Obscenity, Censors, and the Movies

The censor’s work is never secure, for history deals harshly with yesterday’s moral judgments. The road from the 1909 Chicago censor’s refusal to license two feckless horse operas (“Tile James Boys” and “Night Riders”) to this year’s unstinting praise for the frankness of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” has been a long and rocky one.

But if past censors have been arbitrary and flinty, Hollywood has also been much to bl...