This entertaining and insightful book is the first devoted exclusively to the films that have earned a special place in motion picture history by pushing the “cinematic envelope” with their treatment of provocative subjects and themes. Obscene, Indecent, Immoral & Offensive: 100+ Years of Controversial Cinema chronicles the history of Hollywood censorship and the films that were banned, censored, and condemned by the Production Code Administration and the Legion of Decency. Stephen Tropiano offers readers insightful and accessible analysis of films that were branded “controversial” at the time of their release due to explicit language, nudity, graphic sex, violence, and their treatment of “adult” subject matter and themes. The films profiled include The Birth of a Nation, Anatomy of a Murder, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Baby Doll, Blackboard Jungle, Bonnie and Clyde, The Wild Bunch, A Clockwork Orange, Natural Born Killers, Caligula, Rosemary's Baby, Life of Brian, The Last Temptation of Christ, and The Passion of the Christ.

Censorship has been an ongoing issue from the early days of filmmaking. One hundred years of film censorship, encompassing the entire 20th century, are chronicled in this work. The freewheeling nature of films in the early decades was profoundly affected by Prohibition, the Depression and the formation of the Legion of Decency--culminating in a new age of restrictiveness in the movies. Such powerful arbiters of public taste as Will H. Hays of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America and Joseph Breen of the Production Code Association fomented an era whereby films with contentious material were severely censored or even condemned. This held sway until rebellious filmmakers like Otto Preminger challenged the system in the 1950s, eventually resulting in the abandonment of the old regime in favor of the contemporary "G" through "NC-17" ratings system.

Focusing on key texts, leading scholars explore how Hollywood has given an enduring life to the classics of Broadway theater.

Throughout his career, Alfred Hitchcock had to contend with a wide variety of censors attuned to the slightest suggestion of sexual innuendo, undue violence, toilet humor, religious disrespect, and all forms of indecency, real or imagined. From 1934 to 1968, the Motion Picture Production Code Office controlled the content and final cut on all films made and distributed in the United States. During their review of Hitchcock's films, the censors demanded an average of 22.5 changes, ranging from the mundane to the mind-boggling, on each of his American films. In his award-winning Hitchcock and the Censors, author John Billheimer traces the forces that led to the Production Code and describes Hitchcock's interactions with code officials on a film-by-film basis as he fought to protect his creations, bargaining with code reviewers and sidestepping censorship to produce a lifetime of memorable films. Despite the often-arbitrary decisions of the code board, Hitchcock still managed to push the boundaries of sex and violence permitted in films by charming—and occasionally tricking—the censors, and by swapping off bits of dialogue, plot points, and individual shots (some of which had been deliberately inserted as trading chips) to protect cherished scenes and images. By examining Hitchcock's priorities in dealing with the censors, this work highlights the director's theories of suspense as well as his magician-like touch when negotiating with code officials.

Thoroughly researched and fully APA referenced chronological history of film censorship and classification in Australia. Case by case histories of banned films punctuate a detailed account of the evolution of the Australian Film Classification system and the concurrent development of the Australian adult XXX industry, culminating in the establishment of the Australian Sex Party. Former SAR Research Fellow at Australia’s National Film & Sound Archive Robert Cettl gained exclusive access to both the national collection and the highly restricted Australian adult industry archive, the Eros Collection, at the Flinders University of South Australia Library to piece together the complete history of film censorship in Australia. Progressing through individual banned and censored films – including works by such internationally renowned directors as Hitchcock, Whale, Bunuel, Forman, Godard, Oshima, Pasolini, Hopper, Lyne, Breillat, Noe, Brass, Bertolucci, Fellini, Ford, Clark, Despentes, Winterbottom, Von Trier – Cettl maps out the specification of “offensive” material in parallel to the emergence of Australia’s adult XXX industry and the Christian morals-driven pressure groups that advocate tighter censorship restrictions. In a country that has the dubious honor of being the most censorial of Western democracies, film censorship is based on the principle of “offense to a reasonable adult”, an undefined refrain that religious minorities have used to manipulate censorship decisions in their favor. The history of these groups and the political support for their right-wing Christian agenda – driven by what Australians term “Wowserism” – makes Australian film censorship unique in its delineation of :the “aesthetics of offense” as grounds for the suppression of free dissemination, to the point of seeking mandatory ISP Internet filtering and Internet blacklisting of all material classified RC (or “refused classification”), much of which is available for dissemination throughout Europe and the USA, in violation of UN Human Rights Article 19. In this comprehensive study of the socio-political ideology surrounding the censorship of primarily sexually explicit material (“pornography”), Cettl delineates the aesthetic construction of “offense” as a transgressive genre and charts the morality-driven religiosity behind their construction as Other to a civilized society, questioning whether the categorization of such material as other makes of it legitimate discourse. With extensive case histories, never-before-published government censorship reports, press clippings and secret internal memos between some of Australia’s most powerful and influential politicians, Offensive to a Reasonable Adult exposes the quagmire of Australian censorship law and the morals-cabal of “wowsers” that dominate the censorship agenda in the so-called “Clever Country”.