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14 Collapse Reminiscing about the art film scene of the 1960s, Andrew Sarris remarked : “No one on either side of the Atlantic—or Pacific—wants to admit it today, but the fashion for foreign films depended a great deal on their frankness about sex. At a time when the Hollywood censors imposed twin-bed strictures on American movies, foreign films were daringly adult. Once the censors began to depart, in the late ’60s, Hollywood was free to supply the oohla -la factor—and without subtitles.”1 As the title of Sarris’s article suggested, foreign films had lost their cachet. Hollywood in Transition A seismic shift in American culture during the 1960s led to the dismantling of movie censorship. For over three decades a triad of controls had regulated content: (1) governmental censorship boards (2) organized religious pressure, and (3) industry self-regulation. Governmental censorship effectively ended in 1965 when the Supreme Court handed down a decision involving the Danish film A Stranger Knocks, which declared that the statutes governing the New York Board of Censors were unconstitutional. No longer would films have to be submitted to the state agency to secure a license for public exhibition. Because of New York City’s strategic importance as the port of entry for foreign films, the decision had an immediate impact on the entire art film market. Thereafter almost anything could be shown as long as it was not obscene. According to the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), the industry trade association , the obscenity law was in “a hopeless mess” in the courts.2 279 280 Part Three: Changing Dynamics  Organized religious pressure declined as well. In 1966 the Legion of Decency renamed itself the National Catholic Office for Motion Pictures and adopted a new stance. Instead of advocating picketing and boycotts of films deemed offensive to the church, it decided to support “worthy films and a widespread educational campaign to develop a new appreciation of the medium among Catholic laymen.”3 Beginning in 1966, industry self-regulation went by the boards when the MPAA, under the leadership of its new president, Jack Valenti, replaced the old Production Code with a more liberal version that allowed the organization to affix the “Suggested for Mature Audiences” label to Hollywood films judged unsuitable for children. In 1968 the MPAA did away with the Production Code altogether and instituted a full-scale rating system, the Code and Rating Administration that classified films according to their suitability for different age groups. The ratings included an X, which prohibited those under seventeen from gaining admission to the movie and gave Hollywood producers license to deal with themes and subjects designed specifically for adult audiences. Valenti justified the changes by claiming that “films can’t live in a vacuum. They relate to the temper of the times, the postures of today.”4 The impact of this new freedom on Hollywood was immediate. As Time put it, “Hollywood has at long last become part of what the French film journal Cahiers du Cinéma calls ‘the furious springtime of world cinema,’ and is producing a new kind of movie.” Freed from the shackles of the Production Code, the New American Cinema, as it was dubbed, “assimilated the cinematic techniques of the French New Wave” and began to treat “once-shocking themes with a maturity and candor unthinkable even five years ago.”5 Time singled out Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde, a revisionist gangster film set in the Depression, which starred Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway, as exemplary of the trend. Released by Warner Bros. in August 1967, “Bonnie and Clyde stirred up a battle among movie critics that seemed to be almost as violent as the film itself.” Bosley Crowther, it will be recalled, was so offended by the violence in the film that he reviewed it—negatively—three times and ultimately resigned his post as chief film critic of the New York Times. Taking a fresh look at the film, Time said, “Undeniably, part of the scandal and success of Bonnie and Clyde stems from its creative use of what has always been a good box-office draw: violence. But what matters most about Bonnie and Clyde is the new freedom of its style, expressed not so much by camera trickery as by its yoking of disparate elements into a coherent artistic whole—the creation of unity from incongruity. Blending humor and horror, it draws the audience in sympathy toward its anti-heroes. It is, at...

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