Hollywood: The Big Leer

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When the Hays office still reigned as Hollywood's moral arbiter, a fearless film producer optioned Radclyffe Hall's notorious bestseller, The Well of Loneliness. For weeks, his writers wrestled with the story, but finally admitted defeat. "What's the trouble?" demanded the producer. "The heroine's a Lesbian," stammered the writers. "So change it," roared the producer. "Make her an American."

In the ensuing years, Hollywood's attitude toward sex, natural and otherwise, has undergone a radical change. A case in point is Director William Wyler's forthcoming remake of Lillian Hellman's play, The Children's Hour, a study of two teachers falsely accused of Lesbianism. When the picture was first made in 1936, the Hays office kept Producer Sam Goldwyn both from announcing that he had purchased the play and from using its title (the film was released as These Three), insisted that he change the plot to a conventional heterosexual triangle. Director Wyler's new version will stick closely to Playwright Hellman's original subject matter, though he, too, has bypassed her title for the more sensational Infamous. But Wyler's use of the Lesbian theme does not guarantee that his film will be any better than the excellent Goldwyn version; it is only indicative of a new Hollywood era in which all the old taboos are gone, and more seems permissible than at any time since the movies' earliest, nudest and crudest days.

Varieties of Life. Few regret the passing of the phony Hays ethics in which morality was supposedly satisfied as long as movies stuck to a long list of artificial don'ts (don't show a man and woman in bed, even if they are married, etc.). But Hollywood's new freedom, while making more room for honest art, has also made more room for calculated smut, drawing a barrage of protests from parents, pastors and assorted pressure groups. Defying accusations of censorship, many have suggested some sort of adults-only classification system on the theory that movies are a special, and specially public, medium. Books present problems, too, as for instance Henry Miller's notorious Tropic of Cancer (see BOOKS). But even bestsellers have a smaller audience—and less direct impact—than any movie. Actually, the anti-Hollywood protests have been far milder than might have been expected, considering the varieties of erotica and sexual aberrations explored by today's film makers: fornication, adultery, incest, prostitution, pimping, nymphomania, voyeurism, frigidity, rape, homosexuality, cannibalism and necrophilia.*