SEX IN THE CINEMA PART 1
From The Sexy 60s to The Naughty 90s
Before 1968, when the Motion Pictures Association of America (MPAA) rating system was created, my mother took me to see the slapstick comedy It’s a Mad Mad Mad World. Among the coming attractions was what today would be an R-rated trailer for an Italian film called Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow. I sat riveted by the sight of a twenty-nine-year-old Sophia Loren performing a striptease for Marcello Mastroianni. Soon I was squirming awkwardly in my seat, hoping that my mother didn’t notice my prepubescent arousal.I had all but forgotten that young sexual awakening until I visited Italy last year and dined in a restaurant where an autographed publicity still of Ms. Loren from the film hung over the bar. While the image of her in a black corset, garter belts and dark stockings no longer provoked a sexual response, it did get me thinking about how sexy movies used to be and why they aren’t anymore.
It seems appropriate that the 1960s, a decade rife with social and cultural upheaval, would be the breeding ground for cinema’s sexual revolution. While President Kennedy was promising to send a man to the moon, Hollywood’s sexual awakening had already reached the stratosphere. In the final years of the Hays Code, the self-administered moral guidelines for censorship that the motion picture industry adhered to from 1934-1968, filmmakers began testing the limits. Aside from the erection-inducing Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow, films like Lolita, which centered on pubescent temptation and quasi-incestual lust, were exploring what heretofore had been taboo subjects. It was a decade of firsts, including the release of Advise and Consent, Otto Preminger’s film on party politics that had an audacious homosexual subplot, Irma La Douce, Billy Wilder’s romantic farce starring Shirley MacLaine as a lovable Parisienne prostitute, Women in Love, Ken Russell’s landmark film that contained a highly erotic nude wrestling scene between Alan Bates and Oliver Reed, which was the first time audiences saw male genitals in a mainstream film, and Walk on the Wild Side, the first major film to deal openly with the subject of lesbianism although Sapphic love had been at the core of 1961’s The Children’s Hour starring Audrey Hepburn and Shirley MacLaine as two schoolteachers whose lives are thrown into turmoil by a young student who accuses them of having an ‘unnatural’ relationship.
Beyond controversial themes, sometimes the 60s just gave us controversy. The Swedish film, I am Curious Yellow was seized by US Customs officials and barred from exhibition. The case proceeded to the Supreme Court where it was determined to fit “within the ambit of intellectual effort that the First Amendment was designed to protect.” As such, the film, which featured images of flaccid penises and a couple having sex in a tree, went on to play to swelling crowds despite tepid reviews and its two somewhat unattractive leads.
The decade also gave us the first time a major star bared her breasts and buttocks on screen. That dubious honor was to have gone to Marilyn Monroe in Something’s Got to Give, but when 20th Century Fox fired the star from what turned out to be her last film, that distinction went to Jayne Mansfield in 1963’s Promises… Promises! By the decade’s end, films like Bob, Carol, Ted and Alice, were revealing experimentation with mate-swapping extramarital sex.
In the midst of a flurry of sexploitation films including director Russ Meyer’s Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, the 1970s got off to a gender-bending start with the big screen adaptation of Gore Vidal’s Myra Breckinridge, starring Raquel Welch as a man-hating transsexual who straps one on to teach a young actor a lesson about manhood. The film, which featured movie legend Mae West’s return to the big screen, is considered to be one of the biggest bombs in Hollywood history.
Top-billed stars were increasingly drawn to sticking their toes (and other appendages) into the rising tide of sexual liberation. One of the biggest names to take the dive was Marlon Brando who, fresh off his Oscar win for The Godfather, starred in Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris. The film, about a grieving widower who enters into an anonymous sexual relationship with a much younger woman, earned an X rating and was the first time a major male star’s character had sex throughout an entire film. With its infamous ‘butter’ scene, which Brando improvised, Tango pushed boundaries and earned the actor his final Oscar nomination. Unlike Brando, most other leading men opted for less graphic forays, preferring to star in sex comedies, or farces as they were called. Think Ryan O’Neal in The Main Event and Warren Beatty in Shampoo.
Although its cast, including James Mason, Perry King and Susan George, couldn’t match the star wattage of Brando, producer Dino de Laurentis’ Mandingo was nearly as controversial. The movie about a slave-breeding plantation featured interracial sex and both male and female full-frontal nudity, which ultimately led to it being banned by the Catholic church.
Starting with Richard Gere’s dick shot in American Gigolo, the 1980s may just be the sexiest decade on film. In the span of ten years, Hollywood gave us everything from Debra Winger’s erotic mechanical bull ride in Urban Cowboy to Jane Fonda as an intelligent, yet sexy call girl with great breasts in Klute. Let’s not forget a nymph-like Brooke Shields and her tropical island sprite, Christopher Atkins, romping around The Blue Lagoon in next to nothing, the young Tom Cruise showing us the money in All the Right Moves, and a smoking hot Kathleen Turner dragging William Hurt back to bed by his penis in Body Heat. Although chaste, there was something very sexy about Patrick Swayze and Jennifer Grey doing the Dirty Dancing thing, and Demi Moore and Patrick Swayze’s steamy pottery scene in Ghost became one of the most romantic movie scenes ever. Spike Lee showed us why She’s Gotta Have It, and Melanie Griffith registered a 10 on the pecker meter in Brian De Palma’s Hitchcockian thriller, Body Double.
Between ‘83-‘87, director Adrian Lyne hit the G spot with three sexy hits. Flashdance contained only one brief glimpse of nudity, but the image of the lead character in repose on a chair getting doused with water became one of the most erotic and iconic images of the decade. 9 ½ Weeks, perhaps the most sexually explicit big-budget film since Last Tango in Paris, avoided being just another mainstream soft-porn exercise due to solid performances by Mickey Rourke and Kim Basinger. Fatal Attraction gave us everything, including sex on the kitchen sink, and transcended the raw sexuality expressed by its stars, Michael Douglas and Glenn Close, to become a cautionary tale about the dangers of promiscuity in a decade still reeling from the AIDS epidemic.
From Deathtrap, where Christopher Reeve planted one on Michael Caine in what would be the first on-screen kiss in an American film between two gay characters, to Al Pacino exploring the underbelly of New York’s gay S&M culture in Cruising, the 80s offered an abundance of movies dealing with alternative lifestyles. Among them: Making Love, Personal Best, The Hunger, Another Country, Desert Hearts, Maurice, and My Beautiful Launderette.
It was hard to top the overt sexuality of the 80s, but Sharon Stone gave it a try in 1992’s Basic Instinct. With her pudenda ready for its closeup, she uncrossed her legs and went from actress to sensation. But despite her memorable performance and those of others including Demi Moore’s love-for-sale turn opposite Robert Redford and Woody Harrelson in Indecent Proposal, the 90s saw the beginning of what would be a precipitous drop in onscreen sex. There was still plenty of longing, and in the case of Interview with the Vampire, it came mostly from audience who screamed, “Kiss him” when Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt came nose to nose in the highly homoerotic big screen adaption of Anne Rice’s bestseller.
A loose retelling of Richard IV, Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho is also about longing. It tells the story of two hustlers (River Phoenix and Keanu Reeves) who don’t hunger for sex (the pair gets more than their share of that), but for love and understanding. Similarly, Jane Campion’s The Piano tells the story of a mute woman (Holly Hunter in her Oscar-winning role) who longs to be heard and finds love through the loss of her cherished piano.
The movies’ ability to titillate, arouse and provoke audiences didn’t stop at the stroke of midnight on December 31, 1999, but with the new century came change. Log on next week to see how the consolidation of the film business, the growth of cable and the advent of streaming has impacted sex in the cinema. The story, as they say in the movies, is to be continued, but considering the context of this piece, perhaps I should say, more to come.
