"The Lovers" ("Les Amants") (1958) - you know it when you see it.

When I was in law school, the most controversial battleground of the 1st Amendment was not school prayer or press freedom or even religious preferences. It was censorship of the arts, focusing on the definition of "obscenity." States passed laws which tried to proscribe sexual content, especially in motion pictures, and particularly in the European imports that were infesting art houses all over the country.

Challenged by the commercial disaster of television, American filmmakers in the 1950's struggled to produce movies with "adult" content, stretching the boundaries of taste and "morals". But most of the studios didn’t dare to cross any lines. Douglas Sirk’s suburban melodramas talked about infidelity, but no filmmaker dared to show it in any explicit scene. The age-old devices of cameras pulling away from closing doors, showing waves crashing on the shore, and other heavily coded but well understood substitutes for sex scenes were still needed.

The rigid Hays Code, Legion of Decency, The Catholic Church and other arbiters of taste and morals, supported by laws in many states, were simply too powerful. While definitions of obscenity varied with each organization and statute, any nudity or showing of the act of sex was always covered.

In 1958, the U.S. Supreme Court, in Jacobellis v. Ohio, finally overturned Ohio’s ban on the release of a motion picture on grounds of obscenity. It is from this case, the Justice Potter Stewart’s often quoted concurring opinion was given. Stewart wrote that defining obscenity was an almost impossible task. He couldn’t do it with precision and without trampling on artistic freedom. In effect, he wrote, the most he could say was that he knew it when he saw it, and the film in question was definitely not obscene, even though it contained brief nudity and a sex scene.

The movie in question was called "The Lovers" ("Les Amants"), directed by Louis Malle. It had been a sensation in Europe and was a critical and commercial success. It made both the leading actress, Jeanne Moreau, and its director, superstars. Malle’s success at 25 heralded the "New Wave" of young French directors who followed in quick succession to revolutionize the art of film: Clouzot, Godard, Truffault.

I just watched "The Lovers" on DVD and, placed in its time, can understand what all the fuss was about. It is a rather mundane story of a provincial haute bourgeois marriage going sour. The young wife is bored with her inattentive older husband, travels frequently to Paris where she is having an affair with an attractive man of her own social set, who bores her somewhat less. The husband becomes annoyed with her frequent absences, and is possibly suspicious about an affair though he is too snooty to confront her. It is hinted that he too is meandering, with a woman who works for him. The husband insists that she invite her Paris friends to visit their country house. On the day they are to arrive, the wife’s car breaks down and she accepts a lift from a young man who has rejected his bourgeois roots and the social pretense that money and position afford. At first she is annoyed by the young man, but eventually he impresses her with his carefree air.

In a classically romantic sequence, she roams the gardens in the night and encounters the young man, who pursues her. They fall in love and decide to run away together. Back in the house, the wife kisses her young daughter in her bed, and dreamily takes her new lover to her bedroom There follows a passionate, though tastefully (by today’s standards quite mild) love scene in which the camera does not – as Malle commented — move to the window at the moment of truth, but rather lingers during the consummation of their love, including a close-up of Moreau’s face as she whispers repeatedly and more and more intensely, "Mon amour, mon amour," as she reaches orgasm. There are more scenes of the couple cuddling, in bed and in the bath and back in the bed until the sun rises. They then get into his car and leave.

Absent the historical context, the movie doesn’t qualify as a great film. Fifty years of sex filled movies about bored housewives having affairs have steeled me against this ancient relic, which contains the scenes I've seen so often that that I had to keep reminding myself that this movie created the clichés. Even considering that, it doesn’t do what Malle seems to have wanted. Moreau’s jump from unsatisfied ennui to passionate liberated woman seems too sudden. He fails to prepare us adequately for the gauzy romance that she finds in the idyllic garden. He stated that he wanted to capture love at first sight, but as the scene progressed, I kept thinking that this woman was playacting at love, doubted that she would follow through, despite her contented smiles. Her later work, especially as Catherine in "Jules And Jim", were far more convincing portrayals of the women she came to epitomize. Yet, as the first slap on the face to the bourgeois mind set, it is still retains some of its power.

European censors objected, not only to the explicit sex scene, which was perhaps the first of its kind in a mainstream popular release, but even more vehemently to the values expressed by the woman’s conduct, leaving her child behind while she pursues real love. Notably, it was not the story of adultery that was found objectionable, but rather the subversion of family values by a woman who dares to abandon her child in a loveless marriage and who appears to be content at the fade out, as if the filmmaker approved of her actions.

The story Malle chose was based on an 18th Century novel (written by a contemporary of LeClos, who wrote "Les Liaisons Dangereuses."). Although European literature contained a tradition of similar stories, notably "Madame Bovary" and "Anna Karenina," the opprobrium that this movie inspired is proof of just how hide-bound the culture had become in the 1950's.