[1] The petitioner wished to exhibit Le blé en herbe (The Game of Love), a French film directed by Claude Autant-Lara and based on a novel by Colette.

[1] After the defendants objected to the Master's Report, the District Court issued its ruling on March 21, 1956, sustained their objections, calling the film prurient and stating that the First Amendment still allows local authorities to censor films deemed obscene, noting that the right to free speech under the First Amendment is "not absolute and unlimited.” The court cited Near v. Minnesota;[2] Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire;[3] and Joseph Burstyn, Inc. v.

The Court issued a one-sentence per curiam opinion, granting the petition for a writ of certiorari and summarily reversing the judgment of the Seventh Circuit.

The Court purports to leave these questions for another day, but I am aware of no constitutional principle which permits us to hold that the communication of ideas through one medium may be censored while other media are immune.”[11] Citing such precedents as Near v. Minnesota[2] and Grosjean v. American Press Co.,[12] as well as Cantwell v. Connecticut,[13] in which the court found previous restraint unconstitutional, Chief Justice Warren emphasized that the question presented in the case was not whether an exhibitor has a “complete and absolute freedom to exhibit at least once, any and every kind of motion picture.” Rather, the question was whether government at any level can “require all motion picture exhibitors to submit all films...for licensing and censorship prior to public exhibition within the jurisdiction.”[11] Protesting that the court's decision “gives formal sanction to censorship in its purest and most far-reaching form,” Chief Justice Warren compared the Chicago censorship procedure to the “English licensing laws of the seventeenth century which were commonly used to suppress dissent.” Recounting several dozen recent examples of egregious censorship in the U.S., including a Chicago ban on Charlie Chaplin's The Great Dictator, which the city deemed offensive to German-Americans, he referred to “the evils of the censor's basic authority, of the mischief of the system against which so many great men have waged stubborn and often precarious warfare for centuries.”[11] Justice Douglas, in a briefer dissent with which Justices Warren and Black concurred, wrote that “censorship of movies is unconstitutional because it is a prior restraint and violative of the First Amendment.” Citing statements about censorship from Plato's Republic and Hobbes's Leviathan, he noted: “Regimes of censorship are common in the world today.

Every dictator has one; every Communist regime finds it indispensable.” While censors had once been concerned with political satire, they were now preoccupied “with atheism and with sexual morality,” with a variety of groups seeking to “translate into secular law their notions of morality.”[14] Yet in the U.S., Justice Douglas pronounced, “the state is not the secular arm of any religious school of thought, nor is the church an instrument of the state.” The First Amendment forbids the government from supporting any censor: “It is not for government to pick and choose according to the standards of any religious, political, or philosophical group.

It is not permissible, as I read the Constitution, for government to release one movie and refuse to release another because of an official's concept of the prevailing need or the public good.”[14] Justice Douglas further warned of “the ease with which the censor can erode liberty of expression.” The point of the First Amendment is “to enlarge, not to limit, freedom in literature and in the arts as well as in politics, economics, law, and other fields....No more potent force in defeat of that freedom could be designed than censorship.

It is a weapon that no minority or majority group, acting through government, should be allowed to wield over any of us.”[14] Within a very short time after rendering these two decisions, the U.S. Supreme Court would shift toward a far broader interpretation of the First Amendment.

The Court would hear several related cases over the next five years, and by 1965 reversed its decision on censorship, ruling states and municipalities can not necessarily censor films under the First and Fourteenth Amendments.