The film that got switchblades banned was "Blackboard Jungle", starring Glenn Ford, Vic Morrow, and a very young Sidney Poitier. Ford is a high school teacher in New York City trying to deal with a class full of punks, called "juvenile deliquents" in those days. There is an attempted rape scene of a pretty young librarian where Vic Morrow threatens her with one of those Italian stiletto type switchblades. You don't really see anything, but in 1954, it was hot as Hell.* The punks are always flicking their knives open and intimidating people with them and parents in Ike's Middle America got the idea that the switchblade was "the weapon that would end civilization as we know it," a position now occupied by the "assault weapon" (sic). Ironically, those old stiletto switchblades were junk, as shown in the climactic scene in the film where Ford takes one away from Morrow and jabs it into a desk. He then backhands it and snaps the blade off at the pivot. They were crappy steel and very, very weak at that point.
This film was followed by any number of "teen exploitation" flicks intended for the drive-in movie crowd that only exaccerbated the problem, just as Hollywood did with the nunchuks, the bali-song, and the "assault weapon" (sic). None of these are inherently evil, but exploitaion films using them scared Middle American parents half to death and ther pressure built to ban them. Fortunately, calmer minds have prevailed on the "assault weapon" (sic) ban. As a curious historical footnote, there was a similar panic in the years before the War Between the States over the reputation of the Bowie Knife and carrying a Bowie Knife was made illegal in many Southern and Border states, including Texas, Arkansas, Maryland, and Virginia. It is still illegal in Arkansas and Virginia and probably several others.
* I was 11, rising 12, at the time that this film came out and my parents absolutely forbid me from seeing it. Of course, I saw it at least twice.
