Forbidden Films: Censorship Histories of 125 Motion Pictures (Facts on File Library of World Literature) [Hardcover]

Dawn B. Sova (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 2001 | ISBN-10: 0816040176 | ISBN-13: 978-0816040179

Since the earliest days of the film industry, mainstream films have been banned for their sexual, religious, social, and political content. Forbidden Films traces the efforts to censor 125 films, ranging from the silent Birth of a Nation to Schlindler's List. This fascinating reference examines the continued efforts to regulate the industry, providing a summary of each banned film-including production details, censorship history, and suggestions for further reading.

Coverage includes:
* Early efforts to regulate the movie industry, such as the Hays Code in 1922 and the Motion Picture Production Code in 1930
* The emergence of the Catholic League of Decency, which wielded extensive power for nearly forty years
* The reasoning behind different types of film censorship-including racism and anti-Semitism, sexual "indecency," and the fear of Communism
* Classic and contemporary films that have faced censorship, for sexual content (Last Tango in Paris, A Streetcar Named Desire), social content (Basic Instinct, Of Human Bondage), political content (Anna and the King, Revenge at Daybreak), religious content (La Dolce Vita, The Last Temptation of Christ), and violence content (Natural Born Killers, Scarface)
* Appendixes profiling the directors of the banned films, films classified according to the reason for their censorship or ban, and a listing of 125 additional challenged, censored, and banned films.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

What do Anna and the King, Basic Instinct and La Dolce Vita have in common? All have faced censorship for political, religious, sexual or social reasons. In the vein of 100 Banned Books (and from the same imprint) comes Forbidden Films: Censorship Histories of 125 Motion Pictures. The title says it all, almost but in addition to outlining each film's troubles with decency boards, however formal or informal, Dawn B. Sova offers plot summaries, production details and suggestions for further reading. And since each film entry can be digested in under five minutes, it's both a handy basic reference and a good coffee break read.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

The notion that the best way to insure an artwork's popularity and enduring fame is to declare it forbidden is amply demonstrated by many of the motion pictures featured in this engrossing compilation, including Frankenstein, A Streetcar Named Desire, and The Great Dictator. Along with the familiar array of films suppressed for sexual, political, social, and religious reasons are some X-rated movies, including Emmanuelle and Deep Throat, that reached mainstream audiences. For each film profiled, the cast and production credits are provided, along with a "Plot Summary," "Censorship History," and "Further Reading," a handy format identical to that used by Sova (English, Montclair State Univ.) in her well-received contributions to Facts On File's "Banned Books" series. The entry for Damaged Goods, a largely forgotten 1919 British silent film about the tragic consequences of syphilis, is typical of the careful research throughout. After tracing the film's history from an earlier, now lost version produced for the U.S. Army as a training film about the dangers of promiscuity, Sova explores the history of censorship from the perspective of redeeming artistic qualities; the "Further Reading" includes valuable citations to three contemporaneous articles from obscure, long-defunct movie magazines. Highly recommended for academic and public libraries. Richard W. Grefrath, Univ. of Nevada Lib., Reno

Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 368 pages
• Publisher: Facts on File (October 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0816040176
• ISBN-13: 978-0816040179
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.4 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,339,381 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

DAWN SOVA is a strong opponent of censorship in its many forms and has authored Banned Plays, Forbidden Films, Banned Books: Literature Suppressed on Social Grounds, and Banned Books: Literature Suppressed on Sexual Grounds. Third editions of the latter two books are in progress. She has felt honored to speak on the topic to both library associations and private groups.

She was born in northern New Jersey in 1949 to first-generation Americans of Eastern European descent whose parents came through Ellis Island with great hopes and dreams for the future. Economic disadvantage limited her parents' access to education, but they empowered their daughter to strive and to earn several advanced academic degrees. She taught writing, journalism, and literature for over two decades at both the high school and university level.

More important, their influence propelled her to dream beyond the boundaries of their working class neighborhood. She is the author of 23 books. In 2002, she won the Mystery Writers of America Award for Best Non-fiction Work for her 20th book Edgar Allan Poe A-to-Z. She was nominated by the MWA in the same category several years earlier for her work on Agatha Christie.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Hugely inaccurate, February 11, 2003

By 

Andy Klein (Santa Monica, CA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Forbidden Films: Censorship Histories of 125 Motion Pictures (Facts on File Library of World Literature) (Paperback)

It doesn't take long to find errors in this book: just read the wholly inaccurate plot synopsis of The Last Picture Show, which is hardly obscure or difficult to find on video, and thus would have been easy to check.

Or how about the reference to a film receiving an R rating from the MPAA *several years prior to the establishment of the MPAA's rating system*?

Had this been a book of insights or analysis, a few such lapses might have been forgivable. But this is a dry reference work, with little interpretation by the author: and dry reference works require a higher standard of accuracy.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A touch of free speech with a sense of lacking, September 26, 2002

By 

N. Laguna "veganioull258" (Los Angeles, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Forbidden Films: Censorship Histories of 125 Motion Pictures (Facts on File Library of World Literature) (Paperback)

Even though this book brings important items out to light, the work itself is lacking and at times incomplete. It also has a strong sense of sensasionalism to it, think of watching NBC on daily news. The mention of films like The Great Dictator as items under censorship and controversy is in itself sensasionalistic, as opposed to Citizen Kane which is not mentioned at all, gives a better idea of how subtle and hyped this work is, besides, the constant reference to the De Grazia book by title Banned Films: Movies, Censors and the First Amendment, makes it look like it is a copy of such book and no actual research was ever done to actualize, itemize or distinguish one text from the other. In short this book could be helpful on legal matters and cross reference from one legal case to another,since it does provide the actual case numbers and states where cases where trialed (picture yourself battling the Supreme court and having this book as a resource for enlightment on appeals, injunctions and motions), as far as film is concerned, I personally know of at least 125 more banned films within one decade alone and after the Hays Production Code or the Christian Legion of Decency to write a book on. Sova deserves credit for sticking it out with the female stars and the sex/erotic/porn oriented genre, but I for one think of film as a much broader medium in which the powers that be relish to exert their power to limit the means of expression whether this be of religious, sexual or political nature. Recommended for the high school reader with a strong suggestion to do further reading

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Good information, poorly organized, July 1, 2010

By 

Edison McIntyre (Durham, NC United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Forbidden Films: Censorship Histories of 125 Motion Pictures (Facts on File Library of World Literature) (Paperback)

There are a few easily discernable factual errors in FORBIDDEN FILMS (which could have been avoided with a bit more time in fact-checking), but the big disappointment here is the format. Dawn Sova has chosen 125 movies, made between 1908 and 1998, that have run into censorship trouble in various countries and at various levels: from city, state and national agencies, as well as various private pressure groups and the American film industry's own self-censorship apparatuses, i.e., the motion picture association's Production Code and, after 1968, its ratings system.

Instead of presenting a historical sense of the development of motion picture censorship (principally in the United States, long the most important film production center and audience market), Sova chose to list her 125 films in alphabetical order, by title, giving each a list of major credits, a brief synopsis, and a "censorship history" for each title. With the exception of a few relatively minor errors, the information on each individual film is relevant and logically presented. What's missing, however, is much sense of the progression of film censorship: how it grew in the early 1900s (due in part to a sympathetic U.S. Supreme Court decision in 1915), how Hollywood itself -- under strong pressure from the Catholic Church and other moralistic organizations -- instituted its own self-censorship system in the 1920s that dictated the limits of American film content for decades, how the Supreme Court reversed itself in 1952 and made the gradual demise of government censorship almost inevitable in the United States, and how Hollywood's self-censorship system also imploded in the wake of the Supreme Court decision, only to be replaced by a ratings system that has created its own problems for filmmakers seeking to show their movies in U.S. theaters.

You can glean this story in bits and pieces from reading FORBIDDEN FILMS, but if Sova ever gets a chance to revise this book, she would do well to arrange the 125 exemplary films in chronological order (and perhaps increase the number a bit) and include some connecting text that would create a smooth and continuous narrative instead of the disjointed articles that now constitute this book. (The present book does include a three-page introduction that tries to give an overview of American film censorship, but it's not adequate in the context of so many films.)

Much of the "censorship histories" include references to and quotations from various court decisions on various individual films. No doubt many of these are important, but after a hundred films or so they get a bit repetitive. There's also a section of short biographies of the directors of the 125 films Sova lists, but this information is easily available elsewhere (e.g., the Internet Movie Database) and, in many cases, the stars (e.g., Mae West), movie producers (Irving Thalberg, Carl Laemmle Jr.), and censors themselves (Joe Breen, Martin Quigley) are of more interest and significance than the directors of mediocre exploitation films.

This is an adequate supplementary work for those interested in the history and issues surrounding U.S. film censorship, but there are other books listed on amazon.com that are better starting points, i.e., better organized and more comprehensive.