You'd think the word VIRGIN would be a word that conservatives would WANT to hear (music to their ears)-LOL.
shareLOL indeed! Nevertheless, it was shocking at the time. I teased by mom into taking me to see it. It was naughty, but cute and funny, more like the Gable/Colbert "It happened One Night.
Took many years for me to understand the bit of dialogue where David Niven called Maggie a "little burgher". "Why?" "Bacause people who advertise are trying to sell something."
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It's the same thing as the old twin beds thing that they used to have. It wasn't about instilling good sexual morals, it was about denying that sex even existed. The Catholic Church has since then repudiated the Code saying it was counterproductive by denying natural things like marital relations and pregnancy. My Dad said that TV and movies used to confuse him as a kid: "Why do Lucy and Desi sleep in two separate beds? My Mommy and Daddy sleep in one big bed, and so do all my friends' Mommys and Daddys". It was totally weird considering how people lived
shareI wasn't the least confused. I just didn't think anything of it. My parents had twin beds. Just a matter of preference. Also, back then if one of the couple had any kind of sleep issues, twin beds were the answer. unlike nowadays with the high tech double beds that practically cook your breakfast.
I had no idea of the sleeping arrangement of lot of my friends' parents and didn't care. Even the ones I knew I didn't think about. I don't recall my friends making a big to-do about it either.
Imitation is the sincerest form of television.
Fred Allen
William Holden said "virgin" with an empty bed showing in the background.
shareNot to forget, however, that the other words were "seduce" and "pregnant."
Most important of all, it broke a major taboo in the Production Code by suggesting that a person could be immoral and likeable at the same time.
The heretical line: "You are shallow, cynical, selfish, and immoral, and I like you."
Having pronounced the Code "antiquated," Preminger, to his credit, went ahead and released this film without PCA approval. The movie made a bundle.
I recently saw "Tomorrow is Another Day" from 1951 in which Ruth Roman tells her on-screen husband Steve Cochran "I'm pregnant" and that film wasn't banned or controversial at the time.
I'm here, Mr. Man, I can not tell no lie and I'll be right here 'till the day I die
The Motion Picture Code allowed for certain exceptions. If dialogue or a scene was relevant to the plot, it was included. The most famous example is probably Clark Gable's last line in Gone With the Wind, "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn." Those words were in the book that many of the film's viewers had read. They expected them to be in the script. Also, "damn" is true to the character of Rhett Butler, and his anger as he leaves Scarlett. Just that one profanity adds an intensity to her predicament. It makes her tears that much more believable.
An indication of how much movies have changed is that the now mild "damn" was the object of such a debate that one would think it would have needed a papal dispensation to be included. But the argument about it only added to the movie's pre-release frenzy.
There were other allowances. In the 1944 musical comedy, Greenwich Village, Don Ameche and Vivian Blaine discover that they are sharing a bed. As they are appropriately shocked, he gets out of it as fast as he can.
The most often remembered censorship rule was that husbands and wives in movies had to sleep in separate beds. If they were shown with any part of them on the same bed, at least one foot had to be on the ground. This was hilariously satirized on Saturday Night Live. Imitating Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn, Bill Murray and Laraine Newman have sex on her bed. All we see is his foot on the floor, pushing towards her.
Two years after The Moon is Blue, the film Foxfire was released. In it, Jane Russell and Jeff Chandler, as a husband and wife, are in bed together. It has been years since I saw only part of the movie. But what is recalled is that they are safely apart from each other as the camera begins to reveal them under
the covers.
A year later, in Giant, Rock Hudson and Elizabeth Taylor play a husband and wife. As an elderly couple, they are shown in separate beds. Maybe this was done to reveal how much they had grown apart. The movie Giant was a sprawling saga of an oil family in Texas that took place over about thirty years. It was
the type of blockbuster film, done in color, with major stars. Hollywood was hoping that this type of action filled soap opera might draw people away from the new challenge of their little, mostly black and white televisions. But as much as Giant had to offer, in the bedroom it was like I Love Lucy.
It may all sound silly now but I think the people behind the Production Code had the best intentions. Some of the rules may not have made much sense from the perspective of an adult but I think a lot of it was to keep children and young people from being exposed to ideas and concept they didn't yet understand or weren't exactly ready to handle.
You have to remember at the time anyone could go to any movie. The multiplex hadn't yet been invented so there was likely one movie option each week and that's the one the whole family would go to see. The code was the precursor to the rating system we have now; it just wasn't as well thought out.
Some parents are good about talking to their children about the things they see and hear but others are not. That's always been the case. The child starts asking question they're not prepared or able to answer. A word like ‘virgin’ cannot be explained well without talking about what’s it’s not. Kids deserve to have someone who can discuss things with them but most don't have that. They go to their friends and then often get misinformation or the wrong values.
In regards to young adults who probably would understand a lot of those concepts, the goal was probably to avoid putting ideas in their heads. It's bad enough their hormones are raging. If they're hearing and seeing things in the movies that make them think it's okay to behave in certain ways, they will. Hearing the words ‘seduce’ and ‘pregnant’ are things horny teens and twenty-something’s will translate to one thing, sex. That's what's happening these days. We live in a culture of 'anything goes' so sure enough a lot of people are doing anything under the sun with no consideration of the consequences.
Woman, man! That's the way it should be Tarzan. [Tarzan and his mate]