Leonard Whiting and Olivia Hussey in Zeffirelli's 1968 Romeo and Juliet. Photo / Supplied
OPINION:
My earliest encounters with film censorship involved a red plastic folder and 30 or so even redder teenage faces. They occurred in English class when I was 15 or 16 years old, and were conducted ad hoc by our teacher Mr Stone, a cinema buff with the poster for David Lynch’s Eraserhead pinned up behind his desk to prove it.
The teaching of any Shakespeare text – any text at all, come to that – was inevitably followed by its film adaptation. For Macbeth, this was the ghoulish Roman Polanski take from 1971, and for Romeo and Juliet the Franco Zeffirelli, from 1968. A ripple of excitement ran through the room with the arrival of the television itself, dragged in from the departmental cupboard on its ceremonial wheeled plinth.
But it was nothing compared to the widespread agitation five or so seconds before a nude scene, when Mr Stone would spring to his feet, stroll over to the unit, and hold an A4 ring binder in front of the screen until the danger had passed. “All right,” he’d always tut sardonically, “I think you lot have got the gist.”
So I have to confess to not having quite seen the brief bedroom sequence which the two stars of Zeffirelli’s film, Leonard Whiting and Olivia Hussey, are now suing Paramount Pictures over, on the grounds that it was sexually exploitative. Both are currently in their early 70s, but during filming Whiting was 16 and Hussey 15 – and, they allege, pressured by Zeffirelli into performing in the nude. (In the released cut of the film, Whiting’s bottom is briefly visible, as are Hussey’s breasts.)
The lawsuit – permitted after California’s statute of limitations on historic claims of child sexual abuse was temporarily suspended at the end of last year – accuses Paramount of sexually exploiting the two young performers, and of distributing nude images of adolescent children. It claims that Zeffirelli, who died in 2019, initially assured the young performers that no nudity would be required, only to insist otherwise towards the end of the shoot, warning them that “the picture would fail” without it. Hussey and Whiting, it continues, had both suffered mental anguish and emotional distress as a result, as well as losing out on further roles, in the 55 years since Romeo and Juliet’s release.
The action has the air of a classic US legal hit-and-hope, and there is no shortage of inconvenient quotes which Paramount could conceivably deploy in their defence. (As recently as 2018, Hussey told Variety that the scene had been shot “tastefully”, and was “needed for the film”, adding that she and Whiting “were very aware” of what they were doing.) But it also forces us to reckon with the fact that Hollywood once deemed such scenes not just permissible, but in their active commercial interest.
Like Romeo and Juliet, Polanski’s Macbeth also featured underage nudity: the massacre of Macduff’s family begins with a shot of an 11-year-old actor standing naked in a tin bath, before the castle is overrun by Macbeth’s thugs. Polanski said the scene had been inspired by memories of SS officers ransacking his childhood home in Kraków, while others recognised gory parallels with the murder of Polanski’s wife Sharon Tate by the Manson cult at the couple’s Los Angeles home one year beforehand. It’s at least possible to mount a spirited and legitimate artistic defence of the sequence.
But it’s clear such moments were also designed as inducements to certain sections of the audience who might be otherwise disinclined to sit through two or so hours of Shakespearean tragedy. That purpose was frankly acknowledged by critics of the time: “Pederasts can feast on the naked body of MacDuff’s young son,” Film Quarterly’s Kenneth Rothwell bluntly pronounced.
And if we stand by our modern understanding of consent – that is, that children under the age of 16 simply aren’t equipped to make informed decisions about appearing in scenes of this nature – then there’s no avoiding that they are, by definition, exploitative, whether or not we consider them indecent.
But in the 1970s, a push to lower the age of consent had become a plank of the wider progressive movement, and adolescent nudity suddenly had traction as art. The photographer David Hamilton’s misty images of nude girls were dismissed by his contemporary Euan Duff as “wholemeal stoneground pornography”, but his tastefully dreamy style made him internationally adored for 10 years, with book sales that ran into the hundreds of thousands. (Shortly before his death in 2016, Hamilton was accused of rape by four former models.)
In 1976, Playboy Enterprises, which had financed Polanski’s Macbeth, published a hardback volume titled Sugar and Spice, which contained nude images of the 10-year-old Brooke Shields, who two years later starred in Louis Malle’s Pretty Baby, about a 12-year-old child prostitute working in 1917 New Orleans.
This, too, featured full-frontal nude images of Shields, which caused much consternation at the British Board of Film Censors, who recognised such content would likely fall afoul of the recently passed Protection of Children Act, which criminalised indecent photographs of under-16s. The board suggested to Malle that he cut the film for UK release: Malle pushed back but in the end six seconds were trimmed, which was enough to persuade the Director of Public Prosecutions that the film was not indecent.
A number of critics at the time were at pains to stress that Pretty Baby wasn’t child pornography. They were correct – though it is extraordinarily uncomfortable to watch today, with its scenes of a prepubescent Shields canoodling with a 29-year-old Keith Carradine. It makes the gauzier nudity of Shields’ next major role, in the 1980 adaptation of The Blue Lagoon, look demure by comparison: long hair strategically draped over shoulders, and older body doubles deployed where required.
Even so, cultural shifts soon made even The Blue Lagoon unthinkable, and when Larry Clark’s Kids was submitted to the BBFC in 1995, the board insisted on 51 seconds of cuts, in part to remove sexual activity between a 14-year-old boy and a similarly young girl. Even in a controversy-mongering outsider project, such scenes were now firmly beyond the pale.
Like Hussey, Shields has defended her controversial early roles: “Maybe the movies I did wouldn’t be made now because of such censorship,” she told an interviewer in 2021, “and that’s a tremendous loss.”
But is it? Your critic is staunchly pro-screen nudity and anti the banning of art that certain groups might consider pornographic, but in such cases as these, surely the consent issue kills any artistic defence at a stroke. It’s a relief that Shields feels unscarred by her experiences, but that was by no means a given – as Paramount may be about to discover to their cost.
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