So you rape a girl ...

You come across as a comparatively young person who doers not remember the world before the "Sexual Revolution". If you don't know about that, you will almost invariably mostly if not completely misunderstand the sexual content of all of these movies. All the writing in them will be largely over your head. I don't know what to tell you to do about it. Everything I've ever looked up about the subject of the Sexual Revolution was written to make sense of it to people who had lived through it rather than to explain it to somebody who knows practically nothing about it. Maybe you need to find a retired sex education teacher from the early 1960's and she could explain it to you.

The bottom line is that it was a different world before the Sexual Revolution than after; and your posts show no understanding of that, the Sexual Revolution itself, or even why it was called a "revolution". To make a long story short, though, before the Sexual Revolution you simply did not wear your sexuality on your sleeve the way that is so typical today. It was a world 180 degrees different than today's. Sex was considered "dirty" by just about every responsible American alive no matter how many lovers they had or how much they liked it, and so even the most promiscuous people normally did not talk about it out loud except among people they felt would understand their very small minority point of view. The Hugh Hefners of the era were very few and exceptionally far in between. They were seen as out of step with the mainstream at best. Even people who subscribed to his magazine thought he himself was kind of "out there" if they bothered to think about him at all (and that includes even my own father and his friends). Probably his real genius was in finding a way to get his point of view out there without being shut down for obscenity (a word all educated and most uneducated people used to be as familiar with even as today it is practically unknown in popular culture). The fact that the movies liked to titillate people's imaginations with forbidden sex was just because of that - it was not only sexual but forbidden, and therefore exciting for both reasons to many movie-goers. The same was true of the output of "Hollywood gossip columnists" (a cliche of the era) who wrote about the antics of the Stars, something that got rather less play than the entertainment media of today; some women readers of the era got caught up in that stuff, but there at least as much of a tendency to regard Hollywood personalities as a bunch of lowlifes as you can find among many people today. That was also why the authorities in society in general were mistrustful of the movie industry and why the industry felt it necessary to set up the production code as a defense in the first place. The movie industry (gossip columnists and all) had a tendency to encourage people to think thoughts that traditional authorities promoting traditional morals had generally always tried to suppress. And those authorities in turn had the wholehearted support of most of the public (or at least the public that voted, went to church every Sunday, joined the PTA, and mattered the most). I must wonder if you realize how much of contemporary society in 2015 is by even recent historical standards a trash culture that was not only non-existent but even unimaginable to the typical World War II veteran in 1960. You seem to be trying to judge these old movies by modern standards and it makes about as much sense as trying to run a gasoline engine on diesel fuel and expecting it to run.

Take for instance the movie you cited, THE BEST YEARS OF OUR LIVES. I have more than one copy of this movie and have watched it many times. Judging from your comments, you have totally misunderstood the sexual aspects of this movie. Virginia Mayo's character was a stereotypical party girl of the era whom poor dumb Fred Derry (Dana Andrews) fell for because she was probably the first hot blonde that ever gave him a second look in his life. He in turn had been a drug store "soda jerk" (about the 1940 equivalent of a guy working at McDonald's now) who tested high on his military induction exams and so was made an officer bombardier in the Army Air Forces in spite of what till then had been an utter lack of significant accomplishments in his life, and not being bad looking she had fallen for his looks, most especially while wearing his officer's uniform. He then deployed to England (as we would say nowadays) to fight the war in the nose of a B-17 Flying Fortress heavy bomber while with her hot looks and party girl personality she proceeded to have a good time without him while he was gone. This was yet another wartime cliche, and that is why it is in the movie. Practically every grown-up in that era knew, knew of, or had heard about this kind of relationship. That's why it was a cliche.

Party girls are nothing new to the human race. They have probably been around since before Bathsheba decided to bathe where King David could see her. Where you err is in assuming that this was acceptable. It was most certainly NOT acceptable. Even today we would call somebody who treated her husband the way she did in the movie a slut, or even a whore, and even now we would not countenance her disloyal, adulterous behavior. The same is true in the movie (although in those days most people would have referred to her as merely, "that kind of girl", while making an unpleasant face). That's why Frederick March's family doesn't leave Dana Andrews to his fate when he arrives at her apartment and can't raise her with her doorbell, and instead he eventually winds up at Frederick March's home to spend the night. They already suspect what's up, even though they would rather put off thinking the worst. They get it, and the 1946 audience would get it, even if some Gen-Xer in the year 2015 might not. Likewise, they do not need to discuss it. It wasn't something people discussed out loud much in 1946 outside of some place like a really bad neighborhood. It was considered too ugly to talk about. Moreover, classy people like Frederick March and his family didn't need to say anything to each other about their misgivings about what they were hoping the situation would not turn out to be. Everybody knew already what you seem to have missed.

Moreover, the people Virginia Mayo's character hangs around with were again, stereotypical lowlifes. While some poor dumb sap like Dana Andrews is playing target for German flak guns over Europe at 25,000 feet in an effort to save Mankind from the Nazi Menace for a couple hundred dollars a month or so, back home there were guys making ten times the money with no comparable risk doing God knows what in the wartime economy (the implication here being that Virginia Mayo's boyfriend was a black marketeer, bypassing the wartime rationing regime) and screwing the absent warriors' hot blonde party-girl wives in their patriotic absence. Because she is Dana Andrews's WIFE (and not merely his girlfriend), everybody on his side tries to give her the benefit of the doubt, including he himself, before the realization sets in that, in the parlance of the times, "she's just no good."

Moreover, this aspect of the plot also should make you focus on the issue of wartime marriages, as well. Despite her party-girl tendencies, they did get married anyway. During that time it was surprisingly very common for young, naive, frightened and simultaneously excited people like Dana Andrew's character to get married to people they scarcely knew after only three, two, or even a single solitary date. God knows what all was going through these people's minds, but one thing that was clear to the typical person was that you simply weren't supposed to "go to bed with" somebody without being married the way your parents, your teachers, your boy scout leader, your church, and your favorite Uncle Bob had always told you. Countless couples observed this during the war in a way practically unimaginable today, and that's why they did it. They had all grown up being taught that you didn't "shack up" with somebody without marriage unless you were were trash, and they didn't think of themselves as trash. Even where the guys might have more "liberal" ideas, you can bet that most of the young women did not (they were still usually pretty reluctant even in the 1970's or early 80's). Naturally, once they had broken the ice and lost their virginity, some folks then found it easy to stray, as both some guys did once they were deployed overseas to locations offering such opportunities and as some women like Virginia Mayo did back home. Google up the concept of the "Dear John letter" to see what it looked like when the girl wasn't as much of a party girl yet still didn't want to wait for her impulsively-accepted husband to come back home. And then, of course, there were those folks that never had any traditional morals to start with.

So, lots of ugly things happened. But where you are mistaken is in assuming that was because they happened they were considered acceptable. No one thought they were acceptable. They were considered ugly and selfish, and to the morally rectified, utterly immoral at every level. The audiences in 1940's, 50's, and even 60's and 70's knew this already and didn't need the filmmaker to explain it to them. And whenever courts or commanding officers had to deal with them, it was with a tone of disdain or even contempt. A great example dramatized for your edification is in an episode of the TV series *12 O'clock High* that appeared in 1964 or '65, where a B-17 crewman who knocked up his English girlfriend but wouldn't cure the infraction by the normally accepted method of marrying her was grounded by his C.O. The C.O. was a one-star general who was the main character in the show, and he grounded the man saying that he didn't trust a man in combat with nine other lives depending upon him who wasn't responsible enough to know what to do when he got his girlfriend pregnant. He concluded by telling the crewman to come back to him when he made up his mind whether he was a man or a little boy. This would have been a prevailing attitude not only in World War Two but even in the mid-sixties among an audience mature enough to be interested in watching a heavy TV drama about a heavy bombardment group flying missions back during the war, and that's why it was written in there as an example of how the series's main character, the C.O., showed his superior leadership ability.

Maybe what you should be doing if you really want to understand this is to watch a whole bunch of TV shows from the 1960's (including lots and lots of episodes of the major sitcoms) and then do the same thing for the 1980's, and look at the huge difference. Sex was avoided or minimized 99% of the time in old TV shows as much as it is embraced in the later ones. It is yet another reflection of the sexual revolution that is plain to see. In fact, if you have not the time to do what I just suggested, just watch one single show - I DREAM OF JEANIE - and you'll see it all right there. The premise was that an astronaut splashes down off course and washes up on the shore of an uninhabited Pacific island and discovers a genie in a bottle lying on the beach there, releasing her from it after a confinement of about 2,000 years. She turns out to be a hot little blonde who not only explains that since he released her she now belongs to him exclusively, but she insists on calling him "Master" and also immediately falls madly in love with him. He, in return, never lays one single finger on her until they actually finally get married in the fifth and final year of the series. Until then she sleeps alone in her bottle in her silk pajamas every single night (and don't think I was wasn't looking - we were ALL looking). The audience of that time accepted that premise with no problem for five years on a major big-three TV network. It ran from 1965 to 1970. Today, decades post-sexual revolution, that premise wouldn't last five whole episodes (you can just imagine what the producers of *Two-and-a-Half Men* would have done with something like that). I still remember a disc jockey in the early 1980's announcing that the *Cheers* season finale would be airing that night and that a big audience was expected to tune in to see whether Sam and Diane would "finally do it." That would have been unthinkable only a dozen or so years earlier.

One other thing you might do is listen to the hit pop song "Harper Valley PTA" from about 1968 or '69. It's all about how the traditional forces of a small town ("Harper Valley") go after a widowed (even then, they weren't willing to take on the still-controversial issue of divorce) single mother they think is a floozy (Google that, too) but, in the spirit of the 1960's social revolutions, she doesn't take it but instead attacks them back for their hypocrisy, as she exposes publicly all their own hitherto covered-up peccadilloes. (Curiously enough, when that song was finally ready for TV and turned into a TV movie in 1978 and a series in 1981, the same actress who previously played "Jeanie" played the single mother). It's a way to see the pre- and post-sexual revolution cultures crashing headlong into each other in one performance only about three minutes long.

At any rate, the people watching THE BEST YEARS OF OUR LIVES or CASABLANCA in the 1940's knew what they were seeing as much as you clearly do not seem to, and the same would be true of this movie.