Controversy
The film's title and subject matter were the subject of controversy in some locations. Playing off of the film's provocative title, newspaper advertising (see example above) urged readers to "SEE SEX SEE SEX SEE SEX."
The Pennsylvania State Board of Motion Picture Censors refused to allow the film to be shown in Pennsylvania under its provocative title. To appease the censors, the film was distributed in Pennsylvania under the title "Sex Crushed to Earth."
In Hagerstown, Maryland, the theater owner defended his showing of the film by pointing to its "social import":
"Of all the social problems that beset the world that of 'Sex' is indubitably the greatest. The 'mystery' of the sex equation has given rise to innumerable pruderies and pruriencies but Manager Thropp of the Colonial Theatre has come out flatly with the pronouncement that he has booked 'Sex' ... because of its vast social import."
The film was a box office success, and the Los Angeles Times reported that it had led to a war being declared in some quarters against "sex pictures." Echoing the response of Sex producer, J. Parker Read, the Times in February 1921 wrote:
"Sex has an important part in life either for evil or good, and it is the producers' privilege to show the error of the former and the virtue of the latter. Anybody who would wish to ban sex pictures from the screen, would be simply eliminating a highly important, if not the most important phase of life from the pictures. Thus did J. Parker Read, impresario of sensational sex films, outline his attitude toward the present agitation against pictures on sex themes."
Read more about this topic: Sex (film)
Famous quotes containing the word controversy:
“Ours was a highly activist administration, with a lot of controversy involved ... but I’m not sure that it would be inconsistent with my own political nature to do it differently if I had it to do all over again.”
—Jimmy Carter (James Earl Carter, Jr.)
“And therefore, as when there is a controversy in an account, the parties must by their own accord, set up for right Reason, the Reason of some Arbitrator, or Judge, to whose sentence, they will both stand, or their controversy must either come to blows, or be undecided, for want of a right Reason constituted by Nature; so is it also in all debates of what kind soever.”
—Thomas Hobbes (1579–1688)