Lascivious Ecstasy

The Federal prosecutor called it "unsuitable, immoral and lascivious, with adultery as its theme."

Defense counsel called it "as beautiful as anything ever filmed," insisted that "it teaches a lesson of life which is different from obscenity. . . ."

The picture was famed Extase, starring Austrian Hedy Kiesler, most popular cinema shown at the International Film Exposition in Venice year ago (TIME, Aug. 27). In ten reels containing only 300 words it tells the story of an unhappy bride's enthusiastic responses to a strange young man who meets her when she is enjoying a nude swim, seduces her in a nearby cabin. Extase, brought to the U. S. last November, was excluded under the Tariff Act by Secretary of the Treasury Morgenthau after Mrs. Morgenthau had joined Government officials in inspecting it at a private showing (TIME, Jan. 14). Last week's trial in Manhattan was to determine whether Federal authorities had a right to confiscate and destroy the film. Said U. S. District Judge John C. Knox, charging the jury: "The standards of the forests of Africa differ from those of certain European countries...." A jury of bored business men watched a screening, deliberated 35 minutes, decided that Extase was too dirty for U. S. cinemaddicts.

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