SEX
AI NO CORRIDA (1976) Nagisa Oshima’s graphic depiction of sexual obsession was not submitted for British classification until 1989. It was given an 18 certificate in 1991 after optical changes to a scene involving naked children.
BAISE-MOI (2000) The mix of real sex and staged violence for this French “hardcore Thelma and Louise”, about a prostitute and her raped friend on a sex and killing spree, provoked shock horror and debate (is it an issue drama or pure exploitation?) wherever it was shown.
CRASH (1996) David Cronenberg’s tale of sex addicts aroused by car crashes and injuries, based on a J. G. Ballard story, was banned by Westminster Council before the British censor had even viewed the film for classification.
DEEP THROAT (1972) Porn briefly went overground and achieved dinner-party chic thanks to Linda Lovelace’s antics and films such as The Devil in Miss Jones.
THE IDIOTS (1998) Lars von Trier’s Dogme satire, about commune members pretending to be physically and mentally handicapped, featured flapping erections and an explicit orgy scene.
I’M NO ANGEL (1933) Religious, civic and industry groups finally coerced Hollywood to expand its self- regulating Hays Code after this ribald Mae West sex comedy. The Code went from prohibiting indecency to mere indelicacy and demanding chaste passion and moral endings. As West remarked of Tinseltown: “Here they tell you what not to do before you do it.”
LAST TANGO IN PARIS (1972) Early 1970s cinema began pushing the boundaries of screen sex, led by Marlon Brando’s butter-assisted encounter with Maria Schneider and explicit sex talk. The film was banned in Italy for 11 years.
9 SONGS (2004) Michael Winterbottom’s film charts a young couple’s relationship through their (unsimulated) sexual encounters punctuated by visits to indie-band concerts. Asked Winterbottom at the time: “Why can a writer engage in sexual imagery with no restrictions and yet a film author can’t do the same?”
PANDORA’S BOX (1929) Scenes of prostitution, lesbianism and Louise Brooks’s sensual performance as a high- class call girl made this film fall foul of censors everywhere.
SEBASTIANE (1976) Derek Jarman’s homoerotic movie, shot in Latin, sees St Sebastian going gaily to his martyrdom at a remote Roman outpost. Features the first erect penis approved by the British censor.
DRUGS
CHRISTIANE F. (1981) “At 12 it was angel dust. At 13 it was heroin. Then she took to the streets.” Based on the true story of a teenager in 1970s Berlin, Uli Edel’s film was described by one critic as “revoltingly offputting”.
EASY RIDER (1969) Nicholson, Fonda and Hopper were at it again in the definitive countercultural jamboree, bookending the now-obligatory LSD trip with (real) spliff-smoking sessions and a (fictional) cocaine deal.
HUMAN TRAFFIC (1999) One of the truer films about club culture, evoking the permissive mood of the 1990s, Human Traffic raised eyebrows for its authentic depiction of Ecstasy bonhomie and comedown paranoia.
THE LOST WEEKEND (1945) Billy Wilder claimed that the liquor industry offered Paramount $5 million not to release his searing portrait of an alcoholic, played by Ray Milland. Ironically, temperance groups thought the film would actually encourage drinking.
THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN ARM (1955) Frank Sinatra excelled as a heroin-addict card-sharp in Otto Preminger’s film, which was originally refused a certificate by the MPAA. The following year the production code was changed to allow movies to deal with drugs as well as kidnapping, abortion and prostitution.
PERFORMANCE (1970) On screen, James Fox’s gangster was plied with magic mushrooms by Mick Jagger’s rock Mephistopheles. Off screen, they allegedly smoked psychotropic DMT. Time’s critic called it “the most disgusting, worthless film I have seen since I began reviewing”.
REEFER MADNESS (1936) A brush with wacky baccy consigns a pair of innocents to a downward spiral of murder and mental illness in this propanganda piece turned cult classic. Notable more for being cack-handed than for any subversiveness.
REQUIEM FOR A DREAM (2000) Darren Aronofsky’s adaptation of Hubert Selby Jr’s novel cut a disturbing line in trans- generational addiction, with Jared Leto’s descent into heroin Hades being mirrored by his mum’s slimming pills habit.
TRAINSPOTTING (1996) The scenes of heroin use — for which the cast prepared with Generation Game style “cooking up” workshops — drew the loudest snorts from Middle England. But Renton and his cohorts also consumed Ecstasy, Valium and, erm, opium suppositories.
THE TRIP (1967) In preparation for this psychedelic wig-out, the LSD virgin Roger Corman took his writer Jack Nicholson and stars Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper to drop acid in Big Sur. The film was branded a “user’s manual” for LSD and was banned in Britain until 2003.
VIOLENCE
BATTLE ROYALE (2000) Kinji Fukasaku’s death-sport take on Lord of the Flies also aspired to be a parable on violence and the State — enough to prompt questions in Japan’s parliament.
BONNIE AND CLYDE (1967)/ THE WILD BUNCH (1969) Two films that pioneered the art of slow-motion carnage. The final scene in Bonnie and Clyde saw Clyde’s head blown apart and was intended to remind audiences of JFK’s murder. The Wild Bunch, meanwhile, helped to establish Sam Peckinpah as the “Picasso of violence”.
IRRÉVERSIBLE (2002) By dressing up sick shock values as arthouse innovation, the French auteur Gaspar Noé subjected audiences to such treats as a man’s head being smashed 22 times by a fire extinguisher, as well as the anal rape of the heroine filmed in a single take lasting nearly ten minutes. Each one feels like an hour.
LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT (1972) Wes Craven’s grainy debut stands as the daddy of slasher movies, as two teenage girls are abducted, raped and murdered by psychopaths; then their parents take revenge with chainsaws. Tagline: “To avoid fainting, keep repeating ‘It’s only a movie . . . ’ ”
NATURAL BORN KILLERS (1994) Oliver Stone saw his media satire both (initially) banned and take the record for the largest number of cuts and reshots needed to attain an R rating (150). The film’s anti-heroes murder approximately 50 people.
NO ORCHIDS FOR MISS BLANDISH (1948) You’d be forgiven for never having heard of this Brit- thriller about the New York underworld. But it had UK critics spluttering hyperbole: “The most sickening exhibition of brutality, perversion, sex and sadism ever to be shown on a cinema screen,” was one journal’s considered verdict.
STRAW DOGS (1971) It ends with local Cornish thugs being scalded by boiling whisky and having their feet blown off by a shotgun; earlier a cat is hanged in a closet. But it was the rape sequence that saw it banned since, at one point, Susan George’s victim appears to become compliant.
THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE (1974) It later transpired that the pain on the faces of the actresses was often real amid the lacerating terror wielded by Leatherface and co. It was allowed an uncut release in the UK only in 2000.
VIDEO NASTIES The rise of the video-rental market in the early-1980s also ushered in the age of the video-nasty: cheapo splatter- movies that had Britain’s moral crusaders on the rampage faster than Leatherface in a sorority house. The likes of I Spit on Your Grave, The Driller Killer and The Evil Dead led to the Video Recordings Act of 1984, ending the media frenzy.
RELIGION
DARK HABITS (1983) Made before Pedro Almodóvar achieved global fame, this typically lurid tale in which the Mother Superior is a heroin addict was refused a screening at Cannes. Also see Valerian Borowczyk’s Behind Convent Walls, in which a nun gets closer to the Saviour by means of a conveniently shaped object imprinted with Jesus’s face.
THE DA VINCI CODE (2006) The biggest controversy centred, in the end, not on the offence to Christians for traducing the faith with specious semi-historical bunkum, but on how Ron Howard could have turned the talents of Tom Hanks, Audrey Tautou, Jean Reno and a budget of $125m into such pedestrian tosh.
THE DEVILS (1971) Was it Vanessa Redgrave’s hunchbacked, sexually frustrated Mother Superior, the torture scenes or the indictment of Church corruption in 1634 that caused The Devils to be banned in several countries and released heavily cut under an X certificate in the UK? Whichever, it remains one of the most successful films of Ken Russell’s envelope-pushing career.
THE EXORCIST (1973) Its release occasioned fainting in the aisles, one viewer breaking his jaw on the next seat when he fell, and some British councils banned it altogether — a ban made ridiculous by Exorcist bus trips to neighbouring areas. The director, William Friedkin, also caused consternation within the industry for the lengths he went to to scare his actors in order to get realistic performances.
THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST (1988) Used to coming under fire for violence, swearing and the negative portrayal of Italian-Americans, Scorsese hit his rawest nerve with this film, in which Christ has sex with Mary Magdalene. Attracted then record complaints (more than 1,500) when shown on Channel 4.
THE LIFE OF BRIAN (1979) It seems extraordinary now, but this finest of all Python films was banned in several countries and ran foul of several local councils in England. So many Christian groups complained that John Cleese used to joke: “We’ve brought them all together for the first time in 2,000 years!”
THE MAGDALENE SISTERS (2002) Unremittingly bleak tale of three young Irish women committed to work in a laundry run by a sadistic order of nuns, for the crimes of, respectively, flirting, being raped, and having a child out of wedlock. Condemned by the Catholic Church, it was based on a true story.
THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST (2004) The controversy at the time — was the film by Mel Gibson, whose father is a Holocaust- denier, anti-Jewish? — has been eclipsed by Gibson’s recent drunken anti-Semitic rantings. The extreme violence also raised eyebrows, though Gibson himself has been obsessed with torture and sacrifice in his films from Mad Max through Braveheart and Lethal Weapon to Payback.
SUBMISSION (2004) After making this ten-minute documentary about the abuse of women under Islam, the director Theo Van Gogh (a direct relative of the artist) was murdered by an irate Muslim. His 2004 film Submission is currently being remade by Steve Buscemi, and he and the leading actress, Sienna Miller, have reportedly been granted high-security protection for fear of reprisals.
VISIONS OF ECSTASY (1989) With most of its 18 minutes taken up with erotic lesbian nun scenes (supposedly of St Teresa and her “psyche”) and of passion with Christ, this is the only film to have been successfully banned in Britain on grounds of blasphemy. An appeal to the European Court of Human Rights in 1996 was unsuccessful.
OTHERS
BAD LIEUTENANT (1992) Some films court controversy for glamorising the dark side of modern society. Bad Lieutenant does the opposite. It dives right in to the sleaze and filth, offering, through its nameless central character (Harvey Keitel), a worldview so filth-encrusted that you need a shower after watching it.
BAMBI (1942) Death comes to Disney when Bambi’s mother is killed by a hunter, a scene that has traumatised generations of children. The hunter was to have appeared in the film, but Walt Disney, worried about the hunting lobby, cut the role. For the same reason, the film’s premiere was moved from Maine to New York.
BIRTH OF A NATION (1915) Depicting the Ku Klux Klan as the saviours of the American south, the film was boycotted by the National Association for the Advancement of Black People, and inspired the re-emergence of the Klan, dormant at the time.
FREAKS (1932) Given free rein after the success of Dracula (1931), Tod Browning produced this twisted tale of love, betrayal and revenge in a circus sideshow, starring real-life “freaks”. The film was banned in the UK for 30 years.
JFK (1991) Oliver Stone caused outrage in the press by suggesting that elements within the US government were responsible for the assassination of the 20th century’s best loved president.
KIDS (1995) The film follows 24 hours in the lives of a group of hard- drinking, drug-taking inner-city kids, as an HIV-positive teenager sets out to deflower as many virgins as possible.
PEEPING TOM (1960) The film that graces our cover also finished off Michael Powell’s career. It is now recognised as a masterpiece. The question it asks of the viewer — if you enjoy a murder-thriller, what makes you so different from the killer? — remains unsettling.
ROMPER STOMPER (1992) This brutal Australian portrayal of skinheads and racial violence features a remarkable performance by the pre-Gladiator Russell Crowe, and was barred from cinemas in Glasgow.
SOUTH PARK THE MOVIE (1999) The proud holder of the record for profanity in an animated film, and with one song containing 24 “f***s” in a minute, South Park is a hilarious satire on censorship, but not recommended for the easily offended. Or Canadians.
THE WILD ONE (1953) This tale of rampaging bikers was banned in the UK until 1968. “What are you rebelling against, Johnny?” asks Mildred (Peggy Maley). “Whaddya got?” replies Johnny (Marlon Brando).
Reader's choice: A Clockwork Orange (1971)
On August 10, in Screen in Times2, we asked you to vote for the most controversial film yet made. Three films came close: The Birth of a Nation, I Spit on Your Grave and The Passion of the Christ. But the clear winner was Kubrick’s chilling vision of a violent dystopia, based on the novel by Anthony Burgess.
For 27 years there was no easy way for British film fans to see it. There were sneaky screenings in the Scala cinema in London (it was listed in Time Out as a “fruity mechanical treat”; the cinema was eventually sued and pretty much bankrupt); you could take a trip to a fleapit cinema in Paris or Amsterdam; illegal bootleg copies circulated on dodgy market stalls. Otherwise, it remained off limits until Kubrick’s death in 1999.
The film was initially released during a national debate about the effects of violence on the screen, but it was the director himself who withdrew it after reports of crimes copying the gang of “droogs” and their scenes of rape, robbery and violence. Kubrick’s widow recently revealed that his decision actually came after he received death threats.
Naturally, the film’s absence only swelled its cult reputation, to the point that it has come to obscure the original point of contention: does Kubrick’s bleak depiction of ultraviolence flaunt what it purports to condemn?
To see or not to see?
The US censor increasingly controls what we watch in British cinemas, says Kevin Maher
There’s a sex scene you might never see. And it involves puppets. It’s the romantic climax of the 2004 satirical comedy Team America: World Police, and two loved-up marionettes are, ahem, making the beast with two backs. Suddenly, the tempo changes and the puppets engage in all manner of sexual depravity — mostly involving human rejectamenta, both faecal and urinary. These are bizarre moments, and hilarious in their own right, and yet, even more bizarrely, they were shot exclusively for the US censor, aka the Motion Picture Association of America.
“You have to give them (the ratings board) something to cut,” explains the Team America writer-producer Matt Stone in the witty documentary exposé of modern US censorship, This Film is not Yet Rated. “So we put in every second of sex we could. We ended up shooting extra shots that we didn’t even want in there.”
Stone isn’t the only film-maker who shoots sacrificial footage for the sake of the all-powerful censor. It’s now common practice among mainstream studio movie- makers, says Kirby Dick, the director of This Film is not Yet Rated. Absurd? Yes. “But Scorsese’s done it,” he says, “And Wes Craven. It’s game playing, but most of them are really unhappy about it.”
To Dick, an Oscar-nominated director (for his 2004 child abuse documentary Twist of Faith), that is not the only absurdity of the current system. The MPAA board, based in Los Angeles, is made up of a secret panel of between eight and 13 so-called “regular” people who rate the films they see as either G (general), PG, PG-13, R (under 17s require accompanying parent or guardian), or finally the commercially poisonous NC-17 (no children under 17).
One problem, according to Dick, is that the board is funded entirely by the motion picture industry (ie, the six major Hollywood studios), and so cannot be objective. Excessive violence is greeted more leniently than scenes of a sexual nature — hence the generous R rating given to Saving Private Ryan’s beach-splattered gore, and the punishing NC-17 for a glimpse of the actress Maria Bello’s pubic hair in the Vegas-set drama The Cooler.
Same-sex sex scenes are a guaranteed risk, as are scenes of women enjoying, gasp, exceedingly long orgasms (both of which were contained in Kimberly Peirce’s NC-17 rated Boys Don’t Cry). And while casual stabbings, shootings, slashings and full-blooded decapitations are often passed unnoticed by the board, the merest hint of sexual transgression, even in conversation, can get you into hot water, as the independent film-maker Kevin Smith (Clerks) found out when a tame conversation about female masturbation between Liv Tyler and Ben Affleck landed his kiddie-friendly romance Jersey Girl with an R rating.
And yet, says Dick, this is not just about moral prudery. This is first and foremost about the bottom line. “The MPAA is basically a trade organisation,” he explains. “So they’ve set up a system where the kinds of films that they make, the ones more targeted towards adolescents, and the ones that often have more violence in them, are the films that get through with less restrictive ratings.
“Their competitors’ films, however — independent and foreign films which often deal with adult themes and sexuality — get more restrictive ratings. So it’s a win-win situation for the MPAA.”
It’s enough to make you feel good about the independently funded British Board of Film Classification, which serves the public, and only the public, to the best of its unbiased ability. And yet, says Dick, it’s worth noting that these same American films that have been effectively “cut” by the MPAA are not often handed over to the BBFC in their original “uncut” form. In other words, the BBFC is often merely getting the chance to look at the MPAA’s sloppy seconds, to see if there’s anything at all transgressive to be found in the neutered, studio-friendly R version. Instead of rating a movie, they are effectively rating the MPAA’s rating of a movie. Is this not, as with most issues associated with ratings, kind of absurd? “That’s nothing to do with us,” says Sue Clark, the director of communications at the BBFC. “We classify what comes in. Sometimes we get the R version, sometimes we get the uncut version — it’s of no consequence to us what version of the film we get.”
Clark adds that on some occasions they are indeed fortunate enough to get their hands on the original director’s cut of a movie, as with Mary Harron’s American Psycho. The film initially featured a brief three-in-a-bed scene that was removed from the US version to avoid an NC-17, and to secure an R. The BBFC had a look at Harron’s director’s cut, popped the threesome back in, and duly gave the film a commercially friendly 18 cert. And that is a helpful illustration of the culture gaps between the UK and the US: an 18 certificate may be technically equivalent to an NC-17, in that it bans children under 17, but it’s far more socially acceptable to English viewers than in large parts of the US, where family entertainment is king.
Elsewhere, the cultural differences between the two markets can lead to genuine headaches for the more audience-aware film-makers. The UK tends to be more lenient with sex, the Americans with violence. Thus the legendary Bond producer Michael G. Wilson has often recounted the difficulties involved in re-cutting a Bond movie with an eye to both markets. More recently, the Scottish director Michael Caton-Jones described the headache of editing Basic Instinct 2: “
Three bobs and you’re out? That’s the rule! Three buttock thrusts, that’s all I can show? So I’m on the phone all day trying to argue these soccer moms on the ratings board down from three bobs! Nightmare!” Perhaps the best example of our cultural differences is that the UK passed Michael Winterbottom’s sexually explicit 9 Songs uncut as an 18 certificate, while we recently banned outright the delicately titled US import DVD Terrorists, Wackos and Other Killers — a compendium of executions and accidental deaths caught on camera and stitched together with a rock soundtrack and frat-boy voice- over. “It was very sick,” says Clark.
The BBFC has, since the days of its longstanding head James Ferman, become more open and accountable. But the more important change would be from within the MPAA. What hope of that? Strangely, says Dick, this might not be as unlikely as it sounds. The appointment of a new, less hard-nosed, president to the MPAA, Dan Glickman, is a promising start. “Since the MPAA isn’t Dan Glickman’s own creation there’s a certain willingness to change. The real question is, however, because the system so benefits the studios, how much change can they really make?” For his part, Dick says he’d like to see today’s unqualified amateurs replaced with a less intrusive review body of trained experts (in child psychology, sociology, etc); the rating itself replaced with a detailed information guide; and for written and openly available standards rather than secret backroom discussions.
Until that day, we can continue to cast a cold eye on our studio-sanctioned sex scenes. We can shake our heads and grumble at the creepy promotion of violence in our films. And, most of all, we can rest easy in the knowledge that film-makers every- where, and against their better instincts, are shooting raunchy scenes of explicit filth that we will probably never see.
This Film is not Yet Rated is on selected release from Sep 1
Horror and the censor
“Today’s horror movie directors are deliberately trying to bait the censor,” says the horror cinema guru Alan Jones. “They actually want to come up with a film that forces you to go, ‘God, you won’t believe your eyes! It’s so shocking!’ ” Jones, the author of The Rough Guide to Horror Movies, and the co-director of the FrightFest horror movie festival, which opens in London this Friday, adds
that it’s nonetheless increasingly difficult for modern horror directors such as Eli Roth (Hostel) or Christopher Smith (Creep) to produce censor-baiting shockers in our increasingly sophisticated viewing culture. “It’s mostly seen as fantasy violence now, isn’t it? It’s a good night out, rather than something that’s going to be harmful to the audience.”
Horror, of course, has traditionally provided fertile hunting grounds for the scissor-happy censor. From garish X-rated action in Hammer films such as The Satanic Rites of Dracula (1974) to banned 1970s horror classics such as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Last House on the Left, right through to the mid- 1980s “video nasty” hit list (Zombie Flesh Eaters, et al), horror movies have always provided the moral guardians with ample evidence of cinema’s rank depravity.
Sometime in the mid-1990s, however, around the time of the phenomenally successful Scream series, high-profile horror movies were tamed by the power of irony. Everything was a joke, a gag, a reference, and a parody of a parody. Films such as Scream, Urban Legend, and I Know What You Did Last Summer, though often needlessly violent, were protected from the wrath of the censor by a layer of brazen irony. “Geddit?” they said. And we did. Elsewhere, the mainstream was beguiled by the sappy spiritualist horror in The Sixth Sense and the kiddie-friendly occultism of Harry Potter.
It’s the legacy of this same safe censor-friendly horror that Roth and his ilk, and indeed many of the film-makers at FrightFest, are trying to combat with their darker, more provocative fare (see Adam Green’s slasher shocker Hatchet). “The old tricks that used to shock us don’t work any more,” says Jones. “So these directors are going back to that feeling of dread created by films such as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
They’re always trying to push the envelope of what’s acceptable with each movie. And I, for one, am really pleased by that.”
The Zone Horror FrightFest, Odeon West End, Leicester Square (www.odeon.co.uk 0871 2244007 www.frightfest.co.uk), Aug 25-28
