‘Evil suggestions and influences’ at the pictures
Censorship, once the preserve of the conservative, today finds a home on the political left wing, where those who have forgotten the lessons of Orwell attempt to reshape cultural expression to fit their narrow precepts, often, with unacknowledged irony, in the name of “diversity”.
Back in 1917, when World War I might have been thought a higher priority, Hamilton had a strain of the earlier type of censorship, in philosophy if not impact.
In March of that year a person signing themselves ‘Pro Bono Publico’, wrote to the Waikato Times in order “to draw the attention of the public to a matter that is causing considerable anxiety in the minds of many people in our community”.
In the manner of the censorious, he or she conflated their own concerns with those of the majority.
“Great exception is being taken to the sexual type of pictures which are so often being staged in our Hamilton theatres”, wrote Bono, “...no healthy minded men or women can shut their eyes to the evil suggestions and influences lurking within.”
A rhetorical question followed: “how can our youths and maidens keep pure and wholesome in their thoughts and feelings when week after week such questionable pictures are presented for their entertainment?”
Sydney Tomes, manager of both Hamilton’s first cinema, The King’s Theatre, and its most opulent, The Theatre Royal, was swift to reply.
Tomes argued that the “part of the community” Bono referred to were “those who do not patronise pictures or amusements” and that given his actual audience “comprise some of our best and soundest citizens, their wives and their families’’, the allegations were groundless. Local censorship, he claimed, “is surely enough for the most prudish person”.
Whatever the truth of the Tomes riposte, Hollywood was at this time producing films which dramatised infidelity and marital discord. The Weaker Sex, featuring an affair between a philandering husband and a “Broadway vamp” opened at The King’s Theatre in December, 1917. Of more concern to today’s would-be censors was The Birth of a Nation, DW Griffith’s brilliant if racist epic, which finally reached Hamilton in the same week.