Emmanuelle, a 1974 softcore flick starring Sylvia Kristel, was only the beginning of the Ontario censor chief's influence on film and video in the province.United Archives/Getty Images
I remember trying to sneak into Child’s Play 3 at the Cinema Six in Timmins, Ont. I was 11 and didn’t make it past the final boss at the door. That defeat sparked my fascination with the rules around what Ontarians are allowed to watch.
Later, as a journalist covering Toronto’s film scene, I often returned to Ontario’s uneasy relationship with classification and regulation, writing about films such as Larry Kent’s High, Al Razutis’s A Message From Our Sponsor and Catherine Breillat’s Fat Girl.
Rarely discussed in this history is Emmanuelle, the 1974 softcore smash starring Sylvia Kristel. I recently made a short documentary for Severin Films, titled Emmanuelle in Ontario, about its controversial release. Just Jaeckin’s film became one of the most profitable French films ever made, launching a wave of sequels and imitators. Yet its release intersected with a transition at the Ontario Censor Board: the retirement of long-time chair O.J. Silverthorne and the arrival of Donald Sims, a broadcaster with the sensibility that audiences should not be trusted.
Created in 1911, the board emerged at the demand of moral crusaders who saw movies as threats to public decency. It held sweeping powers: it could censor or ban films, approve or reject trailers and ads, decide where a film could play and even approve the construction of new theatres.
By 1974, the board had operated for over 60 years. Silverthorne, chief censor since 1934, stepped down after 40 years on the job. He often described himself as “a man in the middle” – one who must please the public, the film industry and the government. Sims, by contrast, arrived with little faith in viewers or the industry.
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On Nov. 20, 1974, Sims signed off on Emmanuelle, but only if specific cuts were made to sex scenes. Columbia Pictures of Canada boss Harvey Harnick took his objections public, criticizing Sims for demanding eliminations that hadn’t been required in other provinces. A public dispute erupted.
The board’s process was secretive: padlocked cans of film delivered to the Toronto office, private screenings and decisions issued without explanation. If cuts were approved, the board removed the scenes from all prints and the excised film-strips were stored in a vault. Projectionists in Ontario theatres could only run prints stamped with the board’s seal.
What counted as objectionable varied by era. In the 1910s, too much of the American flag was prohibited to subvert U.S. influence and maintain a pro-British tone. In the 1940s, sacrilegious words were struck from film. By the 1960s, concerns shifted to sex and violence, with little consistency.
For Emmanuelle, motion during an airplane love scene was to be cut. “Allow head and shoulder views,” noted the board’s report in November, 1974. Harnick joked: “Someone at the board is saying you can copulate without moving.”
With a major Christmas release at stake, Columbia capitulated. Emmanuelle opened Dec. 20, 1974. Its tagline, “X was never like this,” was softened to “R was never like this.” Reviews were harsh. The Globe’s Jay Scott wrote: “The movie tries to explain eroticism as if it were a demonstration pulley or a hydraulic pump built for the edification of pimpled physics students.” None of this hurt its box office sales; it ran for weeks and became a repertory staple.
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For Sims, Emmanuelle was only the start. In 1975, the province amended the Theatres Act, extending the board’s authority to all film and video formats. As art historian Taryn Sirove wrote in her book Ruling Out Art, this marked a shift: “The Board of Censors and the ministries that oversaw it no longer had the same agenda they once had to bolster cultural industries.” By the late 1970s, video artists, experimental filmmakers and the queer community were targeted by the board.
Lawyer Rosemary Sexton joined the Censor Board in 1977. “We would go into the screening room at nine, watch the first movie, break for lunch and then continue on in the afternoon,” she recalls. The chairs – Sims, later replaced by Mary Brown – weren’t present, but their influence was felt. “There was an atmosphere of intimidation,” Sexton says. She later resigned in protest over the board’s handling of the Palme d’Or–winning film The Tin Drum in 1980.
Sims, defending his decisions in a 1979 CBC interview about Bernardo Bertolucci’s Luna, said “too many people are ready to call things art, when it’s not really art,” adding, “if you get down into the garbage, you’re gonna wallow in it. It’s going to infect you sooner or later.”
Sexton, who later became a Globe columnist, says Sims saw no difference between art and pornography. “He shouldn’t have been making decisions about movies. He should have been working in finance.”
In 2019, the Ford government scrapped the provincial classification system, which was renamed the Ontario Film Authority six years earlier, citing declining revenues in the streaming era. A self-regulated system replaced it in 2020. The Maritimes board has also announced it will dissolve, but British Columbia, Alberta and Quebec still maintain classification systems.
In August, I reported on the classification hurdles facing B.C. cinemas in particular, with exhibitors describing the system as “parochial,” “archaic” and “out of step.” A century of headlines shows the same pattern – that whether it is a government or lobby group, the final boss of film regulation still looms.
Emmanuelle in Ontario screens at the Revue Cinema in Toronto on Nov. 29, followed by the original Emmanuelle and Gordon Lawson’s stop-motion short, The Censor (1980).