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GORDON GREB |
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WANT US TO SEE
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NEAR RIOT AT FORT DIX
OVER CENSORED MOVIE
of TheColumnists.com
It wasn't my fault they had to call out the military police. Nor could I blame New York newspaper columnist Ed Sullivan. Both of us simply reported the truth.
Yet it led to hundreds of excited soldiers causing a near riot at Fort Dix, N.J. in January 1946 as they scrambled to get inside Post Theater No. 5 to see a new movie called "Scarlet Street."
Why such a fever to see an off-beat black and white movie? Everybody knew "Scarlet Street" wasn't going to be the next "Gone With the Wind."
Hollywood had made plenty of movies showing drunken sailors or soldiers needing to be controlled by MPs because they'd just had too much alcohol. But nobody could blame booze for this surprising episode. These GIs were serious minded and sober. They were angry about what they'd read in The New York Daily News and The Fort Dix (N.J.) Post: The movie was being banned by the censors.
That irritated lots of men who had just
returned from war, fighting to keep America a place where you
could make up your own mind about such things--a free society.
Let me set the scene for you: World War II was finally over.
Most of the men--and some women--at Fort Dix would be eligible
for discharge in just a few days and could return to their homes
in New York and other cities on the East Coast. These were their
final days of military service, and they were spending them at
the largest separation center in the country, Fort Dix, where
3,000 soldiers were being processed every day for civilian life.
So, why would these men and women risk jeopardizing their honorable
discharge from military service over a movie? Why couldn't they
just wait a few days to see this movie in their hometowns?
The answer was simple: They feared that if they didn't see this particular movie at Post Theater No. 5 now, they might never see it anywhere! They had read in their own post newspaper that the movie had been censored in New York, so it might never get to their hometowns. It had become a matter of principle.
When the word got around, they overwhelmed
the system. Such vast numbers showed up to see this new Hollywood
film that the auditorium filled up right away. The staff sergeant
who managed the theater had to close the doors and turn away
the pressing crowd outside, afraid the soldiers would force their
way in and exceed the theater's capacity. He couldn't risk violating
the fire code by packing more patrons inside.
When he finally called the MPs for help, he knew they would have
a job on their hands quelling the potential melee. But many of
the MPs were war veterans themselves. So they didn't bang any
heads or arrest anyone unnecessarily, understanding the anger
of the recently returned veterans from Europe and Asia who had
risked their lives overseas fighting for freedom.
At the time, I was a Staff Sergeant editing
the weekly camp newspaper, The Fort Dix Post, heading
a staff composed of veterans of overseas service as well as reporters
and photographers who had worked on New York and Philadelphia
newspapers. We were always on the lookout for a front page news
story or a good feature story that would appeal to our readers.
Ordinarily it was a routine job to tell readers what movies were
to be shown around the camp. We had six theaters, not counting
those at our Army hospital. But the item I prepared about "Scarlet
Street" was different.
What led to my publicizing this unique story is that I happened
to pick up a copy of The New York Daily News and spotted
a small item in Ed Sullivan's gossip column saying that the New
York State Motion Picture Commission had banned a movie called
"Scarlet Street."
When I found this out, I made it front page news in our Army
camp newspaper. You couldn't miss it--NY NIXES FLICK--a small,
short feature, neatly boxed and set in bold face, so that it
hit readers smack dab in the face. Before joining the Army, I
had lived all my life in California and never heard of movie
censorship anywhere in our land. However, when I first learned
of it I was a U.S. Army Private on leave at Columbus, Ohio, seeing
to my surprise the theater flash an "approved" notice
on the screen before showing the picture. Funny, I thought for
"Casablanca" needing to be passed by an Ohio State
censorship board. Again I was amazed to see the same type of
approval notices on screens in other cities and states.
What kind of movie was provoking all this?
Some would call it just a routine B-movie thriller. "Scarlet
Street" had been made by Fritz Lang, the famous German director
who fled his homeland when the Nazis took over and came to America.
While still in Germany, he had made several classic silent films,
including "Metropolis," and such powerful early sound
films as "M." In America, he'd been making dark, shadowy
thrillers like "Fury," "You Only Live Once"
and "Man Hunt." This new picture starred Edward G.
Robinson as a timid, law-abiding citizen who's seduced into a
criminal life by a conniving young woman, played by Joan Bennett.
When "Scarlet Street" came along, things became radically
different. It was banned from being shown by the New York Motion
Picture Division on January 4, 1946. Previously these censorship
boards simply cut and slashed portions of pictures. But this
time they banned the entire film. The l921 statute said they
could do it if any picture was deemed "obscene, indecent,
immoral, inhuman, and sacrilegious" or that would "corrupt
morals or incite to crime." It outraged me to think that
a handful of bureaucrats had been given such absolute power and
that movie freedom had been taken away from ordinary American
citizens.
We had fought a war against dictatorship. Now veterans whose
homes were in New York were forbidden to see this picture after
fighting for their constitutional democracy all over the world.
Why didn't the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution protect
us against this abuse of power?
Several years later I would ask this same
question and pursue it before the U.S. Supreme Court. But for
the time being--as things eventually turned out--I enabled a
lot of veterans to see the picture and saw the day when everybody
in New York who wanted to see "Scarlet Street" got
to do so.
Universal Pictures needed the New York market--it was the single
largest movie market in the nation. So it wasn't the First Amendment
but big money that got this Hollywood company going. It was the
$1 million it had cost to make the picture, which convinced the
studio heads to send the film's executive producer, Walter Wanger,
to New York to lobby for the film's release.
Over the next few weeks Wanger, who was
married to the film's leading lady, met with the head of the
Catholic Legion of Decency, key state officials and others with
powerful influence in government. After weeks of artful negotiation
Wanger finally made his points and got the film released.
"Scarlet Street" opened to its first New York audiences
near Times Square (Loew's Criterion) on February 20. Today it's
known as a classic film noir achievement of director Lang
and screen writer Dudley Nichols.
Remembering this incident caused me to
choose movie censorship as the topic for my master's thesis research
at the University of Minnesota in l949. In 1952 I offered the
results of my research to Ephraim S. London, a New York attorney
fighting a censorship case on appeal. He quoted from my research
in the oral argument and said afterwards it had been invaluable
in persuading the U.S. Supreme Court to unanimously rule that
movies cannot be censored under the First Amendment to the U.S.
Constitution (Burstyn v. Wilson, et al, l952).
It was almost an odd coincidence that there were eight states
and 90 cities with censorship boards, but it fell to me to help
make the case against the state of New York. However, maybe the
entire credit should go to Ed Sullivan, not because he became
a star of his own CBS television program, but for what he did
for us at Fort Dix by alerting us to the censorship of "Scarlet
Street."
What Ed Sullivan gave a lot of us at the Army post in New Jersey was "a really big show" and he didn't even know it at the time.
©2006 by Gordon Greb. This column
first posted March 13, 2006.
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