The History of Sex in Cinema

Since 1959, when Russ Meyer's mini-budgeted The Immoral Mr. Teas made its unblushing bow on American screens—and walked off with better than a $1,000,000 gross—the "nudies" have had an impact far in excess of their numbers, their cost or their quality. Not only was many a failing art house saved from extinction by switching from foreign films to domestic flesh, but Hollywood itself, despite the strictures of its own Production Code, soon began cautiously to insert seminude scenes into its glossy "A" features. Meyer, a veteran glamor and figure photographer, has stated that he "showered the screen with nudity" in Mr. Teas. Within three years, his shower had turned into a flood; by 1963, thanks jointly to the unanticipated success of his picture and to the even less anticipated leniency of the local censors, Meyer was able to count 150 imitations of his girl-studded gold mine—seven of which were his own. Singlehanded, he had touched off a whole "nude wave" of moviemaking.

Nudity, of course, has never been totally absent from American films. Even after the formation of the Hays Office, in 1922, it continued to flourish: The Haysian restrictions applied only to the member companies of the Motion Picture Producers Association, and there were always plenty of fly-by-nights to supply the exploitation market with suitably lurid material. State and local censors contributed their mite toward controlling the situation by snipping away at offending sequences or by banning entire pictures outright; but those who demanded stronger sexual titillation in their movies soon discovered that they could leap across state lines to communities where censorship was either more permissive or nonexistent. It is a fact, and one that today's proponents of a more stringent censorship might well ponder, that during the middle and late Thirties, when America's censors were most potent, the sexploitation movies could anticipate at least 2000 bookings across the country, while today's nudies rarely average over 400. Obviously, the relaxation of censor controls has not increased the average American's appetite either for greater sensationalism or for more nudity.

For the most part, then as now, the films played in shabby, third-rate houses on run-down streets leading off the main drag. Often they supplemented, or supplanted, the local burlesque shows; and one bought tickets with the same furtive prurience. Some of the films from the late Twenties are quite remarkable even for that era of precensorial permissiveness. In a series of short one-reelers shot for (text continued on page 128) the burlesque trade, or to be used as a midnight-show fillip in small-town exploitation houses, groups of girls cavort against desert or beach backgrounds totally in the raw, their pubic hair abundantly displayed. Far from erotic— for affection between the sexes rarely extended beyond a simple handshake —some of these peep shows had rudimentary plots, others merely nude or seminude dance routines. (In the early Thirties, a number of these were re-edited, a sound track added, and then re-released to continue on their profitable way for the next decade.) Others presented nudity in the context of a very well-developed story line. Hollywood Script Girl, for example, a one-reeler produced in 1928, pretended to chronicle the rise to stardom of a bespectacled minion in a movie studio that seems to be producing the last-act curtain for a Ziegfeld show. Just what her script duties would be under the circumstances is difficult to imagine, particularly since the sequence being shot presents nothing more involved than an array of unclad chorines posing artistically against a Follies-type staircase. During a break, however, some of the girls think it might be fun to transform their ugly duckling. With a suitable show of reluctance, the heroine permits herself to be stripped down to her step-ins. Then, after her figure is appraised and approved, she is bustled off to make-up, where the final touches are applied—including the belated removal of her spectacles. "Why, you're really beautiful!" the girls exclaim in subtitle, and when the recalcitrant star of the show throws a temper tantrum, they introduce their new "find" to the director. As the film ends, our heroine—the new star—stands posed at the top of the stairs in the briefest of G strings, while below her the other girls wink and simper like mad at the success of their little prank.

Naïve as this film and its contemporaries may have been in subject matter, they were professionally made and mounted, and on a technical par with any modestly budgeted studio production of the period. Unlike most of the early nudies, which went out of their way to avoid sets and give the impression of having been shot largely in motel bedrooms, most of these were produced with full Hollywood crews and on proper Hollywood stages. When sound came in, the practice continued. Whereas the first wave of nudies dispensed with dialog in favor of the cheaper voice-over narration, the exploitation pictures of the Thirties and Forties were fully sounded, shot on standard 35mm film and employed professional actors (frequently an admixture of tired has-beens and eager, hungry young hopefuls). By the early Thirties, features had replaced the shorts, and men like Louis Sonney, Duane (text continued on page 136) Esper, Al Dezel, Howard Underwood, Willis Kent, J. D. Kendis and Samuel Cummins (who brought Ecstasy to America) began amassing small fortunes by catering to the exploitation market. Known among themselves as the Forty Thieves, they carried cutthroat competition to new extremes. One of them went so far as to send faked FBI "Most Wanted" photos of a rival distributor to theater managers whom both of them served. When the distributor appeared in person, instead of booking his pictures, one manager called the police.

Throughout the Thirties, in addition to the established theaters, the producers of exploitation pictures also sold their wares to "states-rights" distributors and itinerant showmen, who would buy for an entire territory, then hawk them as best they could. Occasionally, they would rent the film to a theater owner; more often, however, they would make a "four walls" deal, renting a theater or a tent outright for a night or two and reaping their harvest before either the police or the public caught up with them. It was rarely possible to please both. Such pictures were known to the trade as "Main Street" films—not because they played the gaudy flagship houses. They didn't. In thousands of American communities, the newer theaters had gone up in more fashionable areas, often leaving the "Main Street" altogether. The theaters that remained behind, dust-laden, dim-bulbed and decrepit, provided homes for the sexploitation market.

Not that the films themselves were particularly shocking, at least by today's standards. Although owing no allegiance to the industry's self-imposed Production Code of 1934, and hence theoretically free to emphasize sex and nudity in their own movies, the producers of the exploitation films of the Thirties and early Forties were nevertheless relatively circumspect. They were, after all, well aware of the force of local censors and watch-and-ward societies—plus the need to get their pictures accepted by theater owners in the first place. The Road to Ruin, one of the best-known exploitation pictures of the early Thirties, had as its key scene a strip-poker sequence in which the girls finally get down to bras and panties. In Child Bride, a heavily moralistic condemnation of child marriages in the Kentucky hills, the attractive young teacher who speaks out against this practice is abducted by a band of vigilantes, stripped to the waist, bound to a tree and flogged. (As an added fillip, the child herself, a half-developed adolescent, is seen in extenso bathing in the nude in the ole swimmin' hole while her 16-year-old swain looks on. It's all very folksy.) In these, as well as in such sex-potboilers as Forbidden Desires, Hopped Up and literally dozens of other movies in which teenage girls, eager for excitement, find more than they bargained for in the back rooms of a roadhouse (the standard symbol for sin in the Thirties), nudity or near nudity was clearly the motivating factor in their production. But it was introduced either as a story element or with seeming inadvertence. The women, for example, even when attired, invariably were bra-less and wore loose-fitting dresses that afforded frequent peeks of what lay beneath. High School Girl and Birth of a Baby insinuated sex in the guise of hygienic moral enlightenment. The Virgin Goddess and Goona-Goona employed the ethnological approach to anatomical exposure—abetted by the fact that censors rarely objected to the display of female breasts, provided the breasts were black. Elysia (1933) was perhaps the first of a still-unabated series of nudist-camp features. And following the success of Ecstasy, many shoddy French and Italian pictures were imported, dubbed into English and sexy scenes inserted for the exploitation market. Generally, these were pseudo documentaries of life in primitive, nonwhite cultures, re-edited and hoked up with a hastily invented story line. Each of these approaches— moral, ethnological, pseudo-documentary or nudist-camp—had the same all-important virtue: It permitted a "legitimate" rationale for the existence of nudity in a context that was essentially nonerotic.

After World War Two, a new variant appeared in the form of burlesque movies —nudity in a setting diat was a bit more forthright in intent but still far from erotic in its effect. Burlesque, of course, had been dead in New York since May of .1937, when Mayor Fiorello La Guardia denied the Minskys a license to reopen their Oriental Theater or even to use their family name on any place of public entertainment. Rising prices and the siphoning off of top burlesque talent— baggy-pants comics and strippers alike— by Broadway shows and the movies soon reduced the old burlesque wheels to a dispiriting few weeks' spin through antiquated fleabags centered mainly in the Midwest. But there was still a tawdry magic to names like Georgia Sothern, Ann Corio and Margie Hart, not to mention such curvaceous newcomers to the ecdysiasts" art as Lili St. Cyr, Blaze Starr, Evelyn "Treasure Chest" West, "the ever-popular" Tempest Storm and the tooth-some Candy Barr (although Miss Barr, as will be noted later, was to gain even greater fame for her unorthodox appearance in films of a more exotic nature). All of them were names that could draw an audience, even though their audiences now saw them in crudely photographed black-and-white flickers instead of, as before, with the blue spotlight playing seductively on the quivering, living flesh.

The burlesque films—there were only about two dozen of them—were generally produced on the West Coast, where both "talent" and capital were available. Done on the cheap (from $10,000 to $20,000 budgets), they followed the burlesque format of the Thirties, with the accent falling on the peelers and the nude production numbers. The singers and the comics, holdovers from an earlier, happier burlesque era, had degenerated into little more than obvious stage waits before the next stripper emerged. (This quality was unintentionally accentuated in several of the films where, through technical ineptitude, songs and comedy routines were frequently visibly out of sync with the lip movements, yet no one bothered either to reshoot or to rerecord these sequences.) Since the name of the star was what sold the show, the actual titles of these films were little more than formalities. Nor did the same title necessarily guarantee the same film. Generally, the pictures were shot in two versions—a "hot" version, in which the girls stripped down to an abbreviated G string (these had their major distribution in the Soudi), and a "cold" version, which got the girls down to panties and net bras or pasties—as far as they could safely go, in other words, to get the pictures distributed in New York and other major metropolitan centers. Without exception, these were movies made for the fast buck—and not even the staunchest enthusiast for burlesque as it was could be deceived into thinking that his favorite form of entertainment had been revived and immortalized on celluloid.

Of far greater importance historically was the 1954 production of a nudist film, Garden of Eden. Professionally made (the cameraman was Boris Kaufman, who had shot On the Waterfront for Elia Kazan only the year before), it was actually filmed in a Florida nudist colony—thus differing from a number of its precursors, which customarily rigged up the semblance of a nudist camp solely for picture purposes. Essentially a documentary, although it took some liberties for exploitation purposes, the film was promptly labeled "indecent" by the New York State censors and barred from the screens of that state. As described by one of the judges who found against it, "The motion picture depicts in color the life in a nudist camp with views of nude men, women and children, singly and in pairs, walking, talking, swimming and playing together. ... In addition, the picture contains specific protracted scenes of women in unwholesome sexually alluring postures which are completely unnecessary to—and in fact a radical departure from—the activities of the nudist camp depicted. For example, there is a dream sequence where the principal actress, a comely young lady, completely disrobes in full view of the audience in a manner not unlike ... professional ecdysiasts."

Unlike most producers for the exploitation market, who would rather switch (continued on page 177)Sex in Cinema(continued from page 136) bookings than fight, Walter Bibo, the head of Excelsior Pictures, appealed the decision, maintaining that his film was neither indecent nor obscene, but highly educational. When, in 1957, the New York Court of Appeals finally ruled that "Nudity in itself, and without lewdness or dirtiness, is not obscenity in law or in common sense," the gates were suddenly swung wide. Russ Meyer and his cohorts were standing just outside.

Meyer, an Army Signal Corps cameraman during World War Two, had arrived in Hollywood during the Fifties hoping to break into the studios. Unable to penetrate the closed-shop setup there, he turned instead to shooting glamor-girlie photos and stills for television shows. But the idea of doing movies remained with him, particularly since both his Army training and some experience doing industrial shorts in San Francisco had shown him how to turn them out fast and cheap. In 1958, a meeting with Pete DeCenzie, an Oakland impresario who had previously produced and distributed nudist pictures, made it possible for Meyer to combine his two skills. The two men pooled $1000 and, with the assistance of some Army buddies, Meyer shot The Immoral Mr. Teas in four swift days. Sound, processing and editing brought the bill to $24,000 (and, incidentally, established a norm for subsequent nudie budgets—between $15,000 and $30,000—although it might be noted that some of the more parsimonious fast-buck operators frequently managed to bring in a picture for as little as $7500).

But Mr. Teas also did something far more important: It established a new norm for nudity on the screen and indicated the way to make it acceptable to the censors. The formula was simplicity itself: plenty of skin but no sex. Mild, middle-aged Bill Teas is a "girl watcher," with many pleasant opportunities to exercise his hobby as he pedals his bicycle through the sunny streets of Los Angeles delivering dental supplies. One afternoon, however, he has a molar extracted, and the anesthetic has a somewhat disturbing aftereffect. Under its influence, every girl he looks at—a pretty dental assistant, a melon-breasted lunchroom waitress—becomes instantly, and utterly, undressed. Far from being overjoyed at the prospect (Mr. Teas is "immoral" only in the title), our hero goes off to a secluded spot for some solitary fishing, but soon suspects he is losing his marbles when all the girls he has met earlier in the picture invade his sanctuary and, stripped to the buff, frolic in the water about him. He takes his troubles to an analyst who, unfortunately for him (if not for the audience), turns out to be a spectacularly stacked female. When the inevitable occurs, Mr. Teas decides he might as well be philosophic about his affliction. As the him s narrator states at the conclusion, "Some men just enjoy being sick."

Since the courts had already ruled that nudity in itself is not obscene, and the picture was devoid of any kind of sexuality (except for blatant voyeurism), the film played with surprisingly little difficulty. At its opening engagement, in Seattle, the local censors' sole objection was to a sequence in which a girl, glimpsed in a passing car, is seen inserting her tongue in her boyfriend's ear. Meyer and DeCenzie were only too happy to make this cut, and the picture was thereupon passed (if not wholeheartedly approved). Its reputation built slowly, since the two entrepreneurs found themselves at first limited to the dingy grind houses that normally ran exploitation features, and excluded altogether from cities like New York and Chicago that still had strong censor boards. But gradually, as its fame spread, their film made its way into those marginal art theaters whose managers had already discovered that receipts increased substantially whenever they ran an old Brigitte Bardot or Gina Lollobrigida sextravaganza instead of some of the heavier stuff. There were, to be sure, some risks involved. The show was labeled "indecent" in Pasadena, for example, and the print was confiscated from the projection booth of a Philadelphia theater in which it was playing; but every time it reached the courts— except in Fort Lauderdale, where it was labeled "obscene"—the picture was passed and resumed its run.

The Immoral Mr. Teas and its unprecedented immunity from censorial crackdowns, not to mention its unprecedented grosses in the field of exploitation films —and its equally unprecedented favorable review from no less than literary critic Leslie Fiedler in Show magazine— quickly inspired a host of imitators. Bachelor Tom Peeping, for example, presented the stratagems of a photographer for "Huge Hefner's Playaround Magazine" who, assigned to break into an all-girl nudist camp, eventually succeeds by dressing up as a woman. In Kipling's Women, an aging pukka-sahib reminisces fondly of the various "rags, bones and hanks of hair" that had brightened his earlier years. Not Tonight, Henry features a henpecked, middle-aged husband (burlesque comic Hank Henry) who dreams he is a succession of great lovers from the past, including Napoleon, but is somehow thwarted in every encounter with the opposite sex. The dean of The House on Bare Mountain purports to be a Granny Good (played by the film's producer, Bob Cresse, in drag), who is so unobtrusive that the girls pay her no attention whatsoever as they scurry about their dormitory with little or no clothes on. In Pardon My Brush, two house painters discover that their paintbrush makes whatever walls they touch with it transparent. Curiously, the walls that need painting always seem adjacent to the bedrooms of particularly luscious and narcissistic young women. In a number of others, such as Paradirio and Magic Spectacles, the gimmick is X-ray eyeglasses that permit the wearer to see through the clothes of the various young ladies he encounters. But if the makers of these films provided an abundance of female breasts and bottoms in every size and shape, they were circumspection itself when it came to the display of pubic hair or genitalia . At least for the time being, the regions below the navel remained unexplored by their cameras.

The voyeuristic nature of these early nudies is perhaps the most striking thing about them. The hero does not crave sex; he just wants to look—and the devices of the film makers are all bent toward making it possible for him (and the audience) to look at the girls as unobtrusively as possible. Frequently, the films go even further, removing all suggestion of sexuality from the leading male character. The hero of Russ Meyer's Wild Gals of the Naked West (which had earlier been titled, less explicitly, The Naked West and How It Was Lost ) is a bowlegged runt of a man who, even in a ten-gallon hat, barely reaches to the chests of the bosomy cowgirls and saloon girls studding the film, and who carries a four-feet-long silver-plated pistol to compensate for the virility he so obviously lacks. In Bachelor Tom Peeping, the photographer quite literally surrenders his masculinity when he dons female attire to gain entry into the nudist camp. In The Playgirls and the Bellboy, starling the statuesque June Wilkinson, the bellboy is a bumbling Jerry Lewis type who keeps rushing back and forth between his hotel and the theater next door where a sexy play is being rehearsed. His object is to pick up pointers that might impress June and her covey of lingerie models (who spend most of their time languorously dressing and undressing). Needless to say, it is to no avail.

The Playgirls and the Bellboy, incidentally, typifies with special crudity a prevalent production technique for nudies of the early Sixties. Its producer, Harry Ross, had exhumed a dull, mildly risqué German sex comedy of the mid-Fifties, pared it to about an hour, dubbed it and added to it some 30 minutes of footage featuring Miss Wilkinson, her lovelies and the bellboy. Although the German film was in black and white, Ross shot his new material in color. (Color is practically a sine qua non for nudies.) All the action in the picture centering around the theater came from (he German original; the color sequences were confined to the girls' hotel bedroom. Similar domestically created inserts spiced up many a cheap French, Italian and Swedish film, as well as numerous imported documentary and nudist-camp features.

Humor—or at least an attempt at humor—was another lesson that "nude wave" producers learned from Mr. Teas. While Naked West was Meyer's only attempt at outright satire (and, ironically, his least successful venture commercially), virtually all the nudies maintained a wisecracking voice-over narration that either kidded or proffered a leering commentary upon whatever was happening on screen. A majestically proportioned girl is seen bouncing on a trampoline and the voice opines, "I'll bet she's better at indoor sports." The camera enters a nudist colony that seems to be populated solely by buxom beauties aged 18 to 20, and the voice informs us it's "time for another walk down mammary lane." Musical scores for these films invariably include a jew's-harp in the ricky-ticky orchestration: Its sharp, nasal twang synchronized with the bouncing breasts or dimpling buttocks of a saftig female manages at once not only to desexualize her but to turn her into a figure of fun. This seems to be the function of the narration as well—-to reassure not only the censors but also their practically all-male audiences that they are not taking sex too seriously. Music and narration together underscored the lack of any real sexuality in the first American nudies, and by 1964 most of their producers were realistic enough to recognize that their limited market had become glutted. To retain their customers, they would have to supply hotter stuff.

By a curious coincidence, while the "nude wave" was still on the rise in the United States, the traditionally austere Japanese were enjoying a similar phenomenon in their own country. They called their nudies "eroductions"—erotic productions—and with typical Oriental thoroughness, they carried their fleshly delights to the limit. Nudity was simply where these pictures began. With titles like Blood and. Naked Flesh or The Girl with the Mole on Her Breast, they presented quite explicitly action that most film makers up until that time would hardly dare hint at. Donald Richie, an American film historian living in Japan, describes one typical of the genre: "Disturbed young man," he writes, "listens to lovemaking in next room; attacks his sister, proves impotent; opens icebox on array of sausages and cucumbers; spies on lady next door having intercourse; goes over, menaces her; she allows him in; he proves impotent again; shoots her in head and kills her."

Because these films show actual intercourse—sometimes even with animals— few have found their way to these shores, and those few that have, such as Abnormal, The Adolescent, The Bite, The Love Robots and Village of Love, have all been sharply scissored by their American distributors prior to release. As if to compensate, additional nude sequences featuring Japanese models in baths and showers are photographed in Los Angeles and spliced into the original.

But if these pictures represent but a tiny fraction of the nudie and sexploitation scene in the United States, they just about dominate the film industry in Japan. In 1965, of the 503 features produced, 233 fell into the eroduction category—and their popularity is enormous. Booked into a wide circuit of theaters throughout the country, they often recoup their modest costs in a single week. Not only that, where most Japanese houses close around ten p.m., the theaters running eropros regularly grind on through the night and often into the next morning to accommodate the crowds. As was the case with the American nudies, new companies have come into the field specifically to make these films; and as was the case with Hollywood's major studios, which are now cautiously insinuating nude sequences into their own films, such respected Japanese firms as Toho and Daiei have found it expedient to present unprecedentedly intimate bath and bedroom scenes in their pictures just to stay in business. Significantly, the theaters that run these eroductions are never raided. Specifically designated as such, they play to audiences that know precisely what to expect. And, what is more, they get it.

Naoki Togawa, a prominent Japanese critic, has suggested several reasons for the present prominence of these "pink films": the growing competition for a relatively limited market (500 Japanese pictures per year, plus another 250 imports, with only 6000 theaters available); the ever-increasing popularity of television (90 percent of Japanese homes now have TV sets); the sharp rise in participation sports; and the outlawing of prostitution. In the United States, when television threatened the movie industry, the studios responded with wide screens and 3-D. The Japanese, working on budgets barely ten percent of those of most Hollywood films, were blocked from making important technological changes. Instead, impressed by the growing eroticism of their European imports, they experimented with more-daring material— stories of fallen women, strange perversions, sadistic criminals and broad, sexy comedies. At its best, this led to such films as Onibaba and Woman of the Dunes, which combined rare artistry with outspoken eroticism: but it also led to the eroductions—films made without art or emotion, films made as a substitute for sexual experience.

But this explains only the reasons for their existence, not the reasons for their tremendous popularity. Drs. Phyllis and Eberhard Kronhausen, who were recently in Japan, studied this phenomenon and offered two explanations: With the high quotient of aggressiveness (primarily against women) that these films contained, they filled a popular need; and in their heavy accenting of male impotence (at least once in almost every picture), they reflected a popular fear. But the films themselves are not essentially sexy. Indeed, critic Donald Richie finds them essentially antisexual. "Thoroughly commercial in intent," he says, "they have cheapened the erotic (a prestigious sign of the avant-garde in other countries) and confused the salacious with the sensual." In this, too, they seem to parallel America's nudies.

By the end of 1963, the crest of America's "nude wave" had pretty well passed. After all, the formula they followed neither was terribly stimulating nor did it afford scope for many interesting variations. And while the girls they presented were often comely and invariably well endowed, the shoddy, slipshod productions that surrounded them were distressingly devoid of glamor. To make matters worse, theaters began to double-feature the domestic product—Ruined Bruin, Adventures of Lucky Pierre, Surf-tide 77 and the like—with straight nudist-camp films, most of them from England. Curiously, during the Fifties, the English turned out a considerable number of these sunshine-and-health features—curious since it is difficult to imagine as many bona-fide nudists lurking in England's chilly grasses as in such traditional sun-worshipers' paradises as the Cap d'Antibes and the Isle of Levant on the French Riviera. But perhaps it was the forbidden-fruit novelty of nudism alone that held such attraction for the English—just as it did for their American cousins. Certainly, there was a minimum of attractiveness in the films themselves, all of which tended to follow the same humdrum formula: A shy (and generally bespectacled) secretary is induced to spend a weekend at a nudist colony, where, after she has shed her clothes, she finds to her surprise and delight that the aloof young executive she has secretly admired is also a member. And he, discovering that she has a figure, shares her surprise and delight in his own way. Unfortunately, the girls' figures in these British-made pictures were rarely memorable, and the camp activities depicted—volleyball, swimming, diving and calisthenics—-made nudism not only antiseptic but insufferable. American nudie producers, concerned less with fact than with figures, eventually abandoned all pretense of documentary authenticity. Instead, they introduced curvaceous models or burlesque queens. Blaze Starr Goes Nudist and Bell, Bare and Beautiful, featuring Virginia "48-24-36" Bell, typified the new trend, while Orgy of the Golden Nudes merely used the nudist-camp setting as background for a horror story. But nudie producers soon learned that, even though the Supreme Court has ruled that nudity is not obscene, total nudity severely limits the number of play dates a picture can have. Although many nudist and art magazines publish photographs revealing the entire figure without being barred from the mails, theater managers fear to take this ultimate step lest they be closed down. Symptomati-cally, when The Raw Ones was produced in 1966—the first nudist-camp picture to reveal male and female genitals—at managed to get only a single booking, in liberal-minded San Francisco.

Like any major studio, the enterprising producers of the skin films sought to prolong their profitable trend by adding novelties. Not surprisingly, 3-D was brought back to enhance such films as The Toucliables and Paradisio—but considering the inherent possibilities of protuberances projecting from the screen straight toward each member of the audience, this technical gimmick was utilized with a consummate lack of imagination in both of these pictures. The biggest novelty of all, although ultimately no more successful in attracting the customers, was the inclusion of "name" performers. Whereas most of the girls who appeared in these films were (and are) youthful unknowns, models, dancers and strippers from Hollywood, New York and Miami, who make themselves available for about $100 a day, comedian Tommy Noonan introduced a calculated escalation in 1963. For his Promises, Promises!, which he both produced and starred in, he hired as his co-star the opulent and well-publicized Jayne Mansfield. The premise of this comedy, which has considerably more plot than any of its nudie predecessors, is the classic gambit of the woman who wants a baby but is married to a psychologically impotent male, played by Noonan. "And you know what they call me?" he wails. "Hollywood's most prolific writer!"

On an ocean cruise, Noonan tries to regain his vitality through various pills and plans recommended by his doctor. He is made even more frantic by the presence on shipboard of muscleman Mickey Hargitay (in real life, Mansfield's then-husband), playing a movie star who, Noonan suspects, has been making out with his wife. When she finally becomes pregnant, Noonan is convinced that Hargitay is the father; the rest of the picture is devoted to straightening out that earthshaking problem. Actually, in the entire film, there is only one nude scene —of Jayne taking a bubble bath, then drying herself off—but since this is repeated at various points where interest in the story proper might otherwise bog clown, and since there is a good deal of double-entendre dialog throughout, Promises, Promises! made money despite its $80,000 budget (high for this type of picture). Noonan has admitted that he was helped considerably by playboy's exposure of his bosomy star lying naked on a bed—an exposure that received even wider attention when playboy's Editor-Publisher, Hugh M. Hefner, was hauled into a Chicago court on an obscenity charge for publishing the pictures in the June 1963 issue of the magazine. (The case against Mr. Hefner ended in a hung jury, with the 11 women and one lone urban male voting 7 to 5 for his acquittal. The charge was never reinstated, and Chicago's Censor Board cleared the film itself for showing only a few weeks later—containing nude scenes almost identical to those that appeared in playboy.) Curiously, Noonan did not use the sequence in the completed film, despite its notoriety. "There is a distinction," he later explained, "between nudity in films and nudies. Mine was not a nudie." It was perhaps because of this distinction that his second movie, Three Nuts in Search of a Bolt, starring Mamie Van Doren, lost money, even though it came in at approximately the same figure and his luscious leading lady was given approximately the same playboy exposure. In any case, apart from a handful of films featuring the likes of June Wilkinson and Candy Barr (My Tale Is Hot), nudie producers have preferred to stick with their unknowns, figuring that the added cost of a star is rarely compensated for in box-office proceeds. Further, the Screen Actors Guild has always made it clear to its membership that it frowns upon their taking clothes off for movies—at least, that is, for cheap exploitation pictures. More recently, however, with Hollywood's biggest-budgeted pictures emerging increasingly laced with nudity, this attitude seems to be relaxing; but those actresses willing to doff their dresses before the camera have now discovered that they can do it far more profitably for the major studios than for the nudies.

As a result, the nudies have moved in two directions since 1964. On the one hand, a number of nudie-house operators, recognizing that their audiences are drawn primarily by the expectation of seeing an abundance of female flesh, have switched away from the nudie formula films, with their pretense of a plot, and have substituted programs of from one and a half to three hours of "strip" films, with no plots whatsoever. These reels, always in 16mm and approximately ten minutes in length, have been available as "party movies" for years, sold by direct mail through mouth-watering ads placed in the various nudist magazines and girlie publications. Mostly, they depict nothing more than girls of assorted sizes and ages (one to a reel, as a rule) wriggling provocatively out of their clothing. The aesthetic effect of three hours of this in a fleabag grind house is not unlike a bullfight in which everything has been eliminated except the kill. Grouped together under such titillating titles as The Battle of the 48's and Gal-A-Rama, and set to whatever phonograph records the management happens to have on hand, they keep faith with their customers at least to the extent of offering a maximum of nudity in a minimum of time. Probably to reassure the censors and the police that these exhibitions have redeeming social and cultural value, not infrequently a title appears on the screen to the effect that "Through this medium we are attempting to furnish artistic, lifelike models to those artists or students who cannot afford to hire models or attend classes." Ars gratia artis.

More recently, and again following the lead of the mail-order houses, the films for this type of operation have become not only bolder but kinkier. In place of a single girl squirming out of her panties on a divan, now there are apt to be two or even three girls mauling, wrestling and divesting one another of their garments on a large and rumpled bed. In place of the old striptease, which prolonged the stripping and delayed the removal of the bra until the last possible moment, the new breed of strippers starts with a flimsy negligee, bra and panties (and frequently black-net stockings that are seldom removed), and gets down to fundamentals as quickly as possible. Once the panties have been slipped off, they are often retained as a coy cover-up for the pubic area; but even this ultimate exposure is being admitted more often these days, as attested by titles like Wild and Woolly and Beaver Girls, with their not-unwarranted implication that pubic hair will be on view.

Other films depict sadistic refinements. In one, a blonde girl who is reading a book is quickly overpowered by a big-breasted brunette, manacled, tied to a chair, gagged, then stripped of her bra. The blonde is whipped with a rope, tickled on the breasts and thighs with a back-scratcher, then tossed on a bed and spanked. (All of this, it should be noted, is performed in the most perfunctory, even torpid manner, with both girls self-consciously aware of the camera throughout. Descriptions, like the subject matter, are apt to be somewhat more lurid than the films themselves.) In another, a young Negress is bound and humiliated; and in still another, two girls who have been "tortured" turn the tables on their captor, bind him, then flaunt their nude bodies and beat him with ropes. There are films in which women enjoy pain, others in which they enjoy inflicting it. The number of Lesbian films is also sharply on the rise—with titles like The Dominant Dyke and Her Lez Slave—in which leather-clad girls fondle and undress their passive partners.

Even the nudist-camp films are falling in with the new trend. No longer are genitals coyly concealed by the shrubbery, or activities confined to such healthy outdoor sports as volleyball and swimming. Men, at least in the reels run at these skin houses, have virtually disappeared from the picture; and in their place are girls—whole bevies of them—who promptly disrobe to indulge in such healthy indoor sports as craps, pool, ping-pong and push-ups. While one can legitimately doubt the authenticity of their nudist fervor, one cannot deny that the models used in these pictures are far more attractive, bountiful and uninhibited than those who populate the features shot in actual nudist camps. Although such films are now gaining in national exposure, at theaters in perhaps a dozen cities from Los Angeles to Miami grinding away at the product, their biggest market remains the private collector with his own 8mm or 16mm projector.

Of far greater significance has been the change in theatrical trends from the straight, voyeuristic nudie of the Immoral Mr. Teas and Bachelor Tom Peeping type to the current taste for sex-cum-violence melodramas. These "roughies" began to appear as early as 1962, when Dave Friedman released his Scum of the Earth, followed within the year by Festival Girls, a German-made shocker made even spicier by domestically produced inserts. But it was Russ Meyer who actually called the turn when, in 1963, hoping to move beyond the limited nudie circuits, he produced the sensation-packed Lorna—"Too Much for One Man," according to its teaser campaign. "I realized the nudies had had it," Meyer said recently. "Women had been presented in every conceivable way. There was nothing left to the imagination. Now there was required, in addition to the exposure of flesh, some sort of simple story. So from Lorna on, I have concentrated on action melodramas, violence and sex, presenting lovemaking in the most realistic manner and, when the situation required, photographing our actresses pretty much in the nude."

Lorna is in every sense a transitional film—not merely a roughening of the nudie concept but a fusing of the sensation-packed, sexually stimulating eroticism of the old exploitation pictures with the hitherto nonerotic, anti-emotional approach of the nudies, in which nudity alone was the attraction. By its very appearance, Lorna indicated the new direction that the roughies were to take. Unlike most nudies that preceded it, it was photographed in black and white instead of color—with consummate directorial skill, according to some critics—and with a story line that smacked strongly of ersatz Erskine Caldwell. Set in a Southern backwoods community, the film recounts the tribulations of po' white trashy Lorna, a buxom lass addicted to solitary skinny-dips in sylvan streams. Lorna gives herself freely to her rugged boyfriend, is lectured repeatedly for her sinful ways by a Bible Belt preacher whose interest in her transcends religion, and is raped by a lout who has been maddened by her open blouses and naked legs. Ultimately, Lorna is killed when, during a fight, she intercepts a knife tossed by the villain at her boyfriend.

Featuring Lorna Maitland, a statuesque, melon-breasted dancer from Las Vegas, Lorna was made for $37,000—and has to date grossed close to $500,000. Like Mr. Teas, its success immediately inspired a host of imitators, no few of them by Mr. Meyer himself. In them, women were changed from passive, posturing, piquant creatures viewed at a distance by the assorted Peeping Toms of the skin films into the role of innocent victims of man's unrestrained lust. John Fowles' The Collector, not altogether coincidentally, seems to have provided the archetypical plot for the films of this new genre: the girl kidnaped early in the picture, then held against her will as her abductors force themselves upon her. Among the first of these was The Defilers (which its writer-producer, Dave Friedman, admits "came to him" after reading Fowles' novel). The film begins with an irrelevant beach-party sequence in which its two heroes, Carl and Jamie (who refer to themselves as "studs" throughout), pick up four "broads"; while they are busy making out with two of them behind some rocks, the other two run off into the surf for some nude bathing. Carl, it soon develops, is a vicious type. One girl rejects him for biting too hard; another he beats into submission by tearing her clothes off and slapping her on her naked rear.

The story proper gets under way when, under the influence of marijuana, Carl proposes that he and Jamie kidnap a girl and hold her as a slave concubine—"for kicks." Their victim is Jane Collins, an innocent from the Midwest who hopes to get into the movies—and whom they have met because the nice old lady in whose apartment she is staying happens to be their "connection." They spy on Jane in her bubble bath, then lure her to the basement of an abandoned warehouse on the pretext that they are taking her to a party. "Where's the party?" the girl asks when she sees the small, dirty room they take her to, empty except for a bed and a toilet. "You're it!" Carl laughs, ripping off her dress. In the days that follow, Carl repeatedly rapes Jane as Jamie looks on, and feeds her with scraps from his millionaire father's table. But when Jamie finally tries to get into the act, Carl thwarts him. Jamie suddenly recognizes Carl for what he is—a sadistic lunatic—and orders him to release the girl. Carl refuses, and in the course of a vicious, gouging fight, he is killed—impaled through the forehead by a nail sticking out of the wall. Jamie rushes off to get help for the now-unconscious Jane. End of film.

Strikingly similar is a French import, dubbed into English, called Sexus. Once again, it opens with a completely irrelevant sequence as a voluptuous, sinewy Negress caresses a sleeping blonde while stripping down to a leopardskin bikini. When the blonde rises from her couch, the Negress divests her of her filmy white nightgown, kisses her tenderly, and the two begin an erotic dance together. (So irrelevant was this sequence that it turned up again, intact, in another sexploitation movie titled Night of Lust. Significantly, this was shot by the film's original producers in France and added specifically for the American market.) The plot itself follows very closely that of The Defilers, differing only in detail. The heroine, Virginia, is picked up on the streets of Paris by a gang and held for ransom in an old château. While the gang, which includes an attractive, revealingly dressed Lesbian, awaits further instructions, Virginia awakens in her room, removes her dress (which had been ripped up the back by the kidnapers) and dons a loose denim jacket and brief skirt. While Frankie, one of the gangsters, amuses his mates by undressing the Lesbian with his switchblade knife, Virginia makes her escape from the château. But does she then run for help? She does not. Unaccountably, no sooner is she out of the house than she shucks all of her clothes and stretches out in the grass for some moon-bathing.

Subsequently, there is an attempted rape, that is thwarted by the gang's handsomest member, Blackie, and a ripening romance between Blackie and the girl that leads to a love scene reminiscent of the opening of Hiroshima, Mon Amour—except that sighs and groans replace the stylish dialog of the earlier film. This sequence, incidentally, is interlarded with another totally irrelevant but highly salable bit of eroticism. In a sleazy bar where the Lesbian has gone to report Blackie's defection to the gang's leader, a tall, provocative honey-blonde stands in the middle of the room, apparently transfixed. With her is a dark, slender girl with a butch haircut, blue denims and a man's shirt. Indeed, she might almost be taken for an effeminate man, were it not for the fact that, in the course of the ensuing dance, she removes the shirt to reveal small but well-shaped breasts. During the dance, she uses a cat-o'-nine-tails on the blonde, removing bits of her costume with every blow of the lash, until the girl is down to a black, abbreviated G string. They fondle and caress each other to the music, and the dance climaxes as they kiss each other on the lips. Meanwhile, back at the château, learning that the gang is after him, Blackie drives Virginia to a clearing where, as luck would have it, her father is waiting for her, then returns to the château to be cut down by the police who are waiting for him. Obviously, neither logic of motivation nor clarity of continuity is uppermost in the minds of the producers of these films.

Bad Girls Go to Hell is the somewhat lurid but otherwise pointless title of a New York–based production that, while avoiding the kidnap theme, nevertheless reveals a strikingly similar attitude toward its heroine. Mary Kelton, a happy housewife who goes about her daily chores in a transparent negligee and bikini panties, is raped one morning while setting out the garbage. (The rape is filmed quite explicitly, even to the detail of having her panties pulled down over her wriggling toes.) The rapist, a neighbor, threatens (however illogically) to tell Mary's husband what happened unless she comes to his apartment. Mary goes, he tries to rape her again, and she kills him. Now she decides to run away. "I know," she says. "I'll go to New York. I can lose myself in the crowd there." (A few previous establishing shots have revealed that she already is in New York, but such petty details are readily ignored.) Under an assumed name, Ellen Green, the girl is soon befriended in the big city by a shy and kindly man who has only one minor vice: When he gets drunk, he beats up on women unmercifully. Ellen escapes his clutches and shacks up with a Lesbian, but growing alarmed at the woman's advances, she moves to a rented room in a private home. No sooner is the wife of the family out of the house than the husband attempts to rape her. Finally, she answers an ad, "Companion wanted for semi-invalid," and all seems well in her new surroundings until the son, a police detective, recognizes Ellen as the runaway murderess, Mary Kelton. At that point, Mary wakes up in her own little bed with her own little husband by her side. It was all a dream. But as she begins the day's chores in her transparent negligee and brief bikini, she is raped all over again beside the garbage cans. Perhaps this time it's for real, the film implies.

From such pictures as these, in which the women are essentially men's victims, it was but a short step to the next wave of sexploiters, in which women are portrayed as the aggressors—insatiable nymphomaniacs, perverse Lesbians, professional prostitutes. One of the first, one of the best and most typical of these films is The Dirty Girls, which seems to have been assembled from two European movies—one French, one German—and tied together by an English narration. Its first episode introduces us to an attractive prostitute on the prowl in Paris. One of her customers is so shy that she has to seduce him after he loses his nerve; another beats her unmercifully the moment she has stripped down to bra and panties; and a third insists on dressing her in a military uniform, complete with cap, boots and riding crop. "Do you love me?" he whimpers as she whips away at him with the quirt.

The second, and main, section of the film carries us to Munich, where we meet a cute, slender blonde prostitute named Monique, who has been highly recommended to Robert Marshall, an American businessman traveling through Germany. Although, wandering into the wrong apartment, Robert begins an affair with the wrong prostitute; he no sooner learns of his error than, with startling single-mindedness, he departs. Monique proves to be all that his friend had promised. First she captivates him with an uninhibited private performance of the twist; then she seduces him with abandoned sighs and groans. As they embrace on her bed, the scene dissolves to a quiet shot of the city at night. "Whatever ecstasy imagination can evoke will be realized here tonight," the narrator intones. Back in the room after a discreet interval, Robert confirms this. "Paul was right," he tells Monique. "You were great." Earlier in the evening, the girl had told Robert of her new lover, Lawrence. When Robert leaves, she phones Lawrence, but there is no reply.

In the next sequence, Monique is at a party that is straight out of a Fellini movie—the men in formal dinner jackets, the girls in brief bikinis, all jaded high-society sophisticates. A film star calls to Monique across a swimming pool. Without hesitation, the girl takes off her shoes and wades across the pool toward him. The film star, still in his tuxedo, laughs and jumps in, too. As they meet, embrace and start undressing each other in the water, the watching guests become filled with erotic hungers of their own and the girls begin offering themselves to the nearest males. Soon only Monique and her star are left outdoors with a bundle of their clothes floating on the water. The others have disappeared to make love inside. Later, while waiting in her apartment for the elusive Lawrence, Monique kisses and caresses her image in a mirror, then undresses and takes a shower. She is still in the shower when a chic and sophisticated woman enters and makes her way to the bath. "Bathe me, Lawrence," Monique pleads like a love-hungry little girl. Although Monique knows everything about pleasing men, clearly "Lawrence" has the upper hand with her. The picture ends with a tacked-on epilog in which Robert, leaving Munich, meets on the train a young, unsophisticated, "nice" girl, and the two begin to discuss opera. "Who is really the woman of ten thousand pleasures?" the narrator asks rhetorically.

The Dirty Girls, despite its prosaic title, is not without its moments of poetry, and the sequence at the swimming pool creates superbly the sense of a mounting erotic tension. No such virtues distract the New York–produced The Sexperts from its raunchy, single-minded course. It relates the story of Liz Adams, a dark-haired, curvy model who uses her body to make her way on the Broadway stage. Befriended by a wealthy theater owner, who takes her to his beach house on Fire Island for a weekend of fun and games, Liz permits her attentions to wander to his other guests. "If there was anything Liz liked better than making it with one guy, it was making it with two guys at the same time," the narrator informs us. Liz, we discover, is not merely promiscuous but a nymphomaniac—and her insatiable appetite for men ultimately destroys her chances for a theatrical career, when her patron discovers her snuggling en déshabillé in the arms of another. But the authors of the film cannot agree on an ending. What is to be Liz' fate? As a compromise, two endings are shown. In one, Liz becomes a kept woman in a luxurious Manhattan apartment; in the other, she is seen as a five-dollar-a-night whore operating out of a dingy rooming house. Along the way, the film is studded with nude sequences—models in a photo studio, bare-bosomed sun-bathing aboard the producer's yacht, a Greenwich Village party that degenerates into an orgy, along with such run-of-the-mill moments as a bathtub scene and assorted sexy clinches on beach and bed. In all of them, however, it is made apparent that the woman is the manipulator, man the creature to her whims and desires.

Loose-living Liz and her problems were not only duplicated but intensified in a series of pseudo-scientific movies that made their appearance concurrently, all of them exploiting in one way or another the popular notion that sexual mores are on the decline and sexual aberrations decidedly on the increase. The approach is often anthropological, as in Sin in the Suburbs, a gamy treatise on suburban wife swapping that was the first in this genre; and in the some 20 descendants of Italy's Mondo Cane, which made its debut in the art houses, but soon—along with such forthright imitations as Mondo Freudo and Mondo Bizarro—found its proper level in the sexploitation circuits. Whether pseudo-scientific or pseudo-documentary, however, the attitude is identical—a clucking disapproval in the commentary of what is shown gleefully, and often in intentionally shocking detail, on the screen. As Lee Frost (who also directed The Defilers) said of his Mondo Freudo, "We showed genuine things that happen in the United States and in the world, dealing with sex and sex taboos. It is authentic, it is truthful and it is very interesting." (In point of fact, despite Frost's claims of "authenticity," the entire film was reportedly fabricated in a studio.) Not too dissimilar is the advertising come-on for The Twisted Sex: "Taken from the actual files of a practicing psychiatrist ... people whose thirst for sex brings them close to madness."

Authenticity, however dubious or distorted, is the rationale for another group of roughies that portrays nymphomania, frigidity, Lesbianism, exhibitionism and homosexuality—although, curiously, there is little of physical sadism or masochism in them. Typical of this genre, if only because its plot embraces most of these aberrations, is Tony Orlando's Lust and the Flesh, produced in 1965. A story of wife swapping and its unfortunate consequences, it introduces us to Mark and Myra, an unhappily married couple who have just arrived at a seaside resort. Myra, like all the characters in the film, muses a great deal in explanatory narration. We learn that she is frigid, because early on her wedding night she lost her virginity to a rapist. "I do love you," she tells her husband in the inner monolog. "I just can't give you the physical love you want." This is fully confirmed in the bed scene that follows. They go to a night club and there they meet another couple, Helen and her husband, who narrates most of the film. Helen, he tells us, is a nymphomaniac who picks up a new man every weekend, using him as a "front." A few moments later, the husband also tells us that he has just fallen in love with Myra.

Helen coyly suggests that Mark and Myra come home with them after the club, then lures Mark away when Myra falls asleep. At dawn, the two go for an impromptu swim in the surf—she in her bra and girdle, he in his boxer shorts— and they make love as the waves lap around them. Later, as the husband and Myra go off together, the two make love all over again, this time naked and in bed. Now all four take a boat trip to a secluded island, where the newly formed couples go their separate ways. The husband readily conquers Myra's frigidity, and Helen and Mark fall to in a sequence that is an unintended parody of lust—close-ups of Helen's mountainous breasts, her coarse tongue licking her lips in erotic anticipation, her tongue pulsating with saliva as she kisses Mark's ear, Mark's flabby stomach and legs, and an eagle incongruously tattooed on his left arm. After this episode, Helen easily convinces Mark that he and Myra should remain with them for the rest of their vacation.

A few days later, Helen stages an orgy (which has become the scéne obligatoire of sexploitation movies), complete with a strip dance, a pair of Lesbians fondling each other, two homosexuals embracing in the bathtub, a muscle boy quietly lifting weights in one corner of the room and a nude girl who is ceremonially tarred, feathered and set to beating on a bongo drum. Finally, all the participants snake-dance out to the various bedrooms, leaving Myra and the husband alone to make love again (graphically depicted in an enormous shadow play)—followed by a sequence in which the two shower together and scrub each other's backs. By now, the husband is certain that Myra is his. Helen, however, has other plans. She takes Myra to visit Corinna, one of the Lesbians who was at the orgy. Myra doesn't return home that evening. As the narration informs us, "Myra, with her throbbing heart, was led by the experienced Corinna into a world of unnatural love." Mark, troubled, walks along the dreary beach, where he suddenly meets Ilsa, a girl who had been seen earlier dancing at the night club and at the orgy. Ilsa invites him to her cottage, and he accepts.

The husband, who has some inkling of what is going on between Myra and Corinna, reproaches Helen for her part in it. In spite, Helen flounces out of the house and allows herself to be picked up by a bunch of teenage hoods, who make out with her on the back seat of their vintage Buick. Also in spite, she later urges Mark to continue his affair with Ilsa— for which her husband beats and slaps her. Hoping to convince Myra that her marriage is over and that she should come away with him, the husband takes her to Ilsa's cottage. There, in the attic, she finds Mark and Ilsa flagrante delicto. Shocked, she runs away—not to the husband but to Corinna. Mark and Ilsa hurriedly dress and join the husband in a search for Myra. The story catapults to its climax—a wild thunderstorm, an overturned ashtray, a blazing curtain, then a whole forest on fire. The narration tells us that Corinna's home is burning and that Myra is dead, while flames flicker against the faces of Mark, Ilsa and the husband. But Ilsa and Mark have found true love; the husband has broken with the perfidious Helen, and in the final shot he is left alone by the sea, remembering his departed Myra. Unlike the earlier nudies, where the narrator's voice leers and mocks at sex, in Lust and the Flesh—as in most of the pictures of this species—the narration is heavily moralistic, even shocked by the sights we are seeing. Thus, besides saving money on synchronous sound, the narration becomes in a very real sense a sop for the censors. Incidentally, the producers of Lust and the Flesh saved even more money by gathering up the outtakes and trims from their movie and stringing them together to make something called Banned, which did very well in the sexploitation market.

Concurrent with these, but carrying their antifeminist theme a long step further, are the "kinkies," a sick genre of fetishistic, sadomasochistic sexploitation films in which the woman appears not merely as a perverse manipulator but as a wanton, willful destroyer of men. Typical of this genre is Sharon Winters, the heroine of Dave Friedman's A Smell of Honey, a Swallow of Brine. A girl who gets her kicks from turning men on, then turning them in with cries of "Rape!," Sharon has one of her admirers sent to prison; another loses his job and still another, wild with frustration, attempts to assault a woman and is shot dead by her husband. But when a tough rock-'n'-roll singer laughs at her game and beats her up, she turns prostitute. Far more sinister is the trio of handsome amazons who populate Russ Meyer's Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (originally titled The Leather Girls, and then, with complete accuracy, The Mankillers). The film has barely gotten under way when Varla, the psychopathic ringleader, attacks and kills a young man just for the hell of it, breaking his back with a combination of judo, akido and karate chops. "One of the most salable things," Meyer stated at the time of its release, "is the fact that possibly for the first time on the screen, we will see a woman kill a man with her bare hands. The only way I can compete is to do things that the majors are still not willing to do." In Pussycat, he succeeds nicely.

Dave Friedman has contributed to this far-out field an unholy trilogy of films—Blood Feast, Color Me Blood Red and Two Thousand Maniacs—in which nudity is minimized, but violence runs riot; they're aptly called "ghoulies" in the trade. In Blood Feast, beautiful young virgins in flimsy white gowns are ritualistically carved up as human sacrifices by a sinister high priest, to be eaten by the members of a black-magic sect. So gruesome was the film that vomit bags were passed out at the theaters where it was shown—and not solely as a box-office gimmick. Although such violence resulted in all three films' being barred in England, there is an irony in the fact that, because of their minimal nudity, they played some 4000 engagements in the United States—ten times the bookings that normally accrue to a movie in which the violent action is confined to a girl struggling out of her clothes. In the lingering puritanism of American audiences, sadism is still more acceptable than sex; when the weakening hold of the censors was finally broken in the mid-Sixties, the effect was not to encourage a free and healthy approach to sex in cinema. Almost predictably, the sicknesses engendered by decades of puritanical repression boiled to the surface in the form of sadomasochistic screen entertainments.

On the other hand, distasteful or not, the roughies, the kinkies and the ghoulies have already wrought a significant change in American film making. By accentuating erotic realism both in their themes and in their treatment, they have moved notably closer to the Europeans, who accept sexuality as a motivating factor in human behavior. Unfortunately, because of our inherent puritanism, because sex must be either apologized for or moralized about, our film makers are barred from probing and exploring its more natural aspects. Instead of the healthy humor of Divorce—Italian Style, we get the sanctimonious "tut, tuts" of the Lust and the Flesh narration. Instead of the frank sexuality of The Lovers, we get the perverted, sadistic thrill-seekers of The Defilers and Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! Instead of delicate dissections of a sick society, as in Antonioni's La Notte or in Fellini's La Dolce Vita, we get the "dirties," the "ghoulies" and the "Mondos" in which sex is associated with sadomasochism, fetishism, flagellation, Lesbianism and orgiastic encounters of the most degrading kind. Like a dog lapping its vomit, our puritanism seems to feed upon the very thing it has rejected.

It is this same puritanism that accounts for much of the difficulty that the nudies and their descendants today encounter in the courts. Although the Supreme Court ruled, as early as 1957 (Roth vs. U. S.), that a work might be termed obscene only if it could be proved that it was "utterly without redeeming social importance," and in 1964 (Jacobellis vs. Ohio) the test of "customary limits of candor" was redefined to mean standards acceptable to the nation as a whole; nevertheless, when films such as Sexus or Mondo Frcudo are hauled into court by the police or by a publicity-conscious district attorney, local juries rarely fail to convict. Invariably, on an appeal, in which the merits of the case are re-examined by a judge purely in terms of law, the jury's decision is promptly reversed; but, as many of the producers of these films are quick to point out, they operate on such a narrow margin of profit that the expenses of fighting through to a favorable decision are often prohibitive. As a nudie producer once stated bitterly but factually, "In opposing censorship, you can't fail—if you have enough money to go to court."

It isn't always quite that simple, however. Robert Cresse, the youthful head of Olympic International, one of the largest producers and distributors of sexploitation movies in this country, recently spoke of a not-atypical situation that arose in Philadelphia involving one of his pictures, The House on Bare Mountain. "It's a silly little comedy," Cresse said, "totally innocuous. A sexual act never takes place in the film. You couldn't conceivably find anything obscene in it. But we were arrested three weeks before election, along with many of the book-dealers and newsstand dealers in Philadelphia. Now, obviously, they can't win the case, so they don't want to go to trial. They have come to us repeatedly and said they'll drop the case if we will promise not to play the picture in Philadelphia. Legally, they can't do that, but that's their stand at the moment. We just can't get into a courtroom in Philadelphia. It's now been in the court for over two years, but we haven't been up for trial yet and they will not set a date." Nor did they. The case was ultimately dismissed, but with the proviso that the film would never be shown in Philadelphia.

Producers' lives are further complicated by the fact that standards of acceptability vary widely from community to community. What can be shown freely in one community may be banned in another, severely cut in yet another. As Lee Frost, the director of The Defilers, explained in 1966, "In New York City, we can say filthy words on the screen; we can't say them in L. A. In L. A. we can show bare bosoms on the screen; we can't show them in New York. So there is a jagged edge as to what we can and cannot do throughout the United States; and as a national distributor, we must constantly be aware of this." New Yorkers are aware of it in a curious way. While the features are cut, the trailers are not; and following a picture that has discreetly avoided so much as a suggestion of erotic activity, audiences are apt to be treated to tantalizing coming attractions filled with nudity that will be denied them the following week. For example, in the trailer for One Naked-Night, a Lesbian sequence is shown in considerable detail. Two girls kiss on the lips, then one kisses the naked breasts and stomach of the other. In the film itself, however, the scene ends before even the first kiss—at least in New York. Actually, by 1967, even this has begun to change somewhat. Because of the competition, a number of the New York theaters are now risking police action by showing nudity in their features as well as in their trailers; while in such Upstate New York communities as Buffalo and Syracuse, the wraps had come off completely soon after the Supreme Court declared New York's State Board of Censors illegal. In Chicago, still wrestling with its municipal censor board, such films as Rent-A-Girl and Body of a Female are under permanent injunction against exhibition in that city (as of this writing), although both have played in New York and Los Angeles without interference. But staid Philadelphia, whose thrill-seeking citizens formerly had to hop across the river to Camden for anything steamier than a Walt Disney movie, is now considered one of the most wide-open towns in the country as far as the sexploitation films are concerned—unless there is an election in the offing.

Another problem that faces the producers and exhibitors of sex films is that of advertising. All are agreed that a lurid title is the best possible come-on for their wares (and some have even admitted that the more lurid the title, the tamer the merchandise). But in some cities, such as Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Chicago, Detroit and Cleveland, the newspapers have refused to accept ads that either show or imply nudity. Theaters merely insert their telephone numbers and invite prospective patrons to phone in for further information. Lobby displays, those indispensable "point of sales" persuaders, have also come under attack—particularly by irate parents and church groups who fear that the young will be corrupted by the sight of naked breasts or the innuendo of a catch phrase. Thus, The Dirty Girls, originally blurbed as "The Movie That Goes Too Far," eventually appeared on New York marquees with the slogan "You've Never Seen Anything Like It Before." And nudie-house managers work overtime painting improvised bras and panties on posters of naked girls, or gluing nickel-sized pasties over their nipples. The result, not surprisingly, is that the posters look more lurid and suggestive than ever before. In some areas, the gaudy lobby displays have disappeared altogether, replaced by obviously hand-lettered signs describing, in the piquant argot of old-time burlesque's peripatetic candy butchers, the forbidden goodies to be found on the inside.

But the most pressing problem that faces the sexploitation people is where they can go from here. If Carroll Baker, Jane Fonda and Elizabeth Taylor can be seen in the buff in well-made, glamorously mounted productions, who will pay two dollars to look at some anonymous cuties prancing about in pictures that are wretchedly filmed and even more shoddily written? Nor is the market for sadism and violence wholly cornered by the sexploiters, as the Bond and Flint pictures remind us. Again, the major studios have the resources and facilities to hopelessly outclass their pinchpenny rivals. None of the nudie producers—a remarkably conservative and knowledgeable group—has the slightest intention of taking the ultimate step and showing intercourse on the screen. Not only would that eliminate their already circumscribed market by inviting instant police action but, as more than one producer has put it, their pictures would soon become as boring as a glut of straight stag reels.

What seems to be happening now is a refinement of quality. Within the past few months, Galia arrived here from France—an unabashedly sexy film about a girl with no inhibitions about taking off her clothes or taking over another woman's husband. Well directed, handsomely produced and with an arresting performance by slender Mireille Darc, it went straight to the art houses. At about the same time, a turgid Swedish-Danish co-production, I, a Woman, starring dark, attractive and equally uninhibited Essy Persson, also arrived on these shores. This lumbering tale of a girl who much prefers sex to marriage went primarily into the far more limited sexploitation market. Movies, like water, seek their own level. The line between the conventional movie and the nudie, between the art-house film and the exploitation picture, is rapidly disappearing. It is no longer so much a question of content, but of quality. For sheer survival, the makers of sex movies will probably have to get better, not bawdier.

In their next installment of "The History of Sex in Cinema," authors Knight and Alpert report on a film phenomenon that has been more frequently whispered about than written about: stag films.