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Wiseman did have permission from the state corrections commissioner and other authorities to make the film, and in the end the controversy may be settled on the narrow grounds of just what was agreed to. The state contends that Wiseman had promised not to photograph incompetent inmates and to give the state final review. Unfortunately the agreement was largely oral, and is wide open to dispute. But it may be easier to settle that than to reconcile the thornier question of how much privacy an insane convict is entitled to in the face of the public's right to be informed about what amounts to a state scandal.
OBSCENITY
Test by Jury
Book publishers rarely beg the government to prosecute a book for obscenity. But that is just about what the English firm of Calder & Boyars did early this year. The book was Hubert Selby Jr.'s Last Exit to Brooklyn, which had been banned in London's Soho district (TIME, Dec. 30). Under English custom, such local rulings tend to be honored throughout the country. Calder & Boyars decided that the only way to lift the ban was a full-scale trial, and the government finally agreed to prosecute. Said Publisher John Calder: "I'm sure we'll win before a jury."
Last week, to his astonishment, he lost. The jury unanimously found Exit obscene. In so doing, it crisply ignored the testimony of a number of literary lights who contended that the book was a near masterpiece that denounced the gutter by wallowing in it. Critic Frank Kermode, former co-editor of Encounter, argued that he "was horrified by it, but impressed by its novelty, originality and moral power. Dealing as it does with the lower depths of a great city, it is very much in the tradition of Dickens." Since Selby offered a minutely detailed chronicle of unremitting violence, perversion, homosexuality, sadism and sex without directly indicating any objection, the comparison with Dickens, who made his point by contrasting the good and the bad, may have seemed specious to the jury.
In any case, they decided to judge for themselves. The twelve men (the judge had barred all women) spent two days reading Exit, ultimately agreed with Prosecution Witness George Catlin, a former professor at Canada's McGill University, who said: "I can't imagine anything being obscene if this book isn't." The question that now arises for England is how many other modern works might fail a test by jury.
JUDGES
For Services Rendered
The Soviet Union has announced the award of the Order of Lenin to Judge Lev N. Smirnov for his "services in strengthening socialist legality." Smirnov is the judge who last year convicted and sentenced Authors Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel to seven and five years respectively in a labor camp for disseminating "slanderous material besmirching the Soviet state and social system."
* He did say that he would not, and did not, photograph certain specified inmates, among them Albert De Salvo, the confessed Boston Strangler.