult.
Despite the expected grumblings from several members of the Hollywood community, there were a surprising number of filmmakers who actually had no problem with censorship at all. One example is director Henry King. In the great 13 part 1980 television documentary on the silents, produced in Britain and simply entitled, Hollywood, King said, “Censorship makes you think. All it does is make you guard your language. Makes you express yourself in a wee bit different way. Makes you smart enough to bypass this, make an audience see it, without them actually seeing it. This makes you three times sharper than you would be without it. That’s all it does.” Others in the documentary, like Lillian Gish, lament that stars in the movies today have it too easy, being able to say and do anything, when back then they had to suggest things. Heck, Gish even goes so far as to say the movies should have never started using sound but that’s for another time. But is what they’re saying true? Is it accurate to claim that censorship makes one sharper simply because you have to play around the issue at hand?
It seems obvious, though “seems” and “actually” aren’t the same thing, that the movies did not suffer a great artistic loss in the decades before the ratings system came in and said, “Put whatever you want on the screen, we’ll rate it accordingly.” I can’t imagine most great films of the classic period being improved upon by having Myrna Loy give someone the middle finger while yelling for them to go… um… do something to themselves. There’s no part of that scenario that makes me think, even for a second, “Ah, what might have been!”
At the same time I’m not entirely convinced by Henry King’s hypothesis that censorship makes a movie maker smarter. Clever, perhaps, but not necessarily sharper. Sure, you may have to figure out a better way to show that a couple slept together, for instance, and it’s been done with some great imagination but that doesn’t mean your movie would necessarily be worse if you didn’t have to do that. In A Place in the Sun, the unmarried couple of George Eastman (Montgomery Clift) and Alice Tripp (Shelley Winters), are shown to sleep together by having George and Alice embrace while the camera focuses on a radio in the window while it rains outside at night. After a few seconds, the rain stop, the sun comes up, we literally hear a rooster announce the morning in the distance, and we finally see George walk past the window. It’s a clever way to show they spent the night together while not having to actually show them sleep together. It’s also something a good director might do even today, regardless of the fact that they didn’t technically have to. Indeed, sometimes, when they do, it doesn’t work at all. In the 1981 remake of The Postman Always Rings Twice, director Bob Rafelson was able to show much more than the director of the 1946 version, Tay Garnett, and yet the 1946 version honestly seems far more erotic and the characters more seedy. Just as the original Red Dust outdoes Mogambo in much the same way.
And let’s not forget, as several of the directors and actors in the same documentary are quick to point out, censorship also makes you put married couples in separate beds, and not because they’re mad at each other. What King is ignoring is that while you may have to think on your feet in certain instances, you’re also forced to show things like twin beds in a married couples bedroom or war scenes where actors grab their heart after being shot and dramatically fall to the ground rather than show, as was done pre-code in All Quiet on the Western Front, a man’s body being blown up and leaving only his hands. At the same time, plenty of movies show gore simply because they can and not because it has any real dramatic impact. And I’ve seen plenty a modern movie where scenes of actors improvising pretty much just means they say the F word a lot. Yawn.
So were the movies sharper under censorship? Was Mr. King right? No, I don’t think he was. I think the great directors knew how to make it work and the lousy ones made lousy movies that didn’t bother to come up with anything creative as a workaround. Conversely, I think the great directors of the ratings era knew and know how to create a great scene without need of lazily showing what they know they can while lousy directors just show a lot of gore and say “f***” a lot. The truth of the matter is, there’s no real difference at all between the movies of the pre-code era, the code era, or the ratings era. They were and are all working under different conditions but the best of them don’t lean on what’s allowed or not allowed to make their movies work, but simply what works best regardless of what’s allowed. It turns out, then and now, the greatest tool of any filmmaker is their imagination, and censorship or not, when they’re good, it shows.