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Post by Isapop on Oct 27, 2017 13:19:56 GMT
We all know that 1939s Gone With The Wind was given special dispensation by the Production Code. But how much longer after that did it take before another Hollywood movie got to say "Damn"? (It wouldn't surprise me if some preacher got to say it from the pulpit. "Damn" could squeak by in a religious context.)
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Post by mattgarth on Oct 27, 2017 15:11:25 GMT
We all know that 1939s Gone With The Wind was given special dispensation by the Production Code. But how much longer after that did it take before another Hollywood movie got to say "Damn"? (It wouldn't surprise me if some preacher got to say it from the pulpit. "Damn" could squeak by in a religious context.)
It wouldn't dare! I think Fredric March does say it in 1951's DEATH OF A SALESMAN, though (could be a faulty memory) |
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Post by snsurone on Oct 27, 2017 15:58:05 GMT
We all know that 1939s Gone With The Wind was given special dispensation by the Production Code. But how much longer after that did it take before another Hollywood movie got to say "Damn"? (It wouldn't surprise me if some preacher got to say it from the pulpit. "Damn" could squeak by in a religious context.)
The original play, ON THE TOWN, had lyrics that read, "New York, New York--a hell of a town..." For the movie, the lyrics had to be changed to "...a wonderful town...". The Hayes Office was still pretty strong then, even 10 years after GWTW. BTW, David Selznick was fined $5000 for allowing Clark Gable to say "damn" on screen. |
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Post by politicidal on Oct 27, 2017 17:23:20 GMT
I swore (no pun intended) that I heard it in a war film or a detective movie a while back.
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Post by koskiewicz on Oct 27, 2017 17:39:31 GMT
"The Damned don't Cry" (1950) film title featuring Joan Crawford
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Post by captainbryce on Oct 27, 2017 18:38:27 GMT
We all know that 1939s Gone With The Wind was given special dispensation by the Production Code. But how much longer after that did it take before another Hollywood movie got to say "Damn"? (It wouldn't surprise me if some preacher got to say it from the pulpit. "Damn" could squeak by in a religious context.)
Raoul Walsh's western The Big Trail (1930) marked the first film role for Marion Morrison (aka John Wayne). The film has also been noted as the first to contain a swear word (the very tame "damn") in live dialogue by Breck Coleman (Wayne): "Zeke always told me women were damned funny." However, other talkies around the same time also used the curse word: Glorifying the American Girl (1929), Gold Diggers of Broadway (1929), The Dawn Patrol (1930), and The Green Goddess (1930) (the closing line: "She probably would have been a damned nuisance, anyway"). Lyle Talbot also said "damn" in Monogram Pictures' low-budget "old house" mystery The Thirteenth Guest (1932) (aka Lady Beware), one of the earliest uses of the word in a major studio film. World War I epic, Hell's Angels (1930), really let it rip: you could hear "It's me, goddamit", "What the hell", "For Chrissake", "Jesus!", and "That son-of-a-bitch!" amid the aerial dogfights. Even after the Motion Picture Production Code began to be enforced in 1934, there were pre-Gone With the Wind uses of "damn", including Katharine Hepburn quoting Lady Macbeth's "Out, damned spot" in Holiday (1938). The earliest Code-era "goddamn it" I know of was from Don Murray in Bus Stop (1956). Scott Wilson was the first to say "shit" in an American feature, as one of the murderers in In Cold Blood (1967). The first mainstream movies to use the word "fuck" were Ulysses and I'll Never Forget What's'isname, both from 1967, Ulysses was released first though. |
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Post by mattgarth on Oct 27, 2017 18:50:44 GMT
We all know that 1939s Gone With The Wind was given special dispensation by the Production Code. But how much longer after that did it take before another Hollywood movie got to say "Damn"? (It wouldn't surprise me if some preacher got to say it from the pulpit. "Damn" could squeak by in a religious context.)
Many years ago while I was in Boot Camp in Parris Island, SC -- we were given a rare night off of back-breaking training and were herded off to an auditorium to watch a movie ("And you will have a good time!" ordered the Drill Instructor). The movie was the 1945 war film PRIDE OF THE MARINES. John Garfield plays real life Marine 'Al Schmid' who received the Navy Cross for his action in Guadalcanal as part of a three-man machine gun unit who stopped a massive Japanese attack -- and was blinded by a grenade. The point of that background for this thread -- at one point as the Japanese are shouting in the dark ("Marine -- tonight you die!"). I swear we all heard Garfield defiantly shout back -- "Eat dick!" How did that ever get past the censors! |
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Post by london777 on Oct 28, 2017 3:19:22 GMT
Anatomy of a Murder, as late as 1959, was the first film to refer to "panties".
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Post by neurosturgeon on Oct 28, 2017 17:43:21 GMT
Pre-GWTW, though in a British film, Leslie Howard said "damn" in "Pygmalion" in 1938. I am pretty sure that film was released in the U.S.
Things were allowed to be damned or damnable, but vulgar exclamations seemed to be forbidden, as taking the Lord's name in vain.
I must admit to liking films better when they needed to be more creative in the showing of disgust. After Pacino's "Scarface," The f-word lost the shock value it intended.
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Post by Doghouse6 on Oct 28, 2017 18:27:19 GMT
Pre-GWTW, though in a British film, Leslie Howard said "damn" in "Pygmalion" in 1938. I am pretty sure that film was released in the U.S. Things were allowed to be damned or damnable, but vulgar exclamations seemed to be forbidden, as taking the Lord's name in vain. I must admit to liking films better when they needed to be more creative in the showing of disgust. After Pacino's "Scarface," The f-word lost the shock value it intended. The "damns" and "hells" fly rather freely in British-produced films of the '30s, but your observation raises questions that have never occurred to me, and to which I don't know the answers. During the years of "enforcement" by the PCA office from '34 to '68, nothing was legally binding; all studios and indie members of the MPPDA (forerunner of the MPAA) voluntarily agreed to approval of scripts and final cuts by the PCA in order to qualify for an MPPDA seal upon films' releases. More often than not, British-produced films were distributed domestically by U.S. entities that were MPPDA members, such as MGM for Pygmalion.
What's uncertain is whether mere distribution agreements provided a loophole, since such films weren't produced by those members. Or it could be that U.S. distribution prints actually had the offending words removed from the dialogue track when first released, and that copies we now see on home video or broadcast have had them restored in the intervening 49 years since the official abandonment of the Production Code. Looks like I've got some homework to do. |
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glenesq
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Post by glenesq on Oct 29, 2017 2:26:41 GMT
Many years ago while I was in Boot Camp in Parris Island, SC -- we were given a rare night off of back-breaking training and were herded off to an auditorium to watch a movie ("And you will have a good time!" ordered the Drill Instructor). The movie was the 1945 war film PRIDE OF THE MARINES. John Garfield plays real life Marine 'Al Schmid' who received the Navy Cross for his action in Guadalcanal as part of a three-man machine gun unit who stopped a massive Japanese attack -- and was blinded by a grenade. The point of that background for this thread -- at one point as the Japanese are shouting in the dark ("Marine -- tonight you die!"). I swear we all heard Garfield defiantly shout back -- "Eat dick!" How did that ever get past the censors! Hi matt. I really like this movie. I burned it to dvd from a TV broadcast, I don't have subtitles/captioning. I read your post and was intrigued to what Garfield shouts at the Japanese. The Japanese soldier yells "Marine you die!" and Garfield says this twice... The first sounds very much like "Eat dick!" and the second is clearly "Eat dirt!". I replayed it several times and on subsequent replays, alas Garfield yells "Eat dirt!" both times. |
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Post by mattgarth on Oct 29, 2017 5:19:38 GMT
Thanks for the clarification and the effort in discovering it, Glen. I guess an auditorium filled with randy Leathernecks just heard what they wanted to hear.
At least we know what Garfield really meant to say.
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Post by telegonus on Oct 29, 2017 8:00:26 GMT
Too bad about Garfield not saying "eat dick" in a war film but then it's not a perfect world. In a review of Bataan! on either an IMDB message board or in a review someone commented that if you read the actors' lips in many scenes of the movie, action scenes, in moments when you can't hear the dialogue, they're swearing like, well, soldiers.
Speaking of that movie and the way it ends, with Robert Walker's memorable "bushwa!", I remember reading that that word, which was used fairly often in movies back then, was a "genteelized" "bullsh!t", and that everyone knew it. In another war film, A Walk In The Sun the soldiers regularly refer to their weapons using phrases like "this lovin' gun" rather than something beginning with f.
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Post by mattgarth on Oct 29, 2017 9:48:03 GMT
Just remembered -- in 1943's THE MORE THE MERRIER, curmudgeon Charles Coburn recites the refrain 'Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead' several times. He not only got away with it But also won the Oscar as well!
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Post by Isapop on Oct 29, 2017 11:23:12 GMT
Just remembered -- in 1943's THE MORE THE MERRIER, curmudgeon Charles Coburn recites the refrain 'Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead' several times. He not only got away with it But also won the Oscar as well! Good catch there, matt. I'd say that instance is much like in GWTW. In this case the Board could hardly ban an honored quotation from American history. So another dispensation is given. But there had to be a Hollywood movie that ushered in an end to the ban by simply challenging the Board's power and defying the rule. Whatever movie that is deserves a place in the history of Hollywood censorship. Unlike GWTW, it wasn't pleading for an exception to be made. It was telling the Board, "Go fuck yourself".
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Post by Doghouse6 on Oct 29, 2017 16:17:29 GMT
Just remembered -- in 1943's THE MORE THE MERRIER, curmudgeon Charles Coburn recites the refrain 'Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead' several times. He not only got away with it But also won the Oscar as well! But there had to be a Hollywood movie that ushered in an end to the ban by simply challenging the Board's power and defying the rule.
Whatever movie that is deserves a place in the history of Hollywood censorship. Unlike GWTW, it wasn't pleading for an exception to be made. It was telling the Board, "Go fuck yourself".
There was probably not any individual film deserving of that credit as much as there were gradual cracks in the dam, as it were, occasioned by many elements such as a postwar influx of imported product and competition from television, but two of the largest were inflicted by one producer/director and one distributor. In 1953, Otto Preminger's The Moon Is Blue was denied an MPPDA seal of approval by the PCA unless the word "virgin" (in a colloquial rather than Biblical context) and frank references to seduction and out-of-wedlock sex were eliminated. Preminger refused and United Artists backed him up, and the film was released without a seal. Two years later, Preminger's The Man With the Golden Arm brought about a similar fracas surrounding its candid depiction of drug use and addiction, and again, UA backed him up. What was likely the most significant element of change was the 1954 retirement of Joseph Breen, director of the PCA office and board, who had headed that body for the first twenty years of its existence. While The Man With the Golden Arm was helpfully catalytic, changes to the Code and relaxation of its authority ushered in by Breen's successor Geoffrey Shurlock would most certainly have been in the works in any case. Just to give an idea of where Breen's sensibilities - and sensitivities - lay, I provide an excerpt from a 1935 letter sent by him to the MPPDA Eastern Studio Relations office in NYC: "With regard to the use of the word 'nuts' in pictures, please note:
(1) The word 'nuts' when used to characterize a person as crazy is acceptable. In other words, the expressions, 'You're nuts'; 'He's nuts'; or 'He's a nut' may be used.
(2) The use of the word 'nuts' as an exclamation should not be used, as in the case of 'Aw, nuts', or 'Nuts to you', etc."And as they used to say in pictures of the era, nerts to that! |
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