The Cardinal & Caroline

Blonde Martine Carol, ex-wife of U.S. Actor Stephen Crane and France's No. 1 pin-up girl, has no hesitation about climbing in & out of her filmy clothes for the greater glory of Technicolor. Playing the skittish wife of a Napoleonic general occupying a northern Italian town in Un Caprice de Caroline Cherie, busty Martine bounces about in a low-cut bodice, splashes nudely in a shell-shaped bathtub, flits from moonlit gardens to candlelit bedrooms in a minimum of ninon.

Among Martine's previewers was a church group who reported to Pierre Cardinal Gerlier, archbishop of Lyon. Wrote the cardinal in his religious weekly: "The lowly and licentious film entitled Un Caprice de Caroline Cherie . . . is a scandalous display of vice." On church doors throughout France Caroline Cherie got a five rating on the Index of forbidden films: to be seen neither by adults nor children. Said Martine: "I'm flabbergasted! And what do they think about Mary Magdalene?" Author Cecil Saint-Laurent accused the church of yielding to Anglo-Saxon standards of prudery. But the film was passed by the French censorship, and with Cardinal Gerlier's unintentioned advertisement, Frenchmen flocked to see Caroline Cherie. Paris receipts in the first three weeks were $140,000. The film was rushed to the provinces.

At Niort (pop. 29,068) in southwestern France, Caroline Cherie ran into the Abbe Francis Ferrier. Rallying parents' associations, parochial-school pupils, and politicians, the abbe demanded that Mayor Felix Lelant prevent the film from being shown. The mayor thought hard, decided that he might prohibit the film on the grounds that it was a "provocation to riot," and got the municipal council so to rule. That night pro-Carolinians chalked the walls of Niort with the slogan: "Liberate Caroline." The anti-Carolinians retaliated with: "Caroline go Home."

Worried about the establishment of a new kind of censorship, based on the mayor's interpretation of the riot act, the film studio threatened the mayor with a suit. He had not protested a few weeks earlier when a bare-breasted film called The Is land of Nude Women had been shown in Niort; why did he protest against Caroline? The mayor admitted that he hadn't seen Caroline Cherie himself. He would talk it over with the municipal council. Weighing the risk of civil suit against church displeasure, the council last week tried to satisfy both groups. They decided to let Caroline Cherie be shown, but the exhibitors should "wait a few months until tempers are calmed."

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