We used to count on the legion of decency to flag the juicy stuff—back when grownups still believed they could protect us
By David Linzee
That great cultural revolution called the ’60s took a long time to reach St. Louis. The old joke is that when it was 1966 in San Francisco, it was still 1956 here. If you were in your early teens and attending a boys-only Catholic school, as I was, it felt more like 1856. There wasn’t a woman on campus, except for the headmaster’s secretary; women were seldom even mentioned, except for the Virgin Mary. When our Latin teacher put a sentence about Gauls on the board, and then turned Gauls to Amazons to give us an exercise in word-gender agreement, the room broke out in moans and panting.
But the real erotic high point of our lives came on Friday afternoons, with the arrival of the St. Louis Review.
Now the truth can be told: The archdiocesan newspaper was our guide to hot stuff on TV. Back then, remember, there were no DVDs, no cable, no Internet. We had five channels, and regular programming was rigorously censored. Television was very proper in those days. When students at Columbia University demonstrated against the Vietnam War and other students beat them up, the latter group was described on the TV news as “white athletes,” because you couldn’t say “jocks” in public.
So our only hope of catching some smut on the tube was the late movie, and the only nights we were permitted to stay up past our parents’ bedtime were Friday and Saturday. We couldn’t channel-surf—we didn’t have remote controls back then—and the “hot part” we were hoping to see might last only a few seconds, so we had to choose carefully.
That was where the Review came in. On the movie page, we could read moral ratings of all that week’s movies on television. Each one got a letter grade: A, B or C. A’s were clean and of no interest. C’s (for “condemned”) were never shown on television, at least not in St. Louis. So it was B movies we looked for. The listings specified what was bad about B movies—and that was what we wanted to know.
Recently, at a microfilm reader in Saint Louis University’s library, I relived the forbidden passions of my youth. Scrolling through 1966 issues of the Review, I found that the art of interpreting their objections wasn’t lost to me. “Light treatment of marriage,” for instance, was likely to mean that stars in tuxedoes engaged in sophisticated badinage that would go right over the heads of us kids. “Low moral tone” also indicated a film to be skipped. The word we watched for was “suggestive.” There were generally three ways for a film to be suggestive—situation, dialogue and costuming—and the best of these was costuming. Every once in a while, we would hit the trifecta: a film that was objectionable in all three categories. This was an easy Friday-night pick. One trifecta winner was The Three Faces of Eve. (It was the movie for which Joanne Woodward won an Oscar, but artistic quality was no concern to the raters or to us.) A more unusual objection was “suggestive dancing.” That went to Hell to Eternity, which has gained a modest place in Hollywood history as the first film to depict the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. But protests against racial injustice didn’t interest the raters, who zeroed in on a brief striptease scene. As I recall—and of course I do—the actress got no further than her bra and slip, but—gasp!—they were black.
The ratings we were perverting to our own uses had been promulgated by a once-mighty organization called the Legion of Decency. It began in 1934, with church congregations reciting a pledge against “vile and unwholesome moving pictures” that were “promoting a sex mania in our land.” Within the year, between 7 million and 10 million people had taken the pledge. Outraged Catholics would picket or boycott theaters that showed C movies, so the Legion had enough clout to make powerful producers and directors recut their films. Otto Preminger added dialogue to prove that the courtesan in Forever Amber was punished for her sins. David O. Selznick removed from Duel in the Sun such offensive lines as “take your fun where you find it.” Howard Hughes reprinted all of The Outlaw to fill in Jane Russell’s plunging necklines.
Eventually the idea that sinners were promptly punished in this world—and that sexual arousal was just plain bad and to be avoided—began to look a bit naïve. The Legion changed its name to the blandly bureaucratic National Catholic Office for Motion Pictures. This happened in 1966, so in the Review issues I was reading, the Legion’s cut-and-dried ratings of old movies ran side by side with NCOMP’s long, nuanced discussions of new movies. The new system was deplorable, from the point of view of us adolescent smut-hunters. Torn Curtain, a bland Hitchcock thriller, was rated objectionable, while The Pawnbroker got by with no mention of the fact that it was one of the first Hollywood films to feature nudity. How we missed the Legion’s guidance!
All kidding aside, though: Didn’t I, scrolling through those ancient Reviews as an adult, feel any nostalgia for that vanished age of innocence? In fact, I did feel one twinge. It was when I was reading an objection that had nothing to do with sex. A 1961 film called The Explosive Generation was rated B because “successful rebellion of high school students against lawful authority presents dangerous blueprint for youth.” By 1968, we youths would be watching the film If...., in which preppy Malcolm McDowell gunned down his hated teachers. Thirty years later came Columbine.
I’m not saying there’s a cause-and-effect relationship here—but I did feel a pang for a world where people believed that the young could be protected from evil.
