The History of Sex in Cinema

As The Long Shadow of the swastika cast its pall over Europe in the first half of the Forties, every aspect of life was affected, and the movies by no means least of all. In occupied France, one of Dr. Goebbels' first moves was to take over the studios and theaters; throughout the War years, his Propagandastaffel rigorously controlled every picture made or shown in that country. In Italy, production was so disrupted and the industry so demoralized that, by 1944, as the Allied armies swept over the land, the total output for the entire year was only 17 features. England, straining its resources to the War effort, mobilized its films as well; production was centered almost entirely on pictures for educational, propaganda and morale purposes. And in Germany, whose studios concentrated on escapist entertainment, movies suddenly became so popular as to constitute a major problem. In some cities, only soldiers and workers in vital war industries were permitted to attend. Tickets, sold far in advance, were in such demand that Goebbels finally banned their use in order to free the printers for war work.

Curiously, for a country whose soldiers went into action armed with pornographic postcards as well as Mausers, Germany's films during the entire Hitler period had very little erotic content--a puritanism duplicated in the pictures produced by the Soviet Union. One of the rare exceptions, for Germany, was the lavish color film Münchhausen, produced in 1942 to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the famed Ufa studio. In rather heavy-handed fantasy, a present-day descendant of the Baron recalls the adventures of his fabled forebear in the court of Catherine the Great, in the war against the Turks and as a privileged prisoner in a Turkish harem. In all of them, of course, Munchhausen is seen as a swaggering rakehell, in ardent pursuit of the ladies whenever they are not in equally ardent pursuit of him. Although such moments of dalliance remain on the chaste side, swathed as they are in yards and yards of 18th Century silks and satins, in the course of his visit to a harem, the bouncing Baron--and the audience--is introduced to a whole bevy of unwrapped beauties. The girls, many of them totally nude, loll on brightly hued hassocks or plash playfully in an aquamarine pool. Unaccountably, Munch-hausen's fancy settles upon the one houri who is wholly garbed, and he promptly makes plans to quit these altogether agreeable premises with her in tow.

Münchhausen has had a checkered history. Enormously successful in Germany when it was released there in 1943 (handsome Hans Albers, its star, had been Germany's most popular leading man for over a decade), the film died with the Third Reich. No theater in liberated Europe would touch it, and it passed into film history more talked about than actually seen. Prints that have turned up, their Agfacolor woefully faded, suggest that Ufa must have edited the harem sequence several different ways. The official German version reduces the nudes to a few quick shots, although stills indicate that far more footage was taken; while a print in the Danish film archive not only lingers over the girls in extenso, but actually repeats some of the fleshier shots of the nudes disporting in the water.

But if the German film makers were unwilling to insert sex into their pictures for its own sake, they had no compunction about using it as an anti-Semitic tool. The most notorious of these pictures was Veit Harlan's Jud Süss (Jew Süss), an adaptation--or rather, a malicious distortion--of Lion Feuchtwanger's masterpiece, power. Feuchtwanger had written a sympathetic historical novel describing the rise of an 18th Century Jewish financier, Süss Oppenheimer, to a position of eminence in Württemberg and his ultimate destruction by other, non-Jewish financiers who were jealous of his behind-the-scenes authority. Predictably, Harlan turned all of this upside down: His Süss, egged on by a rabbi who looked like a Streicher caricature of a Jew, advanced himself by stealthy exploitation, corruption and assassination; and the sturdy Aryans who ultimately "save" Württemberg are motivated solely by their revulsion to Süss' evil excesses. The turning point comes when the Jew, maddened with power, forces an Aryan lady to look on while his men torture her husband, then ravishes her before the husband's anguished eyes. To make matters worse, the film suggests that Süss raped the woman not to satisfy his carnal appetites, but merely to humiliate a non-Jew; and so complete is his victory that the woman, blemished forever by this contact with a Semite, promptly drowns herself. (As an interesting footnote to Nazi psychopathology, Harlan amplified the role of the woman considerably, then cast it with his own wife, the vigorously pro-Nazi Swedish actress Kristina Söderbaum.) This experiment in erotic sadism ends with Süss in an iron cage in a public square; suspended over a roaring fire, he is slowly being roasted to death--and the camera, in a close-up of his face, savors every moment of it. As Feuchtwanger noted in an open letter to the German film makers published in London, "By adding a touch of Tosca, you have transformed my novel into a vile anti-Semitic movie à la Streicher and his Stürmer."

But even before the War was over, such vigorous, hard-breathing racist tracts had begun to recede from the German screen. Producers, perhaps sensing the approaching Allied victory, shifted to safer ground--harmless biographies of Beethoven, Schiller, Goethe and the like, and escapist romances set against backgrounds of old Vienna or the Tyrol. Movie Germans were either jolly, beer-drinking fellows or time-mellowed characters from the pages of history, never Party members. Apart from the newsreels, the War ceased to exist in German films. With the Germans themselves almost pathetically eager for anything the studios turned out, the producers had prudently begun to think of what could profitably be distributed abroad once hostilities had ceased.

Actually, they could have saved themselves the trouble. When the War ended, the market for German pictures simply evaporated; they couldn't even be given away--at least not those produced in the Western Zone. The Eastern Zone, which included the giant Ufa plant at Neubabelsberg, had its own automatic market in the Communist world. Hesitantly--for they were working under the eyes of the U.S. Army's Civil Affairs Division--the Germans in the West began to inject a fillip of sex into their pictures, and got away with it. Since the Army's primary function was to prevent militaristic or pro-Fascist ideology from creeping into German (and Japanese) films, it was powerless to interfere even if it had wanted to. But since the Civil Affairs Division was also charged with the task of selling democracy, its administrators were even more reluctant to impose restrictions that might have been construed as controls on free speech. The producers perforce grew bolder.

Typical of the films that began to appear in West Germany during the late Forties, along with the nostalgic operettas and stodgy histories of past emperors, was Der Apfel 1st Ab (The Apple Has Fallen), a curious and complicated allegorical drama. In it, a staid cider manufacturer named Adam Schmidt begins to entertain wild thoughts about his pretty secretary, Eve. Not getting along too well with his wife at the moment, Adam falls asleep and finds himself in an ultramodern Garden of Eden, a night club in which the Devil is the headwaiter. Eve is there, too, of course, and so is his wife, both of them clad in costumes that seem to be cellophane from the waist up; Adam himself runs about clad in his B.V.D.s. Although other cellophaned cuties are there, most of them far better endowed than either the wife or the secretary, Adam firmly resists the Devil's temptations and wakes up next morning to a nice middle-class reconciliation. As Variety's critic in Germany correctly opined, "The Hays Office undoubtedly would take a dim view of the cellophane costumes of the leads." The film played here without a Production Code Seal.

East Germany, on the other hand, took very seriously its new role of spiritual advisor, via films, to the German people. It had inherited not only the best studios but most of Germany's best film makers, who were promptly de-Nazified and set to work making anti-Nazi pictures. Many of these were set in the Hitler period, such as Affäre Blum (The Affair Blum) and Ehe im Schatten (Marriage in the Shadows), the story of a German actor's efforts to remain married to a Jewish wife despite the Nazis. Others attempted to deal realistically with East Germany's post-War problems. Strassen-bekanntschaft (Street Acquaintance), for example, although nominally the story of a young girl in Berlin who turns to prostitution for sheer survival soon after the War, was actually a singularly graphic account of the government's efforts to control the spread of venereal disease at that time. Competent and thematically intriguing as such films were, however, German films--both East and West-- throughout the Forties and well into the Fifties continued for the most part to suffer from the artistic blight that Hitler had brought to his country in 1933.

Something of the same blight settled over France when Hitler's armies invaded and occupied it in 1940. Indicative of the paralysis that immediately overtook the French film industry was a fall-off in production from 83 pictures in 1939 to only 28 in the following year (most of them made in unoccupied Nice and Marseilles). Once the Germans had moved in, Goebbels gave top priority to the assainissement (decontamination) of the French studios and theaters, a euphemism for purging them of Jews, and the creation of a control center with absolute power over all branches of film activity. Laws were passed prohibiting double bills, so that German-sponsored newsreels and documentaries could be included on every program. Feature production in France was largely concentrated in the German-operated firm Continental. Despite all these measures, however, the French cinema did not turn into the intended propaganda factory. In fact, those film makers who were permitted to work prudently chose to eschew realistic themes altogether, preferring to concentrate instead on harmless detective stories, escapist comedies and vast, moody romances set in a safely distant past.

Under the circumstances, it is not difficult to understand a retreat from sexuality as well. France during the years of the Occupation was as a country frozen, unable to function, all normal instincts forcibly held in check. One of the first important films of the War period, Marcel Garné's gloomily impressive Les Visiteurs du Soir (The Devil's Envoys), implied this in allegorical form: In a medieval castle, a feast is under way to celebrate the forthcoming marriage of the mistress of the manor to a handsome chevalier. Two troubadours, emissaries of the Devil, have been sent to seduce the happy couple and prevent their wedding. During the dancing that evening, they both succeed; but the Devil is infuriated to learn that the young troubadour has genuinely fallen in love with the girl. He arrives on the scene in person, arranges to have the two lovers discovered in bed together, and both are imprisoned, where they languish decoratively in chains. Desiring the girl for himself, the Devil promises to let the young man go if she will come away with him. The girl agrees, but breaks her word the moment her lover is freed--and the Devil, finding them together again, turns them into stone statues. But true love, the film informs us, will defeat even the Devil: On the sound track, from deep within the stone, we hear their two hearts beating away in unison. Tremendously popular in France, the picture seemed to echo the emotions of a people who were themselves entombed by a more modern incarnation of the Devil.

Significant, too, was Jean Cocteau's retelling of the Tristan legend, L'Eternel Retour (The Eternal Return). Although not retreating in time (the story was told in modern dress), the setting was a remote château complete with dark towers and winding stone stairwells, love potions, a vengeful dwarf and a trancelike atmosphere of doom and despair that made it all seem even more medieval than Les Visiteurs du Soir. The lovers--if one could truly call them that--were played by blond, stone-faced Jean Marais and an even blonder Madeleine Sologne, aptly described by one critic as "a marbled Veronica Lake"; their passion couldn't have been less fiery or fervent if they had sipped malted milks instead of love potions. Missing completely was all sense of the frantic eroticism that throbs through Wagner's opera. Only at the end, when Tristan and his Isolde lie decorously side by side atop an overturned boat, united by death in love eternal, is there the suggestion of fulfillment; but it is fulfillment at the cost of life itself. Never before had the French cinema, though often gloomily fatalistic, so eagerly and ardently embraced death.

Perhaps the best-known film of this sterile period was Marcel Carné's masterpiece, Les Enfants du Paradis (Children of Paradise)--the more remarkable because, in a period of national humiliation and commonplace death, it emerged as an eloquent, cosmic affirmation of life. Characteristically, it was set in the past, the Paris of 1840, when Frenchmen of all classes rubbed elbows in its teeming streets. Its hero (played to perfection by a youthful Jean-Louis Barrault) is a mime, the star of a small pantomime theater. Innocent, almost simple-minded, he is plunged into life through his love for the worldly Garance (portrayed by Arletty). When, in a scene still remarkable for its explicitness, she permits the boy to make love to her, he is unable to rise to the occasion. Next day, she takes another lover, a man of greater virility--and leaves him soon after for the wealth and protection of a sophisticated count. Meanwhile, Baptiste, the mime, has married an actress in his troupe, although still in love with Garance. And she has retained her affection for him. Their moment comes years later, after the count has been slain by yet another of her lovers. They have a few hours together; but when the wife pleads with her for Baptiste, Garance realizes that she has long since forfeited the right to happiness at the expense of others. In a magnificent final scene, she drives off through the crowded boulevard while Baptiste, on foot, follows in anguished pursuit until swallowed up by the masses. This sumptuous three-hour spectacle, with its far-flung sets and flawless cast, was more than a skilled evocation of a century-old slice of life; in its richness and variety, its poising of good and evil, its mature awareness of the (Cont. on page 206) Sex in Cinema (continued from page 178) interpenetration of personal motivations and social drives, it emerged an ageless re-creation of the human comedy. Made while the Occupation was approaching its end, the film also symbolized a resurgence of France's own life force.

During the entire five-year period of the Occupation, only one French film of note dealt at all realistically with the contemporary scene--a contemporary scene, incidentally, in which Nazis and their agents were conspicuously absent. This was Henri-Georges Clouzot's spine-tingling thriller Le Corbeau (The Raven), a picture that, not coincidentally, also afforded a high quotient of sexuality. Written before the War and based upon an actual news story, the film traced the effects of a series of poison-pen letters upon the inhabitants of a provincial French town. Suspicion swings in turn from a doctor accused of having an affair with the wife of a confrere to the wife's jealous sister, and then to an oversexed girl whom the doctor has rejected. Among the suspects is the confrere as well, an elderly doctor who suddenly breaks down and admits that his young wife was really the poison-pen pal. And when the wife is carried away, she screams that the mysterious Corbeau is actually her husband. At the finale, it becomes clear that actually there have been several Corbeaus, each acting out of his (or her) own desires or frustrations. The picture, masterfully directed and uncompromisingly honest in its depiction of small souls working at cross purposes, was released in Europe by the Nazi-run Continental Company as A Little French Town. As a result, after the Liberation, the film was completely banned by French military censors for the next few years, and Clouzot himself, along with his scriptwriter, evicted from the industry.

As if to compensate for their wartime abstinence, French films of the post-War years rediscovered sex with a vengeance. Early in 1945, the French were finally permitted to see a smoldering version of Carmen, filmed France, Italy and Spain two years earlier and starring Viviane Romance. The background music was Bizet's, but old Prosper Mérimée probably never dreamed that he had created a heroine as wanton and lascivious as Mlle. Romance. When, clad in her standard black-lace negligee, she flung herself hungrily upon Don José, even the French snickered, although long deprived of such scenes. The deprivation did not last much longer. Boule de Suif, a combination of De Maupassant's Boule de Suif and Mademoiselle Fifi, had much of its action set in an 1870s whorehouse; the action was often far too explicit for the American censors, who chopped it unmercifully before it was released here as Angel and Sinner. Le Gardien (The Guardian), filmed in the swampy Camargue country, had scenes reminiscent of Hedy Lamarr's Ecstasy--including the discovery by a passing cowboy of the heroine swimming an naturel. Before long, nudity had not only returned to French films but was included in them with matter-of-fact casualness. In Clouzot's Jenny Lamour (Quai des Orfèvres--the French equivalent of Scotland Yard), for example, a murder trail leads police inspector Louis Jouvet to the backstage of a Paris music hall. When he enters a dressing room filled with half-clad showgirls, only one has the presence of mind to put her hands over her naked breasts. In a comedy fantasy, Télévision, Oeil de Demain (Television, the Eye of Tomorrow), the abundantly endowed heroine, Muriel Taylor, is seen talking into a videophone, nude from the waist up; she has forgotten to turn off the picture part of the gadget.

But sex also suffused more serious films as well, films that by the end of the Forties had restored to France much of its earlier eminence as a source of mature and realistic drama. Jean Gabin, in Martin Roumagnac (The Room Upstairs) with Marlene Dietrich and in Au Delà des Grilles (The Walls of Malapaga) with blonde, seductive Isa Miranda, re-created his familiar late-Thirties portrait of a man driven by his instincts into love affairs that could only end unhappily. The same character was played in reverse by lovely Simone Signoret in one of her first screen roles,Dédée d'Anvers, made in 1947. Dédée, a prostitute on the Antwerp waterfront, falls in love with the captain of an Italian freighter, an arms smuggler. When he wants to take her away, however, her pimp kills him. Then Dédée and the patron of the bar where she works kill the mec and, sadder but wiser in the ways of love, she resumes her professional career. The film, directed by Yves Allegret, was remarkable not only for the authenticity of its atmosphere of low bars and cheap hotels, but for the many sordid details it portrayed in the life of a prostitute. At one point the pimp, demonstrating his contempt for women, crushes out his burning cigarette between Dédée's naked breasts.

No less specific was Clouzot's Manon, an updating of Abbé Prévost's 18th Century novel of a faithless and fickle woman, transforming her into an embodiment of modern youth caught up in the chaos of the post-War era. Such, at least, was Clouzot's intention as he played the story against a background of Paris black marketeers, a jazz cave, an expensive bordello, a fashionable dress salon and, ultimately, the Jewish-Arab war in Palestine. However, with smoldering, baby-faced Cecile Aubry--an unsettling amalgam of innocence and carnality--in the title role, Manon became rather the sordid story of a vicious and willful tramp who gave or sold her body with equal indifference. "Nothing is disgusting when one is in love," she tells Des Grieux, her lover, when he slaps her for taking money from a dirty old man. Completely indifferent to Des Grieux' emotions, she knows she can win him back at any time simply by unbuttoning her blouse and drawing him down on a convenient bed--which she proves to herself, and the audience, repeatedly. So enamored is he that the film's finale, a lengthy shot in which Des Grieux carries Manon, dead from thirst and exposure, across the desert sands, seems motivated by sheer necrophilia--a fitting conclusion to a picture in which flagrant sensationalism is repeatedly offered in the guise of utter realism. But Mlle. Aubry was unquestionably a "find," and she continued to play the instinctual sex kitten until displaced in public favor by an earthier, livelier rival: Brigitte Bardot.

On a far more serious artistic level was Jean Delannoy's somewhat literary adaptation of André Gide's novel La Symphonie Pastorale, co-starring Pierre Blanchar and Michèle Morgan. Perhaps the first of the post-War French films to win international acclaim, it told with great sensitivity the story of a married Swiss minister who unwittingly falls in love with a blind girl he has raised as an orphan. When the girl, her sight restored, falls in love with the minister's son, he forbids their marriage. Sensing the reason, but unwilling to go against the wishes of the man who has done so much for her, the girl commits suicide. Rarely has a father-son rivalry been handled with such discretion, and made all the more poignant by the fact that the minister, because of his position, cannot even admit to himself what his real motives are--not even when he drives his son from his house. Such delicate and tasteful probings of human relationships emphasized the maturity of the French cinema.

Even more acclaim--and not a little scandal--attended the presentation of Claude Autant-Lara's Le Diable au Corps (Devil in the Flesh). Based on Raymond Radiguet's autobiographical novel, it depicted with poetic insight the love affair between a teenaged schoolboy and an older, married woman. For all its poetry, the film made it quite clear that the two had gone to bed together--indeed, the scenes of their love-making are among the most rapturous ever put on the screen--and that when the woman dies in childbirth, it is the boy's baby she is carrying, not her husband's. The late Gérard Philipe established his eminence as the youth who, dislocated emotionally by World War One, seeks desperate refuge in an illicit love; and the veteran Micheline Presle was never better as the woman who provided it. Because the husband was a soldier, however, the French Cartel of Moral and Social Action professed shock and demanded that the film be withdrawn and destroyed; while in this country, prints were seized by the Customs office and released only after Huntington Cairns, of the National Gallery of Art, reviewing the film at the request of the Treasury Department, judged it to be art "of the highest order." Nevertheless, the New York State censors banned it until one of the more ardent bed scenes was excised. When it finally reached American art-house screens, however, most critics and audiences echoed Mr. Cairns' opinion.

Increasingly, as the decade drew to a close, the French film makers found themselves in contention with American censors. Some, like the producers of Le Bal Cupidon (The Cupid Club), arranged their shots of almost-nude dancers cavorting in a Parisian night spot so that they could readily be cut without affecting the visual continuity. In Jean Grémillon's Pattes Blanches (White Legs), a shot of singer Suzy Delair standing naked in her bathtub was also eliminated without affecting the story. In Prison des Femmes (Marked Girls), however, in addition to censor cuts, English subtitles substantially changed the story from its original Lesbian motif to one in which an elderly woman disinterestedly helps a girl recently released from prison get back on her feet. A French-produced François Villon, notable in this country solely for its abundance of well-stacked females in low-cut gowns, led a Variety reviewer to note, "Censorial lads have been busy apparently with their shears and the expected torrid developments seldom come off. However," he added, significantly, "the torture and stabbing scenes are left in with all their goriness." Other films, because of less readily excisable nudity, or less readily concealable themes involving incest, Lesbianism or homosexuality, simply never made it to these shores. French pictures, however, were beginning to gain a prestige that was to have notable repercussions in American censor circles during the Fifties.

In England, the coming of war seemed to shake British film makers out of a lethargy that had persisted since World War One, injecting into their pictures both a national consciousness and the breath of life itself. Throughout the Thirties, hampered by a lack of funds, most producers leaned heavily on polite, self-contained tempests in teapots or comedies of manners translated from the West End theater. Symptomatic of the coming change was Carol Reed's The Stars Look Down, in which a leader of the Welsh miners in a depressed coal town is deflected from his course by marriage to a cheap and vicious girl who, in time of crisis, deserts him to rekindle an old flame. For the first time, apart from the documentaries, some semblance of the true face of Britain was placed upon the screen--and inevitably this face showed not only riches and squalor, but passion as well. During the War years, naturally enough, the newly discovered vein of realism was explored primarily in the development of war themes, where passion was either directed against the enemy or served to bind together the men of one unit, one bomber or one battleship. Toward the end of the War, however, attention began to revert from deeds of daring on distant battlefronts to realistic glimpses of sex at home. Typical was Waterloo Road, in which a tough little private, John Mills, goes A. W. O. L. to track down and beat the living daylights out of Stewart Granger, the local black marketeer who has seduced his wife. The wife, incidentally, as depicted by shapely Joy Shelton, is not at all averse to Granger's illicit attentions. A Canterbury Tale featured a provincial justice of the peace (Eric Portman) with the interesting aberration of throwing glue in the hair of local girls he finds dallying with the troops in his vicinity--partially on moral grounds, but more specifically because he feels they might distract the boys from his lanternslide lectures on historic Canterbury.

If The Stars Look Down directed British film makers toward a cinematic realism, it was David Lean's Brief Encounter that discovered for them the special arena of adult relationships on which the best of Britain's post-War films were focused. Expanded from a one-act play by Noel Coward, Brief Encounter dealt with two attractive married people whose chance meetings ripen into a love affair far deeper and more meaningful than anything they have known with their respective spouses. But the little deceits they must practice, the little lies they must tell--to others and to themselves--gradually drain their weekly meetings of their joy. The end of the affair comes when the man borrows a friend's apartment for an afternoon. Just as they are about to go to bed together, the friend unexpectedly returns and rather primly upbraids him for this abuse of confidence--while the woman flees in panic down the back stairs. Too decent to hurt others, too conventional to abandon all for love, they decide to call it off--with bitter regrets. Flawlessly enacted by Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard, Brief Encounter gained much of its strength from the verisimilitude of its backgrounds--the tawdry railway buffet where they meet for the first time and where they make their tearful, wellbred farewells; the small-town teashops and movie houses where they must steal their moments of happiness. But more than this, the fact that the film recounted an illicit affair not only with sympathy but without censure made it extraordinary in its day. To be sure, the relationship was not consummated; that was to be taken care of in films to come. An important precedent had been established, however--and no small part of its importance was the ready acceptance of this relationship as artistically valid by Europeans and Americans alike.

This initial good impression, this onscreen treatment of adults as adults, was happily confirmed in the films that followed. In the visually stunning I Know Where I'm Going, Wendy Hiller drew a sharp portrait of a materialistic young lady who learns about love--and sex--in the Scotch Hebrides just before she marries for money. In The Seventh Veil, narcohypnosis is employed to explain to a sex-starved concert pianist (Ann Todd), undecided which of her coterie of admirers to marry, that she is really in love with her neurotic guardian. The hero of Mine Own Executioner is a selftorturing psychoanalyst (Burgess Meredith) who loves his wife but is having an affair with a young actress; he resolves this conflict by dismissing prematurely a dangerously schizoid patient who obligingly murders the wife and then commits suicide, just as the analyst knew he would. The Rake's Progress (shown in this country as A Notorious Gentleman, perhaps to avoid any confusion that it might be a gardening film) presented Rex Harrison as a charmingly amoral young man who passes bad checks, cheats on his wife, cuckolds an employer and, driven to drink by his father's overamorous secretary, accidentally runs him down with a speeding car. Although American censors snipped away at the scenes of Harrison at work and play with his numerous female companions, they generously permitted him a heroic wartime death. Also subject to censorial tampering before it reached American screens was Graham Greene's Brighton Rock, adapted by the author himself from his racking novel about life, death and a seedy British razor gang; New York's censors used their own razors on a sequence in which Richard Attenborough, the pimply-faced leader of the gang, cold-bloodedly seduces a nice girl who has witnessed a murder, compromising her so that she cannot testify against him.

But if American censors were growing increasingly concerned over what they construed to be the new immorality of British films, there was another aspect of British film making that distressed them even more, and with which they were well equipped to deal: cleavage. During the War years, the English began turning out costume dramas in great numbers, many of them examining in clinical detail the libidinous private lives of the respected gentry. Typical was Fanny by Gaslight, a 1944 adaptation of the popular novel by Michael Sadleir set in London of the 1870s. Fanny, the illegitimate daughter of a dignified cabinet minister, had been brought up by the owner of a bawdyhouse frequented by wellborn rakes. When her guardian is killed by the dissolute Lord Mander-stoke, Fanny is taken on as a maid in her father's house and discovers that his wife is having an affair with the lord. Falling in love with a young aristocrat, she refuses to marry him out of deference to his family and position, but agrees to live with him. In Paris, they meet Mander-stoke, who is now living with Fanny's childhood friend. In the course of a duel, the young man kills Manderstoke, and somehow this reconciles the family to his marriage with Fanny. Since the director, Anthony Asquith, did nothing to conceal the numerous illicit relationships in the film, and since the costume designers did even less to conceal the abundant charms of Fanny and her bordello friends, the picture was severely scissored by the American censors, who cut it from 108 minutes to 90.

Beautiful, dark-eyed Phyllis Calvert, who played Fanny, was only one of many British heroines who suffered the censors' shears because they hadn't a thing to wear on top. Margaret Lock-wood, Patricia Roc and Joan Greenwood also starred in a number of these costume dramas and melodramas, invariably co-starred with Stewart Granger or James Mason, and set in eras, such as the Restoration, when the female bosom all but burst its bonds. Googie Withers' generous cleavage in Pink String and Sealing Wax barred that film from American distribution for almost five years. Ultimately, as more and more of these pictures hit censor snags on American shores, the British producers in 1946 sent for Joseph Breen, Hollywood's intrepid Production Code administrator, to explain just what his Code was all about. Breen not only described, to the fraction of an inch, how much cleavage was acceptable before it became offensive, but also blithely suggested that the British might submit their scripts to his agency for prior approval. The suggestion roused a storm of indignation, and not merely in film circles. C. E. M. Joad, the distinguished English scholar, wrote: " I find myself tempted to ask Americans who and what they are that they should set themselves up as arbiters of manners and morals." And the eminently respectable New Statesman and Nation complained in verse:

America's artistes may stripThe haunch, the paunch, the thigh, the hip,And never shake the censorship,While Britain, straining every nerveTo amplify the export curve,Strict circumspection must observe...And why should censors sourly gapeAt outworks of the lady's shapeWhich from her fichu may escape?Our censors keep our films as cleanAs any whistle ever seen.So what is biting Mr. Breen?

Clearly, Joseph Breen was not America's favorite bundle for Britain. Once more, the Europeans were setting standards of maturity for the handling of sex and sex relations on the screen beyond anything that Hollywood had yet attained.

A similar liberation was taking place in other countries as well, although the language barrier effectively prevented many of these films from achieving wide distribution outside of their native lands. The Scandinavian countries, for example, had always been notably freer in the presentation of nudity on the screen than anywhere else in the world. In the Danish Ditte Menneskebarn (Ditte, Child of Man), based on Martin Andersen Nexö's classic novel, a young girl makes the transition from childhood to puberty by wonderingly exploring the changes in her nude body. Carl Dreyer's Vredens Dag (Day of Wrath), set in a 17th Century Danish town, includes a sequence in which a naked woman, condemned as a witch, is trussed to a stake and burned. Incidentally, the heroine of the film, the wife of the town's pastor, comes to believe that she is also a witch because she has been unfaithful to her husband. The link between repressed sexuality and religious hysteria has rarely been probed more profoundly than in the sequence in which the wife, having willed the pastor's death because she is in love with his son, guiltily accepts the charge of witchcraft after her husband has died of natural causes.

In Sweden, which long has accepted mixed nude bathing as the norm, total nudity was completely acceptable on the screen--with the result that few Swedish films of the Forties and early Fifties slipped past U. S. Customs. Alf Sjöberg's Bara en Mor (Only a Mother), for example, included the classic sequence of a woman bathing in a wooden tub--only in this film, the water barely covered her hips and her breasts were fully exposed to the camera. In Den Ljusnande Framtid (Our Bright Future) by Gustave Molander, Signe Hasso, later to star in American films, took a shower without the slightest display of false modesty. But it was not only their nudity, nor the language barrier, that long prevented Swedish films from entering the American market. Swedish film makers were also concerned with themes that had not, as yet, found acceptance on the American screen. Nymphomania was treated in such films as Det vackrast pa lorden (The Most Beautiful Thing in the World) and Kvinnavtan ansikte (Woman Without a Face), the latter written by a youthful Ingmar Bergman. Bergman also wrote Törst (Thirst, later released in the United States as Three Strange Loves after Bergman had been "discovered"); it included an exceptionally frank Lesbian sequence in which, during a dance, an old girlfriend attempts to seduce the heroine. Gösta Werner's Gatan (The Street) astonished even the Swedes by the authenticity with which it depicted Stockholm's gangsters and prostitutes--particularly the scenes showing the harbor police carting Swedish girls, including heroine Maj-Britt Nilsson, half-dressed, off an American ship where they have been plying their trade.

But it was Alf Sjöberg's Hets (Torment), again with a script by Ingmar Bergman, that first established Sweden as a contender in the international arena. Introduced at the Venice Film Festival of 1947, its story of a middle-aged, pathological schoolteacher and his effect on two young lives--a sensitive schoolboy and a terrified shopgirl--hinted (albeit discreetly) at perversions seldom treated on the screen. His teacher's petty cruelties, and the coldness of his home life, drive the youth into a liaison with the girl. Although he is unaware of it, the girl is also seeing the teacher, who brutalizes and debauches her until she dies of drink. The man is shown to be a small-minded tyrant who glories in the power he wields over the weak and the young to inflict mental and physical pain, and the film makes it altogether clear that for him sadism is his sole form of sexual release. The American censors delayed its distribution in this country. There was nothing to cut, but its central character was patently unhealthy; both the boy and his teacher were having an affair with the same girl, and no one really suffered at the end. What the censors called immorality, however, was hailed by the critics as maturity.

About the same time, Mexico began to edge into the spotlight with the eloquently photographed (by the great Gabriel Figueroa) Maria Candelaria. Mexico had long supported a thriving motion-picture industry, catering primarily to its domestic and South American markets; but its films were in the main pathetically cheap imitations of Hollywood's grade-B romances and musicals. Maria Candelaria, by contrast, starred lovely Dolores Del Rio in a story that was authentically Mexican. The daughter of an Indian peasant who once posed in the nude for an artist and was stoned to death by the outraged villagers, Maria meets the same fate for the same reason. Actually, she had supplied only the face for the portrait; another girl (Margaret Cortes) supplied the body. The film, internationally praised for its artistic and scenic beauties, inspired a host of imitators in Mexico--most of them devoting far more footage to the scenes in which the girl poses nude for an artist. Before the decade was over, nude scenes were being worked into many Mexican pictures, most of which were turned back at the American border.

The country whose films dominated the post-War scene, however, and inspired film makers everywhere with the freshness and honesty of their themes, was newly liberated Italy. Suddenly, almost out of nowhere, appeared names like De Sica, Rossellini and Visconti, and their neorealist movies--with a suddenness accentuated by the fact that production under fascism had grown so stultified and corrupt that the pictures were, for the most part, utterly devoid of interest and rarely shown outside of Italy itself. An exception--or, more literally, a harbinger of things to come--was veteran Alessandro Blasetti's delightful comedy Quattro Passi fra le Nuvole (Four Steps in the Clouds). In it, Gino Cervi, as a shabby salesman with a nagging wife and raucous family, meets an unwed girl who is reluctantly traveling home by bus to have her baby. His sympathies aroused, Cervi volunteers to pose as her husband in order to avert parental wrath. Naturally, the parents, though simple farm people, are instinctively suspicious of this decidedly unslick city slicker; but their coldness promptly dissolves when the baby proves to be a boy. "Mascolino!" the new grandfather shouts proudly, holding the tiny bundle high over his head for all to see--and the harassed salesman returns to his crowded tenement filled with memories of a happier way of life. It was a joyously affirmative film; although produced in 1942, it was not released abroad until 1947--and critics unhesitantly hailed it as the latest achievement in neorealism.

Another important precursor, which, for copyright reasons, has still not been seen outside of Italy, is Luchino Visconti's Ossessione (Obsession), also made in 1942. Following (without the necessary legal sanctions) the general outlines of James Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice, Visconti transplants Cain's unholy trinity of vicious wife, slobby husband and itchy lover to the flat, marshy stretches of the Po delta, with its easygoing peasants clamoring through wayside trattorias and turbulent street fairs. The wife is a passionate slut who sees in the young man a welcome change from her fat, complacent and sexually repellent husband. The lover has no compunctions about climbing into another man's bed, but grows uneasy as the affair continues. Actually, he is far happier when, eluding the woman for a while, he can spend a night with a simple, uncomplicated prostitute. But his desire flares up once more and he returns to the wife, and to his fate. Together, they kill the husband--and he finds himself locked to a woman he no longer really wants.

All of this Visconti tells with unadorned realism. And the film's natural backgrounds are every bit as removed as the characters from conventional, studio-made street scenes and interiors. "This is the way things are," Visconti seemed to be saying, neither condoning nor condemning his protagonists. "This is the way things are" was to become the philosophic keystone of the neorealist movement.

First, however, the past had to be buried. When Italy signed an armistice in September 1943, and hard-core Fascists set up the short-lived Republic of Salò, Fascist elements in the motion-picture industry hastily moved from Rome to the Scalera studios in Venice. Here, in the months that remained to them, they put into production perhaps a dozen pictures--films with revealing titles like Desiderio (Desire), Il Ratto delle Sabine (The Rape of the Sabines) and Le Due Modelle (The Two Models). Meanwhile, ugly reports began to leak out of wild profligacy in the studios and of sadistic orgies in the villas of Scalera producers, directors and stars--orgies at the expense of the captured partisans and suspected sympathizers. Although never proven, the charges were so widely accepted that when the partisans finally took over the city, they summarily executed a number of the film people there.

At the same time, back in Rome, while Nazis still occupied the city, Roberto Rossellini had already begun work on what was to become, officially, the first neorealist film, Roma Città Aperta (Open City). Shooting from rooftops and from behind windows, setting up his camera on roads where he had been tipped off to expect partisan action, Rossellini assembled the documentary footage that would lend authenticity to his picture. The story itself was drawn from real-life incidents; his characters were composites of actual people. His purpose was admirably single-minded: to show the bravery, the humor and the torments of the people of Rome under the Occupation. And he succeeded because, although studio-trained himself, he refused to glamorize a single character or a single shot. Anna Magnani, conspicuously pregnant, trots through the early reels in a shabby black dress and wearing the clumsy clogs so prevalent among the Italian poor during the War years. Carla Rovere, the willful sister of an underground printer, sports a dress cut almost to the navel--suitable attire for a complaisant night-club entertainer who trades her body for German cigarettes and nylons. Most remarkable of all, however, is Maria Michi's tormented portrait of a night-club dancer, the mistress of a hunted partisan leader, who is fed drugs by the SS until she reveals his whereabouts. The SS woman, unmistakably Lesbian, adds to the drugs the offer of a costly fur--and coldly withdraws it after the girl has served her purpose. The partisan is tortured at SS headquarters by a colonel whose sadism is clearly dictated by perversion, and other Nazi types are depicted as ranging from the homosexual to the voluptuary. "This is the way things were," says Rossellini--and his film stands as eloquent testament to a time that made people better, or worse, than they were.

Rossellini followed Open City with the equally persuasive Paisa (Paisan), a series of six episodes that followed the course of the War up the Italian peninsula. In the Rome sequence, perhaps the most extended of the sextet, he again introduces Maria Michi. Seen first as a fresh-faced, laughing-eyed slip of a girl cheering the American tanks as they make their entry into Rome, she is discovered again six months later, an ordinary prostitute. The War has taken its toll. What gives this sequence its special poignancy, however, is the fact that she is discovered--but not recognized under all her make-up--by the young American who had fallen in love with her on the day of liberation. After their night together, she tells him she will leave the address where he can find the girl he loves and hurries there to wait for him. He looks at the slip of paper on the street; when another soldier asks him about it, he tosses it away. "Just another whore's address," he replies. War, Rossellini seems to imply, coarsens both the conqueror and the conquered.

Rossellini had set a course that other film makers were quick to follow. For the first time in their lives, they could make the films their consciences dictated without fear of reprisal or unemployment. It was a great moment in the Italian cinema--and many of the pictures that resulted were also great. De Sica's Sciuscià (Shoeshine), Zampa's Vivere in Pace (To Live in Peace), Visconti's La Terra Trema (The Earth Trembles) all sprang from this same impulse--to draw for the Italians a true account of their lives and their times, and to set it forth realistically and without adornment. Inevitably, this degree of realism was not universally acclaimed. When De Sica's Ladri di Biciclette (The Bicycle Thief) came to this country, for example, the Production Code people would not grant it a Seal unless the distributors eliminated a short flash showing a little boy, his back only partially turned to the camera, quite obviously urinating in the street. Others objected to the fact that, in the course of his frantic search for a stolen bicycle, the father takes his boy into a brothel (although, since it is Sunday morning, the women are not exhibiting their wares). But the distributors stood their ground and the film, shown intact, became not only one of the most widely praised but one of the most profitable Italian pictures ever to play in the United States.

While it is pointless to question the sincerity that lay behind most neorealist films produced in the years immediately after the War, neither can one blink away the fact that many themes were chosen for their exploitability or for the relative ease with which their documentary settings could be used as backdrops for melodrama, mayhem and sex. The Tombolo, for example, a heavily wooded area near the port town of Livorno, had become notorious throughout post-War Italy as a hide-out for American Army deserters, Negro and white, who lived there in open defiance of the law with town prostitutes and other criminal elements. It inspired such sensational items as Tombolo, Paradiso Nero (Tombolo, Black Paradise) and Senza Pietà (Without Pity), both depicting in lurid detail the rampant vice and lawlessness of the place, but centering their stories on cases of miscegenation--Negro GIs and Italian whores. Gioventù Perduta (Lost Youth), by Pietro Germi, dealt no less candidly with teenage delinquency just after the War paying particular attention to the criminal activities of teenaged gangs. Il Bandito (The Bandit), with Anna Magnani, began simply enough as an account of the problems facing a young soldier upon his return to civilian life, but soon got beyond that when the young man, following a pair of pretty legs to a brothel, discovers that the girl is actually his sister. He promptly kills her pimp and sets off on a spectacular, if brief, life of crime.

But the picture that, for all time, turned neorealism in a new direction and profoundly affected every aspect of Italian production was Giuseppe de Santis' resoundingly successful Riso Amaro (Bitter Rice). Once again, it was a film that used a real setting and real people as its point of departure--the mondine, the migratory workers who harvest the rice crops in the Po valley. In this instance, they are primarily women. And among the women, wearing short shorts, loose blouse and incongruous long black stockings, stands the voluptuously proportioned Silvana Mangano. As The New York Times put it, "It is not too excessive to describe her as Anna Magnani minus 15 years, Ingrid Bergman with a Latin disposition, and Rita Hayworth plus 25 pounds." A big, fun-loving girl, she is half-seduced, half-raped by a fugitive from justice (Vittorio Gassman) in a wild, rough-and-tumble scuffle in a barn, then abandoned to her fate.

What the Italians learned from Bitter Rice was that all around the world there was a considerable public for big, fun-loving girls wearing brief pants, loose blouses and long black stockings. Almost overnight the earthy Anna Magnanis were displaced by the new neorealist heroines--full-busted, long-stemmed beauties like Gina Lollobrigida, Silvana Pampanini, Eleanora Rossi-Drago and Sophia Loren. These were the new stars to which the Italian studios hitched their vehicles.

At the same time, toward the end of the decade, as the country returned to normalcy and producers were able to lay their hands on greater sums of risk capital, the old Italian taste for sex-laced spectacles began to reassert itself. Probably no other nation has ever relished quite so much the opportunity to dress up and play its past--the good bad old days at Pompeii, the good bad old days of bread and circuses in Rome. In 1948, for the fourth time, the Italians prepared a mammoth superproduction, with a mixed French and Italian cast, of that old war horse, Gli Ultimi Giorni di Pompei (The Last Days of Pompeii). Simultaneously, Alessandro Blasetti--he of Four Steps in the Clouds--directed a huge Franco-Italian co-production of Nicholas Wiseman's venerable Fabiola, also a remake, starring Michèle Morgan and Michel Simon. "Two hundred leading French and Italian athletes engaging in spectacular feats of arms of ancient times," read the preliminary announcements, "and 7000 actors, bit players and extras." For all this extravagance, its complex story of skulduggery in Fourth Century Rome, when Christians were still being fed to the lions with alarming regularity, proved routine and dull--while the sequences that Blasetti had introduced to spice the proceedings (dozens of naked girls herded into the blood-flecked arena, dozens more dangling from crosses while flames licked at their feet) were absent from the American version. It was from such precedents as these, however, that Joseph E. Levine was to amass a fortune just a decade later.

One more film needs mention before the Forties draw to a close, although its full significance was not apparent until the early Fifties. In 1948, to honor the talents of Anna Magnani, Roberto Rossellini prepared a modest two-part film entitled Amore (Love). The first half, La Voce Umana (The Telephone), based on an absorbing but uncommercial one-act play by Jean Cocteau, never reached this country. The other half, however, was called Il Miracolo (The Miracle), and it reached not only this country but its courts as well. In it, Magnani appears as a simple-minded peasant girl who, seduced by a passing vagabond (played, incidentally, by Federico Fellini), becomes convinced that the man is St. Joseph. When she discovers she is to have a baby, she thinks of the Virgin Mary before her and her baby. Mocked by the villagers, who place a bedpan on her head instead of a halo and pelt her with garbage instead of flowers, she withdraws into the hills to await her time, then climbs painfully to a stable on a mountaintop, where she gives birth to her child. The final shot is her radiant, beatific smile as she bares her breast to give suck to the infant. New York's censors, at the insistence of the Catholic Church, hauled it off the screen as "sacrilegious" days after its opening, early in 1950. But its courageous distributor, the late Joseph Burstyn, initiated a series of court battles that was to shake the very foundations for legal censorship in the United States. For all its artistic merits, The Miracle will live in film history as the motion picture that wrung from the U.S. Supreme Court the admission that the film is a medium of communication subject to all the freedoms and protection guaranteed by the First Amendment. That in itself was no small miracle.

until V-E day, axis censorhip suppressed sex in cinema abroad, but liberation created the climate for a new erotic realism

In the next installment of "The History of Sex in Cinema," authors Knight and Alpert scrutinize the charismatic sex stars of the Forties: leggy wartime pinups such as Lana Turner, Betty Grable and Rita Hayworth; sultry femmes fatales such as Ava Gardner, Lauren Bacall and Veronica Lake; beefcake boys such as Victor Mature, Robert Mitchum and Errol Flynn; teenage dreamboats such as Van Johnson and Frank Sinatra; matinee idols such as Alan Ladd and Gregory Peck; and everybody's favorite tough guy, the late, great Humphrey Bogart.