This article investigates two powerful institutional forces – the Franco regime and the Catholic Church – which jointly set up a strict set of guidelines to control imported material and to maintain a kind of cultural conformity. While giving the illusion of allowing intercultural transfer, the state and church in Franco’s Spain attempted to block many foreign topics and ideas. By looking at the translation of film during Franco’s dictatorship, the author shows how international pressure and internal subversion destabilized even the strictest efforts to impose national cultural standards. Though Spanish censorship boards attempted to promote codes of sexual practice through cuts and modifications, the results were full of contradictions. In an extended analysis of Billy Wilder’s 1957 film Love in the Afternoon, translated as Ariane, the author shows how strictures of the church and state were based on moral and political principles, as well as negotiated public opinion and economic interests.