Censorship and Hollywood: Filthy Days Are Here Again

Censorship is the strongest drive in human nature; sex is a weak second.

Phil Kerby

Blaming Hollywood for society's ills is a safe way to address real problems without getting your hands dirty. And blaming Hollywood has a long history. In the tract "Filthy Days Are Here Again," Dr Theodore Graebner [1] rails against the silent classic "Our Dancing Daughters" [2].

Besides the very real dangers of censorship caused by moralistic crusades, there is the danger of diversion. Are we only fiddling, while the real problems that try our youth rage on? Can we afford the self-aggrandizement of moral outrage when our children need real help? And are we teaching our children that they are not responsible for their behavior, that they can blame it on the media?

It's my belief that suppressing expressions of sex, and even some expressions of violence, leads to a perversion of each. The publisher of the tract "Filthy Days," while railing against sex and violence in Hollywood simultaneously published what must be among the most vile and perverted examples of anti-Semitic pornographic expression ever seen. [3] Censorship is the handmaiden of oppression, and a society that relies on it is generally attempting to control more than a medium. Anyone who doesn't fit the collective vision of normalality is in danger.

[Graphic Text: Coming - another thoroughly demoralizing picture. "Filthy Days Are Here Again" "filthy days" commends itself to the public s being typically rotten. Sex, lust, crime, rape, murder, divorce - in fact characteristic movie filth of every sort. See "Filthy Days" - it nauseates - fires the passions, pollutes the mind. Corrupt Theater, starting Fri...]

The Movies

By Dr Theodore Graebner

There is no more saddening sight than a young man or woman passing through the door of a theatre which announces in letters a foot high some such legend as: "Big Love Scene"; "A Beautiful Blond Woman in His Life - Could He Resist?"; "All of Me"; "Girls For Sale"; "Nudity in Gold"; "Back Into Nature with Venus."

If they were to visit a hospital for contagious diseases they would have to put on sterilized gowns and masks. But better a thousand times to fall a prey to smallpox or typhoid fever than to be inoculated with the germ of the Hollywood type of love-life, which is nothing but a bestial service of lust camouflaged by fine dresses and glamorous music.

The thought of the millions that have minds and hearts poisoned every week by these shows, is enough to make one realize the existence of a personal Devil, even if the bible said nothing about it.

There is an interesting statement from a young man of 21, a college junior. Notice how coolly he analyzes the effects of the movies. "A highly charged sex movie puts many girls in an emotional state that weakens, let us say, resistance. I took a girl friend of mine to a racy sex picture. It had the usual lingerie scenes, complication, etc. That night when I took her home, she was, in the vernacular, quite warm... Nine times out of ten with intelligent interpretation the girl's emotional state can be regulated and used to what may be either advantage or disadvantage.

How would you like to have some man plan, in such a cold-blooded manner, how to break down the will of your daughter by selecting the moving picture he takes her to see?

Nearly one-half of delinquent girls examined, admitted that they were moved to invite men to make love to them after seeing passionate sex pictures.

Scene from "Our Dancing Daughters," 1928.

Female delinquency is intimately bound up with the theatre. The Motion-Picture Research Council has the letter of a girl of sixteen who wrote: "The movies have given me some ideas about the freedom we should have. For instance in the picture the wildest girl always tames down and gets the man she loves. Why not in real life?

"My notion of the freedom I should have (and I have it) is to go out and have a good time, but watch your step. On the screen when it shows a party with the heroine included, she is generally the life of the party, and I believe that, when you are in Rome, do as the Romans do. I used to think just the opposite but after seeing 'Our Dancing Daughters,' I began to think this over, and I find out it is the best way to act.

Another sixteen-year-old girl wrote: "Bad and pretty girls are usually more attractive to men than intelligent and studious girls. No wonder girls in the olden days, before the movies, were so modist (sic) and bashful. They never saw Clara Bow and William Haines. If we did not see such examples in the movies, where would we get the idea of being 'hot?' We wouldn't."

Joan Crawford in "Our Dancing Daughters," 1928.

A delinquent girl of seventeen wrote: "The most responsible thing for getting me in trouble is these love pictures. When I saw a love picture, at night, and if I had to go home alone, I would try to flirt with some man on the corner. If it was the right kind of bad man, he would take me to a dance or a wild party; at these parties I would meet other men that would be crazy for fast life. This is the kind of men that got me in trouble."

The merit of these quotations is not that they tell an unexpected story; no one can see the average gangster and sex film without being convinced that they breed criminals and prostitutes. The merit of these quotations is rather their authenticity. They prove to the hilt what we have suspected on general lines of reasoning for a long time.

Our young people should, on their own account, stay away from Photoplays of an immoral or suggestive character. Why deliberately fill the mind with images derived from the intimate lives of Hollywood prostitutes and the paramours?

Why bring the atmosphere of the gangsters den into a mind which God has meant to be a temple of the Holy Ghost? - Ed.

After viewing many such films, nature becomes acclimated to these fumes from the pit and soon tolerates, yes, even begins to relish, the foul odor.

"He that being often reproved hardeneth his neck, shall be suddenly destroyed, and that without remedy." Prov. 29:1.

"The wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life, through Jesus Christ." Rom. 6:23.

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Re-printed by permission of The Defender Tract Club.

(Read The Defender Magazine. Sample copy 10 cents. Defender Publishers, Wichita, Ks.)

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NOTES

1) "Dr. Theo Graebner, the author of this essay, was for many years a professor at Concordia Lutheran Seminary, St. Louis, Missouri. He was a prolific writer and the author of many excellent books and treatises in which he clearly and boldly set forth the truth of Scripture on a variety of subjects. He proved himself a staunch defender of sound, conservative Lutheranism. This is evident also from this essay which appeared in the LUTHERAN WITNESS, the official organ of the Missouri Synod, in 1918." Biographical notes from The Leprosy of Unionism by Dr. Theodore Graebner, published in 1918.
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2) Plot summary of the silent movie Our Dancing Daughters, produced in 1928 directed by Harry Beaumont, and starring Joan Crawford and Anita Page. Buy Our Dancing Daughters.
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3) Defender Magazine was notorious for its anti-Semitic stance as evidenced in this pornographic fantasy of "Jewish" excess after Bolshevik takeover in 1917.

The Jews were now free to indulge in their most fervent fantasies of mass murder of helpless victims. Christians were dragged from their beds, tortured and killed. Some were actually sliced to pieces, bit by bit, while others were branded with hot irons, their eyes poked out to induce unbearable pain. Others were placed in boxes with only their heads, hands and legs sticking out.

Then hungry rats were placed in the boxes to gnaw upon their bodies. Some were nailed to the ceiling by their fingers or by their feet, and left hanging until they died of exhaustion. Others were chained to the floor and hot lead poured into their mouths.

Many were tied to horses and dragged through the streets of the city, while Jewish mobs attacked them with rocks and kicked them to death. Christian mothers were taken to the public square and their babies snatched from their arms. A red Jewish terrorist would take the baby, hold it by the feet, head downward and demand that the Christian mother deny Christ. If she would not, he would toss the baby into the air, and another member of the mob would rush forward and catch it on the tip of his bayonet.

Pregnant Christian women were chained to trees and their babies cut out of their bodies. There were many places of public execution in Russia during the days of the revolution, one of which was described by the American Rohrbach Commission: 'The whole cement floor of the execution hall of the Jewish Cheka of Kiev was flooded with blood; it formed a level of several inches. It was a horrible mixture of blood, brains and pieces of skull. All the walls were bespattered with blood. Pieces of brains and of scalps were sticking to them. A gutter of 25 centimeters wide by 25 centimeters deep and about 10 meters long was along its length full to the top with blood. Some bodies were disemboweled, others had limbs chopped off, some were literally hacked to pieces. Some had their eyes put out, the head, face and neck and trunk were covered with deep wounds. Further on, we found a corpse with a wedge driven into its chest. Some had no tongues. In a corner we discovered a quantity of dismembered arms and legs belonging to no bodies that we could locate.

(Defender Magazine, October 1933)

[The author apologizes for including the previous excerpt, but felt it pertinent to the discussion.]