Captain Billy's Whiz Bang, April 1922 · page 51 of 67
Captain Billy's Whiz Bang #32 — page 51: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This page satirizes film censorship and director Erich von Stroheim's 1922 film "Foolish Wives." The text mocks how censors struggled with the film's scandalous content—a degenerate Russian aristocrat seducing women, ruining a servant, and attempting to seduce an ambassador's wife. The satire's central joke targets the censorship board's apparent confusion and inconsistency. They approved morally questionable material (the count's depravities, seduction attempts) yet seemingly didn't know how to handle a premature baby shown at the premiere. The censors apparently had the baby footage removed after the initial screening. The author ridicules the arbitrary nature of film censorship: producers themselves cut 200,000 feet from von Stroheim's original negative, suggesting heavy-handed studio self-censorship. The piece implies censors possessed unclear, inconsistent standards—comfortable with sexual misconduct but baffled by an infant. This reflects 1920s anxieties about film regulation and moral authority in cinema.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
50 Captain Billy's Whiz Bang place. So do incense burners from the Far East, tapestries that date back to the middle ages and jeweled keepsakes that may have be- longed to rajahs. Back of the place is a mod- ern kitchen, where suppers are prepared for the manager's guests. It is all very atmos- pheric— But words fail us. We leave you to draw your own picture. Soft music, soft divans, soft viands * * * * * * THEN there's Erich von Stroheim's million dollar movie, “Foolish Wives,” for in- stance. This has been a picture after the censors' own heart. The hero is a degenerate Russian count who drinks perfume, lives with two pretty adventuresses, ru-u-ins a serving maid, tries to capture an American ambas- sador's wife and is only prevented by a fire, and ends by being killed when he climbs into the bedroom of a half-witted peasant girl. The am- bassador's wife, by the way, leaps from a bal- cony to escape the fire and has the first pre- mature baby ever noted in the films. You can imagine how the censors tackled this material. The baby must have puzzled them. They apparently are found on the back porch—or somewhere. The censors didn't seem to know what to do about it, for the premature child was shown at the film premiere. Later it dis- appeared. The producers themselves cut some 200,000 feet out of von Stroheim's original negative to