ABFFE Book of the Month: The Miracle Case by Laura Wittern-Keller and Ray J. Haberski, Jr.
 

The ABFFE Book of the Month for December is The Miracle Case: Film Censorship and the Supreme Court by Laura Wittern-Keller and Raymond J. Haberski Jr. (University Press of Kansas), 978-0-7006-1618-3.  It was only a forty-minute foreign film, but it sparked a legal confrontation that has left its mark on America for more than half a century. Roberto Rossellini's Il Miracolo (The Miracle) is deceptively simple: a demented peasant woman is seduced by a stranger she believes to be Saint Joseph, is socially ostracized for becoming pregnant out of wedlock, but is finally redeemed through motherhood.

Although initially approved by state censors for screening in New York, the film was attacked as sacrilegious by the Catholic establishment, which convinced state officials to revoke distributor Joseph Burstyn's license. In response, Burstyn fought back through the courts and won.

In The Miracle Case: Film Censorship and the Supreme Court, authors Laura Wittern-Keller and Raymond Haberski show how the Supreme Court's unanimous 1952 ruling in Burstyn's favor sparked a chain of litigation that eventually brought filmmaking under the protective umbrella of the First Amendment.

Interview with Laura Wittern-Keller and Raymond J. Haberski, Jr:

ABFFE: Why did the censorship of movies begin at the very beginning of film?

Wittern-Keller and Haberski: Two basic reasons: first, movies were considered little more than products, certainly not art or speech; and second, many civic minded groups—we can lump them under the term progressives—believed that restricting movies would prevent them from having dangerous influence over the most vulnerable members of society.


ABFFE: What impact did censorship have on the content of American movies?

Wittern-Keller and Haberski: The answer to this question presents an interesting dichotomy. On the one hand, some of the movies at the top of the best-movies-of-all-time lists compiled by film critics and film organizations were made under censorship—Gone with the Wind, the Wizard of Oz, Citizen Kane, Wuthering Heights, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, The Best Years of Our Lives. On the other hand, at the height of motion picture censorship from the mid 1930s through the late 1940s, American movies offered something far short of a realistic view of relationships, marriage, crime, and religious groups. And artistic matters were not taken into consideration when censors demanded changes. Foreign films, in particular, were often hacked apart by censors with little regard for continuity or artistic value.


ABFFE: Who were the people who fought film censorship?

Wittern-Keller and Haberski: These people break into three broad groups: distributors, producers, and critics.  Distributors disliked censorship because it could prevent them from getting films into theaters and because it affected their profits since they were the ones required to pay the necessary censorship fees.  Some producers rejected censorship because it violated their ability to make the kinds of films they and directors wanted.  And critics protested against censorship because it treated a popular art in a shabby way and treated moviegoers like children in need of protection.


ABFFE: Why was the Miracle case so important?

Wittern-Keller and Haberski: By 1950, when The Miracle was brought to New York City, American movies had been censored by state and local governments for four decades. Moreover, this censorship had been judicially sanctioned by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1915.  At that time, when movies were still in their infancy but were already being censored, the justices heard a direct appeal from the Mutual Film Company for movies to be afforded free speech protection.  But, regarding movies as nothing more than “spectacles” and comparing them to circus shows, Mutual Film’s appeal was vigorously denied.  Thus empowered by the nation’s highest court, censorship boards were free to cut and ban movies without any meaningful judicial oversight.  But when New York State responded to the demands of many of its Catholic citizens and banned The Miracle, its distributor decided that censorship had to be challenged as an infringement of the rights of free expression. 

Even though this was the height of the Cold War anti-communist fervor in the U.S. with its atmosphere of repression for dissident speech, the Supreme Court agreed that movies deserved to be included under the protections of the First Amendment.  This came at a moment when it was clear that movies were no longer regarded by the public as merely mass entertainment.  Movies were art and they as well as their audience deserved more respect.  The case, cultural as well as legal, was a major expansion of free speech jurisprudence and the beginning of the end of the era of multi-level restriction of movies.  It weakened the legal authority of governmental censors as well as the extralegal authority of Hollywood’s self-censorship, the Production Code, paving the way for a new era of film freedom.


ABFFE: Does the film rating system that is in place today have a chilling effect on films?

Wittern-Keller and Haberski: Yes, in the sense that studios can press producers and directors to make movies that will be given a rating that ensures maximum profit and in the sense that independent productions seem to come under closer scrutiny than do the MPAA’s member studios.  However, to suggest that movies are made to glorify some pure concept of art is to operate under a misunderstanding.  Hollywood makes movies to make money.  If a producer wants to make money, he or she needs to work within this system.  If a filmmaker doesn’t care about making money in this system, then his or her film can avoid the ratings board altogether.  To see this, all we need to do is to look at the fact that the pornographic film industry makes as much money each year as Hollywood does. So, the bottom line is this: the ratings system is not mandatory as the old governmental censorship regimes were, but it does have significant and often unavoidable economic clout.
 

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