De Mille and the Madonna

In 1915, the Supreme Court held that movies were "spectacles . . . capable of evil," that States might censor them at will. Not only States but pressure groups of all kinds have censored movies ever since. No group has pressed harder than the Roman Catholic Church. Its U. S. hierarchy sponsors the potent Catholic Legion of Decency "as a permanent protest against everything in the moving pictures which is subversive of morality."

Last week the Catholic Sodality of Our Lady said its say on a movie that has not yet been made. The editors of The Queen's Work, Sodality magazine, sent an open letter to veteran Director Cecil Blount De Mille, who is planning a cinema on the Virgin Mary, titled The Queen of Queens. Director De Mille is an old hand at lavish religious spectacles (The King of Kings, Ten Commandments, The Sign of the Cross). But the Sodalists were disturbed to hear that he had bought the film rights to Family Portrait, a last-season Broadway play which Catholics objected to because it showed Mary as the mother of other children.

Wrote the Sodalists: "In this day, when purity is taking such a battering and virginity is treated with contempt, a play that presented Mary, not as a virgin, but as the mother of a large family was more than distasteful to us. ... You are going to be surprised and probably shocked to find how many followers of Jesus Christ bitterly dislike, if they do not actively hate, the mother of the Savior. . . . May we hope that because of your picture there wilt be reawakened in the hearts of this modern age, which conspires against the entrance of children into the world, a sense of the beauty of the Madonna? . . .

Yours is a heavy responsibility." To this letter Director De Mille, whose dictum is that no religious film has ever flopped, made soothing reply. Having promised to use no part of Family Portrait in his picture, he added: "We are approaching the hallowed story . . . with a deep sense of responsibility and with the same spiritual and artistic thrill that impelled the making of The King of Kings."

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