iends on high places in the movie industry. Even though his name was on the committee all he was responsible for was making the set of rules. To enforce these "laws" a reporter with catholic leanings (surprise, surprise), Joe Breen, was used. The way the censoring worked is that the studio would send the finished screenplay and reels of the movies to the committee. They in turn send a letter back to the studio telling all the "corrections" that needed to done. This would go back and forth until the committee was satisfied it would give the movie its stamp of approval. Without this stamp none of the distributors would touch it. There was a court of appeals but it was more of a token than any thing else.Some of the dialog that was cut from movies was ludicrous. In Going My Way they thought priests in a bad light. In Inherit the Wind the whole premise of the film could not be accepted originally because it supposedly slammed Christianity and "portrayed the minister as the villain in the movie (parish the thought no pun intended)." Sunset Boulevard was rejected because Norma's crime of shooting Gillis went unpunished. Apparently the fact that she was a lunatic wasn't enough. In Casablanca certain facts were left on the cutting room floor. Like Ilsa knew that her husband was alive and had the affair anyway. The whole movie is full of sexual innuendoes. Captain Renult, the viche officer, only gave visas to women who would have sex with him. All this was neatly taken out of the movie. Every one knows that no married woman sleeps with another man unless her husband is dead (sometimes not even then). And there would not be a man in the world who would take advantage of a woman in that way.And the directors had other concerns as well. Casablanca was not accepted in Sweden. It was one of the few countries that escaped the scourge of the Nazis. Sweden thought that if they showed a movie with so much Nazi bashing it would cause ...
