"Moral Breach"

Seven states and 50 cities in the U.S. still put up with official movie censors, but their laws permit meddling only with such moral questions as how low can a neckline plunge.* Last spring Maryland's three censors extended their sway from decolletage to dialectics: they banned a 50-minute Polish documentary, On Polish Land (with no English subtitles), because they did "not believe it presents a true picture of present-day Poland." Instead, they ruled, the film "appears to be Communist propaganda."

Against prompt charges of political censorship, the Maryland board argued: "Immorality . . . extends to the entire moral code"; therefore, a film "based upon deceit and misrepresentation" could be banned as a "moral breach." Prodded by the Baltimore Sunpapers, Governor W. Preston Lane Jr. asked his attorney general whether the censors were within their legal powers. Ruled Attorney General Hall Hammond: no.

But the ban stuck when the film's distributor, George I. Shafir of Manhattan, refused to contest it. In their annual report, the stubborn censors were still defending their decision: "Certainly the screen is no place for documentary subjects that are presented without truth and sincerity, and the sooner the board is enabled to cope with such abuses beyond legal .doubt, the better . . ."

Last week the American Civil Liberties Union raised an outraged voice. In a letter to Governor Lane, Playwright Elmer Rice, chairman of its National Council on Freedom from Censorship, branded the board's proposal "flagrantly unconstitutional." Said Rice: "If the ... board is to have the power to ban pictures because the subjects are not presented with truth and sincerity, there will be very few Hollywood productions indeed which could ever be shown. [If] censorship on this ground should be limited to documentary subjects, then the attempted restrictions on free speech become all the more obvious ... If the board has power to censor for inaccuracies and hypocrisies, there is no reason why such a board could not censor every book, every newspaper, every speech in the state."

*Some Southern cities, through their police departments, also ban films that take a sympathetic view of Negroes. Recent example: Lost Boundaries, banned in Memphis and Atlanta.

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