WorldNetDaily: The movie ratings game

And what is that game? Simply this: Joseph L. Farah--who once covered Hollywood before he founded an Internet news service--states that finally, after twenty years of men like Ted Baehr and Michael Medved making the case, Hollywood now acknowledges the obvious. And the obvious is that movies rated G or PG are bigger box-office draws than are movies rated PG-13, R, or NC-17 (formerly X). The problem: American Movie Classics and Turner Classic Movies are apparently issuing "mature-audience" ratings to movies that couldn't possibly be for mature audiences only--because they were made back in Hays Code days!

Farah makes one blanket statement with which I must raise at least one exception. He says that any movie made prior to 1968 is safe to take your kids to view, while anything made later, you should be careful about. Well, I must offer this exception: Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, which, in its re-release after the MPAA Ratings system went into effect, drew the rating of M. A bit of background: the original MPAA Ratings were three in number: G (Suggested for General Audiences), GP (Parental Guidance Suggested), and M (Suggested for Mature Audiences). A few years later (during which Psycho got its M rating), the MPAA broke out the M category into two others, labeled R (Restricted, in that no one under 17 should be admitted without a responsible adult) and X (absolutely no one under 17 should be admitted at all). In recent years, the MPAA had to replace X with NC-17, reverse the letters in GP to PG, and add another intermediate rating--PG-13--to describe those movies that didn't rise to the level of a full-blown restriction but which were still a little too intense for twelve-year-olds.

Farah's point is, in general, valid: 1968 was the year in which the Hays Office disbanded and the MPAA was on its own. Frankly, how Alfred Hitchcock got away with making a movie like Psycho when he did is beyond me. Nudity, a crime against the law committed by a sympathetic character, the most disgusting murder that anyone had yet seen (and depicted in graphic and bloody detail), sexual themes that would make Ruth Westheimer blush--Psycho has them all. But Psycho was the exception that presaged all the blood and gore we see in movies post-1968. (In fact, shortly after that, Alfred Hitcock made his movie titled Frenzy, about a serial murderer of women and a man wrongfully accused of those murders, which two men happened to be roommates.)

Psycho aside, Farah suspects that Hollywood wants to desensitize people to the R rating by showing that it often applies to perfectly acceptable fare. This column, then, serves as an attempt to disclaim that, and to advise people that applying "ratings" to movies made in Hays Office days is totally inappropriate. (The pre-code movies are another matter--while none are as bad as Psycho, many are at least as bad as, say, Fatal Attraction or The War of the Roses.) The one best remedy to the situation might be one thing that Farah did not mention: reinstatement of the Hays Office. The problem is that many churches have gone so far as to denounce the movies completely, and too many in Hollywood have grown enamored of their "artistic freedom" to indulge their goriest and/or most salacious fantasies in their work. Hence, a rapprochement might not be possible.