Kefauver v. Hollywood

Preceded by some of the surliest advance notices ever published in the Hollywood press, an erstwhile TV star, Tennessee's mild-mannered Democratic Senator Estes Kefauver, quietly moved into the movie capital last week. Sitting as a one-man Senate subcommittee on juvenile delinquency, Prober Kefauver was looking for answers to a valid question: Do sex and violence in Hollywood's product give U.S. kids bad ideas? He also wanted to know more about dirty movies, commonly shot in hotel rooms on a G-string budget. The linking of the two probes was more than Hollywood's outraged trade press could bear in silence. Fumed the Hollywood Reporter: "It is insulting that Estes Kefauver should include the motion-picture industry in an investigation . . . of stag reels and other pornography . . . [This] is obviously nothing more than a pre-presidential publicity campaign conducted at our expense."

"Everybody's Smoking . . ." Blandly ignoring his press clippings, Kefauver opened his easygoing hearings, heard Hollywood defended by its top men, explained sympathetically by two psychiatrists, attacked by only one witness, William Mooring, syndicated movie editor for some 50 Roman Catholic newspapers. Critic Mooring cited a murder-rape case directly inspired by a rape movie, listed eleven recent films as harmful to youthful morals, irrelevantly wound up by lambasting drive-in theaters for encouraging young couples to neck, or worse, in cars.

Hollywood's top production bosses solemnly testified that movies could not realistically exclude' sex and violence, but far from inspiring juvenile crime, films often combatted it by portraying its ugly consequences, thus arousing public zeal for reform. MGM's Dore Schary argued that his Blackboard Jungle, condemned by Critic Mooring, did not "accelerate" delinquency but "insulated" against it. The family itself, testified Paramount's Y. Frank Freeman, is delinquency's chief hotbed, and "an old-fashioned hickory stick" is the remedy. Taken to task for the violence dished out in Warner's unreleased juvenile crime saga, Rebel Without Cause, Executive Producer Jack L. Warner sourly snapped: "The critics must be using radar. I haven't even seen the picture yet." Interrupting, a spectator challenged Warner to state how many of his last 30 movies showed women smoking and drinking. Sighed Warner irritably: "You must be living in a backwoods country, boy. Everybody's smoking and drinking now."

"Wild Melodrama . . ." As the testimony rambled on, industry spokesmen conjured up several novel defenses of their wares. Columbia's Jerry Wald asserted the right of U.S. moviemakers, unlike that of Soviet producers, to criticize their country's seamy side; Motion Picture Industry Councilman Lou Greenspan fell back on the Bible, where "murder, adultery, even incest are described." One movie adman piously explained, when Kefauver cited an advertisement showing two scantily clothed lovers grappling suggestively, that it could have been worse: "In the original [drawing] submitted to us they were clad only in beads. We at least put pants on the woman."

At week's end Hollywood seemed little changed by the probe. A local theater was showing a kid gang thriller called Mad at the World, with a special prologue by none other than Senator Estes Kefauver. Most local critics gleefully panned Mad as "wild melodrama . . . frightening . . . brutal." In gentle tones. Prologuist Kefauver told newsmen between hearings: "I read the script and thought it would make a fine picture." Then the Senator, who won renown in a coonskin campaigning hat long before most folks knew much about Hollywood's Davy Crockett, moseyed off on the trail of the pornographers.

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