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artistic merit'. Despite Kennedy's much-resented intervention on behalf
of his pet industry, which led to the burning of movie palaces in Boston
and Birmingham, Justine and Juliette became the most successful film of
all time, breaking the fifteen-year-old record of Birth of a Nation. It
swept the third Academy Awards ceremony, taking Oscar statuettes for the
production, direction, Arliss, Gaynor and Brooks (sharing Best Actress),
Interior Decoration and Sound Recording. When Great Britain and Germany
banned the import of Justine and Juliette and other 'immoral' pictures,
there were protests by intellectuals angered at the silencing of a voice
as great as von Stroheim's and by film fans infuriated by the loss of a
chance to see a fabled 'hot' movie. In both countries the film was shown
by special license; a print was later discovered in Hermann Gцring's
personal archive.
For all the attention garnered by the erect nipples of Mae Clarke in
Waterloo Bridge and the lush posterior of Miriam Hopkins in Dr Jekyll
and Mr Hyde, not to mention an oiled Myrna Loy horse-whipping a victim
to ecstasy in Mask of Fu Manchu and Charles Laughton kissing Jackie
Cooper on the mouth in Sign of the Cross, there were still limits. The
areas of the human anatomy observable in movies were as rigidly defined
and patrolled as the frontiers laid down by a Balkan peace treaty.
However, as history had shown, frontiers were always on the move and, in
time of emergency, liable to disappear entirely. 1932, the movies' most
licentious year, saw the President's federal aid programs in collapse, a
second Wall Street crash and the growth of William Dudley Pelley's
Silver Shirts. Unthinkably, movie attendances were falling. Many people
stayed at home and listened to talking boxes.
It was time for the last taboo to be tested, and in King Kong the
fig-leaves finally came off. In the jungles of Skull Island, Kong
clutched the heroine in his huge paw and, delicately as a smaller
character might peel a grape, divested her of her already-tattered
dress. Then, in the most often-reproduced image in '30s cinema, the
hairy fist opened, presenting on a palm-platter the totally naked girl,
legs slightly apart, eyes wide in surprised ecstasy.
Catriona Kaye, Libido in America: A Social History of Hollywood (1953)

Garbo Strips! The Painted Veil (1934).

Melvin Purvis stood at the back of the auditorium, by the main exit. DA
William Powell was prosecuting gambler Clark Gable. The girl who had slept
with both of them and probably the court ushers besides was pretty upset
about things. Movies were dumber than ever.
The G-Man concentrated on the audience, not the picture. Dillinger was in
the crowd somewhere. And with him Anna Sage, a Roumanian madame who'd
agreed to finger him in return for leniency in her deportation hearing.
Also Polly Hamilton, a waitress rumoured to be Johnny's girl of the week.
Sage was wearing a red dress. As the show let out, she would pass Purvis.
Then he was supposed to light a cigar to signal the agents staking out the
Biograph. In a precise move which would give that fairy J. Edgar a
hard-on, the G-Men would close on their man and take him down. If Johnny
wanted to shoot it out, Purvis would oblige. None of the men on the