Black on White

Old Queen Catherine the Great, of Russia, was a lusty and lustful lady, from all accounts, including her own. Far from resenting the tall stories of her fleshly excesses, she gloried in them. Her memory thrives in Russian legend in a thousand tales real and imagined, celebrating her mundane appetites and how she satisfied them.

Indeed, it was the lady’s reputation for indulgence of the baser passions which led moving picture producers, first in England and then in America, to dramatize her career on the silver screen. Her very name carries suggestive overtones.

When they got down to business, however, the film magnates lost their nerve. The Catherine they pictured was so well-behaved, relatively speaking, that the average stenographer is lewd and wanton by comparison. Had the empress been anything like Elizabeth Bergner or Marlene Dietrich portrayed her, nobody would have thought of making a picture about her in the first place. Nobody has thought of making a film drama out of Queen Victoria’s placid career.

They tidied up Catherine’s life and character to make it suitable for ten-year olds. Poor Catherine must have turned over and over in her grave as she saw herself despoiled by London and Hollywood of the man-eating reputation she liked so well.

But the self-appointed censors of the Legion of Decency, who hold a mandate from the celestial powers, find even the tidied- up version “indecent, immoral and unfit for public entertainment.” That, poor Catherine must feel, is adding insult to injury.

For the general public, it presents a fine dilemma. Either stories about Catherine and people like Catherine must be further doctored, diluted and falsified—or they must never, never be told at all. Whatever one’s opinion may be about these specific pictures, it seems monstrous that the public should agree to have entire aspects of human history and human reality forbidden to them. They must not contemplate about three-quarters of the real world, even through the medium of artistic presentation!

That is the real meaning of the Legion of Decency drive. The pictures actually suppressed or boycotted are not important. What is important is that producers, being interested in profits and a wide public, will be scared out of their wits. Even the faint aroma of reality will hereafter be drowned out by the fumes of holy incense.

Nothing suitable for an understanding higher than eight years will hereafter stand much chance of production. While that age-level does take in a majority of the population (so psychologists assures us) it puts the rest, those over eight mentally, in a bad position.

Certain Jewish organizations have approved the Legion drive. Such approval is often given without understanding of its implications. The arbitrary boycott of plays or pictures for moralistic reasons opens the road to boycott of magazines, newspapers, books.