A Landmark Decision

Anyone familiar with the history of American film censorship is at least nominally aware of the “Miracle Case” of 1952, in which the U.S. Supreme Court finally extended free-speech protection to motion pictures. Prior to that time, the high court had not ruled on this particular issue since 1915, when it concluded in Mutual Film Company v. Ohio that the movies were “entertainment, pure and simple,” and as such did not fall within the purview of the First Amendment. The court’s decision in the “Miracle Case” (more properly known as Burstyn v. Wilson) ended decades of prior-restraint censorship and helped to usher in a period of greater freedom in American cinemas, in terms of the international films that could be shown here, as well as the kinds of subject matter that Hollywood studios and independents could broach in their films.

What many of us might not know about the “Miracle Case” is the history of the man who brought it about. Joseph Burstyn (1901 – 1953) was a Polish immigrant who got into the film business in the 1930s as a distributor of European motion pictures. After World War Two, he and his partner, Arthur Mayer, introduced American audiences to the Italian Art Cinema, with such acclaimed and successful titles as Rome: Open City (1945), Paisan (1946), and Bicycle Thieves (1948). Burstyn’s contributions to the way we have come to understand the international art cinema cannot be overstated. When he began his career in the 1930s, the total American market for international screenplays consisted of roughly 500,000 people. By the time of Burstyn’s death in 1953, the U.S. art-house audience had ballooned to over 7 million, thanks in large measure to his efforts.

Burstyn’s greatest notoriety came with Roberto Rossellini’s Il Miracolo (The Miracle, 1948), which he combined with two other short photodramas—Jean Renoir’s A Day in the Country (1936) and Marcel Pagnol’s Jofroi (1933)—into an omnibus film which he titled, Ways of Love (released in 1950). The film opened at New York’s Paris Theatre, to critical acclaim and enthusiastic audiences. The City License Commissioner, however, found The Miracle to be “personally and officially blasphemous.” Subsequently, the New York State Board of Regents withdrew the film’s license, effectively banning it from New York screens. As Burstyn, together with the brilliant young attorney Ephraim S. London, fought the case all the way to the U. S. Supreme Court, he garnered the support of organizations such as the New York Film Critics, the ACLU, the American Jewish Congress, and the American Book Publishers Council. Burstyn and London’s victory in the case rocked the film industry and indeed shaped the future of American film history, as the Supreme Court declared, “expression by means of motion pictures is included within the free speech and free press guarantees of the First and Fourteenth Amendments.”

Authors Wittern-Keller and Haberski are legal historians, offering a fresh angle on their subject that film scholars should welcome enthusiastically. One of the book’s greatest strengths is that it explains the legal intricacies and far-reaching ramifications of Burstyn’s case without getting bogged down the slightest bit in legalistic jargon. As such, it offers an account that is at once rigorous and highly readable.

Furthermore, the book goes to great lengths to contextualize Burstyn’s individual legal struggle within the larger history of American film censorship—going back to the first local moving pictures censorship board, formed in Chicago in 1907, and looking forward to the era of Jack Valenti’s ratings system, self-imposed by the industry and still in effect today. Wittern-Keller and Haberski also do a commendable job of situating Burstyn v. Wilson within larger American cultural contexts, such as the changing attitudes towards freedom of expression in the 20^th century, especially during the McCarthy era.

However, the fact that the authors are not film scholars does present a few problems here...