With Max Alvarez, film scholar, cultural writer, historian and festival curator.
This visual talk takes the audience (via DVD clips and slides) on a colorful tour of Hollywood film censorship during the early 20th century and its gradual demise by the 1960s. Censorship surged during the years of the Great Depression in the wake of countless melodramas and comedies depicting gangsters, drugs, bootleg gin, prostitution, political corruption and other society ills. As Barbara Stanwyck, Mae West, James Cagney, Jean Harlow, Edward G. Robinson--and even Betty Boop--gleefully ignored various laws and religious commandments, morality watchdogs plotted ways to enforce a rigid censorship code to “clean up” the movies.
New York City, NY; NYC