Censored: From Mickey Mouse to the Marx Brothers
Professor's research reveals a disturbing history in British Columbia of material being banned for political reasons
VICTORIA — There was a time Mickey Mouse was considered vulgar and unsuitable for British Columbians and news reporting was censored by the provincial government.
Welcome to the not-so-distant era of the British Columbia Censor of Moving Pictures.
Stanley Fox, a former television producer and program director at the CBC and TV Ontario, film professor at York University and current documentary film consultant recently spent several weeks examining the contents of eight boxes of letters and directives relating to film censorship in B.C. What he discovered in the documents held at Victoria's B.C. Archives is both absurd and disturbing.
"These letters, many flimsy carbon copies, contained what the censors said about films from 1914 to 1963," Mr. Fox says. Considered through a 2007 lens, the correspondence appears arbitrary and rife with politics.
In the 1920s, B.C. Chief Censor C. L. Gordon ordered the B.C. distributor of British Pathe, the producer of the famous biweekly newsreel the Pathe Gazette that ran prior to feature films, to cut the subtitles accompanying the speech of Irish nationalist Éamon de Valera. According to Mr. Gordon's notes, "Mention of the Irish rebellion against England was prohibited. Anything derogatory to the Crown was prohibited."
In the early 1930s, James A. Smith, Mr. Gordon's successor as chief censor, was faced with the additional challenge of audio tracks and was tasked with eliminating all reports of rebellion in the British Empire from newsreels. Toward these ends, Mr. Smith expunged news on riots in India and eliminated all coverage of the "Will Durrant talks in India on the Hindu crisis" from Fox Movietone newsreels. On June 14, 1930, Mr. Smith ordered a Universal Newsreel censored: "Cut subtitle '50,000 Jews protest immigration ban in Palestine by British,' and all scenes relating to same.' " And on Sept. 5, 1930, he ordered that a Universal Newsreel be censored: "Eliminate. 'U.S. Coast Guard captures 10 Britons and $200,000 rum cargo.' "
The censor's political agenda also extended into main features. In 1929 Mr. Smith ordered all references to the Prince of Wales and the King "cut" from The Cocoanuts, the first feature-length Marx Brothers film. In 1930 he ordered all "references to the King of England and the revolt of the Colonies" be eliminated from the comedy/romance Under a Texas Moon.
"There was a political agenda," Mr. Fox says. He says that while he did not uncover any direct correspondence or political directives between the censor of the day and politicians, it is easy to infer the issues and news the censor was expected to eradicate.
After the Second World War, the Cold War trumped all other political concerns. The outbreak of war on the Korean peninsula in June, 1950, raised the issue of Japan's rearmament. The need to quickly rehabilitate Japan's image extended to the Vancouver offices of the Censor of Moving Pictures and the private screening room in the Vancouver Courthouse. In April, 1952, censor R. W. McDonald banned the feature film Outrages of the Orient.
"This picture portrays the atrocities perpetrated by the invading Japanese armies upon the Philippine Islands in 1942 and in the light of present day events and a world trying to rise above feelings of hatred and revenge, I consider the showing of this picture to be against the public welfare," wrote Mr. McDonald to the film's B.C. distributor.
While troubled by feature-film censoring, Mr. Fox finds newsreel censoring most disturbing. Film censorship was a provincial responsibility. Mr. Fox says censorship mechanisms were established in B.C., as in other Canadian provinces, under the pretext of politicians' concern about exposing a "largely uneducated audience" to material "of an immoral or obscene nature."
In March, 1913, the B.C. Legislature passed the Moving Pictures Act, and created the office of Censor of Moving Pictures which operated under the auspices of the attorney-general. Under the terms of the legislation, which remained virtually unaltered until 1970, it was the censor's duty to "prevent the depiction of scenes of an immoral or obscene nature, the representation of crime or pictures reproducing any brutalizing spectacle, or which indicate or suggest lewdness or indecency, or the infidelity or unfaithfulness of husband or wife, or any other such pictures which he may consider injurious to morals or against the public welfare or which may offer evil suggestions to the minds of children, or which may be likely to offend the public."
Based on his archive research, Mr. Fox says it appears B.C.'s chief censors enthusiastically flexed their muscles and the censoring of films and newsreels was done with a machete rather than a scalpel.
"Each newsreel would have between six and eight stories. The [censored] material would then be physically cut out," Mr. Fox says. If a single element in a news story ran afoul of the censor, the entire story was cut. The cutting and reassembling was the responsibility of the film distributor who worked from an itemized list of changes provided by the censor. All of the film pieces were preserved and before the reel was shipped out of B.C. and to another provincial censor it was reassembled. "The film, after it had gone through all the censors in Canada, was choppy and full of splices," Mr. Fox says.
The distributors were less concerned with politics and suppression of the news and more concerned with getting the film in the theatres and making money: "Most [distributors] did not fight the censors and simply made the cuts; they were not into any moral or artistic dilemmas," Mr. Fox says.
The biggest fear was the censor's outright rejection of a film, which meant - until an appeal board was introduced in 1929 - there were no avenues of appeal and the film was considered banned from the province for perpetuity.
Mr. Fox says a common misconception is that censorship activities were focused primarily on sex. He says B.C. censors cast a wide net and employed loose interpretation of the act, censoring for not only sexual morality and political content, but for social and even artistic reasons.
In 1930,JosephWalters, B.C. Chief Censor from 1924 to 1930, banned Academy Award-winning film The Big House from being shown in B.C. for being "educational on jail breaks." The same year East is West was rejected. The reason: "The B.C. Board goes on record in objecting to Eurasian romances as the consensus of opinion is that these romances and marriages are not in the best interests of the Province."
The censor was even able to find wickedness with Walt Disney's seemingly innocuous animated characters. In 1929, Chief Censor James A. Smith ordered Barn Dance, which featured Mickey and Putrid Pete vying to take Minnie Mouse to a barn dance, "cut" because of the "objectionable scene of [a] cow's udder." Mickey's Follies and Skeleton Dance, also released in 1929, suffered a worse fate: Both were "rejected." Mickey's Follies features Mickey putting on a show in his barnyard, an operatic ode by Patricia Pig, and then the main attraction: Mickey sings and plays his theme song, then dances to it. Mr. Smith "rejected" the film for "vulgarity." Skeleton Dance was rejected for being "gruesome."
Most of the correspondence contained in the archives was written exclusively for film distributors. According to Mr. Fox, in the early 1930s, Chief Censor Smith began writing lengthy comments on the moral degeneracy of films. For example, in notifying the distributor that the 1933 film The Woman I Stole was being rejected for exhibit in B.C., Mr. Smith wrote: "The whole theme of the story is the unfaithfulness of the wife ... culminating finally in the discarding of the woman for a little hussy picked up in a speak-easy ... unwholesome and degenerating exhibition of dishonoured females, entirely lacking in portrayal of chivalry upon the part of the chief actor."
In 1943, Chief Censor J. B. Hughes notified distributor Monogram Pictures that the film Ape Man would not be exhibited in B.C.: "... because this is a horror picture and extremely frightening, and as we have decided to reject all horror pictures for the duration of the war, this one is placed in that category." On April 2, 1943, Mr. Hughes rejected Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein: "This is nothing more than a reproduction in most part of the horror pictures Frankenstein and Dracula and as horror pictures are being banned from showing, this is classified as such."
In the 1960s under the direction of B.C. Chief Censor R. W. (Ray) MacDonald, censorship began to be phased out for classification. The B.C. Cougar logo was registered as a trademark on April 29, 1966 and used as the warning symbol for age-restricted features. The censor was replaced by a film-classification director in 1970. Instead of censoring, the province introduced the current general/adult/restricted rating system for films to be exhibited in commercial theatres.
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