Mae West: Sex in Cinema

A new TV documentary on sex in cinema will include clips of MAE WEST — — which makes perfect sense.
• • Denver Post TV columnist Joanne Ostrow writes: Expect a spicy clip assemblage when Starz recounts the sexiest, most sex-obsessed, sexually boundary-breaking and sexually shocking movies of all time.
• • From "Lolita" to "Caligula" to "American Beauty," the most memorable moments are all here. Changing public attitudes toward depictions of sex and sexuality are explored in sometimes thoughtful ways, charting America's trend toward liberation, but mostly it's about the racy clips.
• • The hottest, most emblematic moments from movies that had something to do with sex are on display in a Starz Original, "Sex and the Cinema," debuting at 8 [this week].
• • The documentary explores how the boundaries have changed, what the Production Code did for creative approaches to sex decades ago, why sex can be the source of elements for good drama and what audiences see when they look at on-screen sex.
• • Things used to be much simpler in Hollywood, various directors note. Now, nudity in PG-13 is acceptable as long as it's not sexually motivated. The lines are blurred.
• • Sex is "the strongest drive in biology," according to director Paul Verhoeven ("Basic Instinct"). He says it works better than dialogue in movies to explain characters' psychology and motivation.
• • The clip fest considers funny, disturbing, athletic, and forbidden sex; merely suggested sex; kitchen-table "Postman"-style sex; underage sex; and various forms of illicit sex.
• • "Nudity is the smallest part of sex," says Ron Shelton, director of "Bull Durham."
• • The best sex scene in his movie "Waking the Dead," director Keith Gordon says, was the closeup of two faces during sex, relaying the experience.
• • Who gets credit for bringing sex to the screen in a new way? Humphrey Bogart, Barbara Stanwyck, Daniel Craig, George Clooney. Marilyn Monroe, of course. Bo Derek, Pamela Anderson, Halle Berry — all are sized up for their appeal. Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie are determined to be the "perfect storm of sexuality."
• • The usual high-minded, historic art references are thrown in to make the case that sexuality has been interesting for a long time. Cut from a closeup of a Grecian urn to examples of the earliest use of film (an Edison clip from "The Kiss"), onward to Rudolph Valentino, Mae West, and the parade of naked people doing what they'll do, onscreen ever since.
— — Source: — —
• • TV Review: Starz rolls out sexy movie clip fest
• • BY: Joanne Ostrow
• • Published by: The Denver Post — — www.denverpost.com
• • Published on: 11 November 2009
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• • Come up and see Mae every day online: http://MaeWest.blogspot.com/
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Mae West: Story of O

Only one of MAE WEST's motion pictures received an Academy Award nod. Alas, a wink is not a win. The Brooklyn bombshell's big box-office for "She Done Him Wrong" left no impression on the gold-plated statuette's baby-sitters. And so, anticipating the season of Oscar, New York Times writer Dave Kehr offers his analysis about the tug-of-war between wowing the audience versus winning the laurels.
• • According to Dave Kehr: One of the enduring traditions of the Academy Awards is that the Oscar for best picture almost invariably goes to a film that isn’t. This will not be news to anyone who has sat through some genuine groaners from Oscars past: pictures like Frank Lloyd’s 1933 “Cavalcade,” Robert Z. Leonard’s 1936 “Great Ziegfeld” and Cecil B. DeMille’s 1952 “Greatest Show on Earth.”
• • But even when good movies win, the other nominees are usually of equal or even greater interest. Most famously there was the banner year of 1941, for which John Ford’s magnificent “How Green Was My Valley” was named what the academy then termed “outstanding motion picture” (a more modest, defensible claim and perhaps one the academy should revive) while Orson Welles’s game-changing “Citizen Kane” went home with only the original screenplay award.
• • If the Oscars aren’t a reliable guide to artistic accomplishment, they provide an infallible index to how the leaders of the motion picture industry want their business to be seen in any given year. In 1933, for example, pressure was mounting from civic and religious groups for Hollywood to clean up its act — — pressure that would result in the renewed enforcement of the Production Code in 1934.
• • By selecting “Cavalcade” — — a numbing historical pageant, derived from a Noël Coward play, about a wealthy couple (Diana Wynyard and Clive Brook) stiff-upper-lipping their way through 40 years of English history — — the members of the academy distanced themselves from the racy entertainments that then dominated the box office.
• • Hollywood's 1932 — 1933 Season of O
• • Among the other nominees of the 1932 — 1933 season: the flesh-baring, garter-snapping backstage musical “42nd Street”; Mae West’s “She Done Him Wrong” — — the film in which she sings the innuendo-laden ballad “Where Has My Easy Rider Gone?” [sic]; and Frank Borzage’s adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s “Farewell to Arms,” a film so forthright in its depiction of premarital sex that 12 minutes had to be cut when it was reissued into the more prudish, post-Code world of 1938. . . .
• • For most of the ’30s the academy whipsawed between popular entertainments (“It Happened One Night,” 1934) and prestigious literary adaptations (“Mutiny on the Bounty,” 1935) meant to assure would-be censors that Hollywood was a dignified, pipe-smoking kind of place, tirelessly working for the moral improvement of American audiences. . . .
— — Excerpt: — —
• • Article: "Big, Important Picture? Sure. But Is It Best?"
• • Byline: DAVE KEHR
• • Published in: The New York Times
• • Published on: 31 December 2008
• • Come up and see Mae every day online: http://MaeWest.blogspot.com/
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Mae West: Censorship

MAE WEST was always doing battle with the censors. Once the Brooklyn bombshell was under contract to Paramount Pictures, Joseph Breen, "the Hitler of Hollywood," took a hatchet to all of Mae's scripts. Since Joe Breen — — who died at age 75 during the month of December (on 5 December 1965) — — held the power, some folks might believe he wrote the Production Code. He did not.
• • Gregory D. Black outlines the history of The Hays Code thoroughly in his book, The Catholic Crusade Against the Movies, 1940 — 1975.
• • During the 1920s, celebrity scandals threatened to rock Hollywood. Celebrities were dying in freak sex accidents, lurid private lifestyles were being revealed in the media, and extramarital affairs among screen stars spiced up the tabloids. These shockers, as well as a declining morality portrayed in motion pictures, shook the movie-goer's faith and threatened government censorship in cinema. This new film industry, fearful of alienating ticket-buyers, felt it must boost its image from within — — and created the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA) in 1922.
• • The MPAA appointed William Hays, a stout Presbyterian politician, to be the front man for the organization and to ward off government censorship bills while creating a code calling for self-regulation by creators of films. The code Hays created prohibited nudity and profanity as well as other elements. However, the code allowed for each director’s interpretation, therefore, morality in film improved only a little.
• • The Catholic Church furnished a solution. The Church felt that if the Catholic hierarchy supported a moral code, its influence would be strong enough to eliminate the need for political censorship. Because of the enormous and centralized nature of the Roman Catholic Church, the industry would be forced to conform to their standards.
• • Martin Quigley, owner of the trade journals Motion Picture Daily and Motion Picture Herald, together with Father Daniel Lord, S.J., teamed to write a document presenting the Catholic position on the new medium.
• • A portion of the code follows:
• • • • Reasons Supporting Preamble of Code • • • •
• • • • Correct entertainment raises the whole standard of a nation. Wrong entertainment lowers the whole living conditions and moral ideas of a race.[…]
• • • • They [motion pictures] reproduce the morality of the men who use the pictures as a medium for the expression of their ideas and ideals. They affect the moral standards of those who through the screen take in these ideas and ideals. […]
• • • • Reasons Supporting the General Principles • • • •
• • • • No picture shall be produced which will lower the moral standards of those who see it… This is done:
• • • • When evil is made to appear attractive or alluring and good is made to appear unattractive.
• • • • When the sympathy of the audience is thrown to the side of crime wrong-doing, evil, sin. The same thing is true of a film that would throw sympathy against goodness, honor, innocence, purity or honesty. […]
• • • • …throughout, the audience feels sure that evil is wrong and good is right. […]
• • • • Crimes against the Law • • • •
• • • • Revenge in modern times shall not be justified. […]
• • • • Sex • • • •
• • • • Impure love must not be presented as attractive or beautiful. […]
• • • • In general, it must not be detailed in methods and manner.
• • • • Costume • • • •
• • • • The effect of nudity or semi-nudity upon the normal man or woman and much more upon the young and immature person, has been honestly recognized by all lawmakers and moralists. […]
• • • • Nudity can never be permitted as being necessary for the plot. Semi-nudity must not result in indecent exposure. […]
• • • • Dances • • • •
• • • • …dances which suggest or represent sexual actions, whether performed solo or with two or more, dances intended to excite the emotional reaction of an audience, dances with movement of the breasts, excessive body movements while the feet are stationary, violate decency and are wrong.
• • • • Religion • • • •
• • • • The reason why ministers of religion may not be comic characters or villains is simply because the attitude taken toward them may easily become the attitude taken toward religion in general. […]
• • Martin J. Quigley and Daniel Lord presented their code to Hays, who felt it was just what he had been looking for. Despite the many restrictions put on their art, the industry accepted the “Hays Code” with little resistance.
• • Come up and see Mae every day online: http://MaeWest.blogspot.com/
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Mae West: A New DVD

MAE WEST pops up onscreen again in a new DVD released this week.
• • The title is: "WHY BE GOOD: SEXUALITY & CENSORSHIP IN EARLY CINEMA" [Image, unrated, 2008] — — hey, hey, hey, this is hoo-ha central!
• • Accompanying this frisky footage is the actress Diane Lane, who narrates a breezy documentary that looks at the ways in which sexpots Mae West, Clara Bow, and Marlene Dietrich pushed the va-va-voom envelope in the days before Hollywood adopted proto-MPAA Production Code. Extras: None.
• • Come up and see Mae every day online: http://MaeWest.blogspot.com/
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Mae West: Hays Fever

NPR's "All Things Considered" did an episode on the Hitler of Hollywood, celluloid censor Will Hays, whose Hays Code crippled the motion picture career of MAE WEST.
• • Here is an excerpt from Bob Mondello's broadcast — — Remembering Hollywood's Hays Code, 40 Years On.
• • Bob Mondello begins: · When people talk about the "more innocent" Hollywood of years gone by, they're referring to an era when the movie industry policed itself. But that early Hollywood wasn't always so innocent.
• • For decades, it's true, the major film studios were governed by a production code requiring that their pictures be "wholesome" and "moral" and encourage what the studios called "correct thinking."
• • But that code, which was officially abandoned 40 years ago this year, was the result of a nationwide backlash — — an outraged reaction to a Hollywood that by 1922 had come to seem like a moral quagmire, even by the bathtub-gin-and-speakeasy standards of the Roaring '20s.
• • Silent-film comic Fatty Arbuckle charged with manslaughter in the death of an actress; a bisexual director found murdered; movie stars dying of drug overdoses — — small wonder the nation's religious leaders were forming local censorship boards and chopping up movies every which way to suit the standards of their communities.
• • And at first, when Hollywood studios banded together under former Postmaster General Will Hays to come up with a list of 36 self-imposed "Don'ts and Be Carefuls," it's no wonder no one believed them. There were no penalties, no laws, no enforcement.
• • Moralists were so outraged, meanwhile — — by Mae West's casual slatternliness in I'm No Angel, by Barbara Stanwyck's promiscuousness in Baby Face, by Cecil B. DeMille's racy biblical epic Sign of the Cross — — that calls for official government censorship became overwhelming.
• • A Power Play, For Propriety's Sake • •
• • Of course, they were calls that Hays himself, working behind the scenes, had helped to make overwhelming — — and he used the pressure to force filmmakers to toe his line and obey the new Production Code he eventually promulgated.
• • "The code sets up high standards of performance for motion-picture producers," Hays proclaimed when the new code was unveiled. "It states the considerations which good taste and community value make necessary in this universal form of entertainment." . . .
— — Excerpt: — —
• • "Movies — — Remembering Hollywood's Hays Code, 40 Years On"
• • Byline: Bob Mondello
• • Published by: NPR — — "All Things Considered" — — www.npr.org/
• • Published: 8 August 2008
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• • Come up and see Mae every day online: http://MaeWest.blogspot.com/
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