The History of Sex in Cinema

In the 70-Year History of the cinema--a medium which can claim with some truth that it has profoundly influenced, if not revolutionized, popular culture, morals and social customs throughout the world--perhaps its paramount dilemma has been the vexing question of what the surface of the silver screen may properly reflect to its myriad patrons. Hardly had the photographed image begun to move when objection to the manner and form of its movement became a kind of continuing counterpoint to its commercial and artistic progress. Early moviemakers were incessantly exhorted--and sometimes legally compelled--to conform to Victorian standards of conduct and content. Because the movies began as peep shows, they soon acquired the undeserved taint of the shady and the suggestive, and the new medium became fair game for smut-minded censors, opportunistic reformers and grandstanding legislators. Inevitably, it was the depiction of sex, explicit and implicit, that occasioned the most ire and anxiety among those already indignant about the moral state of their fellow men. Thus the history of sex in cinema takes on a social and psychological relevance that goes far beyond the medium itself, and this chronicle may be viewed, therefore, as a unique kind of psycho-sexual history, as well as an objective account, of the cinema's treatment of erotica and of the repression it has so often inspired.

The more things change, the more they remain the same in cinema, to paraphrase the old French saying. Today, as it was 60 years ago, the question of the questionableness of sex on the screen remains an agitating matter for the makers of motion pictures. But throughout the American film industry, once swathed in the wraps of its own pious Production Code, there seems to be a growing awareness that nudity need not be equated with pornography, nor lovemaking with lubricity. The tides of change are upon us at last; and caught up in that change are the official censor, with his prim "thou shalt nots," and the unofficial reformer, with his thundered charges of moral corruption at any attempt to treat realistically, honestly and artistically what are generally called "the facts of life." Legally, the Supreme Court, in a series of sweeping decisions over the past dozen years, has cut the ground out from under both of them. But more important, the ticket-buying public has indicated that it can absorb a frank portrayal of sex on the screen, as in Fellini's La Dolce Vita, without promptly staging a Roman orgy of its own. Our films are growing up, and our audiences with them. Only the censor lags behind.

This, however, has been the immemorial role of the censor. He is the watchdog of the past, the guilt-ridden guardian of a hypocritical moral status quo outmoded long before he takes up the cudgels in its--and secretly, his own--defense. Else why defend it so vigorously? The sharpening edge of the arts cuts deeply across traditions and conventions, producing new forms, new concepts that not merely challenge, but subvert the old. Those who regard sex not only as unclean but as reprehensible, those who are piously and often pathologically committed to a rigid and censorious interpretation of morality, sense the threat. With the righteous wrath and firm support of a handful of likeminded reformers, they rise to join battle, to wreck vengeance on society for their own obsessive prurience. For a time they can look for public approbation with some confidence; the entrenched authorities of state, press and churches will be behind them. But even these authorities are more responsive to the movement of history, the counsels of reason and the biological realities than are the censors. In the dynamic of society, the censors are perpetually fighting a repressive rear-guard action to protect their own sick set of moral standards, and to perpetuate a way of life that often has long since vanished --if it ever in actual fact existed.

Nowhere--except perhaps on network television, which lies beyond the scope of this chronicle--is this cultural and sexual lag among censors more glaring than in the field of motion pictures. Because the movies portray life in a realistic way--and also because they are produced for profit--they are particularly sensitive to shifts and changes in tastes and values. When Pillow Talk, to name a recent example, began to rack up unanticipated grosses all across the United States, every studio flew into production with frankly imitative efforts in which the heroine (Doris Day or a reasonably exact facsimile) strove successfully to protect her virginity against amusing but formidable odds, and in which the flippant dialog (written by Stanley Shapiro or a reasonably exact facsimile) was more flagrantly suggestive than anything ever before heard in American pictures since The Moon Is Blue. At this point, so many have appeared, with interchangeable casts and titles, that it is quite impossible to differentiate between a Move Over, Darling and a Lover Come Back. What all have in common, however, is their ready acceptance by American audiences--and B ratings ("Morally objectionable in part or all") from the Legion of Decency.

But the vagaries of the censorious mind are not the primary concern of this PLAYBOY series, psychiatrically intriguing though they be. Rather, because the censor represents an organized and articulate minority in any society, he becomes useful as a barometer for the temper of the times. What shocked the censors in the early 1900s often seems naive, amusing, even charming in 1965. (And, incidentally, scenes in American pictures that may slip unscathed through the fingers of our own censors today are often ruthlessly eliminated by the censor boards of England or Sweden; and vice versa. Censorship, like morality, is a matter of time as well as of place and pathology.) This transiency, coupled with the vindictive intransigence of most censors, casts a very special light upon the films of an era and a nation, one that illuminates not merely the movies themselves, but the morals and mores that helped shape them.

In tracing a history of the treatment of sex in the cinema, therefore, the censors' censure is often more significant than the critics' approbation--or even the public's acceptance expressed in terms of box-office dollars. For the public can always be lured into a theater to purchase a ticket for a movie sight unseen, or barred from a theater by the watchdogs of decency and, still sight unseen, contribute to a film's commercial failure. But whether the censors' grip upon the medium be weak or firm at any given moment, their voices are always the loudest.

• • •

Censorial voices were loud at the very birth of the film medium. Terry Ramsaye, in a delightful book called A Million and One Nights, reprints at length an article by Herbert S. Stone, excoriating what was probably the movies' first kiss. The year was 1896. "In a recent play called The Widow Jones," wrote Mr. Stone, "you may remember a famous kiss which Miss May Irwin bestowed on a certain John C. Rice, and vice versa. Neither participant is physically attractive, and the spectacle of their prolonged pasturing on each other's lips was hard to bear. When only life size it was pronounced beastly. But that was nothing to the present sight. Magnified to Gargantuan proportions and repeated three times over it is absolutely disgusting. All delicacy or remnant of charm seems gone from Miss Irwin, and the performance comes near being indecent in its emphasized vulgarity. Such things call for police interference." And he went on to observe that "The Irwin kiss is no more than a lyric of the Stock Yards."

Interestingly enough, it was mainly the size of the kiss that Stone objected to, not its intensity or its duration. The enforced proximity of the motion-picture screen and its extreme magnification of the Rice-Irwin intimacies were acutely distressing to those proper Victorians who had been schooled to avert their eyes, if not their thoughts, from matters pleasant and unseemly. But in the darkened movie theater, with all light concentrated upon the silvered sheet, the shadowy images attract and hold the gaze like magnets. One may react to them with pleasure or indignation, but one cannot avoid them. This heightened, larger-than-life reality made even the most innocent of pictures suspect. For an age of prudery, they were just too real.

The conditions of their exhibition were no less contributive. Born as peep shows, movies were first projected in vaudeville houses and wax museums, in amusement parks and itinerant fairs. And, despite such uplifting efforts as scenes from the Oberammergau Passion Play, or Joseph Jefferson's Rip van Winkle, most of the short pictures turned out prior to 1900 were frankly designed to captivate the fairground mentality. Apart from the incessant parades, and the express trains that set the crowds aghast by pounding down the track straight toward the camera, apart from the Sunday strollers photographed on the Fifth Avenues of the world, and scenic views of beaches and waterfalls, the early moviemakers put on celluloid the very attractions that brought the rubes to the fairs and music halls in the first place. Annie Oakley shot at clay pigeons for the benefit of the Edison camera. There were Chinese acrobats and German musclemen to exhibit their prowess. There were innumerable "re-enactments" of famous prize fights. And there was Fatima, hit of the 1893 Chicago Columbian Exposition, doing her notorious danse du ventre.

Fatima was an amply proportioned woman with no particular allure beyond the ability, shared by belly dancers everywhere, to undulate various portions of her anatomy at will and with considerable abandon. Apart from her bare midriff, across which dangled several chains of coins, she was fully, even self-consciously, attired. (This self-consciousness was reiterated in the fixed smile she wore throughout her brief performance.) But if Fatima was permitted to display her talents in extenso on the Columbian Exposition Midway, not so on the screens of the nation's nascent cinema. A generous and ingenious censor, instead of barring the film outright, created a stencil that resembled two New England fences, and placed these strategically over the offending portions of Fatima's anatomy in every frame of the negative. Movie censorship was under way.

During the movies' formative years, censorship had much to batten on. From the peep shows that immediately preceded screen-projected films came such innocently wicked titles as How Bridget Served the Salad Undressed, or What the Bootblack Saw. (What he saw, of course, was nothing more than a lady's well-shod ankle. The sight so unnerved him, however, that he mindlessly smeared boot polish all over the trousers of the gentleman he was working on.) As the novelty of motion pictures took hold, such subjects were extricated from the nickelodeon boxes and transferred to the big screen, there to be joined by hundreds of other little pictures, produced specifically for projection, that were no less provocatively titled and titillating. Particularly favored were films showing women in various stages of undress: In the Dressing Room, In Her Boudoir, In My Lady's Boudoir, In a Massage Parlor, The Bridal Chamber. At no time did the unveiling go beyond the chemise; but to an age in which a glimpse of stocking was shocking, a lady in her unmentionables was deemed downright indecent.

When, around 1903, pictures began to disappear from the vaudeville theaters and move into auditoriums of their own, they immediately became far more vulnerable to censor repression. Vaudeville at least enjoyed the sanction, if not precisely the blessing, of the middle class. Tony Pastor had by then reformed the medium into a family entertainment; he had made it respectable. Such respectability was precisely what the new store shows and nickelodeons lacked. As these "electric theaters," replete with gaudy posters hawking the wares within, fanned out into the poorer neighborhoods of the nation, they promptly acquired the status of the corner saloon. They were called "a cheap show for cheap people." Actually, movies and saloons were quite properly equated at that time: Both were primarily working-class entertainments; and movies, like beer, cost only a nickel. Proponents of the new medium argued that, at the very least, movies were better than liquor for the workingman. The reformers, of course, denied this.

What gave their denials point was the fact that, sensing the caliber of their audiences, the pioneer producers were pouring forth a flood of one-reelers calculated to appeal to the most primitive tastes and emotions. Apart from innumerable little cinematic parables illustrating the evils of drink, all very moral and reformist, the bulk of their output unabashedly relied on the age-old appeal of crime and sex. As early as The Great Train Robbery (1903), which inaugurated the nickelodeon era virtually singlehanded, these producers learned that crime did pay, and handsomely. Movie programs, consequently, were studded with subjects that recounted the exploits of criminals, both real and imagined. When these could be combined with sex--as in Biograph's re-enactment of the Stanford White-Harry K. Thaw shooting of June 25, 1906, staged only a few hours after the actual shooting had taken place--the result was invariably a box-office bonanza. And then as now, the producers looked to the box office to keep their signals straight--and the turnstiles twirling.

Actually, toward the end of the first decade of the century, the pioneers had an added incentive to inject sex into their pictures. The little nickelodeons had become so enormously successful that dozens of small firms, often operating with "bootleg" equipment brought from abroad, tried to force their way into the profitable and proliferating field. To protect themselves, the firms that held basic patents on either camera or projection equipment--Edison, Bio-graph, Vitagraph, Lubin, Selig, Essanay, Pathé, Kalem and Méliès, plus the importer and distributor, George S. Kleine --formed the Motion Picture Patents Company in December 1908. By all the standards of that first Roosevelt era, the company was a full-fledged "trust," organized as a monopoly for the specific purpose of restraint of trade. The Patents Company licensed the equipment, while its creature, the General Film Company, was set up to handle the pictures. Theater owners paid a weekly tribute of two dollars to the Patents Company merely for the privilege of running movies--plus, of course, paying the rental cost of the films. The view from the top, from the Motion Picture Patents Company's headquarters in New York's Flatiron Building, seemed perfect. Its members apparently controlled every phase of production and exhibition. Nothing, however, was further from the truth.

The independents, far from being ousted from the field, became more active than ever. And because, unlike their better-heeled brethren, for them every picture involved not only a financial, but even a considerable physical risk (the trust enforced its legal position with extralegal goon squads that were freely deployed to smash both bootleg cameras and their operators), these firms were particularly anxious to give the public what it wanted. Titles such as Right of the Seigneur, Wages of Sin, An Old Man's Darling and Beware, My Husband Comes began to decorate nickelodeon marquees. If the titles were often a good deal racier than the pictures themselves, nevertheless they set a tone that was soon to make the movies an easy mark for police and reformist action.

In addition, although actual nudity was rare in the American films of the time, it was far from absent from American screens. Early Italian one-reel "spectaculars"--most of them imported by the same George Kleine who played such an important role in the creation of the trust--used the pretext of historical pageantry to exhibit the undraped female form; while many of the French fantasy films then in vogue featured inspirational tableaux in the style of (and often with the ladies of) the Folies-Bergère. These, of course, were run cheek by jowl with the American product. There were no subtitles or transparent "dubbing" to enable the uninitiated to differentiate them from the home-grown commodity. And the reformers saw no reason to quibble over country of origin. By 1907, in consequence, they were off in full cry against all movies.

• • •

In Europe, far from the inhibiting influences of the puritanical tradition, the early film makers lost no time in spicing cinema with sin. France's "official art" at the turn of the century, for example, was rampant with majestic, superbly fleshed nudes. Its popular music halls still featured the naughty cancan. Its theater and literature celebrated la vie bohémienne. And there were, even then, French postcards. The first French films derived a little from all of these, although it was several years before the producers were willing to venture so far as total nudity. The well-padded, popular music-hall artiste, Louise Milly, whose charms had already decorated many postcards, appeared in several striptease films before 1900, disrobing either for the bath or for bed, but always stopping discreetly short of the ultimate disclosure. (In one of them, she clutched her dressing gown in her teeth while wriggling into her nightie. The consequent acrobatics were sufficiently intriguing to make this one of the most popular subjects of its day. In Paris, it played over 300 times in three different halls.)

Similarly, in a bonne bouche called The Flea, Angèle Hérard, a star of the Casino de Paris, hunted that offending insect here and there amid the diaphanous folds of her gown, vouchsafing premeditated peeps at her shapely anatomy in the process, but never all of it at once. The early catalogs of the French companies listed literally hundreds of titles that implied some form of disrobing--Le Déshabille du Modèle, Couché d'Yvette et Pierreuse, Le Coucher de la Mariée (repeated several times with different actresses), Les Soubrettes Indiscrétes, Déshabilles Féminins, and many more. The new century had hardly started, however, before these titbits were supplemented by utterly uninhibited strip films that followed the same formula, but actually delivered what their titles promised.

Perhaps the salon paintings then in vogue gave sanction to the switch. Certainly the French Academy saw nothing wrong in nudity; and painters such as Bouguereau, Bonnat, Rochegrosse and Garnier alternated between gigantic canvases crowded with classic nudes, and more intimate, artfully detailed scenes of domestic life illustrating love's awakening, assignations, infidelity unveiled, and the heartbreak of disillusion. Often absurdly sentimental, they nevertheless reflected the fashionable morality of their day. And since they represented, in the fullest sense, "official art," the French film makers could see no reason not to bring these highly representation- (continued on page 136)Sex in Cinema(continued on page 133) al pictures to glowing life. Their very subject matter seemed to invite it. Garnier's well-known Flagrant Délit d'Adultère, for example, depicts a lover held by the police while the husband rushes at him in a fury, while the unfaithful wife, nude, cowers in her boudoir. It took little imagination to transform this situation into a movie scene: the wife and her lover locked in amorous embrace, the entry of the outraged husband accompanied by the gendarmes, and Garnier's own melodramatic denouement. The film included one little element that poetically befits the Gallic temperament, however: When the husband bursts in with his entourage, the lover, infuriated at this public humiliation of his inamorata, makes a lunge at him that is intercepted by the police. Whatever sympathies the scene generates are all for the lover and his instinctive gallantry.

Paintings continued to inspire an entire genre of French film making throughout the first decade of the 20th Century--Olympic (after Manet), The Birth of Venus (after Botticelli) and Awakening of Chrysis, in which, according to the plot synopsis, "a Negress attends her respectfully as languorously she raises from the couch her slumbrous body." But even more of the French films from this era owed their inspiration to the tableaux vivants then so popular in the casinos and music halls. Such scenes, with the artistes either in flesh-colored tights or no tights at all, could readily be incorporated into the primitive storytelling films that had begun to make their appearance. Particularly favored in the early 1900s were lively fantasies in which the camera conjured up visions of Arabian Nights palaces complete with seraglios and harem dances; voyages to impossible places, always with the same voluptuous houris standing about in awkward attendance on the local potentate; and films of magic in which the shapely victims were transformed into flowers, flora or furniture, or perhaps, with a wave of the magician's wand, given a wholly new dress--or in an instant, stripped to the buff. The pioneers Georges Méliès and Ferdinand Zecca were particularly adept at this last form of cinematic divertisement.

As the story film progressed, its plots became more complex. Typical--and also typically French--was a Pathé release of 1906, The Age for Love. According to the catalog: "She had married out of ignorance, or fear, or obedience, or indifference, as young girls do. He was an elderly general, gallant and covered with medals, decorations and glory . . . She was everything in the world to him, the one great love in the life of a man already growing old. Her days were long, meaningless and gay, filled up with a round of engagements and visits where everyone ate and drank and laughed without knowing why. She had no child. She lived without cares, without hope, without anchorage. A young acquaintance of her husband's who came often to the house brought new interest into her life. She felt happy, suffused with a quick and radiant joy under the influence of a dawning sympathy for him. They went for walks together, talking as they strolled slowly side by side. She drank in his every word, gazing entranced as he spoke of things often disturbing to hear but delicious to listen to. He became her lover . . . How should it happen otherwise when two human beings are drawn together by a mutual love? The husband, warned by an anonymous letter, surprises them in a hunting lodge. Yet in his troubled soul, pity arises and, maybe, a realization of the helplessness of two such young and ardent lovers, and he turns against himself the weapon with which he had thought to reap revenge . . . 250 feet, price 170 francs." A far cry from the Flagrant De-lit d'Adultère, and yet obviously a close relation.

For a brief period, from 1904 to 1906, several of the French studios produced, for general distribution, films of a frankly pornographic nature. Grouped in the catalogs under the heading Les Sujets Grivois et d'une Caractère Piquant ("Naughty Subjects of a Piquant Nature"), they opened on the bath and bedroom scenes, then moved swiftly on to an unhurried view of highly suggestive erotica. Girls in their tubs boldly displayed and fondled their charms, swam nude in garishly decorated tanks, or writhed sensuously in their beds in anticipation of a visit from the Chevalier Vaselinus, an oily character who kept popping up in a series of "piquant" pastiches put out by Pathé (Many of these titles are still in distribution, thanks to the tireless efforts of early "pirates" who duped prints and sold them all over the world.) Police action in 1905 curtailed production; but the major factor in driving such films underground was a new urge for respectability on the part of their two largest producers, Pathé and Gaumont. In the face of mounting protests from press and clergy, they prudently dropped the entire category from their catalogs in 1907.

• • •

Strange as it may seem today, French films dominated the screens of the world in the first decade of the 1900s. Pathé alone produced more pictures each year than all the American firms combined; and they were shown everywhere, inviting imitation. In Germany, which had little in the way of native production until shortly before World War I, the leading imitator was Oskar Messter, who began his long career in 1902 with a Salome so erotic that it was banned almost everywhere but Germany. For the most part, however, Messter lingered in the bathrooms and bedrooms of his French contemporaries, his principal contribution being the addition of one or more on-screen spectators at contretemps that unpleasantly underlined the voyeuristic nature of his entertainments. For outright pornography, there was Venus Film in Berlin, as well as several small companies in Vienna; but their output was intended less for theatrical exhibition than for private soirees in places as far off as Russia, Japan and South America. Nevertheless, there were enough "piquant" productions in distribution in Germany to encourage the government, in May of 1908, to inaugurate its first censorship measures--measures which, as one might expect, did little to halt the flow.

The Italians, who began film production in 1905, promptly hit upon what still remains their favorite genre: the pseudohistorical spectacle, with its operatic crowds, its vast disasters (natural or man-made), its dashing heroes and its ever-imperiled heroines. Under the guise of history, all manner of atrocities were permitted--orgies, rapes, refinements of torture--which would have been frowned upon in more contemporary surroundings. Films such as The Last Days of Pompeii, The Divine Comedy (which dwelt most graphically upon the tortures of the damned in hell), Lucrezia Borgia, and a mounting tide of others, revealed what the French historian Ado Kyrou aptly identified as "the principal characteristics of the Italian cinema: lascivity, sumptuousness, a hysterical romanticism and exaggerated passions." The sumptuousness, at least in the early films, was largely a matter of gilt paint and potted palms; while the passions, enacted pantingly by corpulent principals, often produced a pachydermal romanticism that was hysterical in ways unanticipated by the producers. But the prurience was there, and a curious grandeur as well--particularly when contrasted with the films of other nations at the time. Until eclipsed by World War I, the Italian film was prized the world over for its lavishness, and for its zeal in bringing to life the more lurid aspects of dead (and hence defenseless) civilizations.

• • •

Such was the cinema in its swaddling clothes. Such were the films seen not only by Americans in their nickelodeons, but by the French in their fétes foraines, the Germans in their Ladenkinos. The exchange of films was international. They knew no boundaries, ignored all borders. And their appeal, universally, was to the lowest common denominator--to which their makers and viewers instinctively gravitated. The workingman, the illiterate, the immigrant--these were the film's first audiences; movies were the poor man's legitimate theater--for the most part, very poor indeed. As such, of course, they had to be protected--and policed--by the self-styled "better elements" of society. In this country, Chicago can claim the distinction of having enacted the first censorship ordinance. In 1907, because an automobile was stolen shortly after the appearance of a film titled The Great Automobile Robbery, the police were put in charge of previewing pictures--a responsibility which was immediately understood by them to encompass the defense not only of public property, but of public morals as well.

New York, followed suit a year later when Mayor George B. McClellan held a hearing ostensibly to determine the physical safety of the movie houses, and whether they should be permitted to operate on Sundays. His decision: Effective immediately, all theaters in the Greater New York area were to be closed by the police until further notice. The hue and cry was immediate. Outraged producers and exhibitors called a special meeting to fight the ban, while a self-appointed watchdog committee, purportedly in the public's behalf, sprang into existence under the aegis of the People's Institute, a group of zealous liberal reformers. Organized as the National Board of Censorship of Motion Pictures, it continues to function to this day as the National Board of Review. With reassurances from both sides, McClellan permitted the theaters to reopen, but only on the condition that they show only those pictures approved by the new Board.

The die was cast. The censors had achieved both official sanction and the promise of cooperation from the industry as well. And with this acceptance began a struggle that still shapes and colors the production and exhibition of movies in America--a continuing cold war on official morality fought on one flank by that sizable army of cinematic wheeler dealers who view the violation of established moral codes less as a crusade for freedom of expression than as a sure-fire shortcut to a fast buck, and on the other, by those anti-Establishmentarian artists--may their tribes increase--who sincerely strive to dramatize on film their own private visions of man, and of his good or evil.

Part One: The Original Sin

This is the first of a series of articles on "The History of Sex in Cinema" which will be appearing in PLAYBOY in the coming months. In the next installment, authors Knight and Alpert explore "The Rising Tide of Censorship" which engulfed the movies in. a moralistic and legalistic quagmire during the reactionary decade that ended in 1919.