Tag: ontario board of censors

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The Last Laugh: Banned in Ontario

Eric Veillette

Released in 1924, Murnau’s film was not screened in Ontario until 1928. During the winter of 1925, F.W. Murnau’s masterpiece, The Last Laugh, was shown to a very exclusive group of Ontario movie-goers. The audience was the Ontario Board of Censors, and while they were no doubt impressed by the film’s dazzling cinematography and lack of subtitles, the film was banned simply because it was made in Germany. Murnau’s film was screened in other provinces and shattered box office records in the United States, but provincial treasurer W.H. Price, under whose authority the censors sanitized cinema, maintained that with the … Continue reading The Last Laugh: Banned in Ontario

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Restricted: Ontario film censorship in the 1950s

Eric Veillette

While rummaging through the Revue Cinema’s projection booth in preparation for a recent Silent Sundays screening, I found this old “Adult entertainment” sign buried under some obsolete  electronics. As we recently examined, Ontario was the first Canadian province to enact “Adult entertainment” film designations, reflecting the public’s reaction to the changing mores in Hollywood and European film-making. With their playful italics and authoritative bold type, these signs dangled underneath a theatre’s marquee or canopy — seen here at the Mavety Theatre showing The Tender Trap in 1956 — leading pre-pubescent boys to imagine what restrictive fun they were missing out on unless … Continue reading Restricted: Ontario film censorship in the 1950s

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One hundred years of film censorship in Ontario

Eric Veillette

Since 2011 marks the centenary of the creation of the Ontario Board of Censors, we present the first in a series of articles examining film censorship in Ontario. There was a time in Ontario when film versions of Shakespeare’s greatest plays were too violent or too racy for the public good. In February 1910, one Staff Insp. Kennedy seized a print of Hamlet. The Daily Star quoted this arbiter of public morals about how how he “witnessed a moving picture show of Hamlet, written I think by Shakespeare, this week. . . .That’s all very well to say it’s a … Continue reading One hundred years of film censorship in Ontario

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Ontario Film Censorship: Then & Now

Eric Veillette

In case you missed it, I wrote about the history of film censorship in Ontario for the Toronto Star last weekend. I was surprised to learn from a few friends who didn’t know we still had censors (nowadays known as the Ontario Film Review Board), but the truth is that Ontario has had constant film censorship, certification, review — whatever you want to call it — for nearly a century. I originally set out to contrast the puritanical outlook on film exhibition from the board’s inception in 1911 to its latter days in the 1980s with today’s “hands-off” approach, but … Continue reading Ontario Film Censorship: Then & Now