A Surprising Amount of Sex and Violence for 1955

1955 was supposedly in the dark depths of the "Hays Code" which censored pretty much all levels of sex, profanity and violence in movies. Things would slowly change in the sixties leading up to the R rating of 1968 and after, but it was meant to be pretty "pure" in the 50s.

Not to say there weren't some assaults on the censors in the 50's. Otto Preminger chose to release The Moon is Blue without studio backing to allow the word "virgin" to be spoken on screen, and at the very end of the fifties -- 1959 -- enlisted no less a clean liver than Jimmy Stewart to play the lawyer lead in "Anatomy of a Murder," about a murder trial where the victim is posthumously accused of rape.

But watching The Indian Fighter the other night, I saw some surprising things:

Its a post Civil War Western and it opens with Kirk Douglas' titular character spying on the "Indian Maiden" (played by Italian discovery Elsa Martinelli) as she skinny dips in a mountain stream.

In some ways, things are covered as they were back then -- the camera is from Elsa's shoulders up as she disrobes.

But as the now-naked Martinelli walks down to the river for her bath, her body can be glimpsed through the tree branches and leaves around her and -- she looks pretty nude from behind. I'll assume there was some sort of body stocking or panties on her, but it doesn't LOOK that way.

Once Elsa enters the water, she is partially visible beneath the surface and again -- she looks nude.

Eventually she emerges and Douglas confronts her with a lustful smile and "comes on to her." She fights it. He says: "What's the matter, you don't like that I saw you?"

She fights further, but he pretty much forces himself on her, and twists her wrist evilly when she pulls a knife on him. He doesn't "get her" in this scene -- she runs off, but I understand that later in the movie, he does. There is some "in the river" love action. (I missed some of the movie, in the middle.)

I did come back at the end to see our happy couple BOTH swimming in the suggested nude in the river, with Douglas having promised his beloved's tribal chief father than they he will soon be having a baby with the Chief's daughter and "peace will come to the land." (Mixed race and all.)

That's the sex part (with a touch of rapey violence.)

The violence part is elsewhere:

Two cavalry officers ride into the fort after the Native Americans have had their way with them. the men are on horseback and seem to be alive but -- they are dead and propped up on their saddles by boards, "trickery to attack the white man's fort." As the first dead officer's head leans forward in death, we see the bright red blood on the top of his head: scalped. As is the second dead officer.

Bad guy Lon Chaney Jr. holds an Indian brave's arms behind him as bad guy Walter Matthau proceeds to stab the helpless victim "straight through the heart." No blood is shown, but the victim is shirtless and it takes two separate shots to show the blade going right into his bare chest. (The Matthau character's villainy here is repaid with brutal Native American justice later. More violence.)

Douglas has a couple of brutal fights with Native American warriors. He spares one life, but stabs others to death (below the frame line.)

Douglas' horse takes an arrow to the neck and collapses. Douglas mercy-kills the horse with a bullet to the head and we see the whole thing in one medium shot. Ok, its a "horse stunt" (the horse's head jumps up) but in the 1962 modern-day Kirk Douglas Western Lonely Are the Brave, a similar mercy shooting of a horse is kept offscreen.

There are other acts of violence in the film. The way I figure it, in 1955, a tough guy Western with a tough guy star like Kirk Douglas perhaps got latitude to play more graphic with the violence(and rough with the sex) than the average production. Douglas played "heels" in Champion, The Bad and the Beautiful and especially Ace in the Hole. His screen persona lent itself to danger -- to sex and to violence.

So maybe that allowed the Hays Code people to back off a bit here.