Customer Reviews

Miracles and Sacrilege: Robert Rossellini, the Church, and Film Censorship in Hollywood

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The book is a far more comprehensive examination of the social & religious mores of U.S. culture than the title would suggest. It soars above a book about film and gives a unique and detailed view of how and why film censorship happened. Censorship is a vehicle for an informed and sophisticated tracing of the Americanization of religion over the past 150 years culminating with a pivotal Supreme Court decision about free speech.
Hard to imagine serious thought or study of the subject without guidance from this book.
And it is amusing and entertaining all the while.

This book is not a law review article. There is plenty of legal discussion of the 1915 Mutual Film case holding that films were not subject to First Amendment protection, the decision 37 years later that they were, and a number of cases in between. However, there is little of the back-and-forth argument over which side has the better position in a given case; the book offers much more than that. The author gives us plenty of background into the religious, political, and cultural milieu that existed at the time of Mutual Film and how it changed through two world wars, the Depression, and the Red Scare. Readers who question the relevance of the 19th-century experiences of Irish Catholics in America (and how it differed from the 20th-century experience of Italian immigrants) will eventually come to see how that history lead to the Church's involvement in film censorship (both public and private). That, in turn, influenced the industry's response to the social changes that accelerated after World War II. In a way, the Supreme Court's decision regarding The Miracle is unsurprising--almost an anticlimax. Given all of the threads in this story that are expertly woven together by the author, it was inevitable.