I remember reading that the 1996 version of Emma, starring Gwyneth Paltrow, actually had the word “damn” dubbed in* so the movie wouldn’t wind up with a G rating. There’s otherwise nothing in the film that would be at all inappropriate for children, but since there’s also little that would be of any interest to young children the filmmakers apparently wanted to avoid giving the impression that this was a kid’s/family movie.
*In the scene where Harriet Smith is menaced by gypsies, you can hear someone say “Hold her down, damn it!”
I think they were simply given as examples of full-length movies adapted from short books.
According to Wikipedia, G and R are the only original 1968 ratings still used today. The other original rating was M, which is not automatically equivalent to PG, seeing as movies originally rated M were rerated to either GP or R.
That doesn’t sound right to me. I’d be curious to know what films were re-rated from M to R. As I remember it, GP was just a straight renaming of M, since M for “mature” had too strong a connotation. Then GP had the opposite problem when people thought it meant “general public” and confused it with G, so it was again renamed PG.
The one film I could point to in recent years to receive a “G” rating that was not an animated childrens movie is The Rookie with Dennis Quaid as the middle aged high-school baseball coach who tries out for the majors and makes it. It’s based on a true story and not oriented toward children.
Bonnie & Clyde was re-rated in 2007? That’s bizarre. But what would be to the point is what happened in 1970, when the M classification was discontinued.
That’s weird – unless they added new material for the DVD, why would they re-rate an M-rated film higher? There was already an “R” rating in place in the GMRX system, and it had the same meaning then as now. The general trend has been to re-rate films lower. I’ve heard many times that Midnight Cowboy, rated X when released, would be rated R today.
That’s really weird, I had no idea. I just did a little searching for VHS copies on eBay, and apparently those did not carry an MPAA logo–the dealers list them as “not rated.”
It should be pointed out that Sendak himself was asked whether or not the film might be inappropriate for children. He responded that if someone asked him that, “I would tell them to go to hell. That’s a question I cannot tolerate…if they can’t handle it, go home.”
Really, no idea? The ending of Bonnie and Clyde (link goes to YouTube video) is perhaps tame by the standards of a modern crime film, but it’s certainly well beyond typical PG level violence.
Midnight Cowboy was re-rated R years ago. The IMDB claims it was re-rated in the early 1970s, but I seem to remember it happening in the 1990s. I’ve heard that people have comment that it could be dropped to a PG-13 though.
Concerning the OP, Oliver! won the Oscar the year before Midnight Cowboy. So the only G-rated movie to win an Oscar was followed by the only X-rated movie to win the Oscar.
