
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, June 25, 1995                   TAG: 9506260089
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: F-3   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: RITA KEMPLEY
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

BRING BACK THE CODE

WHEN Clark Gable took off his shirt in ``It Happened One Night,'' women in the audience fainted at the sight. But today nobody bats an eye when, in the gruesome Scottish epic ``Braveheart,'' Mel Gibson and a cast of thousands lift their kilts and flash the British before hacking them to bits.

In fact the movies have become so squalid that presidential candidate Bob Dole recently condemned the industry for its corrosive influence on pop culture. Of course, presidential candidates should be addressing more important sociopolitical issues - and there was a time when they could, because Hollywood was operating under the restrictions of what was called the Production Code.

A list of 11 ``don'ts'' and 25 ``be carefuls,'' this document seems quaint by today's loose standards. Among the taboos are ridiculing the clergy, ``licentious nudity,'' ``actual scenes of childbirth'' and traffic in illegal drugs. Filmmakers were further advised to be careful about depictions of ``surgical operations,'' ``lustful kissing'' and ``the deliberate seduction of girls.''

There were restrictions, too, regarding ``the dynamiting of trains, mines, buildings, etc.'' In parentheses, the code-makers express their concerns about ``the effect a too-detailed description of these may have upon the moron.''

Quaint perhaps, but it just might have been the midwife of Hollywood's Golden Age. The constraints of the code forced writers, directors and performers to tax their skills and to use their imaginations. Filmmakers evoked everything from sheer terror to sexual longing - in some cases unforgettably - without resorting to excesses of profanity, flesh, blood or grandiose effects.

Lovers made eyes, clinked champagne glasses or, better yet, invented sexy shtick - for example, take Paul Henreid, who simultaneously lights two cigarettes and hands one to Bette Davis in ``Now, Voyager.''

By contrast, in ``True Romance'' - one of the worst films Dole has never seen - Christian Slater wins Patricia Arquette's heart by shooting her pimp in the face. This scenario would at the very least be unlikely under the code, which urged care in depictions of ``the use of firearms'' and ``the sale of women or a woman selling her virtue.''

Not surprisingly, there is little industry nostalgia for the code. Jack Valenti, the chief architect of the movie-ratings system that replaced the code in 1968, snorts of the old days, ``There was no open-mouth kissing and a couple in bed had to have a foot on the floor. You had to be Nadia Comaneci to have a moment of affection.''

But many moviegoers miss that moment. In today's Hollywood, it's off with the fine washables, on with the handcuffs and up against the wall. Sex scenes today aren't just gymnastic, they're aerobic. (You find yourself hoping the couple in question stretched first.) If ``Casablanca'' were made today, Bogey would slam Bergman against Sam's baby grand and proceed to tickle her ivories till she achieved multiple crescendos. And when it came time to part, he might try to console her with ``We'll always have the Steinway.''

But wouldn't we rather just have Paris?

Now that they can rely on profanity, writers don't write lines like that anymore. Well, hardly ever. Fully half the dialogue in the ordinary buddy-cop thriller of today would have been banned 40 or 50 years ago. And to think that ``Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn'' was strong stuff in 1939.

It seems that freedom of speech has only limited the moviemaker's vocabulary, just as the lifting of restrictions on graphic sex and violence has crippled scenarists' solutions to moral quandaries. In other words, the more they show, the less they create. Both sex and violence quicken pulses. Indeed, there is no more simplistic way to manipulate audiences.

True, they come to be manipulated, but they also come with the hope that it will be done masterfully, as in Hitchcock's ``Psycho.'' Instead, they're confronted with the garden-variety grotesqueries of some cartoon psycho. ``Batman Forever'' is so tired behind the glossy pyrotechnics that it takes two wackos - the Riddler (Jim Carrey) and Two Face (Tommy Lee Jones) - to keep the night-wing flying. But just try to get in the theater.

The morons are at the gate.

Rita Kempley is a film critic for The Washington Post.

- The Washington Post

by CNB