Perversion for Profit

The first 5 minutes and I thought this must be from the McCarthyite early 1950's, when the Communist menace spread like an ink blot across the map, and every New Deal liberal had an FBI tail. But, no-- It's 1965, and thanks to a liberal Supreme Court, sexual explicitness is spreading to magazines and, horror of horrors, to neighborhood news stands. So the same folks who brought us the McCarthy purges must again swing into action against this newest assault on God, country, and the missionary position. After all, these self- appointed watchdogs are well practiced in the art of subversion—of the First Amendment, that is.

No need to repeat consensus points made by others. The logic of this 60-minute screed is indeed puerile and on the order of "If you like hamburger, you'll love cannibalism". But then, the script was never intended as an appeal to reason; it's meant to rally those already believing that any kind of sex outside monogamous marriage and man-on-top is not only wrong, but just plain evil, and a "threat to the American Way". Of course, it doesn't hurt, as the Bible well knew, to provide a little titillation along with the righteous sermon to keep all those nodding heads awake.

But these folks know what they're doing. Like fundamentalists of all stripes, they know that if you control a person's sex life, you control the person. Putnam gives away the game in the last 5-minutes, which stresses the significance of a tightly regulated sex life to our God- ordained right-wing American society. In short, Hugh Hefner is not just an evil pornographer, he's downright un-American and a threat to the family, and so much for the First Amendment and the rest of us. Thanks be to TMC for reviving this curiosity, for these forces are still among us, going by the name of Falwell, Robertson, and Roman Catholic conservatives, among others. They may have lost the 1965 battle, but the Word of God is absolute, and so, unfortunately for our democracy, are their beliefs.

(In passing—those of us living in LA and of a certain age are quite familiar with the late George Putnam. Regrettably, he anchored a local news show for many years, where he pontificated nightly in the same pompously self-righteous manner as this 1965 diatribe, that is, until the Nixon scandals, among others, undid his credibility. Perhaps most revealing, he was the inspiration for the smugly vacuous Ted Baxter newsman on the old Mary Tyler Moore TV show. You know, the silver-haired guy who was clueless to everything but his own ego. How appropriate.)

"A flood tide of filth is engulfing our country in the form of newsstand obscenity, and is threatening to pervert an entire generation of our American children!" So says 'reporter' George Putnam, who is not only upstanding but 'outstanding' as well! Putnam, a natty, well-dressed guy with Brylcreem in his hair, seems like the righteous sort of family man you might see volunteering as usher at your local parish. He uses amusing placards to warn us that magazine pornography (a two billion dollar a year business!) and other forms of filth reach 75-90% of our children (so much for that clever hiding space!) and that perversion is like an octopus reaching its tentacles out to the malt shop set--luring them into the insidious world of unnatural desires. "There are more than 800 distributors" peddling porn, and--no thanks to rapid transit and mass distribution--our children are being exposed to homosexuality at a faster rate than ever! Such dated naiveté is then accented with pulpy paperback covers and vintage sex rags which would go for big bucks today on eBay. One has to hand it to Putnam: he stands tall and holy, like a mighty Sequoia, putting emphasis on words like 'whips' and 'bestiality' with authoritative conviction. One can just imagine him hitting the local pub after the long film shoot, chatting up the neighborhood trollop and heading back to her place for a little R 'n R.

Watching this 49 year old film from the perspective of same sex marriage rapidly gaining ground throughout the USA and civil right statutes for sexual orientation and gender identity being passed and enforced, one can only marvel at the sea change in attitude in half a century. Four years after this film and it does spend a good deal of time attacking gays, the Stonewall Rebellion took place.

Perversion For Profit is at the same level as Reefer Madness. I have no doubt that this was a work personally conceived by J. Edgar Hoover. The presence of George Putnam as narrator who was a running buddy of Hoover in the same manner that Walter Winchell was gives credence to that belief. During the course of the narration Putnam makes mention of the fact that our opponents in the Cold War, the Communists are at least applauding America's descent into 'degeneracy'. Putnam used the phrase Masters Of Deceit which was a book authored under Hoover's name and the phrase was that the Communists were masters of deceit.

I've also no doubt that after seeing this film those so inclined to alternative sexual expression went racing around their towns to find if their outlets for porn were still secure or seeking to acquire new ones.

Putnam's strident narration leaves us no doubt that the number one problem in America was porn, that it led people into all kinds of immoral behavior. Not race relations, not poverty, not the environment, kids getting their rocks off over something salacious and turning into polymorphous perverse. Does that not sound familiar?

Listening to Putnam among other things that ran through my mind was Robert Preston telling the folks of River City about their number one problem with that pool hall. No doubt the yokels of 1965 just ate this up.

George Putnam lived to the ripe old age of 94 dying in 2008. I can only imagine what he thought of the America he was leaving.

"They lack the dignity of our dutial Christian heritage." So says "outstanding news reporter" know-it-all George Putnam (pronounced 'Putt-Numb', the man can't even pronounce his own name!). He is referring to the mongers of perverse material that are covering the nation with smut and trying to corrupt our youth (let's face it, they don't have anything better to do). We sit and watch as this creepy guy narrates, talking directly to the camera (staring uncomfortably right at you) about the evils of girly magazines, nudist journals, physique pictorials "and all the rest" (as he puts it). Since soft-core pictures of women's boobies will automatically turn you into a perverted slob.

Shots of him are intersperced with barely censored illustrations from said magazines. Full page spreads from Playboy, One, Sunshine and other tepid publications are displayed, with pieces of colored tape covering objectionable areas. That is, just barely.

This movie leaved basically nothing to the imagination, in terms of whit it exhibits visually. When seen today, the film becomes something else: a fascinating look at an underground Adults Only culture. The skin magazines of the 1950's and 1960's, which were legal, were hardly as `perverse' as the harcore 16mm `blue' movies that were being made at the time. Putnam promises that `What you have been shown here is not the worst' and he'd be right, but according to him, shots of half-naked women sitting around at a pool looking bored were depraved and deranged. Of couse the major bone that the consevatives have to pick is mentioned over and over: kids can legally get this stuff. There's no drive towards a solution, though, like maybe restricting the ages, plastic wrap, etc. How typical.

Of all profiteers of perversion, it is the homosexuals who fair the worst. Putnam holds up an image of a ten-year-old boy in a g-string (not a very pretty sight if you ask me - and I'm gay), and says `See at what tender age homosexuals prefer their conquests!' And he promises us that there are also slides and movies showing tawny young men in alluring states of undress (yummy).

Also glowered upon is sado-masochism. While recent films like Secretary attempt to explain it in a positive light, most of the world is still in the dark when it comes to S/M. Can we expect a thoughtful, positive or at least somewhat enlightening view on the subject in this film. No. Mr. Putnam treats it the same way he treats everything else, by doing the verbal equivalent of stamping a great big OBSCENE on every last image he shows us.

So, it's a sad story. This film that apparently conservated a lot of peoples minds on the the subject of obscenity. Despite Putnam's claim that they aren't trying to sensationalize their presentation, it's clear that that's what they had on their minds. Yet the movie is also talky and dull. Skip to the good parts, and then never, ever watch this movie ever again.

After watching a few Ed Wood films, I think I can safely say that if you want a bad film that is truly hilarious, you should look for this one instead.

The narrator very sternly intones against the "flood-tide of filth" that he considers against Christian values, and carefully and methodically gives examples of this "filth," showing almost as much as you'd see if you'd bought it yourself. But it's not all pretty pictures: the narrator explains a bit about it as well: that people can get sexual satisfaction from hurting themselves or others, and that various forms of fetishism deserving thorough discussion are "threatening our children": "the extreme spiked heel and the tight boot, the burning cigarette, the laced leather garment, the nakedness," "the worship of the whip, the riding crop, rubber and leather garments."

Aside from the S&M, which didn't disturb me at all, the film does also focus on child pornography; it's hard to dismiss that.

Yet still, by the end of it, the film has given so much detail in decrying all these "perversions" that one wonders whether the protest were a bit more personal than the staunch narrator pretends. It's easy to imagine the writers stacking up more and more magazines, saying to themselves "oh, that /is/ perverted ... yet oddly intriguing... such a nice boot...."