The Big Leer

When the Hays office still reigned as Hollywood's moral arbiter, a fearless film producer optioned Radclyffe Hall's notorious bestseller, The Well of Loneliness. For weeks, his writers wrestled with the story, but finally admitted defeat. "What's the trouble?" demanded the producer. "The heroine's a Lesbian," stammered the writers. "So change it," roared the producer. "Make her an American."

In the ensuing years, Hollywood's attitude toward sex, natural and otherwise, has undergone a radical change. A case in point is Director William Wyler's forthcoming remake of Lillian Hellman's play, The Children's Hour, a study of two teachers falsely accused of Lesbianism. When the picture was first made in 1936, the Hays office kept Producer Sam Goldwyn both from announcing that he had purchased the play and from using its title (the film was released as These Three), insisted that he change the plot to a conventional heterosexual triangle. Director Wyler's new version will stick closely to Playwright Hellman's original subject matter, though he, too, has bypassed her title for the more sensational Infamous. But Wyler's use of the Lesbian theme does not guarantee that his film will be any better than the excellent Goldwyn version; it is only indicative of a new Hollywood era in which all the old taboos are gone, and more seems permissible than at any time since the movies' earliest, nudest and crudest days.

Varieties of Life. Few regret the passing of the phony Hays ethics in which morality was supposedly satisfied as long as movies stuck to a long list of artificial don'ts (don't show a man and woman in bed, even if they are married, etc.). But Hollywood's new freedom, while making more room for honest art, has also made more room for calculated smut, drawing a barrage of protests from parents, pastors and assorted pressure groups. Defying accusations of censorship, many have suggested some sort of adults-only classification system on the theory that movies are a special, and specially public, medium. Books present problems, too, as for instance Henry Miller's notorious Tropic of Cancer (see BOOKS). But even bestsellers have a smaller audience--and less direct impact--than any movie. Actually, the anti-Hollywood protests have been far milder than might have been expected, considering the varieties of erotica and sexual aberrations explored by today's film makers: fornication, adultery, incest, prostitution, pimping, nymphomania, voyeurism, frigidity, rape, homosexuality, cannibalism and necrophilia.*

By concentrating on such themes, Hollywood scarcely mirrors life, which is full of a great many other concerns. But the real trouble with movies today is not so much the choice of subject matter, since even the most sordid subject can be treated with dignity and art; the trouble is precisely their lack of art, their crass and speculative exploitation of sex. With TV, plus new waves of foreign pictures steadily nibbling away at Hollywood's audience, most producers have plainly decided that virtue--at least at the box office--is its own punishment. So many "adult" films are being produced that Manhattan's family citadel, Radio City Music Hall, is showing pictures such as Parrish, all about sex and sadism on a tobacco farm. Even last year's top Oscar winner. Billy Wilder, signed Shirley MacLaine for The Apartment before he had a word on paper, with the pitch that he wanted to make a film about "that grand old American folk ritual, the afternoon shack-up." In Co-Writer-Producer-Director Wilder's hands, the result was one of the sharpest social satires ever filmed. And Hollywood's new lack of inhibitions has made possible other excellent pictures (Elmer Gantry, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof), and some that are at least artistically ambitious (Shadows, The Savage Eye). But these are the exceptions. At the other end of the scale are such lurid Z pictures as Albert Zugsmith's The Beat Generation, and Sexpot Goes to College. The point is that these are no longer drastically different from many quality productions.

As Writer Rod Serling recalls: "Zugsmith called me into his office once and told me that he wanted me to help him bring M-G-M back to the top of the heap with quality pictures. Then he gave me my first assignment. It was something called Rape, Baby." Local Off-Color. Working in much the same vein is Jerry Wald, who recently announced that Peyton Place was going to be a grandfather. So successful was P.P.'s first sequel, Return to Peyton Place, that it will have a sequel of its own, Peyton Place Revisited. Like its predecessors, the new installment will first be written in novel form; Producer Wald has already packed Author Grace Metalious back to New Hampshire to soak up local off-color.

On the same plane, but partly redeemed by humor, are the one-joke japes around which Hollywood has built entire pictures. In Marriage-Go-Round an Amazonian Swede decides to have the perfect baby with a married college professor; Happy Anniversary dealt with a married couple's knee-slapping revelation that their 13th wedding anniversary was actually the 14th of their togetherness. Proof that such stories can be first-rate if treated right: Facts of Life, in which middle-aged Suburbanites Bob Hope and Lucille Ball tail a course in infidelity.

To go along with Hollywood's new relaxed standards, screenwriters have had to furnish a whole new set of cliches Superficially, the elements of junior living are unchanged--the car. the drugstore the beach; but where Andy Hardy's girls frolicked at the prom, today's movie teen-ager is more likely to rollick in the hay. if that is Where the Boys Are. Surefire box office seems to be the will-she-or-won't-she pictures, such as Ask Any Girl and Pillow Talk, whose happy healthy, wholesome heroines never do--although things get fairly steamy while they are trying to decide.

For the girl who does, after all there is always the friendly neighborhood abortionist. Actually. Hollywood still shies away from this plot device, and more usually the heroine suffers a fortuitous auto accident on the way to the quack (The Best of Everything), or is done right by the best friend of the man who done her wrong (Home from the Hill).

Good & Bawd. Even less plausible is the spate of abstinence-makes-the-heart-grow-fonder pictures (Private Property Strangers When We Meet), in which the pneumatic charms of the young wife are scorned by a husband more interested in watching the late, late show on TV. This justifies the pulsating wife's bundling with a fellow P.T.A. member or with a freelance gardener--as long as the home fires are banked. In the multigeneration epics, such as A Summer Place, mom and dad can get away with almost anything because in the last reel their children will pay the piper. Worst of all the cliches is the slightly soiled heroine, a mixture of good and bawd, as in Go Naked in the World or Butterfield 8, in which the glossy prurience of treatment lacks even the redeeming ingredient of honesty.

Hollywood still worships the happy or at least technically decent ending. In the adaptation of Breakfast at Tiffany's, Truman Capote's roundheeled heroine will emerge, according to Director Blake Edwards, as a fey rather than immoral girl "with a profound set of values." In the end, the screen Holly (unlike Capote's) is saved by the love of a good man. But just to spice things up. Edwards has included a nightclub striptease scene that was not in the book. Because of such striptease ethics, cause and effect are seldom sorted out, and the tragedy or pathos that can raise a sordid theme to dignity is seldom explored. In theend Hollywood stands foursquare against sin but not against salaciousness.

* Examples, in order: From the Terrace, Portrait in Black, The Last Sunset, Let No Man Write My Epitaph, Girl of the Night, The Fugitive Kind, The Bramble Bush, Two Loves, Sanctuary, Tea and Sympathy, Suddenly, Last Summer and Psycho.

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