The unlikely protagonist in this elegant book by Laura Wittern-Keller and Raymond Haberski Jr. is a short, and by most accounts, mediocre Italian film called The Miracle. The movie, released in the United States in 1950, tells the story of an unstable homeless woman who is seduced by a traveler on the hills of the Amalfi Coast. Finding herself pregnant and alone, the woman becomes convinced that she has spontaneously conceived the child of Saint Joseph. When she seeks help from the villagers, they taunt and shun her.

Charmed by what he considered a tale of man's cruelty to man, Joseph Burstyn, a young American film distributor, picked up the movie and arranged for its release in the United States. After having passed the harsh censors at customs and at the state level, Burstyn was surprised to find his film condemned by the Legion of Decency, a powerful Catholic lobby. New York's commissioner of licenses, alerted by the Legion of Decency, revoked the license of Paris Theater for showing the film, which he considered a sacrilegious mockery of the virgin birth. Burstyn and his film became the center of a religious, legal, and cultural battle that culminated in a Supreme Court case, Joseph Burstyn, Inc. v. Wilson (1952), which reversed years of doctrine by holding that films like other artistic expression are protected by the First Amendment.

While a seemingly modest endeavor to describe the controversial release of this film in the United States, this study contributes to the history of the postwar era by elaborating how evolving values shaped law, religion, and urban politics. One would expect that larger issues like the Korean War and the incipient anticommunist movement in the United States would at best obscure the issue of film censorship, or at worst reinforce its mission. This movie and its proponents, however, were able to capitalize on an emerging commitment to cultural expression despite, or perhaps because of, these more pressing concerns.

By focusing on the history of The Miracle, Wittern-Keller and Haberski Jr. help answer a question that has plagued historians for quite some time. How and why did the country abandon its progressive focus on communal values and mores in favor of a liberal emphasis on a value-neutral public? How did the commitment to moral uplift, which nurtured urban censorship boards and their religious analogs just decades before, ultimately cave under the pressure for a diversity of self-expression? The Legion of Decency articulated the traditional faith in imposing a set of values that would put limits on individual freedom in the service of a common good. The legal and cultural controversy surrounding the release of The Miracle illustrates a growing frustration with this model and emergence of a new modern sensibility. At the very least, the film's victory illustrates an unwillingness to cede the job of defining communal values to a religious elite.

The second half of this book looks at the aftermath of the Supreme Court case. It explores how Burstyn v. Wilson's narrow holding, acknowledging that films deserved some protection under the First Amendment, turned into a devotion to freedom of expression. By the 1960s, the Court made it clear that movies deserved First Amendment protection. Movies were, however, also a product with great commercial potential. The film industry, representing the capitalist impulse, is an important force throughout this story. Largely absent from the drama that led to the Supreme Court decision in Burstyn, Hollywood took advantage of the new freedom in the late 1950s and early 1960s, by capitalizing on the public's thirst for sex and violence. Even some of The Miracle's greatest proponents were shocked by the trash that flooded the movie theaters. The critics and intellectuals who supported the film's release and First Amendment protection believed that films were a valuable artistic expression. Ironically, their victory led in their own eyes to the demise of the medium, the slow devolution of movies into a play for everyman's most base desire.

Tempting as a narrative of progress might be in this context, Wittern-Keller and Haberski Jr. resist the impulse. Instead, they conclude with a nuanced understanding of what was won and lost in the battle against film censorship. History proved that churches are the wrong censors. Courts rightly declined to take their place. The corporate interests of large Hollywood studios rendered them uniquely unsuited for the job. Artists themselves perhaps were well situated to ensure that cultural expression would be both creative and socially responsible, but the intellectual pursuit in the United States had shifted by mid-century from a social to an individual endeavor, from an act of cultural expression to a statement of personal alienation. Thus the void left by religious and secular sensors was never filled. While at times a bit repetitive, The Miracle Case: Film Censorship and the Supreme Court is a thought-provoking and insightful history of film censorship and the postwar era.