Did the sixties ‘swing’ too far?

Last week I wrote about The Invite, a film that carried a 15s Cert but was more sexually explicit than most Under-18s ones in the past. Do such certs mean anything these days?

It’s a long time since 1934, when Hollywood imposed a restrictive Code on films in an attempt to ‘clean itself up’ under pressure from the church and the Legion of Decency. These bodies were powerful in the forties but by the end of the fifties were losing their teeth. As Bob Dylan said, the times they were a-changing.

The floodgates against censorship opened wider again in the sixties. In 1961 we had Sanctuary. Based loosely on William Faulkner’s novel of the same name, it had already been filmed as The Story of Temple Drake in 1933. This was a pre-Code film which caused censors enormous headaches. The 1961 version was tamer.

Federico Fellini, who’d pushed the envelope with La Dolce Vita in 1960, became a thorn in the church’s side once again with Boccaccio 70 in 1962. Comprised of three separate segments all with objectionable material, it was released without a Code and condemned by the Legion of Decency but still did good business at the box office.

Catholics were now making their own minds up about what they wanted to see. Their decisions were often at odds with the church’s system of checks and balances.

The epic film Cleopatra, which began filming in Britain in 1959 before it was moved to a more suitable climate in Rome, almost bankrupted Twentieth Century Fox due to Elizabeth Taylor’s multiple hospitalisations and her astronomical salary of $1 million. Headlines about her affair with Richard Burton on the set eventually became of more interest than the escapades of the eponymous Egyptian queen.

Taylor became a ‘scarlet woman’ after stealing Eddie Fisher from his then wife Debbie Reynolds, but after she nearly died of pneumonia on the set of the film she was forgiven. No sooner had that taken place than she dived headlong into the relationship with Burton. The world couldn’t stop talking about it.

Russia was lining up ships at the Bay of Pigs at the time. The world stood on the brink of World War II but even this became subservient to what eventually came to be called ‘Le Scandale.’ Not only did Taylor have a spouse. Burton did too.

Posters of the film were sent around the world featuring the lovestruck pair. The affair even knocked astronaut John Glenn’s historic space flight off the front of the newspapers.

The Vatican condemned Burton and Taylor for what it called “erotic vagrancy.”

Its radio station branded both stars as ‘dissolutes’. “Rome is a holy city,” it stated, “God forbid it becomes one of perversion.” Taylor was heckled on her way to the studio each day. The studio itself received a bomb threat.  “You’d think,” Burton surmised, “we were out to destroy Western civilisation.”

In some ways it felt like that.