This blogpost is CONDEMNED by the Legion of Decency

I’m always interested in reading about interesting jobs. And the one that was held by about-to-retire Joan Graves for 30 years was of particular interest to me. Graves was a movie-rater. Not a critic, mind you, but someone who decided whether a film was G, PG, PG-13, R or – horror of horrors -  NC-17.

The article/interview in the NY Times on Graves’ career was full of good little tidbits. For instance, in 1969 there were 101 films with a G rating; in 2017, there were 11. In Graves’ view, filmmakers prefer a PG rating to a G rating, as it means more box office. She believes that filmmakers started throwing in a stray ‘hell’ or ‘damn’ into their G movies in order to get the preferable PG stamp.

Another tidbit is that Harvey Weinstein is a pain in the butt. Now that did not come as much of a revelation. Yet to find out that, when he wasn’t harassing women, he found time to regularly get up in the ratings group’s grill is something of an affirmation of his overall nastiness.

What reading about Graves’ time spent rating movies – she estimates that she saw 12,500 during her tenure – really did was prompt me to think about the rating system that was the bane of my movie-going existence as a kid: the Catholic Legion of Decency.

Each week, The Catholic Free Press (Worcester’s diocesan rag) published the Legion’s ratings of the movies playing in Worcester.

And it was thanks to the Legion of Decency – a tribe of censorious little prudes if ever – that I wasn’t able to go with my friends to see West Side Story when it came to town in 1962. I could listen to the album all I wanted, and that I did, mooning over all that glorious music, playing the LP over and over whenever I could grab an hour when someone else wasn’t monopolizing the Webcor stereo in the family room, or, worse, watching something on TV.

While my mother was a watchdog on the movie front, by seventh grade, I could take anything out of the adult section of the library and read it. Not that I was reading anything racy, but it was okay to read To Kill a Mockingbird. (I just looked it up and saw that the movie came out in 1962. I’m pretty sure that I went to see it, but surely a movie with a rape in it wasn’t rated A-1. If I could see Mockingbird, what was the big deal with West Side Story? Was it the hinted at idea that Maria and Tony did “it” without benefit of clergy? They were, after all, a couple of Catholic young folks, Maria being Puerto Rican and Tony being Polish. Anyway, I wasn’t much of a moviegoer but remember the keen disappointment and resentment I felt when I couldn’t go to see West Side Story. The only other movies I remember seeing in 1962 were The Music Man and The Castaways.)

I can’t remember whether West Side Story was rated A-II (suitable for adults and adolescents), A-III (suitable for adults only), or A-IV (suitable for adults with reservations). Since my sister Kath (at 14), was an adolescent in 1962, and I (age 12) wasn’t, I’m guessing it was A-II.

Anyway, I tried to fact-check the rating by googling ‘west side story legion of decency’, and the top response was a very funny blog post written by none other than my cousin Ellen, who was a fellow-12 year old forbidden by her mother, my Aunt Mary, from seeing it as well. (Did they collude when they sent letters to each other? Phone calls were holidays-only, other than the exception made for a death or similarly life-shattering incident.) Ellen thinks that the movie was an A-III or even a B. She may be right about A-III.

My sister was a freshman in high school in 1962, and the movie-restriction reins were definitely loosened in high school.

When I was in high school, I went to arty-movies like Bunny Lake Is Missing and Séance on a Wet Afternoon – at least I thought they were arty, the Beatles movies (which surely the Legion of Decency would have objected to!), and movies full of sex and violence (c.f., Goldfinger).

I looked through the list of movies condemned by the Legion of Decency, and saw that I actually saw a couple of C-rated movies while still in high school – The Pawnbroker and Blowup. These were mortal sin movies, so my mother’s guard must surely have been down. My father was ill off and on throughout my high school and college years. (He died of kidney disease when I was a senior in college.) So maybe she was preoccupied with other things and didn’t bother to ask when I told her that I was going to the movies with my friend Marie.

While in college, I find from the list that I saw a number of C movies. Not that I would have given a rat’s ass what the Legion of Decency had to say by then. The C-rated includes Rosemary’s Baby, which Ellen saw on her first date with her future husband Mike. It also includes Last Tango in Paris, which I actually saw in Paris (and didn’t like all that much). And the movie Billy Jack, which should be condemned on aesthetic grounds alone!

I have no idea whether the Legion of Decency still exists. Need to know basis only, I guess…