The “illicit” erotic movie banned in America and denounced by the Pope: “We cannot approve your production”
Nobody in the history of the moving image has ever made an erotic movie in the hopes of gaining approval from the Vatican City, but the Pope nonetheless felt compelled to speak out and publicly denounce a film that he hadn’t even seen.
Jaws must have been left all over the floor across the industry when the head of an organisation that preaches celibacy to its priests was left clutching his pearls at a motion picture that featured depictions of sex, scintillation, titillation, and even orgasm that had censors getting too hot under the collar for their own good.
The idea of the Vatican dispatching a representative to the Venice Film Festival to cast an eye over the latest feature-length offerings is strange enough, but a pontiff-approved journalist catching a screening of director Gustav Machatý’s steamy 1933 picture, Ecstasy, starring known bombshell Hedy Lamarr, is enough to make you wonder if he knew exactly what he’d signed up for.
Whether he got it or not remains unknown, but what did happen was Pope Pius XI using the Vatican’s in-house newspaper to denounce the movie. Once he’d done that, Italian distributors shit a brick, and none of them even contemplated acquiring the distribution rights. Pope-related or not, many other nations followed suit.
In America, it was condemned by the Catholic Legion of Decency and ran afoul of the Hays’ Code. Three years after it had been released in certain international markets, Ecstasy ended up on the losing side of a ten-month battle with the Stateside censorship board, where it was labelled as a “highly, even dangerously, indecent” work.
“I regret to have to advise you that we cannot approve your production, Ecstasy, that you submitted for our examination yesterday,” an internal memo read. “For the reason that is our considered unanimous judgment that the picture is definitely and specifically in violation of the Production Code,” findings based on its tale of “illicit love and frustrated sex,” all wrapped up in a movie “without sufficient compensating moral values.”
These days, Ecstasy is pretty tame. However, in the early 1930s, it was scandalous. It was among the first mainstream features to commit sex and the female orgasm to the screen, and even though it never showed anything more than the faces of the actors having a whale of a time in the throes of passion, the mere intimation was enough to rankle the Pope and the precursor to the MPAA.
It was eventually shown in America, but not exactly how Machatý intended. The filmmaker was smart enough to know it would ruffle more prudish feathers, so he shot alternate and less salacious scenes that could be spliced into the film to make it more palatable to anyone who’d gotten themselves all hot and bothered about the characters getting all hot and bothered.
In the grand scheme of things, the director had Ecstasy recorded in German, Czech, and French, so the Vatican and America weren’t on his list of priorities, making it more of a storm in an orgasmic teacup than a death blow for his literal passion project.
