The History of Sex in Cinema

Society's increasingly permissive moral climate ushers in an era of unprecedented nudity and sexuality on screen

With the onset of the Sixties, a détente of sorts was arranged between the film and the television industries, and both mediums managed to thrive in peaceful economic coexistence. The major studios, while continuing to turn out feature films, also used their assembly-line know-how to mass-produce series fodder for home-screen consumption. In the meantime, however, an ever-increasing proportion of film production was being shifted to foreign centers--London, Paris, Rome and Madrid--where, inevitably, control over the moral content of films became harder to exercise; and with this came a shift in the power center. Increasingly, the reins were being held by New York-based financial wheeler-dealers--individuals such as Joseph E. Levine, or titans such as Gulf & Western or M.C.A. that gobbled up whole studios. Cannily assessing the state of the world market and aware of the eventual bonuses that would come from the sale of features to television outlets, they loosened up production purse strings. By the early Sixties, big budgets were back with a vengeance. With huge investments at stake--as much as $40,000,000 in the case of Cleopatra--the problem of censorship became a vital consideration for the American film industry. The Motion Picture Association of America, representing the major companies, now found it a matter of sheer self-interest to fight for greater freedom for film makers; and this included not only legal battles against acts of censorship but, eventually, the need for loosening the restrictive provisions of its own Production Code.

To appreciate this development requires a brief recapitulation of certain trends of the Fifties. During that decade, the studios, unwilling to invest heavily in film production, had retrenched on contract talent, thus allowing individual film makers (stars, writers, producers, directors) to operate virtually independently of studio control. Actors, as a result, now represented by (or in partnerships with) profit-motivated agents, no longer trotted meekly into executive offices to be told what to do but, instead, initiated their own projects. The studios, in order to stay in business, were forced not only to negotiate with the stars, directors and producers who only a few years earlier had been their hirelings, but often to grant them a share of the profits as well. Albeit grudgingly, they also often found it necessary to go along with projects they did not wholly approve of, simply to get the stars. Thus, by 1960, the studios' control over content had slackened considerably--which meant that the industry's Code was well on the way (text continued on page 142) to becoming a dead-letter document. Ostensibly, it was still in force; but seldom could it be meaningfully applied.

The Code's principal raison d'étre was as a supposed bulwark against state and local censorship; but after 1962, this plaguing nuisance was definitely on the decline, as court rulings went more and more in favor of cinematic freedom of expression. New York's strategically important censor group gave up the ghost in 1965, after a U.S. Supreme Court ruling declared unconstitutional the statutes on which its power was based. That same year, and for the same reason, Maryland's censors went out of business. And in January of 1968, the High Court disarmed the guardians of movie morality in prim Chicago by declaring that city's stringent film-censorship ordinance unconstitutional on administrative and procedural grounds. Still remaining to be dealt with was the Catholic Legion of Decency; but its condemnatory ratings began to ring hollow, especially when applied to the prestigious and provocative works of such film makers as Ingmar Bergman, Michelangelo Antonioni and Francois Truffaut, which ran unmolested in an ever-increasing number of American arthouse cinemas. American-made films that incurred the Legion's wrath could also be shunted off, with profitable results, to this area of exhibition.

Despite the pronounced atmosphere of tolerance that now prevailed, however, American film makers were not entirely able to eradicate old, ingrained habits of caution (text continued on page 148) and discretion in the treatment of erotic material on the screen. Some, instead of growing up, merely managed to flower into a retarded adolescence. In one sense, at least, the Sixties provided us with some of the cleanest movies ever made. Everyone was forever taking baths! In such spectacles as Spartacus, Cleopatra and Genghis Khan, the stars dunked in extenso, their bared torsos only partially concealed by the waters--and never a bar of soap in sight. Indeed, when Telly Savalas and his fellow warriors sorely needed bathing after their long march into China in Genghis Khan, both cleanliness and godliness were quickly forgotten (particularly in the prints intended for foreign exhibition, as previewed in these pages) as a bevy of Chinese beauties leaped into the pool-sized tub to assist them at their ablutions. Readers of playboy will also recall the informal alfresco bathing arrangements of Elsa Martinelli and Robert Mitchum in Rampage and of Susannah York and William Holden in The Seventh Dawn--although both became decidedly more circumspect in the versions released for domestic distribution. But perhaps the most specifically sexual bathing scene in American movies was Sean Connery's in A Fine Madness (1966). Momentarily out of Bondage, Connery was shown splashing merrily in the king-sized ripple bath of a swanky sanitarium--in less than decorous company with Jean Seberg, wife of the institute's director. It can be stated quite axiomatically that the bathroom, while often a (text continued on page 198) Sex In Cinema (continued from page 148) locus for adolescent humor, has never been depicted on the screen solely for the purpose of promoting sanitation.

Nor, for that matter, are bedrooms solely for sleeping. Since 1960, the bedroom comedy has flourished as never before, fostered by the farces of writer-producer Stanley Shapiro, whose Doris Day-Rock Hudson romances established an arch pattern that still persists. Shapiro habitually set up situations in which the worst always seemed about to happen, then coyly resolved them so that virtue, generally in the person of Miss Day, emerged triumphant. In one such Shapiro comedy, That Touch of Mink, Doris stands on the very brink of her first seduction--somewhat belatedly, in view of her rather advanced age--by Cary Grant; but she is made so nervous by the imminence of the encounter that she develops an immobilizing skin rash. Later, learning that Doris apparently (it's always apparently in movies of this ilk) is about to try again with someone else in a motel room, Cary Grant rushes to save her for himself--in marriage, of course. The bad joke is further compounded when Grant himself develops a rash on the bridal night. Thus, the two lovers--even with the marriage certificate in hand--are left in a state of unconsummated desire for each other. Such were the comedic movie commentaries on the sexual morals of middle-class Americans. Other Shapiro comedies--Come September and Lover Come Back among them--invariably promised more titillation than they delivered. Adding to the irritating nature of these films for sophisticated audiences was the fact that such hypocrisy was no longer even necessary.

That the slick commercial comedy could be brightened with flashes of satire and cynicism, however, was notably demonstrated in the mordant films of the witty Billy Wilder, who earlier established his eminence in this field with The Seven Year Itch and Some Like It Hot. In The Apartment (1960), he appeared headed toward a coruscating commentary on the sexual habits of the American businessman. The bigger they get, according to Wilder's movie, the more they require a hideaway for sneaking in some extramarital sex on the sly. To aid and abet them, Jack Lemmon, a bumbling opportunist hoping to make his way up the ladder of success in a huge insurance firm, lends his apartment for the romantic dalliances of his superiors; meanwhile, he casts shy glances at a comely elevator operator (Shirley MacLaine), who, unbeknownst to him, is no stranger to his pad. As long as Wilder remained cynical and kept his characters bad, his film was good; but toward the end, he became as nervous as Shapiro. Instead of permitting Lemmon's lack of virtue to be unjustly rewarded, Wilder has him rescue Miss MacLaine, who had been seduced and abandoned by Fred MacMurray, from a remorseful suicide. Lemmon righteously resigns from the firm (surrendering the symbol of his success, the key to the executive men's room), and he and Shirley prepare to make an honest life together, without much chance for promotion for either of them. Wilder's own chance for a truly trenchant film disappeared as he turned his satire into saccharine. Nevertheless, The Apartment won him several awards.

Wilder was less lucky with Kiss Me, Stupid, which played heavily--far too heavily--on the themes of cupidity and concupiscence. Disaster first struck when Peter Sellers, who was to portray another bumbling hero in a town unsubtly yclept Climax, Nevada, was stricken by a massive heart attack. His replacement, Ray Walston, made for a dull substitute; and Kim Novak, bursting from her blouse with everything but talent, gave an equally lackluster performance as a prostitute known as Polly the Pistol. Dean Martin, driving through Climax, tarries in the hope of passing time with Walston's pretty wife, Felicia Fair. His hopes are fulfilled; Walston unwittingly counters by making out with Polly the Pistol; and all ends happily. But not for Wilder. Critic Judith Crist, her hackles bristling, awarded Kiss Me, Stupid "the distinction of being not only the slimiest movie of the year but also the dullest." The film, admittedly badly cast, was not all that bad; and if it was lascivious, it was at least honestly so, in contradistinction to several films praised by the same Miss Crist. Though it was finally granted a Code Seal, the Legion of Decency further jumped on it with a Condemned rating. Wilder learned to his sorrow--for the film failed at the box office, too--that there were limits to what he could get away with.

These limits were tested in several more serious pictures of the early Sixties as well. A bellwether film in this regard was Joseph L. Mankiewicz' skilled--and resoundingly successful--adaptation of Tennessee Williams' Suddenly, Last Summer, made at the very end of the Fifties (and discussed in our installment covering that decade). This grim, ground-breaking drama--which incorporated homosexuality, cannibalism and generous peeks at Elizabeth Taylor in a skimpy, almost transparent bathing suit--went into general release in the first weeks of January 1960, and its box-office reception undoubtedly did much to embolden other producers into working a similar vein. In Sweet Bird of Youth, also taken from a Williams play, Paul Newman appeared as the kept companion to an aging actress who lives on liquor, narcotics and bottled oxygen; at the film's finale, he is beaten within an inch of his life for having given a dose of V.D. to the virginal daughter of a Southern politico. In the original play, Williams had him emasculated on stage; but apparently there were still some subjects that the studios continued to regard as not in "good taste." Indeed, the producers seemed to go out of their way to avoid "approving" of this new injection of sex into their pictures. Not infrequently, the price of dalliance ranged all the way from madness to suicide or death. In yet another mining of Tennessee Williams' antimother lode, The Fugitive Kind, Marlon Brando brings his guitar to a small Mississippi town and is promptly seduced by the matronly proprietress (Anna Magnani) of the general store in which he finds employment, and pursued by the local nymphomaniac (Joanne Woodward). When Magnani's husband learns that she is being generous with her favors, he shoots her dead, then traps Brando in the store and burns it--and him--to the ground. Brando fared little better in his next film, One-Eyed Jacks, which he both produced and directed. For sheer spite, he seduces and impregnates the stepdaughter of a man who once betrayed him (Karl Malden). In retaliation, Malden horsewhips him, pistol-whips him and smashes his gun hand with a rifle butt. In the end, after the inevitable shoot-out, Brando brings down his enemy; but Malden, his eyesight failing, snaps off one final shot--and hits the errant stepdaughter. Such were the wages of sin as recently as 1961.

To be sure, not all American movies of the early Sixties were quite so relentlessly Victorian in their approach. In The Misfits (1961), which Arthur Miller wrote specifically for his then-wife Marilyn Monroe, she is cast as a divorced ex-stripper with, as one character puts it, "a gift for life." This gift prompts her to a prolonged, idyllic shack-up with an aging, womanizing cowboy (Clark Gable), an affair that ends abruptly when she discovers that he makes his living by rounding up wild horses for the dog-food factories. But when he promises to find another, more humane form of employment, she climbs back into his truck with him and together they "head for the big star"--a prospect of happiness rarely proffered the promiscuous. Similarly, playwright William Inge and producer-director Elia Kazan conceived their Splendor in the Grass (also 1961) as a forthright attack on conventional morality. It was the corn-belt hypocrisy of Natalie Wood's parents, their film insisted, that kept her from satisfying her youthful, imperative physical needs with boyfriend Warren Beatty. Exacerbated emotionally by seminude cleavings and partings beneath a waterfall, Warren comes down with psychosomatic pneumonia, and the girl goes off her rocker. In spite of the film's commendable effort to give sex a nice instead of a dirty name, it was all a bit too overwrought to be completely convincing. Unfortunately, for the next few years, these films were the exception, not the rule. More often, sex was examined with a certain amount of candor, then rejected.

Natalie Wood, for example, ran into more sexual difficulties in Love with the Proper Stranger, this time through overindulgence. Meeting Steve McQueen, and finding herself pregnant shortly thereafter, she seeks out an abortionist, but is thoroughly revolted by the seedy circumstances surrounding the operation. Eventually, McQueen solves her problem with a marriage proposal; and the film, which seemed on the verge of reflecting reality, wound up with a romantic cop-out. Sex remained a somewhat gloomy business for the married as well as the unmarried. In The Dark at the Top of the Stairs, the wife, Dorothy McGuire, was frigid; in By Love Possessed, the husband (Jason Robards, Jr.) was impotent and his wife, Lana Turner, soon found herself having an unsatisfactory affair with Efrem Zimbalist, Jr., also married; unmarried Susan Kohner, meanwhile, spurned by George Hamilton, committed suicide. The plusher the surroundings, the harder it became for married couples to find sexual satisfaction, or so The Chapman Report reported. When a team of Kinseylike sex surveyors looks behind the scenes in fashionable Beverly Hills suburbia, it uncovers some highly disconcerting mating patterns. Housewife Shelley Winters has a silly affair with a pretentious theater director; love-famished Glynis Johns, whose studious husband is too preoccupied to notice, let alone satisfy, her needs, picks up a muscular beach athlete who proves woefully unathletic in the clinches; and Claire Bloom, an alcoholic nymphomaniac, is collectively raped by a gang of overheated jazz musicians. (The Legion of Decency thought this last episode too strong and threatened condemnation until Warner Bros. dutifully recalled all prints and did some cutting. A similar gang rape was excised from Splendor in the Grass, also at the Legion's behest.)

Ever searching for salable sexual content for its films, Hollywood found prostitution even more intriguing than rape in the early Sixties. Butterfield 8, a long-neglected John O'Hara novel, was filmed in 1960 by MGM, with Elizabeth Taylor playing an ill-fated callgirl; the role won her an Academy Award. Shirley Jones was similarly rewarded when she changed her ingénue image and portrayed a prostitute in Richard Brooks' bold adaptation of Elmer Gantry. A deacon's daughter, she took up the profession after having been seduced by the unworthy divine, played by Burt Lancaster. This movie, though lurid, was saved by fine acting and direction and, except for a compromised final scene, was relatively free of moral cant. More popular, although less distinguished, was The World of Suzie Wong, which featured curvaceous Nancy Kwan as an Oriental hustler working the bars of Hong Kong --that is, until she meets and falls in love with William Holden, who takes Suzie off the market by marrying her. Marriage, too, provided the happy ending for Audrey Hepburn as Holly Golightly in a relatively antiseptic version of Truman Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's. The film was somewhat chary about calling a callgirl a callgirl; the producers wanted us to believe that Holly was just a gay madcap in the habit of accepting $50 from gentleman escorts in order to visit the ladies' room in style. The gimleteyed reviewer for Time was not hoodwinked, however, for he reported that the director, Blake Edwards, "induces poor Holly to give up mattress money for matrimony." Just as likable but far more earthy was Melina Mercouri in Never on Sunday, written and directed by America's Jules Dassin. A hard-working Greek streetwalker, Melina gives her all for six days of the week and not even a simple-minded American tourist, attempting to regenerate her, is able to turn her from her regular work habits. Made in Greece, the film was a stunning commercial success, and a condemnation by the Legion had no effect whatever upon its drawing power. Members of the Legion, forced to view all the above films and others in a matter of weeks, privately took to calling their ordeal "the month of the prostitute."

With such sterling precedents, American producers became notably more open in their treatment of this previously taboo subject matter. Whereas, in such films of the Fifties as From Here to Eternity and Some Came Running, a bordello was generally depicted as an innocent night club, in Columbia's 1962 adaptation of Nelson Algren's sordid Walk on the Wild Side, his New Orleans whorehouse remained unmistakably just that. Into it wanders Laurence Harvey, a Texas boy searching for his lost ladylove, Capucine. To his dismay, he discovers that she is available only to the best customers of the establishment--and to the house's hard-bitten, mannish madam, Barbara Stanwyck. Even when Harvey proposes marriage, Miss Stanwyck jealously intervenes. In the ensuing tussle, Capucine is shot to death--thus leaving Harvey free to marry Anne Baxter, the cafe proprietress who really loves him, although for reasons not altogether clear. (Almost simultaneously. William Wyler's remake of Lillian Hellman's The Children's Hour went into release. When first filmed in 1936 as These Three, the Lesbian motivations of the play were elided completely; in the 1962 version, although no overtly Lesbian activities were presented, the script has Shirley MacLaine admitting that she loves Audrey Hepburn "in the way they said" and adding, "That's what's the matter with me.") By 1964, when the film version of Polly Adler's A House Is Not a Home put in its appearance, not only was there no effort to disguise the nature of Polly's home life but the picture ended without the slightest show of repentence or regeneration on her part. Nor was she shown ending her life as a sodden wreck or beneath the wheels of a convenient train. What gives this otherwise shoddy picture its significance, however, is not that it lacked an unhappy ending to satisfy the censors, but that a major studio decided to portray the life of a successful madam in the first place.

Were American film makers merely attempting to redress the wrongs done to the oldest profession through past movie moralizing? Hardly--although sexual soiling for commercial reasons was no longer viewed as quite the horrendous sin of yesteryear. Prostitutes and prostitution, now freely portrayable, simply afforded Hollywood the opportunity to resuscitate one of its favorite film types, the good-bad girl. There was a difference, though. In earlier decades, she was more often than not the victim of a cruel misunderstanding: She only seemed bad and turned out to be good at the end. Most of the time, of course, she really was bad, in terms of the remunerative employment of her body, but she was still eminently salvageable. It was again Billy Wilder who carried this pattern to its illogical extreme, In Irma la Douce. Originally a French musical of considerable charm, it was taken to London and then to the New York stage. Wilder, in turning it into a commercial Hollywood success, relegated the lilting score to the background sound track and diluted the dialog from its former frankness to a series of double-entendre wisecracks. As the Parisian Poule, he cast Shirley MacLaine and, as the policeman turned pimp for the love of Irma, he again chose Jack Lemmon. Monogamy, of course, eventually triumphed, as it did in the play; but somehow the bite and buoyancy of the original story was lost in translation to the screen, and Jack Lemmon was unthinkable as a jealous procurer. As one critic remarked, Billy Wilder had gotten into the habit of telling "dirty fairy tales," while what audiences were asking for was a greater degree of honesty.

Wilder, for all his seeming boldness, fell into the rear guard of American directors, as a younger generation began to come of age. Perhaps the best of the new breed was Stanley Kubrick, originally of the Bronx, who took a contemptuous view of Hollywood's pussyfooting and much preferred to work abroad. When he and his partner, James B. Harris, obtained the film rights to Vladimir Nabokov's controversial Lolita, they arranged their financing independently and went to England to make the picture. That they were able to obtain the rights to this famous novel at all revealed how uneasy the major studios still were (in 1962) with erotic material of undeniable distinction. Hollywood could be forgiven, however, for looking somewhat askance at Lolita. The book had first been published in France by the pornographically inclined Olympia Press (although Lolita could by no contemporary legal definition be regarded as pornographic); after being warily imported into this country by travelers, it became famous; its brilliance was recognized and it was finally published here to great acclaim.

Kubrick, backed to the tune of $2,000,000 for the film version, was forced into a certain amount of compromise, particularly on the touchy matter of the age of the nymphetic Lolita, who, in the novel, was assumed to be no more than 12 or 13. For this pivotal role, Kubrick chose then-14-year-old Sue Lyon and left it to the audience's imagination to decide what her age in the film might be. Most critics, as it turned out, thought she looked at the very least a voluptuous 16. The question of age aside, however, Kubrick did manage to treat with frankness, honesty and sardonic humor the story of Humbert Humbert, a middleaged man (James Mason) fixated on preadolescent girls. So compulsive were his somewhat esoteric sexual needs that he resorted to the extraordinary stratagem of marrying Shelley Winters just to be near her nubile, provocative daughter. After the mother's demise, the stepfather-daughter relationship is turned into a carnal one; but following a crosscountry chase from one motel to the next, Peter Sellers, a nymphetophile in his own right, manages to steal the fun-loving Lolita away from the moody Mason. The ending, which shows Mason in prison, is double-edged in its morality, for Mason is there not for his seduction of a minor but because he has shot to death that other child molester, Peter Sellers. MGM, once ruled by the moralistic Louis B. Mayer, showed not the slightest hesitation in releasing the film; since presumably everyone paid in the end one way or another, even the Legion of Decency did not condemn the picture.

For all its excellence and daring, Lolita was not the trail-blazing film that many of its eloquent laudators would like to think. Sexual deviation of one sort or another had already begun to enter the mainstream of American picturemaking, significantly in such readily assimilable popularizations as Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, a surprise hit of 1960. Its hero (Anthony Perkins) is a transvestite who assumes his dead mother's dress and voice while stabbing to death, in a sexual frenzy, a comely miss (Janet Leigh) who is unfortunate enough to be taking a shower in his motel. When Perkins is ultimately trapped by the dead girl's sister, the nature of his ailment--a murderous schizophrenia--is revealed by a police psychiatrist. Indeed, a goodly number of the films of the early Sixties could readily be taken for case histories of sexual aberration. The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone, based on a Tennessee Williams novella, cast the brilliant Vivien Leigh as an aging society woman, a former actress who finds herself reduced to purchasing the affections of young Warren Beatty--and, when he jilts her, those of a nondescript Italian who, as she cheerfully admits, will probably end up by strangling her. In All Fall Down, Beatty turns up again, as an amoral youth with a pathological penchant for slugging his numerous female benefactors because, we gather, he had a weak father and a foolish, overprotective mother. In Summer and Smoke, yet another of Tennessee Williams' prejudicial dissertations on the frailties of woman, Geraldine Page plays a lonely, spinsterish Southern belle whose dormant desires are so roused by Laurence Harvey that she turns into a pushover for a passing salesman after he abandons her. With such Freudian characters--and caricatures--crowding the screen, it was only fitting that, in 1963, a major motion picture be devoted to the master himself. John Huston's Freud, in fact, turned out to be not one but two case histories--one of Freud (stonily played by Montgomery Clift in a beard) and one devoted to Freud's fictitious first patient, Cecily Koertner, who gradually reveals, in a series of dream sequences, that the reason she can't walk is because she wants to kill her mother, sleep with her dead father--and become a prostitute in the bargain.

It was by now abundantly apparent to the film industry that the larger the sexual quotient of a film, the more it was likely to please the public--and that under such circumstances, a cast of stellar names was not always needed for bait. New people lacking the credits and the capital to attract big stars could sometimes get independent financial backing by simply offering a provocative script. In France, a new cinematic movement--the New Wave--had developed in the late Fifties on just such a basis, and some of the younger West Coast film makers felt understandably challenged. French directors on the order of Jean-Luc Godard, Louis Malle and Francois Truffaut had achieved two main objectives: (1) They had found methods of cutting production costs to the bone and (2) they had substituted their personal moralities--or amoralities--for the traditional ones of cinema. One of the first Americans to emulate this approach was Leslie Stevens, already well established as both a screenwriter and a playwright. Finding his capital from outside the establishment sources, he directed his own story, Private Property, and proved, for the time being, that a commercially viable film could be made at low cost (a little over $50,000) and without expensive star names. In the starring role of a luscious housewife whose husband is often away on business, he cast his own wife, Kate Manx. Lolling by her pool, lounging about her house, she is not aware at first that she is being spied upon by a pair of creepy young men who have invaded the house next door. Aroused by the all-too-fetching view, one of them embarks on a forthright seduction campaign and, after succeeding, drives the woman at knife point to the neighboring house to oblige his pal, a sexual innocent and, presumably, a latent homosexual. An improbable and violent ending marred the film, but it did manage to break new ground with, as film critic Paul V. Beckley wrote, "its precise and psychologically persuasive details."

Produced at the same time, although almost two years went by before it found a release, was Alexander Singer's A Cold Wind in August; for the next several years, it enjoyed the distinction of being the most honest erotic film made in the United States and is still considered a classic of the genre by French cinemaphiles. Singer, whose background strikingly parallels that of his friend and onetime associate, Stanley Kubrick, described with a minimum of sensationalism but a wealth of steamy detail the burgeoning love affair between an aging stripper and a 17-year-old boy. They are drawn together in mutual hunger, but sexual satisfaction soon leads to a deeper relationship--until the young man learns the truth about her profession. Disillusioned and disgusted, he breaks with the woman; but through their affair, he has discovered his own manhood and begins to search for a mate of more suitable age. With love scenes and language that were remarkably frank and a striptease sequence that for sheer tawdry sexiness remains unsurpassed in American films, Cold Wind had the misfortune to come to the screen several years ahead of its time. It was too American for the art-house trade, too open in its eroticism for the neighborhoods.

Also destined for limited distribution was Joseph Strick's modestly budgeted The Savage Eye, which took a relentlessly bleak view of life in Los Angeles for the lonely. Barbara Baxley, as a young divorcée, has little choice but to pick up a married man and, besides having to endure his passionless lovemaking, must accompany him--if she is to have the companionship she needs--on an endless round of wrestling matches, cheap night clubs and strip joints. The world she encounters is hardly the world as reflected by Hollywood; and the film often seemed more anxious to make this point than to touch the emotions. But, again, the playability of such films in the growing number of offbeat art houses was recognized. Strick continued his off-Hollywood career by making The Balcony, based on Jean Genet's scandal-rousing play about a surrealistic brothel catering to every conceivable pleasure of the flesh, and then moved on to his important adaptation of James Joyce's Ulysses, about which more will be said later.

All this creative ferment, bubbling toward the evolution of a new American cinema that would not be tied to Hollywood and its familiar precepts, quickly spread to the East Coast, where Shirley Clarke, attached by inclination to the new school of "underground cinema," revealed obviously professional skills when she made a film version of Jack Gelber's long-running off-Broadway play about drug addicts, The Connection. She promptly ran into difficulties, however, because of her insistent use of the word "shit" in the film's dialog as a euphemism for heroin. The New York State Board of Regents, the film-censoring authority, cracked down by denying The Connection a license; and it took two years of appeals and counterappeals before the movie obtained its clearance. By that time, however, the whole matter had become academic; the New York censors had gone out of business. Undaunted, Miss Clarke employed the same inflammatory word in her next film, The Cool World. With a powerful use of the camera, she showed what life was like for the lumpen teenagers of Harlem, long before race riots made her point even clearer. One sequence in her remorseless study showed a whole teenage gang taking turns with an underage prostitute. Sincere as the film was, it failed to attract large audiences, perhaps because Miss Clarke was obviously not capitalizing on sex and degradation but using these to make a trenchant comment upon contemporary society and its failure to provide any ray of hope for the youthful denizens of its ghettos. In her most recent film, Portrait of Jason, Miss Clarke devotes the better part of two hours to a direct, on-camera interview with a 30ish, bespectacled Negro male prostitute who, high on whiskey and marijuana, reveals the sordid details of his way of life with truly shattering candor. Although it is strong stuff for any audience, the picture won considerable critical acclaim in its debut at the New York Film Festival last September.

An independent theatrical cinema (we do not speak here of the rebellious underground experimental movement led by Jonas Mekas) failed to develop to any important degree in this country, however, primarily because the exhibition outlets were not actually as available as they had seemed to be at first. The major distributors began tossing their more mature efforts--both domestic and foreign-made--into the art houses for long runs, thus creating a safety valve for themselves against the fulminations of the Legion of Decency, should such develop. But what was good for the major studios as they edged into the field of art-film production proved a near disaster for independent film makers; showcases for their bold but starless and unglamorized pictures became harder to come by. This had the unfortunate effect of putting a damper on any film production outside the usual channels. Thus, when a film such as Goldstein, a zany, impudent allegory, was made in Chicago by a group of young cinema enthusiasts, it received few play dates, although it featured, among its several flippancies, an abortion scene in an apartment house in which the pregnant girl is administered to by two ghoulish practitioners who make quips as they wield their instruments. Similarly, Tom Laughlin's youthfully earnest We Are All Christ, despite such graphically described samples of teenage degeneracy as the prolonged seduction of a moronic girl in a church choir loft, was shown in only a handful of theaters; and Laughlin's backers, a group of Midwestern financiers, were unwilling to put up the money required to complete his trilogy on the wild, wild ways of today's adolescents, despite the evident talent and sincerity of this young writer-actor-director.

Thus, as the theatrical outlets for such ambitious efforts dried up, so did their sources of financing: and the independent film makers turned increasingly to the far-out--but far less costly--field of underground cinema. A few, such as Jonas Mekas' Guns of the Trees and brother Adolfas Mekas' Hallelujah the Hills!, were made with at least one eye on theatrical release; but for the most part, the underground was content to remain just that, its primary sources of income being campus screenings by the numerous film societies in the United States and late-night showings in those art theaters willing to test the limits of police tolerance in their communities. Of all the underground esoterics, the protean Andy Warhol has come closest to moving into the big money with The Chelsea Girls (1966), a three-and-a-half-hour experiment in exotic and erotic monotony. His solution to the theater shortage was to rent one; and word of mouth about the Lesbians and similar fringe types in the film attracted a fairly wide audience, as did two other of his amateurish efforts, My Hustler and I, a Man, both of which consisted largely of homosexual chatter.

In the past few years, only an occasional example of genuine achievement has come from the independent field and made its way into commercial distribution. In San Francisco, the youthful John Korty has produced, on budgets of about $200,000, two delightfully fresh and offbeat features, The Crazy Quilt and Funnyman, both of which display a healthy irreverence for conventional themes and techniques. In the former film, a termite exterminator marries a girl who, because he won't say that he loves her, goes off and has affairs with several other men. The wife returns; the husband admits that he loves her; and they have a child --who grows up and runs away with a motorcycle bum. In Funnyman--a far more accomplished film--Korty follows the adventures of a mixed-up comic who is even less willing to commit himself, although any number of attractive girls are delighted to share their bread and bed with him. Studded with sophisticated gags and with a rare appreciation of the importance of sex in any social adjustment, Funnyman scored an outstanding success in its debut at last year's New York Film Festival. In England, an American independent, Gene Persson, recently produced an electrifying adaptation of LeRoi Jones' sensational Dutchman, starring his wife, Shirley Knight. In an otherwise deserted subway car hurtling through the night, a sexy, miniskirted blonde begins to tantalize an exceedingly proper young Negro. At first, unsure of himself, the young man rejects her; but as she becomes more brazen, placing his hand on her thigh, thrusting her breast into his face, he becomes passionately aroused. Jones probably meant the lure of her sexuality to symbolize for Negroes in general the dangers of succumbing to white blandishments, for the subway Romeo is finally stabbed to death by the provocative girl. Here was a case of sex being used by a film maker not for titillation, as is the normal practice in Hollywood, but to illuminate--whether one accepts the picture's implied conclusions or not--a contemporary situation. And here was also a case of virtual censorship in advance, for the producer had to do his filming in England and construct his own subway car there. The New York authorities refused him permission to use their own depressing facilities.

The independent film movement has, within the past few years, received occasional aid and assistance from an East Coast theater owner and distributor, Walter Reade, Jr., who, when a project appeals to him, will provide as much as 50 percent of the necessary capital; those producers he backs can also count on exposure of their finished films either in his theaters or through his releasing organization. Reade's sympathy for films that challenge the status quo in acceptable subject matter has had much to do with widening the range of material that is permitted to play in American cinemas. Keenly aware of the extent of the so-called "mature" audience, he knew that it included many young people of college age whose views of what constituted a real movie were far removed from those of the hard-shelled Hollywoodites who assumed they had all the answers to American audience mentalities. Nor was Reade in the least afraid of controversial sexual content in films. His most ambitious backing venture to date has been on behalf of Ulysses, a long-dreamed-of project by the aforementioned Joseph Strick. Strengthened by Reade's financing and a guaranteed release for the film, Strick shot Ulysses against authentic Dublin backgrounds and unhesitatingly used Joyce's own gamy dialog. Thus, for the first time in American theaters, the word "fuck" clearly rang out, melifluously enunciated by Barbara Jefford in the pivotal role of Molly Bloom. Strick's adaptation, while hardly up to the brilliance of the novel, was as faithful to its erotic origins as could be expected, even though a good deal of Joyce's mythic nuance was missing. Once it was finished, Reade lined up 60 theaters in the United States to show the film for three days at an unusually high admission price and "for mature audiences only." Catholic objections were thus mollified to a degree and, after the three-day trial run, several theaters continued to show the film on a reserved-seat basis. Although it encountered little difficulty here, mainly because of its supposedly "limited-run" exhibition policy, Ulysses--ironically --ran into trouble abroad. Ireland banned it completely and, at the 1967 Cannes Film Festival, where it was an invited entry, the festival director blacked out about 20 of its French subtitles, deeming the language in translation far too shocking. The United States became, in effect, the vanguard of those nations willing to allow movies a wider gamut of expression.

Meanwhile, back in Hollywood, the old order was rapidly changing and the successes of such unmistakably adult fare as Hud and Dr. Strangelove served notice that vast segments of the American public had passed well beyond the sanitized sex of the standard Code-endorsed movie. Hud was identified as an unmitigated rakehell who slept with any available female and was not above an attempted rape if the female proved less than cooperative; but audiences responded to him because, if not precisely lovable, at least Hud was recognizably human. Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove presented a paranoid general (Sterling Hayden) whose psychosis was clearly based on impotence after sexual contact with a diseased whore, and another (George C. Scott) who is even more specifically depicted as a bull in a bedroom. Strong stuff, perhaps, but audiences loved it. In 1964, a major MGM movie, The Outrage, an American translation of Kurosawa's memorable Rashomon, presented four different versions of the same rape scene as recalled by the rapist, the ravished woman, her husband and a passer-by. That same year, MGM also offered the sensation-packed The Night of the Iguana (again, from the prolific pen of Tennessee Williams); in it, Richard Burton played a defrocked minister guiding busloads of tourists through Mexico and shacking up with Ava Gardner between engagements. Miss Gardner, the film makes clear, keeps two beach boys on tap for lonely evenings-- which begin to come when Sue Lyon, fresh from Lolita, makes a play for Burton while her tour group is marooned at Ava's hotel. Burton is denounced by Miss Lyon's female chaperone for conduct unbecoming a minister and a gentleman--but mainly, it seems, because the woman herself has a Lesbian yen for the girl.

Even nudity, that bugaboo of both the Code and the Legion, was attempted in 1964 in such films as The Americanization of Emily and Becket; but the Code Administration prevailed upon the producers of the former to darken down and/or eliminate the revealing frames of James Coburn's numerous girlfriends; and the latter had its bawdy bedroom sequence (previewed in Playboy) completely reshot, so that shapely Veronique Vendell might remain discreetly draped while sharing a bed with Peter O'Toole and Richard Burton. Similarly, the following year, Playboy's readers saw the bounteous Barbara Bouchet au naturel as she breasted the waves in Otto Preminger's In Harm's Way, but somewhat more decorously garbed in the movie itself. And the nudist camp, which had until this time remained pretty much the private property of the nudie-film producers, moved into a more public domain with such films as The Prize and A Shot in the Dark--although, in both instances, the directors saw to it that towels, shrubbery or Peter Sellers' outsized guitar were always strategically arranged between the star and the camera, while the nude young ladies who seemed to make up the bulk of the population of these establishments were always glimpsed discreetly and from afar.

By this time, however, most industry observers were well aware that such restrictions would soon be a thing of the past and that the Production Code would have to be liberalized to conform to the realities of the contemporary scene. Even that old ogre, the Catholic Legion of Decency, was putting on a new face. In a surprise move, late in 1965, the Legion became the National Catholic Office for Motion Pictures; and while it retained the annual pledge to the Legion made each December in Catholic churches, its initial statements indicated an intention to support worthy films and a widespread educational campaign to develop a new appreciation of the medium among Catholic laymen. The first clear-cut indication of this change in attitude came when, in June 1963, the Legion expanded its A, or acceptable, category to encompass four distinct ratings. A new A-IV rating was invented specifically to indicate approval for mature adults of those films that, despite their inclusion of sexual episodes, could be regarded as basically moral in intent.

In explanation of its still-restrictive policy toward nudity in films, the Legion issued a statement in 1965 that read in part, "In itself, nudity is not immoral and has long been recognized as a legitimate subject in painting and sculpture. However, in the very different medium of the motion picture, it is never an artistic necessity. The long history of film production proves that dramatic and artistic effect has been achieved without recourse to nudity in motion-picture treatment. The temptation for film makers to exploit the prurient appeal to nudity in this mass medium is so great that any concession to its use, even for otherwise valid reasons of art, would lead to wide abuse. For this reason, the National Legion of Decency will continue to apply the policy of resisting every effort to employ nudity in film production. Though some may regard this policy as rigid and perhaps arbitrary, it is a policy which is in the best interests of the national community and of the motion-picture industry itself."

This prudish policy, however, was not always rigorously applied; one notable exception was in the case of Cleopatra, the most expensive extravaganza ever made and one that seriously endangered the financial position of the 20th Century-Fox studios. The sequence that caused so much agitation in the Legion over whether or not to condemn the film was one featuring the nude Elizabeth Taylor sprawled face down on a massage table, her dimpled buttocks revealed to the world at large. The Legion spanked the picture for "its continual emphasis upon immodest costuming throughout," but pointedly refrained from mentioning the bare bottom of its star. It was hinted to Fox that only the company's financial crisis kept the picture from being condemned outright. A few years later, another Fox film, The Bible, was also spared Catholic censure, even though Adam and Eve strolled bare-bottomed through their hazy Eden. Here, the Legion bowed to higher authority for the nude scene--the Bible itself.

The greatest furor over Catholic censorship came in 1965, when the Legion condemned a serious American film, The Pawnbroker. At issue were two brief scenes containing nudity, one showing a Jewish woman being humiliated sexually by German officers in a concentration camp; the other, a view of a young Negro prostitute's breasts as she offered herself to the dead woman's husband, now a pawnbroker in New York's Spanish Harlem. As Judy Stone, a writer for Ramparts, described the latter scene: "The homely young Negro prostitute stood there, in the sad, shabby Harlem pawnshop where people deposited old dreams in order to survive one more day of reality. She looked pleadingly at the pawnbroker, a man numbed by concentration camps beyond all seduction or appeal, and swiftly bared her breasts. She did it with almost innocent pride in the only beauty she possessed and with an untouchable dignity." The scene was crucial to the meaning of the film, for the shock of the exposure forced the pawnbroker to recall the image he had tried to forget--his glimpse of his wife being shamed by a Nazi officer--and it began the restoration of his long-repressed human emotions. The Legion's view was that giving approval to The Pawnbroker would be tantamount to opening the floodgates to a wave of nudity in American films. "Nudity would become just as common as blowing your nose," was the way Monsignor Little, then the Legion's executive secretary, expressed it.

The Legion did not retreat from its position, in spite of widespread dissension among Catholics over the Condemned rating--which, in effect, was a directive to the nation's more than 45,000,000 Catholics to avoid the film as an occasion for sin. The film's producers, Ely Landau and Roger Lewis, forsook the usual course of compromise with the Legion, a traditional form of bargaining during which the Legion, upon consultation with producers, would sometimes agree to a less severe rating in return for cuts of the offending portions. Instead, Landau chose to battle not only the Legion but the Motion Picture Association, which had denied his film a Code Seal. His recourse here was to demand a hearing by the Association's Board of Appeals, a group of industry leaders who alone had the power to rescind a ruling by the Code Administration. Actually, Geoffrey Shurlock, the Code Administrator, had quite deliberately left the matter up to the Appeals Board to decide; for in his own view, The Pawnbroker was neither a vulgar nor an indecent picture. But he had indicated to Landau that any change of policy with regard to the Code injunctions against nudity would have to be authorized not by him but by the Board. Landau marshaled his arguments, pointed out that New York State had licensed the film intact and that its chief censor (this was shortly before state censorship was declared unconstitutional) had commented, "The nudity evokes reactions of bitterness and pathos, not eroticism." The Board met, viewed the film and, after an eloquent defense of it by Joseph L. Mankiewicz, granted its Seal of Approval. As Mankiewicz told a writer afterward, the film at issue "was not any one of the blockbuster dirty pictures made by a major company for tremendous profits. It was made by a small independent with no public stockholders. Thus, there was at hand a golden opportunity to demonstrate that the morality of the motion-picture 'industry' was a shining and untarnished force for the public good. By beating the brains out of one independent producer who couldn't matter less, they would stand shoulder to shoulder with the Church and parent groups as they stamped out sin. And then continue with the five or six or ten versions of Harlow or similar spiritually uplifting projects they were contemplating."

The breach that resulted between the Motion Picture Association and the Legion was soon lessened as bargaining sessions on behalf of other films got under way. The Carpetbaggers, for one, was saved from Legion condemnation when Carroll Baker, at first shot in the nude, was clothed in a nearly transparent black negligee for the scene in which she seduced her rugged stepson (George Peppard) immediately after the death of her husband. The Legion won again when a scream was eliminated from the sound track of Sylvia as Carroll Baker is being raped by her stepfather, Aldo Ray. And, irony of ironies, within two years after The Pawnbroker had played the art houses and recouped its investment, a new distributor, planning to put the film into general release, either cut or reframed the nude scenes, resubmitted the film to the National Catholic Office for Motion Pictures and came away with an A-III rating. Thus, what had started as a firm stand against both the Legion and the Code ended up as another version of the same old compromise.

Whatever its motives for making an issue of The Pawnbroker, however, the Code Administration had come under relentless attack from all quarters of the industry because of it. Ensuing discussions between industry leaders and the Code Administration now aimed at a complete revision of that pious document. The new president of the Motion Picture Association, Jack J. Valenti, formerly an assistant to the President of the United States, took the bull by the horns and called for the outright dumping of all the old injunctions. On September 20, 1966, the Motion Picture Association announced with considerable fanfare "A Great Historic Landmark." The old Code was dead and a new Code was born. The Code Seal was maintained, but it would now be granted according to a brief "Declaration of Principles" and a brief set of "Standards for Production." These standards, to be sure, were not much different from the old, but they were not spelled out in any great detail and they mainly counseled good taste and restraint. Geoffrey Shurlock retained his office as Code Administrator--an unenviable position, since the "good taste" that henceforth would guide the industry would be primarily his own.

Just before the new Code went into effect, another hassle occurred within the Association over granting its Seal to the Warner Bros. adaptation of Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, the salty dialog of which had been retained almost intact by its producer and screenwriter. Ernest Lehman. Here, it was not nudity that raised doubts in the minds of Shurlock and Valenti but language that, although well spoken by a cast that included Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, was undeniably rough. Valenti, in effect, became the final arbiter, in his first major task as president of the Association. Of the picture itself, he asked little--merely the changing of a few lines of dialog. But he also asked Warner Bros. to release the film with a "For Mature Audiences" tag in its advertising and a similar warning to be applied by exhibitors. The N.C.O.M.P. gave Valenti its tacit approval by awarding the film an A-IV rating. After a good deal of haggling, some minor changes were made, the tenor of which can be judged by the substitution of the phrase (spoken by Burton) "Goddamn you!" for "Screw you!" Oddly enough, the word "screw" was allowed to remain when used later in its more physical sense. Stanley Kauffmann, reviewing the film for The New York Times, called it "one of the most scathingly honest American films ever made"; but Judith Crist, in the rival New York World Journal Tribune, suddenly turned moralistic and told her readers that "we are reduced to the nasty voyeurism that seems well on its way to dominating moviegoing. ..." A good many of her readers, however--and millions of others who had never heard of Miss Crist-- seemed to enjoy being reduced to nasty voyeurs; for Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? became one of the major smashes of 1966.

It was apparent that the only effective form of censorship surviving was selfcensorship. Film companies and the film makers with whom they contracted sometimes preferred to play it safe, as when Columbia and Carl Foreman thought it best to excise some eye-opening nude views of Elke Sommer from The Victors or, more recently, when MGM decided to cut down on some of the bed shots of Angie Dickinson in Point Blank. The wacky, irreverent What's New, Pussycat?, which featured a good many lecherous high jinks, toned down its intimations of copulation in time for its release, presumably out of deference to the N.C.O.M.P.; and Warners reduced to a minimum the generous display of Faye Dnnaway's epidermis that originally opened Bonnie and Clyde. But there was now no clear-cut pattern for compliance with Catholic objections, as it became more and more apparent that the boycott power of the N.C.O.M.P. was relatively ineffectual, particularly after its C ratings on both Hurry Sundown and Blow-Up failed notably to keep either the films or the customers out of the theaters. Kiss Me, Stupid has often been cited as a demonstration of this power, but it was actually the American public that had turned thumbs down on the picture. Tony Richardson's The Loved One, a heavily satiric view of mortuary customs in California, fared little better; but this may well have been because mass audiences failed to dig such arcane, necrophilic jokes as the one in which high-ranking Army officers are given the opportunity to cohabit with some scantily clad showgirls in a funeral parlor--using the satin-pillowed coffins, of course. A more subtle moment of erotica occurred in that film when Bobby Morse surreptitiously kissed the nipple of a nude statue, Richardson's implied point being that had it been a real girl and a fleshly nipple, the same act would not have been permitted on the screen. What he was really kidding was what writer-producer Norman Lear once termed "the American film makers' unrealistic and kittenish attitudes toward sex."

Yet there is no doubt that the range of the permissible has vastly widened on the American screen. If the presentation of nudity still causes qualms--for some industry leaders, vigilance committees and parent-teacher groups have joined the N.C.O.M.P. in its fight against undue exposure--what was once known as illicit sex has become commonplace in films today. So clean-imaged a star as Julie Andrews made flagrant unmarried love in The Americanization of Emily, her gift to the boys on their way to the battle fronts. Both Tuesday Weld and AnnMargret bedded down (separately) with Steve McQueen in The Cincinnati Kid, and Elizabeth Taylor had a shameless affair with the married clerical headmaster of a school (Richard Burton) in The Sandpiper. She also posed nude for a beatnik artist and just managed to cover herself, inadequately, when Richard Burton walked in. The situation was reversed recently in The Comedians: In that adaptation of Graham Green's novel, Miss Taylor is married to Peter Ustinov but has a prolonged, passionate extramarital fling with a hotelkeeper played by--you guessed it--Richard Burton.

Perversion is also becoming an increasingly popular plot element in American films. The Group, an adaptation of Mary McCarthy's best-selling novel, introduced Candy Bergen quite openly as the group's resident Lesbian--right down to her wearing a derby. (There was also a rather surprising shot of one of the girls breast-feeding her baby.) Otto Preminger's Hurry Sundown not too delicately implied a more esoteric bit of erotica as Jane Fonda suggestively mouths Michael Caine's saxophone reed. Marlon Brando is depicted as, at the very least, a latent homosexual in Reflections in a Golden Eye, which goes on to include nymphomania, fetishism, voyeurism and a woman who has snipped off her nipples with garden shears in its catalog of aberrations. And in The Fox, viewers actually saw on the screen, uncut, what Playboy readers previewed on these pages, including a long Lesbian kiss between Sandy Dennis and Anne Heywood and an equally protracted sequence in which a totally nude Miss Heywood masturbates before a bathroom mirror. Miscegenation, once shunned by the film makers, has also been featured in several recent independent films--among them, Sweet Love, Bitter, which includes a long sequence showing a white girl and a Negro man attempting to work out their sexual hang-ups in bed. The biggest breakthrough in this area, however, has been in Stanley Kramer's Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, co-starring Katharine Hepburn, Sidney Poitier and the late Spencer Tracy. Mr. Poitier is the surprise guest, and the end of the film has him not only marrying white Katharine Houghton (in real life, the niece of Miss Hepburn) but actually sharing with her a genuine kiss of passion.

Presumably, hardly a barrier remains for the American screen, including the frank showing of copulation. After all, ordinary lovemaking can have little shock value left when, as a plot twist in the frenetic Point Blank, Lee Marvin persuades svelte Angie Dickinson to distract a closely guarded enemy by going to bed with the fellow. At the precise moment of orgasm, Marvin enters the room and taps him on the shoulder. On Miss Dickinson's perspiring face is an indication that she has not been totally unresponsive. In the scene that follows, as Marvin slugs it out with the gangster, Angie is clearly seen in the background coolly climbing into her clothes.

Today, even the strictures against onscreen nudity are being constantly tested. Back in 1962, when MGM was filming Mutiny on the Bounty in Tahiti, the native girls were carefully fitted with what the crew referred to, with simple descriptiveness, as "titty cups"--small flaps of flesh-colored material that were glued to the breasts. Not only did they appear to be the real thing on camera but they set a whole new fashion for the island. No such fripperies three years later, however, when Hawaii was on location. Perhaps because they were already aware of the pending changes in the Code, the producers included scenes showing a bevy of youthful Hawaiian girls, their breasts flopping prettily and bravely, racing toward a shipload of sexstarved sailors. Neither the Code officials nor the N. C. O. M. P. voiced the slightest objection. In The Professionals, Richard Brooks included several long shots of a big-bosomed Mexican girl, already branded as the camp's official whore, brazenly displaying her wares to her roistering companions. Both Harriet Andersson as the nymphomaniacal wife in The Deadly Affair and ladylike Eleanor Parker as an emasculating, alcoholic wife in An American Dream proffered tantalizing side views of their naked selves without raising objections. On the other hand, to confuse the issue, the N. C. O. M. P. has recently condemned such releases as Reflections in a Golden Eye, Beach Red and The Trip because each contained what it felt was an excess of nudity. Jack Valenti agreed with a reporter shortly after the new Code went into effect that bare breasts could be deemed decent in one film and indecent in another.

In 1967, an equally serious crisis presented itself over the question of whether the male and the female posterior had equal privileges in movies. For a long time, Hollywood had been in the habit of exhibiting female derrières in the export versions of its movies and eliminating them from domestic prints, in line with both Code and Legion wishes in this matter. As recently as 1965, after a midnight swim in a state fish hatchery with two blonde strippers from Las Vegas, Sue Ann Langdon and Hope Holiday, Henry Fonda and Glenn Ford gallantly shield the girls' shapely derrières from the camera's searching eye with their cowboy hats. When the revised Code came along, however, it contained no clear-cut definition of undue exposure. Twentieth Century-Fox, therefore, in a Doris Day comedy-melodrama titled Caprice, decided to breach the bottom barrier--not with Miss Day's sacrosanct rear, it should quickly be emphasized, but with that belonging to Irene Tsu, a Shanghaiborn beauty. Miss Tsu had dived into a swimming pool, where the pelvic portion of her bikini became dislodged. The camera recorded the result, much to the N. C. O. M. P.'s displeasure. Fox, perhaps remembering the Legion's earlier kindness in the case of Cleopatra, agreed to snip the offending footage, although it ungraciously pointed out that the N. C. O. M. P. had recently approved Ulysses, which displayed the bare bottoms of two of its male characters; and that Georgy Girl had gotten by, even though Alan Bates had clearly shown his. In actual fact, in Zorba the Greek (1964), Anthony Quinn had already revealed his posterior to the camera, and was probably the first major star to do so on the domestic screen. By 1967, however, with Kirk Douglas' dimpled rear briefly visible in The War Wagon, Paul Newman's in Cool Hand Luke and Peter Fonda's far more so in The Trip, the sight had become such a commonplace that the Reverend Patrick J. Sullivan, the new executive secretary of the N. C. O. M. P., found it necessary to explain the Church's view: "A brief shot of a male derrière is not going to present a problem to a normal individual," he said. Exposure of the female rear, on the other hand, was "pruriently" stimulating. Reflections in a Golden Eye solved the problem for everyone by impartially offering generous displays of both. Since that time, the problem--if ever it actually was one--has ceased to exist. In The President's Analyst, lovely Jill Banner, maked as a jay bird, takes an idyllic stroll with James Coburn, the camera to the--and on her--rear. And if the long-awaited film version of John Cheever's The Swimmer is ever released, the manly buttocks of Burt Lancaster will also be on display.

It is no coincidence that all three pictures, Ulysses, Georgy Girl and Reflections, were produced abroad, although financed with American money. Since the early Sixties, "runaway productions" had begun to plague the Hollywood union. Some producers made their films abroad because labor was cheaper, and others because they could get partial financing for the pictures through government subsidies, such as Britain's generous Eady Plan. But the inevitable result was that American film makers, in closer contact with their European counterparts--and far removed from daily home-office supervision--began to turn out pictures that were often thematically more mature and pictorially far more stimulating than those being ground out in the Hollywood studios. Concomitantly, American films became increasingly international in outlook and in fact. Roger Vadim's stylish, erotic The Game Is Over, for example, featuring Jane Fonda in almost total dishabille through most of the footage, was produced in Paris for Columbia. Does this make it a French film, or American? Even more international was MGM's Blow-Up, filmed in London with an English cast and an Italian director, Michelangelo Antonioni. Purely as a matter of convenience, we propose to discuss these pictures in our next installment, on the foreign films of the Sixties; creative control, not financing, we feel should be the deciding criterion in determining a film's nationality.

A striking indication of the pervasively international nature of film making in the Sixties is to be found in the stunning commercial success of the James Bond films--made in England by English directors but backed by the American cash of United Artists and, for Casino Royale, of Columbia. By the end of 1967, the five Bond films--plus Casino Royale, which featured no fewer than six James Bonds (not including Sean Connery)--had grossed close to $90,000,000 in the American market alone. Homegrown Bond imitators quickly appeared, all of them equally adroit at seducing heroines and villainesses alike. Among those sentenced to this agreeable Bondage were Dean Martin as the liquored, lecherous Matt Helm of The Silencers; James Coburn as the all-knowing Flint of Our Man Flint, who keeps his luxuriously gadgeted penthouse well stocked with rare whiskies and four wellstacked ladyfriends; James Garner in A Man Could Get Killed; Michael Caine as the detached, somewhat seedy Harry Palmer of The Ipcress File and Funeral in Berlin; Robert Vaughn as a CIA type in The Venetian Affair; Michael Connors spoofing the spoof in Kiss the Girls and Make Them Die; and even, for a further switch, Monica Vitti as an op-art adventuress turned supersleuth in Modesty Blaise, filmed in England by 20th Century-Fox. The rampant amorality in this cinematic genre presents a curious fantasy reversal of prevailing sexual mores. Heroes are not only permitted but expected to take their sex where they find it; and the only mating habit denied them is marriage. The imperturbable self-sufficiency of the male invariably brings out the rutting instinct in the female, these films assure us, and the girls frequently offer themselves without so much as a formal introduction. The huge audiences for such pictures are thus able to participate vicariously in adventures quite contrary to their real-life conventional patterns and achieve thereby the wish fulfillment of their most erotic dreams.

Curiously, it is possible to see in the sexuality of these films the projection, on a far more grandiose and sophisticated level, of the themes and approaches noted earlier in this series in the nudie films. James Bond, after all, is, in a way, nothing more than a logical extension of Bachelor Tom Peeping; and such films as A Guide for the Married Man incorporate most of the bad jokes about the instant availability of females that have been part of the nudie trend ever since The Immoral Mr. Teas. The difference is that today's heroes both look and touch. Similarly, the sadomasochistic delights that stud the Bond films seem merely an elevation of the cruder terrors spelled out in the cycle of sexploitation pictures. Some confirmation of this fusion may be found in the films of a small independent firm, American International, that has in recent years seriously challenged the sway of the majors in the exhibition field. Sticking carefully to the lowest of budgets, the firm's heads. James Nicholson, Samuel Arkoff and the late Lou Russoff, early in the Sixties invented the beachparty pictures to capitalize on such fads as surfing, scuba diving and the numerous dances engendered by the twist. Built up as stars for these films, but nowhere else, were the bosomy Annette Funicello and shock-headed Frankie Avalon. So successful were these quickies that even the major companies cranked out several bigger-budgeted imitations--such as Elvis Presley's Girl Happy for MGM. A variant of the beach-party films were the twist movies that, with titles such as Twist All Night and Twist Around the Clock, also had a brief vogue. If the new dancing was the lure of these films, their choreographic action was mainly relegated by the camera to regions below the belt, thus raising the buttocks to the rank of a primary erogenous zone.

By the middle of the decade, even when heralded as a "Bare As You Dare Exposé About What Happens When 10,000 Kids Meet on 5000 Beach Blankets"--almost nothing, as it turned out--the beach-party pictures were regarded by the kids as too tame. But now Nicholson and Arkoff had something else to offer. American International was concerned, they said, with "reflecting the exciting social changes, crises, rationalizations and adjustments of society in our time." This reflection was to occur, principally, in the nation's 3600 drive-in theaters, where kids, avid to know what was going on in the way of changes and adjustments in society, were wont to throng of an evening--although there were those suspicious souls who wondered if the occupants of the cars always kept their eyes religiously on the screen. The first of AI's "social" films was The Wild Angels (1966), made by a lowbudget specialist in movie shock treatment, Roger Corman. Led by begoggled Peter Fonda, a gang of motorcycle cultists wearing leather jackets emblazoned with swastikas goes in for such pastimes as raping a Negro nurse in a hospital and desanctifying a church for a funeral service for one of its number. The pastor, bound and gagged, has to look on at the ensuing orgy, one of the highlights of which is the gang-banging of the dead cyclist's girlfriend; amid the melee, the corpse is stowed against the wall, a cigarette dangling from its blue lips. The teenage market had been gauged correctly; $6,000,000 came in at the box office. The film also had the honor of opening the arty Venice Film Festival that year, presumably for its forthright reflection of American behavioral patterns.

AI continued to follow the headlines with films called Riot on Sunset Strip, Thunder Alley and Devil's Angels, a sequel to their wildly successful The Wild Angels. With a third film about California cyclists, Born Losers, it began to look as though that state was about to be taken over by rampaging motorcyclists. Luckily, however, in this last film, a goodguy loner manages to cramp their style, although not before they have raped several pretty young things. In fact, so filled with rapine was the movie that even the real Hell's Angels complained that they were being given a bad name. Corman, ever a serious student of the contemporary scene, next turned his attention to the psychedelic world with The Trip, in which Peter Fonda again was starred. (The previous year, Paramount had made a tentative move in this direction with The Swinger, in which Ann-Margret was implausibly cast as an innocent young writer who finds it necessary to stage an all-out orgy--including a flash of nude body painting--in order to convince a skeptical editor that a fictitious short story of hers is really autobiographical.) Corman's movie included not only orgies but a protracted LSD-induced hallucination that just happened to include scenes from old Roger Corman horror movies. Although outright nudity had been eschewed in the past by Corman and AI, it was deemed necessary in The Trip, because of the sexual nature of several of the hallucinations, to include it for reasons of "integrity." Accordingly, as mentioned earlier, Fonda's fans were treated to a glimpse of his backside and also to extensive views of him coupling with his wife (Susan Strasberg) and a strange girl he met at a party. The latter encounter, unlike the others, was not a dream sequence. The girl admitted to having "a sexual thing going with people on acid"--something new in erotic kicks in the cinema. A Catholic condemnation of the film, it should be noted, had no effect on its theater bookings. By 1967, the oncedreaded C rating had lost its power to scare.

N.C.O.M.P.'s Father Sullivan told a Variety reporter, "If there was a classification system that worked, we would reconsider our position on nudity." But classification measures introduced in the legislatures of 25 states during the Sixties had all failed to pass, partially because the Motion Picture Association itself fought fiercely against them. By 1967, legal classification, although it still has many proponents, seemed all but a dead issue. The kind of classification that appears to be closest to general adoption is little more than a labeling system. "Suggested for Mature Audiences" is the phrase now used by many exhibitors to warn that the fare on their screens is not meant for childish mentalities, and parents fearful of the corruptive influences of movies may take heed if they wish. Should the film industry prove willing to go further and label its films according to their suitability for varying age groups, the time may not be far off when the N. C. O. M. P. will drop its Condemned classification altogether. But at the end of 1967, it looked as though the issue was not going to be that easily resolved, and for basic economic reasons. The more film companies define the audience for a particular film, the narrower that audience becomes--with a corresponding reduction in receipts. At a time when production costs continue to spiral, such a voluntary abnegation of income seems less than likely. Indeed, the Motion Picture Association has sturdily refused to term its SMA (Suggested for Mature Audiences) appellation a form of classification at all; it is meant, so the Association maintains, purely for information and, in that sense, as a guide for parents. One large newspaper, the Los Angeles Times, noticing the impasse and favoring a degree of classification, has taken to publishing its own ratings of current movies.

It has now become apparent that control over the intent and content of motion pictures is all but futile.

American film makers have now only themselves to blame for any moral cant or hypocrisy in their films. Code Administrator Shurlock has himself declared that no subject matter is out of bounds, the only strictures being "in the areas of integrity, good taste and a decent consideration for the sensibilities of the audience to which the film was addressed." Even the American movie comedy, one of the principal repositories of outmoded morality, has begun to respond to this new freedom, a notable case being Stanley Donen's recent Two for the Road. In it, Audrey Hepburn and Albert Finney are seen having a premarital affair and, after they are married, both engage in adulterous relationships; nevertheless, despite the stresses and strains that these impose on their marriage, it survives. No complaints were heard from any quarter. In Barefoot in the Park, Jane Fonda portrays a forthright girl who demonstrates to her study husband that a happy marriage must include an active sex life; and in Any Wednesday, Miss Fonda (again) plays a kept woman who, for commonsensical reasons, displays no false modesty over her equivocal position. No one in the film--or in the movie houses--seemed unduly shocked in either instance. More recently, a brace of successful comedies have been built around the loss of innocence for a young male. Dustin Hoffman, the half-pint hero of Mike Nichols' The Graduate, finds himself being seduced--reluctantly at first--by the voracious wife of his father's business partner. What makes the situation less than satisfactory is that he then falls in love with the woman's nubile daughter, Katharine Ross. Similarly, despite the vigilance of his domineering parents, Peter Kastner manages to lose his virginity to a Greenwich Village lass in You're a Big Boy Now--and the picture makes it an occasion for rejoicing, not moralizing. The fact that this film was shot completely on location in New York by a young director, Francis Ford Coppola --whose previous directorial experience had been confined largely to nudies and university-based student films--is indicative of the new freedom the studios are now affording fresh talent.

One large question remaining is whether the American film will be able to match in maturity and sophistication the new freedom it has won. With controls removed, with the Code not much more than a public-relations gesture, American film makers can now, if they honestly so desire, treat their subjects with candor and integrity. If they fail to respond to this opportunity, it may be out of a cynical, greedy commercialism--or because of a puritanical strain still residing in a good many areas of the national consciousness and which they, too, possess. But the prospects seem good that they will not fail to meet the challenge. Only time will tell.

In the next installment of "The History of Sex in Cinema," authors Knight and Alpert examine the unprecedented eroticism--and unexpurgated exposure--of foreign films in the permissive Sixties.