Cinema: Discreet Omissions

Hollywood was having a little trouble with Oliver Wendell Holmes. Incredible as it might seem, the life story of the late great Justice did not always conform to the censor's standard. Polishing up The Magnificent Yankee last week, Producer Armand (Ambush) Deutsch admitted that he had left out some of the great man's saltier habits "to avoid sidetracking our main story." Among the discreet omissions: the Chief Justice's regular excursions to Washington's burlesque houses, his well-thumbed library of spicy stories, his ear-curling, off-the-bench vocabulary. Also missing, from the parade of Justice Holmes's law secretaries: the 1929 incumbent, Alger Hiss.

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