The Weekly Screed (#598)

A Man for All Movies
by David Benjamin

BROOKLYN — I encountered in Saturday’s obituaries the death of Henry Herx with a pang usually reserved for the passage of family or friends. This is because Henry Herx and I were kindred spirits — in different times and places — from the moment we were tall enough to see over the seat in front of us at a downtown movie house.

Henry Herx, from 1964 to 1999, was the senior film reviewer for an outfit that has been variously known as the Legion of Decency, the Office of Film and Broadcasting and, currently, the Media Review Office of the Catholic News Service. Herx’s immediate Legion of Decency predecessors were among the most important people in my childhood. They were the all-powerful few who decided what movies I could see at my hometown theater, the Erwin. The Legion — whose listings came out monthly in diocesan newspapers — ranked films according to their moral purity, from “A-1” (which was my category) to “C” (condemned). To my dismay, only about one of every 20 movies was rated “A-1” and, thus, fit for my delicate altar-boy sensibilities.

Of course, I always read the whole list. Who can resist movie titles? I wondered, a little dubiously, whether all those forbidden flicks, even “C” movies (which scared me a little even to know their titles), would really corrupt me beyond any hope of redemption. What salacious antics, I wondered, could be going on in movies like The Seven Year Itch, Some Like It Hot, The Apartment, Psycho, Butterfield 8, and Spartacus?

Spartacus was a dirty movie?

In those days, I fed my movie appetite by watching the late late show every Friday night (accompanied by brother Billy, snoring beside me), and at the Erwin’s Saturday matinees. Herx has said that he got hooked on flicks by attending the same sort of movie-house ruckuses with throngs of sticky kids. Jujubes! Dots! Milk Duds! Tarzan!

While I eventually outgrew the Legion of Decency and became an amateur movie maven (I’ve even written a few reviews), Herx joined the Legion of Decency and grew up into a human encyclopedia of 20th-century cinema. No one has seen more movies than Henry Herx. Few reviewers have his ability to capture the scope of a film — its aesthetic coherence, its moral fabric, its emotional credibility and the pleasure, or pain, of watching it — with so few words and so much wit.

Henry Herx was a genius of the 30-second review, which — when you think about it — is plenty of time to sum up and pass judgment on the vast majority of flicks.

I interviewed Henry Herx 17 years ago when I stumbled upon the discovery that the re-named Legion of Decency had a hotline rendering reviews of current films. When I called, I heard a series of concise and insightful thumbnails, each with a subtle but substantive moral undertone. In Henry Herx’s court, a film review was a balance of art and morality folded into a nutshell. The filmgoer learned from him just enough to decide — using either criterion, or both — whether to see a movie, and whom to take along.

Reviewing the 1995 clunker, The Scarlet Letter, Herx deemed the movie “a badly flawed adaptation of the Nathaniel Hawthorne classic set in 1666 Puritan Massachusetts, where an unfaithful wife, played by Demi Moore, is held up to public scorn for refusing to name the father of her illegitimate child. Director Roland Joffe fills the screen with bogus emotion, eliminating the novel’s moral insights by adding ludicrous characters, goofy situations and an absurdly happy ending.”

When I got Herx on the phone in 1995, we settled in easily, reminiscing about favorite movies and agreeing that the old Legion of Decency was a dinosaur overdue for extinction. In the ‘70’s, when the Church relaxed its standards for judging movies, Herx was set free to exercise not just the well-honed moralism of a good Catholic schoolboy, but the cool, critical acumen of an unshockable film maven who’s seen it all — twice.

One of the questions I asked him was if — as representative of the Church — he thought of himself as a censor. “Since the ‘60’s,” he replied thoughtfully, “films have not been a family experience. Increasingly, movies are an adult experience. At first, the approach the Legion of Decency tried to take was to keep Hollywood films for family entertainment. The battle was lost because television had taken over the role of family entertainment, and families weren’t going to movie theatres anymore… Our approach to the job we’re doing now is not to try to hold back the tide of change but to provide information, consumer information for thinking Catholics…”

Playing devil’s advocate, I suggested that a church-sponsored film office posed a sort of Big Brother danger to filmmakers’ First Amendment rights. “That’s illogical. We’re trying to help people make judgments. That’s what people are doing all the time — making judgments about life, hopefully with the right information. I would object strenuously to anyone who would say we don’t have a right to give out this information. I’d say they were trampling on my First Amendment rights.”

Toward the end of our conversation, I popped the big question. When I was little, I was terrified that I might accidentally stumble into a movie I wasn’t supposed to see, an “A-2,” or an “A-4,” or — God forbid! — Liz Taylor wearing nothing but a slip, in a “condemned” movie. If I saw her — I mean the movie — was it a sin?

“No,” said Henry Herx, upheaving the very foundations of my childhood moral edifice, “it was never a sin.”

Not even if Father Rourke said so?

“Not even if Father Rourke said so.”

My God, I murmured as I thanked Henry Herx and hung up. I realized I had squandered tons of youthful curiosity — and the first sweet surge of my hormonal tides — in Lenten overkill! All those juicy movies I’d missed!

All those murderous psychopaths, dripping with blood!

Richard Widmark… Robert Mitchum… Anthony Perkins.

All those smoldering sex goddesses, spilling from their blouses!

Rita Hayworth… Jane Russell… Anita Ekberg…

And oh! most heartbreaking of all… Marilyn. If only I’d known.