isotheos

Are English films of the nineteen-sixties and nineteen-seventies vintages being subjected to selective bowdlerization, to conform to present-day sensibilities? This practice began here in America quite some time ago, but it appears to have passed largely unnoticed.
I first observed it in video-tape releases of The Saint Valentine's Day Massacre (1967), where entire portions of Walter Winchell's narration were expunged, probably because they established the racial origin of the villains all too clearly. The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight (1971) has also been sanitized, so that the gangsters now say things like 'this freakin guy', in place of the original, realistic phraseology. A recent release of Woody Allen's redubbed Japanese spy film, What's Up, Tiger Lily? (1966) has been completely re-redubbed to eliminate all sorts of inoffensive dialogue.
I am curious to learn if this is happening to films in England, because I know 'they' have started on sixties novels: a paperback edition of Len Deighton's Funeral in Berlin, which I recently purchased in London, has had the phrase 'Fuck off' converted to '---- off'. This in an age when the word is heard all too commonly in the mouths of children, ancients, and everything in between. Has anyone noticed this in any new releases of films from the period in question?

Steve Crook

I think a lot of it depends on who's doing the broadcast or the tape/DVD release.

I have noticed that Paramount Comedy bleeps (actually just blanks with a period of silence) all naughty words, even the only slightly naughty ones. It's ______ annoying :)

Many American TV shows seem to require that nobody ever says "damn". You can sense the mental gymnastics as they force themselves to sar "darn" instead.

But I've never seen any Bowdlerisation on any video tapes or DVDs I've bought. As I said at the start, I expect that depends on who has released them as it would almost certainly be done just for that release.

Steve

Steve Crook

PaPAS

smudge

Paramount Comedy drives you up the wall ! :mad:

Made me so angry I went out and BOUGHT episodes of MINDER on DVD just so I could hear the bloody 'Bloody'-s !

Worst of all is the ad-hoc cutting of post-watershed films on the box.....

(They wonder why TV viewing figures have dropped !)

SMUDGE

Welcome to my house. Enter freely, and of your own will...

isotheos

Thank you, gentlemen. I am just curious if (as I suspect) it is a certain epoch that is being targeted for this sanitizing. For example, MTV (of all people) ran the Monty Python Flying Circus episodes a few years ago, and they prefaced each one with 'Hey, dude, if you are like shocked easily, y' know, don't like watch these shows, OK?' This from an outfit that specializes in what the immortal Blackadder would refer to as 'utter crap'.

dylan

Where copies of British films are obtained from the States some are found to have been overdubbed to remove *obscenities* or non-PC remarks.

Victims include:

The Long Good Friday: Hoskins' and the other villians' F-U's removed.

The Long and the Short and the Tall:Frequent use of *b*****d* removed although the Cockney rhyming slang *berk* was overlooked by the American censors.

The Dam Busters: The *n* word overdubbed with *Trigger*.

Don't Look Now: Sutherland/Christie sex scene removed.

The UK TV stations now tend to show the original theatrical versions.

isotheos

All of the films you name are excellent examples - I have seen sanitized versions of all of them. Dam Busters they simply stopped running here about twenty years ago. Same thing with other great films that didn't necessarily have 'the wrong sort' of language, but perhaps more importantly, were perceived as delivering 'the wrong sort' of message. Thus, Guns at Batasi and Zulu haven't been seen on broadcast televison here in many, many years, and even the cable stations are reluctant to play them. Ditto The Wild Geese

David Brent

Doesn't it seem strange that old movies can be 'sanitised'like that - political correctness gone mad.
Yet people of any age can go out and get video games that promote mass murder,torture,theft & destruction - no problem!

Modern movies can show blood,guts,rape,slaughter without much censorship yet a sight of Janet Jackson's left nipple on American television can cause panic,condemnation & vitriolic outpourings from every politically correct do-gooder in the country.

Strange also that the 'N'word used in Dam Busters as a true reference to a dog's name & a word that everyone feels is taboo & derogatory to black people (am i allowed to say that!) is in fact frequently used by Afro American's themselves in rap music,film & speach in reference to their own people.

It seems to be one sided madness that logically has no rhyme or reason behind it.Who are the faceless minority that deem what is & what is not acceptable to the majority?

The only thing that can be said about common sense is that it's not so common.

Dave.

Ascoyne D'Ascoyne

I was wondering about that sort of thing only the other day Dave. At just what point in time was it decreed, for instance, that hospital patients were to be referred to as "clients", who made the decree, and why change things in the first place?

Pam1927

In the September NFT brochure, Kevin Brownlow points out that The Directors' Guild in California have expunged the name of D.W.Griffith from their award because 'The Birth of a Nation' is a racist film. So, despite all his other work and achievements, the politically correct thought-police are trying to delete from history the man who is known as the Father of Film. frown

It's nice to be nice...

Gibbie

Excellent example Pam.

While many think, via the press and others, that this is a right wing nation - the aforementioned is what really holds sway here.

dylan

I believe scenes showing apparent cruelty to animals have also been censored. Gone is the mule shooting in PATTON which looked very real to me in the cinema. I suspect that horses falling when they hit the trip wire in John Ford's cavalry films have been snipped too.

Pam1927

Hey Gibbie, just to say that I've just found a DVD of Griffith's 'Way Down East' (1920) with Lillian Gish... so knickers to the Directors' Guild in California... I'm still going to be watching the man's stuff, even if those twits aren't!!!

It's nice to be nice...

Jim

Whoa! Dave. Wasn't it the right nipple????
blush

Good morning boys.

Jim

Dave, it's NOT PC gone mad!

It was ALWAYS mad!!!!

Good morning boys.

Gibbie

The term "political correctness" is Marxist in origin, the politics of which, goes back to the Hungarian Communist theorist Georg Lukacs through the professor (err, political activist) Herbert Marcuse. Marcuse defines "liberating tolerance" as intolerance for anything coming from the Right and tolerance for anything coming from the Left.

The political purpose is to replace Western Civilization mores, particularly the Christian religion, with politically activist mores. And, this is the politics behind this term. The contemporary usage of the term itself developed among leftist activists by the 1980s. The first time I heard this term was on an independent Left wing radio news program in Seattle, circa 1988, where the term was used frequently to refer to social or political acts and public speech.

As this term was used during politically aggressive acts, particularly at universities in the US, it was noted by those who were persecuted by this politic. It is now mainstreamed and is used in many different ways. The reaction to the Jackson incident would not be a PC incident (the sale of mindless violence is another issue - Yes, it is mad!). In its original etymology, the term is used by academics and social activists (the Worker's Party variety) and the main beneficiaries of this politic (in the US) are generally African-American racially political groups, feminists and homosexuals.

This is briefly the origins and political usage.