Let's talk about sex during the Production Code!

Shelley Winters was TCM's Star of the Month a few months back. One of her movies that I hadn't seen before is The Chapman Report, so I recorded that and recently sat down to watch it.

Dr. George Chapman (Andrew Duggan) and his assistant Paul Radford (Efrem Zimbalist Jr.) are flying from the east coast out to Los Angeles in order to continue their scientific research, which is on the subject of human sexuality. Specifically, they want to do research into the sex lives of women, somthing which would have been a fairly controversial subject back in the early 1960s (and, you'd think -- rightly, in my view -- difficult to discuss with the Production Code still in effect).

Cut to a series of suburban women, all of whom plan to go to a lecture Chapman is giving about his research. This lecture is also a forum to call for volunteers, who are being handled in a very discreet way, or at least that's the intention. They'll all get ID numbers that aren't tied to their names in any way (indeed, they're not supposed to sign the cards they fill out); they'll do the interviews behind screens so that the researchers interviewing them won't be able to see them, and the like. The four women who form the main part of the movie are:

Kathleen Barclay (Jane Fonda). She was married to a test pilot who unfortunately died in an accident, leaving her a widow for the past three years. She's moved back in with Dad, and the two are busy editing her late husband's memoir, trying to turn it into a book in some way that might possibly sell. She's frigid because she was a virgin when she got married, and then when she didn't perform well for her husband, he treated her less than admirably.

Sarah Garnell (Shelley Winters). She's in a conventional marriage to Frank (Harold Stone) with two children, but one that's hit a rut with her being bored by the relative lack of sex. So she's started getting romantically involved with Fred (Ray Danton), a director who works at the community theater that middle-aged housewives like Sarah were wont to take part in.

Naomi Shields (Claire Bloom). She's a divorcée, who suffers from an extremely high libido. As such, she started having sex at a relatively young age, and having it with a succession of guys. She got married (we never see her ex-husband), and had a series of affairs. Indeed, one of the first times we see her, she meets the bottled-water man (a young Chad Everett) delivering to her house; not long after that, a musician brings her some mail that was mistakenly delivered to him; this starts a disastrous relationship.

Teresa Harnish (Glynis Johns). She's happily married to Geoffrey (John Dehner), working with him to put out an audiobook of recorded poetry or somesuch. She starts recording her interview, which seems like a huge no-no, and gets the distinct impression that, while she's happily married as far as she knows, the interviewers are going to find it boring. So when a group of football players led by Ed Kraski (Ty Hardin) accidentally cross her path at the beach, she decides to start pursuing Ed, although things don't wind up the way she imagines.

While Naomi's story winds up in melodramatic disaster, as though she could have been one of the characters in a movie like The Best of Everything; Teresa's goes more humorously wrong. And frankly, this dichotomy is part of the problem with the movie. If everything had been handled as more of a light drama or a comedy in the sense that the later Sex and the Single Girl was, the movie might not be such a mess. However, director George Cukor and the writers wanted this to be a serious drama.

As I mentioned, back in the early 1960s you still couldn't really talk that openly about sex. So trying to talk about the serious issues that the Bloom and Fonda characters have is very difficult if not impossible. Well, maybe only impossible to make something good out of the material. In Fonda's case, it doesn't help that there's a serious violation of scientific research ethics that drives the plot. What works better is Winters' storyline, and even more so the more comic Johns storyline. She comes off as the best of the bunch.

I suppose, not having even been born back when The Chapman Report was made, that it should be viewed as a product of its time. It's just a product that's doomed by the constraints of the time.