Judge — September 13, 1930 — page 18: what you’re looking at

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

opay’s Leerene, my boys, will be on that old dose of hokum: “The Immorality of the Stage. of you who fecl an overpowe sire to go out and smoke instead are accordingly duly warned. For rs I have been readin nd and, to prove my wealth of wisdom on the subject to those few of you who are still in your seats, I'll say that I still don’t know what the whole damn thing is about. If the stage as we get it these days is immoral—in the sense that the blue-beaks mean it—I am ap- parently too tough an old bird to suffer the appropriate reaction to it Take, for example, the time when they put the Mlle. West in the sponging- house for showing a play of hers called “Sex.” The cl gainst the lady, as I remember it, was that the exhibit tended to put naughty and very dangerous thoughts into our heads and to encour: mission of carnal whooy I want to ask: How? The scenes that the cops chiefly objected to, by way of safe- guarding our purity, displayed the Mlle. West in divers saucy posture some of which might conceivably have exerted a baleful influence on us if a Ziegfeld hussy had been in the Mlle. West's place but none of which, under the circumstances, did a soupcon of a thing to any of us. Always a gentle- man, I hesitate to be impolite to a lady, even in the service of the fine arts and great critical truth, but the plain fact is that the Mlle. West was altogether too blamed fat to make us think of anything but virtue in its highest and most sacred form. Avoir- dupois and deplorable thoughts don’t go together, but the moralists wouldn't about that. As an idiotic conse- nd with only negligible excep- the whole range of our modern policed drama, the exhibits which have been pulled have invariably shown fat —or at least overly plump—ladies in their leading roles, and the pulling has hence aroused the justifiably indig- nant protests of all honest, if some- times happily evil-minded, citizens. us to the com- JUDGE cTHE THEATRE GEORGE wes NACHIAIAN “The Captive,” Mile. Menken in the with the willowy tar role, is an doesn’t count use it dealt with a subject hardly calculated to “Pleasure Man’ count for, let us hope, obvious also doesn't & Turtle” had Sadic Martinot in it ke it from an eye-witness, and in those che certainly showed had Blanche Bates in i days the fair Bla no signs of dieting. had the other Blanche—Walsh—in it, and that equally fair Bl exactly a sylph either. Olga Nethersole in it, a t the leading man str. cry night t he Girl With Cough,” if it Suratt wore These plays and their star ladies y have been highly aphrodi Milwaukee, St. Louis and other G man communities, but New York, where they like ‘em under 90 pounds, they were just about as ie as home-made Profession” two other allegedly dealt with the subject of bordellos. The former dealt with it philosophi- and if a philosophic: sailor I am much more in favor of a reduction in battleships than I used to And the latter presented the bor- dello in such a greasy light that even a French sailor would have galloped around to take a long- ing look at the Y. M. C. A after the show was over. € the question gf nudity in Let a woman with a shape like a polacca and an epider- mis like a Communist flag that had heen left out in the rain appear on the stage with only a few tinsel hints at- tached to her person and the Knights luinbus who favor blue and malodorous will descend on the showhouse, deter- inined to safeguard us from our baser instincts. in, I find myself puz- zled. If I may be taken as a fair lab- oratory specimen, I wish to report that I have been looking at these lumpy and bemeasled women in the altogether since boyhood—in Paris, the Straits Settlements, American re- ligious plays and a lot of other 1 —and the net effect they've had on me has been chiefly atheistic. If I ever have a son, I shall do with him precisely what my old man did with me when I was a kid: take him around to the music halls and let him in on the soothing and purifying secret of what most women look like when they aren't edited by Paquin, Lelong and Lanvin. The whole fuss about immorality on age is fostered by men with in- ly dirty minds. That section of statutes which rants against “any obscene, indecent, immoral or impure drama, play, exhibition, show or en- tertainment, or any obscene, inde ; impure scene, tableau, i rt or portion of any pl n, show or entertainment whi would tend to the corruption of the inorals of youth or others” is invoked hy men who, more than anythin need a good cerebral serubbin, here is something pretty wrong with any fellow who feels funny all over when some poor, pathetic female in a span- gled diaper reveals her powdered ee- zema. And there is something a whole lot more wrong with any fellow, in or out of uniform, who takes, it upon him- self to arrest her. The stage is clean What is needed are cl minds-in its spectators. And what is also needed is some faint consistency in censorship. If a woman clad only in a loin-cloth is in- decent, why isn't a man? Yet no cop has so far—unfortunately—gone after the vaudeville acrobats. If a scene in a shabby bawdy house, as in “Maya,” is corrupting, why isn’t one in an ele- gant bawdy house, as in a Morris Gest Biblical exhibit, even more so? If the (Continued on page 29) er comicbooks.com i } { | | j ] | | |