The Lion (1962)

Here’s the latest from The Magnificent 60s

For such a harmless picture The Lion raises a couple of troubling issues. The first concerns the titular beast. Doubt if you’d get the authorities these days to greenlight a movie where a pre-pubescent girl was in such close proximity to a full-grown lion. Having as a safety measure two sharpshooters on the sidelines out of camera range, as director Jack Cardiff did here, might not cut it.

Secondly, we’ve got censor double standard. I remember my shocked parents forbidding me from seeing Zulu (1964), a massive hit in Britain, on account of the toplessness of the indigenous females. The censor didn’t slap an X-certificate on that sequence on the assumption that such nudity, in the context of tribal tradition, wouldn’t apparently incite the lewd male gaze….

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