10 great censored films

This month sees the UK release of Caligula – The Ultimate Cut, an attempt at reconstructing the film that Gore Vidal thought he’d written and actors like Malcolm McDowell and Helen Mirren thought they’d appeared in. Instead, director Tinto Brass was fired and producer (and Penthouse mogul) Bob Guccione took over, re-editing the footage to emphasise the violence and sexual debauchery, and beefing up the latter by adding clearly unsimulated sex scenes filmed clandestinely on the same sets.

In the UK, the print was initially impounded by customs, and the BBFC only passed it after the removal of 11 minutes, with the full Guccione cut not passed until 2008. (This new version still amply merits its 18 certificate, but is decidedly less sensationalised.)

Films have fallen foul of censors since the medium’s very dawn, with the 1909 Cinematograph Act granting local authorities the power to regulate what cinemas within their jurisdiction were allowed to show. Fearing chaos, the film industry created the British Board of Film Censors (now Classification) in 1912, as a one-stop shop that would apply consistent principles according to the mores of the era.  

The list below could easily be 10 times longer, but these specific films were chosen because they ran into trouble for different reasons – some of them demonstrating that it’s not just the BBFC that regulates what we’re allowed to see (at least legally in British cinemas), with local authorities, the law and even the original filmmakers also having the power to ban films.

Director: Sergei Eisenstein

Now a fixture on Best Films of All Time lists, Sergei Eisenstein’s incendiary masterpiece about a sailors’ mutiny during the abortive 1905 Russian Revolution was once considered so politically potent that it was banned not just by the BBFC but also by various local authorities. Officially, the council rejections were because of its violence, although since there was comparatively little on screen and it could easily have been cut, it’s widely assumed that the motives were political. Bolshevism was considered a potent threat, as was left-wing activism across the board, this being the era of the 1926 General Strike. 

The film was screened privately from 1929 by various workers’ organisations and Ivor Montagu’s renowned Film Society, but the film wasn’t formally BBFC-approved until 1954, the year after Stalin’s death. By then it was felt that it had sufficiently dated in terms of style and subject matter to have limited appeal on any grounds other than artistic ones.  

Director: Tod Browning

In the wake of the phenomenal success of Universal’s Dracula and Frankenstein (both 1931), MGM’s head of production asked Tod Browning, director of the former, to make something that would “out-horror” them both. Browning delivered with a vengeance, by digging deep into his own background as a teenage roustabout and carnival barker, devising a story in which a travelling circus’s most downtrodden employees wreak revenge on their tormentors. 

As a pitch, this must have seemed wholly uncontentious, but Browning’s decision to cast actual circus performers with visible disabilities caused audiences of the time to react with revulsion, no matter that Browning’s portrayal of them was entirely sympathetic – indeed, the film’s entire point is that its real monsters are the characters played by conventionally good-looking actors. Significantly cut in the US, it was banned outright in the UK until a successful BBFC resubmission in 1963, over three decades after it was originally made.

Director: Ken Russell

Ken Russell’s dramatisation of the events that occurred in the French city of Loudun, where an alleged outbreak of demonic possession in an Ursuline convent was cynically used as an excuse for a full-scale political crackdown, remains a censorship cause célèbre to this day. The full version that Russell privately showed to the BBFC’s John Trevelyan was never publicly screened and is now believed irretrievably lost, and what Russell reluctantly signed off on a few months later was substantially trimmed both by the BBFC and by Warner Bros, who had their own corporate views on what they were prepared to release under their banner.

Since then, they’ve licensed the X-certificate British theatrical version to the BFI for DVD release and have permitted sporadic screenings of a 2002 semi-restoration in which Russell reinstated a couple of scenes that Trevelyan recommended removing prior to formal BBFC submission, but that’s the most that they’ve sanctioned to date.

Director: Stanley Kubrick

Although passed uncut by the BBFC, Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of Anthony Burgess’s provocative novel about freedom and (ir)responsibility was released to a storm of controversy. Despite careful handling by Warner Bros, which initially restricted it to a single London cinema for a year, this failed to abate, and by the middle of 1973 Kubrick (who had personally received threats to himself and his family) decided that enough was enough. 

He duly persuaded Warners to withdraw it from UK distribution, something carried out so surreptitiously that it was only its omission from a 1979 National Film Theatre Kubrick retrospective that first alerted people to its unavailability – which in the event lasted until 2000, a year after Kubrick’s death. However, repertory cinemas in Paris were happy to cater for curious British tourists, while the Virgin Megastore on the Champs-Élysées made a point of selling it in a form compatible with British VHS tape decks.

Director: Tobe Hooper

Now regarded as one of the seminal masterpieces of American horror cinema, Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre posed a significant headache for the BBFC, which wouldn’t grant it a certificate until 1999. The problem was that, despite the title suggesting a relentless orgy of graphic violence, there was in fact remarkably little on screen, with Hooper’s masterly control of mood instead constantly suggesting that the absolute worst was mere seconds away from happening to the hapless Sally (Marilyn Burns). 

The BBFC therefore decided that the film was both uncuttable and unclassifiable, at least according to their own guidelines, but it was nonetheless shown regularly over the next two-and-a-half decades within the jurisdiction of more liberal local authorities, most notably the Greater London Council, whose GLC-X certificate effectively legalised screenings across the capital. It was also widely available on VHS before the post-1984 Video Recordings crackdown drove it underground again.

Director: Pier Paolo Pasolini

Although BBFC secretary James Ferman was an admirer of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s last film, completed shortly before the director’s violent death, he felt that its unflinchingly graphic study of fascism as expressed via the torture and degradation of a number of captive young men and women went too far for a BBFC certificate. He duly recommended it as a club screening (whereby films could legally be shown without BBFC approval, provided the local authority was amenable), only for the print to be seized and impounded by the police. 

After taking extensive legal advice, Ferman argued that the film was unlikely to fall foul of the “deprave and corrupt” test of the 1959 Obscene Publications Act, since its purpose was to shock and revolt, but he nonetheless prepared a milder cut that also included a lengthy text-based introduction setting the film in its original historical context. That version was screened under club conditions until it was finally passed uncut by the BBFC in 2000 following a significant liberalisation of their guidelines.

Director: Nagisa Oshima

With various countries, including his native France, legalising hardcore pornography in the early 1970s, producer Anatole Dauman decided to make a film about sexual obsession that was as graphic as any hardcore feature while at the same time being an unimpeachably complex, psychologically intricate work of art. 

No stranger to controversy in his native Japan, Nagisa Oshima was the ideal director to take it on, although local laws meant that the unprocessed footage had to be shipped to France, with Oshima reliant on Dauman’s verbal description. Rather than cut a film that went far beyond their then guidelines, the BBFC recommended it to the club cinema circuit, where it was regularly screened until the BFI persuaded the BBFC to grant the film an 18 certificate in 1991 after making a small optical trim over legal concerns about a scene involving children. The full version would finally get a BBFC certificate in 2011.

Director: Ruggero Deodato

In 1937, following concern over the treatment of horses in westerns, the government passed the Cinematograph Films (Animals) Act. This remains on the statute book, and forbids the distribution of a film featuring cruelty to animals, with two exemptions: if the cruelty is provably faked, or if it would have happened regardless of the camera’s presence. 

The Italian cannibal genre that flourished at the turn of the 1980s (which featured prominently in the DPP’s official list of proscribed ‘video nasties’ from a time when BBFC classification didn’t apply to video) posed numerous problems on this score, and although Ruggero Deodato’s Cannibal Holocaust wasn’t officially submitted until 2001, even then it still lost nearly six minutes. However, 10 years later the BBFC had decided that clean kills were acceptable under the Animals Act, and most of the film was therefore passed, aside from a shot of a coatimundi clearly being tortured for real.

Director: David Cronenberg

Much to the surprise of its director David Cronenberg, this typically cool, cerebral adaptation of what its author J.G. Ballard described as “the first pornographic novel based on technology” ran into a virulent media storm in the UK, with the Daily Mail’s front-page “BAN THIS CAR CRASH SEX FILM” being the first of many tabloid salvos. 

Long sympathetic towards Cronenberg’s work, the BBFC was always minded to pass it uncut, and duly did so, whereupon Westminster Council exercised its right of veto, preventing all cinemas within its jurisdiction from screening it. However, Westminster didn’t cover the entire West End, so distributors Columbia TriStar simply opened it in multiple venues as close to the Westminster border as they could get. Fellow Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin jokingly wondered if there’d be legal ramifications if a queue to see Crash ever spilled over that border, but this was never put to the test.

Director: Srđan Spasojević

The early 21st century ‘torture porn’ genre has caused various censorship headaches, including the outright banning of Kōji Shiraishi’s Grotesque (2009). Already notorious on the festival circuit, Srđan Spasojević’s film about a porn star being coerced out of retirement to make a new kind of politicised pornography presented legal challenges galore, despite the fact that the blocking and editing made it very clear indeed that children were never present in the same shot as graphic sexual atrocities. 

Although the film might well have survived a challenge under the 1978 Protection of Children Act because of this, the BBFC nonetheless played safe, removing around four minutes. Ironically, this made the film’s most notorious scene a fair bit more disturbing, as the baby at the centre of it was so obviously fake in the uncut version – but in the UK release version we can only hear its anguished cries on the soundtrack.

Caligula: The Ultimate Cut is in cinemas from 9 August.