Post by spiderwort on Jun 16, 2017 21:55:27 GMT
London, in terms of censorship in American films at the time, Virginia Woolf was the first film that was allowed to use the kind of profanity it did. It's definitively and historically significant for that reason.
As for Bonnie and Clyde, it is commonly acknowledged to be the film that broke the barriers of portraying graphic violence on the screen in America. I haven't seen every film in the world from every country, but I've seen thousands of American films, and I know that in my experience back to the silent era no American film before Bonnie and Clyde portrayed graphic violence in the way it did. I am not alone in that assessment; film scholars attribute it with that historical significance also.
I can't speak for you Londoners, though I have to say I haven't seen any English film before 1966 that had that level of graphic violence - but maybe there is one or more.
And your points about the more sexually explicit English films in the 50s are quite interesting. Censorship in America prohibited that until - God, I don't know when. Now it's all gone to hell in a hand basket and people can have sex on television in what used to be designated as "family hour."