The New York court case that permanently altered the course of cinema history
For a country that holds the principle of free speech at its very core, the United States has a history of going against it if it happens to come in contrast with the vein of Christianity that runs through it from coast to coast, and it was that argument that prompted a court ruling in the 1950s that changed the face of cinema censorship for good.
The furore came about due to the release and distribution of an Italian film called The Miracle, directed by Roberto Rossellini, which told the story of a simple peasant woman who believes a stranger she meets to be St Joseph, known in religion as the foster father of Jesus, the husband of the Virgin Mary. She then believes her pregnancy must also be a miracle, and that her baby must be the second coming. The film centres on the ideas of religious delusion and suffering.
The Catholic church in America, and in New York, particularly where it was being shown in December 1950 as part of an art film programme, was outraged by the movie. Despite only initially being screened at the Paris Theatre in Manhattan, word spread that the film supposedly mocked religious beliefs, and soon a furore was building.
The Catholic Archbishop of New York, Francis Cardinal Spellman, publicly denounced it as blasphemous and sacrilegious, urging Catholics to boycott the film, while groups such as the Catholic War Veterans picketed the theatre with placards claiming it insulted the church and women, stating ‘Don’t Enter the Cesspool’.
Soon, debate raged in the US over whether or not religious groups should be able to influence government censorship of films, in addition to whether films should be subject to the same censorship as books and newspapers.
That debate intensified when the New York Board of Regents, a body responsible for the supervision of educational activities in the state, rescinded the license for showing the movie, a decision which was challenged by the film’s distributor, Joseph Burstyn. Despite the New York Court of Appeals upholding the decision, it went all the way to the US Supreme Court, who eventually reversed the ruling.
The court said that movies were a “significant medium for the communication of ideas” and therefore were protected by the First Amendment, the right to free speech. It marked the first judgment by the Supreme Court on motion pictures since 1915. Although it meant much less censorship for films in the decades to follow, some religious states still found an obscenity loophole to continue to get films banned into the 1960s.
There may well have been other factors at play, however. Rossellini, the film’s director, had made himself something of a controversial figure in the US by wooing and then later marrying the actress Ingrid Bergman, who was born in Sweden but seen as an American icon by audiences. Cardinal Spellman himself would comment: “The picture should very properly be entitled, ‘Woman Further Defamed’, by Roberto Rossellini”.
The Miracle was originally made in 1948 as part of an anthology titled L’Amore, and starred Anna Magnani and the future directing legend Federico Fellini. It was not subject to any censorship on release in Italy and, when included as part of a collection called The Ways of Love, won the New York Critics Circle award for ‘Best Foreign Language Film’.
