Hollywood sex and violence: we've seen it all before

USA Today (Society for the Advancement of Education), Sept, 1993 by Wayne M. Barrett

Those who claim today's films dwell too much on life's darker side obviously haven't watched any old movies lately.

"They don't make movies like they used to" has been the clarion call of close-minded critics throughout the century. Consider the following well-known and well-received features that have illuminated the silver screen over the last 10 decades:

* A gang of masked desperados hold up a train with guns blazing. A posse then hunts down the bandits and wipes them out in the first classic western gunfight scene ever captured on film. This movie will serve as the prototype "good guys always get the bad guys" for years to come (Edwin S. Porter's "The Great Train Robbery," 1903).

* The epic story of the Civil War and Reconstruction is told in the most politically incorrect manner imaginable. The Ku Klux Klan is glorified as the protector of beleaguered white womanhood, and blacks are portrayed as subhuman, bestial darkies complete with all the familiar stereotypes: a shuffling gait, large white teeth, and rolling eyes (D.W. Griffith's "Birth of a Nation," 1915).

* This heavy-breathing silent melodrama has one of the world's most famous actresses playing an alluring femme fatale who ends up as an impoverished Parisian prostitute (Greta Garbo in 1926's "The Temptress").

* A mad scientist obsessed with immortality takes to grave-robbing so he can build a man from dead body parts. His experiment works, but the creature accidently is given a "criminal" brain. The monster goes on a murder spree throughout the countryside before finally being destroyed - or so everyone thinks (Boris Karloff in 1931's "Frankenstein").

* A drifter gets a job at a roadside restaurant and commits adultery with the young, beautiful wife of his fat, middle-aged immigrant boss. The lovers eventually kill the husband, but beat the rap, only to have her die in a car accident and him sent to the electric chair for murdering her - although he didn't (John Garfield and Lana Turner in 1946's "The Postman Always Rings Twice").

* A Hollywood director discovers a talented dancer in a Spanish cafe. She becomes an internationally acclaimed movie star who goes through a succession of lovers before marrying a nobleman who fails to tell her he was rendered impotent in a war-related injury. She cheats on him, gets pregnant, and eventually is shot to death by her no-good spouse (Humphrey Bogart and Ava Gardner in 1954's "The Barefoot Contessa").

* A secretary steals a bundle of cash from the company where she works. While making her getaway, she stops at a motel run by a psychopath who never accepted his mother's death. The secretary is stabbed to death in the shower by the motel clerk (dressed as his mom) in one of the most famous murder scenes in cinema history (Janet Leigh and Anthony Perkins in the 1960 Hitchcock thriller, "Psycho").

* A group of screwball, but enormously talented doctors try to keep their sanity amidst the ravages of the Korean War. There is plenty of drinking, sex, comedy, and, of course, blood and guts (Donald Sutherland and Elliott Gould in 1970's "M*A*S*H").

* In what has to be the most brutally graphic boxing film ever made, the life of former middleweight champion Jake La Motta is detailed from a very personal perspective. The language - but especially the fight scenes - will make even the most hardened viewer wilt (Robert DeNiro and Joe Pesci in 1980's "Raging Bull").

* The old West is revisited in this Academy Award-winning effort when a Civil War hero comes to sympathize with the Indian way of life, but the cold-blooded US. Cavalry would rather massacre the Native Americans than coexist with them (Kevin Costner in 1991's "Dances with Wolves").

Now if all that is trash, it sure goes back a long way. Why be shocked by movies? Art indeed imitates life. Doubters are instructed to pick up any newspaper or listen to any nightly news broadcast for the fodder that leads to tomorrow's big blockbuster.

Are the ruthless drug dealers of the 1990s that much different from the rum-running gangsters of the 1930s? Are the coke-snorting bimbos of the 1980s that much different from the drunken floozies of the Roaring Twenties? Are the cigar-chomping politicians and big-bellied capitalists of the "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington" era that much different from the corruption-plagued government officials and double-dealing corporate raiders of the "Wall Street" regime? Are the recession-racked 1990s that much different from the Depression-saddled 1930s? Have the horrors of armed conflict - and the cinematic tributes they engender - become any more palatable through World Wars I and II, the Korean War, Vietnam War, Cold War, Operation Desert Storm, or what's going on right now in Somalia and Bosnia?

"Oh sure," the nostalgic romantics will say, "but in the old days, movie violence wasn't so graphic and gratuitous, and neither was the sex. So much used to be left to the imagination. " Not so. In the 1920s, actress Hedy Lamarr was shown frolicking nude in the film "Ecstasy" - and there was no tall grass hiding anything. Moreover, silent screen siren Clara Bow wasn't called the "It" girl because of her refined manners.