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  • Featured Movies
    • 12 Years a Slave (2013)
    • 1941 (Spielberg) >
      • 1941: Part 2
    • Affair of the Necklace
    • Alice's Restaurant: best of the American counterculture movies?
    • Army of Crime
    • Army of Shadows
    • The Artist >
      • 'The Artist':2
    • Anthropoid: the Assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, 1942: Four Very Different Movies >
      • Hangmen Also Die: Hollywood meets emigres from Nazi Germany
    • Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman
    • Battle of the Rails ( La bataille du rail)
    • Belle (2014)
    • Bhowani Junction
    • Blackboard Jungle >
      • Blackboard Jungle Pt.2
    • Carry On Up the Khyber
    • Charlie Wilson's War
    • The City Across the River
    • The Counterculture : best movies about the American counterculture era
    • Custer - two contrasting movie portrayals: "They Died With Their Boots On" and "Little Big Man" >
      • They Died With Their Boots On
      • Stalin and the Movies >
        • Stalin, Disney, Eisenstein, & Ivan the Terrible
      • Death of Stalin
      • Little Big Man (1970)
    • Dark Knight Rises >
      • Dark Knight Rises Pt.2
    • The Deceivers
    • Diplomacy / Diplomatie (2014) movie
    • Dunkirk: Christopher Nolan's epic movie
    • El Cid
    • The Enigma Machine : four movies about the Enigma machine
    • Generation War >
      • Generation War: Jazz and the Swing Kids
      • Generation War: German women and the war
    • The Great Gatsby On the Big Screen
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    • A Hard Day's Night: Influences on the Movie
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      • Martha Gellhorn >
        • Women war correspondents
    • Hyde Park on Hudson
    • The Imitation Game (2014) >
      • The Imitation Game Part 2: the truth about Turing and the Bletchley 'Bombe'. >
        • The Imitation Game: Turing, Bletchley and the Colossus >
          • Imitation Game: Turing, Bletchley Park and the Soviet spy
    • The Inner Circle (1991)
    • Is Paris Burning? >
      • Is Paris Burning? General von Choltitz
    • KIng of the Khyber Rifles
    • Kim
    • Léon Morin, Priest
    • Les Miserables (2012) >
      • Les Miserables in Movies: Fantine the grisette >
        • Les Miserables 3: guide to some historical references
    • "Les Misérables": Claude Lelouch updates a classic
    • Lives of a Bengal Lancer (1935)
    • The Long Duel
    • Looking at Lincoln - Spielberg's "Lincoln" & its predecessors and influences >
      • Spielberg's Lincoln
      • Abraham Lincoln: D.W. Griffith's version
      • Young Mr. Lincoln (1939)
      • Abe Lincoln in Illinois
    • Mandingo (1975) Dir: Richard Fleischer
    • The Man Who Would Be King
    • Marie Antoinette (2006)
    • Marie-Antoinette / Shadow of the Guillotine
    • Farewell, My Queen
    • Marie Antoinette (1938) >
      • Marie Antoinette (1938) Pt.2
    • Mayerling
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      • Midnight in Paris:2 >
        • Midnight in Paris:3
    • The Monuments Men (2014) Dir: George Clooney
    • North West Frontier / Flame Over India
    • La Nuit de Varennes - a post-modern take on a key episode in the French Revolution
    • Le Pere Tranquille (The Quiet Father) 1946
    • Peterloo: MIke Leigh's New Movie >
      • Peterloo2
    • Pompeii in the movies >
      • Pompeii (2014) Paul W.S. Anderson director
    • Rebel Without a Cause
    • Ridicule
    • Scott Fitzgerald Goes to Hollywood
    • Sergeant Rutledge
    • Silence of the Sea
    • Swing Kids (1993)
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    • Stranglers of Bombay
    • Tonka
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    • The Wind and the Lion
    • Woman in Gold >
      • Woman in Gold Pt.2: the Vienna Scene in early 20th Century Vienna
    • Un village française: French TV series
    • Waterloo: the movie about Napoleon's final battle
    • Zabriskie Point
  • Places
    • Settings: the North West Frontier
    • Movies Set in the North-West Frontier >
      • Thuggees
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  • Events
    • Events That Inspired Movies 2
    • French Resistance and Collaboration in World War II: Selected Movies
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    • People Part 2
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    • Rock Around the Clock
    • Don't Knock the Rock
    • The Girl Can't Help It >
      • Pt2:The Girl Can't Help It
  • Free State of Jones
  • Great Wall (2017)
  • Rogue One & World War 2
  • Hollywood and anti-Americanism in a small country: Amercan movies & their critics in New Zealand 1916 - 1956
    • New Zealanders' Love of Movies 1900s-1956
    • Campaign against Hollywood movies in New Zealand
    • Campaign against HollywoodPt 2
  • Hollywood versus Pinewood Pt2
  • New Zealanders and Movies: the Enigmatic Gordon Mirams: film critic, film censor and public intellectual
  • Aryan Papers: Stanley Kubrick's Proposed Movie

The Myth of Gordon Mirams, New Zealand film censor,
​ movie critic and cultural entrpreneur

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Mirams in the Film Censor's Office early 1950s. He proclaimed himself a liberal on matters of film and literary censorship but the evidence contradicts this shrewdly self-engineered image.
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During the 1940s and early 1950s the "New Zealand Listener" had a wide circulation because it was the only publication allowed to list all the week's radio programmes. Mirams made his name as a witty and incisive film critic -for a time the only one in the country.
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Mirams' "Speaking Candidly" (1945) was a pioneering work of cinematic and socio-cultural criyicism.
From the late 1930s to the mid-1950s Gordon Mirams was a key figure  on the  New Zealand' cultural landscape. A former journalist, he used his literary talents, lifelong interests in  movies and New Zealand's cultural politics  as well as his wide-ranging social and political contacts to  become an influential figure in the inner circles of the Labour Government of 1935 - 1949. By the 1940s he was one of the country's best-known public intellectuals.  Mirams became the country's first genuine film critic for the New Zealand Listener, which was for years the only only New Zealand  publication containing cultural commentary. The weekly publication had a wide readership because it  provided the only source of radio programmes  listings and times. His lively and stylish film reviews (with heir cleverly concealed political commentary) were for years a popular feature of the Listener.  He also wrote and spoke frequently on movies and movie culture, urging a new, more liberal approach to film censorship in New Zealand, ostensibly based on age restrictions to movies rather than outright banning or cutting films.
is wide range of social and political contacts in Wellington to become New Zealand Film Censor  and he used this success and his efforts  in setting up and organising  film societies roles as the nation's first genuine film critic and then as  New Zealand Film Censor from 1949 to 1959 to become a a shrewd  participant in, and manipulator of, cultural politics during the  the period from before the second World War to the mid-fifties. 
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 Mirams  took pains to construct an image of himself as a bold  and broadminded pioneer on a civilising mission in New Zealand's cultural wilderness. and as a modernising progressive in his approach to film (and print) censorship. He cheerfully declared his socialist sympathies  and proclaimed his fondness for democratic values. 
But in fact Mirams was an elitist in his approach to culture and education in general and movies in particular. Like his fellow cultural campaigner  Walter J. Scott, Mirams  was convinced that ordinary New Zealanders needed paternalistic guidance and supervision  from their cultural superiors, in the form of censorship and education. Like most New Zealand public intellectuals of that era Mirams believed that  popular culture, especially American popular culture, was a pernicious influence, tempting New Zealanders away from socialist  values  and 'high' cultural standards. 
​

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Mirams tried to use his role as film censor to protect the New Zealand public -and especially its youth - from what he considered to be the excesses of Hollywood culture. These included an emphasis on violence, sentimentality, and the overwhelming aim of making money rather than art.  So he banned Marlon Brando's motorbike gang epic The Wild Ones and tried to ban Rebel Without a Cause. But an Appeal Board recognised what most overseas critics had seen in Rebel: a serious, thought-provoking , intelligent examination of family and generational conflict. Mirams' ban was overturned .

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