The Moon is Blue

 

 

Hawkeye: I’m outraged! It’s a disgrace. I’ve never seen a cleaner movie in my life.
B.J.: There was more filth and dirt in this morning’s breakfast.
Father Mulcahy: Well, one of the actors did say “virgin.”
Hawkeye: That’s because everyone was.

 

 

–M*A*S*H, Season 11, Episode 8: “The Moon is Not Blue”

On Saturday afternoon I sat down and watched The Moon is Blue (1953).  I was aware of the controversy surrounding the film but I had never seen it before.  It may be found on YouTube.  My reaction?  A bit bored actually, although it starred two of my favorite actors, William Holden and David Niven.  It is a very talky film, with the type of dialogue that one hears only on stage and almost never in real life.  A comedy, it left me cold except for an occasional smile here and there.  The female lead, Maggie McNamara, was an Audrey Hepburn look alike when Audrey Hepburn was just starting out.  She is good in the film.  She would make just a few other films, eventually earning a living as a typist.  She would kill herself at age 49 by a deliberate barbiturate overdose, the poor soul having been troubled by mental illness for years.

The plot may be summarized thusly:  boy meets girl, they talk a lot during the evening they meet, former girlfriend of boy who lives in the same apartment building as  the boy is used as a comic foil, father of former girlfriend, who happens to be a next door neighbor to boy, drops in and engages in witty conversation with girl, girl and boy decide they are made for each other.  Nothing sexual happens, but there is a lot of talk about romance in which terms like seduction, virgin and mistress pop up.  And that caused the problem.  Its coy talking about sex was not allowed by the Production Code of the time.  The Catholic League of Decency condemned the film, the film ran without the Production Code seal of approval and was a financial success.  It was banned in Boston.

This all happened four years before I was born, but it seems from the vantage point of 2023 to have occurred centuries ago.  Why?  Because the first chink in the armor of voluntary censorship had been made and the films soon reflected completely amoral and immoral attitudes about sex.  Usually those seeking to uphold the Production Code are depicted as villains when the tale of The Moon is Blue is told, but they were actually the visionaries who had a sense of where this would all lead.  The mainstreaming of pornography is one of the most devastating events in the past seven decades and in the US the avalanche began with this film.  The Devil is always most successful when he starts small.