Decoded

The sanctity of the institution of marriage and the home shall be upheld. No film shall infer that casual or promiscuous sex relationships are the accepted or common thing.

--Hollywood Production Code

Toward the end of a tatterdemalion 20th Century-Fox film called Harry Black and the Tiger (TIME, Oct. 13), now showing in all the nabes. Hero Stewart Granger beds down with the wife of a close friend, and it is with the greatest reluctance that she finally returns to her husband. Not so much as a snowflake of retribution drops on either of them; it was, the movie makes clear, a most enjoyable affair for both parties. Because Harry Black is just a potboiler, rather than an "art film," the liberties taken in the picture point up the fact long recognized in Hollywood but only recently acknowledged: the much-publicized Production Code, which once bulldogged producers and exhibitors, is being observed these days about as often as the whooping crane. In the past few months, Eric Johnston's Production Code Review Board has passed out its seal of approval to these films:

P: Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Tennessee Williams' savage dissection of a tormented Southern family, which has as its hero an implicit homosexual. (Article III, Section 6: "Sex perversion or any inference of it is forbidden.")

P: The Naked and the Dead, in which Stripper Lili St. Cyr gets about halfway through her act before the cops raid the joint. (Article V, Section 1: "Dances suggesting sexual actions are . . . obscene.")

P:Onionhead, an unfunny comedy about the Coast Guard, in which a wife seduces her husband's shipmates because he cannot satisfy her. (Article III, Section 3b: "Seduction is never acceptable subject matter for comedy.")

P: Perfect Furlough, in which part of the chatter has to do with sending "do-it-yourself" kits to the sex-starved personnel of an Army radar station in Alaska. (Article V, Section 2: "Obscenity in words . . . even when likely to be understood by only part of the audience, is forbidden.")

In many cases, e.g., The Key, Desire Under the Elms, defiance of the code has produced superior films that would have been flattened under rigid adherence to the rules. Says Luigi Luraschi, Paramount's agent in charge of code compliance: "Once upon a time the movies had a tendency to leer at sex. I think perhaps the first inkling was in the good foreign pictures shown here that handled sex rather forthrightly but still in good taste. American producers began to see the light."

Another light first brightened by the Europeans is the double version--one for export, one for domestic consumption. The code is still strong enough so that U.S. viewers of Cry Tough will see Linda Cristal with a blouse on instead of bare to the waist when she does her love scene with John Saxon. But Hollywood, faced with the stinging competition of TV and foreign films, is in the mood to shed any garments that seem to get in the way at the box office.

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