In at least one of Mae West's mid-1930s star vehicles, she murmurs indistinguishably in a love/seduction scene. This doesn't quite fit the request for conversation "drowned out" by other sounds, but West's explanation for the technique does point to another possible reason for its use. West claimed that the murmuring (mostly sequences of "ums") was a means of circumventing anticipated censorship of the bawdy remarks she would like to have made in performing the scene. Her contention was that viewers would "fill in" the words from their imaginations, which, given their established expectations of the star and the scene, were likelier to be far racier than any she could have uttered on film at that period. The idea recalls for me both the supposedly indecent song "Louie, Louie" and the balcony love scene in Hitchcock's NOTORIOUS, in which Cary Grant and Ingrid Berman murmur and nibble at each other for what seems a tantalizingly long time, without holding a single kiss for more than a second or two. I've read somewhere in the voluminous "Hitchcockania" that the scene strove to achieve maximum erotic (and yes, suspenseful) effect, without violating any strictures on a kiss's duration that the Production Code Administration might have imposed (to preclude the kissing's seeming "indecent.") Ramona Curry Dept. of English University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign ---- To signoff SCREEN-L, e-mail [log in to unmask] and put SIGNOFF SCREEN-L in the message. Problems? Contact [log in to unmask]