Censor's Censor

Italy's prizewinning The Bicycle Thief (TIME, Dec. 12), one of the screen's most widely acclaimed films, has been called honest, moving and classic. It remained for sharp-eyed Hollywood Censor Joseph Breen, who administers the industry's production code, to call it indecent and unacceptable for the bulk of U.S. moviegoers. Last week the picture's sponsors were fighting Breen's edict that the movie must be cut before it can go from the art theaters into most U.S. cinemansions.

Breen demanded two cuts: 1) the shot of the little boy "about to make his toilet against the wall" and 2) all the interior shots of a bordello into which the hero chases the thief.

In Milan, Director Vittorio De Sica was "astounded." To Joseph Burstyn, the film's U.S. distributor, he cabled: "Picture circulates successfully whole world including England without ever meeting similar demands. As to girls' house scene, critics everywhere have stressed the delicate way same is conducted ... As to [the boy's] wall scene, once more its spirit and execution have been judged everywhere simply candid. May I recall that noble religious town of Brussels, Belgium, emblem is boy in said circumstances whose statue stands in one of its squares." Taking up the argument, Burstyn charged "a subtle form of sabotage." He pointed out that the cuts demanded by Breen would entail gouging hundreds of more feet out of the picture to have its continuity make sense.

By still another yardstick, the Breen order seemed somewhat strange. As an outraged American Civil Liberties Union quickly noted, the production code office's parent body, the Motion Picture Association of America, was waging a legal fight against movie censorship by states and cities. Yet The Bicycle Thief already had passed muster with the official censors of New York, Pennsylvania and Ohio.* Was the M.P.A.A. trying to be more censorious than the very censorship boards it was opposing? Distributor Burstyn planned an appeal to the M.P.A.A.'s directors and beyond them to the U.S. public.

*Massachusetts censors fretted about the same scenes that offended Breen but ordered only a few seconds snipped from each -- and only for Sunday showings. On weekdays in Boston, the original version is shown.

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