Hedy Lamarr. Ruth Barton

It seemed to Rollett that the film started three times and each time came to a halt. Yet again, however, Rollett was full of praise for Hedy Kiesler, who was not only beautiful but, as the many close-ups demonstrated, intense and expressive. The Wiener Allgemeine Zeitung's critic wrote lyrically of Hedy Kiesler's beauty. The Neue Zeitung was less appreciative of the film's finer qualities. “It shouldn't be called ‘Ecstasy,’” its critic stormed, “it should be called ‘Scandalous'!…Nudity in cinema is never aesthetic.” Even worse, Machaty's effort was boring and its narrative, mindless. It could only have passed the censors, the writer continued, warming to the theme, because they fell asleep during the screening, a dereliction of duty that might otherwise have saved the public the disappointment of seeing the film.¹⁸

      If the Viennese film critics were divided over the artistic merits of Ecstasy, for the citizens of Vienna, the issue was a little different. At the seven o'clock screening on the film's opening night at the Ufa-Tonkino, some audience members hissed and booed; four people were forcibly removed by security staff. This evidently prompted the rest of the audience to join in, filling the auditorium with catcalls, hissing, and shouting. Some left of their own free will during the screening; others remained to the end and started demanding that management be called. Cries of “We want our money back. It's a scandal!” were heard. As cinemagoers for the next showing began attempting to take their seats, the police were called to restore order.¹⁹ Similar public outcries accompanied other screenings elsewhere; much of the public's unhappiness was not about the film's erotic content, but its misleading advertising, which had, according to Rollet, “awoken in them unjustifiable expectations of obscenity.”²⁰ This kind of response, over frustrated expectations, would be echoed by filmgoers from Paris to New York.

      Audiences in Germany, where the film was first banned and then released under the title Symphony of Love (Symphonie derLiebe), also greeted the screening with laughter and whistles from certain seats and with reproaches for this behavior from others. The German version was heavily censored and contained two scenes shot especially for it. One scene made it clear that Eva was already divorced from her husband when she met her lover, a second added a happy ending, with the lovers united. Later, Machaty claimed that the film had been banned because Hedy Kiesler was Jewish, though there is no evidence to support this. More spicy rumors spread after the war: that a copy of the film had been found in Goebbels's private safe; that it was Göring's favorite film and he also had a private copy.²¹

      Ecstasy in America

      Ecstasy was distributed in the United States by Eureka Productions, which also traded under the name Jewel Productions. In January 1935, the Customs Bureau of the U.S. Treasury Department denied entry to a print of the film. The case came to court, and the judge, District Judge John C. Knox, ruled in favor of the plaintiff, declaring, “I think that this is the only verdict that properly could be returned…this picture, in my judgment, had no purpose to serve and was intended to serve no purpose other than to bring about a glorification of sexual intercourse between human beings and between animals and to arouse lustful feelings in those who might see it. It is suggestive of sexuality throughout.”²²

      Despite a swift appeal lodged by Samuel Cummins, general manager of Eureka Productions, a zealous U.S. marshal burned the film. No pushover, Cummins simply ordered another print and won on appeal. Cummins's interest in film distribution was not limited to controversial Czech pictures: In 1934, he imported a film made by Cornelius Vanderbilt Jr. from Germany, which Cummins renamed Hitler's Reign of Terror; the film introduced many Americans to the realities of Nazi dictatorship. Cummins also produced War Is a Racket that year, which aimed to discredit arms dealers. He ran a sharp business distributing exploitation films and was familiar with the art cinema circuit where such releases were often shown.

      With the new print of Ecstasy, he did, however, exercise some sleight of hand. This version contained a scene of a typewriter moving along its carriage while a voice-over read that the girl's divorce had been granted and she was now free to remarry (a close-up of the typed letter ends with the line “I hope that your next marriage will be a happy one”); a new ending showed Eva standing with a baby in her arms while Adam gazed wistfully at the hill where he first glimpsed her.

      Cummins's new 1935 print went into immediate circulation in independent picture houses and in states where it was not banned outright. He had thirty-six prints in circulation and audiences saw different versions depending on the local censorship regulations. Critical responses varied widely among those who saw the film on the independent circuit. Most knew of the film's reputation from press coverage of its European release, and it was also widely believed the Nazis banned the film because Hedy Kiesler was Jewish. The story of Fritz Mandl's attempts to buy up all existing prints of the film (detailed in the next chapter) was also familiar to many, as was the rumor that he pressured his old friend Mussolini to award the top prize at the Venice Film Festival to Man of Aran instead of Ecstasy.

      Informed critics also knew that the film they were reviewing contained the inserted sequence in which we are informed that Eva has obtained a divorce from her husband. They most likely were cheated of the view of Hedy Kiesler's naked breasts and the orgasm sequence but were treated to a new soundtrack composed by William Colligan and Henry Gershwin, rather than the original by Giuseppe Becce. As Vinzenz Hediger has discussed, Machaty likely anticipated censorship problems and shot several versions of Ecstasy to accommodate local censorship requirements; most writers agree that the preferred version is the 2005 reconstruction by Prague's state archive, Narodni Filmarchiv.²³

      The Legion of Decency's response to Machaty's film was typical of the moral perspective taken on Hedy's role: “[The love] affair, accompanied by heavy-handed symbolism, is portrayed solely on an animal plane. ‘Bestiality’ would be a far more descriptive title than ‘Ecstasy.'”²⁴ Other critics deemed it an art film with appeal to that specific audience. For a few, Ecstasy was considered art of the highest order:

      Someone has well denned great art by stating that it will yield only in part to dissection and analysis. Always there remains an elusive residue of the unexplainable. For this reason we are at a loss for words with which to convey the qualities of Ecstasy. It is a pictorial poem, a symphony in moods and movement expressed in the most evanescent overtones of sight and sound. It lives with a harmony and a rhythm which are the rising and falling rhythms of nature, and it overwhelms us with the ecstasies and the inappealable tragedies which they bring. No picture which we have seen has so completely realized the cinema as an independent art form.²⁵

      In a subsequent editorial in The Hollywood Spectator, editor Welford Beann returned to the film and its triumph as an art film, praising in particular its spare use of dialogue: ”Ecstasy was made by people who know what motion pictures are. Ours are made by people who lack such knowledge, or perhaps by people who are not allowed by the higher-ups to apply such knowledge to their screen creations.”²⁶

      Those reviewing the film as a work of art managed to turn a blind eye to Cummins's and the independent cinemas’ marketing campaigns for Ecstasy, which promoted the product as the “sensational uncensored European version” and decorated their lobbies with sensual images of the naked Hedwig Kiesler. Cummins released the film in certain districts to coincide with the opening of other films starring Hedy (now Lamarr); thus, Ecstasy received a November 1940 release in New York to coincide with the first night of Comrade X (King Vidor, 1940) and Cummins re-released it in New York in 1950 to take advantage of the publicity for Cecil B. DeMille's Samson and Delilah, in which Hedy played the starring role.

      Viewing the new print in May 1937, Joseph Breen, the sober head of the Production Code Administration (PCA), whose job it was to enforce morality on Hollywood, pronounced that “the picture is definitely and specifically in violation of the Production Code. This violation is suggested by the basic story and by a number of the details, in that it is a story of illicit love and frustrated sex, treated in detail and without sufficient compensating moral values.” The PCA ensured that Hollywood cinema conformed to the standard of morality set forth in its Production Code, and Breen was charged with guiding filmmakers toward acceptable