The Moon Is Blue Reviews

No one today is likely to mistake this smarmy little sex farce for a good film, but it is significant historically as one of the nails in the coffin of Hollywood's self-imposed Production Code. Otto Preminger, an Austrian bull running amuck in the china shop of Hollywood censorship, refused to take the words "virgin", "pregnant", "mistress," and "seduction" out of his script, based on a popular Broadway farce. The film was released without the MPAA seal of approval, and was a solid box office success. The rest, as they say, is history. The story--which hinges on whether a thirty-something architect (William Holden) or a forty-something roue (David Niven) will get a twenty-something virgin (Maggie McNamara) into bed--follows a painfully predictable line. Holden and Niven are fine, but McNamara, a rather amateurish performer here making her film debut, comes across like a recent drop-out from the Audrey Hepburn Spirited Gamine Academy. (She would act in only three more films before her suicide in 1978.) Luckily, the scene in the taxi where some of the "dirty" words are used comes fairly early on, so you can skip the rest and just read about it in some film history text. Try watching TROUBLE IN PARADISE or THE MAJOR AND THE MINOR instead.