Adam and Eva :Google Doodle

December 2nd, 2017 at 10:57:27 AM permalink
Pacomartin
Member since: Oct 24, 2012
Threads: 1068
Posts: 12569

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3R_sVeezhpY
I wonder how many 16 year olds could even pay attention long enough to watch this movie let alone be scandalized.

Ecstasy (film) 20 January 1933 (Czechoslovakia) 24 December 1940 (USA)
Ecstasy was highly controversial in its time because of scenes in which Lamarr swims in the nude and runs through the countryside naked. It is also perhaps the first non-pornographic movie to portray sexual intercourse and female orgasm, although never showing more than the actors' faces. The film was celebrated as the first motion picture to include a nude scene, rather than the first to show sexual intercourse, for which it has a better claim.

In the United States, the Catholic Legion of Decency found the film morally objectionable. It condemned the film in 1933, making Ecstasy one of the first foreign films condemned by the Legion. Beginning in 1936, the US distributor of Ecstasy lobbied the Hays office for ten months to get the film the Hays Code seal of approval which would allow it a wide American release. Joseph Breen called the picture "highly—even dangerously—indecent" . Ecstasy was not released in the United States until 24 December 1940. It went on to limited run in America without the Hays seal, where it played in mostly independent art houses. Some state censor boards such as New York approved the film but most others either only allowed it with restrictions, demanded substantial cuts, or in the case of Pennsylvania, banned it altogether. Lamarr's first husband, the wealthy arms dealer Friedrich Mandl, reportedly spent $280,000 ($5.18 million in 2016 dollars) in an unsuccessful attempt to suppress the film by purchasing every existing print.