Over the years many films have been banned or at least heavily censored, I'm going to cover a few here but not the ones generally highlighted by the DPP during the Video Nasty debacle, those titles and the whole sorry story I'll cover in a series of blogs.
This is not a complete list, just the ones that I find interesting, or at least the reasoning given by the British Board of Film Censorship before it's name change in 1984.
I'll start with 1925 silent classic The Phantom of the Opera, this was banned for 4 years as it was considered too horrifying for general release.
Battleship Potemkin (1926) is considered a classic and is used in film schools all over the world but was banned until 1954 because of "inflammatory subtitles and Bolshevist Propaganda". The Odessa stairs sequence of the baby in the pram was famously recreated in The Untouchables.
Tod Browning's Freaks (based on Browning's own experiences, he ran away at an early age to join the circus) was banned in the UK until 1963, the reasoning behind the ban was, in both 1932 and 1952, that the BBFC felt that "the film exploited for commercial reasons the deformed people that it claimed to dignify."
The Mad Doctor, a 1933 Disney short starring Mickey Mouse was banned both here and Nazi Germany for a short while due to it's horror theme being unsuitable for children!
A year later Red Hot Mama, a Betty Boop short, was banned for depicting Hell in a humorous manner, thus it was deemed blasphemous.
In 1953 Ed Wood (lots more on him in a later blog) released Glen or Glenda, a semi-biographical film about a transvestite, the BBFC were having none of that, it was finally given a general release in 1995!
491 is a controversial Swedish film that was released in 1964, and as far as I can tell has never been officially released in the UK, the BBFC website is a bit sketchy on it. The film plot involves a group of young offenders living in an apartment supervised by a couple of social workers as part of a social experiment, what could go wrong! Well it seems the scenes of homosexual rape and a woman getting raped by a dog were a bit too much for the Swedish people, and the film was given as one of the reasons for the founding of the Christian Democratic Party in 1964.
Roger Corman's 1968 The Trip was banned in the UK until 2002 due to it glamorising the use of LSD, the BBFC rejected it 4 times between 1968 and 1988, it's not even that good a film, just a curio really.
Paul Morrissey worked a lot with The Factory and Andy Warhol and as such (in my humble opinion) most of his work is pretentious trash, which, funny enough, is the name of the film which the BBFC banned in 1970. Trash was banned for it's graphic scenes of intravenous drug use, sex and full frontal nudity, or so they say, I believe that for once the BBFC were trying to do us a favour and save us from this poorly acted, directed and written trash!
Homo Eroticus or Man of the Year is a 1971 Italian sex comedy about a man with 3 testicles and an insatiable sex drive who tries to bed, no matter the age, all the women in town! Was banned for unspecified reasons but later given a certificate, again details are quite sketchy on the BBFC website.
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