Any game, sport, play, or public diversion, including, specifically, miniature golf, is forbidden by law on Sunday in Massachusetts. This same law also once closed the doors of movie theaters, unless their owners could get a city license to show a picture. But the cities of Massachusetts could not grant such a license without a censor's written approval that the film was in keeping with the character of the day. Even the State government got into the act; the Commissioner of Public Safety had to see the picture, too. All this censorship machinery, however, came to a sudden halt last summer. On July 6, 1955, the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts ruled the Sunday censorship law unConstitutional.

Sunday censorship was only one of the famous "blue laws" which have been part of the State's statutes since colonial days. Yet they were not an American invention. All "unnecessary work" on Sundays has been forbidden in England since 1678. Colonial lawyers only expanded the British precedent with typical thoroughness, among other things, forbidding a man to kiss his wife on the Lord's Day. Since the no-kissing days, chapter 136 of the Massachusetts General Laws, the blue law code, has been amended many times. Censorship of entertainment grew out of one of these amendments in 1908.

Court Challenge

But during their long history the blue laws have seldom been attacked in court. Although censorship was resented, it was never seriously challenged until 1954. Then the attack came from the owners of the Brattle Theatre in Harvard Square.

Cyrus Harvey '47, and Bryant Halliday '49, co-proprietors of the Brattle applied in February of last year for the usual license, in order to show Miss Julie, a film based on Stindberg's play about a fallen woman. The Cambridge city manager, who issued one of the permits, gave them no trouble; but the State Commissioner of Public Safety turned their application down. He felt he could not approve the picture after just a few cuts because the central theme of the film was an illicit love affair.

Miss Julie was not the first of the Brattle's films which the Commissioner failed to approve. The Young and the Damned, Volpone, and Desires, a German picture about drug addiction, all met with frowns and rejections. Others, like Pepe le Moko and Jean Cocteau's The Eternal Return, passed only after cuts.

The Brattle could, of course, exhibit any film on other days in the week. Sunday alone had restrictions. "But Sunday is our best day," Halliday points out. "Many of our films are foreign, and on Sunday people from all over the Boston area come to see the pictures which they can't see anywhere else. Furthermore, we felt that the censorship law was clearly unConstitutional and was hurting the motion picture industry throughout the state, so we decided to test it in court."

Initial Failure

The legal battle began in the Middlesex County Superior court. William C. Brewer, lawyer for Brattle Films, Inc., drew up a brief demanding that the Commissioner of Public Safety permit Miss Julie to be shown and asking for a decision on the Constitutionality of the Sunday censorship law. Assistant Attorney General Arnold H. Salisbury opposed this claim with a demurrer, a legal technicality which stated that Brattle Films could not prove any real damage, and that the blue law was Constitutional anyway. The judge agreed, and tossed the case out of court.

But Harvey, Halliday, and Brewer were not defeated. They prepared to appeal the Superior Court decision before the the State Supreme Court. Brewer drew up a new brief, a 51-page document which cites over a hundred precedents and references, and on May 5, 1955, he argued his case before the full panel of the Court.

Pressing Issue

Brewer chose to attack the Sunday censorship law on the grounds that it transgressed the right of freedom of the press, guaranteed by the First Amendment. To do so, be first had to prove that motion pictures were indeed a form of the press, but a number of decisions in courts throughout the country had indicated that such an assumption was acceptable before the law.

The Brattle lawyer did not try to assault the whole structure of the blue laws. He concluded that laws prohibiting some activities on one day of the week could be defended, as they had been in the past, on the grounds that one day of rest each week was a health measure which any state could rightly force its citizens to observe. "But," he added, "to impose censorship of ideas in the guise of a law dedicated to rest and recreation is an abuse of the underlying Constitutional power. No law which assails our great Constitutional freedom on Sunday is either appropriate or valid."

One of the great weaknesses of the law which established the censorship machinery was the vague terms which it gave as a criterion for the censor to follow. All law had to say on this subject was that entertainment to be licensed must be "in keeping with the character of the day and not inconsistent with its due observance." In the famous "Miracle" case, the United States Supreme Court condemned a New York movie censorship law which forbade the showing of "sacrilegious films, as too vague to be enforced. Brewer argued that the same judgment applied equally well to the Massachusetts law.

Sunday No Exception