Getting it Past the Puritans: The 1940s

Abstract

Examining the ingenious and entertaining fashion in which clever screenwriters, directors and stars circumvented the crushing censorship demands of the day is a source of pleasure in itself. Those who try to unpick such Machiavellian strategies have often found that it increases their admiration of the ingenuity of the filmmakers of the period. But under the demands of the Mrs Grundys of the day — an insistence on a kind of prelapsarian innocence in which there was no place for adult themes — the concomitant, repressed charge given to material that, on the surface only, conformed to the restrictions of the era made for some electric undercurrents. A good example here might be the discussion of horse racing between Bogart and Bacall in Howard Hawks’ The Big Sleep (1946) — when Lauren Bacall says her pleasure depends on ‘who’s in the saddle’, audiences understood what she was talking about. Similarly, in the same film, when Bogart opens a book (the contents of which we do not see), his expression makes it clear that he is looking at pornographic material. This sleight of hand was something that powerful newspaper interests in the UK and the US were uneasily aware of; newspaper editors were mostly self-serving supporters of censorship, since shrieks of outage about the immorality of everything — apart from the press itself — has always sold papers.