CHILDREN, CINEMA AND CENSORSHIP Turner Classic Movies British Film Guides General Editor: Jeffrey Richards Brighton Rock Dracula The 39 Steps Steve Chibnall Peter Hutchings Mark Glancy A Hard Day’s Night Get Carter The Dam Busters Stephen Glynn Steve Chibnall John Ramsden My Beautiful Charge of the Light A Night to Remember Launderette Brigade Jeffrey Richards Christine Geraghty Mark Connelly The Private Life of Whiskey Galore! & The Henry VIII Maggie Greg Walker Colin McArthur Cinema and Society Series General Editor: Jeffrey Richards ‘Banned in the USA’: British Films in the United States and Their Censorship, 1933–1960 Anthony Slide Best of British: Cinema and Society from 1930 to the Present Anthony Aldgate & Jeffrey Richards Brigadoon, Braveheart and the Scots: Distortions of Scotland in Hollywood Cinema Colin McArthur British Cinema and the Cold War Tony Shaw The British at War: Cinema, State and Propaganda, 1939–1945 James Chapman Christmas at the Movies: Images of Christmas in American, British and European Cinema Edited by Mark Connelly The Crowded Prairie: American National Identity in the Hollywood Western Michael Coyne Distorted Images: British National Identity and Film in the 1920s Kenton Bamford Epic Encounters: The Films of David Lean Michael Coyne An Everyday Magic: Cinema Culture and Cultural Memory Annette Kuhn Matinees, Clubs and Children’s Cinema Culture i Film and Community in Britain and France: From La Règle du Jeu to Room at the Top Margaret Butler Film Propaganda: Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany Richard Taylor Hollywood Genres and Post-War America: Masculinity, Family and Nation in Popular Movies and Film Noir Mike Chopra-Gant Hollywood’s History Films David Eldridge Licence to Thrill: A Cultural History of the James Bond Films James Chapman From Moscow to Madrid: Postmodern Cities, European Cinema Ewa Mazierska & Laura Rascaroli Past and Present: National Identity and the British Historical Film James Chapman Powell and Pressburger: A Cinema of Magic Spaces Andrew Moor Propaganda and the German Cinema, 1933–1945 David Welch Somewhere in England: British Cinema and Exile Kevin Gough-Yates Spaghetti Westerns: Cowboys and Europeans from Karl May to Sergio Leone Christopher Frayling Spectacular Narratives: Hollywood in the Age of the Blockbuster Geoff King Typical Men: The Representation of Masculinity in the Popular British Cinema Andrew Spicer The Unknown 1930s: An Alternative History of the British Cinema, 1929–1939 Edited by Jeffrey Richards CHILDREN, CINEMA AND CENSORSHIP From Dracula to the Dead End Kids Sarah J. Smith 2619 M&M Child,Cinema,Censorshi 19/5/05 12:58 pm Page vi Published in 2005 by I.B. Tauris & Co Ltd 6 Salem Road, London W24BU 175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010 www.ibtauris.com In the United States and Canada distributed by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010 Copyright © Sarah J. Smith 2005 The right of Sarah J. Smith to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyrights, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. ISBN 1 85043 812 9 (hardback) EAN 978 1 85043 812 0 (hardback) ISBN 1 85043 813 7 (paperback) EAN 978 1 85043 813 7 (paperback) A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library A full CIP record for this book is available from the Library of Congress Library of Congress catalog card: available Project management by M&M Publishing Services Typeset by FiSH Books, London Printed and bound in Great Britain by MPG Books Ltd, Bodmin For my Mum, Jill Stidwell (1932–2004) Contents Tables and Figures x Illustrations x Abbreviations xi General Editor’s Introduction xiii Acknowledgements xv 1. The Doom of a Generation? 1 2. How Bridget Served the Salad Undressed: The Regulation of Cinema 1895–1929 18 3. It Ain’t No Sin: The Regulation of Cinema 1929–1939 45 4. Moral Panic or Flapdoodle? 77 5. Children as Censors 105 6. Matinees, Clubs and Children’s Cinema Culture 141 7. Children and Cinema: Control and Resistance 174 Appendix 1 T.P. O’Connor’s 43 Rules of the BBFC 179 Appendix 2 BBFC Codified Grounds for Censorship, 1926 181 Appendix 3 List of ‘Don’ts and Be Carefuls’, adopted by California Association for guidance of producers, 8 June 1927 184 Appendix 4 Films classified as ‘Horrific’ or certified ‘H’ by the BBFC, 1933–40 186 Appendix 5 Members of the Edinburgh Cinema Enquiry Committee 188 Notes and References 193 Bibliography 213 Index 230 Tables and Figures Table 2.1 Theatre Fires of the Nineteenth Century 21 Table 3.1 Responses to Home Office Questionnaire on Model Conditions, 1931 64 Figure 4.1 Relative Sample Sizes of British Cinema Enquiries 1930–33 82 Illustrations 1. ‘A’ or ‘U’? Punch cartoon. 62 2. Full house at a children’s matinee. 118 3. ‘The hero is in danger’: children absorbed by a matinee film. 132 4. Children outside the Glen Cinema, Paisley. 160 5. Sisters Jessie and Edith Anderson escaped from the Glen on the day of the disaster. 163 6. Hugh Blew who died in the Glen disaster. 163 7. An orderly queue awaits entry to the Playhouse Cinema, Inverness. 165 8. Members of Sidcup Mickey Mouse Club after a performance. 169 9. Media attention for young Ramsgate cinema entrepreneur Eddie Oliver. 171 10. A Saturday matinee queue in Plaistow, east London, 1937. 178 Abbreviations BBFC British Board of Film Censors BCEC Birmingham Cinema Enquiry Committee BFI British Film Institute BVC Birkenhead Vigilance Committee CEA Cinematograph Exhibitors’ Association CEF Children’s Educational Films CFD Children’s Film Department ECEC Edinburgh Cinema Enquiry Committee FCCC Film Censorship Consultative Committee GBI Gaumont British Instructional LCC London County Council MPPDA Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America PCA Production Code Administration (‘The Hays Office’) PFS Payne Fund Studies PRO Public Record Office x Children, Cinema and Censorship General Editor’s Introduction hildren were amongst the most regular and habitual filmgoers in Cthe heyday of the cinema. It was generally agreed that their experience of film-watching was more intense than that of adults, owing to the visual impact of the medium and their emotional involvement with the stories. The cinema’s influence on children greatly preoccupied society’s cultural and educational elites. Few of the concerned groups would have dissented from the view expressed by Dr John Mackie, who edited the report of the Edinburgh Cinema Enquiry in 1933: ‘The public...should realise the importance that the cinema has assumed in the lives of the children. Seven children out of every ten go to the pictures at least once a week. Most children spend longer at the cinema than they do at many school subjects. Here is an influence of first importance.’ Commentators on the cinema have frequently referred to adults’ ‘moral panic’ about the influence of films on children. But in what is the most thorough, thoughtful and illuminating study yet of children’s cinema-going experience in inter-war Britain, Sarah Smith qualifies and nuances that view. She concludes that there was not a ‘moral panic’ so much as a thoroughgoing and wide-ranging debate on the subject. She argues convincingly for the interaction of the regulation of children’s viewing from above and below; she traces the development of official film censorship and its application to children; she analyses the debates and conclusions of the four major local cinema enquiries 2619 M&M Child,Cinema,Censorshi 19/5/05 12:58 pm Page xiv xiv Children, Cinema and Censorship in the 1930s (London, Birmingham, Edinburgh and Birkenhead); and she assesses the effectiveness or otherwise of particular regulatory restraints. There was, for example, the A certificate, which only permitted children to enter cinemas accompanied by an adult. Sarah Smith finds that some cinemas blatantly ignored the requirement and that children themselves asked adult strangers to take them in. I myself can recall that in the 1950s, when I was still a teenager, a cinema manager asked me to take a group of unaccompanied children into an A film. Then there was parental authority and self-regulation by the children – both of which had variable results. Finally, drawing extensively on oral evidence, she vividly recreates the children’s interaction with the films – their involvement in Saturday matinees and cinema clubs, their behaviour in the auditorium, their imitation of the dress, speech and behaviour observed in the film. The whole study adds up to a major and welcome contribution to our understanding of the role of cinema in the lives of 1930s children. Jeffrey Richards Acknowledgements uch of the research for this book has drawn on archived Minterviews and correspondence with those who experienced cinema first hand in the 1930s. I have benefited enormously from listening to taped interviews and reading the files of over 300 such individuals, virtually none of whom I have met. I am therefore very grateful for their invaluable contribution to this work. My first thanks go to them and to those who conducted the original research projects. I would like to thank those who facilitated my archive research, including Barbara Hall and the staff of the Margaret Herrick Library, Beverly Hills; Janet McBain, Curator of the Scottish Film Archive; Nick White in Special Collections at the British Film Institute; Andrew Martin, for access to the Going to the Pictures project in the Scottish Life Archive of the National Museums of Scotland; and particularly Annette Kuhn, not only for offering generous early access to the archives of the Cinema Culture in 1930s Britain project, but also for her interest and support for this work over the years.