Gordon Mirams

Who was Gordon Mirams?

Gordon Holden Mirams was born in Christchurch on 9 March 1909, the son of Leslie Haywood Mirams and Mary Elvire Webb. He married Ruth Taylor in Christchurch on 23 November 1932. They had three daughters and one son.

Before becoming a film censor, Mirams worked as a journalist and film reviewer for the Christchurch Sun, the New Zealand Radio Record, the Dominion newspaper, and the New Zealand Listener. In his book Speaking Candidly: films and people in New Zealand published in 1945, Mirams argued that film has an enormous influence on culture. For this reason, he campaigned for more local New Zealand documentary and feature film production. He also argued for the need to show quality films that were generally ignored by commercial film distributors, which led to the formation of the New Zealand Film Institute, a national federation of film societies, which Mirams chaired.

In Speaking Candidly, Mirams was forthcoming about his views on censorship. He wrote, “I am one of those people who believe that, ideally, the best censorship, like the best government, is none at all” and “in the long run, the community is best left to censor itself; that when given the opportunity coupled with knowledge it can usually be relied on to reject the bad and accept the good.” On the other hand, Mirams was critical of Chief Censor W A von Keisenberg’s decision to approve the film Iceland in which Sonja Henie abandons her Icelandic sweetheart in favour of a US Marine, “at the very time that the American-serviceman-New-Zealand-girl problem was causing concern” in New Zealand. He wrote, “I am against censorship on principle, [but] if we must have it I would suggest that the custodians of our screen morals might be better employed in discouraging this sort of thing than in worrying about whether we should, say, be allowed to hear a few naughty words in Noël Coward’s In Which We Serve.”