The only country that banned ‘Saving Private Ryan’ from cinemas
Censorship is a funny thing, with different countries having different rules about what can and can’t be shown in cinemas. Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan might be an unrepentantly graphic movie, but it’s not a particularly controversial one, although the ratings board of one nation evidently disagreed.
The director wanted to make the most authentic, immersive, and realistic wartime epic ever committed to film, and he succeeded. The opening D-Day sequence drops the audience into the thick of the action in a jaw-dropping spectacle that’s as astounding as it is harrowing, and the pace never relents from there.
A film instantly and deservedly hailed as a masterpiece that won rave reviews from all corners, became the highest-grossing World War II picture in cinema history, and won five Academy Awards doesn’t carry the hallmarks of something that’s going to irk the censors so much that it gets banned from the big screen.
That said, Spielberg’s commitment to refusing to shy away from the horrors of conflict did cause some issues, both before and after Saving Private Ryan‘s release. It was initially denied a release in India, and the national Censor Board refused to approve it unless the filmmaker made the requested cuts, which he refused because he had no intention of compromising his creative vision.
Ultimately, political strings were pulled, with the Home Minister reportedly stepping in after seeing the movie for himself, after which it was allowed to be shown in its entirety. Even in America, one of television’s most controversial moments pumped the brakes on what had become a small-screen tradition.
Saving Private Ryan aired uncut annually on Veterans Day across stations owned and operated by ABC, but in the aftermath of the Justin Timberlake and Janet Jackson incident at the SuperBowl in 2004, 66 affiliates refused to show the film because they didn’t want to face the wrath of the regulators who’d started clamping down on adult content making the airwaves.
More than 50,000 complaints were lodged against Saving Private Ryan being screened on TV in November 2004, but a ban wasn’t in place. The same can’t be said for Malaysia, though, which put its foot down and wouldn’t back down when presenting Spielberg with the same ultimatum as India.
Less than a week before it was due to hit Malaysian cinemas in November 1998, the censors requested that Spielberg make nine edits to the theatrical cut to either tone down or remove the violence. Once again, he stood his ground and declined to compromise the film, with the stalemate denying local viewers the chance to see it in an official capacity, seeing as grainy bootlegs were already circulating by then.
It wasn’t his first rodeo, with Schindler’s List also falling foul of the country’s censors. However, whereas he obliged on that occasion and toned down the graphic content of his other World War II masterpiece, he wouldn’t budge for Saving Private Ryan.
