A play can be changed from night to night, performance to performance. It’s a living, breathing piece of art that may play one way at a Sunday matinee and a completely different way at a Friday night packed house. But a movie is here to stay. It is filmed and edited and scored and released and that’s that. What we see is what we get, forever after. Except it’s not. Sure, the takes you’re seeing on the screen are probably always going to be the takes you see when you watch that movie again but the scenes may come and go and changes to the movie made for as long as the director or studio sees fit.
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Today TCM plays the 1939 Busby Berkeley musical Babes in Arms, with Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland, and when the movie was originally released, it contained a number called “My Day” that was a good-natured parody of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. When the movie was reissued in 1948, three years after the president’s death, the scene was removed. Later on, it was put back in. The initial reaction was one of respect for the deceased president but also one of unease. By that point, everyone knew the president had been wheelchair bound, something the press had agreed not to reveal while he was in office, and seeing Mickey Rooney bound up the stairs as Franklin Delano Roosevelt seemed a little odd. Later, being seen as a product of its time, it didn’t seem odd at all. No odder than seeing James Cagney hoof across a table in Yankee Doodle Dandy as said same president. Based on the information most people had at the time, those scenes made perfect sense. Leave them in.
But directors and studios have a long history of deleting scenes that later turn out to not sit so well with history’s judgment. And that’s precisely why I find it useful and necessary to leave them all in. Some cases are more ridiculous than others.
In the 1933 Joan Crawford classic, Dancing Lady, with Clark Gable, there’s a scene with Larry Fine, later of The Three Stooges, putting together a puzzle only to react shockingly when it’s revealed to be Adolph Hitler. “Oy!” he says, “It’s Hitler!” Both Fine in real life and his character are Jewish and both products of Vaudeville and Hitler had just come to power. His anti-semitic beliefs and attitudes were already well known and yet the studio took the shot out after the initial run. Why? It was offensive to Germany. The Hays Code, suddenly and for the first time being enforced after years of being ignored, stated that representations of other countries, or their leaders, should be fair and non-inflammatory. Remarkably, most prints you’ll see of it today still have the scene removed. But it does exist because on television I’ve seen it. On DVD, though, it’s not there.
Other removals make more sense but still should be included in full releases on DVD or streaming. One that comes to mind is Holiday Inn. In an otherwise completely inoffensive film, the sequence of Bing Crosby in black-face for the Lincoln’s birthday number hits the viewer like a ton of bricks. Except, ever since that first release, it’s rarely seen. That number was removed quickly as it raised eyebrows even upon its initial release among several moviegoers and groups. But the thing is, it was filmed and was a part of the original film and it should be available as a reference point in film history. By all means, release two versions of DVD if you must, one with and without the scene, but label them accordingly and never sweep that kind of thing under the carpet. It happened, let’s not pretend it didn’t.
This is where Warner Brothers has done film history a huge favor with its decision to release its cartoons of the thirties, forties, and fifties completely intact with warnings on the box and DVD itself before it plays. It says that the cartoons you are about to watch contain racist imagery, sexist messages, and violent content, as well as other variously outdated bits and pieces that make the modern day viewer’s eyes pop. Watch them or don’t but Warners owns up to the fact that that’s how they were made and their existence is a part of the record. One that shouldn’t be destroyed.
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Take Birth of a Nation. To remove the racist content from the film would require excising the entire second half and cutting the story off at the legs. That’s because Birth of a Nation is filled to the brim with racist content. It’s more than wincing, like some classic Hollywood content, it’s downright horrifying. But seeing that movie in its entirety is more than a little important. It’s a vital testimony to the vicious lies about race and Reconstruction in this country and how deeply they were believed and how easily they were spread. Others will continue to argue that it merits artistic recognition as well and as an early example of D.W. Griffith’s expertise and groundbreaking work in story structure and editing, it does, but I would actually argue that, at this point, it’s more important as a sociologically important record.
The Disney studio has, of course, honed removing offensive content into an art form. From taking entire movies out of release, like Song of the South, to removing offensive content from its bigger films, like the inexplicable inclusion of a black servant centaur in Fantasia, Disney has tried its best to cover its tracks but there’s no reason it should. Everyone knows about the content so put it back in, or release it again, so we can show it to others as historical examples of what used to make to the premiere for everyone to see.
Even with movies made well past the sixties, changes have been made when later reissued. In 1978′s Superman, the title character rescues a little girl’s cat from a tree. When she goes inside to tell her mom, you hear a slap as the mother tells her not to lie. This is on at least one DVD release because it’s on the DVD I own, but in many of the tv edits, the audio is cut and you never hear the slap.
Steven Spielberg famously CGI’d the guns in E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial out of existence for a DVD release only to reinsert them later. And everyone should know at this point that George Lucas has made 84,567,483,491 changes to Star Wars since it was released, including making Greedo shoot first because he felt it sent the wrong message to have Han Solo shoot first. And honestly, that’s fine, if unnecessary and stupid, but do us the favor of allowing us to see the original print forever after as well.
Movies are both entertaining and works of art, either good or bad. They’re important to many of us beyond the point of simple entertainment but they’re also, by their very nature of preserving imagery on film from a very specific place and time, historical records. If a scene that seems fine when filming later offends, too bad. Leave it in. We should never be able try to hide the past. If we do, how will we learn from it? None of us have to watch any of these scenes if we don’t want to, but we should always have the option.