The Censors Versus Scarlet Street

A bleak noir thriller, director Fritz Lang’s SCARLET STREET, was playing at scattered sub-run locations on April 18. The movie had aroused a firestorm when the New York State Board of Censors banned the film in toto in January even though it had been passed by censorship boards in other states as well as by the Motion Picture Code authority, the notorious Breen office. The Legion of Decency had rated the film “B,” morally objectionable in part for “suggestive dialogue, costumes and situations,” rather than “C” for condemned. In other words, Catholics might be morally compromised but would not go straight to hell if they saw the movie. The last film to be banned in New York was Howard Hughes’ “The Outlaw” in 1942, which had not been approved by the Motion Picture Code, had received the dreaded “C” from the Catholic Church and was banned almost everywhere that a censorship authority existed.

In “Scarlet Street” Edward G. Robinson plays a meek, middle-aged man who thinks he has rescued an attractive woman (Joan Bennett) from an attack, but the attacker (Dan Duryea) actually is her boyfriend and partner in crime. The lowlife pair mistakenly thinks the older man might have money and they decide to set him up. Robinson falls for Bennett according to plan, then she and Duryea proceed to fleece him out of everything he’s got and then some. Lang previously had cast Robinson, Bennett and Duryea in “The Woman in the Window,” playing similar characters in a similar situation. “Scarlet Street” was produced by an independent company formed by Miss Bennett; producer Walter Wanger, who was married to Bennett at the time; and Lang. It was distributed by Universal. Here is the mugging scene.

In a series of articles in The New York Times on the “Scarlet Street” situation, film critic Bosley Crowther deplored the proliferation of censorship boards across the country, each subject to the whims of their individual members. He noted that he did not see anything that made this “average thriller” more objectionable than many other films with similar themes that had been given the green light by the New York censors. And what element in the film, he wondered, was objectionable in New York but not in Ohio or Maryland? Crowther did not take a radical stand against censorship per se in his articles but he called instead for a single authority, preferably from the industry, with well-defined standards instead of the current situation by which a movie had to face seven state censorship boards as well as a number of municipal censors in addition to the Code authority. His articles drew letters pro and con on the need and value of local censorship boards. Most of the major New York film critics were on Crowther’s side. A bemused Lang pointed out that nothing in his film would entice a moviegoer to live a life of crime, which was presented as a totally unappetizing prospect. The American Civil Liberties Union joined the fray. The movie’s opening was delayed as the debate raged.

After meeting with Wanger, the head New York censors rescinded the ban, announcing that the producer agreed to two small edits, one reducing the number of times a victim gets stabbed and the other eliminating a line of dialogue. But then the censor in Atlanta banned the film, proving Crowther’s point. According to the critic, the New York opening was almost canceled a second time when the film appeared likely to be caught up in a dragnet set by the city’s new mayor, William O’Dwyer, who had returned City Hall to the Irish Catholics of Tammany Hall, deposing the coalition of reformers, Republicans, Jews, Italians and liberals who had put LaGuardia into office. A former seminarian who had made his name as a mob buster but who would later be charged with having mob ties of his own, he launched his term of office with a crusade against vice, rounding up the usual suspects and railing against smutty books and movies. By then public interest in the film was running high. Crowther mocked the sanctimonious reasoning offered in the official announcement for the reversal of the ban offered by the head censor who declared that the film addressed a serious social issue. And exactly what burning social issue was that, Crowther wondered in print, the exploitation of middle-aged men by gold diggers? If a censor board could find a film to be morally objectionable one day and acceptable the next, how was a filmmaker to know what was and was not allowable? As soon as the film was cleared for exhibition it was advertised with a suggestive illustration showing Joan Bennett leaning against a lamppost in the classic prostitute pose while Dan Duryea greets her with “Hello, lazy legs” and Edward G. Robinson glowers at them from above like a disapproving Jehovah.

Fred Stanley reported from Hollywood in the April 14 New York Times that Joseph Ignatius Breen, administrator of the motion picture industry’s Production Code, had called in Hollywood’s leading studio executives, producers, writers and directors for a series of meetings to castigate them. This situation was their own fault, he railed. They might be staying within the letter of the purity code but they repeatedly were violating its spirit with all these sordid melodramas, soon to be dubbed "film noir," that they were turning out. If the moviemakers did not begin exercising some self control, he warned, censorship groups here and abroad increasingly would step in to limit the "freedom" of the screen.

Meanwhile Howard Hughes again was thumbing his nose at the censors with his re-release of “The Outlaw,” not yet gracing Manhattan screens.(Trailer here). He had made some changes to get a Production Code okay this time around. However, Stanley reported in his column that John J. Cantwell, the Catholic archbishop of Los Angeles, had denounced the local showings in a letter read in Catholic churches throughout the diocese. That week Hughes had been called to New York to appear before Eric Johnston and the board of the Motion Picture Association to explain the suggestive tone of the film’s advertising. The MPA was convinced that the graffiti calling attention to the ample charms of the film's scantily clad star, Jane Russell, that had appeared on LA billboards was not the spontaneous effort of amateurs. Of course, as board members sighed to Variety, Hughes’s publicity man, Russell Birdswell, was just going to use this latest controversy to publicize the movie further. Meanwhile former-MGM-executive-turned-independent-producer Hunt Stromberg was taking advantage of the notoriety with full page ads showing Russell in a bathing suit in a classic pin-up pose advertising the release of his new picture for United Artists, “Young Widow.”

“Scarlet Street” was paired at the neighborhoods with an MGM comedy, SHE WENT TO THE RACES, starring James Craig and Frances Gifford with up-and-comer Ava Gardner in a supporting role. (Trailer here) The gossip columns reported that Miss Gardner, the current wife of oft-married band leader Artie Shaw, after her successful campaign for bigger roles, including a major role in the upcoming crime drama “The Killers,” was contemplating retiring from acting.