The Hidden Cinema by Robertson James C

Author:Robertson, James C. [JAMES C. ROBERTSON]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)
Published: 2011-07-31T16:00:00+00:00

This must be the most sickening exhibition of brutality, perversion, sex and sadism ever to be shown on a cinema screen…. It seems an extraordinary oversight on the part of the British Board of Film Censors that this monstrosity has been passed for public showing with an ‘A’ certificate, which means that adolescents and most children with determination about the matter will be able to see it.33

Another reviewer called the film ‘this final word in the tough, the nasty, the moronic, the depraved’.34

A public campaign against No Orchids was soon mounted. It originated from of all places inside the reforming Labour government when two days after its release Dr Edith Summerskill, the Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Food, attacked the film in her presidential address to the Association of Married Women and contended that it would pervert the minds of the British people. Both she and the chairman of the meeting, Lady Helen Nutting, advised members to protest.35 This uncompromising stance—it is unknown whether Dr Summerskill had actually seen No Orchids—swiftly found an echo on the Labour benches in the Commons when Tom Driberg tabled a parliamentary question to Prime Minister Clement Attlee asking, fruitlessly, if he would appoint a Royal Commission to look into BBFC methods. Without naming No Orchids Driberg referred to ‘one particulary notorious film, which will be a disgrace to the British film industry wherever it is shown’.36 Two days after this Commons exchange the public control committee of the LCC, then still under Labour control, viewed No Orchids at County Hall and publicly declared that Renown had until the following Monday (26 April) to cut the film still further or face a total LCC ban. The Plaza run was planned for six weeks and the film was already playing to packed houses,37 and as a result of the LCC pressure the public control committee chairman, Victor Mishcon, personally supervised the demanded cuts in collaboration with the director on the same evening as the committee had announced its decision. These effected cuts evidently involved two beating up sequences, some dialogue between men and women, and the affair between Fenner and Black Dice Club singer Margo (Zoe Gail).38 All this reduced the film by a further 182 feet or two minutes running time.

The LCC action against the film divided the other local authorities more seriously than at any time since the early 1930s. Four Surrey county councillors on the Surrey public control committee soon visited the Plaza after the LCC cuts and decided upon a ban as the film was judged to be ‘injurious to morality and offensive to public feeling’,39 a curious pretext in the light of the large numbers flocking to the Plaza. Some local authorities followed this policy, others followed the LCC, while yet others allowed the BBFC version. The local authorities were in disarray, and some were at loggerheads with the BBFC. A wide variety of prints was in circulation throughout Britain, and although the BBFC adopted a stiff upper lip in

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