The History of Sex in Cinema

in their search for sexual freedom on the screen, today's international moviemakers literally leave nothing to the moviegoer's imagination

During the Fifties, the box-office popularity of foreign films in America grew, not coincidentally, in direct proportion to the increasing acreage of their shapely heroines exposed by Europe's liberated moviemakers. Emboldened by the European example, as well as by the healthy grosses that the imported product had begun to rack up, American studios began gingerly to emulate their Continental competitors in the early Sixties--and with far greater freedom after the industry finally jettisoned its restrictive Production Code in 1966. Meanwhile, however, the foreign producers were by no means marking time. Never before has the medium been so single-mindedly devoted to cinematic investigations of the physiology of love, the psychology of perversion and the pathology of sadism. The sweet smell of sex pervades the foreign films of the Sixties, but more often than not it has been a kind of sex that would have interested Krafft-Ebing more than Freud.

Perhaps it was sheer coincidence, but three of the most successful pictures, both artistically and commercially, to enter the American market at the start of the Sixties all centered on a brutally realistic rape scene. In Ingmar Bergman's The Virgin Spring, the virgin daughter of a 13th Century landowner is ravished, then murdered by a trio of herdsmen, whose crime comes to light when they attempt to sell the girl's torn dress to her mother. Although it was a highly moral film--according to some, almost a religious experience--Americans saw it with some of the violence of the rape removed; the censors objected to two shots in which the girl's bare legs are pulled by one of the shepherds around the body of the man on top of her. Vittorio De Sica's Two Women, filmed in 1960, avoided the censors' wrath by concentrating the camera on the agonized faces of the mother and daughter (Sophia Loren and Eleanora Brown) as they are being gang-raped in a war-ruined church by a squad of Moroccan "allies." In Luchino Visconti's prize-winning Rocco and His Brothers (also 1960), censors dealt with its no-less-crucial rape sequence in a novel and then fairly original manner: Instead of snipping out the shots of Simone ravishing his brother Rocco's inamorata while Rocco is forced by Simone's hoodlum henchmen to look on, the censors merely ordered that the offending frames be darkened until the action was just short of invisible.

But the point is not that these directors, with or (text continued on page 181) Sex in Cinema (continued from page 130) without the censors' connivance, managed to depict a rape scene in one way or another but that they sought to do it at all. Between the Production Code in this country and the censors' shears all over the world, rape had never been a particularly profitable subject for film makers. Its mere presence in a picture was generally enough to cause the film to be banned altogether from America, or at least to have its distribution severely curtailed. But clearly, this attitude was changing.

Significantly, it was Ingmar Bergman who led the way. His relentless exploration of man in relation to God and woman led him to themes that others--less daring--shunned. Throughout the Sixties, philosophic questions were explored repeatedly in the Bergman films--and generally in contexts that were specifically and often graphically sexual. Between 1960 and 1962, he wrote and directed three films--chamber plays, he called them--that were designed to study three forms of alienation in modern society. First in this trilogy was the spare, somber Through a Glass Darkly, which, on its surface, depicted an attractive young married woman (Harriet Andersson) going slowly out of her mind. Religiously devout to the point of hysteria, she is unable to return the love of her husband, but experiences a frantic erotic seizure whenever she believes she hears the voice of God. Through a Glass Darkly was followed by the ascetic, almost motionless Winter Light, which, although without a moment of overt eroticism, chronicled the repressed, guilt-ridden relationship between a prim and ineffectual minister and his more-than-willing schoolteacher mistress (Ingrid Thulin).

Bergman more than compensated for the ascetic quality of this film with the last in his trilogy, The Silence, a picture so filled with erotic tensions and overt sexual activity that the Swedish censors held up its release for many months. The "silence" to which Bergman refers is God's--a God who has withdrawn from the universe, leaving behind an arid wasteland devoid of warmth and love. Into a hotel in a strange city in a totalitarian east-European state come two attractive sisters and the small son of the younger one. We learn that the girls have had a Lesbian relationship, that it is ending and that Ester, the older sister, is reluctant to let this happen. But Ester has had a breakdown while the three were traveling together and now is virtually a prisoner in her hotel bedroom; while Anna, the more passionate of the two, is free to roam the dark streets of the silent city. At a movie house--inflamed by the sight of a couple copulating in a nearby seat--she picks up a man and brings him to her hotel, where the two proceed to make prolonged and passionate love, with her son and her sister as interested onlookers. After a vituperative showdown, in the course of which Anna makes it clear that she had submitted to Ester's passion solely to keep Ester from telling their father about her other affairs, Anna and the child pack for home, leaving the older woman presumably to waste away in an alien land where she knows not one word of the language.

Quite apart from the eroticism implicit in this theme--which Bergman refrained from playing up sensationally--The Silence yields an unusually high quotient of sex-charged scenes. Beyond mere nudity, however, the film includes glimpses of perverse sexuality that were then rare even in the Swedish cinema, such as Ester's graphic acts of autoeroticism, Anna's lascivious squirming in the theater to attract the attention of her male neighbor and Ester's extraordinary gesture when, after confessing her hatred of sex and "male glands," she wipes her hand over her sweating breasts and brings it to her lips. Unfortunately, as so often happens, censorial outcries placed undue emphasis on the sexual details in the film, thus drawing attention away from Bergman's underlying theme: the delineation of an amoral and godless universe. Also unfortunately, the ground broken by Bergman to achieve his moral purpose was soon being plowed by others of somewhat less lofty intent.

The Silence had hardly survived its bout with the Swedish censor board (which is specifically forbidden to make cuts in any film of substantial artistic merit) when that august body banned completely Vilgot Sjöman's 491 for dealing far too graphically with a band of teenaged delinquents. Included in the picture were scenes of homosexual seduction, a shipboard sequence in which a prostitute is cruelly and abnormally abused by some sailors and shots of a teenaged prostitute's dalliance with a large police dog. After considerable debate, which went all the way to the Swedish parliament, 491 was finally passed with four cuts and the occasional blurring of the sound track. Promptly and predictably, it then ran afoul of the U. S. Customs Bureau and its private coterie of censors. Although eventually cleared after appeals to the higher courts, the film only recently has begun to be shown publicly in this country. As Sjöman noted after his battle to show 491 in public, "The censorship board is working after some very strange rules, judging films by an Ingmar Bergman from one moral ground and films by other directors on different grounds. What Bergman shows is 'great art,' but if another director shows the same thing, it seems to be pornography."

It is questionable if 491, or any of its successors, could ever have been shown in the United States had it not been for a film produced in 1960 in neighboring Denmark--Johan Jacobsen's controversial A Stranger Knocks. The controversy had nothing to do with the film's artistic aspirations, which were modest; nor was the time-honored accusation of "excessive nudity" leveled against it. There was none. (Indeed, several critics complained that in its crucial scene, when in the midst of intercourse the heroine discovers that her lover is actually her husband's murderer, both participants were fully clothed--a condition as difficult as it is unlikely.) On the other hand, their sexual encounter was depicted in toto--largely as reflected in the expressive features of lovely Birgitte Federspiel, who warms from passivity to passion and then, at the moment of ecstasy, cries out in agony at the shock of recognition. Because the scene was the film's dramatic as well as sexual climax, integral to the plot rather than a mere amatory interlude, it obviously defied excision. Not until 1963, when U. S. censorship had begun to relax, did the picture receive limited distribution here, with New York State the primary holdout. The situation was ultimately resolved in March of 1965, when a U. S. Supreme Court ruling not only decreed that A Stranger Knocks could be shown uncut in New York but simultaneously knocked out the entire legal basis for New York's censor board.

Because of New York's strategic position as the center of both exhibition and distribution for foreign films, the removal of censor controls within that state had an immediate effect on art houses across the nation. Indeed, unless, as in the currently disputed I Am Curious--Yellow, the film maker happens to include shots that unblushingly reveal the sex organs in intercourse (which might result in police action on charges of pornography), there is now almost nothing that cannot be shown. The Swedish cinema, which had already gained considerable notoriety as the most sexually uninhibited in Europe, swiftly consolidated its position with the release of Dear John, depicting in graphic detail the 48-hour love affair between a middle-aged barge captain (Jarl Kulle) and a pert waitress (Christina Schollin) in a small waterfront café. Told in the fashionable, out-of-sequence style introduced by Bergman and Alain Resnais, much of the story is narrated from the vantage point of the couple enjoying themselves in bed, with the dialog possibly even more candid than the shots themselves. ("Are you washing off Thomas?" the girl calls to the captain after they have had intercourse.)

Even more notorious, thanks to the vociferous efforts of Shirley Temple Black to have it barred from the 1966 San Francisco Film Festival, was Mai Zetterling's Bergmanesque Night Games, which sought out the reasons for a young man's inhibitions in his boyhood relationship with his beautiful, morally depraved mother (Ingrid Thulin). The memories stirred by a visit with his fiancée to the family manse include an orgy at the height of which the mother, in full view of the boy and her assembled guests, gives birth to a stillborn child; and a bedtime interlude in which, while the mother reads to him, he masturbates under the covers--until she suddenly pulls the covers away. In addition to autoeroticism and Oedipal impulses, Night Games also manages to touch upon necrophilia, homosexuality and several forms of sadomasochism before the son finally blows up his old house and frees himself forever from the influence of it and his mother.

Less publicized than Night Games, but even more erotic, was Vilgot Sjöman's production of My Sister, My Love, with its theme of incestuous love between blonde Bibi Andersson and brother Per Oscarsson. Set in the late 18th Century, it tells of a young nobleman who returns home to find his adored sister on the verge of a loveless marriage. The film is extraordinary for the lyricism of its love passages between the brother and the sister, for its attempts to suggest that incest can be "pure" if motivated by deeply felt emotion--and for a ribald sequence in which the brother, drunk on his sister's wedding night, dallies with three enormous whores.

The eroticism in Ingmar Bergman's recent film, Persona, is less overt but equally aberrant--and pervasive. Some critics have chosen to interpret its story of the merging identities of a disturbed actress and a seemingly guileless nurse as a study in Lesbianism. But the nurse (superbly played by Bibi Andersson) has had a fairly active and thoroughly heterosexual love life before moving into the seaside cottage to care for the mute actress; through flashbacks, we learn of an affair with a married man, of her involvement in a wild orgy on a beach and of a subsequent abortion necessitated by this indiscretion. Actually, what Bergman seems to be saying in this complex and trick-laden film is that all of us are role-playing and that when our pose has been penetrated and our sense of self destroyed, we are left with nothing. Whether the actress succeeds in doing this to her nurse through sexual or psychological means is almost beside the point, and one that Bergman does little to clarify; as is frequently the case in his pictures, however, the visual images are suffused with an elusive eroticism that is all the more disturbing because it is left so undefined.

The sexuality in the films of young Jörn Donner, all starring Harriet Andersson, is far more forthright. Set to restlessly modern jazz scores by Bo Nilsson, each features the restlessly modern Miss Andersson provocatively poised on the horns of a thoroughly modern sexual dilemma. Donner, who has been enjoying considerable success on the film-festival circuit, sees to it that none of her sexual problems is ever satisfactorily resolved in any of his modish movies--and that Miss Andersson achieves maximum exposure in each.

Like Donner, the new generation of Swedish film makers seems to be pushing both sex and nudity to the limit these past few years. Arne Mattsson's The Vicious Circle involves child rape, Lesbianism, masturbation, voyeurism and nude sexual play in its story of a vengeful woman who returns after 20 years to the rooming house in which she had been attacked as a child. The late Lars Gorling's Guilt was notable--even notorious--at the time of its production (1965) for its offhand inclusion of a side view of the man slipping off his shorts before climbing into bed with his lady, briefly exposing his penis. Perhaps for the same reason, mention should be made of Bo Widerberg's first film, The Pram, the story of an unwed mother who casually explains away her delicate condition by saying, "I left my diaphragm in the pocket of my other coat."

To date, however, no one has gone farther--and one wonders, from all accounts, if, indeed, there is farther to go--than Vilgot Sjöman with I Am Curious--Yellow. Released in Sweden late in 1967, it promptly ran into difficulties with the Swedish censors, although less for its extensive and explicit sexual activity (which includes shots of the sex act itself) than for its anti-American and anti-Spanish political line; nevertheless, the film was passed without cuts and immediately began playing to crowded houses throughout the country. I Am Curious is presented as a film within a film. On one level, Lena Nyman, playing Sjöman's girlfriend, wins the role of an inquiring reporter in his new movie, then--despite her director's jealousy--begins to fall in love with her leading man (Börje Ahlstedt), even as she was supposed to do in the film itself. On the other level is the film that frames this story--Sjöman's inquiry into contemporary Swedish attitudes. Miss Nyman, with tape recorder, participates in an anti-Vietnam demonstration outside the American embassy, asks draftees why they are not pacifists and interviews tourists returning from Spain on their reactions to Franco's dictatorship. (Her own attitude is made clear when she viciously stabs a portrait of Franco in the eyes--both eyes.) But meanwhile, this inquiring reporter is devoting even more of her time to a married salesman, and the two are constantly slipping out of their clothes whenever and whereever the impulse seizes them--which includes such unlikely places as the branches of an ancient oak, with a religious group looking on; on a balustrade of the Swedish Royal Palace, with the Royal Guards looking on; and in a wide variety of private bedrooms and public parks. The nudity for both male and female is total and the filming of their sexual activity is, as Variety's Swedish correspondent delicately phrased it, "as explicit as one can get in or out of a stag film," including a scene in which the girl kisses Ahlstedt on the penis. Shown intact in Sweden and Denmark, Yellow was cut by the censors of Germany and France before distribution in those countries and is currently the subject of a censorship battle being waged by Grove Press to secure its release in the United States. The Scandinavians, long hung up on matters of sin and expiation, have gone modern with an intensity that few would dare equal, but also in a fashion that suggests they have carefully studied the film styles and tastes of their European contemporaries and the rich potential of the American market.

Nor have Sweden's neighbors, Norway and Denmark, been noticeably hesitant about catching up with the rest of the world. Although each country produces, at best, fewer than 20 pictures a year, few of which get far beyond their own borders, just one of these--Denmark's A Stranger Knocks--has already, as we noted earlier, had powerful repercussions in this country. Similarly, the Danish Weekend (1963) kicked up a considerable furor when it reached the U. S. Directed by Palle Kjaerulff-Schmidt, it cast a coldly observant eye on the profligate pleasures of middle-class young adults seeking to escape the protective custody of Denmark's brand of state socialism in wholly random sexual experiences and sadistic acts. Despite numerous nude scenes (which prompted a Legion of Decency C rating in this country), the film makes profligacy seem both sordid and tedious--which is undoubtedly precisely what its director intended.

Another Danish offering, Knud Leif Thomsen's Venom approaches with a stolid solemnity its somewhat offbeat subject of a young pornographer who moves in with a respectable middle-class family. Before long he is not only flirting with the wife but sleeping with the daughter and starring her in his pornographic movies. When the father finally discovers this, he beats him up and throws him out of the house, along with his cameras and his reels of film; but, undaunted, the pornographer picks himself up and--symbolically--begins ringing the front doorbell as the film ends. Once the bars of "decency" have been let down, Thomsen seems to be saying, they can never be put back in place. For all his pompous moralizing, however, Thomsen is clearly not averse to letting down a few bars of his own. The young director incorporated into his film a few feet from an actual stag reel--probably the first time such footage was ever shown in a picture intended for public distribution; but when the film was presented in the U. S. and on the Continent, since the sequence was too intrinsic for outright excision, a white X appeared, printed over the offending frames.

Perhaps the most successful of these Scandinavian sexpotboilers, at least in the United States, was the Danish-Swedish coproduction I, a Woman, with the well-endowed Essy Persson as a neurotic nymphomaniac who feels compelled to prove her womanhood at least once in every reel. Despite a certain repetitiousness of plot, Miss Persson's recurrent exposures netted her American distributor over $3,000,000, and inevitably prepared the way for a sequel (as well as inspiring the title for Andy Warhol's I, a Man).

Norway, with even fewer films to her credit, also has a number of young directors who seem prepared to go the sexploitation route. Typical is The Passionate Demons, produced in 1961. Its story, both naïve and familiar, deals with an errant son who, while hating his father, is quite willing to accept money from him in order to continue an affair with his girlfriend. Spiced with nude sequences, the film was cut by four minutes before the censors allowed it to be shown in the United States.

Similarly, as Germany moved into the Sixties, its producers became increasingly aware of the overseas box-office boost attainable by the injection of a little sex into their pictures, a maneuver best demonstrated to them by the international success in the late Fifties of Rolf Thiele's Rosemary, based on the actual murder of a well-known callgirl. Typical of the sex-oriented films of the early Sixties in Germany was Ordered to Love, a dramatization of life in the notorious Nazi breeding camps set up by Hitler to create an Aryan master race through the scientific mating of pure-bred German girls with Wehrmacht and SS officers.

Despite its high quotient of aberrant eroticism, the German studios experienced considerable financial difficulties throughout the Sixties. On the one hand, a restrictive censorship limited their freedom in choice of theme and, on the other, spiraling costs sent one firm after another either out of business or into the hands of a new film giant, Bertelsmann. Originally a publishing house, Bertelsmann filled the screen with cheap adaptations of updated Edgar Wallace thrillers and pseudo-Westerns based on the works of Karl May, the German Zane Grey, many of them featuring either Stewart Granger or Lex Barker. Exceptions were Rolf Thiele's DM Killer, co-starring sexy Nadja Tiller and the Israeli beauty Daliah Lavi; and his Wälsungenblut, narrating the affair between a brother and a sister, based on a famous Thomas Mann story.

Things were considerably freer, however, in Austria, Germany's neighbor to the south; not only do most of Austria's movies find their major distribution in Germany but many of the leading German film makers began to divide their time between the studios of the two countries. Thus, Rolf Thiele, who is probably Germany's outstanding proponent of sex in cinema, moved to Vienna for his 1962 remake of Wedekind's perennially popular exercise in eroticism, Lulu, with the sloe-eyed Nadja Tiller in the title role as a woman who is ruled by her sexual urges. A notable film when it was first produced in the late Twenties (as Pandora's Box) with America's Louise Brooks as Lulu, the Thiele version degenerated into a series of sexual extravaganzas: Lulu twirling in a peekaboo mininightie while her elderly first husband sweats; Lulu dancing lasciviously to lure the susceptible doctor away from his well-born fiancée: the countess literally crawling on hands and knees for the love of Lulu: and no less inordinate displays of passion proffered by Lulu's odd assortment of male lovers. To make matters worse, Fräulein Tiller played this coldblooded femme fatale with all the intensity of a Hausfrau making her way through a supermarket.

Meanwhile, back in Germany, some of the restraints--and much of the reticence--of local producers to handle such material themselves had begun to disappear by the second half of the Sixties. Thanks to the creation in 1966 of a new, government-sponsored film school in Berlin and the establishment of a Young German Cinema backed by substantial grants to encourage the production of promising scripts, there are signs that a German "New Wave" is now in the process of formation--a wave that, being young, is inclined to take its sex somewhat more seriously than do the oldsters. Outstanding in this group are the brothers Ulrich and Peter Schamoni, both of whom have turned a sharp and critical eye upon social conditions in prosperous West Germany. In It, Ulrich describes the problems that beset an aggressive, rising young real-estate agent who lives in unwedded bliss with a beautiful blonde who has a good job of her own. Life becomes complicated when the girl discovers that she is pregnant. Because neither the girl nor her lover is quite prepared to settle down to middle-class domesticity, she sets off in search of an abortionist. In the course of her quest, she encounters a cross section of contemporary attitudes toward both abortion and unmarried love. It ends with the abortion taken care of, but the situation between the two young people is far from settled. Brother Peter's Close Time for Foxes follows the adventures of several young bachelors who find themselves forced into restrictive relationships with their ladyfriends and, ultimately, with society at large. In both instances, the point is not that sexy situations are shown, as in the popular German comedies, but that the brothers Schamonitend to view sex as a cornerstone of the social structure. Ironically, it seems as if the Germans must look to their younger generation to bring maturity to their films.

On the far side of the Iron Curtain, the Sixties brought a similar awakening to the facts of life. Although the Soviet Union still appears to believe, puritanically, that sex is not something one talks about--particularly in the cinema--such satellite nations as Poland, Czechoslovakia and even Romania and Bulgaria apparently feel quite different; and with the lifting of Stalinist repression, their film makers have been exploring hitherto forbidden themes with notable enthusiasm. Perhaps the first such picture to receive any wide distribution in this country was the Polish Knife in the Water (1962), directed by Roman Polanski. In Knife, Polanski's first feature, a discontented wife and her somewhat bored and complacent husband pick up a youthful hitchhiker en route to a lake for a Sunday's sail on his boat; impulsively, the husband invites the boy to accompany them for the day. As the wife stretches languidly on the deck in the briefest of bikinis, the excursion turns into a bitter rivalry between the two males, with the boy's pocketknife--symbolic of virility--the point of contention between them. Despite the fact that the film contains little nudity and even less lovemaking, it crackles throughout with the electricity of eroticism as the men vie with each other for the wife's approbation. A "lady or the tiger" ending does nothing to relieve the tension.

Until his untimely death in January 1967, the top star of the Polish cinema was stocky Zbigniew Cybulski, identified by his dark spectacles and black-leather jacket, who also made a number of films outside his native land (notably, the Swedish To Love and the French La Poupée). Cybulski was, in a sense, the James Dean of Poland--an unruly, antiauthoritarian figure whose irrepressible individualism always kept him on the outer fringes of society. Typically, in the Polish episode from the internationally produced Love at Twenty, he played a war veteran who is picked up by a pretty coed and brought to her apartment, where she tries to seduce him. Their lovemaking is interrupted by the unexpected arrival of some of her friends; Cybulski gets drunk during the ensuing festivities and the girl, already bored with him, has him thrown out by her steady boyfriend. The Saragossa Manuscript (1964), based on a tale by the 18th Century Polish writer Jan Potocki, forced Cybulski to abandon his glasses, but not his way with the ladies. As an indomitable captain of the Walloon guards during the siege of Saragossa, he finds himself constantly in demand--and by two girls at a time. As Cybulski beds down with them, he is a bit discomfited when they offer him a love potion served in a skull--and even more when, on awakening the following morning, he discovers (prophetically for himself) that he is embracing a skeleton.

Death also cut short the career of Andrzej Munk, one of Poland's most promising directors of the late Fifties. His final film, The Passenger (1961), incomplete at the time of his death, was nevertheless pieced together and, with stills inserted to bridge the missing sequences, put into international release. Much of the story takes place in Auschwitz (the only sequences that Munk had actually filmed) and none of the indignities of concentration-camp life are spared. Those marked for extinction are first forced to strip naked. Women being punished for infractions of the rules are stripped and made to run a vicious gauntlet of the guards; the laggards are beaten to death.

Another notable work is Jerzy Kawalerowicz' Joan of the Angels (1960), based on the 17th Century incident that inspired Aldous Huxley's The Devils of Loudun. The film, changing the locale from France to Poland, depicts a small convent whose nuns have supposedly been possessed by devils. A priest, Father Joseph, is sent to exorcise the demons but is almost turned from his course when Joan, the Mother Superior, in a sudden fit of sexuality, rips her habit and bares a breast to him. It is not devils, of course, but lust that has possessed the nuns; and while, in the end, Mother Joan is able to restrain her impulses, Sister Margaret is less successful and permits herself to be seduced by a roué from the nearby tavern. As the film closes, both women weep together, less for their own loss of grace than for the frailty of the human condition.

Kawalerowicz, although only in his mid-40s, represents an older generation in Polish film making. The international spokesman for the new film makers now emerging from Poland's excellent film school at Lódz is the dynamic, talented Jerzy Skolimowski, a triple-threat writer-actor-director in his early 30s. In his first three pictures--Identification Marks: None, Walkover and Barrier--he has not only introduced the freewheeling, free-association, Jean-Luc Godard approach to the Polish cinema but has boldly woven his films around the frustrations and restrictions of youth in a totalitarian society. In Skolimowski's most recent effort, Le Départ (1967), which was filmed in Belgium, with substantial French participation, the youthful hero, Jean-Pierre Léaud, is a hairdresser by trade but a racing-car enthusiast by instinct. Gradually he comes to realize, through his relationships with several women, that his mania for speed is, in fact, a cover-up for his sexual frustrations; and the film ends abruptly after a night with his understanding girlfriend relieves him of both. Like his compatriot Polanski, Skolimowski seems to breathe a bit more freely on this side of the Iron Curtain.

With Poland leading the way the film makers in other Soviet-bloc nations have begun to edge westward themselves. At first, predictably, their pictures remained tinged with large infusions of ideology--as in the Bulgarian Sun and Shadow (1961), in which a Bulgarian boy and a beautiful foreign girl, clad in a brief bikini, meet on a beach by the Black Sea and have their first love affair, darkened only by repeated references to nuclear Armageddon and the need to fight for peace. The love scenes are even bolder in the Hungarian Yes, filmed in 1964; in this one, a man whose pregnant wife had been killed during World War Two finds a new mate, but, haunted by the specter of the Bomb, he insists that she have an abortion when she becomes pregnant. By the mid-Sixties, bared bosoms and even total nudity had become almost as commonplace as in the films of France and Italy.

Of all the Iron Curtain countries, however, none has profited more from this new liberalism than Czechoslovakia. Beginning in 1965, with the huge international success of The Shop on Main Street, controls were relaxed sufficiently to permit such youthful directors as Milos Forman, Vera Chytilová and Jirí Menzel to view their fellow creatures with a wry good humor and critical perception unique in the world today.

Perhaps the best known in the Western world--and wholly typical--is Forman's Loves of a Blonde, in which a young factory worker allows herself to be seduced by a jazz pianist after a factory-sponsored dance, then turns up at his apartment in Prague expecting him to become her "steady." Although the disrobing in this delightful film is complete, Forman handles their night of love with tact, discretion and humor. Both the girl and the boy are glimpsed repeatedly from the back (especially when he wrestles with a recalcitrant window shade); but when the view is from the front, her arms cover her breasts and his head is nestled in her crotch. After their lovemaking, the girl sneaks somewhat guiltily to the bathroom down the hall--and spies one of her chums, equally guiltily, scampering back to her own room clad in the overcoat of a soldier she had picked up at the same dance. The cream of Forman's gentle jest, however, is the long sequence that concludes his film as the blonde, waiting in the pianist's home for her inamorato to return from a date, is interrogated by his parents, both of whom are certain that the girl is "in trouble" and want to get their boy off the hook. The counterpoint of their conventional morality, the boy's cavalier selfishness and her unaffected candor and simplicity establishes the girl's essential innocence with touching poignancy.

Perhaps the first step in this new direction was taken by willowy Vera Chytilova, who, in her first feature film, Another Way of Life (1963), contrasted the emotional emptiness of a famed woman athlete (former world champion Eva Bosáková) with the petty discontents of an attractive middle-class housewife (Vera Uzelacová). While the athlete drives herself through ballet exercises and gymnastics, the bored wife conducts a stealthy, seamy affair with a young stud. Ironically, just as she is about to confess all to her husband, he declares that he wants a divorce in order to marry a girl he has been seeing on the sly. The wife suddenly turns on him, using their child as a weapon, and charges him with heartlessness and deceit. The film's bitter finale shows the family walking dispiritedly through a woods together, a family in name only; while the woman athlete, who has beaten her competition, prepares to train others in the grueling process of becoming professional athletes. Curiously for a Communist film, Another Way of Life holds out little hope for either of its female protagonists.

More recently, in Daisies (1967), Chytilová dispatched two bikini-clad teenagers, both of them completely brainless and self-absorbed, into the hedonistically Mod world of Prague's artists and intellectuals, none of whom seem to have anything going for them beyond sex and psychedelics. The Czechs, apparently astonished at their own forthrightness, at first refused to permit the film to be exhibited outside their own country; when it was finally shown here, on a very limited basis, American audiences found its brightly colored images more puzzling than disturbing.

Decidedly closer to American tastes is Jiri Menzel's Academy Award-winning Closely Watched Trains, a black comedy that, like so many Czech films, looks back to the grim days of the Nazi Occupation, but with a singular difference. Whereas in the past the Czechs have concentrated on the horrors and brutality of the period, in this film--at least until its grim finale--the War remains very much in the background. In the foreground is a youth of about 20, impressed by his new uniform as the second assistant stationmaster in a remote whistle stop but unhappy about his bitter inability to make it with the girls. Premature ejaculation is his problem, as attested by an extraordinarily explicit love scene with a compliant conductress. His superior, on the other hand, has no problems at all; in fact, to verify an easy conquest, he rubber-stamps the bare bottom and thighs of his fun-loving secretary with all the available railway insignia--in indelible ink. A compassionate young woman helps the boy discover his manhood after he has attempted suicide in despair; due to complications brought on by an official investigation into the rubber-stamping caper, however, he loses his life the following morning while sabotaging a German supply train. But a ribald humor pervades the film, and so tolerant is the director's easy acceptance of the human condition that the sudden, jolting climax comes as a sobering reminder that death is as much a part of life as its little joys, and that living means enjoying these pleasures as they happen.

Prominent among these pleasures, this new generation of film makers clearly maintains, is the enjoyment of sex. Sex rears its impertinent head increasingly in Czech films. In the wildly erotic dream passages from Markéta Lazarová, a costume drama based on an epic Czech novel by Vladislav Vancura, the statuesque Magda Vasaryova is totally uncostumed as the screen fills with shots of her breasts taken from above and below and, during one long, incredible moment photographed in slow motion, as she strides naked through the fields directly toward the camera lens. In the final section of the triparted Pipes, a take-off on the popular Austrian Tyrol films, the flaxenhaired heroine is seen in bed with her lover while her husband is away on military duty. Suddenly, she pops up, totally nude, and tucks a pillow under her bottom so that she can enjoy her boyfriend more fully. Clearly, Prague is becoming the Paris of eastern Europe.

Or perhaps vice versa; for meanwhile, back in France, De Gaulle's increasingly puritanical regime has been putting the clamps ever more firmly on French film makers. Throughout the Sixties, French directors have complained not only that their government is intent on limiting the political content of their films (particularly with regard to any commentary on the Algerian situation) but that it will crack down suddenly and unpredictably on pictures it considers inimical in any way to contemporary French institutions, including the Catholic Church. One film by Jean-Luc Godard, The Married Woman, actually had snipped from it a shot of one of the best known of all French institutions--a bidet (unoccupied).

Symptomatic was the government ban in 1966 on Jacques Rivettes' Suzanne Simonin, La Religieuse de Diderot, based on an 18th Century novel by the French philosopher Diderot. The film tells of a nun, Suzanne (Anna Karina), who, incarcerated in a convent by her family, revolts against the harshness of monastic life, although she is herself deeply religious. Transferred to a more worldly convent, she stirs the Lesbian desires of her Mother Superior (Liselotte Pulver) and is forced to flee again. Now friendless and alone, the girl is taken in by a procuress, who promptly introduces her to the corruption of the outside world. In despair, Suzanne commits suicide.

Although the film set forth Diderot's story without undue sensationalism, the Catholic Church began its efforts to have it banned even before shooting was completed; parochial schoolchildren were ordered to write letters protesting the picture, then to take them home to their parents for signatures. Promulgated by French Minister of Information Yvon Bourges--even though the film had twice been passed by the official French censor board--the ban immediately roused the entire French motion-picture industry to an outburst of indignation, accusing the minister of a "misappropriation of power." Director Philippe de Broca, who had just been named a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters, sent back his decorations to De Gaulle in protest; and at a mass meeting in Paris on April 26, some 60 directors--among them Alain Resnais, Chris Marker and Roger Vadim, as well as such veterans as René Clair and Abel Gance--told how their own films had been mutilated by the censors. To a man, they vowed their intention of boycotting the imminent Cannes Film Festival if the ban were not lifted; whereupon Minister of Culture André Malraux, in a curiously Gallic form of compromise, permitted La Religieuse to represent France at the Cannes Film Festival but refused to let it be shown anywhere else in the world. Not until two years later was this ukase finally rescinded.

French censorship, as might almost be expected, operates differently and more subtly than in any other country. Only rarely, as in the case of La Religieuse, is there direct government intervention--and for good reason. Established as far back as 1916, censorship began functioning essentially through a government-appointed Commission de Contrôle, which exercises its contrôle at virtually every step of a film's production. To obtain a shooting permit, the producer must first submit his script to the chairman of the Commission--ostensibly to save himself money, in case any aspect of his picture later proves censorable. After the film is completed, it must then be screened for the Commission to receive a visa de contrôle, without which no picture may be publicly exhibited in France. At the Commission's discretion, the producer may then receive any one of six different forms of visa--permission to show as is, with cuts, forbidden to children under 13, 16 or 18, and forbidden for export. Because the Commission has traditionally been manned by a preponderance of bureaucratic petits fonctionnaires rather than by industry people, it is understandably more sensitive to political than to anatomical references. As Roger Vadim observed, "The only kind of movie that won't have censor trouble here is a sex movie."

Although nudity has always been permitted in the French cinema, not until the late Fifties, with the emergence of Brigitte Bardot, did the emphasis seem quite so obsessive. By the early Sixties, however, the BB boom was pretty much over--partially because the international market had been glutted by the belated release of many of her pre--And God Created Woman movies, none of which was precisely a masterpiece; and partially because as her star status increased, she revealed less and less of the lissome frame that had catapulted her to stardom in the first place. In Viva Maria, one of her latest epics, for example, she and co-star Jeanne Moreau cavort through a Central American revolution as 19th Century showgirls, both of them clad from their trim ankles to their pretty chins in the voluminous costumes of the period. No matter; waiting in the wings was a new take-over generation of shapely young French actresses wholeheartedly willing to reveal whatever was required for art and profit.

Many of these new sexpots made their mark in films that purported to offer both before- and behind-the-scenes glimpses of the wicked night life of gay Paree. Also in this category were a considerable number of pictures that corresponded closely to the American sexploitation films; indeed, clumsily dubbed, many of them make the same rounds. Typical of this genre is Daniella by Night, in which, among other divertissements, Elke Sommer is stripped on stage by enemy agents in search of some microfilm that she has secreted on her person. Miss Sommer stripped again for Sweet Ecstasy, this time when she was sent by her cynical lover to seduce a rich newcomer to the pleasures of the Riviera. Perhaps the best known of these films in the United States, if only because of the numerous censor actions initiated against it, is the melodramatic Sexus, in which a girl is kidnaped for ransom, falls in love with one of the gang, who saves her from being raped by another member of the gang and finally returns her safely to her family--with acres of irrelevant nudity and a touch of Lesbianism tossed in for good measure.

What is perhaps more surprising is the fact that many of the leading French directors lent their talents to the production of exploitation-type films during the early Sixties--a fact that can best be explained by the ever-recurrent crises in the French motion-picture industry. If a director, no matter what his reputation, wanted to work, he had to work on something indisputably "commercial." Thus, the veteran Henri Decoin, in 1960, made Tendre et Violente Elisabeth, with its multitude of bared bosoms and fairly explicit love scenes. Claude Chabrol, whose The Cousins had done much to initiate the New Wave in France, found himself reduced in 1960 to directing Les Bonnes Femmes, a story of four girls adrift in Paris. Including the inevitable striptease sequence, it was a virtual dossier of sexual quirks and perversions--the most notable of which was a woman's fetishistic attachment to a handkerchief dipped in the blood of a guillotined sadist.

On the other hand, many of the French films of this period that were quite seriously motivated also contained more than the ordinary degree of shock value. Perhaps foremost among these was Serge Bourguignon's poetic, meticulously photographed Sundays and Cybèle, with its unconventional story of a young aviator, his mind partially blacked out by his war experiences, who befriends a remarkably Lolitalike child in a convent school. Was there a sexual relationship between the two? Bourguignon hints with a great many symbols that there might well have been--while at the same time making it quite explicit that the man has been sharing the bed of a compassionate nurse. Similarly, in Jean Delannoy's This Special Friendship, based on a well-known novel by Roger Peyrefitte, there is a suggestion of homosexual love between two boys at a Jesuit school. As in the case of La Religieuse, there was considerable Catholic pressure to have the film suppressed; but because its makers had refrained from any specific revelation of homosexual activity, the censors had no basis for banning it.

Sex relationships were no less central to the films, generally low-budgeted, of such New Wave stalwarts as François Truffaut, Alain Resnais and the protean Jean-Luc Godard, in almost all of which the sex life of the principals was prominently featured, if not indeed central to the plot. Truffaut, who achieved international success with his first feature, the autobiographical The 400 Blows in 1959, quickly consolidated his position in 1961 with the release of his offbeat and original Jules and Jim. The story of an unconventional ménage à trois in the years of World War One, it co-starred the darling of all New Wave directors, dark-eyed Jeanne Moreau, with Oskar Werner as Jules and Henri Serre as Jim, the men who share her affections. In this film, Truffaut created a fascinating study of neurotic love and selfless friendship, all the more striking because of the many facets in Jeanne Moreau's portrait of the passionate, amoral, castrating Catherine. In Last Year at Marienbad (1961), Alain Resnais, the oldest of the New Wavers, ventured into the future tense to create a cool, enigmatic study of a love triangle played against the rich background of a fashionable European spa. Is the mysterious M the husband of the hauntingly beautiful Delphine Seyrig? Did Giorgio Albertazzi actually have an affair with her last year at Marienbad and gain her promise to meet again? And was it truly an affair, or was it rape? Resnais offers no answers to these or any of the other questions raised by his picture; in what was soon to become a convention of the contemporary avant-garde film, he left it to the audience to find its own solutions--or merely to enjoy the opulent mosaic of marvelously decorative images that he provided.

In La Guerre Est Finie (1966), Resnais revealed again his obsession with time; but in this story of a middle-aged expatriate Spanish Communist living in Paris, wavering in his commitment to continue the struggle against Franco's regime, time is primarily a thing remembered but not shown. Symbolic of the man's political indecision is the choice he must make between his patient mistress for the past seven years (Ingrid Thulin), who wants him to quit the movement, and an attractive, starryeyed student (Geneviève Bujold), who finds his revolutionary activities enormously exciting. As he makes up his mind, the film pays considerable attention to his amatory activities, particularly in a strikingly photographed, skillfully fragmented sequence in which the young girl makes passionate love to the older man.

Unquestionably, the most persistently erotic of this generation of film makers is the oft-married Roger Vadim, who seems to have built a career on his ability to persuade his beautiful wives to undress for his sexy movies. After writing and directing several films for Brigitte Bardot in the Fifties, he moved on to the blonde, Scandinavian-born Annette Stroyberg for the perverse Les Liaisons Dangereuses. A few years later, now married to Jane Fonda, he directed her in The Game is Over, an updated version of Emile Zola's La Curée, in which she plays the bored young wife of an elderly industrialist. To keep herself amused, she seduces his son by a former marriage, a boy about her own age. Working in Paris, Miss Fonda revealed more epidermis to the obliging color cameras than any American star since the days of Annette Kellerman, including a well-publicized nude bathing sequence and a sauna scene in which she was clad in nothing but steam. According to advance stills (previewed in Playboy in March 1968), her wardrobe is little more substantial in Vadim's futuristic Barbarella, in which he cast Jane as France's pop-art comic-strip heroine. No favorite of the French critics, Vadim works with style but little taste, and his story sense seems limited to an awareness of what will titillate the public and irritate the authorities; yet for all his perverseness, his films have a palpable sensuality--and no one can challenge his ability to make his comely heroines look at once glamorous, delectable--and attainable.

If Vadim is the most sensual of New Wave directors, Jean-Luc Godard is the most prolific; since his feature-film debut with Breathless in 1959 (first seen by U.S. audiences in 1961), he has directed some 14 feature films, plus sequences in five more omnibus-type movies. And, like Vadim, he habitually cast his own wife (as long as the marriage lasted) in his films--the wide-eyed, wide-mouthed Anna Karina. Godard is a film polemicist, and his pictures, hastily shot, unconventionally assembled, often seem like pamphlets in which he machineguns his views on everything, from France's Algerian crisis to the rootless, fruitless quest to comprehend--and convey--the life style and values of the Mod generation. Masculine Feminine, for example, includes long passages in which Paul, Madeleine and Elisabeth, his youthful protagonists, discuss sex either with one another or into a tape recorder. In The Married Woman, a rather ordinary triangle--husband, lover, pregnant wife, and which man is the father?--is developed into a philosophical inquiry exploring the role of woman in modern society. His conclusion: She is an object, a thing, a sexual toy for both her husband and her lover. Indeed, as critic Richard Roud has pointed out, in his films Godard tends to view marriage "as a kind of legalized prostitution or, as Kant put it, a contract assuring the signatories the exclusive use of each other's sexual organs."

Actually, prostitution in its several forms is almost an obsession with Godard; it recurs incessantly throughout his pictures. In Alphaville, Godard's grim fantasy of a neon-lit world of the future, the women are slaves of the state, their bodies at the service of their government. The heroine (Anna Karina) is a kind of secret weapon dispatched by the unseen leaders to prevent, with sex and tranquilizers, the interloping detective Lemmy Caution (Eddie Constantine) from discovering their secrets. More recently, in Godard's Deux ou Trois Choses que Je Sais d'Elle, the beautiful Marina Vlady plays a housewife living in one of the new high-rise apartment complexes just outside of Paris. In order to make ends meet for herself, her husband and her two children, she slips into part-time prostitution--a practice, incidentally, that is rapidly mounting to scandal proportions in De Gaulle's supposedly housecleaned country.

In a larger sense, prostitution is also the theme of Contempt, Godard's one attempt at a big-budget picture, made for, of all people, Joseph E. Levine. It concerns an able writer who sells himself and his talents to a Hollywood producer making a film version of The Odyssey. Although he hopes thereby to impress his wife (Brigitte Bardot) with this unanticipated affluence, just the reverse takes place. Contemptuous of the way in which her husband has turned over his brain to the producer (Jack Palance), she turns over her body to him.

A recent addition to France's ever-expanding list of the film auteurs (the title preferred by directors who involve themselves in every aspect of a film's creation, from the original conception to its final form) is the youthful Claude Lelouch, who quickly established an international reputation with two stylish and affecting love stories, A Man and a Woman (1966) and Live for Life (1967). Lelouch functioned on these pictures as both director and photographer, thus creating a rare sense of intimacy and spontaneity on the screen--particularly in the delicately handled love passages between Jean-Louis Trintignant and Anouk Aimée in the former and in the extraordinary sense of unleashed, exuberant passion during an African safari in the latter. Like most of his French confreres, Lelouch is not at all reticent about including bed scenes and nudity where they serve his story--but few film makers anywhere can match his ability to convey an aura of eroticism with such a minimum of specific, tastefully chosen details.

The veteran Luis Buñuel, on the other hand, owes his expertise in erotica to his long experience (dating back to the avant-garde in France during the late Twenties) in manipulating Freudian symbols to cinematic advantage. Self-exiled from his native Spain since the advent of Franco, he returned to Spain in 1961 to film the masterful Viridiana, the story of a convent-bred girl who goes to live on the estate of an introverted, fetishistic uncle. Finding a resemblance between the girl and his dead wife, the man has her dress in her aunt's finery, drugs her coffee, then carries her off to bed. Although he partially undresses the girl, exposing her breasts, he manages to restrain himself from rape. The next morning, however, hoping to keep her from returning to the convent, he pretends that the rape has actually taken place. Panic-stricken, the girl bolts--and the uncle hangs himself in a belated fit of remorse. Joined on the estate by her uncle's illegitimate son and his slatternly mistress, the girl begins to vote herself to good works for the local poor. In a violent finale, these tattered loafers and beggars take over the manor house, provide themselves with a sumptuous banquet (patently designed as a parody of the Last Supper), then attack their benefactress.

Suffused with anticlerical elements, the film was suppressed by the Spanish government--in Spain, and later in France, after the 1961 Cannes Film Festival, where it captured a Grand Prix and flattering distribution offers from all over the world. No less triumphant was Buñuel's arrival in Paris, where, in 1964, he directed what was, for him, a jolly comedy, Diary of a Chambermaid, with sulky-sultry Jeanne Moreau in the title role, playing a Paris-born servant in a country house ruled by a nobleman with a foot fetish but dominated by a fascist-minded gamekeeper given to rape and murder. Most recently, also in France, Buñuel completed the perverse and perplexing Belle de Jour, based on Joseph Kessel's harrowing study of a woman who, because the husband she loves is not sufficiently demanding, finds it convenient to install herself in a high-class house of assignation. Buñuel, characteristically, has decorated the basic story with innumerable fetishistic allusions (including a necrophilic suggestion of intercourse in a coffin) and expanded it with dream sequences that illustrate the heroine's pathological need for degradation and shame. As the film progresses, the dreams and reality become night-marishly intertwined--but through it all, the blonde Catherine Deneuve (whose nom de brothel is Belle de Jour) remains ravishingly, radiantly beautiful.

Currently vying with Jeanne Moreau for the title of best undressed actress on the French screen is the sprightly Mireille Darc, who nonchalantly strolled in the buff through much of Georges Lautner's Galia (while casually having an affair with the husband of a woman she had rescued from the Seine) and repeated much the same performance in the recent Fleur D'Oseille, also for Lautner, as an unwed mother determined to get her share of the loot buried by her deceased gangster boyfriend. The biggest hit in Paris this past spring was Benjamin, in which a naïve young man (Pierre Clémenti) learns about women from such knowledgeable teachers as Michèle Morgan, Catherine Deneuve and Odile Versois, all of whom (and more) literally force themselves upon him. Obviously, the governmental censors have been fairly successful in keeping the French film makers' minds off politics, but sex is too fundamental even for De Gaulle.

In Italy, despite the impact of Luchino Visconti's Rocco and His Brothers at the dawn of the Sixties, the impulse toward neorealismo was rapidly dying away. The Italian film makers were beginning to discover in the drastically changed social climate of their country new material, new themes that they could treat with honesty and insight. No longer did they feel obliged, in the name of neorealism, to turn back to the War years, or even to the tenements and slums, for meaningful statements on the human condition.

The year 1960 might well be regarded as the turning point. Not only did it produce Rocco and His Brothers and Two Women--the impressive last gasps of the old neorealism--it was also the year of L'Avventura and La Dolce Vita, equally impressive harbingers of the new neorealism. Each sought in its own way--L'Avventura austerely and uncompromisingly, La Dolce Vita lustily and flamboyantly--to depict the aimless amorality of contemporary Italy's overprivileged classes; and each succeeded, again in its own way, not only in germinating fresh and widely imitated film forms but in trail-blazing liberated new attitudes toward sex on the screen. Without either condemning or condoning, Antonioni and Fellini depicted on film a world they knew exactly as it was--then left it to the viewer to be shocked, outraged, amused or pitying.

Audiences of La Dolce Vita seemed to partake of all these emotions and more. Fellini himself has spoken of it as "a report on Sodom and Gomorrah, a trip into anguish and despair," but many have found his vivisection of Roman decadents both illuminating and highly moral--particularly since, at the end, the protagonist (Marcello Mastroianni) is fully aware that he has been sucked far too deeply into the sweet life ever to extricate himself again, that he is as much a lost soul as any of the people he has been observing in his three-hour odyssey through a man-made hell. On the other hand, a number of critics chose to view La Dolce Vita as little more than an ambitious exploitation film, pointing in proof to such sequences as Marcello's encounter with a nymphomaniac heiress (Anouk Aimée) who rents a prostitute's bed for their lovemaking; the nightclub scene in which Anita Ekberg disports with an international, interracial crowd of perverts and hangers-on, then romps fully clothed in Trevi Fountain by the dawn's early light; and the concluding orgy in a villa at Fregene, complete with homosexuals, Lesbians, transvestites and a shapely matron who insists on doing a striptease under a fur stole. No doubt these elements helped elevate the film into an international success--but neither is there any doubt, particularly in retrospect, that Fellini had accomplished precisely what he had set out to do: "to take the temperature of a sick society."

The temperature rose a bit higher in 1962, when, again with Anita Ekberg, Fellini contributed a sequence to the multipart Boccaccio '70--a satiric episode in which a portrait of the statuesque Swede, holding a glass of milk, lies sprawled across a gigantic billboard directly opposite the apartment of an anti-vice fanatic. In the man's supercharged imagination, Anita descends from the poster--all 50 feet of her--and begins dancing voluptuously before him in the darkened streets, tempting him to all sorts of unnamable delights. But the pious puritan stands firm, a knight in shining armor, and with his lance he slays the giant sex goddess. When the police find him the following morning, he is clinging to the billboard, completely mad. It is, as Fellini once confided in a Playboy Interview (February 1966), a vast metaphor designed to show "how man's imprisoned appetites can finally burst their bonds and bloat into an erotic fantasy that comes to life, takes possession of its creator and ultimately devours him." Plainly, Fellini had no great affection for the censorial mentality.

After these two films, Fellini turned autobiographical, delineating in 81/2 the identity crisis of a director empty of ideas for his next movie; and in Juliet of the Spirits, his ambiguous and ambivalent relationship with his own wife, actress Giulietta Masina, who played the title role. 81/2 (the title merely indicates this film's numerical position among Fellini opera) opens with Mastroianni, the director, in the throes of a nervous breakdown. Production on his next picture has already started, but he doesn't even have a script. He retires to a spa, where, in addition to his producer and writer, he is soon joined by his mistress, hopeful for a role in the film, and, soon after that, by his wife. To complicate his life still further, there is a marvelous, dreamlike girl at the spa (Claudia Cardinale), who, like a little waitress he befriended in La Dolce Vita, seems to represent everything that is healthy and unobtainable for him. Nevertheless, he makes love with her in fantasy--and with his sleazy mistress in fact. With his wife (Anouk Aimée), he seems always on the verge of a reconciliation but never quite able to make it.

The film's most remarkable sequence is again a fantasy, set in a stone farmhouse, where the director cohabits with all his past loves--including the huge, painted prostitute who introduced him to sex when he was a boy of ten. All live together in apparent harmony, their one object being to serve him. They also know, however, that their handsome Don Juan in his black Stetson and white, togalike sheet may turn at may moment into a heartless Marquis de Sade, who, bullwhip in hand, will drive them up into the attic when they have ceased to please him. As a consequence, despite his efforts to maintain order, the women are soon jealously scratching at each other's eyes and pulling at each other's hair, each frantic to be the one who will win his favor. By the end of the film, after thus reviewing his entire life, the director has come to realize that the time for such role playing is past, that only when he has accepted for what they really are all the people who have had a part in shaping his life can he begin to function again as a whole man. 81/2 closes as all join hands and circle round the scaffoldings of the set for his new picture.

Juliet of the Spirits travels even farther into fantasyland, although this time the fantasies are those of the wife of a successful businessman who is beginning to realize that she is no longer loved, that, in fact, her husband has found another woman. On the advice of some friends, Juliet begins to dabble in spiritualism and learns that what she lacks is the glamor of her mother, the sophistication of her sisters and the sexuality of the other ladies of her social set, a particularly catty lot. She draws closer to her bizarre neighbor (buxom Sandra Milo), whose life is a constant round of psychedelic parties with hedonistic young men, but finds herself--because of her "spirits"--unable to participate in their pleasures with any real enthusiasm. Finally, as her husband packs to leave forever, she dismisses all the spirits she has accumulated, resolving to face the future on her own. Despite his rather pat plotting and shallow understanding of female psychology, Fellini turned much of his Juliet into what is, visually at least, his most satisfying film. Abetted by Gianni Di Venanzo's extraordinarily lush color photography, it is opulent, intriguing and, in such moments as Juliet's encounters with her neighbor's amorous friends, surrealistically erotic.

At the opposite end of the sensual spectrum, yet curiously related, are the films of Michelangelo Antonioni--particularly the trilogy that embraces L'Avventura, La Notte and L'Eclisse (Eclipse, the only one of the three that is generally known here by its English title). Like Fellini, Antonioni exposes the distorted values and twisted interpersonal relationships of the Italian aristocracy and upper middle classes; but where Fellini seems to plunge himself into their decadent world, Antonioni remains on the outside of it, a cool, detached, even ascetic observer. Too much so for some critics' taste; he depicts noninvolvement by not getting involved and, as critic Pauline Kael has remarked, "complains of dehumanization in a dehumanized way."

Antonioni's style and approach are perhaps most clearly visible in L'Avventura, the first of the trilogy. As it starts, a yachting party is being formed by a group of gilded youths and jaded older folks. It includes Sandro, a dissolute architect who has long since "sold out"; Anna, an heiress with whom he has been having a not-too-satisfactory affair; and Claudia (Monica Vitti), who is Anna's best friend. In the course of the day, while the group is exploring a small, rocky island, Anna disappears. The party searches, the police are sent for, but there is no trace of the girl. After a night on the island, the others are prepared to call off the search; but Sandro and Claudia persist, following up tenuous clues on the mainland. Meanwhile, Sandro finds himself drawn to Claudia and, despite some sense of disloyalty to her friend, she to him. They make love in an open field while a train rushes by just a few yards away. (This scene was drastically abbreviated in the American version.) The memory of Anna recedes farther and farther from their consciousness as they check into a luxury hotel, where a party is already in progress, with all of the yachting guests present--none of whom even inquires about the missing girl. Claudia, now certain that she is in love with Sandro, falls into an exhausted sleep; but Sandro, having put the girl to bed, slips off to join the party. Early next morning, finding Sandro missing, Claudia searches for him through the empty corridors of the hotel--and discovers him on a couch in one of the public rooms drunkenly caressing the naked breasts of a callgirl. Horrified and disillusioned, she runs off, but seeks him out later as he sits alone in a small park, ashamed at his own weakness. With a small gesture, Claudia indicates that all is not over between them. She may no longer love him, but she does feel pity.

It is typical of Antonioni that he does not ask us to participate in all this, merely to observe; he has referred to the film as "a demonstration." Thus, early in the picture, when Anna stops off for a "quickie" with her lover before their departure for the yacht, much of the scene is played with the camera trained on Claudia, waiting in the car below. Characters are quite literally kept at a distance by Antonioni's penchant for extreme long shots--even when he is showing them at their most intimate moments. As a result, there is more than an ordinary amount of "atmosphere" in an Antonioni film, and his backgrounds, always impeccably chosen, assume an importance of their own. Great, drear landscapes reflect the spiritual emptiness of his characters throughout much of L'Avventura; and at the hotel, a large painting of a girl offering her breasts to a starving man through the bars of a prison cell makes an ironic commentary on the indolent, self-indulgent crowd that throngs beneath it.

La Notte, much of which takes place at a drunken all-night party populated by frustrated intellectuals and sexual athletes, most closely resembles Fellini's La Dolce Vita. Once again, however, Antonioni's curious remoteness, his unwillingness to become involved--or to permit his audiences to become involved--in the emotional lives of his characters, removes all possibility of the sort of empathic titillation that a Fellini film provides. This is signaled early in the picture, when Giovanni (again, Marcello Mastroianni), a successful writer whose ten-year marriage is on the verge of breaking up, is accosted in a hospital corridor by an obviously deranged nymphomaniac. She lures him, only slightly reluctant, into her room, kicks shut the door and leaps upon him in a sexual frenzy. But just as Giovanni begins to respond to her advances, a doctor and two nurses burst into the room, seize the girl and carry her forcibly to the bed, where she continues to writhe lasciviously. Whatever erotic juices the scene may have begun to generate are abruptly drained by its bizarre, frustrating and (for Giovanni) embarrassing conclusion. Similarly, at the film's finale, when, after a long night in which both Giovanni and his wife (Jeanne Moreau) have sought unsuccessfully for new love partners and now attempt to rekindle their lost passion in one last, frantic coupling, Antonioni plays the scene in a single long shot showing the two in a sand trap on a deserted golf course in the grayness just before dawn. Nothing could have been more artfully devised to remove from their carnal grappling any real sense of eroticism or to suggest more effectively the emotional desert that lies ahead for these two. Even when Antonioni shows nudity--as in his shots of Mlle. Moreau in her bath--the effect is totally hygienic and desexualized.

This technique of desexualization also accounts for the somewhat surrealistic quality of Antonioni's most recent film, Blow-Up, which he made in England for MGM. An account of an unsettling 24 hours in the life of a young fashion photographer (David Hemmings), the picture--it is difficult to call it a story--is set in "swinging" London, where Antonioni's antihero plucks his way through a covey of gaudily plumaged birds. When he makes love, however, it is often with his camera; during a photographic session, his movements and commands seem to rouse his writhing, half-nude model to a sexual climax--whereupon he quickly steps back, turns his camera over to an assistant and abruptly leaves the studio. Later, while photographing in a park, he trains his camera on a pair of lovers. The girl (Vanessa Redgrave) demands the roll of film; when he refuses to surrender it, she follows him to his apartment, strips off her blouse (keeping her bared back to the camera) and offers herself in exchange for it. Suspicious about the girl's persistence, Hemmings proceeds to make blowups from the strip of film and discovers what appears to be a murder. He is constantly diverted from his efforts to get to the bottom of the mystery, however--by a pair of teenaged girls who want to become models, by a visit to a Soho discothèque and by an interlude at a posh pot party where all the guests are turned on in every possible way.

Just as the disappearance of Anna goes unsolved in L'Avventura, Antonioni makes no attempt to explain the murder in Blow-Up; it served merely to jolt the photographer into a new awareness of himself--and audiences into a new awareness of the dehumanized and decadent values of Mod society. Contributing importantly to this is Antonioni's cold and impersonal handling of the erotic elements in his picture--Vanessa Redgrave's brazen use of her body to get what she wants from the photographer, the almost casual inclusion of a girl who may be the photographer's wife sleeping with his assistant and the now-famous naked tussle on purple studio paper between Hemmings and the two would-be models (in which, for the first time in any film released by a major American company, pubic hair was momentarily visible on the screen).

Luchino Visconti was another who departed from the straight-and-narrow road of neorealism to report upon the fleshier, flashier aspects of low life in Italian high society--with perhaps a bit more authenticity than his confreres, since he is himself the scion of an aristocratic family. From his stern, brutal depiction of slum life in Rocco and His Brothers, Visconti turned abruptly to a sophisticated, novelettish, slightly naughty little episode for Carlo Ponti's Boccaccio '70. Titled The Job, it tells of a young wife (Romy Schneider) who discovers that her husband has been dallying with $1000-a-night callgirls and decides on an unusual revenge. Since she controls his money and has already made a bet with her father that she can support herself for an entire year, Romy informs her husband that if in the future he should feel the need for female companionship, he can come to her--at the customary fee. Playing many of her scenes in the nude, Fräulein Schneider makes a story that might have been sordid quite delectable, indeed.

In Sandra, Visconti undertook a modern rendering of the Electra theme. Returning with her American husband to her villa in Tuscany, Sandra (played by the sensuous Claudia Cardinale) begins to suspect that her mother had betrayed her father, a Jewish scientist, to the Nazis during the War, in order to marry her lover. She also has to contend with her younger brother's incestuous designs upon her; when she rejects him, he kills himself. Although nothing much happens as a result of all this in strictly dramatic terms, Visconti contrived to surround his characters with an aura of throbbing eroticism that was often more palpable than in many films that frankly set out to be daringly sexy. Like Antonioni, Visconti seemed, in Sandra, to be viewing society as a structure of manners, with his own attitude toward it left intentionally ambiguous.

In quite another vein, the Italians early in the Sixties began to discover that sex, when handled strictly for laughs, could be both popular and profitable. Perhaps the film that best demonstrated this fact was Pietro Germi's black comedy Divorce--Italian Style (1961), with the indefatigable Marcello Mastroianni as a baron who has hit upon an ingenious plan to rid himself of his hirsute wife and marry his pretty 16-year-old cousin. In Italy, it seems, a man can kill with relative impunity a mate who has dishonored him. The baron's only problem is to find someone who might conceivably be interested in his frowzy spouse, then to prod her into what the law might conceivably regard as a compromising situation. He finally succeeds in his ignoble aim--only to be cuckolded by his bride on their honeymoon cruise.

Germi proved that his stylishly sexy comedy was no mere flash in the pan with such subsequent works as Seduced and Abandoned and The Birds, the Bees and the Italians, both of which cast an exceedingly roguish eye on Italian mating habits. In the former, a pretty Sicilian girl (the sultry Stefania Sandrelli) is in the unfortunate situation described by the title. Both she and her father become understandably indignant when her seducer refuses to marry her because, as he puts it, "She is not of good character." The latter film, produced in 1966, is no less amusing: but underlying Germi's barbed characterizations of small-town bourgeoisie, one can sense an indignation that is absent from the earlier comedies. The first of the film's three stories concerns the town doctor, a man who derives considerable amusement from his friend Toni's self-confessed impotence--until he discovers that this was simply a ploy to reach the doctor's young and attractive wife. In the final tale, Rabelaisian in its humor, a buxom peasant girl arrives in the town to do some shopping and finds the impressionable shopkeepers delighted to load her with merchandise in return for her favors. Pleased with her "bargains," she informs her father of her good fortune, where-upon he storms into town and charges several of its leading businessmen with statutory rape and threatens them with legal action. To buy him off, they take up a healthy collection and offer it to him--then charge the man with perjury after he changes his testimony at their behest. Their honor has been saved.

It is the middle story, however, that most clearly points up Germi's growing disaffection for the moral hypocrisy of his countrymen. In it, a mild, middle-aged bank clerk, married to a harridan, falls madly in love with Virna Lisi, the beautiful cashier in a coffee bar. Gradually, she comes to return his affection. To the consternation of all the solid citizens of the town, he makes no attempt to conceal either his passion or his happiness. Consequently, they turn against him, have the girl fired and ultimately arrange to have the two arrested for adultery. The girl leaves town, the man attempts suicide and is confined in a mental institution until adjudged "sane"--which means simply that he is willing to return to the routine horrors of his job and his family. Never before has a comedy made a more coruscating commentary on small towns and small minds.

In the modern manner, Germi is not at all averse to blending moments of incidental nudity into his comic dramas. For many Italian directors, however, nudity is increasingly becoming the focus of their attention, with the plots of their pictures merely incidental to introducing and excusing it. Typical was The Empty Canvas, which, although based on a novel by Alberto Moravia, stripped away its broader social significance to dwell on the jealous passion of a young artist (Horst Buchholz) for a promiscuous, beautiful model (Catherine Spaak), all leading up to a scene in which he sprinkles her naked body with bank notes in an attempt to buy her love.

The historical pretext also continued to serve during the Sixties as a raison d'être for nudity in an endless cycle of pseudo epics, most of them obviously low-budgeted, featuring such heroes of antiquity as Hercules, Samson and Ulysses (played by such wooden-faced, American-born musclemen as Steve Reeves, Kirk Morris, Gordon Scott and Richard Lloyd). These beefcake parades invariably plunge their manly mastodons into dire perils engineered by a cruel queen for their specific discomfiture. Gauzily clad slave girls frequently cross their paths and sirens flaunt their charms to distract them from their duty--but never do these noble creatures succumb. Perhaps if they did, their pictures would be more fun to watch.

Another extensive series that has begun to resort to generous injections of sex to bolster its popularity is the vampire films, many of them featuring the ever-popular Count Dracula and his sanguinary relatives. Rarely as well produced or as genuinely scarifying as their British counterparts, they compensate with generous dollops of nudity and necrophilia. In The Playgirls and the Vampire, for example, five showgirls take refuge in a gloomy old castle. Since the river is rising, the owner of the castle can scarcely turn them away, but he warns them to keep to their rooms during the coming night. One of the girls, of course, wanders out anyway--with predictable results. Next morning, she is found dead outside the castle, the mark of the vampire on her neck. But the main point is scarcely the story, which receives short shrift in this tatty, low-budgeted movie; it is the girls. Soon after the funeral of their fellow showgirl, they unaccountably decide to rehearse their act--which just happens to include a heated strip routine. When one of the girls is trapped by the vampire in an underground crypt, he undresses her and carries her to his tomb to ravish her in his native earth. Meanwhile, the dead girl returns with fangs but few clothes, making her perhaps the first topless vampire in film history.

Far more sensational were the several Mondo films by Gualtiero Jacopetti, Franco Prosperi and Paolo Cavara and their numerous imitators. Furbished with resounding commentaries that underscore every stomach-churning incident upon which they have trained their voyeuristic cameras, these documentaries have become a sort of international rag bag of the revolting, the degrading and the degenerate. In Mondo Cane--the first and best of the lot--produced in 1961, the film has scarcely been on the screen for five minutes before actor Rossano Brazzi is having his clothes torn off by frantic female admirers, naked Trobriander women are seen chasing after a hapless male and bikini-clad girls on the Riviera are shown engaged in less hectic but no less effective methods of ensnaring the opposite sex. The pseudo-anthropological narration professes to find significant sociological correlations in all these happenings, as it does in the force feeding of geese in Strasbourg and the gorging of prospective wives in Ta-bar, in the suckling of a pig at the breast of a New Guinea woman and the tears of a Pasadena dowager over the grave of her dead pet at a dog cemetery.

Since the series began, there have been repeated charges that Jacopetti has "faked" much of the footage that went into his documentaries--or, at the very least, that he has been guilty of removing it from context. In his second film, Women of the World, for example, he included nude shots of Israeli Army girls in their showers. The Israeli government entered a strong protest; they had assumed that he was making a documentary about the Israeli Army.

Since Italy is still, despite its left-oriented government, one of the great strongholds of Catholicism on the Continent, it was inevitable that some efforts would be made to control the growing exuberance of her film makers--particularly when it conflicted with Catholic dogma. As Italian films grew bolder, the politicians--specifically, the Christian Democrats, who feared a loss of Catholic votes--poised for the strike. It came in 1965. With the Vatican pressing for a law to "punish pornographers," especially in the movie industry, the Christian Democrats took advantage of the absence of some 100 Communist and Socialist members of the Chamber of Deputies to force through a measure denying government aid to pictures that did not "respect the social and ethical principles on which the constitution is based." Bambole, a four-part picture co-starring Gina Lollobrigida, Elke Sommer, Monica Vitti and Virna Lisi, was the immediate target of their wrath; it featured a sequence in which a lightly clad Gina succeeds in seducing the nephew of a Roman Catholic bishop, with the assistance (albeit unwittingly) of the latter. The film was not merely decried; the producer and half a dozen of his stars and directors were hauled into court on obscenity charges--and, at least in the case of the producer, Lollobrigida, Jean Sorel (who played the nephew) and Mauro Bolognini, who directed the disputed episode, the charges were made to stick, though they were later reduced. The Socialists, however, sensing the threat of ideological censorship, threatened to leave the coalition government unless the controversial measure were rescinded. Premier Aldo Moro, faced with this formidable opposition, hastily adjourned Parliament, leaving the issue still unresolved.

Inevitably, the growing boldness of film makers in Italy, France and the Scandinavian countries had its effect on production everywhere. The proliferation of film festivals throughout the late Fifties and Sixties created a setting for mutual exposure, international crosspollination and direct cinematic competition on an unprecedented scale; and each successive festival established a climate of greater permissiveness throughout the film world. Thus, a country such as Turkey, with no tradition of realism in its films, sent to the Indian Film Festival of 1965 Conquerors of the Golden City, a picture suspiciously reminiscent of Rocco and His Brothers both in treatment and in plot detail--if anything, even more brutal and sordid than its Italian counterpart. And the Netherlands turned out The Knife, a modishly Bergmanesque study of a young boy's budding sexuality, replete (as its title suggests) with Freudian symbolism.

Similarly, the Greek industry was totally revitalized by the international acceptance, via the festival route, of the works of Michael Cacoyannis and the expatriate American director Jules Dassin during the late Fifties. Indeed, for most people, it was Dassin's Never on Sunday (1960) that made them aware in the first place of the very existence of a Greek motion-picture industry. This jolly tale of a goodhearted prostitute whom a well-intentioned American (Dassin) tries unsuccessfully to reform not only won all sorts of awards but grossed millions on its tiny ($125,000) budget. It also established Melina Mercouri as an international star--an asset that Dassin proceeded to exploit in the American-Greek production of Phaedra, an updated version of the classic play, with Mercouri as the wife of a wealthy Greek shipowner (Raf Vallone) who falls passionately in love with her stepson (Anthony Perkins), then commits suicide after her stepson rejects her and her husband denounces her. Although the scene in which she seduces the boy before an open fire practically scorched the celluloid, not even Mercouri was actress enough to make altogether convincing the fact that the worldly Phaedra preferred a callow youth to her attractive and sophisticated husband.

The Cacoyannis films of the Fifties revealed the strong influence of Italy's neorealists; but in 1962, with a boldly stylized adaptation of Euripides' Electra, he created a picture that was uniquely Greek--ageless, ritualistic and monumental, with the aristocratic Irene Papas in the title role. In marked contrast to this dark tragedy, Cacoyannis followed it with the exuberant, life-loving Zorba the Greek, in which the sheer joy of living is shown to outweigh the cruelties of people and the callousness of fate. As Zorba, a roistering man of all work who attaches himself to a somewhat naïve English writer (Alan Bates), Anthony Quinn achieved a balance between brutishness and tenderness that made this the performance of his career. Zorba went on to become one of the most successful foreign-made films ever presented in the United States.

The success of such pictures, generally coproduced with American studios and financing, led other Greek film makers to look beyond their home market to create pictures of more general appeal. An ambitious effort in this direction was Nikos Koundouros' poetic Young Aphrodites, based on the Daphnis and Chloë legend--but juiced up with seductions, rapes and repeated shots of teenaged love goddesses in diaphanous gowns that reveal more than they conceal. Symptomatic of the increasing tolerance of nudity on Greek screens is George Skalenakis' Queen of Clubs, in which the darkly beautiful Elena Nathanael finds herself attracted to a handsome young fellow and, despite the presence of her husband, follows him to his apartment. There, she quickly slips out of her clothes, undresses him and indulges in some of the most ardent lovemaking this side of the Scandinavian films.

A similar taste of freedom is evident in the latest films from South America, long one of the more inhibited areas of the earth. Once again, the younger generation discovered its own pantheon of auteurs in the films from abroad--notably, Antonioni and Godard--and began to adapt both their themes and their styles to their own needs. In Argentina, where the government helps out with a handsome bonus (often as much as the entire production cost) for "artistic" films, the incentive to get away from purely commercial efforts is particularly strong; it has spawned a whole new generation of European-oriented young directors, such as David José Kohon, Rodolfo Kuhn and Lautaro Murúa. Ironically, their talents are expended primarily on pictures that illustrate, with existentialist despair, the emptiness and futility of life in Argentina.

The only Argentinian director to have won international recognition, Leopoldo Torre Nilsson, is almost totally ignored by his younger compatriots. Although he is in his early 40s, they profess to find his neatly tailored plots indrawn and old-fashioned, his emphasis too heavy on twisted psyches rather than the distorted social values that have produced them. Perhaps it is this absorption with the problems of adolescents on the threshold of sex--as amplified by the hypocrisy and corruption of the adult world--that has made his films so readily assimilable elsewhere. In his most ambitious film, The Eavesdropper, made for Columbia with an international cast headed by Janet Margolin and Stathis Giallelis, Miss Margolin plays a girl of good family who, primarily for kicks, shares the seedy bedroom of a youthful terrorist and political fanatic. Invariably, Torre Nilsson draws a world that is confined, corrupt and corrupting, a world that either entraps or destroys his innocent, dewy-eyed heroines.

Even in Mexico, where the film medium is tightly controlled by commercial interests, the younger generation is beginning to make statements that sound (and look) very much like those of their European contemporaries. But the youngest of them all remains the indomitable Luis Buñuel, who returned to Mexico during the Sixties and directed one of the most purposefully erotic pictures of all time, Simon of the Desert. At the start of the film, Simon Stylites is seen climbing to a high pedestal in the desert to demonstrate his saintliness to all; the Devil immediately takes up the challenge, tempting him in all sorts of guises, most of them lasciviously female and frequently topless.

For all the new freedom that film makers in Mexico and Argentina are beginning to exercise, the greatest degree of liberty in Latin America is apparently enjoyed in Brazil, where the tradition of the cangaceiro pictures (roughly the equivalent of our Westerns) has long since given the public an appetite for sex and violence. In recent years, the cameras have shifted from the legendary past to what appears to be, if Brazilian movies bear any relation to Brazilian reality, a fairly lecherous present. In Noite Vazia, for example, a bored, wealthy young man and his reluctant companion pick up two callgirls and retire to his apartment for fun and games--which include stag reels, an attempt to get the girls to stage a Lesbian exhibition and protracted loveplay, all accompanied by unabashed nudity. Not infrequently, the Brazilian films themselves seem to be just this side of stag reels.

But nowhere has the change in what can and what can't be shown on the screen been more radical than in the Orient. In Japan, less than a generation ago, almost any form of bodily contact was frowned on, whether in fighting or in loving. Today, apparently, nothing succeeds like excess. Replete with rape, nudity, sadism and perversions of every kind, the "eropros" (erotic productions, discussed earlier in our examination of nudies) represent the complete negation of traditional Japanese values. And yet not only have they swept almost every other kind of film (except monster movies) off the screen in Japan, but eropro elements are increasingly being introduced into the films of the major Japanese studios simply to enable them to stay in business.

For some producers, the solution was quite simple. No sooner did Mondo Cane appear than, with that peculiar Japanese gift for imitation, they stepped forward with such Mondoesque offerings as Women ... Oh, Women! and It's a Woman's World, both of them pseudo-anthropological studies of Tokyo's fabled night life, complete with strip joints and tours of the red-light district. Other film makers found it expedient to sex up the horrors of war. In Internees of Kampili, for example, several hundred Dutch women and children are seen as wartime prisoners in a Japanese concentration camp in Indonesia. Frustrated at being separated from their men, some of them make a play for the favors of their guards, and two head directly for the camp's incorruptible commander. The scanty costuming and lustful attitudes of the female prisoners roused storms of protest at the time of the film's release (1960), particularly from the Dutch. But Internees of Kampili was an Andy Hardy movie, compared with what was to come.

With the advent of the Sixties, the Japanese screen began to teem with prostitutes; the more bizarre their situations, the more the audiences seemed to like them. In The Shape of Night, an innocent girl falls in love with a pimp, not knowing his profession, and goes to live with him. She is willing enough to entertain the clients he starts bringing home, but she draws the line at going out into the streets for him, whereupon he has her gang-raped to teach her a lesson. The film ends with the pimp, castrated in a street fight and now wholly dependent upon the girl, murdered by her in retribution for ruining her life.

Sexual aberrations of all sorts now crowd the Japanese films, from the uninhibited experiments of teenaged delinquents to the kinkiest perversions of middle-aged adults. But by all odds the strangest film to come from Japan during the Sixties is An Introduction to Anthropology, which has been more succinctly (and aptly) translated into English as The Pornographer. Its hero is a man who has set up a profitable sideline making stag reels, sex drugs and aphrodisiacs and securing "virgins" for his clients--not so much for the money but because he sincerely believes that sexual satisfaction will make people happy. The police, however, interfere with his activities and, quite innocently, he contributes to the delinquency of the two teenaged children of the widow with whom he lives. At the end, he is alone on a house-boat drifting out into the Pacific, happily constructing a life-sized artificial woman--a "Dutch wife"--that will, he feels, make all men at last independent of the female of the species. Despite the fact that The Pornographer twice shows stag films in the making and draws no veil over its hero's related activities, it is far from being a pornographic film; its tone, in fact, is black comedy that darkens to tragedy as the man finds himself first exploited, then rejected in his efforts to benefit mankind.

Curiously, as many critics have observed, despite the sex and nudity that lace the eropros, one must turn for real eroticism in the Japanese cinema to the handful of serious pictures turned out each year by such noted directors as Kaneto Shindo, Masaki Kobayashi and Hiroshi Teshigahara. In Shindo's Onibaba, set in the 16th Century, a mother and a daughter-in-law who make their living by killing off wounded soldiers and selling their armor become rivals for the attentions of a farmer who lives nearby. Quite apart from the candor of its scenes of seduction and copulation, rarely has the face of naked lust been brought so graphically to the screen. In Kobayashi's colorful, picturesque Kwaidan, based on a group of ghost stories by Lafcadio Hearn, the first episode offers a bit of stylish necrophilia as a samurai, who has divorced his loving wife to marry a wealthy woman, returns to his earlier home and discovers his first wife waiting for him; they sleep together--but the following morning, what he finds nestled in his arms is a moldering corpse.

Of all the Japanese pictures to play in America during the Sixties, by far the most successful was Teshigahara's compelling, compassionate Woman in the Dunes, with scenes of nudity and erotic play that seemed totally appropriate to its wholly bizarre theme. In it, a young entomologist, collecting botanical specimens on a lonely stretch of sand, finds himself trapped at the bottom of a large sand pit, the prisoner of a woman whose sole occupation is to keep the sand from flowing into the hole. Neighbors send down food and water, for the safety of their own homes depends upon the sand's not shifting; they not only welcome the captive as an added hand but see to it that he does not escape. Reluctantly at first, but then with mounting fervor, the man begins to look upon his enforced companion as a woman, and she responds to him with passion. There is a horrifying moment when the neighbors, playing on the man's desire to escape the pit, promise to help him if he and the woman will make love in the open, where all can see; and, like a frantic animal, he almost rapes her before their eyes. But gradually the man adjusts to the rhythm of his new life and even begins to make scientific experiments. When the woman is ultimately carried away to bear his child, he chooses to remain below. Symbolic and stylized, Woman in the Dunes is a microcosmic allegory of the human condition, with sex given all the prominence it deserves. It was that rarest of films, an artistic and commercial success.

What has been happening in Japan and the rest of the world during the Sixties is perhaps best encapsulated in the British films of this same period: sharp increases in erotic production, independent production and international coproduction. It was the unqualified success of such British independents as Tony Richardson, Karel Reisz and Bryan Forbes that established independence as a way of life for American film makers (as it had already been established elsewhere by such artists as Antonioni, Bergman and Godard). And it was the unparalleled popularity of the Anglo-American James Bond films, which have so far grossed close to $90,000,000 in the U. S. market alone, that convinced every American studio that coproduction, with all the economic advantages of British government subsidy, was the surest answer to profitable picture-making.

By 1967, fully half the pictures made in England were backed by American studios and most British film makers accepted their new freedom as a challenge--perhaps more so than anywhere else in the world. They have risen to that challenge with films that embrace everything from the bawdy, roistering Tom Jones to the overt homosexuality of The Trials of Oscar Wilde, the implied homosexuality of The Servant, the child-molestation theme of Never Take Candy from a Stranger and The Mark, the miscegenation of A Taste of Honey and the promiscuity of The L-Shaped Room, Girl with the Green Eyes, Georgy Girl, The Knack, Darling, Alfie, Life at the Top, Poor Cow and many more--all refreshingly free of moralizing or sentimentalizing.

What is even more important, American companies have been distributing these films, which they have paid for, either in outright defiance of their own Code or via the thinly veiled subterfuge of such autonomous owned-and-operated subsidiaries as Claridge (Warner Bros.), Lopert (United Artists) and Royal (Columbia). Despite the former Code's specific strictures against scenes of abortion, Paramount persisted in its release of Alfie. Despite Alan Bates' rear-view nudity in Georgy Girl and Hayley Mills' in The Family Way, both films were distributed without the offending sequences removed. In more extreme cases, such as the overt Lesbianism of The Fox (made in Canada by British producer Raymond Stross for Warner Bros.) or the protracted boy-girl skinny-dip in the recent Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush, the distributing firms have merely turned them over to their subsidiaries without even deigning to show them to the Production Code officials. (There is perhaps added significance in the fact that the nudity in Mulberry Bush is visible only in the American version of the film; the offending sequence is not being shown in England.) Similarly, when MGM considerately asked director Michelangelo Antonioni if his would like to make a few cuts in his English-based Blow-Up in exchange for a Code seal, he replied that he preferred it as it was. Whereupon MGM, rather than appeal the Code's decision, minted its own new subsidiary, Regent Films, on the spot to handle the distribution independently.

The reasons behind this seeming leniency toward film making in England are many. For one thing, the British studios are clustered about London, with the result that the British film makers themselves tend to be part of the mainstream of the contemporary cultural scene, be they angry young men or the most far-out Mods. For another, the moment a John Osborne or a Shelagh Delaney breaks new dramatic ground in the theater, the moment a novel by John Braine or Alan Sillitoe sets in motion a new current in literature or when a Paul McCartney creates a new sound in music or a Peter Watkins offers a fresh approach to the documentary film, these people are promptly brought into the studios and given their head--as opposed to Hollywood, where the tendency is still to take new talents and set them to work on old-fashioned properties.

But perhaps the most telling development of all has been Britain's enlightened and effective approach to the problems of censorship. Rather than outright suppression (although this happens on occasion, particularly where violence is concerned), the nongovernmental British Board of Film Censors has long followed a tradition of classification: X for films suitable for adults only, A for adults and children under 16 when accompanied by parents or guardians, and U for everybody. Thus, a film maker who hopes to reach the broadest possible audience knows in advance that certain kinds of material must be omitted from his picture. On the other hand, the creators of such pictures as Cul-de-Sac, The Family Way and Our Mother's House, all of which received an X certificate in England, are perfectly free to make their films as they wish but with the full awareness that their audiences will be somewhat restricted. (The judgments of the British Board, while unofficial, are generally accepted by local authorities and enforced by the theater owners on pain of heavy fines or, for persistent offenders, loss of license.)

Since 1960, the so-called "club" cinemas, similar to our film societies in that one pays a membership fee to join, have carried this lenient policy a step farther. For a modest subscription fee, such organizations as Compton (which is now in film production) and Gala permit their members to see pictures irrespective of censorship sanctions--and this means not only sexploitation films produced specifically for this market but also such pictures as the French I Spit on Your Grave and Marlon Brando's The Wild One, both of which had long been banned for excessive violence. The censorship principle here seems to be to ensure that the public knows specifically what it is getting, rather than to make certain that it doesn't get what it wants.

There is no question that the British films of the past decade have led not only to new concepts of what constitutes adult entertainment on the American screen but to new levels of permissiveness on the part of America's censor groups. There is also no question that, either through force of example or through the even more persuasive tactic of coproduction deals, the American cinema is now taking a leading position in spreading this liberalized attitude throughout the world. One can only hope that the freedoms gained within these past few years will be further consolidated in the years ahead--and that producers everywhere will accept with maturity and discretion the responsibility such freedoms entail.

In their next--and final--installment of "The History of Sex in Cinema," authors Knight and Alpert zoom in for close-ups of the charismatic foreign and domestic sex stars of the Sixties, from the Continent's Julie Christie and Marcello Mastroianni to America's Raquel Welch and Paul Newman.