In Charlie Bubbles (1968), the only movie the late, great Albert
Finney ever directed, Finney affectingly plays an author who, for a goodly
portion of the film, is on a road trip with his adoring secretary, played by a very
young, pre-Sterile Cuckoo Liza
Minnelli. (She’s pretty terrific, by the way.) There is a scene where it’s
fairly clear, though not explicitly depicted, that because he’s too enfeebled
by ennui or just plain exhausted, she scoots down between his legs in a hotel
room bed to fellate him. That’s one of the reasons why Universal had to release
Charlie Bubbles through a subsidiary
distributor — the studio couldn't get a production code seal for it.
Something
similar happened the same year with Michael Winner's I'll Never Forget What's'isname, a movie that has a scene in which
it’s heavily implied that Oliver Reed performs cunnilingus on Carol White. The
minor controversies sparked by both films are amusingly detailed in Jack
Vizzard's 1971 memoir See No Evil: Life
Inside a Hollywood Censor — a book, not incidentally, that I cited as a
reference in the long-delayed master’s thesis I wrote more than a decade ago
for my MA degree at the University of Houston.
Oddly enough, both Charlie Bubbles and I’ll Never Forget What’s’isname played for months on a double bill
at the Gentilly-Orleans, an art house in my hometown of New Orleans, during my
senior year of high school. And I viewed the double bill multiple times — not
because of the risqué scenes (though, I must admit, they weren't exactly a
deterrent) — but because, for reasons I still don't fully understand, I felt
extremely simpatico with the alienated characters played by Finney and Reed.
(Yeah, I was a strange kid.)
What I had no way of
knowing at the time is that both films provided early headaches for Jack J.
Valenti, who took over as head of the MPAA in 1966 — and wound up replacing the
Production Code with the vastly more flexible MPAA Ratings System in November
1968.
Now I teach at the Jack J.
Valenti School of Communication at University of Houston. And the world keeps
spinning in its greased grooves.
