SEX APPEAL

Southland Times, Issue 22486, 22 January 1935, Page 5

SEX APPEAL

FUNCTIONS OF FILMS

ARCHBISHOP’S COMPLAINT

REPLY BY MR BERNARD SHAW

(United Press Assn—Telegraph Copyright.) (Rec. 6.45 p.m.) London, January 20. “Sex appeal is a perfectly legitimate element in all fine arts dealing directly with humanity,” declared Mr G. Bernard Shaw during a broadcast. He added that the Archbishop of Canterbury referred to undesirable films. There was now no film studio that would spend £50,000 making a film unless it was very desirable indeed, possibly not by the Archbishop, but certainly by a large section of the human race who were not Archbishops. “Let us cease talking about desirable and undesirable and consider whether we can extirpate films detrimental to public morals,” he said. “Censorship involving handing over the job to some frail erring mortal man, making him omnipotent on the assumption of official status confers infallibility. Omniscience is silly. One of the most sacred functidns of the theatre is to educate and refine sex appeal, the treatment of which under censorship is often vulgar, yet the good done by associating sex appeal with beauty, cleanliness, poetry and music is incalculable.”