A Scrupulous Monitor Closes Shop

By Richard N. Ostling

The Catholic film office and its ratings Review are no more

It is Christmas Eve 1962. Faint echoes of Silent Night twinkle through the frosty air. As Father Patrick J. Sullivan of the Roman Catholic film office recalls the scene, he is off in a small New Jersey parish hearing confessions. Suddenly he is summoned for an urgent phone call. Gregory Peck is on the line, wanting to know why on earth the church has rated his forthcoming film To Kill a Mockingbird unsuitable for teenagers. The priest explains that the ending seems to justify the sin of lying, even though it is in a good cause. As Sullivan remembers it, before Mockingbird is released, the final scene is altered slightly. The church gives the film an "adults and adolescents" rating and, later, an award.

That is how things went during the three decades when Catholicism's Legion of Decency (later the Catholic film office) exercised vast moral sway over U.S. film making--in league with Hollywood's own self-censoring agency, the Production Code Administration (P.C.A.). The church's ultimate weapon was an ungentlemanly C (for condemned) rating, a box-office kiss of death partly because U.S. Catholics used to take a public pledge at Mass, once a year, to boycott movies that were designated trash.

In the system in use till 1958, films were labeled A-l (suitable for general patronage) or A-2 (morally unobjectionable for adults); shady flicks got a B (objectionable in part for all). Thus armed, the Legion had leverage both before production and during final editing. For instance, an epilogue was added to the film version of Tea and Sympathy so the kind schoolmaster's wife (Deborah Kerr), who helped the troubled schoolboy learn about love, could allude to the guilt she felt afterward. Not till 1953 did a major studio make a profit on a movie with the scarlet letter C: that film was Otto Preminger's saucy The Moon Is Blue.

Last week the U.S. Catholic Church closed down its film office. It also ceased publication of the biweekly film Review, which since 1935 had carried unsigned critiques, as well as ratings, on 16,251 feature films. The official reason for the shutdown is financial, but the office clearly fell victim to changes in the law, public morality, the movie business and the church itself.

In the freewheeling Hollywood of the early 1930s, two Catholics wrote a moral code for the industry. It forbade not only overt sex and brutality but sympathy for any evildoers and even the very word "damn" (Gone With the Wind got a special P.C.A. dispensation). As the film industry created the P.C.A., the church created the National Legion of Decency. Soon it was hard to tell where one ended and the other began. The major studios owned some 70% of first-run theaters and refused to distribute any film that did not have P.C.A. approval. Over the next 33 years the P.C.A. gave its seal to only five movies the church had rated C. Films like the superpure Miracle on 34th Street got a B simply because a major character was divorced and unrepentant. The whole system was possible, remarks President Gordon Stulberg of Polygram Pictures, because in those years "there was still a kind of national morality."

But times were changing. With The Moon Is Blue, the church had its reasons for the C rating--sex and innuendo--but the general public failed to understand the fuss over such a fluffy, flossy little comedy. Gradually, confidence in the film-office ratings eroded among Catholics, too.

Enter Father Sullivan, who joined the Catholic film office in 1957, fresh from a seminary faculty. Realizing the authority of the rigid system was crumbling, he tried to replace the old legalistic strictures with broader moral judgments from a panel of experts, including non-Catholics. The rating system was made more flexible, recognizing that some films may be accept able for teen-agers though not for younger children, and acknowledging the legitimacy of "adults only" films. Sullivan tried to permit more flexibility in detail if the whole creation was worthwhile.

The ban on nudity was a case in point. The church did not want to give it up for fear that "acceptable nude treatment would soon degenerate into exploitation for commercial gain," says Sullivan. By 1970 the no-nudity rule was modified after a long debate over The Pawnbroker. The film had several brief scenes showing a woman's breasts. But otherwise it was a serious effort and the nudity was or ganic to the artistic purpose. Who 's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? escaped a B or C rating though it turned the air blue with foul language. So long as the advertising stressed that it was for adults only, the film office judged it worthwhile for showing.

The Supreme Court had already applied First Amendment free expression to motion pictures, then to nearly any thing that called itself artistic expression. The watershed in the decline of standards, however, was 1968, when the Motion Pic ture Association replaced the old P.C.A. code with the G, PG, R and X system. According to Sullivan, film producers "decided, now that the kiddies were protected, anything goes for adults." Because TV had come to dominate family entertainment, movies went for specialized audiences. Then the new wave of "adult" films began entering American homes via network and cable TV.

In its final years, during the deluge of violence and pornography, the film office struggled to maintain reasonable standards despite changing times. After 1971, the year the Catholic office withdrew its support of the Hollywood rating code, the Review branded 15% of releases with a C. But Oscar-winning Midnight Cowboy, rated X by the film industry itself, got the Catholics' A-4 (O.K. for adults "with reservations") because it was seen as a serious slice-of-life film, homosexuality and all. Another A-4 film, John Travolta's disco epic Saturday Night Fever, was deemed to contain positive moral values, despite dissolute doings in the back seat of a car.

The last edition of the film Review, distributed in September, condemns All That Jazz, American Gigolo, Friday the 13th, Little Darlings, Night Games, Used Cars and especially Dressed to Kill. Re the last: "A perfectly loathsome little movie" with fantasy sequences that seem to have "sprung from the kind of fevered but impoverished male imagination that feels threatened by any woman who is neither masochist nor prostitute."

Patrick Sullivan's plans are indefinite. Though the film office is closed, the church will still offer ratings to diocesan weeklies, but with vastly reduced impact. Significantly, one of the most passionate epitaphs for Sullivan's Review came not from a Catholic but from Julius Schatz of the American Jewish Congress. Said he: "The death of the film Review is an American tragedy."

--By Richard N. Ostling with Diane Cotu/Los Angeles and Mary Cronin/New York

With reporting by Diane Coutu, Mary Cronin

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