Judge — March 12, 1927 — page 18: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

POPULAR MECHANICS NUMBER OF JUDGE THE MECHANICS OF CENSORSHIP By GEORGE JEAN NATHAN As no new plays have been put on during the week about which I am writing, I think I'll pass the time and amuse myself like all the other boys by getting up on the soap-box and spieling a little on the subject of censorship. Any persons in the audience who there- fore wish to leave may have their money refunded at the box-office. To begin with, I believe censorship to be a good thing. True enough, I don’t believe it to be a good thing in the way a lot of other people do, but 1 am nevertheless heartily in favor of it on other grounds. If there is a better low show to be found anywhere than that provided by censorship, the boy friend doesn’t know of it. We are just now badly in need of such a hot show and the only way we can get it to have censorship become a reality. Things are altogether too is going to a Raines Law hotel in Bru man and that sentimentalizes the ursion, or “The Brothers Karamazov,” that tries to get away with it by calling a guinea-pig Dmitri Feodoroviteh? And what about a play like “An American Tragedy,” which shows Tung-fang realistically going on in Grand Rap- ids surroundings, or “Chicago,” which opens up with a slam-bang bedroom scene, or “Pinwheel,” which dis- plays a young girl being seduced to a jazz accompani- ment, or “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes,” with a heroine as loose as a yokel’s garter? If the censors are going to be honest, they will have to go after these plays and a lot of others like them. How otherwise will they avoid having ridicule heaped upon them? Then, too, what of the frankly las- civious librettos of half the operas at the Metropolitan, many of them els with a young tame; what we need is the good old rousing circus that censorship, whichever form it takes, is sure to give us. We have already had a hint of the fun to come in the gendarme raids upon “The Cap- tive,” “The Virgin Man” and “Sex.” But these raids were more or less obvious, since The Captive” deals with degen- eracy, “The Virgin Man” with the at- tempt to relieve a young man of his chastity, and “Sex” with what sailors do when tl trousers. All this, however, is but a soupcgon of gala times yet to be. If the censors are going to be logical about their job, they will have to raid at least nine- tenths of the plays now on view in New. York. If they pull “The Virgin Man,” how can they reason- ably let alone “The Constant Wife,” that assures the public that a married woman is perfectly justified in going off on the loose, “The Play’s the Thing,” that makes a Mount of Venus out of a molehill, or “Satur- day’s Children,” that actually recommends casual liaisons to young women as more desirable than early marriages? If they throw the law into “Sex,” how can they defend themselves against charges of favorit- ism by allowing to go on undisturbed such a play as “The Road to Rome,” that defends any woman mar- ried to a fat man for going the limit with a thinner one, or “The Constant Nymph,” that shows a young girl are not hitching their The ultimate triumph of civilization—Niagara Falls harnessed to a cocktail-shaker 16 enough to ruin an entire convent at one blow? What of the living skele- ton at Hubert’s Museum in West 42nd Street, seated on a platform in a disgracefully nude condition? And what of the two fat women at the same place, with their 200 pound legs observable an embarrassing — dis- tance beyond the knees? What of a revival of “Ham- let,” surely as dirty a play in certain censorship direc- tions as “The Drag,” or of a score of such present-day exhibits as “Cradle Snatch- ers,” “Lulu Belle,” “Seed of the Brute,” “Bride of the Lamb,” “Rain,” “The Shanghai Gesture,” etc.? What of the Black Bottom, which is twice as aphrodisi- acal as a dozen “Virgin Mans”? What of three- fourths of the sketches in the revues, all of them as loud as anything you'll find up the Paris side streets? There is only one way out of the current difficulty that I can see and that is to shut down almost everything in town with the possible exception of Walter Hampden and the Sunday night folk song recitals at Town Hall. When censorship is finally instituted, most of the sport will come in writing in letters complaining of all sorts of plays. I myself shall write no less than a half dozen a day, and I have a friend who has already hired two secretaries in gleeful anticipation of the beanfeast. The chief diversion among the humorists (Continued on page 28) comicbooks.com