With all the hubbub over James Franco and Seth Rogen’s "The Interview" this week, it seems timely to mention that movies in Chicago have long been subject to censorship—and not just a ratings system or nervous studio brass, but actual, government-sponsored censorship.
It was a century ago this week that Charlie Chaplin moved to Chicago. Having been signed by Essanay, one of Chicago's (and the country's) biggest film studios, he and cowboy star "Broncho Billy" Anderson arrived at the train station just before Christmas. He was charmed by Anderson’s apartment (Anderson’s wife remembered him saying, “A Christmas tree! A baby! It’s wonderful!”), but he picked a bad week to move to town from California.
Every movie shown in town had to be approved by a committee of censors headed by Major Metillus L.C. Funkhouser of the Chicago police, and they almost always found something to object to, such as scenes showing gambling, drinking or people thumbing their noses at each other. I haven’t seen The Interview yet, but it’s not hard to imagine that it would have been reduced to a 10-minute short.
Chaplin’s own Essanay output would not escape Funkhouser’s ire. In the summer of 1915, he released a film called "A Woman," which the unimpressed Chicago Tribune called “Chaplin’s latest and most deplorable break into the realm of suggestive slapstick.” In the two-reel short, Chaplin’s Little Tramp spends a good chunk of the movie pantless (though still wearing long johns and what appears to be a skirt made from an umbrella), and a larger chunk dressed as a woman.
The list of cuts detailed in the Tribune was extensive:
-Woman kicking man;
-Woman picking man’s pocket in park;
-All scenes of man minus trousers;
-All scenes of man in bedroom showing him dressing up as a woman;
-All scenes showing extraction of hatpin from man’s anatomy;
-Man pulling skirt off woman and subsequent vulgar sections;
-Picture with father giving couple blessings.
Curiously, the male-on-male kiss scene, which Chaplin tricks the bad guys into, seems to have been left in.
Now that we live in the YouTube era, it’s easy to watch the movie in its uncensored glory (most of the objectionable stuff starts about 12 minutes in). Even now, the movie is kind of a shocker — it’s amazing that they got away with this anywhere in 1915. They might not even get away with some of it now, when using cross-dressing and male-on-male kissing as comedy can be problematic for entirely different reasons.
Funkhouser himself wasn’t above hosting screenings of the cutout scenes (a practice that occasionally got him in trouble), and was about as popular as any other censor. In an August 1917 issue, a film critic for the Tribune said, “Major Funkhouser should be soundly spanked and sat in a corner until he behaves.”