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But times were changing. With The Moon Is Blue, the church had its reasons for the C rating—sex and innuendo—but the general public failed to understand the fuss over such a fluffy, flossy little comedy. Gradually, confidence in the film-office ratings eroded among Catholics, too.
Enter Father Sullivan, who joined the Catholic film office in 1957, fresh from a seminary faculty. Realizing the authority of the rigid system was crumbling, he tried to replace the old legalistic strictures with broader moral judgments from a panel of experts, including non-Catholics. The rating system was made more flexible, recognizing that some films may be accept able for teen-agers though not for younger children, and acknowledging the legitimacy of "adults only" films. Sullivan tried to permit more flexibility in detail if the whole creation was worthwhile.
The ban on nudity was a case in point. The church did not want to give it up for fear that "acceptable nude treatment would soon degenerate into exploitation for commercial gain," says Sullivan. By 1970 the no-nudity rule was modified after a long debate over The Pawnbroker. The film had several brief scenes showing a woman's breasts. But otherwise it was a serious effort and the nudity was or ganic to the artistic purpose. Who 's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? escaped a B or C rating though it turned the air blue with foul language. So long as the advertising stressed that it was for adults only, the film office judged it worthwhile for showing.
The Supreme Court had already applied First Amendment free expression to motion pictures, then to nearly any thing that called itself artistic expression. The watershed in the decline of standards, however, was 1968, when the Motion Pic ture Association replaced the old P.C.A. code with the G, PG, R and X system. According to Sullivan, film producers "decided, now that the kiddies were protected, anything goes for adults." Because TV had come to dominate family entertainment, movies went for specialized audiences. Then the new wave of "adult" films began entering American homes via network and cable TV.
In its final years, during the deluge of violence and pornography, the film office struggled to maintain reasonable standards despite changing times. After 1971, the year the Catholic office withdrew its support of the Hollywood rating code, the Review branded 15% of releases with a C. But Oscar-winning Midnight Cowboy, rated X by the film industry itself, got the Catholics' A-4 (O.K. for adults "with reservations") because it was seen as a serious slice-of-life film, homosexuality and all. Another A-4 film, John Travolta's disco epic Saturday Night Fever, was deemed to contain positive moral values, despite dissolute doings in the back seat of a car.
The last edition of the film Review, distributed in September, condemns All That Jazz, American Gigolo, Friday the 13th, Little Darlings, Night Games, Used Cars and especially Dressed to Kill. Re the last: "A perfectly loathsome little movie" with fantasy sequences that seem to have "sprung from the kind of fevered but impoverished male imagination that feels threatened by any woman who is neither masochist nor prostitute."