The History of Sex in Cinema

Part XX: Sex Stars of the Sixties

When 20th Century-Fox filed a suit for $50,000,000 against Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton in 1964 for damaging the box-office receipts of Cleopatra, as well as their own reputations, with their highly publicized off-screen liaison during the production of that epic disaster, it represented a last gasp on Hollywood's part to control the private lives of its stars through financial penalties. In previous decades, the power of the studios to do so had been potent. Ingrid Bergman, for one, had all but been drummed out of her career for "moral turpitude" with Roberto Rossellini during the late Forties. But stars during the Sixties breathed freer, if not purer, air. Indeed, Fox' suit was patently absurd on its face, for the soporific spectacle would probably have fared far worse if the two headstrong stars had not created an avalanche of titillating gossip during the making of the picture. (text continued on page 166) And the real-life romance turned out to be far more sensational than the tepid affair between Mark Antony and the Queen of the Nile as dramatized in the film, with the result that the movie was given an aura of sexuality that undoubtedly helped its success.

In retrospect, it can be seen that the Burtons were in the forefront of what might be termed the second Hollywood revolution. The first revolution had taken place during the Fifties, when the major stars seized control of their own financial destinies. Buttressed by phalanxes of agents and lawyers, many became corporate entities of their own and dealt with the studios from a position of strength, even though morals clauses (text continued on page 168) were still written into their contracts. During the Sixties, however, they dropped all pretense of being homebodies and lived, loved, mated, divorced and even gave birth without undue regard for the shocked sensibilities of maiden aunts and elderly grammar school teachers. However belatedly, they separated their public and private lives.

So radically and speedily did public moral attitudes change during the Sixties that censure virtually became a thing of the past and movie marriages less of a necessity than a convenience--and when they were inconvenient, several stars made no bones about saying so. Thus, Julie Christie, one of the more luminous of the new breed, candidly told interviewers that marriage was an unsuitable state while she was involved with the frenetic exigencies of her zooming career and that she much preferred sharing a temporary abode with some congenial "mate" of her choice. Another dazzling newcomer, Faye Dunaway, declared categorically, "I think, marriage is a hindrance to love." Such statements would have been almost unthinkable ten years earlier. On the other side of the Atlantic, Italy's Monica Vitti lived openly with her favorite director, Michelangelo Antonioni. And in France, Jeanne Moreau was frank when she told a reporter, "What I like most of all is to act and to make love. Is there anything more that a woman could ask?" Most male stars remained unwilling--out of a certain chivalry--to name their current attachments; but Michael Caine, the British smoothie, intimated he was close to being a well-heeled Alfie in real life as well as on the screen, and publicly proclaimed his disinclination to settle down with only one bird in a cage of domesticity; after all, he had tried marriage once and had found the relationship unsatisfactory. Albert Finney was another British luminary who developed a reputation as a bird fancier; and on these shores, Warren Beatty did his level best to emulate him, changing partners with near-frenzied abandon.

It was almost as though the achievement of stardom now gave the newly anointed an opportunity to lead the free-swinging lives of their juvenile dreams. But more remarkable than this was the absence of any condemnatory verbiage in the popular press. The mass-circulation magazines such as Life, Look, McCall's, The Saturday Evening Post and the Ladies' Home Journal, which had formerly taken it upon themselves to be the custodians of America's moral heritage, still ran "personality" pieces of film stars but now added distinctly gamy tidbits to their portraits. In a recent issue of Look, for example, a picture-and-text story about Catherine Deneuve, the piquant French sex star, informed readers that "she often sees director Roger Vadim, whom she refused to marry when he became the father of her son Christian...."

The wheel had not merely turned, this was a new era entirely. Sex was now regarded as so normal, natural and healthy a function that many of the female stars found it not only socially acceptable but downright essential to cultivate their sexual images. Where formerly only a brazen few, such as the late Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield, and minor stars of the Mamie Van Doren variety, had disrobed for picture spreads in men's magazines, Playboy's pages were graced during the new decade by a shapely procession of female stars au naturel: Ursula Andress, Joanna Pettet, Sylva Koscina, Susan Strasberg, Kim Novak, Carroll Baker, Stella Stevens and Carol Lynley, among several others. Not only did these young ladies feel that the exposure was helpful to their film careers but producers were eager, through this kind of advance unveiling, to stress the nudity quotients in their pictures. With the rapid erosion of censorial restrictions in the Sixties, Hollywood's female stars and would-be stars had the opportunity to display a good deal more than their acting ability.

Heading the parade was the beautiful, tragic Elizabeth Taylor, who, as early as 1959, gave some indication of things to come when she emerged from the Mediterranean in Suddenly, Last Summer clad in a clinging bathing suit that left little to the imagination. But more than her seductive curves, the drama of her personal life was the key to her continuing popularity. At times, it seemed that someone at that Great Typewriter in the Sky was scripting an impossibly corny soap opera for her to suffer through. She was a beauty, she was the acknowledged queen of the movies, she was rich, she was showered with attention and gifts and even the critics grudgingly acknowledged her professionalism as an actress. Yet this woman who had everything that an $80-a-week typist might dream of was sorely tried by sorrow, bereavement and a near-fatal illness. Four times married, twice divorced and once widowed--all by the age of 28--she moved elegantly through life like a daily participant in a gossip column, a target of voracious photographers and reporters wherever she went.

She was also judged by 20th Century-Fox to be worth $1,000,000, plus ten percent of the proceeds, as the Queen of the Nile in Cleopatra--with such extras as a personal hairdresser and $3500 weekly toward living expenses thrown in. Arriving in London in September of 1960, where production headquarters was at first located, she was soon laid low with a series of complaints that included pneumonia, various viruses and infected teeth. She was declared well enough to begin work in January--but then she came down with a cold; within days the word spread that Elizabeth Taylor was "at death's door." It was true; she had contracted double pneumonia and was gasping for every breath.

A tracheotomy was performed and her weakened lungs responded; although the accompanying fever zoomed to 108 degrees, she rallied and eventually pulled through. Two months later, still shaky, only partially recovered--but her eyes as lustrous as ever and her scarred throat clearly visible above the neckline of her gown--she managed to mount the stage at Hollywood's Academy Award ceremonies to accept an Oscar, voted to her less for her performance as the unhappy trollop in Butterfield 8 than for her triumphant struggle for life in a London hospital.

Meanwhile, Cleopatra's expensive sets in England were dismantled and filming was rescheduled for the following September in Rome. By now, the bedeviled project had a new director--Joseph L. Mankiewicz--and a new cast that included Rex Harrison as Caesar and Richard Burton as Antony. In Ruth Waterbury's biographical panegyric, Elizabeth Taylor, the historic moment of meeting between the two stars was highlighted by Burton's opening remark to Elizabeth: "You're too fat." The effect on Mrs. Eddie Fisher was cataclysmic; not only did her poundage melt away but so did her affections for her husband--and rumors that they had been transferred to Burton began flying around the world.

Suppression of the story by ulcerated studio press agents proved impossible, thanks to the hordes of Italian paparazzi who plagued the pair with long-lens cameras and the battalions of reporters who checked their every movement. Denials were issued--by Burton, by his wife, Sybil, by Elizabeth, by Eddie--but all to no avail. Sybil fled in one direction, Eddie in another--and eventually Fisher took refuge in a New York hospital bed, "tired, overwrought and in need of a sedative," according to his manager, who also stoutly claimed that Eddie and Liz were as devoted as ever. Liz, however, made her feelings fairly clear when Eddie put a call through to her in Rome and she relayed the message that she was "too busy" to bother answering the telephone.

Despite disapproving editorials--including one in the Vatican newspaper--Burton and Taylor continued to keep each other's company and soon costarred in another film: The V.I.P.s, for which Elizabeth received her customary $1,000,000 plus percentage; and Burton's fee shot up to $500,000. Eddie Fisher was now mentioning divorce from his absent (continued on page 172)Sex In Cinema(continued from page 168) wife, and Sybil Burton also began to exhibit distinct symptoms of rejection. After protracted negotiations, in which a considerable amount of cash changed hands with their spurned partners, Richard and Elizabeth made it legal in March 1964.

Although the public began to evidence signs of satiety at the avalanche of publicity attendant on all these events, Cleopatra was a stellar attraction during its first months of exhibition, despite reviews that ranged from mixed to shattering. But Elizabeth probably could not have cared less. Finishing The V.I.P.s quickly, she played opposite Burton again in MGM's The Sandpiper, a drama of transcendent mawkishness, with Elizabeth as a bohemian beachnik and Burton as a ministerial headmaster who leaps from the pulpit into a guilt-laden affair with her.

Both were more careful about their vehicles thereafter--and neither could have chosen better than Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, directed by the gifted Mike Nichols. Deliberately despoiling her luxuriantly female image, Elizabeth transformed herself into a frowzy virago of 40, spitting out insults and epithets--some never heard before in American films--at her professor husband. She was suitably rewarded with another Oscar at the 1966 Academy Awards. Her subsequent performance as Kate in The Taming of the Shrew was a trifle fishwifey, but she was ultimately subdued admirably by Burton. Her incipient double chin and her matronly spread have since increased as she continues to share her husband's fondness for the cocktail hour; but at 36, she's still one of the world's most beautiful women--and a celebrity of the first rank.

Her chief rival during the previous decade, Marilyn Monroe, had also run into more than her share of tribulation. Increasingly moody and neurotic after her divorce from Arthur Miller, hung up on a variety of chemical soporifics, the blonde goddess finally removed herself from this world in August of 1962. Hardly had the eulogies and homilies been pronounced when a good many stars and agents realized that a distinct vacancy now existed in the ranks of sex stars. Jayne Mansfield might have been her chief beneficiary, but she was too gross a type for the current market, and her career continued to fizzle until fate struck at her, too; she perished in a car crash in 1967.

The rate of attrition among sex goddesses was growing increasingly high; but that didn't discourage Carroll Baker from making her bid to enter the pantheon. Thirty-one at the time of Marilyn's death and the mother of two children, she attempted to capitalize on her early reputation as a sizzler, achieved when she appeared in 1956 as the thumb-sucking tease of Baby Doll. A few mediocre films followed in which she revealed little flesh and less acting ability; so she returned to being a sex symbol--or trying to be one. In Station Six-Sahara, for example, she appeared, preposterously enough, as a visiting nymphomaniac at a North African oil-pumping station. Taking sun baths in the skimpiest of bikinis, displaying shapely legs and her so-so cleavage to the sex-starved crew of the pumping station, she made for a less-than-lush oasis in the desert.

Something of a disaster, the picture wasn't released in this country until after Miss Baker had found the opportunity to put even more of herself on display in Joseph E. Levine's The Carpetbaggers, made by Paramount from the lurid novel by Harold Robbins. During filming at the studio, word leaked out, hardly by accident, that Carroll was doing one of her scenes in the nude. In the hope of implying that the film was hotter than a stag reel, the studio barred reporters from the set.

When the press somehow managed to get to Carroll anyhow to learn the truth of the matter, she blandly admitted that she had, indeed, shown all for her art in several scenes. "The decision to appear nude was mine," she stated. "I am an actress. As such I am called upon to interpret a part.... The trend now is toward showing human emotions in more depth. This involves sexual instincts." Though her views were commendable, they might have been more convincing if the film in question had not been The Carpetbaggers, since it contained little that was recognizable as human emotion--and precious little nudity either, except for a hasty shot of Carroll's derrière while seated at her dressing table. Paramount had either thought better about violating the Code or the entire nude-scene routine had been a publicity put-on.

Nevertheless, Levine was quick to sign up Carroll for Harlow, and his publicity office ground out endless turgid releases proclaiming her America's new sex goddess. But the validity of this claim was widely questioned; Time, for one, described Carroll as a "middle-aged housewife." Carroll's wooden performance in Harlow--further hindered by a shoddy script--finally convinced even Levine and Paramount that she was not the erotic symbol they had touted her to be. They forthwith decided that their contract with her was less than binding. An out-of-court settlement soothed her wounded feelings and Carroll headed for the Continent, where she hoped to find more appreciation of her charms and abilities.

Another Hollywood glamor girl, Natalie Wood, successfully circumnavigated the professional reefs on which Carroll's career had foundered. A working actress since the age of four, the former Natasha Gurdin was 22 when Elia Kazan helped her epitomize the frustrated sexuality of a Midwestern girl raised by strait-laced parents in Splendor in the Grass. Slim but captivatingly curvaceous, Natalie achieved an early reputation as a swinger in her private life. Among her escorts was the idolized James Dean, with whom she appeared in Rebel Without a Cause, a role that made her an overnight teenage favorite. She was also squired about Hollywood by Elvis Presley, but she by no means confined her romantic life to the youngsters; in 1957, she spoke of a "definite understanding" with Raymond Burr and, later the same year, of a somewhat hazier understanding with Robert Vaughn. So frenetically did young Natalie live it up during this period that her Warner Bros, bosses felt it necessary to advise her to cut out the late hours and the champagne--and to tone down her longshoreman's vocabulary. At the end of the year, she reformed by marrying Robert Wagner--then one of Hollywood's ranking glamor boys--but her instinct for flamboyance and the wild life did not lie dormant for long.

Her large earnings were cannily invested, however, and Natalie's film schedule slowed down considerably, largely due to a reluctance to approve the slew of scripts then being proffered to her. Soon thereafter, she shed Wagner as a mate and resumed playing the field (one of her favorite swains: the ever-ready Warren Beatty) and periodically announcing or retracting her engagement to some rich manufacturer or other. It was evident by 1965 that her popularity had declined, particularly with the younger crowd--as was underscored when the staff of the Harvard Lampoon voted her the Worst Actress of 1966 and, uncharitably, made it apply to 1967 and 1968 also. Wounded but still game, Natalie traveled to Cambridge to accept the award in person--something no other actor or actress had previously done.

Another recipient of the Lampoon's uncovered award was Jane Fonda, who was voted the 1962 dishonor for her performance as a frigid young widow in The Chapman Report. Jane remained undiscouraged--it was only her third film effort, after all--and if she has not gone on to scale the more rarefied heights of stardom, she has since achieved considerable popularity and acting ability. Being the daughter of the distinguished Henry doubtlessly lubricated her career: but her patrimony, in a way, was also a handicap, for the physical resemblance was so close as to cause (continued on page 254)Sex in Cinema(continued from page 172) one critic to remark that she reminded him of her father in drag, and others initially implied that her sole claim to fame was the accident of birth. Jane does, however, owe at least some of her success to her lanky father; her 110 pounds are neatly distributed on a willowy 5' 7" frame, just right for the fashion modeling with which her career began. Soon she was successful enough to appear on five simultaneous magazine covers and to command the goodly wage of $50 per hour. Some of these earnings she used to study with acting teacher Lee Strasberg in 1958, but Jane claims she delayed entering the acting dodge for fear of disgracing the family name.

Being a Fonda, however, was no barrier to obtaining a few stage roles, after which Joshua Logan screen-tested and promptly cast her for the film version of Tall Story. Jane made her first appearance on screen wearing the briefest of shorts and pedaling a bicycle--and from then on, the camera focused lovingly on her well-rounded rear at every opportunity. In such frothy and farcical subsequent films as Sunday in New York, Cat Ballou and Barefoot in the Park, Jane's sense of comic timing was refined and she seemed well on her way to becoming a youthful replacement for Doris Day. But France beckoned, and she heeded the call. Within a year, she was a favorite of the European masses and the literati alike. Director René Clément starred her in Joy House and Roger Vadim, who specialized in making stars of his wives and vice versa, became her constant escort and gave her a role in Circle of Love, his gamy version of the already oversexed Arthur Schnitzler play La Ronde. Though her French left something to be desired, Vadim made her look so desirable that no one really cared.

Obviously desolate without a movie star for a wife, Vadim married Jane in Las Vegas and promptly put her--all of her--on display in The Game Is Over, his adaptation of Zola's La Curée. For the delectation of those who might have missed Mrs. Vadim's first show, Vadim costumed her (if that's the word) in provocative futuristic raiment that revealed more than it concealed, for his far-out film version of the popular and sexy French comic strip Barbarella, which blended science fiction with sadomasochism and every other conceivable variant of the sexual experience--"a kinky 2001," as one critic dubbed it. Whatever else it did, the role added little to her reputation as an actress.

Other pretty young things, new on the movie scene in the Sixties, took their film careers more seriously than Jane, but it still seemed a matter of chance which of them succeeded in their bids for stardom. Probably no one had a greater opportunity, nor made a more spectacular beginning, than Sue Lyon, who, at 15, was chosen for the title role of Lolita by protean director Stanley Kubrick. But Sue somehow never clicked in her subsequent parts and today--though she still appears in an occasional film--is little more than an erotic memory in Hollywood. Yet another teenaged flash in the Hollywood pan was petite and virgin-visaged Sandra Dee, who made her film debut at 15 in Until They Sail and, under the aegis of producer Ross Hunter, soon achieved star status. Hunter's theory was that America's women still hungered, in spite of vast social and moral changes, for old-time Hollywood glamor; his proof of the theory would be Sandra, whom he intended to mold into a sexy-sweet and glamorous star who would enchant women as well as captivate men. But the best-laid plans of star makers oft gang agley, and Sandra sank before she was fully launched--mainly because Hunter's blueprint was years out of date.

Equally precocious but more enduring was Tuesday Weld, who was only 13 when she debuted in 1956 in Rock, Rock, Rock and was soon known around Hollywood as "the baby beatnik." By the time she was 17, it was bruited about that Tuesday was swilling booze like a stevedore, that she ran around with balding bachelors three times her age and that she sometimes looked almost as old as they did by the morning after. In 1963, when she was a preternaturally mature 20, Tuesday decided to reform. She deserted Hollywood in favor of New York, haunted the public library, took an apartment in the dreary nether reaches of Greenwich Village--and observed classes at the Actors Studio. The result: When she appeared opposite Steve McQueen in The Cincinnati Kid, she made co-star Ann-Margret look like an amateur at both acting and sex appeal. The former was no challenge; but the latter was a considerable achievement. Her success at both gives promise of bigger and better things to come--even at the advanced age of 25.

Tuesday's torrid rival in The Cincinnati Kid--born Ann-Margaret Olsson in Sweden and brought to America by her parents at the age of five--made her screen debut in 1961 in Pocketful of Miracles. But she wasn't really noticed until her appearance in 1962 on the Academy Award Show, where she did no more than sing one of the nominated songs--but how she sang it. Bouncing, jiggling and wiggling in a skintight gown, she belted out the lyrics with a growling animality that all but popped the eyes. Though that single performance earned her a succession of roles, this blatant sexuality ultimately hurt her image and her career; she comes on so strong that, in addition to lacking subtlety, she lacks believability. "Ann-Margret comes through dirty no matter what she plays," critic Pauline Kael remarked; and by making sex seem cheap at a time when healthier attitudes were beginning to emerge on screen, she began to fall behind the times.

It was a time when more and more would-be stars used every opportunity to advance themselves through the art of the still photograph. And none was a more accomplished mistress of that art than Raquel Welch, who rose to star status--with the help of a dedicated press agent and her own spectacular endowments--long before her first picture was released: a Neanderthal potboiler called One Million Years B. C.

No less photogenic, though hardly as persistent as Miss Welch in pursuing the lensmen, have been such "instant stars" of the Sixties as Candy Bergen, Anjanette Comer, Jill St. John, Playboy Playmate Stella Stevens and Sharon Tate. Whatever their talent as actresses, they were familiar faces--and physiques--thanks to magazine and newspaper exposure; and this alone was enough to endear them to the studios or to independent producers who were trying to assemble attractive packages they could sell to the studios. Sidney Lumet, for example, faced with the formidable problem of casting eight girls as the Vassar graduates who made up The Group, had no hesitation about signing the totally inexperienced Candy Bergen for an important role, or giving one of the meatiest parts to a relative unknown, Joanna Pettet, whose slim, provocative frame soon graced the pages of Playboy. Mia Farrow also made her way to stardom through the magazine-layout route--with a considerable assist from newspaper headlines linking her with Frank Sinatra.

Promising as most of the above young ladies were and are, they have been outshone by Katharine Ross, a luminous-eyed, vibrant-voiced and freckle-faced 5' 3" mite of a girl who, although a Hollywoodite by birth, was anything but anxious for a career in its major industry. Instead, after a year of college, she went to San Francisco and joined the prestigious Actors Workshop, then run by Herbert Blau and Jules Irving; and to augment her minuscule Workshop salary, she took some television roles that brought her to the attention of Universal. Her first film for that studio was Games, in which she played the terrorized society wife of a husband scheming to take over her fortune. Also in the film was Simone Signoret, who was sufficiently impressed with Katharine's talent to recommend her to Mike Nichols, who, at the time, was seeking a girl to play Anne Bancroft's daughter in The Graduate. Nichols, having emerged successfully from the rigors of bringing Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? to the screen, tested Katharine with an obscure off-Broadway actor, Dustin Hoffman and, to everyone's surprise, gave them the roles. Both received Academy Award nominations and were henceforth in the enviable position of being able to choose from among dozens of screenplays.

In the Sixties, more often than not, it took the right role to make a star; in the case of Faye Dunaway, it was the role of Bonnie Parker in Bonnie and Clyde. A blonde, coolly sensuous beauty and an actress of distinction, Faye also possessed that intangible something known as style. Her attributes were recognized while she was still a drama major at Boston University. Upon graduation, she was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London, but bypassed the fellowship to join the Lincoln Center Repertory Company, and to take a role in the Broadway stage version of A Man for All Seasons. But her big chance came when she took over the Barbara Loden role in After the Fall, the Arthur Miller confessional that appeared to ungraciously castigate his former wife, Marilyn Monroe. The reviews were glowing, and Faye further enhanced her reputation with an appearance in Hogan's Goal, a critically admired off-Broadway hit--by which time several movie producers were hot on her trail, among them Sam Spiegel and Otto Preminger. After debuting inauspiciously on screen in Spiegel's The Happening, she followed up with a featured role in the equally unimpressive, if more expensive, Hurry Sundown for Preminger. But then, fortuitously, came an offer from director Arthur Penn and producer-actor Warren Beatty to co-star in a movie they were planning about the short but eventful career of a pair of Texas bank robbers. The rest, as the expression goes, is box-office history.

The remarkable success of Bonnie and Clyde in financial terms alone (some $30,000,000 world-wide) gave resounding boosts to the careers of everyone connected with it, and the controversy over what a few considered to be its excessive violence helped make it the most talked-about film of the year. And in one of those quirks of popular taste for which film makers are ever grateful, Bonnie and Clyde even sparked a fashion fever: Faye's Thirties costumes were copied and modified by designers, who brought back the maxiskirt and wide-lapelled mannish suits worn with shirt and tie, and long, floppy knitted sweaters. Following the new fashion in movie-star interviews as well, Faye was inclined to be candid; when a British reporter asked her to confirm the rumor that she had once been married to the late Lenny Bruce, he was answered with a firm denial--she hadn't married him, she said; she had only lived with him, adding that it had been one of the most wonderful periods of her life. Of her more recent relationship with photographer Jerry Schatz-berg, she termed it an "engagement." Despite, or perhaps in part because of, such off-screen candor, Faye seems destined to become a genuine celebrity.

Others aren't likely to be so lucky; for careers in American films have had a way of zooming and faltering during the Sixties, and this has been especially true for actresses; relatively few, even the young ones, have endured with their status undiminished. The males, on the other hand, have tended to be more durable. Many--Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Burt Lancaster, Gregory Peck, Kirk Douglas--are still going strong despite the fact that they celebrated their 50th birthdays during the decade. Even the grizzled and 60ish John Wayne and Cary Grant continue to hold their own. And those new stars who have emerged--Lee Marvin, James Coburn, Steve McQueen--are almost all well along in years. One reason for this is that maturity in years, with its implied sexual sophistication, has come to be regarded as desirable and attractive. Another reason is that the male stars are more aggressive about coping with the changing financial structure of the industry. Sinatra, for example, has become a law unto himself: he chooses his own screen properties, commissions screenplays, employs directors and functions as a subcontractor with a studio. With this power, of course, goes the privilege of choosing the plum role for himself.

Sinatra has also taken to adding strong doses of sex and violence, in order to maintain his he-man image. In Tony Rome, he played a hard-bitten Miami private eye who was well acquainted with the city's clip joints and hookers and took his pleasures on the fly. And in The Detective, he played a tough New York cop who had to cope with a repellent case of homosexual murder and with a wife who had nymphomaniac tendencies; the salty dialog employed in the film would have been unthinkable only a few years before. By keeping himself au courant with the ever-increasing permissiveness regarding subject matter and treatment, Sinatra also kept himself on top of the Hollywood heap.

Similarly. Dean Martin, the drinking man's Cary Grant, found new favor in the Sixties with his relaxed, insouciant attitude toward booze and broads, particularly in his impersonation of Matt Helm, one of the more successful American answers to Britain's Bond. Martin, born Dino Crocetti in 1917, worked as a mill hand, a gas-station attendant and a prize fighter before becoming the vocalist partner of Jerry Lewis in a nightclub act that became the sensation of the late Forties and brought the two of them first to television, then into movies. When Lewis decided to go his own way, the wiseacres predicted a rapid demise for his straight-man side-kick; but the new Dino--amused, tolerant, knowledgeable, especially about sex--soared as a solo, while Lewis continued to grind out ever more adolescent Taff riots.

If the role of a black Sinatra is open, only one actor fits the bill: Sidney Poitier, whose film career dates back to 1950. Symptomatic of the change that has come over the American screen in that interim is the fact that in his first picture, No Way Out, he was spat upon by a white psychopath; while in In the Heat of the Night he was able to deliver a resounding slap to the face of a Southern bigot. In the same year, To Sir, with Love and Guess Who's Coming to Dinner established him among the industry's box-office champions and made him a millionaire. But despite the discreet kiss he bestowed upon Katharine Houghton in Dinner, Poitier remained for many black people a kind of Uncle Tom, a figure of implacable probity who could always be counted upon to do the noble thing--by white standards. Anguished by this image, Poitier sought to change it by writing and starring in For Love of Ivy, perhaps the first major film to center around the love story of two Negroes. A box-office hit, it presented Poitier as an elegant, suave, amusing and emphatically sexual rogue.

Far more of a champion to the black community, however, is the fast-rising Jim Brown, former superstar of the Cleveland Browns, who--characteristically--took virile pride in his color in The Dirty Dozen and engaged in some steamy love scenes with Diahann Carroll in The Split. Significantly, the brawny ex-fullback, was the only character to emerge with any virtue in that film's overwhelmingly white cast. By the late Sixties, Hollywood was beginning to act as if there had never been a Stepin Fetchit. Before long, there seems little doubt that Brown will be in a position to emulate Poitier's formula for success--and independence. Head of his own production company--like Sinatra--Poitier is able to pick and choose (and even write) the stories he wants to make; and as one of the industry's most eminently bankable personalities, he can withhold script approval on the films of others until they are altered to his taste.

No less firmly in command of his own destiny is Paul Newman, particularly since his price has skyrocketed to a $1,000,000 fee per picture. Newman's early career was traced in Sex Stars of the Fifties; but in the Sixties, through a combination of strong roles, acting intensity and masculine appeal, he overcame the Brandoesque image with which he had been saddled and established a firm screen personality of his own--usually that of a charming rat who was not above rape (as in Hud) when it came to having his way with the ladies. Unlike Brando--a more gifted actor, who allowed his career to decline through his choice of flabby roles--Newman took chances with what appeared to be experimental material. He was a lost young pool shark in The Hustler, one of the better American pictures of the decade; and he brought his flashy role of Chance Wayne effectively to the screen in Sweet Bird of Youth, a melodramatic mélange of moral and political corruption in the Deep South. He also made a few boners, as in A New Kind of Love and in an eminently forgettable period piece called Lady L; but Newman was resilient and gave his most striking performance in Cool Hand Luke, as a noncomformist prisoner in a Southern work camp.

So popular had he become by 1967 that his very blue-eyed presence in a project often gave the financial leaders of the industry the courage to gamble on unconventional and original material; for, good or bad, his movies usually turned a profit. Refusing to be typed either on the screen or in real life, he made his home in Connecticut with his wife (Joanne Woodward) and children, rather than in Hollywood; he preferred driving a Volkswagen to a Lincoln Continental; and he publicly declared himself against this country's involvement in Vietnam and worked energetically for the nomination of Senator Eugene McCarthy during the 1968 Presidential campaign. A thinking actor, he also insists on putting more than his two cents' worth into the directorial development of his roles, and last year took the ultimate step by directing his wife in Rachel, Rachel, a touching film about the belated love life of a spinster schoolteacher.

His onetime model, meanwhile, the most magnetic male figure of the previous decade, had allowed himself to take on flesh, had gotten horrendously involved in domestic difficulties and had floundered through a succession of unsuccessful films. After a financial and directorial debacle with One-Eyed Jacks (1961), Brando took part in another ill-starred monstrosity, the remake of Mutiny on the Bounty, and further fouled himself up during the filming of that picture by impregnating a sloe-eyed Tahitian by the name of Tarita. Already embattled with his first wife, Anna Kashfi, whom he was reported to have married after she became pregnant, Brando had to endure what he most detested: a public airing of his private life.

All that sustained him was the magic of his name, which was still sufficient for John Huston to pair him with Elizabeth Taylor in Reflections in a Golden Eye. As an Army major tormented by a wife contemptuous of his impotence and latent homosexuality, he displayed flashes of his old power and sensitivity; but even so, the picture was blasted by most critics. Though still undeniably gifted, Brando suffers from what some consider a basic disdain for the art of acting. Perhaps in compensation for what he felt was a fundamentally unworthy endeavor, he has begun to give himself liberally, as Newman has, to the support of the numerous causes he believes in--among them, the civil rights struggle and humane treatment for American Indians. Heading pudgily toward his mid-40s, Brando shows signs of losing his pulling power at the box office; indeed, it has been rumored that his presence in a film is like an albatross hovering over a doomed ship. Certainly, as the end of the decade approaches, the disasters are mounting.

A much firmer hold on his film career has been maintained by Steve McQueen, who, though less creatively endowed than Brando, undoubtedly enjoys more popular appeal. According to one critic, McQueen is "an oddball who combines the cockiness of Cagney, the glower of Bogart and the rough-diamond glow of Garfield"--a potent combination but one to which McQueen adds a charm and a sensitivity all his own; women are attracted to, and men admire, the masculine authority he imparts to his roles. McQueen comes naturally by his toughness and cockiness. Born in Indianapolis, Indiana, in 1930, he was deserted by his father while still a baby. His mother took him to an uncle's farm in Slater, Missouri, then later to Southern California, where young Terence Stephen neglected school in favor of the streets. He was finally sent to Boys Republic, a school for problem children; but at 15, he ran off again and drifted into a series of occupations that hardly seemed to foretell a promising future: At one time or another, he was an oil worker, a seaman, a carnival huckster, a cabdriver, a poker-playing hustler and a bartender. When he eventually played a poker shark in The Cincinnati Kid, McQueen really knew what he was doing.

After a hitch with the Marines, he went to New York and wandered aimlessly from job to job, until an actress friend introduced him to acting coach Sanford Meisner--who told the incredulous McQueen, then 21, that he had talent. Though his first role was unpromising--a one-line walk-on in a Yiddish play--other acting jobs soon turned up in summer stock and road companies of Broadway hits. Turning serious, he applied at the Actors Studio and was accepted. Eventually, he took over the Ben Gazzara role in A Hatful of Rain, then signed on for a TV series, Wanted--Dead or Alive, that ran for three years. At the time, it was thought that excessive television exposure killed an actor's chances for success in the movies, but McQueen was the first exception; capable young leading men were growing scarce. And when his brash secondary role in Frank Sinatra's undistinguished Never So Few caught the fancy of MGM, the television larder began to be raided, with McQueen leading the ranks of its refugees toward movie stardom.

Though anything but a publicity seeker, McQueen did not lack for attention from the press. A talented motorcyclist, close to championship caliber in racing events--and, for a time, an auto racer, too--McQueen enjoyed careening through the California streets, often with the police in hot pursuit. It was difficult for him to slow down, even to attend his wedding; he was on his way to the minister with his bride-to-be when screaming police sirens halted their car. When Steve explained their destination, the state troopers thoughtfully provided a reverend--and served as witnesses at the ceremony. His cycling talents came in handy for his first big hit, The Great Escape (1963). in. which he zoomed about the German countryside outwitting half the Wehrmacht with his spectacular stunts, until he was finally cornered.

A twitchy grin--belying the explosive potential of violence within--gave him a recognizable personality that he went on to display with professional authority in such films as The Sand Pebbles and Nevada Smith. Hollywood came to regard him as one of the industry's most reliable male stars and he soon moved up to the $1,000,000-per-picture bracket. To protect his holdings, he formed his own production company and farmed himself out for such projects as The Thomas Crown Affair. By then, he had traded his speeding proclivities for puttering around his handsome house high in the fashionable hills of Brentwood, devoting himself to his wife and children. Remembering his ill-starred youth, he has even established a scholarship for other problem children at Boys Republic.

Another television refugee is the darkly handsome James Garner, who was once convinced he would spend his declining years starring on the tube in such series as Son of Maverick and Cheyenne Revisited. In 1962, however, he risked all by appearing in a straight--and decidedly square--role in William Wyler's denatured version of The Children's Hour, then went the action route in The Great Escape and finally found his forte in the good-natured comedy of such films as Move Over, Darling and The Americanization of Emily. Looking younger than his 40 years, Garner has since established himself as one of the most popular, if unexciting, of the ranking male stars. And when Garner is not available for the kind of parts he plays, it is frequently the Australian-born Rod Taylor who gets the nod these days.

McQueen was in his early 30s before his career got off the ground; Garner and Taylor were even older. Of those few male stars of the Sixties who are still in the first flush of youth, none in Hollywood is bigger or brasher than the self-assured Warren Beatty. The brother of Shirley MacLaine and her junior by three years, he began his climb to fame as early as 1955, when he enrolled at 18 in Northwestern's School of Speech and Drama. He could have gone just about anywhere--for, while at high school in his home state of Virginia, he had been the star center of the football team and no fewer than ten offers of football scholarships had flooded in. But Warren worried about damaging his good looks and eschewed the college gridiron.

Easily bored--and sometimes boring others, in turn, with his offbeat behavior--he left college after a year and repaired to New York, where he enrolled at an acting school run by Stella Adler. Resolutely refusing any aid or assistance from either his sister or other members of his family, he lived in a furnished room in Manhattan, played cocktail-hour piano at a midtown bar and worked for a time as a sand hog on a new third tube of the Lincoln Tunnel. Eventually, his striking good looks got him into television, and he alternated TV appearances with stock-company jobs--at one of which William Inge and Joshua Logan saw him and arranged a screen test for what eventually turned out to be Splendor in the Grass, directed by Elia Kazan and written by Inge. Meanwhile, Inge got him the lead in his play A Loss of Roses. The critics liked Warren, but the play failed.

Splendor, however, was a box-office winner--in spite of mixed reviews. Life hailed him as "a new and major movie star, combining the little-boy-lost charms of the late James Dean and the smoldering good looks of Marlon Brando." Actually, he looked like no one but his shaggily handsome self, and he was not much of an actor--yet. But he did have a sleepy charm and, with it, youth--a film commodity of which there was not then much around, beyond the confectionary Frankie Avalon and Troy Donahue. In five subsequent films, however (The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone, All Fall Down, Lilith, Promise Her Anything and Mickey One), Beatty appeared to be losing his early luster--and he began to acquire a reputation for being difficult. While making Lilith, he drove the late Robert Rossen to the limits of endurance with his temperament and intractability, once refusing to work for three days unless a line in the script was amended.

But Beatty scored heavily in the field of seduction; he literally mowed the girls down--Natalie Wood, Joan Collins and Leslie Caron, among many others--in much publicized rapid succession. So smitten was Miss Caron that she left home and hearth, inspiring her husband to file for divorce and name Beatty as corespondent. Undaunted, Warren was soon off, looking for other places to pitch woo and make hay. Barbara Harris, the piquant Broadway star, made his not-so-little black book, according to gossip columnist Sheila Graham, and it wasn't long before Beatty was being seen with an obviously smitten Julie Christie.

Ironically enough, it was as an impotent, hick-town bank robber that Beatty at last hit his stride and became one of the biggest, richest and most sought-after stars of the late Sixties. And he had only himself to thank for it, too; he saw the possibilities in a script called Bonnie and Clyde, purchased it for $75,000 and decided to both produce and direct it as a starring vehicle for himself and his sister, Shirley, whom he wisely replaced with Faye Dunaway on the grounds that, as Time expressed it, he would be adding "incest to injury"--since the script featured gobs of gore and sexual transgressions galore. No less wisely, Beatty replaced himself as director with the gifted Arthur Penn, inveigled the requisite $2,500,000 out of Jack L. Warner and gave the performance of his life as Clyde Barrow. Time called the film "a watershed picture, the kind that signals a new style, a new trend" and no one agreed with this estimate more than Beatty himself, who had produced a classic, made himself a millionaire overnight and helped inaugurate a new era of boldness in American film making. If boldness consisted of new wrinkles in the presentation of sex and new dimensions in violence, then it was abundantly in evidence by the end of the decade.

One male star who benefited mightily from the trend toward violence was tall, lean, squinty-eyed Clint Eastwood, a Californian who ambled around the studios for several years playing small roles and finally landed a six-year role in Rawhide, a series that earned him a large fan following but no movie offers. Not until, that is, Clint received an invitation from Europe to play the menacing hero of an Italian-German-Spanish Western called A Fistful of Dollars, which was so successful that it spawned not only a sequel (For a Few Dollars More) but a host of imitators.

Another new star with the capacity to handle violence and still maintain his cool is James Coburn, who came up fast in the mid-Sixties. The lanky, long-faced Coburn has also been eminently successful in adding a comic, even a farcical touch to his portrayals; his ironic acting style is ideally suited for the irreverent mood that has begun to infiltrate a good many of Hollywood's films. But he made little impression on audiences until he played a cold-blooded, knife-throwing cowpuncher in The Magnificent Seven. In The Americanization of Emily, his humorous side emerged; then producer Said David, deciding it was high time to caricature James Bond, tapped Coburn for the role of Derek Flint, an insubordinate supersecret agent who dwells luxuriously in a remarkably well-equipped apartment designed for his special tastes: Dwelling with him are not one or two or even three but four exotic beauties, whose continuous presence on the premises Flint explains with the remark, "Man does not live by bread alone." On the crest of Our Man Flint's success--and that of its sequel, In Like Flint--Coburn has turned himself into a corporation that hires out its chief executive at $500,000 per picture. Coburn, like the grizzled McQueen and Eastwood, signaled a marked departure from the collar-ad good looks of former matinee idols. Indeed, in keeping with the newer trend in moviemaking, they were called upon to portray heavies as often as heroes.

But if Coburn, McQueen and Eastwood were less than handsome by conventional standards, the battle-scarred, heavy-lipped Lee Marvin (see this month's Playboy Interview) was downright ugly. It is significant that he had to wait until his early 40s, by which time the antihero had become firmly established as a screen type, before attaining star stature. Like Coburn, with whom he was sometimes compared, Marvin was equally at home in comic and violent roles, and it was in the former that he was finally recognized. The vehicle was Cat Ballou, a Western take-off in which he did a hilarious lampoon of a drunken gun fighter whose accuracy grew more uncanny the more he drank. Marvin had already made something of a name for himself as a mean brute; as far back as 1954, when he played the leader of a motorcycle gang opposing Marlon Brando in The Wild One, he was nasty enough, as Bosley Crowther expressed it, "to make you cringe"; and in Bad Day at Black Rock, he was, also according to Crowther, "hideous as a dim-witted tough." A well-seasoned veteran of both Broadway and television, Marvin was regarded as merely a good, all-around working actor until public taste elevated his kind of noncommittal toughness from bad guy to good-bad guy.

In one of the biggest and most violent hits of 1967, The Dirty Dozen, Marvin's portrayal of an Army major who goads, browbeats and whips a bunch of convicted criminals into a disciplined and murderous commando unit, won the respect of his men, the critics and the public alike. Hardly had the furor attending that film died down--many regarded it as a flagrant example of the increasing violence in pictures--when along came Point Blank, excitingly directed by newcomer John Boorman. Among its scenes of cold-blooded sadism (in one of which Marvin delivers a brutal and explicit blow to a thug's crotch) was a remarkable moment of cold-blooded sex. Dedicated to a strange vendetta, Marvin persuades his girl (Angie Dickinson) to offer herself to one of his enemies, so that he can dispose of the hapless fellow while they're in the throes of passion--the ultimate coitus interruptus. Marvin's star has since continued to climb, even while his temples continue to silver--his lean, weathered, indisputably male image final confirmation of the fact that sex appeal is no longer a unique possession of the young or the handsome.

Despite all the excitement generated by Marvin, McQueen, Coburn and the other recent arrivals on the Hollywood scene, the American studios--and American audiences--looked increasingly abroad during the Sixties for actors who could combine sex appeal with Thespian ability. It wasn't a matter of selling America short, merely that more and more of Hollywood's product was being filmed in Europe, where costs were lower and substantial subsidies could be obtained from dollar-hungry governments. One caveat generally faced the would-be "runaway" producer: A substantial portion of his cast and crew had to be recruited from local talent. Thus, many an actor who was grudgingly given the lead in an American-financed production suddenly found himself soaring in the rarefied heights of international stardom. And none soared higher during the Sixties than Sean Connery--at least, as long as he sustained his James Bond image.

Although the Ian Fleming thrillers had appeared in book form throughout the Fifties, Fleming had been chary about disposing of the film rights, perhaps cannily sensing that their worth would increase as time wore on. Finally, two producers--Albert Broccoli and Harry Saltzman--offered him a favorable deal for the rights to the books (Casino Royale excepted, the rights to which had been seized earlier by the late agent-producer Charles Feldman, who later made it into a zany spoof with Woody Allen as an improbable heir to the Bond mantle). While looking for the most suitable actor to play Bond, Broccoli and Saltzman instigated a newspaper contest in London for the most likely 007. The winner was Sean Connery--whose varied background would have fitted him for almost any role.

Born in Edinburgh in 1930, he had accumulated a wealth of experience in different occupations; after his school years, he held jobs as a truck driver, cement mixer, bricklayer, steel bender, printer's assistant, lifeguard and coffin polisher. Then, while on a holiday in London, he met an acquaintance who told him the touring company of South Pacific was in need of a chorus boy, and Sean applied for and got the position, later joining a suburban repertory company. His first film appearance was in 1955, in the British crime movie No Road Back. After that, Sean kept himself busy in a series of secondary film roles.

Then Broccoli and Saltzman came along and asked him to do a test for Dr. No. He refused, feeling himself well enough established not to need testing for so frivolous a role; but the producers were so impressed by his "dark, cruel good looks" that he got the part anyway. Filmed largely in Jamaican locales, Dr. No was released in England in 1962 and in the United States in 1963--to sparse and lukewarm notices. No one took the film very seriously; and hardly noticed at all by reviewers was the star--or his comely co-star, Ursula Andress. who padded around with a knife sheathed on her bikini. Time's reviewer, however, turned out to be percipient in assessing the potential of the man who was to become the decade's most important star: "Sean Connery," he wrote, "moves with a tensile grace that excitingly suggests the violence that is bottled in Bond."

Despite the other reviews, the film did well enough at the box office to justify a second Bond picture. Cannily sensing an audience drift, United Artists gave Broccoli and Saltzman more budget leeway for From Russia with Love; and Terence Young, previously a somewhat uncertain director, seemed to know what Bond was all about: cool offhand sex and equally offhand violence. Bond was the one man who could stand up to the sinister, forces at loose in the world, the one man who, with his sexual aplomb, could divert if not convert a beauty bent on his undoing. Any element of parody involved was now intentional: The cretins could take the stuff straight and the sophisticated could appreciate the humor while lapping up the action.

In less than two years, Sean Connery became the hottest star property in a boom-or-bust industry. Good fortune is presumed to mellow its recipients, but it only angered Connery; and as each succeeding film in the series racked up larger and larger returns--Gold finger and Thunderball were among the most profitable ever made--his disaffection grew. He felt his typecasting as the ruttish, ruthless Bond was restricting his capacities as a serious actor; and he felt he wasn't being made sufficiently rich. Connery was already a millionaire when he aired his grievances; Broccoli and Saltzman had cut him in for a percentage of the awesome profits ever since Goldfinger. But he remained dissatisfied.

The off-camera Connery had little in common with the suavely sybaritic 007; according to a Life reporter, he bore "as much semblance to champagne-sipping Bond as a bowlful of haggis to a jambon en croÛte." In contrast to Bond, a Savile Row paradigm, Sean's favorite attire was sloppy sweaters, pullover shirts and work pants purchased at a discount store; and his Volkswagen was a far cry from Bond's custom-built and lethally accessoried Aston Martin--although the Volks was specially fitted with a washbasin and a potty chair for his child. And perhaps most deflating of all to faithful Bond fans, Connery wore a toupee. The most elegant feature of his private life was his beautiful and talented wife, actress Diane Cilento, whom he married in 1962. Finally fed up, Connery left the Bond series after You Only Live Twice; his outside efforts to develop as a more serious actor while continuing as Bond had proved generally unrewarding. In A Fine Madness, he was only adequate; in Hitchcock's Marnie, he was awkward and ill at ease; only in The Hill did he deliver an impressive performance as a compulsively overdisciplined British soldier. But none of these films cashed in at the box office, and many in the industry have begun to conclude that it was Bond who had lifted Connery from obscurity.

Harry Saltzman, the more restless of the Bond producing team, busied himself with other projects while Broccoli minded the store. And one of his outside efforts was The Ipcress File, based on the Len Deighton series about the insolent British secret agent Harry Palmer. For the role of Palmer, Saltzman selected a relatively unknown British actor saddled at birth with the name of Maurice Joseph Micklewhite. Born of poor Cockney parents in 1933, his mother hired herself out as a charwoman. Leaving school at 16, Mick worked at a variety of jobs--tea warehouseman, cement mixer, even for a time as office boy for a movie company. This job may have fired his ambition to become an actor, but he went back to cement mixing; it paid better than pushing paper clips. When he later learned that actors earn even more than cement mixers, however, he cannily decided to pursue the Muse. Since actors with pronounced Cockney accents were in sparse demand at the time, he practiced the fruity tones of "theater" English by sitting through movie after movie, absorbing the actors' intonations and delivery and then imitating them resoundingly in a deserted culvert, where the echo provided an instant replay of his words. Like Demosthenes' mouthful of pebbles, his culvert did the job, and his accent was soon as polished as any toff's at the Old Vic. But his name was still redolent of Bow Bells, so he decided to change it to Michael Caine.

Taking odd jobs to support himself, he applied for and won an assistant stage manager's job with a provincial repertory company and soon stepped into minor acting roles, eventually graduating to regular work on British TV. His first break into the big time came when he played a foppish British officer in the film Zulu. Caine's was only a supporting role, but Saltzman noticed him at the world premiere; and when they happened to dine afterward at the same restaurant, Saltzman invited Caine to join his table. Within ten minutes, Saltzman offered him the role of Palmer in The Ipcress File. A handshake settled the deal--and the role fitted Caine like a chamois glove. The glasses he wore gave him an aura of mildly soporific intellectuality, and a writer in Holiday described his smile as "sweet but faintly corrupt." An unusually literate thriller. The Ipcress File was more realistic in its details of the shadowy world of espionage than the Bond fantasies, and also slyly humorous. While Bond represented the quintessence of the snobbish conceits of the British establishment. Palmer was straight out of the working class. Caine had restored a touch of Cockney to his accent for the role, which required him to live in a small, cluttered flat, where he preferred making his own omelets to eating out. Cool and blasé with women. Palmer tended to choose nice girls with good manners for his sexual adventures. Black-leathered Pussy Galores were decidedly not his "cuppa." The Ipcress File orbited Caine into the stratosphere of stardom.

Adapting easily to a variety of parts, he survived Preminger's clumsy Hurry Sundown and triumphed in Alfie, a role hailed by many critics as the best performance of the year, perhaps in part because Alfie's amiably predatory attitude toward the birds was not unlike Caine's own. Alfie took his sex where he could find it--which was just about everywhere--and refused to tolerate any postcoital complications. Sex wasn't all a bed of roses, of course; at the end of the film, Alfie admitted to a certain ennui and loneliness. But he still had his freedom--and so did Caine in real life. As a master of birdsmanship, he was linked with a succession of lovelies in and out of show business--but never for long. No ascetic in nonsexual areas either, Caine thrived on the rich life; he purchased a sumptuous penthouse flat in London and took to complaining about the exorbitant taxes he was forced to pay. Why penalize a man just because he earns $500,000 a picture? Caine asked.

The success story of Peter Seamus O'Toole is an equally improbable rags-to-riches saga. Taken as a boy to Leeds, England, by his Irish bookie father, O'Toole quit school, which he hated, to take a job as a copy boy on a local newspaper, and to act in amateur theatricals in his spare time; he was then 14. After a two-year stint in the Royal Navy, he decided that acting was the life for him and launched his career with uncommon seriousness. The lanky, green-eyed Irishman's reputation as an actor grew apace with his reputation for womanizing, hard drinking and braggadocio; and after graduating from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, where he'd won a scholarship, he seasoned his talent at the Bristol Old Vic by appearing in no fewer than 73 roles. A couple of minor movie parts elicited a raft of scripts from studios that saw a star in the making, but he scorned them all for a brilliant term at Stratford, where he juggled three Shakespearean roles to considerable critical acclaim. It was there that David Lean, searching for an actor to play Lawrence of Arabia, found O'Toole; in the middle of a screen test, Lean stopped the camera and said, "There's no use; the boy is Lawrence." O'Toole was 27 at the time.

Lawrence was so long in production (20 months) that those associated with it termed it "no longer a movie but a way of life"--and for O'Toole it became a mission of dedication. The film was shot on location in the Jordanian desert--where O'Toole quickly learned to ride a camel as well as any Bedouin--and he threw himself into his role with such passion and commitment that the film made him an instantaneous star. Stardom, however, was not enough for O'Toole; he kept insisting that he was also an actor. "That's my bloody business," he told one and all; and to prove it, he took to the London stage for an Olivier-directed Hamlet and selected the film version of Becket, in which he played Henry II to Richard Burton's martyred archbishop, for his second major screen role. His performance was incandescent; but his next effort was Lord Jim, an underrated film that proved a resounding box-office flop; and the one after that, a farcical role in What's New Pussycat?--neither of which did much to enhance the glamor his depiction of Lawrence had bestowed upon him (though he continued to live up to his reputation as an elbow-bending brawler). Since then, however, his consistently high standards in choice of roles--as a psychotic Nazi general in The Night of the Generals and as Henry II, once again, in The Lion in Winter--have both revived his film career and proved that the art of acting is by no means a secondary or superfluous ingredient of sex stardom.

The same is true of another of Britain's gifted young actors, Albert Finney. Even less inclined than O'Toole to follow the rules of the game, Finney also shot straight to the top in a single picture: Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, one of the first and finest of the British "kitchen-sink" dramas dealing with the social and romantic problems of working-class nonheroes. Finney's round boyish face, clear blue eyes and curly hair gave him the look of a mildly dissipated cherub; but he had the rugged build of a soccer forward and by 1960 was tagged as yet another heir to James Dean and Marlon Brando--upon which the unpredictable Finney turned his back temporarily on lucrative offers of starring roles and took to the stage for the title role in Billy Liar, a sensitive drama of a young man's fantasy world. Even after his lusty portrait of the randy, roistering Tom Jones brought him to the pinnacle of success, Finney continued to pick and choose between stage and screen, obviously preferring the critical acclaim of his London and Broadway appearances in Luther to the greener fields of Hollywood. "I'm not keen on being tied up," he explained. "My life varies and my mood changes. I like to be free." Finney's love of freedom has been reflected in his personal as well as professional life; the film prototype of the angry young man appears to leave his choler at the bedroom door; and his offstage, offscreen hours have been occupied with a succession of lissome ladies.

If Britain in the Sixties is in its twilight as a world power, it has been the center of a social renaissance. The London theater is infinitely more vital and creative than Broadway; and although the British film industry has become commercially a virtual adjunct of Hollywood, it still appears to have a franchise on star making. Every few months, some new Olivier is being heralded--Tom Courtenay, Alan Bates, Terence Stamp, David Hemmings--all of whom have dazzled audiences with their virtuosity and all of whom could almost interchangeably play the others' roles. But the best known of all British actors remains Richard Burton. An old pro who had graduated from Shakespeare to Elizabeth Taylor by using his fee as his yardstick, Burton could lay claim to being Britain's and perhaps the world's foremost film star. His torrid courtship of and marriage to Liz doubtless accelerated his career's progress; but whatever the reasons, by 1968 he was being paid the same amount she was in the habit of receiving--$1,250,000 a picture.

Yet this 13th child of a coal miner, born in the grimy South Wales town of Pontrhydfen, might have ended up in the pits with his brothers if his father had not determined that at least one of his sons would "live in the sunshine." Thus, Richard was allowed to swim, chase swans, attend secondary school, play rugby and box. His second father and devoted mentor was his high school teacher and dramatic coach, Philip Burton, whose surname Richard adopted when he decided on a professional acting career and who was instrumental in gaining him a scholarship to Oxford at the beginning of World War Two. After one term at Oxford, where he performed with the university's dramatic society, Richard joined the Royal Air Force, in which he served for three years before being discharged in 1947 with the rank of sergeant. Rather than resume his education, Burton opted for an acting career and soon found minor work on the London stage, where he was discovered by John Gielgud and selected for an important role in The Lady's Not for Burning, a production that took him to New York in 1950.

By then, he had made his film debut in The Last Days of Dolwyn and had married a piquantly pretty Welsh drama student, Sybil Williams, whom he met while making the film. Two children--and Hollywood--followed. In 1952, he starred there in My Cousin Rachel, for which he earned considerable critical acclaim but little public attention. Twentieth Century-Fox next cast him as a Roman officer converted to Christianity in the first CinemaScope production, The Robe. The Academy Award nominations he won for both films fired his ambition. "By heaven," he said, "I'm going to be the greatest actor, or what's the point of acting?" Some cynics suspect that ten years later, a little demon inside him might have whispered, "Money."

During the last half of the Fifties, Burton was kept busy making films, but his star quality dimmed considerably as his frequently mediocre vehicles died at the box office. He was, however, acquiring another sort of reputation. Frank Ross, who produced The Robe, remarked that Burton was "a born male coquette," and there were rumors that he had practiced his seductive wiles on a host of film-land beauties. But Burton won on Broadway the kudos that had hitherto eluded him in films. Scoring a musical triumph in Camelot, his lyrical performance as King Arthur won him not only several hundred thousand middle-aged female fans but the admiration of Joseph L. Mankiewicz, who chose him for the role of Antony--originally earmarked for Stephen Boyd--in his forthcoming super-spectacle Cleopatra. He was to receive a fee of $250,000; but overtime clauses written into his contract easily doubled that amount, and his affair with and subsequent marriage to his co-star provided all the heady publicity he needed to finally make him a major star. Martin Ritt, who directed Burton in The Spy Who Came In from the Cold, proclaimed him "the greatest phallic symbol in the world"; but unimpressed British critics were inclined to regard the onetime Shakespearean virtuoso as their greatest sellout.

In Mike Nichols' Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, however, both Burton and Taylor rose to impressive dramatic heights as the neurotic, incessantly bickering and self-destructive university couple. The epithets they flung at each other noticeably expanded the horizons on free speech on the screen; and in one soliloquy lasting seven minutes, Burton demonstrated that he still could entrance an audience with his rich, resonant voice and his expressive features. But it was Elizabeth who won the Oscar; that prize still eluded him. Their next joint venture, Taming of the Shrew--which elicited a mixed critical reception and tepid box-office receipts--was followed by The Comedians, a dismal artistic and commercial failure. But producers continued to queue up for their expensive services and the Burtons next assayed a journey into the mephitic regions with Dr. Faustus, which proved a tragedy even more monumental than that envisaged by Philip Marlowe. Undismayed, they went on to Boom, a weird and wordy rendition of Tennessee Williams' The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore. When even Boom bombed, some Hollywood Cassandras began to mutter that the Burton-Taylor magic was at last losing its potency.

But the Burtons certainly behaved as though their luster remained untarnished; Richard purchased at auction a diamond ring costing more than $300,000 and presented it to his wife, who flaunted the expensive bauble across three continents. A few months later, Burton, however, received a chastening blow in the area that hurt him most: his pride. Assigned the starring role in a film adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov's Laughter in the Dark, he was inclined to be tardy about reaching the set, perhaps as a result of his predilection for late-night pub crawling. After several weeks of such dilatory behavior, he showed up particularly late one morning and the director, Tony Richardson, summarily dismissed him from the production, replacing him with a relatively obscure English actor, the brilliant Nicol Williamson. It was a dismissal that rang around the world and perhaps a sign that filmdom was at last coming to the realization that, in an increasingly mature industry, no star is indispensable.

If there is a single exception to that rule, it would have to be Italy's Marcello Mastroianni, who has starred in some of the greatest Italian films of the decade. His film career had flourished throughout the Fifties, but he was relatively unknown outside his native land. In 1956, after playing a cabdriver in a film starring Sophia Loren, he dejectedly remarked to a reporter, "I am resigned. I'll be playing taxicab drivers until the end of my days." Mastroianni's gifts, fortunately, do not include prophecy; he soon became the biggest male European star of the early Sixties. But it was understandable why he had difficulty envisioning such awesome success.

Born the son of a carpenter in 1924 in Fontana Liri, Italy, Marcello went to work in his father's shop after completing secondary school, then began studying surveying--a talent that caught the attention of German occupation authorities during World War Two. They employed him to draw military maps until he had served his purpose, then dispatched him in 1943 to a forced-labor camp. He escaped to Venice in 1944, then headed for American-liberated Rome and found a job with an English film company. In his spare time, he joined a university theatrical group, where he met Federico Fellini and his wife, Giulietta Masina--an acquaintance that was to prove highly fruitful many years later. During the late Forties and early Fifties, still in Rome, he accumulated a considerable amount of experience on the stage, on radio and in films; but his first modest international exposure did not come until 1960, when he played a bungling photographer in The Big Deal on Madonna Street, a comedy that played the art houses in the United States and prompted Hollywood talent scouts to cast an appraising eye at the unknown Italian actor.

By then, word had filtered to the States of a phenomenal Fellini film, La Dolce Vita, in which Mastroianni played what he has since termed his first meaningful role. As a jaded journalist chasing after visiting celebrities in Rome for a scoop or a handout, he squabbled with a clinging mistress, pre-empted a prostitute's bed for a liaison with the elegantly bored Anouk Aimée, joined a weird Via Veneto crowd for a decadent weekend orgy at a castle near Rome and wound up--ambitions soured--as a publicist for a stupid star, while moonlighting as impresario for a perverse saturnalia at a seaside villa. Helen Lawrenson, writing in Look, felt Mastroianni had introduced a radical new note in masculine sex appeal. "He may," she claimed, "go down in history as the man who made apathy irresistible." She found him the perfect embodiment of "the present-day antihero, the modern man who as lover and mate is often inadequate, confused, ridiculous, tired, or just plain bored."

La Dolce Vita established both Mastroianni's stature and his offbeat sex appeal. In Antonioni's La Notte, married to the seductive Jeanne Moreau, he again embodied male futility, drifting through a night of opulent aimlessness until his wife reminded him at dawn of the emotional failure of their marriage and he attempted a passionate rapprochement in a sand trap on a private golf course. Fellini employed him for further research into his own spiritual autobiography in 8-1/2, which cast Mastroianni as Fellini's Doppelgänge, an emotionally and spiritually exhausted director torn by memories, fears, fantasies and sexual hang-ups; only in dreams, Fellini/ Mastroianni implied, could modern man achieve an ideal existence.

In real life, Mastroianni himself appeared anything but apathetic where women were concerned. "The sight of a pretty girl," Miss Lawrenson observed, "causes an instantaneous Pavlovian reaction: His eyes light up, his attention is riveted and his undeniable Latin charm suddenly spreads like ink on a blotter.... His taste in girls does not run to famous actresses. Instead, it is the pretty young waitress, airline stewardess, secretary or salesgirl who evokes his measuring glances.... At home, he is the devoted husband and father. Abroad, his eye is a roving one." An attractive young American woman, who regarded the cinematic Mastroianni as the male embodiment of her dreams, happened to encounter that roving eye at a press party, but did not succumb to its appeal. "He lost me at once," she recalled. "I wanted his elegant apathy; instead, that Latin charm came on just too strong for comfort"--actually a backhanded tribute to Mastroianni's artistry, since, as an accomplished actor, his task is to portray not himself but the director's creation.

As the reigning star of the Italian cinema, Mastroianni has few rivals on the European continent. But among those who have challenged his supremacy, one stands out: Jean-Paul Belmondo, the young Frenchman with the ugly-handsome face, who has galloped from film to film with heady abandon, generally portraying the Gallic simulacrum of Humphrey Bogart.

The son and namesake of a sculptor, Belmondo was born in 1933 in a Parisian suburb and grew up in the bohemian atmosphere of Paris' Left Bank. Jean-Paul neglected his studies and left school altogether at an early age, and by 16 was a gifted amateur boxer; but with his nose already broken in a school brawl, he soon quit in order to avoid further disfigurement--because he now nursed notions of an acting career. He enrolled in a private drama school, won entrance in 1953 to the Conservatoire National d'Art Dramatique and from there graduated into subsidiary roles in a number of French films. The picture that catapulted him to the top, of course, was the nouvelle vague classic of 1959, Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless, in which he played--with a conscious bow to Bogart--an insouciant, amoral young punk who takes not only his love where he finds it but anything else that isn't nailed down.

After the international success of Breathless, Belmondo ran the risk of being forever typed in the Bogart image as he raced from one tough-guy role to the next in a series of eminently forgettable films. Fortunately, few of them ever reached this country; and his reputation as an actor was materially enhanced by his sensitive performances in the Italian Two Women, in which he played a bespectacled Italian intellectual martyred during World War Two; and in Léon Morin, Prêtre, the devoutly spiritual study of a priest. It was at this point that he began to evidence a growing flair for comedy; in Cartouche, he spoofed swashbuckling costume melodramas and in That Man from Rio, he satirized the cliff-hanging clichés of the traditional chase movie. As time wore on, however, critics increasingly accused him of walking through his parts; capable of perceptive performances, he seems to choose his roles whimsically, sometimes even without regard for star billing, and many of his more recent characterizations have been listless and lackluster. As befits an actor of stellar magnitude, the divorced Belmondo has consoled himself of late in the company of a sex star of almost equal status: the voluptuous Ursula Andress. But by the time he took up with her, his image as a punk with panache had dimmed; the younger generation had found new screen antiheroes and Belmondo had begun to wane as a star of international magnetism.

He might have advanced further if it had not been for his inability to master the English language--a handicap that excluded him from the burgeoning American production network in Europe. On the other hand, a late-blooming Viennese actor, Oskar Werner, distinctly benefited from his linguistic talents. His work in the moribund and insular Austrian and West German film industries relegated him to obscurity abroad for many years, even though as early as 1951, he made an impressive American film debut in Decision Before Dawn. But it was not until the protean François Truffaut featured him in the internationally successful Jules and Jim that Werner became a star. He was 40 years old by then but still remarkably boyish in appearance and emanating a soulful, tragic sensibility in German, French or English.

When Stanley Kramer tapped him for Ship of Fools, he was widely reputed to be the most accomplished actor in western Europe; he proved it by running away with all acting honors for his portrayal of a doctor troubled by intimations of brutality (Nazi) and mortality (his own weakening heart). Since it was apparent that his strongest appeal was to female audiences, Werner did not hesitate to turn on the schmaltz in Interlude, an English film about a Continental conductor's tempestuous affair with a lady journalist. His romantic technique may be old-fashioned, but in Interlude, at least, it appeared to work, and the heartstrings of female viewers on two continents thrummed wildly as Werner tenderly pledged his troth.

Also benefiting from the gift of tongues was black-haired, hot-eyed Omar Sharif, already a major movie star in his native Egypt when plucked for the part of an Arab sheik in Lawrence of Arabia, produced by Sam Spiegel and directed by David Lean. Lean was impressed by Sharif's talents and, after several subsequent roles that did little to enhance the Egyptian's prestige, he insisted on having Sharif play the title role in his upcoming Doctor Zhivago. Paired with Julie Christie, Omar was solemn, sensitive, poetic, self-sacrificial and impossibly romantic, and women everywhere sighed and wept over his tragic fate. Despite mixed reviews, the film went on to become one of the decade's most resounding box-office successes, and Sharif was immediately offered his pick of roles. (There were rumors that he had his pick of women, too, in the wake of a separation from his Egyptian wife.) After playing opposite Barbra Streisand as the prison-bound gambler Nicky Arnstein in the film version of Funny Girl, Sharif has gone on to play other doomed heroes, among them the Viennese archduke in Mayerling and the legendary Cuban revolutionary Che Guevara in a controversial filmic biography of his life and death. Among all the male heartthrobs of the Sixties, Sharif is the most eminently well equipped to sustain his romantic image; an actor of power and sex appeal, a linguist with attractive polyglot features that allow him to play any nationality from Mongolian to Israeli, he seems likely to be among the predominant stars of the Seventies.

Just as foreign male stars usurped dominance of the screen from Hollywood's leading men during the decade, so did Europe's females end the era of the Marilyn Monroe--style sex goddess. Particularly in England, talented young directors such as Tony Richardson. Karel Reisz and John Schlesinger brought new life and boldness to the international cinema not only by extending the sexual boundaries of the screen but by introducing several young female stars with interesting faces and equally interesting vital statistics. The appeal of some, such as Samantha Eggar and Sarah Miles, proved ephemeral; but others have been as durable as they are desirable, and give every sign of staying at the top. Of these, Julie Christie is the acknowledged queen.

Her face is the face of the Sixties; John Schlesinger, who directed her in three films and was largely responsible for her initial success, has said: "Her face, which isn't just a face, is a personality by itself. So terribly alive and spontaneous and irregular. Big mouth, strong jaws, dominating almost in a masculine way." Julie herself doubted that men "see any lusty sexiness in me. The appealing thing is an air of abandonment. Men don't want responsibility and neither do I." She was a symbol of the cool Mod morality of swinging Britain and a sign of her times; and her personal life style reinforced her screen image.

Born in India, where her father managed a tea plantation, she was sent to school in England at the age of eight and as a prepubescent rebel was expelled from a convent for regaling the nuns with blasphemous and sexy stories. She eventually enrolled in a London drama school, compensating for a lack of funds by lugging an air mattress about with her and sleeping wherever a friend, male or female, extended hospitality. "I fancied myself quite arty," she later said of this period; but at casting offices, no one fancied her, usually on the grounds that she lacked sex appeal.

Schlesinger eventually selected Julie for a small but vital part in Billy Liar, after noticing her in a two-page spread in Town magazine. Despite her lack of professional training, David Lean mentally cast her as Lara in the production of Doctor Zhivago he was preparing. First, however, came a role as a bouncy Irish streetwalker in the fictionalized Sean O'Casey biography Young Cassidy, followed by Schlesinger's Darling, the film that established her international identity--and won her an Oscar. Those who now wrote about the young star claimed she was secretly terrified of her sudden and enormous success. "Julie's afraid," a close friend said of her, "of what success will do to her, the toll of bitchiness it may exact. She doesn't want to become a bitch."

Much was made of her unabashedly unmarried relationship with a struggling young lithographer and art student, Don Bessant, with whom she shared a flat. Joseph Janni, her producer for three films, exclaimed admiringly: "When they go on holiday together, where do you think they stay? In some luxurious hotel she can pay for? No, in the small pension where he can pay." But it wasn't too long before Julie was staying in posher hostelries--and Bessant had fallen by the wayside, replaced by Warren Beatty. "Why should I marry?" Julie asked rhetorically. "To please the people? I don't care what people say." She was beginning to sound a little bitchy. She further revealed, as her roles grew more demanding, that she wasn't all that much of an actress, either; Far from the Madding Crowd, one of her recent ventures, might have proved a greater success if her role had been played by an actress of greater stature--such as Vanessa Redgrave.

Miss Redgrave, elder daughter of Sir Michael, possesses a talent as distinctive and distinguished as her lineage. "A smooth, cool woman of long, flowing, thoroughbred grace and odd mystery"--in Look's words--she became the "in" star of 1966 at the late-blooming age of 29, thanks to her role as a lithe-limbed, golden-haired rich girl married to a mad English painter in Morgan! The then-wife of director Tony Richardson, she had previously earned a brilliant reputation on the stage. She also won an extracurricular reputation as a lady of causes; a member of the Committee of 100, Bertrand Russell's militantly activist antiwar organization, she delivered fiery harangues against the British establishment at Hyde Park Corner and was once hauled away from a sit-in at Trafalgar Square and tossed into the pokey.

Less ideologically inclined on screen, she played the apolitical role of a hip drifter in Antonioni's brilliant puzzler Blow-Up; her tresses dyed red, quite possibly a murderess, she enigmatically proffered herself, nude from the waist up, to a photographer, played by David Hemmings, after he had snapped her in what appeared to be a lethal embrace with a lover in a deserted London park. That same year, she had a brief, wordless but enchanting bit part as Anne Boleyn in A Man for All Seasons. Through it all, she appeared to be completely indifferent to creating a "star image" for herself and remained interested only in playing whatever role she was assigned to the best of her ability. In Camelot, she was the beauteous, spirited Queen Guinevere to Richard Harris' King Arthur; and in The Sailor from Gibraltar, she played a mousy British secretary on holiday with a churlish lover. It was during the making of this film that she broke with her husband, Tony Richardson; the cause given in the divorce proceedings was Tony's temporary transfer of affections to her co-star, Jeanne Moreau. But it was a most amicable divorce, as she assured anyone who asked; she absolutely adored Tony and admired his talents tremendously and was thrilled to take the role of an ardent Victorian in his The Charge of the Light Brigade.

Probably her greatest screen challenge to date has been the role of Isadora Duncan in Isadora, which required her not only to dance in the moody free style inaugurated by that redoubtable dancer but to age from a young girl to a middle-aged woman during the course of the film. But nothing fazed Vanessa; and when the script called on her to bare her breasts during one of Isadora's famous concert appearances--as the artist was reputed to have done herself--she gamely revealed her not-too-abundant charms. Between roles, she cantered about town with the handsome Italian actor Franco Nero, who, as Lancelot, had wooed and won her from King Arthur in Camelot.

If Julie Christie and Vanessa Red-grave remain in the forefront of the new galaxy of British female film luminaries, there are other important challengers. Among them: Susannah York, a lush lovely who has been somewhat handicapped by her physical resemblance to Julie Christie, generating the mistaken belief that she's a second-rank stand-in for Julie in swinging roles. Another promising and refreshing newcomer is Barbara Ferris, who threw herself freely into a passionate affair with Oskar Werner in Interlude. And, most promising of all, in the opinion of many, is Carol White, an actress of notable ability who exudes a low-keyed, seductively feminine sexuality. Her first starring role was in Poor Cow, in which--as a young hoodlum's pathetically and thanklessly affectionate mistress--she gave birth to a child with uncanny realism. Her next starring appearance, in I'll Never Forget What's 'Isname, occasioned even more comment and caused the Catholic Office for Motion Pictures to single out one of her scenes as grounds for awarding the film a rare "Condemned" rating; the episode in question was a prolonged shot focusing full on Miss White's ecstatically expressive face as actor Oliver Reed brought her to her first orgasm.

Sexuality in the Scandinavian cinema of the Sixties has been even more explicit--particularly when the director involved is Ingmar Bergman. Bergman's sexual preoccupations, as well as his artistry, have resulted in international stardom for most of his Swedish actresses: among others, Ingrid Thulin, Gunnel Lindblom and Bibi Andersson. Miss Andersson, who first blossomed in Bergman's Wild Strawberries, matured into a gifted actress with her recent role in Persona, an intricately textured Bergman film about a nurse attempting to establish communication with a famous actress who has been rendered psychotically mute; the sexual high point of the picture is Bibi's relation of an experience that had occurred while she and a woman friend were sunning on a beach and a youth crept close, spied on them and eventually managed a sexual encounter with each of the sun-dazzled ladies. Critic Judith Crist wrote of this vicariously recounted ménage à trois that "Here Bergman proves that a fully clothed woman telling of a sexual experience can make all the nudities and perversions that his compatriots have been splattering on the screen lately seem like nursery school sensualities." Miss Crist's pejoratives were doubtless directed at, among others, director Vilgot Sjoman, who was responsible for that celebrated tale of incest, My Sister, My Love, in which Bibi Andersson repeatedly and explicitly demonstrated her passion for her handsome brother. Sjöman grew even bolder with his next film, I Am Curious--Yellow, which was little more than a visual textbook of exotic eroticism.

If another Ingmar Bergman favorite, Ingrid Thulin, has exposed herself less than the ebullient Lena Nyman in I Am Curious, her sexual range in films is unquestionably greater. In The Silence, cast as a woman neurotically attached to her sister (Gunnel Lindblom), she was given to exhausting bouts of masturbation; in a brief appearance in Hour of the Wolf, she was the inert object in a fantasy necrophilic act by a deranged artist (Max von Sydow): and in Alain Resnais' La Guerre Est Finie, she returned to normal coital relationships as the wife-mistress of Yves Montand. Miss Thulin once confessed privately that she thoroughly enjoyed her sexual moments in films and felt that such enjoyment contributed to the realism of her scenes.

But in the art of graphically portraying sexual enjoyment on the screen, no actress is superior to another Swede, the dark-blonde Essy Persson. Miss Persson, already in her mid-20s and a stage actress of note when she made her film debut, is practically a pure specimen of the genus sex star: While not eschewing nude exposure of her physical assets, her forte lies in going a step further by providing audiences with a realistic equivalent of a woman's erotic emotions and sensations--or, as one critic put it, replacing the Theater of the Absurd with the Cinema of the Orgasm. She demonstrated her erotic artistry in the Danish-Swedish I, a Woman, in which she played a man-devouring nymphomaniac, and was given even more scope in Thérèse and Isabelle, the film rendition of Violette Leduc's autobiographical novel detailing the Lesbian relationship between two girls at a French finishing school. Although somewhat overripe for the role of a teeny-bopper, Miss Persson was most convincing in her erotic scenes, which included no fewer than three Lesbian experiences, a deflowering in the bushes--the sole heterosexual touch--and one masturbatory episode.

If films such as Thérèse and Isabelle did not exactly qualify as deathless motion-picture art, the authenticity of their eroticism made audiences doubly aware of the unreality and superficiality of such former sex goddesses as Anita Ekberg and Brigitte Bardot, who had been almost totally eclipsed as the decade advanced. The Swedish Miss Ekberg's Junoesque proportions were so much larger than life that few could take them (or her) seriously, and the perceptive Federico Fellini turned this fact to his (and her) advantage by casting Anita as the curvaceous caricature of a sex goddess descending on Rome for a publicity visit in La Dolce Vita. Again, in his segment of the three-part Boccaccio '70--The Temptation of Dr. Antonio--he employed Anita as an imposing billboard embodiment of the virtues of a brand of milk; the mammoth-mammaried giantess came to life and tormented a pruriently minded would-be censor for whom the billboard had become a symbol of the decadence of modern life. Reaching her apotheosis under Fellini, Miss Ekberg soon plummeted back to obscurity--and into plump middle age.

Also of the old school, but distinctly piquant, nevertheless, was the blonde-haired, blue-eyed Elke Sommer, who was born in Berlin in 1942, the only child of a German minister. At the age of 17, she went to London to perfect her English so she could qualify for a good-paying job as a translator; but she quickly caught the eye of talent hawks. By 1960, she was appearing in a number of sexploiters on the Continent and was eventually discovered by Hollywood. In real life an intelligent and talented painter, Miss Sommer has invariably been portrayed as a vacuous sexpot in her English-language films, among them The Prize (with Paul Newman) and A Shot in the Dark (with Peter Sellers). Unfortunately, her acting ability never ripened and her mediocre film vehicles have done little to enhance her stature.

Of German parentage, too, although born in Switzerland, is Ursula Andress, whose penchant for exposing herself in films and stills was once questioned by a newspaperman. "Why do I do it?" she said haughtily. "Because I am beautiful." After running away from junior college in Switzerland to Italy for what she described as "an affair of the heart," she overcame her self-confessed laziness and turned to acting when the affair petered out--but only in order to support herself. Paramount discovered her in 1956 and lured her to Hollywood on the assumption that whatever acting deficiencies she possessed could be remedied by dramatic training--an overly optimistic assumption, since, in Ursula's own words, "I was very spoiled and refused to study. I thought I was a big star and wondered where my house was with the big swimming pool. They threw me out." Thus, her American debut did not occur until 1963, when she played that endearingly hoydenish beach girl in Dr. No, by which time she was married to actor-photographer John Derek, who provided Playboy with some stunning nudes of his then-wife. Ursula has continued to be used in films for spectacularly decorative purposes and has not yet had a chance to prove herself as an actress.

The same can hardly be said for heroically proportioned Sophia Loren, who undisputedly heads the list of Europe's most talented, as well as most beautiful, film stars. Though she got her start in films as a statuesque extra in low-budget Roman epics, it was as an actress that she finally achieved international acclaim--in Two Women, directed by Vittorio De Sica, which won her the first Oscar ever awarded to an actress in a foreign-language picture. In 1966, the Museum of Modern Art honored her with a photographic exhibit chronicling her rise to fame (described in The Sex Stars of the Fifties).

It was a path plagued for many years by a messy Italian bigamy charge against her and her husband, director Carlo Ponti. The Italian authorities refused to recognize Ponti's Mexican divorce from his first wife; and in Roman Catholic Italy, the suit might well have resulted in a jail term for both parties, had not the couple become residents of France, whose courts granted Ponti a second divorce from his first wife in 1965. When he married Sophia again, an Italian appellate court dismissed all charges; but the long ordeal, plus several miscarriages, tended to cut down on Sophia's performing toward the end of the Sixties. Perhaps it was just as well, for a starring appearance with Marlon Brando in another miscarriage, A Countess of Hong Kong, had dimmed some of her luster.

Even so, she had no really serious Italian rivals. Closest to her in appeal was Claudia Cardinale, who was proclaimed in 1961 by no less an authority than Italian novelist Alberto Moravia as "the next love goddess"--after Bardot, presumably. Time chimed in, opining that CC "has the sort of soft wide sulky mouth the champagne glasses were designed to fit." Claudia somehow managed to survive such effusions and went on to make some 30 films--comedies, spectacles and serious dramas--that demonstrated both her ability as an actress and her durability as a star, Claudia's versatility has also enabled her to escape the "sexpot" designation that has proved a limiting factor in the careers of such equally endowed contemporaries as Virna Lisi and the exotic Sylva Koscina.

But it is in France that Continental sex in its most sophisticated form is still best represented; and its leading amatory ambassadress to the world is still the redoubtable Jeanne Moreau--who, though far from beautiful and even in obvious middle age, continues to exude a simmering sexuality; her full mouth and melting eyes eloquently express all the delights and pitfalls of erotic love. Born in Paris in 1928 of a French father and English mother, Jeanne was enthralled by the stage at an early age. At 19, she made her debut at the Comédie Française. Not long after, she took her first lover, an actor; with characteristic Gallic informality, she married him the day before her son was born. The marriage remained in force until 1964, long after Jeanne had gone her own headstrong way--from one lover to the next.

Among them was the New Wave director Louis Malle, who became the first to sense her potential as a sex star. Her first two films with him established her reputation as "the Jeanne d'Arc of the boudoir," in the words of one critic. Malle left little of Mlle. Moreau to the imagination; in one film, his camera even recorded her reactions at the moment of orgasm. The cameras of Vadim, Truffaut and Antonioni soon followed suit, reveling in her every movement, capturing the faintest twitch of her sulky lips and the subtlest stirrings of passion in her luminous eyes.

In 1965, Louis Malle, who had graduated by this time from lover to close friend, teamed her with Bardot in Viva Maria, a semiserious spoof of modern revolution made in Mexico. Her erstwhile intimate relationship with her Paris couturier, Pierre Cardin, failed to dampen the fires of what several gossip columnists reported was a brief fling with George Hamilton on the Viva Maria set, and Jeanne nurtured one torrid crush after another. "There are men one goes through like a country," she told one interviewer bluntly. She confided to another: "Men want to leave women weeping. It is frightening for them to discover a woman can pack up and go just as easily as a man can." One of her lovers, producer Raoul Lévy, presumably could not face the discovery; his own career in tatters, he shot himself to death not long after Jeanne packed up and left him. Undaunted, you'll recall, director Tony Richardson deserted his wife, Vanessa Redgrave, to pursue Moreau while directing both actresses in The Sailor from Gibraltar; but Jeanne had meanwhile developed a sudden, tempestuous passion for a young member of the yacht crew in the film. According to Marcello Mastroianni, Jeanne in life is much like Jeanne on screen: "She is always searching for love and rarely fails to find it. But she leaves many victims along the roadside."

Another late-blooming French cinema seductress is the sophisticated, subtly intriguing Anouk Aimée, who soared suddenly to international fame as a grief-stricken young widow involved in a tormented affair with a racing driver (Jean-Louis Trintignant) in Claude Lelouch's A Man and a Woman. Her film career began in 1946, when she was still a schoolgirl; two years later, she was playing her first starring role in yet another rendering of the Romeo and Juliet story, The Lovers of Verona. Known simply as Anouk, she continued to appear in innumerable French films of the Fifties, often under the tutelage of distinguished directors, but critics and popular recognition stubbornly eluded her. Federico Fellini provided the turning point in her career, casting her first as the pleasure-seeking socialite who got her jollies fornicating in a prostitute's bed with Marcello Mastroianni in La Dolce Vita, and again as Mastroianni's neglected and frustrated wife in 8-1/2. Though not a classic beauty, as Anouk ripened, she developed what critic Paul Beckley described as a haunting quality "so delicately suggestive of the Modigliani portraits that her presence stirs a sense of wonder." By the time general audiences discovered her in A Man and a Woman, she was 34 and in the midst of her third marriage--a worldly woman of intelligence, spirit, pride and melancholy.

As foreign stars such as Anouk Aimée wax fashionable, a host of aspiring stars wait in the wings for their own chance to illuminate the screen. One of the most popular of the younger French actresses is Mireille Dare, who became an idol of French youth with her role as a kookie, bed-hopping rebel with a sexual cause in Galia. Jean-Luc Godard, with his characteristic flair for casting sensuous young hedonists to express his mordantly ironic view of the human condition, picked Miss Dare to play a depraved young bourgeoisie in Weekend. His compatriot Francois Truffaut enhanced the career of the kittenish Françoise Dorléac when he starred her in his The Soft Skin, but Mile. Dorléac's bright career was cut tragically short by a fatal auto accident on the Riviera.

Her sister, Catherine--slender, blonde and ethereally beautiful--promptly took up Françoise's torch, adopted her mother's name, Deneuve, and became a star in her own right. After a few minor roles, she met Roger Vadim, who had already played husband, lover and Pygmalion to Bardot and Annette Stroyberg. But Vadim insisted that it was not his intention to use Catherine in films; instead, he installed her as his mistress, and within a year she presented him with a baby boy; the records are somewhat vague as to who did not wish to marry whom. Vadim himself was by then busy with Jane Fonda, at that time a far more important figure than Catherine, who did not become a star until her sensitive performance in The Umbrellas of Cherbourg.

From that point on, the wide-eyed Catherine was imbued with the urge to make it big on her own--and the opportunities were plentiful. The brilliant young Polish director Roman Polanski cast her as a deranged, sexually obsessed beautician in his macabre Repulsion; explaining his choice of Catherine, Polanski said: "I needed an angelic girl who could kill a man with a razor." Newsweek later theorized that her star quality was "her ability to project a unique blend of purity and perversity"--and this peculiar mixture was apparent in Belle de Jour, the Luis Buñuel film in which Catherine plays a French doctor's deceptively demure young wife who works part time in a Parisian brothel, where the greater the indignity of perversity inflicted upon her, the greater her kick. Mlle. Deneuve's artful blend of innocence and experience carries us back full circle to that age-old cinematic type, the good-bad girl, proving the worthiness of that hoary adage "The more things change, the more they are the same."

And yet, although sex remains now, as yesterday, the central fascination and the very core of vital contemporary cinema, change there has been. Even as this series has progressed, there has been a dramatic reversal of traditional values in the film industry. When we began nearly four years ago, the American Production Code was still in full sway; censorship prevailed in four major states and innumerable communities; and church groups were busily condemning and censoring any picture that featured nudity or depicted deviations from what George Bernard Shaw once derisively described as "middle-class morality." Today, all of that has changed, and with incredible swiftness. The Production Code has been not only liberalized but virtually ignored by the signatory studios; and a great many pictures now come into the market place from independent companies that have no affiliation with the Code whatsoever. A series of landmark Supreme Court decisions has led to the virtual elimination of state and community censor boards; and the Bureau of Customs, which has on occasion marred or cut foreign imports, is currently having its prerogatives in this area tested by the courts. While occasional acts of censorship still take place on the community level, invariably when such cases are appealed, the decision goes against the bluenoses.

Even the churches have swung away from their previous negative policy of condemning and boycotting those pictures they disapprove of and have, instead, adopted a positive posture of generating public support for those they deem socially and artistically worthy--which, in recent years, have included such controversial films as Darling, The Pawnbroker and Bonnie and Clyde.

Meanwhile, the Motion Picture Association of America, under the leadership of Jack Valenti, has adopted its own voluntary rating system, with four major categories covering everything from "general audiences" to "adults only." At the same time, the National Catholic Office for Motion Pictures has significantly broadened its own categories of classification, so that pictures that might formerly have been "Condemned" now often receive an A IV rating, meaning that they are morally unobjectionable for adults, with reservations. Even nudity, which once earned an automatic C rating from the Catholics, is now apparently admissible provided it is "in context" and not "excessive." Whereas The Pawnbroker was once "Condemned" for its nude scenes, within the past few years, such films as Bedazzled, Poor Cow and The Stranger, all of which contained some nudity, have been approved, albeit with reservations.

Despite--or, perhaps, because of--this trend toward total cinematic freedom of expression, however, strong forces are massing on the right--groups such as Operation Moral Upgrade, with its annual "halo" awards--that are only too eager to swing the pendulum in the other direction, back to the restrictions and repressions of the past. Their watchword, invariably, is "Save our children" and their logic is to reduce all pictures to a bland level that they regard as acceptable for the kiddies. It must be admitted that, with a heady sense of their new freedom, many of the supposedly astute producers in Hollywood have in recent years been playing directly into the hands of such vigilante groups; dozens of mediocre pictures laced with gratuitous sex and unmotivated violence have been released--many of them, such as The Wild Angels and The Trip, beamed directly toward the teenage market; and the would-be censors are using such films as justification for demanding a Federal censorship law that would strait-jacket all production. So the puritanical element in American society is not dead; it is vigorously pushing for legal and even extralegal restraints on the motion-picture medium--and it has a considerable body of public and Congressional support.

To forestall such a puritanical backlash, some otherwise enlightened observers have suggested that the movie industry "take a prudent step backward" by imposing compulsory classification on all films. They point out that the intelligent and sophisticated application of classification in England, France and Italy has in no way debased their pictures; that, on the contrary, the necessity of tailoring films for specific audiences has enabled producers and directors to deal with mature themes that would not appeal to a general audience. The proponents of classification argue that such a system in the U. S. would appease, if not disarm, the forces of censorship and would certainly scotch their most potent argument about "saving our children."

But there is a fatal flaw inherent in such an argument, however well intentioned. Where, for example, does classification begin? At what age does a viewer become sufficiently mature to view "adult" films? Various countries set various age limits--12, 14, 16, 18; and France runs the gamut, with pictures rated for half a dozen different age levels. But even if it were possible to decide at exactly what age young people become sophisticated enough to "cope" with a given theme, a more serious question arises: Who is to do the classifying? Censorship in the past has been regarded as a political plum in America, turned over to the wives and widows of staunch party regulars or granted as a sinecure to generous campaign contributors. There is no evidence to indicate that this system is going to be abandoned willingly by those who run it, in favor of classification boards headed by learned, worldly men equipped with the wisdom to determine who should and should not see a film.

But let's assume that rational age categories could be established and enlightened classifiers recruited; would not the whole concept of classification, however reasoned and restrained, still be an arbitrary infringement on the freedom of the creative artist to illuminate the human condition according to his own lights--with all its warts--and to explore any theme he desires? We think it would. Is there not equally little justification for proscribing or circumscribing the depiction of sex on the screen as there is the expression of sex in real life--for "adults" or "youngsters"? We think there is. Are restrictions on what we may watch or read any less oppressive or irrational than legislative restrictions on our private sexual practices? We think they aren't. However idealistic and enlightened the classifiers or legislators may be, do they have any more right to tell you what you can see or read than to tell you what you can or cannot think or do at any given age? We think they don't. Even if it could be proved, as the voices of puritanism claim, that sex on screen or on the printed page has a harmful effect on the viewer or the reader--and most psychologists argue that it can't and that, in fact, the opposite may be true--does not everyone have the human right to do whatever he wants with his own mind and body, provided he does not in so doing infringe on the rights or well-being of others? We think he does.

Admittedly, there are risks in total cinematic freedom: Buck-hungry skin merchants already do and will probably continue to abuse such freedom to grind out garbage; and there is a real and undeniable danger that the proliferation of such trash will further fuel the fires of reaction and contribute to a revival of repressive censorship--a censorship from which serious and responsible artists would suffer as much as the Schlockmeisters. But we must nevertheless take our chances, fully cognizant of the still-potent strength of puritanism, because the answer to tyranny has never been capitulation to it, either by surrender or by compromise. Those who argue that what is needed to forestall Government intervention or Comstockian backlash is "self-restraint" by moviemakers are really just making the censors' work easier for them by volunteering to censor themselves. There must be total freedom in film making, as in every other creative craft--freedom to produce junk as well as works of art. Just as our system of justice is designed to protect the constitutional rights of every citizen, from the capo mafioso to the law-abiding citizen, the smut peddlers are as entitled to produce and market their products as such visionary creative geniuses as Bergman and Antonioni; if you deny or infringe on the rights of one, you are inevitably making a mockery of the rights of the other.

Just as the moviemaker must have absolute freedom to produce whatever he desires--good or bad--so the public must have absolute freedom to indulge its emotions as much as its intellect, its passions as much as its idealism. The film that is repugnant to most of us because of its tasteless or twisted depiction of sex has as much right to be made and shown--and seen by those who like that sort of thing--as the film that is repugnant to others because it expresses a profound and controversial social message. There will always be a market for "socially unredeemable" erotica; and those who want it will somehow seek it out, whatever the legal prohibitions. Ultimately, that which is good will prosper in the free market place and that which is prurient and shoddy will founder. However repellent we may find the excesses of the sexploiters, serious film makers must retain their hard-won freedom to tell the truth as they see it, to continue their increasingly unfettered quest to reveal us to ourselves.

This is something that is already understood by the younger generation and by the more liberated and enlightened of their elders. It is they who recognize the nude form as a thing of beauty rather than of shame; it is they who are creating the social and intellectual climate in which everything is mentionable, everything explorable, in which the human condition can at last be limned upon the screen with full awareness of all its dimensions.

This concludes the authors' 20-part "History of Sex in Cinema," which began in April of 1965, and will be published as a book by Playboy Press.