Miracles and Sacrilege: Roberto Rossellini, the Church, and Film Censorship in Hollywood

by William Bruce Johnson

Overview

Miracles and Sacrilege is the story of the epochal conflict between censorship and freedom in film, recounted through an in-depth analysis of the U.S. Supreme Court's decision striking down a government ban on Roberto Rossellini's film The Miracle (1950). In this extraordinary case, the Court ultimately chose to abandon its own longstanding determination that film comprised a mere 'business' unworthy of free-speech rights, declaring for the first time that the First Amendment barred government from banning any film as 'sacreligious.'

Using legal briefs, affidavits, and other court records, as well as letters, memoranda, and other archival materials to elucidate what was at issue in the case, William Bruce Johnson also analyzes the social, cultural, and religious elements that form the background of this complex and hard-fought controversy, focusing particularly on the fundamental role played by the Catholic Church in the history of film censorship. Tracing the development of the Church in the United States, Johnson discusses the reasons it found The Miracle sacrilegious and how it attained the power to persuade civil authorities to ban it. The Court's decision was not only a milestone in the law of church-state relations, but it paved the way for a succession of later decisions which gradually established a firm legal basis for freedom of expression in the arts.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780802094933
Publisher:	University of Toronto Press, Scholarly Publishing Division
Publication date:	11/28/2007
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	448
Product dimensions:	6.02(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.26(d)

About the Author

William Bruce Johnson is an attorney and writer based in New York. He holds a PhD from the University of London.

Table of Contents

Introduction     3
'A Business Pure and Simple'     9
The Church, 'Modernism,' and 'Americanism'     20
A Church of Immigrants     37
A New Catholic-American Culture     55
Protestantism Balkanized     72
Reining In Hollywood     87
The Production Code     103
The Legion of Decency     118
The Breen Office     128
The Paramount Case     137
Cocktails and Communism     155
New Realities     184
Visions of Mary     203
Mary or Communism     216
The Priest as Public Figure     229
'Woman Further Defamed'     242
'A Sense of Decency and Good Morals'     283
'The Law Knows No Heresy'     307
In the Supreme Court     322
Candour and Shame     334
Notes     361
Bibliography     445
Index     479