![]() The British Board of Film Censors’ philosophy was that children under sixteen years of age were impressionable and emotionally fragile. In fact, the eye poke takes place off screen, and the wound is never seen. It invites the audience to imagine the imminent damage to the eyeball. I wondered “why was this shot deleted?” Was the monster’s deformity too horrific at such proximity? It is the closest shot yet of the Cyclops’ single eye, placed to highlight the target of the blazing firebrand that Kerwin Matthews launches in the next shot. Remove close shot of Cyclops’ face as it peers into cave before being blinded. RHH complained in his book that the British Censor had eliminated a wry moment that humanized the Cyclops. ![]() Remove close shots of Cyclops gloating over man on spit.Īccording to Ray Harryhausen, the Cyclops is licking his lips at the prospect of the meal ahead. Remove the four close-ups of snake-tailed woman being strangled by her own tail. ![]() Let’s start with the origin of my interest The 7th Voyage of Sinbad as an example of the BBFC’s attitude to violence and horror in the 1950’s. The obvious cuts prompted in me a lifelong fascination with the whys and wherefores of movie censorship as an instrument of social control from 1899 to 1968 when proscriptive cuts and bans were replaced in the UK & USA with classification by age. I was 15 when I first encountered this phenomenon during a 1961 splice-ridden re-issue of Ray Harryhausen’s The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, a groundbreaking fantasy adventure that received a hard time from the British Board of Film Censors. What just happened? Discerning UK audiences of action, Sci-Fi and horror knew that something had been CENSORED! The splice would cause the frame to jump in the projector for a fraction of a second, accompanied by a discordant bump in the soundtrack you see printed beside the sprocket holes, and worse, a disconnect in the flow of the scene. ![]() Unless, of course, a CUT was made in the print, where a section had been extracted, then the two ends cemented together. What cinema audiences saw was a continuous positive print made from the spliced negative, that absorbed the splices and so ran smoothly through the projector. In the change of images in the left-hand film strip, you can see a slight overlap of cement along the frame line, incurred when the splicer pressed down to glue the outgoing and incoming frames of negative together. The exposed film was processed, work-printed, edited, and the negative matched to the final cut. Forgive me if I get into the Cinema weeds here. Once Upon A Time in Movies… they were shot on 35MM celluloid. (Disclaimer, this post contains images of cinematic nudity and violence within historical context.) To learn more about how and for what purposes Amazon uses personal information (such as Amazon Store order history), please visit our Privacy Notice.Movie Censorship during my formative years by Brian Trenchard-Smith You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie Preferences, as described in the Cookie Notice. Click ‘Customise Cookies’ to decline these cookies, make more detailed choices, or learn more. Third parties use cookies for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalised ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. This includes using first- and third-party cookies, which store or access standard device information such as a unique identifier. If you agree, we’ll also use cookies to complement your shopping experience across the Amazon stores as described in our Cookie Notice. We also use these cookies to understand how customers use our services (for example, by measuring site visits) so we can make improvements. We use cookies and similar tools that are necessary to enable you to make purchases, to enhance your shopping experiences and to provide our services, as detailed in our Cookie Notice.
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