STATE OF CINEMA

...He suggests that instead of asking what kind of art is good for one's neighbor, we ask: "What are the arts that give us pleasure and enrich our lives, and how do we go about encouraging them...

...Some individuals, like Arthur Mayer, wartime chief of the OWI Film Section, opposed the exhibition of Oliver Twist in Germany, because of the explosive heritage left by the Nazis, but favor its exhibition in the United States and elsewhere...

...When she gives this earnest explanation of her pregnancy to the villagers, they mock her...

...a profoundly Philistine and un-Cath-olic brand of arbitrary moralism...

...They object simply to a popular rendition of Dickens' original character, on the grounds that it is a stereotyped and biased portrait of a Jew and that the effect of the film would be to perpetuate this hostile image of the Jew...

...The British-made film version of Dickens' Oliver Twist, although completed several years ago, has not yet been shown in this country, largely because of the objections raised by a number of Jewish organizations to the character of Fa-gin, played by Alec Guinness...

...Clancy voiced at the white heat of outraged sensibility was illuminated and explored in a brilliant article by David Ries-man published in the January issue of Commentary...

...They are . . . ist deplorable violation of the n spirit...

...The next day he ordered it removed from the screen of the theater on the grounds that he found it "officially and personally blasphemous...

...In this charged atmospJaji the State Board of Regents—<M sisting of a Protestant, a CathoSS and a Jew—reviewed the film, fouai it "sacrilegious," and revoked its cense...

...She finally hides in a church, where her child is born...

...Patrick's Cathedra] that the film "blasphemously and sacrilegiously implies a subversion to the very inspired word of God" besides being "a vicious insult to Italian womanhood...

...It follows that censors are by their nature deficient in the two qualities indispensable to the proper appreciation of a work of art...

...The notion that the art form itself, over a period of time, could affect the quality of American life, and hence of its race relations, is forgotten in anxious concern for the presumed immediate results...

...Riesman, a lawyer turned sociologist without pomp or cant, raises the question as to what is gained and lost by "militant" crusaders against anti-Semitism and, by extension, against all ideological heresies...

...in a crowded theater...

...He did not understand me—what did this movie about a pastor's family tragedy have to do with race relations...

...This involves a defect of sensibility...

...Holmes' example, it is worth noting, was a person shouting "Fire...

...What will make America a more interesting and lively place to live in...

...Catholic doctrine itself, he pointed out, denies to any secular body the right to define sacrilege...

...I would say that censorship in the arts, like any restriction of free expression, is an absolute evil, which can be justified only when free expression represents, in the phrase of Justice Holmes, "a clear and present danger...

...Catholics would demand more stringent censorship legislation...

...Whereupon Cardinal Spellman declared from St...

...Since the state censor board had already licensed the film, the Supreme Court in Albany invalidated Commissioner Mc-Caffery's ban...

...He tells the story of a producer's representative who wanted him to go on record in favor of Home of the Brave because it was "good for race relations...

...Usually, when we oppose censorship, we are attacking the imposition of stodgy majority views on the rebellious artist...

...And unless the picture were banned, 'he warned...

...One gathers that the Church's mildness on the West Coast is grounded on more than the comparative smallness of the Catholic community there, or even the shocked criticism of its conduct in New York by otherwise friendly non-Catholics...

...At this writing, The Miracle cannot be shown in New York State...

...The story concerns a simple-minded peasant girl who is seduced by a bearded stranger she takes to be Saint Joseph...

...Confronting Cardinal Spellman on grounds of doctrine, Tate made a useful, if dry, polemical point...

...What is more dangerous and frightening, however, is that the person willing to take the role of censor must have a low opinion of the minds and souls of his fellows, as well as an exalted sense of his own perception and virtue...

...In his attitude, he patronized both his own craft of moviemaking and the movie audience: he assumed that people get out of a movie a message as simple as the fortune-teller's printed slip in a penny arcade...

...This short Italian film, combined with independent works of Jean Renoir and Marcel Pagnol under the collective title...

...Some time after its opening at the small and luxurious Paris Theater, New York's License Commissioner went to see The Miracle...

...These organizations do not question Guinness' performance or the goodwill of the film's creators...

...More eloquent and closer to the heart of the matter was William P. Clancy's, article in The Commonweal, a Catholic weekly edited with a combination of taste, intelligence, and feeling rare in American journalism "These appeals to mass hysteria, wrote Clancy, "these highly arbl trary invocations of a police censor...

...To support an overeager censorship exhibits an unconcern for the hierarchy of values...

...This producer's representative did not ask himself what kinds of movies he himself enjoyed seeing, but looked at his product from the stance of an outsider—this is the hallmark of the public relations approach...

...Riesman asked him in turn ("the somewhat ironic question") whether he thought Sym-phonie Pastorale, a beautiful and compassionate French film based on Gide's novel, was good for race relations...

...The disregard for pwnplexity, the use of labels, the con-SCious appeal to surface virtue, the exploitation of non-intelligence evident in the campaign against The Miracle he termed "a semi-ecclesiastical McCarthyism...

...The more publicized banning in New York of Robert Rosselini's The Miracle differs from most cases of movie censorship in that it involves a matter of theology...

...The charge against The Miracle is sacrilege," he wrote to the editor of the New York Times, "a theological category different in kind from those of public morals or public decency...

...What Cardinal Spellman appears not to have anticipated was the ser-" ious breach in Catholic ranks...

...But it is evident that a person who seems only to patronize others also patronizes his own human reactions and, while he thinks he manipulates the emotions of the audience, also manipulates, and eventually causes to evaporate, his own emotions...

...This involves a conspicuous absence of humanity...

...Ways of Love, offended certain Catholic individuals and organizations because of the apparent parallel between the film's story and the Christ legend...

...There followed mass picketing by members of the Catholic War Veterans, anonymous bomb scares, and the sudden prosecution of the theater management for allowing fireT'fjjM tions...

...It has been playing in Los Angeles, however, since shortly after the NeK York ban, without fanfare or inci* dent...

...Two recent examples of film censorship complicate matters by appearing in the guise of defenses of minority groups...

...The viewpoint Mr...

...ship must ultimately result, we feet in great harm to the cause of reli Pis welt as art...

...II Allen Tate—poet, critic, teacher, and Catholic—dissented not only from the action of his church, but from the New York State law which made sacrilege a ground for censorship...

...In my opinion, there is no such institution under a system that separates church and state...

...The question then arises: is there any institution in the United States, civil or religious, which has the legitimate authority to suppress books and motion pictures, however disagreeable they may be to certain persons on the theological grounds...