Censor Board Again Asked for Interpretation of Its Approving, Banning Acts

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BY W. WARD MARSH

INCE THE MEMBERS of the Ohio board of censorship have not answered my oft-asked question: "Just what are the moral standards for a picture which is permitted to show in Ohio?” I shall keep on asking.

Oh, I know they have their rules, but such singular interpretation! And since I'll likely not get an answer this time I had one answer back in the 1920s which was folfowed immediately by an apology—I must again point out some glaring discrepancies and/or weaknesses in the board's shining armor.

The latest Comstockian edict wiped Maurice Chevalier's "A! Royal Affair" from the Lower Mall's screen last Friday.

It was followed immediately by a picture alternateiy titled “Donne Senza Nome," "Femmes Sans Nom, "Last Women” and “Mπjeres en las Ombras." It continues to flourish in this theater. Sex and SEX

UNDER ANY TITLE it will! make all those who were delighted with the so-called "sex stuff". in "A Royal Affair" writhe over the perverted sex in it.

To be sure, Chevalier as le roi took two women-his wife and his mistress-away from . stuffed shirt who thought more of business than of love, but it was all in the gayest of fun and theatric unreality.

I have talked with those who! understand French far better thanį I domine creaks frightfully-and in two instances the spectators were sensitive and cultured) women. They had been vastly ainused by and thoroughly delighted with the picture.

Comparison

THE CURRENT film is set in * detention camp, near Trieste, for unwanted women-women who have no home, no friends, no "papers."

In one long sequence, beginning with a rehearsal for the proposed staging of “Romeo and Juliet," two women openly and viciously brawl for the favors of the third. Now to most spectators I am sure that the homosexual overtones and undertones, so emphatically and unmistakably expressed, are sickening.

Believe me. I am not quarreling with this picture nor its right to play. I rate it ADULT and it is the adults' right to see this vivid semidocumentary, sometimes| horrifying film dealing with hapless women caught in the brckwash of war on the Continentwithout friends, without hope.

But there is this unsavory sequence and there is a long and unpleasant sequence in which the heroine gives birth to a baby she did not want born in prison, and there is the mother's death.

There is also a drumhead courtmartial among the women when an ex-Nazi nurse who had segregated shy, sensitive young girls during the war and had sent them to the front for the Nazi officers and soldiers is brought to swift and merciless trial.

This depraved dame draws the verdict of death from her vengeful associates and is forced to swallow a poison capsule, and none of the sequence is pretty at any time.

Yet Chevalier with tongue in cheek and song on lips makes gay and mocking love, and his picture [gets the censorial ax. To me such edicts just do not make sense.

More Exhibit d's

I MUST REFER again to "The] Prowler" as the long-standing Exhibit A in the examplex of ɔnconĮsistencies of political censorship as practiced in the State of Ohio.

This film openly showed a man. meeting, making Jove to and finally seducing the wife of another man. Not only that but he murdered the husband to get and keep the woman. He got her, too, but did marriage make right the situation? Or was there a single moment in the love-making scenes between the two, so suggestive as to make even this hardened moviegoer wonder what censorship if any was coming to, to match the humor and wit and tongue-incheek love making in "Royal Affair"?

What standards, then, are set Jup in Columbus when the picture is allowed of a man raping his sister-in-law in the very hour when his wife is giving birth to his child-and ultimately driving the nymphomaniac sister-in-law off her last rockerwhen “A Royal Affair,” which hurts no one and amuses everyone (so far as I have been able to find out), is banned? (The picture here is "Streetcar Named Desire.") All I can conclude is that if the; picture is heavy drama and if the sex scenes are sufficiently sunken |in depravity it will get the censorial pat on the head, but if sex is treated lightly with real wit and pour le sport it draws the ban.

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I tell you honestly that we in Ohio take our sex seriously and that the French producers had better stop fooling around with it if they expect to have their films get the Ohio political-censorship stamp of approval.