The Kinsey Era: The 1950s

Abstract

The 1950s in Hollywood cinema was a decade on the cusp prior to the pending sexual revolution, a staging post between the enforced celibacy and uneasy innocence of 1940s cinema and a new, more liberated decade. Films laboured under the limitations of the outmoded Hays Code before the dynamiting of censorship shibboleths in the 1960s. It was an era in which even musicals were rendered inoffensive by rewriting already innocuous material: a line in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma!, ‘A skinny lipped virgin with blood like water’, was obliged to become in the film version ‘a skinny lipped lady’ — although Otto Preminger bloody-mindedly included this unacceptable noun in The Moon is Blue (1953). But just as the American theatre was producing provocative, edgy work with adult themes, shortly to be adapted (and, inevitably, softened) for the cinema, the time was growing ever more ripe for some unruly rebels to take on the censors and once again produce a cinema for grown-up audiences rather than trying desperately to avoid giving offence to church groups. The Catholic Legion of Decency and the formidably right-wing Daughters of the American Revolution were still censorship groups to be reckoned with; however, Freud’s notion of the ‘return of the repressed’ became ever more relevant, as this was also the time of Alfred Kinsey’s rigorous examinations of modern sexual behaviour, documents that became stratified through every level of American society. The strictures and inhibitions of the era are intelligently recreated in Bill Condon’s unsensational biopic Kinsey (2004, with Liam Neeson as the sexologist).