The History of Sex in Cinema

Part XIII: The Fifties-Sex Goes International

If America's Attitudes toward sex in the movies underwent a drastic change during the Fifties, it was due in no small part to the stepped-up importation of foreign films throughout that period. Always, to say the least, tolerant of nudity on the screen, the French during the Fifties began to exploit it in earnest with charmers like Martine Carol and, especially, Brigitte Bardot--augmented in the last years of the decade by the bed-oriented efforts of the Nouvelle Vague. Italy's film makers learned quickly that their neorealism somehow sold better when the likes of Sophia Loren and Gina Lollobrigida decorated their brawling tenements and squalid farms, and that history became a much livelier subject when peopled with beefcake males and gauzily clad (or unclad) females. Ingmar Bergman, by sex obsessed, accomplished singlehandedly a revival of interest in the films of his native Sweden; while Rashomon's multifaceted depiction of a brutal rape focused international attention on Japanese pictures. And in England, where heretofore only cleavage had given our censors occasional cause for concern, a whole new tribe of angry young men explored both social and sexual relations on screen with a candor that was as profitable as it was unprecedented. Suddenly, it seemed, the entire world had discovered sex and was eager to expose the nature of this discovery through cinema.

It was an era markedly similar to the Twenties, when once again the life-destroying forces of war were countered in the post-War years by a reaffirmation of the flesh and the rejection of all repressive influences, whether political or philosophic. But where the Twenties embraced Dr. Coué's view that "things are getting better and better," the existentialists of the Fifties would go no further than the wary admission that "whatever is, is." And where the Twenties had its "flaming youth," the Beat Generation of the Fifties preferred to play it cool. Existentialist or cool, however, implied the same attitude--the acceptance of phenomena, events and happenings on their own terms, without censure and, above all, without applying to them the moral values of the past. It was an era that feared commitment of any sort, except to the fulfillment of the personality and the gratification of the senses. Not surprisingly, the films of the Fifties--and particularly those produced in Europe--not only reflected this philosophy but boldly affirmed it.

Inevitably, however, American censors were more concerned with flesh than with philosophy as they wielded their shears over foreign-made films; and the pictures from France and Italy in the early Fifties frequently provided a good deal more than Shylock's proverbial pound. Indeed, one of France's most popular vedettes, Martine Carol, remains largely unknown in this country because so many of her earlier (and best) works were either slashed unmercifully by our censors or barred completely from our screens. Long before Brigitte Bardot had bounded on the scene, Mademoiselle Carol, a comely and well-shaped blonde, was baring her all in sexy comedies such as Trente et Quarante or in more serious efforts such as Les Amants de Vérone (The Lovers of Verona). Stage-trained, and a capable actress, by the end of the Forties she had become France's favorite pinup. Her career began to skyrocket, however, when in 1950 she was cast in the title role of Caroline Chérie, a kind of French Forever Amber. As Caroline, the bosomy Martine wore gowns that left precious little to the imagination (and in the French version she shucked even these from time to time for the benefit of the completely unimaginative). So successful was the film that it was soon followed by a sequel, Un Caprice de Caroline Chérie (A Night with Caroline), and then by a long series of historic or fictional films about bad girls--Lucrezia Borgia, Madame DuBarry, Nana and Lola Montès. In all of them, the star obliged her fans by appearing in the altogether at least once; but as her popularity increased, the number of glimpses vouchsafed diminished in direct proportion--and Lo Duca, a French authority on such matters, has pointed out as well that in her later films she was not above using a substitute with larger and shapelier breasts as her stand-in for the close-ups.

But if Martine Carol's profits were largely in her own country, Brigitte Bar-dot, whose film career got under way in the mid-Fifties, had the inestimable advantage of rising to stardom just as some of the wraps were coming off the American screen. Americans, of course, saw considerably less of the uninhibited sex kitten than did their European contemporaries. Indeed, the opening sequence of Et Dieu...Créa la Femme (And God...Created Woman), in which BB indulges in a nude sun bath amidst a yardful of drying laundry, was so chopped (text continued on page 238) by the censors as she darted among the blowing sheets that she seemed to be suddenly afflicted by a bad case of St. Vitus' dance. More footage came out of the film's most famous scene, with Bar-dot luring her new husband (and off-screen lover, Jean-Louis Trintignant) into bed by the simple expedient of wrapping her naked self in a sheet, then flinging wide her arms to expose its contents; so well did the gambit succeed that for the next few moments, as the two grapple beneath the shifting sheet upon the bed, the censors went to work all over again. Critics scoffed and censor boards fulminated, but this tawdry tale of a man-hungry gamine who almost destroys herself held a powerful fascination for American audiences, who showered upon it some $4,000,000--making it one of the most successful imports ever to play in this country. It was, incidentally, far (text continued on page 244) less popular in France--perhaps because celluloid stripteases there were far more common.

When And God...Created Woman opened at a New York art theater, the house manager expected it to last a fast two weeks. Instead, it played for almost a year. In the meantime, distributors dipped back into the grab bag of previous Bardot pictures, hoping to cash in on the phenomenon: La Lumière d'en Face (The Light Across the Street), La Mariée Est Trop Belle (The Bride Is Much Too Beautiful), Cette Sacrée Gamine, Mam'zelle Pigalle and Mam'zelle Striptease, which somehow was American for En Effeuillant la Marguerite. Although the films were far from distinguished, by early 1958 all New York was a Bardot festival; her pictures, duly dubbed and scrubbed, were playing not only in the art houses but in exploitation grind houses and in respectable neighborhood theaters as well. Despite the censors' elisions, Americans responded to the girl's frankly animal sexuality. If the animal was at least part alley cat, it made her all the more exciting--an intriguing combination of girlish, dewy-eyed innocence and instant availability. In her willful amorality, her almost petulant avoidance of all commitments, as Simone de Beauvoir has put it, in her "eroticism brought down to earth," Brigitte Bardot virtually personified the youth of the Fifties. And in many of her films, the plots were so contrived as to emphasize the ambivalent reactions of an older generation to her unconventional behavior. American audiences professed to be shocked by Bardot, but they were also intrigued by--and perhaps secretly envied--her emancipated attitudes toward love and life. Certainly, by the end of the Fifties her name had become as potent a box-office lure as that of any homebred Hollywood star.

Actually, in most of the 24 films that Bardot made before And God...Created Woman, she was rarely called upon to do more than exhibit her slim, sensuous body--and there were strict rules about that sort of thing over here. Nor were Bardot's the only pictures to be barred for reasons of nudity. During the Fifties, the French studios turned out a vast number of striptease films with titles such as Bonsoir Paris, Bonjour l'Amour, Casino de Paris and La Reine du Strip-Tease (Queen of the Strip-Tease), which sought to string as many bare-breasted production numbers as possible upon a minimum of story line. Casino de Paris, for example, which included a topless fashion show, starred Caterina Valente and Vittorio DeSica in the mindless kind of plot popularized by Warner Bros. during the Thirties: the vicissitudes of a famous impresario in getting his show produced. Similarly, Robert Dhéry's Ah! Les Belles Bacchantes had the merest pretext of a plot and an abundance of Folies-Bergère--type nudes.

Orgies abounded in yet another version of Alexander Dumas' venerable La Tour de Nesle, a Franco-Italian co-production made in 1954 with the handsomely endowed Silvana Pampanini as the wicked Queen Marguerite. In the absence of the king, Marguerite and her two sisters pass the time in nights of unbridled licentiousness; then, in order to prevent word getting around, arrange to have their lovers murdered every morning. The queen goes mad when she learns that one of the lovers she has disposed of in this fashion is in fact her long-lost son. The plot may have creaked, but its eroticism crackled. Never admitted into the United States, it has been running (without a censorship certificate) on a semiprivate English cinema-club circuit since 1961. Another curious item that Americans may never see at home is one inspired by the Christine Jorgenson case, Adam Est Eve (Adam Is Eve). In it, Charles, a professional boxer, marries against his doctor's advice, but flees on his wedding night. Two years later, he returns as Charlotte. A woman, Micheline Carvel, played both roles.

If the French cinema had had nothing to offer beyond orgies, oddities, stripteases and a tempting assortment of sex kittens cavorting on beds and beaches, the assiduous efforts of the American censors might not have been so keenly resented. Actually, however, some of the decade's finest pictures were French imports, and no few of them tangled with our censors and our courts. One of the first was Max Ophüls' La Ronde, a witty and sophisticated adaptation of Schnitzler's Reigen, which in ten cleverly interlocking episodes presented a cross section of Viennese morals and manners at the turn of the century. Abetted by a worldly wise commentator in the person of Anton Walbrook (who at one point in the film turns up, shears in hand, as a movie censor), Ophüls made the work more a bittersweet romantic comedy than a social satire, with emphasis upon the inconstancy of lovers rather than the milieu that encourages profligacy. But if all the world loves a lover, New York's Board of Censors balked at ten of them. They refused the film a license, charging "immorality"--to which the New York Court of Appeals added the charge that it dealt from start to finish "with promiscuity, adultery, fornication and seduction," and hence constituted "a clear and present danger" to the good people of that state. The decision was reversed, almost two years later, by the U.S. Supreme Court, which tactfully pointed out that the picture had already played in 16 censor-free states and the District of Columbia without any appreciable effect on the public's morals. Obviously, what the censors objected to was not promiscuity, adultery, fornication or seduction, since all of these have been basic to screen plots since the invention of the movie camera; their real objection was to La Ronde's wickedly Continental assumption that extramarital lovemaking might be a pleasurable, and not necessarily punishable, experience.

One of the strongest melodramas of the Fifties was Henri-Georges Clouzot's Le Salaire de la Peur (The Wages of Fear), winner of the 1953 Cannes Film Festival and widely acclaimed in Europe by critics and public alike. But Americans never felt its full impact; by the time the censors and the distributors had finished tinkering with it, almost an hour of playing time had been removed. Part of the objections were political. Set in a Central American oil town, the film cast as villains--that is, the only people with any money--the representatives of an American oil company. Unsympathetically drawn, the manager of the company ostentatiously places property values above human lives when he offers four derelict men a bonus to drive two truck-loads of nitroglycerine through hazardous roads to a burning oil field. Despite extensive re-editing by the distributors to dilute its anti-American tone, the censors greeted it with more than ordinary hostility. Sequences between Yves Montand and Véra Clouzot that furthered their semiserious flirtation in the heat and languor of the tropical town were reduced to a minimum. One would have to read closely between the lines to apprehend that the relationship between Montand and Charles Vanel, a cynical con man, might be anything more than purely platonic. Nevertheless, the picture's essential power was such that, cuts notwithstanding, The Wages of Fear became one of the most successful foreign films of the Fifties in this country.

Less memorable as a film, but more important in the long run for the Supreme Court decision it elicited, was Marc Allegret's L'Amant de Lady Chatterley (Lady Chatterley's Lover), which followed closely the outline of D. H. Lawrence's controversial novel, eliminating only its even more controversial four-letter words. Nevertheless, this was not enough to satisfy the New York censors, who demanded that three crucial scenes be eliminated: Lady Chatterley and Mellors in bed together in his cabin "in a state of undress"; a second, similar scene later in the film; and one in which the lusty gamekeeper begins to make love to the lady by caressing her buttocks, then unzips her dress and fondles her bare back. The American distributor, the late Edward L. Kingsley, refused to make the cuts and, ultimately, the film made its way to the highest tribunal. New York's Regents had noted that the film was "immoral" because its "theme is the presentation of adultery as a desirable, acceptable and proper pattern of behavior." In other words, it was presenting an idea. The Supreme Court, in a decision that has since been widely quoted, flatly rejected this as a basis for censorship. Justice Stewart, speaking for the entire Court, pointed out that "the First Amendment's basic guarantee is of freedom to advocate ideas. The state, quite simply, has struck at the very heart of constitutionally protected liberty." The picture played without cuts. The Supreme Court granted a similar reprieve to Claude Autant-Lara's sensitive and poetic study of an adolescent's discovery of sex, Le Blé en Herbe (Game of Love), based on a Colette novel. This time it was Chicago and the Illinois Supreme Court that found the film "obscene," pointing to the fact that its 16-year-old hero, after having been seduced by an older woman, promptly passes on his newfound wisdom to his 15-year-old girlfriend. The higher Court, by refusing to accept this judgment, made it clear that obscenity charges based on the personal, capricious whims of a censor or censor body would no longer be given credence.

But it was Louis Malle's frankly erotic Les Amants (The Lovers), arriving here late in 1959 as part of the rising "New Wave" of French films, that ultimately wrung from the Supreme Court the broadest, most liberal interpretation of the power of local censor boards. In the case, known as Jacobellis vs. Ohio and not settled until 1964, the Court maintained for the first time that national, not purely local, "contemporary community standards" were to be used in determining whether or not a "work of expression" is to be judged obscene; and also that the Justices themselves--not states, not juries--hold the final word in cases involving the stifling of free speech under the guise of protecting a community against "obscene" works. Writing in The New Yorker from Paris shortly after the film's premiere in January 1959, Gênet had declared flatly, "It could not be shown in New York without cutting, and most likely will not be shown there at all." But the times were changing faster than she knew, and the story itself--a bored wife meets a young man quite casually, swiftly falls in love with him and next morning quits home and husband to run off with him--caused little comment. The commotion came from the final reels, in which the two, by accident, find each other in a park, begin to make love in a little boat, and continue with mounting enthusiasm in her bed and bathtub. The camera's movement is poetic throughout, but the loveplay is altogether specific--including one of the most graphic depictions of cunnilingus ever filmed for public exhibition. It was also distinguished by the presence of dark-eyed Jeanne Moreau, already the darling of the Nouvelle Vague directors, in her first important role, as the discontented wife and mother.

Nouvelle Vague, of course, is less a movement than an attitude, less an affirmation (as was, for example, neorealism) than an out-of-hand rejection of the conventional ways of making pictures with stars, scripts and studios. It began with discontent, and it battened on an economic crisis that swept through the French studios in the late Fifties. Suddenly, there was an unprecedented opportunity for anyone who could gather a few hundred thousand francs to become his own movie director. In addition to the inestimable advantage of having worked with Jacques-Yves Cousteau on some of his underwater films, Louis Malle had a personal fortune that enabled him to make his first feature; Claude Chabrol's wife providentially inherited a few million francs just as the production scene was opening up; and Roger Vadim had Brigitte Bardot--and most of the sexy starlets he featured in his subsequent efforts.

It might be unfair to suggest that the sexuality with which so many of their first works were drenched was at least in part inspired by the fact that these young directors had their own money wrapped up in their pictures, and that Vadim's And God...Created Woman had already eloquently demonstrated that offbeat sex was a solidly commercial commodity. It might be unfair, but it is not at all unlikely. As Alain Resnais wrote about his L'Année Dernière à Marienbad (Last Year at Marienbad), "We wanted, with an objective which might be called commercial, to make a realist film which would get home to a wide public." He had already demonstrated his ability to do just that when, in 1959, he directed Hiroshima, Mon Amour, with its huge opening close-ups of two nude lovers, a French girl and a Japanese, passionately intertwined, the texture of their skins glistening beneath a micalike layer of atomic dust. But Resnais was one of the few Nouvelle Vague film makers to turn his new freedom to social purposes; most of them were more than willing to follow Vadim's lead, concentrating on beds and bosoms. Claude Chabrol's cynical Les Cousins (The Cousins), for example, has as its hero a young man who coolly acquires his friend's fiancée as his own mistress and prepares for a law examination with an orgy. In Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless, Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg spend almost as much time in bed together as they do fleeing the police. Also typically New Wave, at the end of the film Miss Seberg brightly, consciencelessly and purposelessly fingers her boyfriend for the gendarmerie. And Vadim's own Les Liaisons Dangereuses, an updating of an 18th Century succès de scandale about a woman who encourages her husband to seduce the fiancée of her lover of the moment, reprised the novel's scandale (if not its succès) with scenes of lovemaking that left little to the imagination. Atleast one knew the precise location of every mole on the lithe and pretty body of Annette Vadim (Brigitte's successor). Actually, so similar had the films become that by the end of the Fifties the New Wave was already in danger of becoming old hat. As one critic observed, "They don't bother to change the plot anymore--only the sheets."

Sex also played a far more dominant role in the Italian films of the Fifties. Once that war-ravaged nation had struggled back to its feet, neorealist plots and philosophies seemed strangely out of place. Who wanted to be reminded of war and hard times when pasta was plentiful and the ragazze beautiful? These were the themes, however, that had won for Italy a prominent place in the art houses of the world, and the dedicated neorealist directors had no wish to forget it. Bitter Rice, produced in 1948, pointed to a resolution that many directors could readily accept: pretty girls caught up in neorealist situations. Soon the Italian cinema was fairly bristling with lovely young job seekers trapped by social injustice on a collapsing stairwell, with busty youngsters forced into prostitution by "the system," and with fresh-faced telephone operators who were secretly on dope. Realism was rapidly giving way to titillation and sensationalism. Curiously prophetic was a 1954 film supervised by the éminence grise of the neorealists, the writer and theoretician Cesare Zavattini. Called Amore in Città (Love in the City), it purported to be a kind of photojournalism, drawing several of its six episodes directly from newspaper headlines. In one sequence, for example, a peasant girl abandons her illegitimate baby in a park when she can no longer afford to feed it; the case made the papers because she later tried to reclaim the child and was indignantly refused by the authorities. Zavattini persuaded the girl to re-enact her own story, with her own child. In other sequences, the camera interviews prostitutes on the streets of Rome, or recreates the events leading up to the attempted suicides of several attractive young girls; both the narration and the film's accompanying publicity underscored the fact that these were actual prostitutes and would-be suicides talking about their own lives. (The point was made even stronger when the Italian government sought, unsuccessfully, to bar the Love for Sale segment from foreign distribution.) Altogether, Love in the City was a clear admission of the new directions that neorealism was taking Even more significantly, the directors involved in this project included, besides Zavattini, such key figures as Michelangelo Antonioni, Dino Risi, Alberto Lattuada and Federico Fellini.

Love in the City, although the proving ground for a whole new generation of film makers, never enjoyed the success that would warrant repetition. In the meantime, however, Renato Castellani's Due Soldi di Speranza (Two Cents Worth of Hope) had already indicated the new spirit within neorealism. Its concern was still with the poor, its settings the rough-cobbled streets and squares of a small village near Naples. Its hero, returned from the war, supports his large family by working in the parish church by day and posting Communist manifestoes in Naples by night. Before he can marry Carmela, the daughter of a local businessman, he must earn enough money to make up a dowry for his sister, who had been seduced by a rich peasant. Ultimately, driven to desperation, the young man strips Carmela naked in the town square and hurls her clothes at her father: He cannot afford a dowry, and so he will take the girl as God made her, beholden to no one. At the end, the villagers assert their assent and support of his action. Almost forgotten today, Two Cents Worth of Hope was an important turning point. It retained all the humanism of the earlier neorealist films, but it also had humor, optimism--and sex.

Not that sex had ever been lacking. Unwed mothers and illegitimate babies were always part of the neorealistic way of life. But where, in the immediate post-War years, they had provided either pathos or problems, beginning in the early Fifties young maids and their premarital peccadilloes were viewed with tolerant amusement or even enthusiasm, while amorous escapades of every sort became as central to the new neorealism as anti-Nazi activities had been to the old. Vittorio DeSica, who as director was almost alone in maintaining the approach of the Forties, created in his Umberto D. (1952) a figure of great sympathy out of a rooming-house slavey who couldn't say for certain whether she was made pregnant by that handsome soldier from Naples or the one from Rome; on the other hand, at virtually the same time, DeSica as actor, in Blasetti's Altri Tempi (Times Gone By), offered one of his finest performances as a bumbling, long-winded Neapolitan lawyer who defends Gina Lollobrigida in a murder case. It seems the impetuous girl had poisoned her mother-in-law because that good woman had persisted in advising her son of each of his young wife's extramarital affairs. The lawyer, frustrated in every legal ploy by his client's disarming candor, ultimately reaches back to the ancient trial of Phryne for a classic precedent, reveals Gina's impressive cleavage to the delighted court and asks how judge and jury can possibly take the responsibility for removing from the world such unique physical charms. Since most of those present, the film makes clear, had already sampled those unique physical charms, the court comes to swift and unanimous agreement. This worldly, lighthearted and altogether candid appreciation of sex soon became a characteristic of the better Italian movies.

Sex--or at least nudity--was also evident in another group of Italian films made during the Fifties; but thanks to our assiduous censors and ever-watchful Customs men, very few of them reached these shores. They were negligible enough at home even with their sprinklings of eroticism, but if such scenes had been removed, the distributors would have been left with nothing to sell. Typical was Era Lui, Si, Si...(It Was He, Yes, Yes...), notable primarily for giving a very young--and very naked--Sophia Loren her start in pictures. In it, a young man asks a rich shopkeeper for a job, but is rejected because the shopkeeper recognizes him as the rival who constantly turns up in his dreams to steal away his ladyfriends. Needless to add, Sophia was one of his dream girls--and even at 17 a mighty substantial one. Similarly, dreams motivate the mam-marian displays in O.K. Nerone (O.K. Nero), which featured the abundant charms of Silvana Pampanini and a bevy of half-nude slave girls. Loren was plentifully visible again in Due Notti con Cleopatra (Two Nights with Cleopatra), a comedy in which she played the dual roles of the Serpent of the Nile and a servant girl. In both, the bountiful Loren bosom was frequently, and fully, on display.

Two Nights with Cleopatra treated lightly the type of historical material that a long cycle of Italian films of the Fifties handled with utmost seriousness and a lavish disregard for cost. For some reason, the Italians have always had a special affection for the pomp and glory of Rome's Imperial past, with its marbled palaces, togaed throngs and sadistic spectacles. Through the years, these have been a recurring theme in Italian film production; and in the Fifties, with the Italian studios once more operating on a firm economic base, the Italian historical superspectaculars attained a degree of opulence that producers elsewhere (including Hollywood itself) could hope to emulate only by renting studio space at Rome's bustling Cinecittà. Typical of this trend were films such as Messalina, Attila, Il Sacco de Roma (The Sack of Rome) and Frine, Corigiana d'Oriente (Phryne, Oriental Courtesan), in which the spectacular elements were generously larded with sex. Attila (which starred Anthony Quinn and Sophia Loren) and Messalina, for example, featured sequences of bacchanalian revels in which many of the female revelers were naked from the waist up; while in The Sack of Rome, which played briefly in U.S. exploitation houses as The Pagans, audiences were treated to scenes of rape and sadistic massacre, as well as Roman orgies at their most decadent. (American censors permitted such sequences in long shots, but assiduously eliminated the graphic close-ups in the original.)

During the Fifties, incidentally, American distributors of European pictures, in an effort to make them live up to their racy reputation, began to get around the Customs officials and local censorship by the simple expedient of shooting new bits of nudity for insertion into their prints. At first, such sequences merely replaced shots that had been eliminated; but as the distributors grew bolder, special low-budget directors--or "doctors," as they were called--were brought in to "sex up" foreign films with additional erotic footage created specifically for the American market. Perhaps the most famous of these was the nude bathing sequence slipped into Ingmar Bergman's Illicit Interlude. Filmed on a private lake in New Jersey by an American director, Larry Moyer, the scenes showed a shapely young model running into the water and cavorting there with her equally naked boyfriend. So successfully was the footage integrated that contemporary critics commented on the "typical Continental delicacy in the treatment of sex." Not until some years later, after Bergman had attained his international reputation, was this sequence removed from American prints--at Bergman's specific request. The distributors capitalized on this turn of events by reissuing the film in its "original uncut version."

Another, more typical "doctoring" job of Moyer's concerned an Italian exploitation film entitled I Vampiri, which became The Devil's Commandment for the American trade. In its original form, the picture began with a girl's body being hauled out of a river. On her neck, the police discover two mystifying small scratches--the same small scratches that have been mystifying police the world over, despite the fact that Bram Stoker identified them for all time in Dracula in 1897. For his version, Moyer added an opening in which presumably the same girl arrives in her apartment, disrobes in front of a mirror to the inevitable Merry Widow bra and black garter belt, then prepares to take a bath. Meanwhile, outside, shots of stealthy feet on the stairway, a gloved hand at the doorknob. These intercut with the girl in her tub (and brief glimpses of her breasts as she merrily washes away). Then the look of terror as she glances up and perceives the killer, the futile attempts to conceal her nudity as he clutches toward her. She screams. Darkness ... Then into I Vampiri. For good measure, Moyer also threw in a juicy rape sequence later in the picture. Moyer's services were used during the Fifties to "doctor" more than a dozen European features, including a German-made anti-Nazi film that became, with certain judicious additions, The Secret Sex Life of Hitler.

But with or without the subtle ministrations of Larry Moyer and the several other New York--based "doctors" of the Fifties, the European films--and particularly those from Italy--began to gain audiences even outside art-house circles. One of the first was Alessandro Blasetti's gargantuan Fabiola, with an international cast headed by Michèle Morgan and Massimo Girotti. Produced in 1948, it was carefully re-edited for the American market, expensively dubbed into English and released in 1951 by United Artists. This pattern was followed with far greater success when, late in the Fifties, a canny Boston distributor named Joseph E. Levine purchased an idiotic sex-and-gore spectacular called Le Fatiche di Ercole, backed it with a $2,000,000 advertising campaign of the purest hyperbole, and flung it simultaneously onto hundreds of theater and drive-in screens across the country as Hercules. The audacity of his gesture, selling a sow's ear as if it were a silk purse, made a top star overnight of muscle-bound Steve Reeves--and a millionaire of the diminutive Levine. When filmdom's wiseacres solemnly declared that while the American public might be fooled once, it certainly could not happen again, Levine promptly upset their misplaced faith by taking the sequel, Ercole e la Regina di Lidia, retitling it Hercules Unchained and, following precisely the same exploitation procedures, made himself another gold mine. No one--and least of all Mr. Levine--would seriously claim that the Hercules pictures were "art"; but between their beefcake hero and gauzily clad heroines, their beefcake hero and gauzily clad heroines, their scenes of mass violence and uncomplicated eroticism, they afforded a mindless escapism that found wide favor with audiences everywhere.

Unfortunately, for such serious, contemplative graduates of the neorealist school as Antonioni, DeSica, Fellini, Rossellini and Visconti, the road was a good deal rougher. They wanted to put onto the screen their view of an increasingly amoral, increasingly materialistic society, but without the sensationalism that generally spelled big box office. Perhaps their most notable failure, simply because of its size and expense, was Viscounti's gorgeously mounted production of Senso, filmed in Technicolor with Alida Valli and Farley Granger. Set in Venice in 1866, at the time of the war against Austria, its rather operatic plot focused upon the corrupt and decadent aristocrats on both sides. The aging wife of an Italian count falls desperately in love with a pleasure-loving Austrian officer, but after a protracted affair, denounces him to the Austrian commandant when she learns that her passion is not returned. Visconti had added a political tone to the film, attempting to set the love story against the events of the risorgimento; but Italy's censors forced the producer to cut these scenes so drastically that what predominated on the screen were shots of Valli in furs and Granger in satins repeatedly steering each other to sumptuous beds and couches.

Antonioni, truer to his neorealist origins, followed his work on Love in the City with Le Amiche, a typically low-keyed study of a quintet of girls in Milanese fashion circles, and with Il Grido (The Outcry), in which the late Steve Cochran played a restless, irresistible but doomed workingman. So muted in tone were both films that not even the candor (and in Il Grido the frank carnality) of their sex scenes could win them wide popularity, although they enjoyed considerable critical esteem. Rossellini, working with his new wife, Ingrid Bergman, during the early Fifties, was unable to generate even critical enthusiasm. His films--Stromboli, Europa 51 (The Greatest Love), Viaggio in Italie (A Trip in Italy) and Siamo Donne (We Are Women)--tended to feature the radiant Bergman as a somnolent sexpot belatedly awakened to the delights of the flesh by someone other than her husband. No matter how true this may have been in fact, the star always seemed to be uncomfortably miscast. When Bergman finally left the fickle Rossellini, his decline was pitifully abrupt.

The Fifties proved a bad time, too, for Vittorio DeSica. Miracolo a Milano (Miracle in Milan) and Umberto D. had sequences that recalled the power and passion of The Bicycle Thief; but in 1953 he became embroiled in one of David O. Selznick's vast international projects, Stazione Termini (Indiscretion), in which Jennifer Jones has a brief, passionate, between-trains romance with Montgomery Clift. Temperamental clashes between producer Selznick and director DeSica, as well as subsequent clashes with the American censors who sought to lower the temperature of some of the sleeping-car clinches, reduced the film to a hash that did little to enhance the reputations of either DeSica or Selznick. For a time, DeSica actually withdrew from directing altogether, preferring to act in the films of others; but in 1956, with L'Oro di Napoli (Gold of Naples), he demonstrated not only that he had lost none of his directorial authority but that he possessed a strain of humor hitherto unsuspected. One of its five stories, with Sophia Loren as the brawling, fun-loving, flirtatious wife of a jealous Neapolitan pasta maker, her generous bosom literally spilling out of her blouse, lifted her for all time into the ranks of international stardom; while another episode, with Silvana Mangano as a whore who prefers prostitution to a bourgeois marriage with a man she does not love, posed questions that had both moralists and the censors scratching their heads.

Of all the neorealist directors, Federico Fellini fared best during the Fifties. Having written the scripts for several of Rossellini's most notable successes, Fellini made his directorial bow in 1950 when, with Alberto Lattuada, he wrote and co-directed Luci del Varieta (Variety Lights). A squalid backstage story of a third-rate vaudeville company touring the Italian provinces, it had moments of incidental nudity, but lacked the glamor of theater and the appeal of romance. Despite this inauspicious beginning, Fellini's star was in the ascendant. After a Love in the City episode in which the journalist hero applies to a matrimonial agency for a prospective bride for a werewolf friend (the agency obliges with a pathetically plain young girl), he achieved his first success with I Vitelloni, a mordant yet touching study of wasted youth in a provincial Italian town. The thwarted teenagers have their hopes and ambitions, but spend their days in joyless seductions and pointless cruelties. Fellini's next film, La Strada, brought him international acclaim. In it, a brutal giant of a man (Anthony Quinn), a carnival performer, purchases a feeble-minded girl (Giulietta Masina, Fellini's diminutive wife) to travel with him as a combination assistant and concubine. He learns the meaning of love only after she has died from his inhuman treatment and he finds himself alone. Although every scene in the picture was handled with scrupulous taste, there was no effort to conceal the nature of the relationship between the man and his girl. For many Americans, La Strada came to epitomize the true meaning of the new maturity in film making.

Three years later, in 1957, Fellini delighted and startled his audiences by starring his wife again, this time in Le Notti di Cabiria (Cabiria), one of the few films in history that not merely featured a prostitute but actually showed her making her professional rounds. Poignantly memorable were the night scenes photographed on the shadowed streets of Rome where prostitutes of all ages and shapes (many of them real) vied lustily with one another for prospective customers, as well as those in the apartment of a debauched and aging movie star who uses his wealth and position to serve his voluptuous tastes. Again, although his subject matter was sordid in the extreme, Fellini demonstrated that a discreet, discerning use of the camera and a warm and understanding heart could make a film soar high above all but the most rigorous of censors.

Such were the highlights of the Italian film in the Fifties--a few artistic successes and a rather high percentage of commercial blockbusters. But just ahead, in 1960, lay a dramatic reversal, when films such as Antonioni's L'Avventura, DeSica's La Ciociara, (Two Women), Visconti's Rocco e i Suoi Fratelli (Rocco and His Brothers) and, above all, Fellini's La Dolce Vita began to prove for all time that artistic and financial success was no longer a contradiction in terms.

The Fifties also returned the Swedish cinema to the international scene--largely through the efforts of Sweden's great director Ingmar Bergman. From earliest times, the Swedes had never been hesitant about putting nudity on the screen. In a country where nude mixed bathing has long been accepted, such prudery would be unthinkable. But not until late in the Fifties did nudity begin to turn up in Swedish pictures as an exploitation element: Generally, it was there because the story demanded it--as in Bergman's early, searing Gycklarnas Afton (The Naked Night), in which a clown, demented with grief, carries the nude body of his wanton wife through the crowd of soldiers who have already enjoyed her favors. Obsessed with the variant relationships between man and woman through the Fifties, Bergman examined this subject in a heady display of cinematic virtuosity. He was light and mockingly humorous in Sommarnattens Leende (Smiles of a Summer Night), which often seemed more like a naughty French farce than the work of a young Swedish intellectual. Indeed, when the film was distributed in the United States (by, of all things, Walt Disney's Buena Vista company), the dialog of one entire sequence, as a maid and her mistress exchange confidences about the opposite sex, proved so racy that it was left untranslated. In Sommarlek (later released as Illicit Interlude in the U.S.), he treated romantic love with bittersweet overtones: After a passionate night, the youthful hero dives recklessly onto some rocks, and the heroine (Mai-Britt Nils-son) spends the rest of the film dreaming of what might have been. Sommaren med Monika (Monika), on the other hand, depicted the tragic consequences of heedless passion. Nära Livet (Brink of Life) offered an almost documentary account of three women facing childbirth in a maternity hospital (although mercifully omitting the obstetrical details that characterized the French-made The Case of Dr. Laurent, with Jean Gabin, a year or so earlier). And Jungfrukällan (The Virgin Spring) included a rape sequence un-precedented for clinical precision--at least in the uncut version. Rape, nudity, adultery, incest, lust--all of these have turned up repeatedly in the Bergman films. Such is his artistry, however, that there is little in his films to offend the censor. Where sex is there, more often than not it is for philosophic and moralistic purposes. Like all of Europe's best directors, Bergman creates entertainment for mature adults--and honi soit qui mal y pense.

The renaissance in Swedish films that Bergman almost singlehandedly began was soon carried along by other, albeit less gifted directors. Alf Sjöberg, for whom Bergman earlier had written the script of Hets (Torment), enjoyed a brief success on his own with his skillful adaptation of Strindberg's Fröken Julie (Miss Julie), the gloomy case history of a neurotic girl who would certainly have intrigued Dr. Freud. Julie is the repressed but sensual illegitimate daughter of a wealthy landowner around the turn of the century. Her dormant passions are aroused when, in the midst of Mid-summer Night revelries, she spies Jean, the family valet, rolling in the hay with one of the comelier housemaids. Using her own charms as a weapon, the girl makes an open play for the man, sadistically humbling him by having him wipe her shoes and even hop over her riding crop. Driven by a frenzy of desire, the valet flings himself upon her--and she willingly responds. Remorse comes the next morning when her innate abhorrence of men flares up. Seeing Jean once more as merely a servant--too much the servant even to respond to her suggestion that they run away together--Julie commits suicide. The picture was a substantial achievement for its day--so much so that it encountered the usual censorial difficulties when it was released in this country. "The girl in it is illegitimate," a Massachusetts censor complained to the theater manager who was running the picture. "How would you like for your sister to see a film about an illegitimate girl?" It took a ruling by the Massachusetts Supreme Court to assure both the censor and the manager that, regardless of Julie's illegitimacy, August Strindberg's play, first produced in 1888, was a perfectly legitimate subject for filmic presentation in 1955.

Perhaps the best known Swedish film of the Fifties--until the Bergman inundation began in this country after 1957--was Arne Mattsson's Hon Dansade en Sommar (One Summer of Happiness), the story of a young farm girl who enjoys a brief, illicit summer romance that is terminated abruptly when she is killed in a motorcycle accident. The lyrical romantic passages included a sequence that was to become almost the trademark of Swedish films for the next few years: On their lonely farm, the girl and boy, Ulla Jacobsson and Folke Sundquist, shuck their clothes for a swim in the inviting waters of a nearby lake. But swimming is soon forgotten as their splashing and kicking develops into amorous foreplay that is rapturously consummated in the tall grasses that rim the lake. Ulla Jacobsson's fresh, dark beauty, fully revealed to the camera, and the tender responsiveness of the young man inspired one French critic, Georges Sadoul, to rhapsodize about "the chaste sensuality of a Nordic Daphnis and Chloë." Undoubtedly, it was the success of this film that inspired the American distributor of Illicit Interlude to insert a suspiciously similar sequence into the Bergman picture; but by 1954 the sylvan skinnydip had become such a cliché of Swedish film making that a comedy of that year, I Rök och Dans (not seen in this country), featured a scene in which the star, Martin Ljung, a Fernandel type, disrobes with a young lady at the water's edge; then, as they wade out for their interlude of aqueous amour, a subtitle appears over the scene: for export.

Unfortunately, the impish mood reflected by this title was soon turned to dead earnestness by many Swedish producers. As is so often the case, once the Swedish film had established itself in the art markets of the world, the exploiters began to move in, men who equated the new acceptance of Swedish pictures not with the artistry of a Bergman, a Mattsson or a Sjöberg but with the scenes of nudity or sexuality that were so often an integral part of their work. By the end of the Fifties, the girls in Swedish films were taking their clothes off on the slightest pretext (as in Raggare, where pretty Christina Schollin--later to star in Dear John--disrobes completely merely because she is rowing alone in the middle of a lake and the day is sunny). And the studios had launched upon an extended series of sordid, sensational exposé films that dealt mock-seriously with such provocative subjects as prostitution, teenage delinquency, drug addiction, Lesbianism and homosexuality. In the United States, none of these ever penetrated beyond the grind-house exploitation market.

During the Fifties, thanks to the proliferation of film festivals, the world began to learn more about production in other countries. Sjöberg's reputation was established in Venice, Bergman's in Cannes. Soon every resort town with an adequate auditorium, hotel facilities and (preferably) a beach where starlets could cavort for the benefit of photographers was vying for the privilege of staging a festival of its own. So numerous had these requests become by the mid-Fifties that motion-picture producers throughout the world, for their own protection, set up a clearinghouse that solemnly ranked the festivals as A or B, determined which could give prizes and which could not, and was the ultimate arbiter of which cities would be officially entitled to hold a festival in the first place. In the early years of the decade, however, Cannes and Venice held the preferred positions; and since the winning of a prize at either of these festivals virtually assured international distribution, producers the world over were particularly eager to have their wares presented there.

It was at the Venice Festival of 1951, for example, that the West first glimpsed the post-War resurgence of the Japanese film industry and, more specifically, the work of Japan's great director Akira Kurosawa. Rashomon arrived in Venice almost by mistake; another, far more conventional picture from the same studio had been expected, but it was simply not ready in time. The film, in which a brutal rape is four times recapitulated, each time from the point of view of another of the participants and witnesses, inevitably confused many--particularly since one of the witnesses is the ghost of the raped woman's dead husband; but no one failed to be impressed by the film's originality and physical beauty, or by the sheer terror of its central situation. A vagrant wind flicks back the veil from the face of a beautiful woman as she passes through a wooded place. An outlaw, waking by the side of the road, sees her and decides he must have her. From that moment, the stories diverge. The woman declares that it was simple rape. The husband holds that he fought the bandit valorously but, bound to a tree, was forced to witness his wife's defilement. The bandit himself, captured by the authorities, admits that he intended to rob the man but was seduced by the wife into killing him. A passing woodcutter, a belated witness to the tragedy, contributes an account that is equally self-protective. Truth, like beauty, Kurosawa implies, lies in the eye of the beholder. In all probability, it was the rape, not the philosophy, that recommended the film to RKO-Radio Pictures for American distribution (and to MGM in 1964 for a Westernized version titled The Outrage); but for film cognoscenti, the appearance of Rashomon was a signal event. No longer could one speak of the world of motion pictures without including the Japanese.

In the United States, the initial impression created by Rashomon was soon confirmed by the presentation of Ugetsu Monogatari (Ugetsu), directed by Kenji Mizoguchi. Set in the distant past, like Rashomon, it proffered as a hero a would-be samurai who deserts his wife and family to cohabit with a beautiful and aristocratic ghost. Mizoguchi, who died in 1956, was famed in Japan as a director of pictures about women; in the hundred or so films he made, he dealt realistically, but always sympathetically, with the lives of courtesans in the past and of geishas and prostitutes in the present. In Yuki Funijezu (The Fate of Madame Yuki), he dramatized the dilemma of a college girl who discovers that her mother runs a whorehouse. Should she or should she not return home to help manage her mother's business? In Akasen Chitai (Street of Shame), Mizoguchi's last film, he limns in devastating detail, but also with deep compassion, the lowlife of Tokyo's red-light district.

Japan, which then, as now, produced an average of 500 pictures a year (as opposed to fewer than 200 in the United States), is heavily dependent upon its Far Eastern market, with upwards of 50,000 theaters. Each year it supplies them with a heavy dosage of pseudo-American crime pictures, action films, romances and spectacles. Most ambitious of the latter genre was the 1957 production of Seido No Kirisuto (Christ in Bronze), a superproduction in the manner of De Mille in which the early Christians are persecuted with all the eroticism and flamboyantly bad taste of the master himself. Indeed, throughout the decade, the Japanese film makers grew bolder in their handling of sexual material. Prostitutes thronged the screen, their lives of shame providing grist for literally dozens of pictures that pretended to be both documentary and moralistic. A particularly favored theme was the plight of the young girl sold into a brothel by her impoverished parents; the preparations for her first night with a customer were almost as much of a scène obligatoire for the Japanese as was the skinny-dip for the Swedes. Toward the end of the decade, the erotic note grew even more pronounced. Brothel girls had unfortunate encounters with sadists who tortured them with whips or burning cigarettes. In Okinu Otama (Women in the Storm of Night), whole sequences seem to have been torn from the pages of the Marquis de Sade; nude women are bound, whipped and hung suspended over live coals in a veritable orgy of perverse savagery. Perversion of another sort turned up in Kon Ichikawa's Kagi (Odd Obsession): An elderly man can be sexually aroused only by pornographic photographs he has taken of his wife: to rid herself of this dirty old man, she kills him by performing a lascivious striptease by his bedside, bringing on a heart attack. In another film of the late Fifties, Utamaro, the hero is a famous painter who gets his kicks by painting on the nude bodies of women. Still ahead for the Japanese, however, were the "eroductions" of the Sixties--films so overtly pornographic in treatment and content (though short of being outright stag films) as to bar them completely from the world market.

Few German films of the Fifties reached the world market, either, but for another reason. Despite West Germany's swift economic recovery during that period, her motion-picture industry continued to lag behind, hobbled by a form of self-censorship that literally forbade any searching commentary upon the contemporary scene. As a result, most film makers confined themselves to pointless, somewhat dull crime stories, musicals, war pictures and belated anti-Nazi apologias--not infrequently spiced with heavy-handed, typically Teutonic sex. Such reminiscences of the Hitler era as Des Teufels General (The Devil's General) and Der Letzte Akt (The Last Ten Days), for example, thoughtfully included superorgies to indicate the corruption of the Nazi high command. The controversial 08/15 (named for the standard machine gun used by German troops in World War Two) depicted the German army as debauched and despicable: Obscenities blare from the sound track; the barracks dialog is filled with accounts of sexual prowess and easy conquests; officers and noncoms delight in cutting short the furloughs of their underlings so that they can move in on their girlfriends. Sexy starlets such as Elke Sommer, Laya Raki, Romy Schneider and Nadja Tiller began popping up to spice the proceedings.

Perhaps the one big, all-out German sex star of the decade, however, was lithe, long-limbed, tawny-haired Marion Michael, a 17-year-old girl of athletic inclinations who was selected from some 11,800 applicants for the title role in Liane, das Mädchen aus dem Urwald (Liane of the Jungle). Simply switching the Tarzan formula from masculine to feminine, it tells of a scientific expedition searching for a rare orchid in deepest Africa and finding, instead, a lone and lovely white girl who is regarded by the natives as a goddess. Liane uses her influence to free the expedition's handsome cameraman (Hardy Kruger) when the natives capture him, and is in turn herself captured by the expedition and taken back to civilization, where it soon develops that she is in fact the long-lost daughter of a wealthy German shipowner. Although there are plot complications when the shipowner is murdered, the film's main interest was centered in its opening reels as Liane, clad only in the briefest cache-sexe and her own long tresses, strode through the jungle, bathed in its pools or swung Tarzanlike from the vines. Understandably, the film ended with Liane and her cameraman preparing to return to Africa to resume the hunt for the rare orchid, thus paving the way for a sequel, Liane, die Weisse Sklavin (Liane, the White Slave), which quickly stripped away the veneer of civilization from her buff and revealed once more, in full, the golden girl of the jungle.

Established as a sex image (in Germany, at least), Fräulein Michael graced a number of films of the late Fifties that dealt with the problems of youth, such as Ihre Erste Liebe (Their First Love). A housemaid, played by a delightful blonde Yugoslav actress, Marina Petrovna. attempts to seduce a young student (Christian Wolff) by the simple expedient of baring her breasts to him; although tempted, the boy resists in favor of the equally piquant Marion. A teenage striptease party, with the girls wearing nothing but their panties, was featured in Sünde Nach der Schule (Crime After School), with Wolff again as the virtuous student. Temptation of another sort beset him in Anders Als Du und Ich (The Third Sex), directed by the notorious Veit Harlan of Jud Süss fame. A shy boy who likes to paint, he is introduced to a homosexual art dealer by a school chum who obviously has designs upon him. The mother, sensing the relationship, suggests to their attractive maidservant that she try out her charms on the young master. The girl obliges, slipping into a peekaboo negligee while the mother is out of town, and succeeds all too well. Before the picture is over, the mother has been hauled into court on charges of procuring filed by the art dealer and the jealous friend.

Late in the Fifties, the miracle of Germany's "miracle recovery" was suddenly tarnished by unsavory revelations about the corrupt lives of some of her biggest, most respected industrialists. A prostitute--actually, a high-priced callgirl--was found murdered; and among her possessions were tapes made in the course of her professional rounds, tapes that contained the details of business deals along with the bedside intimacies. The girl, it seemed, had been supplementing her income not merely by blackmail but, even more profitably, by selling the information she had received from her various bed partners to their industrial rivals. The case made headlines all over the world; and from it came as well two movies, Rosemarie and Die Wahrheit über Rosemarie (The Truth About Rosemary), which publicized the case even more luridly. The latter picture, almost documentary in nature, starred the statuesque Belinda Lee and was essentially an antiprostitution tract. The other, and far better film, brought together director Rolf Thiele, Peter Van Eyck and Nadja Tiller as the sleek, over-eager entrepreneur. Glossily mounted, and as candid in its sex scenes as in its exposé of the maneuvers of big business in Germany, Rosemarie was one of the few films from the German studios of that period to win a wide international audience.

The film festivals of the Fifties also served to introduce to the world competitive productions from such Latin-American countries as Argentina, Brazil and Mexico (although one often had the feeling that their movies were included less for their intrinsic merit than for their exotic origins). When Argentina's Tierra del Fuego was presented at the Venice Festival of 1955, for example, it was all but laughed off the screen. A steamy triangle set against the mist-swept mountains of Argentina's southernmost tip, the film starred blonde, buxom Anna Maria Lynch, whose extraordinary endowments swayed and bobbled impressively whenever she moved. Unfortunately, while the director obviously strove to keep her in motion wherever possible, inevitably there were moments in the script that required a modicum of acting--whereupon Miss Lynch's bosom, bra-less under a skintight, low-cut dress, would heave so volcanically as to threaten all her buttons and seams; but the words that emerged from her hard, tight face were as flat and perfunctory as a child's recitation in Sunday school. Isabel Sarli, no less spectacularly endowed, never went the festival route, but she did become Argentina's top star, and indeed a favorite throughout Latin America--simply because her audiences knew that somehow or other, sooner or later, the titian-haired beauty would wriggle out of her clothes and take a dip au naturel in a sylvan pool or waterfall.

On the other hand, and again thanks to the festivals, the Fifties saw the emergence of at least one serious and talented Argentine director, Leopoldo Torre-Nilsson, whose 1957 La Casa del Angel (End of Innocence) was the first film to suggest to the outside world the growing maturity and sophistication of the Argentine cinema. Based on a novel by his wife, Beatriz Guido, it described the closed, repressed, almost Victorian way of life for Argentina's upper classes during the Twenties. Its heroine, a lovely girl of about 17, is seen taking a bath modestly attired in nothing less than a long, flowing robe. Her passions, stirred by a movie she sees with her governess, find expression in a kiss that she surreptitiously plants upon the lips of a stone angel in her garden. Racy stuff. But tragedy strikes when a worldly man, a friend of her father's, arrives at the house on the eve of a duel. He convinces the romantic girl that he is about to die and, impulsively, she gives herself to him. But he does not die, and coldly rebuffs the girl's subsequent advances. At the end of the film, thoroughly embittered, she has locked herself away in her gloomy house for the rest of her unhappy life. In this, as in his subsequent films, Torre-Nilsson has used the camera to strip away the false conventions and, particularly, the sexual repressions that twist and blight the lives of the unenlightened.

A similar orientation pervades the work of Mexico's greatest director, Spanish-born Luis Buñuel. A Surrealist by training and inclination (in the late Twenties, with Salvador Dali, he directed two classics of Surrealist film making, Le Chien Andalou and L'Age d'Or), Buñuel demonstrated in 1950 that he had lost none of his power or intensity with his savage study of Mexico's impoverished juvenile delinquents, Los Olvidados (The Young and the Damned). Filled with moments of obscene terror, as when a gross blind man fondles the thighs of a small girl, the picture included what has since become a Buñuel trademark: a dream sequence of unveiled eroticism. An adolescent boy dreams of his mother; he knows that she has been sleeping with his best friend, a boy only slightly older than himself, and subconsciously he is jealous. In the dream, the mother advances upon him in slow motion wearing a long white gown, a lascivious smile upon her face. She holds out her arms to him--but one hand holds a large chunk of maggot-infested meat. Just as he is about to respond to her, the friend, Jaibo, appears and the dream is over.

This searing and seemingly pitiless revelation of life among Mexico City's teeming pauper population was soon followed by other films, such as El (This Strange Passion) and Ensayo de Un Crimen (The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz), that were no less critical of the upper classes--and particularly of their sexual peccadilloes. The hero of El, for example, is a wealthy, respectable man married to a beautiful woman. Soon after the marriage, however, he begins to suspect her of all sorts of infidelities--baselessly, as it happens. But so obsessed is the man that one night, while his wife lies sleeping, he steals into her room with a kit of surgical instruments, prepared to sew together the lips of her vagina and thus allay his suspicions for all time. Happily, the wife escapes this forced foreclosure, and soon after, the man undergoes a complete emotional breakdown while in church. In a nightmarish scene, everyone in the vast cathedral, including the priest in the pulpit, seems to be laughing at him and making the sign of the horn. Archibald de la Cruz is only slightly less distraught. As a child, he had seen his pretty nursemaid killed by a stray bullet. Somehow, the exposed white thighs of the dead girl become mingled in his mind with the strains of Vivaldi that he hears tinkling from a music box at the moment of her death. When he grows up, the sound of Vivaldi and the sight of a beautiful woman produce in him the urge to kill--although it must be added that as a killer he proves spectacularly ineffectual.

Throughout the Fifties, perhaps with a bow to the competition from the south (Mexico and Argentina share essentially the same market), the Mexican studios grew increasingly bolder. Fiery, raven-haired Maria Felix, already an international star by virtue of her performances in such French films as Les Héros Sont Fatigués (The Heroes Are Tired) and French Can-Can, in both of which she shucked her clothes, returned to her native country for torchy items such as The Hidden Women, Sonatas and Florde Mayo, generally co-starring with Mexico's leading actor, mustachioed Pedro Armendariz. Curiously, no matter how hot the story, Señorita Felix refused to strip on home territory, apparently feeling that it would demean her. No such sentiments inhibited the career of busty Anna Luisa Pelufo, however. Beginning in 1954, with La Fièvre del Deseo (The Fever of Desire), she found some pretext--as artist's model or cabaret artiste--to appear in the buff. From Italy, briefly, came the beautiful Rosanna Podesta to star in La Red (Rosanna), remembered primarily for the fact that whenever its story grew too turgid, she walked out into the sea and returned moments later with her cotton blouse clinging wetly to her upper torso. And from France came blonde, slender Christiane Martel to play Eve opposite Carlos Baena's Adam in a naïve, pseudo-Biblical Adam y Eva. Since the actress' long tresses were carefully pasted over her nipples, and the Garden of Eden strategically strewn with shrubs, the film offered little to attract the prurient--and even less for anyone else. But that was in 1956; by the end of the decade, following the lead of Señorita Pelufo, at least half a dozen young actresses in Mexico had become stars--of sorts--solely on the basis of their willingness to strip for action. Unfortunately, they had little else to offer.

For all the increased emphasis on sex in films around the world, however, it remained for staid old England to supply the pictures that eventually broke through the taboos surrounding sex and nudity in the American market. Early in the Fifties, Britain's most endearing export was its succession of Alec Guinness comedies--The Lavender Hill Mob, The Man in the White Suit, The Captain's Paradise--all witty and slyly satirical, although essentially innocuous enough. (Or almost innocuous enough: In the British version of The Captain's Paradise, Guinness was married to two wives; but America's Code authorities, apparently preferring adultery to bigamy, altered the film to make it seem as if he was actually married to only one.) In the mid-Fifties came the Doctor in the House series, slightly sexier, but innocence itself compared with the ribald Carry On films that began in the late Fifties.

But there were other, more serious stirrings. In 1955, a film version of Christopher Isherwood's autobiographical I Am a Camera, produced in England by an American company, was arbitrarily denied a Production Code Seal. The authorities were alarmed by the entire concept: a girl (Julie Harris) who sleeps around moves in, rent free, with a struggling young writer, then starts paying his bills when she finds a rich American who wants to keep her. There is a dramatic moment when the girl fears she is pregnant and frankly discusses the possibility of an abortion; but it is all a false alarm, and she goes merrily on her way. Not only was the Code displeased with this story, but there were also lines such as her overly gracious acceptance of Isherwood's hospitality: "What shall we do first--have a drink or go to bed?" Not to mention her subsequent pronouncement, "I might not be exactly what some people consider a virgin, but I've been chaste. Chased by every man." The picture wound up in a handful of American art houses.

In England, however, the voices of a new generation of "angry young men" were already being heard--and listened to. Writers such as Kingsley Amis, John Braine and John Osborne were kicking up a highly nonconformist storm in literature and the theater. New film makers such as Lindsay Anderson, Karel Reisz and Tony Richardson were trying their hand at the medium, flouting the conventions in England even as the New Wavers were doing simultaneously in France. One of the first of their works to reach these shores was Richardson's film version of the Osborne play Look Back in Anger, with Richard Burton as the passionate young trumpet player who prefers his squalid freedom to the confines and restraints of a proper job and a responsible marriage. Clearly, the man is not "lovable"; but the new generation of writers and dramatists was not out to create lovable characters. They wanted to set down in clear and unmistakable terms the twisted values and false ideals that had sprung up in England's post-War version of the welfare state. They wanted to expose whatever it was that produced the new hard-talking, fast-living, quick-loving heel-hero who, vaguely discontented with his lot, took his revenge on society at large.

Typical of this heel-hero was Laurence Harvey's sponging, amoral, quick-buck agent in a significant film that was strangely ignored in its day: Expresso Bongo. Part of its significance lay in the fact that, simply as part of the story, it introduced bare-breasted girls as fixtures on the contemporary scene. Onstage or backstage at the Soho honky-tonks that were the film's principal settings, they paraded with a totally professional lack of concern. But even more significant was the film's objective, unsentimentalized view of its cocky Cockney hero. He took his girls when and if he could get them, knowing that if one turned him down, there was always another "bird" in the next tree. Similar, too, was Sir Laurence Olivier's The Entertainer, directed by Richardson from another Osborne play. In it, a seedy song-and-dance man bickers with his family, cheats on his wife and virtually destroys himself in the process. The moral seems to be that unenlightened self-interest leads inevitably to self-defeat.

No film ever made this more clear than Jack Clayton's Room at the Top, a vivid transcript of John Braine's best seller. Its hero, skillfully portrayed by the ubiquitous Laurence Harvey, is an ambitious young man of no distinction whatsoever who arrives in a Midlands town determined to rise above his fellows. His method is seduction. The mill-owner for whom he works has an attractive daughter, and Harvey contrives to make her pregnant. Meanwhile, however, he is having an affair with an older woman (Simone Signoret), who both loves and understands him. When, ultimately, the irate father demands that Harvey make an honest woman of his daughter, the young man has little cause to hesitate. Although for him it means a loveless marriage, and suicide for the woman who loves him, it also means that he has made it to the top. In the final shot, he settles back against the cushions of his father-in-law's limousine, but tears well in his eyes as he looks at his bride and understands the emptiness of his victory.

With love scenes unprecedented for candor in English-language movies, with relationships that broke every movie convention, with a hero who knowingly broke every moral rule and, far from being punished for his affronts, wound up marrying the boss' daughter, Room at the Top was promptly and predictably denied a Code Seal. Nevertheless, it ran for months to S.R.O. crowds in a New York art house, and on the basis of this success went on to do the unheard of: Still without a Seal, the film moved into the large American circuit houses, where it continued to do big business. Thus, at the very end of the Fifties, an English film proved that the Code Seal was utterly meaningless. Code-affiliated theaters would book a potentially profitable non-Code picture and Americans in vast numbers would turn out to see it. Suddenly, terms such as "maturity" and "adult" ceased to have sniggering connotations for the American moviegoer. Room at the Top had proved that an honest view of society could provide honest entertainment as well. American film makers were not reluctant to take the hint. In the decade ahead, the studios were to embrace themes and situations heretofore unthinkable in their Code-sheltered enclaves.

In their next installment of "The History of Sex in Cinema," authors Knight and Alpert turn their attention from the films of the Fifties, foreign and domestic, to the charismatic sex stars--from Brando to Monroe--who made them memorable.