Baby Doll, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and Anatomy of a Murder
(three of five directed by Otto Preminger!) were challenging the Production Code before those movies were toned down. Even worse there were European foreign movies like The Miracle, And God Created Woman, and Breathless in which the filmmakers were doing anything without being stopped. As that were not enough a fistful of Hollywood movies released in that decade were written by screenwriters that were barred because the U.S. government accused them for being a Communist (It's a safe bet that in the end they were not). So in short the seeds of the 60's were planting in the 1950's over freedom of expression and conformity-becoming-nonconformity.
In 1961 Eric Johnson, then president of the MPAA, announced that he believed that the Production Code should be scrapped for a more useful classification system. But the plan was dropped after when producer turned United Artists mogul Walter Mirisch threaten to leave the studio if the Code and their seal(s) of approval was dropped and soon, all the studios followed while Johnson backed away of his proposal. By year's end the Theater Owners of America (later renamed the National Association of Theater Owners in 1966) stood by their ground and voted to keep the Production Code intact. That same year Splendor in the Grass was released and despite the MPAA's approval, William Inge's screenplay (he won an Oscar by the way) was filled with sexual overtones.
One actor that noticed it was John Wayne; who described the film as "too sickening for discussion."
Then in 1965, the Production Code's stucco began to crack slowly with the release of the Sidney Lumet film The Pawnbroker.
The controversy was over a scene in which a woman is topless. To add more fuel to the fire, the woman was black (right in the midst of the Civil Rights movement as what Tony Kornheiser would say, "How did that turn out?"). As a result the Catholic Church of Film Decency gave it a C (condemn) and banned it from their list of suitable movies. The next year came changes when former Lyndon Johnson aide Jack Valenti took over as president of the MPAA that May. But just one month later came another lightning bolt: The release of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?.
The film was notorious for using mild-to-bad language and as a result Valenti refused to give the MPAA's approval; until he made an agreement with Warner Brothers president Jack Warner (which his studio released the film) that the film would be tagged with a "Adults Only" message on its poster. Then a month later the same MPAA that refused to give a seal of approval to Woolf gave one to the Michael Caine comedy Alfie
even though it caused protests from some groups because there was a scene in which Caine's character talks about abortion to one of the characters. And then as 1966 was about to end, came the cou de gra: Blow-Up.
As you know the movie featured two nude scenes as well as a group of Cockneys (London people) smoking marijuana. Again, Valenti refused to give the movie a seal of approval and to make it worse, it was made by MGM. Then the studio heads decided on releasing the film and to take out their "Leo the Lion" intro and the words "Metro Goldwyn Mayer Presents" at the start of the opening credits and replace it with the production company that financed it. Some believe the decline of MGM began with this movie and incredibly Roger Ebert in his book "The Great Movies" said that Blow-Up became the highest grossing art house film of that time.
Then in 1967 the free-for-all was in motion with the release of Bonnie and Clyde that summer.
With its graphic showing of blood and violence it caused Jack Valenti to finally scrap the seal of approval and then the Production Code itself (the stucco crumbled) and replace it with a simple message on some risque films: "Suggested For Mature Audiences". The decision came in the same year Valenti's former boss LBJ (or "Lying Bastardly Jackass" as I like to call him) asked for a crackdown of porn in the media (I guess what was the result: He failed). But an even bigger headache would come later that year when the foreign movie I Am Curious (Yellow) was released in Sweden (where it was made). The movie featured male and female nudity
including at one point, the heroine kissing her partner's erect penis. Strangely enough this was not the first time: The image of a man's erect penis was first seen the previous year (for a split second) in Persona, another Swedish film directed by Sweden's most famous filmmaker-Ingmar Bergman. When the movie was released in America early in 1968 it caused widespread panic as people were arrested for showing the film while Maryland became the first state to ban the movie in every cinema theater including art houses. But that was when the Supreme Count stepped in and in May of that year they ruled that the film did not violate the First Amendment in the Constitution for freedom of expression.
As the violence in the real world and chaos in the movies reached an all-time high (or was it a low?) in the summer of 1968, MPAA president Jack Valenti came to the belief that the movies had just turned into Babylon. So on October 7th (three days before the movie Barbarella was released) Valenti held a press conference and he made it official: The MPAA would start a rating system the next month and would be G,M,R, and X. It is curious as to why Valenti choose that time for a rating system since it came days before the presidential election (in which some American historians believe it was the most melancholy election in American history since it featured an acting President and Valenti's one-time aide dropping out in disgrace and one of the candidates getting killed in disgrace) and for me this was the low moment of this film decade.
For the first few months the rating system seemed to work but in May 1969 came the release of Midnight Cowboy.
Despite getting an X rating the movie was a hit and the big blow would come the next spring when it won the Oscar for Best Picture and with that, the MPAA decided to change it to R (to add insult to the injury John Schlesinger, who won the Oscar for Best Director for that same movie would admit years later that he was gay). And with that, the controversy over the rating system began and continues to this day. Not only that but the MPAA would also changed X movies to R such as Medium Cool;
which got it because of a racy but (in all regards) harmless nude scene between Robert Forester and Verna Bloom, The British film If... , and Last of the Mobile Hot Shots, which surprisingly enough was directed by Sidney Lumet. As that weren't enough the MPAA in the first year gave movies like Lady in Cement,
The Magus, Targets,
Goodbye, Columbus;
100 Rifles,
and John and Mary
an R rating and then were changed down to PG (the original M and then GP) and among those movies only Targets and John and Mary have gone back to its original rating. It proves one thing: That the system has never worked (this is the system that first gave Romeo and Juliet a G rating and then moved it up to M/PG after when they made an error in regards to the bedroom scene).
You heard of that saying in which there is no 'I' in team. Well, there is one in "censorship." Which is exactly what the MPAA's ratings is historically: That they want movies that we can't see. If you want to find the truth as to why the shadow of the 60's still hasn't left look no farther than the movie rating system.
