Sex in Cinema 1969

In the ten Months since our last installment of The History of Sex in Cinema, the inundation of sex on screen has exceeded even our permissive predictions. Erotica in films from the major studios now rivals that seen in grind-house sexploitation movies. We are seeing kookie sex, kinky sex, leering sex and loving sex; sex spoofs, sex satires, sex dramas and sex melodramas. Pictures, in short, have become by sex possessed and, considering those still in production, the end is nowhere in sight.

Heralding this change, and in no small measure precipitating it, was the prolonged battle of Grove Press to pass U.S. Customs with the controversial Swedish-made I Am Curious (Yellow). The series of appeals to overrule the Customs ban, begun in May 1968, culminated ultimately in the New York premiere of the film in March 1969. But even as the appeals were slowly wending their way upward through the courts, importers of foreign films (such as Trans-Lux, with the Danish People Meet and Sweet Music Fills the Heart) and domestic producers (such as Universal, with Can Heironymus Merkin Ever Forget Mercy Humppe and Find True Happiness?) stood poised, awaiting the final outcome. Few doubted what it would be.

For the fact is that the new permissiveness was by no means confined to films alone. Gore Vidal's perverse Myra Breckinridge and Jacqueline Susann's randy The Love Machine, both replete with sexual scenes of remarkable candor, had dominated the best-seller lists for months, only to be succeeded by Philip Roth's even more graphic descriptions of intercourse and masturbation in Portnoy's Complaint. Hair, originally an off-Broadway production with a flash of nudity at the end of the first act and a song detailing the delights of fellatio, was swept not only to Broadway itself but to more than a dozen major cities throughout the world. After such subsequent productions as Che!, Geese and Oh! Calcutta! began staging total nudity and simulated acts of coitus, Actors Equity actually found it necessary to draw up a full set of "rules and requirements regarding auditions and performances where nudity and acts of a sexual nature are involved." For the benefit of its membership, it included an injunction that "actual sex acts during rehearsals or performances shall not be required of a performer."

Even the art galleries and museums were not immune. Los Angeles councilmen sought vainly to close a County Museum of Art show that included Ed Kienholz' graphic, three-dimensional representation of a young boy manually stimulating his date in the back seat of an old Dodge; and Los Angeles police attempted to cut short the David Stuart Galleries' exhibition of works by 43 artists, some of them depicting larger-than-life genitalia in exquisite detail. More recently, Washington's Corcoran Gallery of Art devised a kind of X rating for a show consisting of original drawings for comic strips published in the underground press, with a heavy accent on drugs, violence, racism and sex. "Rather than censor the artists," said the Corcoran's director, Walter Hopps, "we've decided to warn our visitors. If their sense of decorum is offended by four-letter words or outrageous drawings, they (text continued on page 258) Sex In Cinema(continued from page 168) ought to proceed at their own risk."

Films, then, were merely riding the crest of a wave that encompassed all the major art forms. For once, however, there was an important difference. Traditionally, the motion picture had been in the backwash of social change. Because of the enormous sums involved in movie production, because of the length of time it takes to actually produce a movie and because the medium has tended to draw on established plays and novels for its material, films have more often reflected than initiated new moral attitudes or modes of behavior. Suddenly, however, the situation has been reversed. It was the movies, not the theater, that introduced nudity as an ingredient of commercial success. It was the movies, not literature, that demonstrated the viability of Lesbianism, homosexuality, demonism and miscegenation as subjects for mass-market entertainment.

Perhaps this was the central significance of Vilgot Sjöman's I Am Curious (Yellow). It quickly became the symbolic target of those who would stifle cinematic sexual candor. In Washington, D.C., the late Senator Everett Dirksen, while admitting that he had not seen the film, cited it as another argument in favor of strong local censorship. In Philadelphia, where scalpers were asking as much as ten dollars for a $2.50 ticket, city council majority leader George X. Schwartz urged "ministers, rabbis and priests to call on their congregations to boycott this film." If any minister did so, the call went unheeded; I Am Curious grossed $86,704 in its first week there. In New York, in Los Angeles, wherever the picture opened, the response was the same, although theater managers were never certain when or if an ax might fall. Symptomatic of changing attitudes, the film played simultaneously in Los Angeles at two Loew's theaters -- a chain that only a year earlier had refused to book James Joyce's Ulysses, on the grounds that it was obscene.

Notable in I Am Curious -- and not merely because this is what got it through the courts -- is the fact that, though sex is present in abundance, it is by no means central to the theme. Vilgot Sjöman, its author-director, set out to present an analysis of the world youth revolution in its opposition to political oppression and materialistic social values; he shows his heroine, pudgy Lena Nyman, holding numerous man-in-the-street interviews (to determine whether or not her country is actually a classless society), chatting with Russian Communists and engaging in anti-Vietnam demonstrations. She has an impudent conversation with the king of Sweden and worships Martin Luther King (well before his martyrdom) as the symbol of peaceful resistance to hateful authority. In the film within a film, the girl both sympathizes with and resents her weak, drunken father, who fought briefly for the Loyalists in Spain. It is only as part of her resentment and her revolt against all forms of authoritarianism that Lena engages freely and uninhibitedly in all sorts of sexual experimentation.

Because Lena Nyman herself is so obviously unlike conventional cinematic sexpots -- indeed, at one point in the film, she describes herself all too accurately as having "drooping breasts and a big fat belly" -- the effect of her sexual gymnastics is much less libidinous than one might suppose. When she fornicates with her young man on the balustrade of the Royal Palace in Stockholm, for example, much of the scene is played off of the reaction of an incredulous palace guard, who watches immobile, save for the bobbing of his Adam's apple. Similarly, when the two make love in the branches of a huge oak tree, their position -- one that not even the Kama Sutra took into account -- is more laughable than lubricious. Perhaps the film's most daring sequence is that in which Lena toys with Börje's penis after a particularly satisfying bit of lovemaking. It seems as if the girl is actually touching it with her lips, but Sjöman's artful placement of the camera makes it impossible to be certain. What is certain is that, either because of camera placement or the actors' clothing, at no time is actual penetration visible on the screen.

In the rapidly shifting legalisms that seek to separate the outré from the obscene, the depiction of penetration now seems to have become the central issue, as indicated by a trial that took place last April. Late in 1968, the Oklahoma state legislature passed a law forbidding "trafficking in movies showing acts of sexual intercourse." Under this ruling, a low-budget sexploitation picture titled The Muthers was confiscated from downtown Oklahoma City's Sooner Theater by the police, and the Sooner's youthful manager, Larry Dieball, found himself facing the prospect of 25 years in jail and/or a fine of $25,000. At the nub of the defense attorney's argument was the interpretation of "showing acts of sexual intercourse." Did it mean implied or in fact? If it meant implied, he pointed out, precious few films would ever come to Oklahoma City; in one way or another -- a sudden thunderstorm outside a bedroom window, the look of ecstasy on a heroine's face, the waves that pounded the shore as Burt Lancaster passionately kissed Deborah Kerr in From Here to Eternity -- the movies have always found ways to suggest far more than meets the eye. On the other hand, if by "showing acts of sexual intercourse," the Oklahoma legislature had meant the explicit depiction of fornication, as in stag films, The Muthers was clearly blameless. Its cameraman, in fact, brought in from Hollywood for the defense, testified to the sheer physical impossibility of staging such a scene in view of the number of crewmen, lights and retakes required for an acceptable feature picture, not to mention the fact that, as he added, "the men generally wore two or three pairs of shorts to prevent any accidents." The jury -- seven men and five women -- saw the film, listened to the testimony and reluctantly declared Dieball innocent. "I just can't seem to look anyone in the face," said juror C.R. Hayes, Jr., soon after the decision. But the precedent had been established: Unless a film explicitly portrayed a sexual act, it could not be barred from public theaters.

Even so, the fine line grew increasingly ambiguous as film makers grew increasingly bold. In The Sweet Body of Deborah (previewed as Honeymoon in Playboy, August 1968), for example, the picture is in progress for barely five minutes before Carroll Baker slips into a shower with co-star Jean Sorel and the two make ardent, literally steamy love under the spray; in the European version, the scene is even longer and more graphic. In Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch, Warren Oates and Ben Johnson leap into a vast tub of wine, where they disport and consort with a trio of buxom, bare-breasted Mexican señoritas. (A strikingly similar scene, which ran in Playboy, had been excised from domestic prints of Columbia's Genghis Khan four years ago.) In The Big Bounce, lovely Leigh Taylor-Young, totally nude, seduces Ryan O'Neal atop a graveyard slab. The British-made If..., distributed by Paramount, alternates shots of Malcolm McDowell and Christine Noonan grappling fully clothed, with shots of the same pair completely in the buff. In Daddy's Gone A-Hunting, the scene of a young couple -- both nude -- in the act of intercourse is reflected in the eye of a watching cat. Perhaps the most overt suggestion of coitus in any picture released by the major studios to date, however, is in Tony Richardson's Laughter in the Dark, based on an early Vladimir Nabokov novel: A nude Anna Karina is in bed atop Nicol Williamson, and the camera moves in for a huge close-up of Williamson in the throes of what is undoubtedly the screen orgasm of all time.

The significance here lies less in the shots themselves -- most of which have had their counterparts in the sexploitation market for the past few years -- than in the fact that they are now to be found in important, big-budget films with important stars. At this point, the mere presence of nudity occasions scarcely a stir -- not even, necessarily, an R (restricted) rating from the Production Code people. Franco Zeffirelli's sumptuous version of Romeo and Juliet, for example, glimpsed those star-crossed lovers naked in bed and still won a G (general audience) rating. Indeed, a bit of nudity is now considered almost obligatory in anything this side of a Disney film, regardless of its relevance to the plot. Julie Newmar's skinny-dip in Mackenna's Gold, Ursula Andress' ditto in The Southern Star, even Ali MacGraw's poolside and shower splashing in Goodbye, Columbus could have been excised from those films without causing so much as a ripple in the celluloid. But they weren't -- because, by an unwritten code far stronger than anything the Motion Picture Association has yet devised, such sequences are part of what the audience wants to see in most films these days, as witnessed by both the advertising and the exploitation campaigns planned for them.

Even more significant than those films in which nudity is incidental, however, is the increasing number of pictures from major studios in which nudity seems to be their raison d'être. Candy, for example, would have been wholly unthinkable only a few years ago, not merely because it sticks reasonably close to the voluptuous outlines of Terry Southern and Mason Hoffenberg's original spoof on a pornographic novel but because it reveals so much of baby-faced Ewa Aulin's well-stacked anatomy, as she indiscriminately distributes her favors among Richard Burton, Marlon Brando, Ringo Starr, et al. And Heironymus Merkin is, in the words of its producer, co-author, director and star, Anthony Newley, "a really erotic romantic movie," with probably more undraped female flesh per foot than any other picture ever designed for general release in this country. Merkin's incessant search for an ideal alternative to Mercy Humppe (played by Playmate of the Year Connie Kreski), at the prodding of Good Time Eddie Filth (Milton Berle), is the very essence of the film; and Universal surely knew going in that it would have to present considerable exposure -- including the star's own hairy buttocks. Similarly, the British-made Joanna, released here by 20th Century-Fox to considerable acclaim, recounts the sexual encounters of a venturesome young girl as she swings blithely from bed to bed in the mad world of mod London. (Her affair with a Negro gang leader, Calvin Lockhart, is only one of several interracial couplings that have taken place on film this year: Jim Brown and Raquel Welch in 100 Rifles, Patricia Gozzi and Lockhart, again, in Hung-Up, Joanna Shimkus and Sidney Poitier in The Lost Man and Dionne Warwick with Stephen Boyd in Slaves.) Birds in Peru offers a very nude Jean Seberg as a nymphomaniac who, among other divertissements, takes a job in a South American brothel to slake her passions. In none of these films -- and there are many more -- would it be possible to revert to the once-favored practice of snipping out a few offending frames. Cut out the nudity from these movies and the whole picture would disappear.

On a somewhat loftier plane, the tastefully photographed nude dancing of Vanessa Redgrave in The Loves of Isadora is as integral to the film as were her more modest nude scenes in Blow-Up. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie includes a sequence in which a pair of teenagers visit an artist's studio and titter over a large, graphic sketch of a male torso. What makes this sequence remarkable is that the camera moves in for a large close-up of the sketch. What is less remarkable, these days, is that one of the girls is seen subsequently posing in the nude for the artist. And Ray Bradbury's The Illustrated Man is climaxed by a sequence in which Rod Steiger reveals conclusively that he has been thoroughly tattooed from ankle to shoulder by Claire Bloom. (The studio ultimately removed a few frames from a frontal shot that suggested, at least in the studio's estimation, that Miss Bloom had been entirely too thorough.)

Frontal nudity is still relatively rare on the American screen, but even here there are signs that the barriers -- and the towels -- are falling. In the original print of If ..., the headmaster's wife, Mona Washbourne, prowls the empty dormitories of a staid British boys' school completely in the nude, including one shot in which she walks down a long corridor directly toward the camera. And in another scene, the boys are seen taking showers without the usual coy concealment of clouds of steam or artfully draped towels about their middles. But Paramount snipped both sequences, in order to change the film's rating from an X (persons under 16 not admitted) to an R. The studio was less timid with a subsequent release -- Medium Cool -- directed by Haskell Wexler. Set against a background of the violence during the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, the film tells the story of a television newsreel photographer (played by Robert Forster) who, during his off-duty hours, takes art pictures of his bosomy girlfriend (Marianna Hill) and, at one point, pursues her around his studio, with both of them in the altogether. Paramount settled for the X rating on this one.

In The First Time, beautiful Jacqueline Bisset is mistaken for a prostitute by a trio of teenagers who have heard that Niagara Falls is the place to score. Under its original title, You Don't Need Pajamas at Rosie's, the picture received an R rating because of a scene in which Miss Bisset begins a practical lesson in sex education with one of the boys. He proves to be a fast study, and soon rolls over on top of her. The Code authorities agreed that if the producers eliminated the roll-over, the film could play with an M (parental caution advised) rating. Apparently, and inexplicably, the Code administrators approve of sex only when the female is in the superior position. To reach the teenaged audience for which their film was intended, the producers made the cut. Similarly, the Code people revised their rating on That Cold Day in the Park from an X to an M after the studio eliminated a sequence in which Susanne Benton tries to seduce her brother, Michael Burns, in a bathtub. Both the boy and the studio drew the line at incest.

Production Code staffers also keep a watchful eye, or ear, open for what they consider overly explicit dialog. They panicked, for example, when Paul Newman stated in Winning that all he wanted was a car seat that would "fit my ass." "Butt," "can" or "bottom" would have been acceptable, but not "ass." Universal obliged by turning up the background sound to obliterate the offending word. True Grit, with John Wayne as a grizzled, one-eyed frontier marshal, might have been released with an M rather than a G rating (despite the fact that, morally, it is perhaps the cleanest picture of the year) had not Paramount agreed to eliminate a couple of "bastards" and "sons of bitches" from the sound track -- epithets that seemed relatively mild under the duress to which the robust Mr. Wayne was subjected. On the other hand, when the young hero in The Learning Tree is raped by the town prostitute, the subsequent conversation has to do with his "losing his cherry" -- and Gordon Parks, who produced and directed the script from his own novel, adamantly refused to alter the sequence to win a G rating. But in cases where the companies are already aware that their primary audiences are not to be found in the G category, profanity springs readily to the lips of their players. In such films as Bullitt and Medium Cool, the language is best described as earthy; in The Detective, one character advises another to "Kiss ass"; and in The Killing of Sister George, the verbal descriptions of aberrant sexual behavior are not only earthy but explicit. "Pansy," "homo" and "Lez" -- all previously outlawed -- suddenly appeared in the film makers' lexicon.

In many respects, 1969 seems to be the year in which the American motion-picture industry has awakened to the fact that there is a third sex (or sexes). Male homosexuality and Lesbianism, barely hinted at in the past (and specifically barred by the earlier Production Code), have been frankly featured in innumerable films. With an assist from last year's The Fox, Robert Aldrich's production of The Killing of Sister George undoubtedly cleared the way. Though based on Frank Marcus' eminently successful and controversial play, the film went far beyond it to portray on screen a climactic seduction scene -- between Susannah York and Coral Browne -- that had been conspicuously absent on the stage. The nature of the relationship between Miss York and her "friend," Beryl Reid, a fading television performer, is clearly established earlier in the film -- particularly in a sequence photographed on location in a notorious London Lesbian club. But when the younger girl submits to the blandishments of the jaded TV executive portrayed by Miss Browne, what transpires is, in the words of Life, "the most explicit and sensational of a flock of films on Lesbianism."

When the film appeared, at the beginning of the year, it was obvious that Life wasn't exaggerating. The ardent caresses, the nipple sucking, the manipulation of breasts so far exceeded anything this side of the outright sexploitation market that the producer-director felt it a waste of time even to go through the motions of applying for a Production Code seal; it received its X rating by default. Thanks to the public's ready acceptance of Sister George, however, other moviemakers eagerly began to explore the darker sides of sex. Foreign-made Lesbian films such as Les Biches, 99 Women, Therese and Isabelle and To Ingrid My Love Lisa were hastily acquired by American distributors and sent into national release, where they often did remarkably well. More often, as in Succubus or Fräulein Doktor, the Lesbian motif has served merely as a subplot or an excursion, although no less graphic on that account. In Succubus, for example, which its distributors have labeled "the sensual experience of 69," the Lesbian activity is confined to a sequence depicting an acid orgy; and in one episode of Fräulein Doktor, Suzy Kendall, playing a German spy in World War One, pretends to submit to the passionate ministrations of the statuesque Capucine, in order to wrest from her the formula for a poison gas that can mean victory or defeat for the Allied cause. A midyear check on film production in Italy, conducted by Variety, revealed that "25 of them either preponderantly or partially centered on girl-meets-girl," including Carroll Baker's forthcoming Orgasmo (retitled Crazy Desire for American marquees).

But if Lesbianism has achieved new prominence in the films of 1969, male homosexuality threatens to inundate the market. One of the first releases of this year was Warner Bros'. The Sergeant, with Rod Steiger as a tough, swaggering noncom whose latent perversion flares to the surface when he encounters Private John Phillip Law. The film goes no further, however, than to show the impassioned Steiger planting a wet kiss on the reluctant lips of the young man -- followed immediately by a scene depicting Steiger's drunken remorse and suicide. No such remorse attended Jon Voight, the strapping Texan in John Schle-singer's Midnight Cowboy, a film that promises to become The Graduate of 1969. Secure in his own virility, Voight heads for Manhattan, where he is certain that high-society ladies will pay handsomely for his stud services. Instead, he is hooked by a hooker, fobbed off on a religious fanatic and, finally, reduced to selling himself to a nervous schoolboy in the balcony of a shabby Times Square moviehouse. In a last, frantic, horrifying attempt to get money, he accompanies an aging homo to his hotel room, then beats and robs the man, shoving a telephone into his broken mouth. Never has the male stud seemed less attractive -- nor more pathetic and vulnerable -- not even in The Queen, a curious documentary sympathetically covering a transvestite beauty pageant held in New York's Town Hall a few years ago.

Male homosexuality also turns up as the subplot or as incidental material in many more of this year's releases. In The Detective, for example, it is the castration and murder of a well-known pervert that provides the springboard to Frank Sinatra's fast-paced and profane man hunt. In Where It's At, David Janssen pays a bosomy Las Vegas showgirl to determine whether his son, Robert Drivas, is "normal" or not. And Riot, a prison-break picture, luridly depicts Queen's Row, a cell block taken over by transvestites while the other convicts hold their warders at bay. In the hunt for The Boston Strangler, police commissioner Henry Fonda pays a visit to a gay bar patronized by wealthy homosexuals (one of whom, Hurd Hatfield, has been fingered by a rejected Lesbian). And in If..., it is made quite clear that the older boys, the "whips," dominate some of their youthful charges sexually as well as physically. The film version of Staircase, with Richard Burton and Rex Harrison as two aging homosexual hair stylists, premiered in September; and still before the cameras at the time of this writing, but scheduled for release before the end of the year, is an original-cast production of the off-Broadway hit The Boys in the Band.

Occupying a position all its own is Andy Warhol's Lonesome Cowboys, which crept out of the underground for a number of highly successful runs in the larger cities. Populated by Warhol's "superstar" Viva and such doe-eyed aides-de-camp as Tom Hompertz and Joe D'Allesandro, Cowboys is a mock Western in which a gaggle of guys from the East Village try to make themselves at home on the range. They do so by acting as if they were still inside Warhol's foil-lined Factory, improvising dialog that consists largely of bathroom humor (interspersed at regular intervals with the word fuck), removing every stitch of clothing at the least provocation, dressing up as girls and indulging in frequent gang bangs of the spindly heroine. Because Warhol's people are so downright unappetizing, and the homosexual motif so clearly in evidence even in the heterosexual encounters, the effect is far less erotic than pathetic.

Actually, Lonesome Cowboys is merely the most far out of a number of extremely kinky movies that have been released in the past year. Perhaps the mildest of these is American International's Three in the Attic, in which college student Christopher Jones is held captive by three of his girlfriends and forced to make love to them in rotation every hour on the hour. This seriocomic treatment seems designed to prove that you can have too much of a good thing. A bit further along is That Cold Day in the Park, in which Sandy Dennis, as a repressed spinster, picks up hippie Michael Burns, then locks him in her apartment so that he can make love to her. Since their lovemaking is less than successful, and the boy is growing restless, Sandy brings home a prostitute for him, then murders the girl in a fit of jealousy. There is also considerable talk in the film about male organs, and an extraordinarily explicit scene in a gynecologist's office, where Sandy gets fitted for a diaphragm.

Borrowing heavily from one of literature's kinkiest pornographic novels, The Story of O, Henri-Georges Clouzot's La Prisonnière (The Prisoner) presents Laurent Terzieff as a gallery owner whose side line is taking photos of nude models in masochistic poses. Irresistibly drawn to him by her own masochistic drives, television news editor Elizabeth Wiener so enjoys these photographic sessions that she willingly becomes his slave. In the Danish-made I, a Woman II, art collector Bertil Loring becomes so enamored of revealing photos of Gio Petre that he can't wait to meet the original. Her husband, an antique dealer only too eager to oblige, not only arranges a rendezvous but sees to it that his wife arrives wearing an extremely tempting -- and readily removable -- dress that Loring had supplied. Before long, Loring and the wife are going at it hot and heavy on the couch, with the husband looking on. His own passions aroused, the husband then brutally attacks and rapes his wife on the same couch. His first wife, we learn subsequently, had turned prostitute after having been used in the same manner.

Art dealers have by no means been the only characters in foreign films to be afflicted with perverse appetites. In the French Life Love Death, directed by Claude (A Man and a Woman) Lelouch, a married workingman finds himself strongly attracted to prostitutes but irritatingly impotent with anyone but his wife, who bores him. Furious with his extramarital failures, he develops the nasty habit of choking his bed partners to death -- a penchant that in the end brings him to the guillotine. The aforementioned Italo-German production of Succubus leans heavily on sadism, as Ja-nine Reynaud, a night-club performer troubled by weird dreams, translates her fantasies into hideous reality -- such as the night-club act that opens the film, in which Mme. Reynaud toys erotically with a knife over the near-nude bodies of a man and a woman chained to the wall. Later in the picture, still acting out her dreams, she stabs the female partner to death during a performance and, a bit later, does in her lover in the same untidy way.

Perhaps the most thoroughly depraved young lady to make her way onto the screen in 1969 is played by lovely Catherine Spaak, star of Radley Metzger's Italian-made The Libertine. Metzger's Audubon Films has been dealing in sexploitation pictures for the past ten years. The Libertine is more than his most ambitious effort to date; it is his most overtly erotic. Metzger was always a great one for averting the gaze of the camera at the crucial moment, substituting a reaction shot for the action itself. But in The Libertine, the scenes are more often than not startlingly specific, as his heroine searches constantly for sexual degradation -- especially the scene in which she shows her lover a film of herself being smeared with excrement.

The action begins when Mimi (Miss Spaak) discovers that her late husband kept a separate apartment that had not only mirrors on the walls and ceilings but also a considerable stock of pornographic films, including pictures of himself making love to her best friend. She decides to keep the apartment for her own pleasure and after reading up on Psychopathia Sexualis, begins putting it to the test by fornicating with everyone in sight, even, at one point, pretending to be a prostitute in order to expand her range. As in I, a Woman, there is an encounter with a brutal stranger who beats her before taking her to bed, and numerous others before she succeeds in seducing her radiologist during a fluoroscopic examination. In Mimi's frantic search for sexual satisfaction, however -- which includes just about everything known to Krafft-Ebing -- it seems that her only real kicks come from riding naked and piggyback on the shoulders of her bed partner.

In the past, such a film would certainly have gone directly into the exploitation houses, where men cover their laps as they watch the show. No longer. I, a Woman was the first to make a break-through into the art-house market; and today, many a picture that only a year or so ago might have been considered a sexploiter plays not merely in the art houses but even in neighborhood theaters. Indeed, the distinctions seem to have crumbled completely away. Sex-education films such as Michael and Helga, borderline cases such as Succubus and Therese and Isabelle, not to mention such outright exploitation films as All the Loving Couples and Russ Meyer's Vixen, now run in direct competition with the products from major Hollywood studios. Indeed, as Meyer (who introduced the entire nudie cycle with his The Immoral Mr. Teas a decade ago) recently observed, "It's getting harder to stay ahead of the studio product. Why should the guy in the street shell out for a Russ Meyer flick, when he can see Lesbianism and masturbation in The Fox, blood and guts in Bonnie and Clyde and nudity in everything else?"

While Meyer undoubtedly has a point, the exploitation market itself has also continued to expand. When we last surveyed the field for Playboy in June 1967, there were about 80 such films produced each year; today, the number has risen to 200, although not every skin flick that is made succeeds in finding distribution. Two years ago, some 400 theaters would accept the product; today, the number is closer to 600 -- and increasing all the time. Ironically, the effect of this expansion has not been the gravy train that the entrepreneurs of epidermis had envisioned. Because of the heightened competition for what still remains a tiny minority of available play dates throughout the country, this fast-buck industry has become not only a relatively slow but a rather uncertain enterprise. Unless a picture can break through to the art or the neighborhood houses, the chances of its earning substantially more than $100,000 are slim, no matter what the initial investment. The days of the $1,000,000 gross on a $24,000 gamble, achieved by Meyer with The Immoral Mr. Teas, are apparently gone forever. The tawdry production values of a low-budget feature are no competition for the all-star nudity now being purveyed by the major studios.

Curiously, the skin peddlers are becoming, if anything, more circumspect than their big-league competitors. Symptomatically, in February 1969, most of the exploitation-film makers in Los Angeles -- Donald Davis, Dave Friedman, Russ Meyer and perhaps a dozen more -- joined to form the Adult Film Producers Association, complete with its own code seal of approval. "This film meets the requirements set forth in the Code of the Adult Film Producers Association," reads the title that now precedes most of the exploitation pictures from the Los Angeles area. (Film makers in New York and Miami, the other major production centers for such movies, are expected to join the group within the year.)

There is a sound economic reason for this. Because of the very nature of these films, they are constantly on the firing line. They may be yanked off the screen at any time for being "utterly without redeeming social importance" and for exceeding "customary limits of candor." Since many of these producers also own their own theaters, however, there is probably no one in the country today more acutely aware of what precisely constitutes the "customary limits of candor" -- nor of what can squeak past the courts as having "redeeming social importance." Like their counterparts in the Motion Picture Association, they view one another's films and try to hold to some putative line. At a recent screening of Hollywood Cinema Associates' production of The Daisy Chain, for example, the members objected mightily to two scenes, one in which oral-genital contact seemed to be visible on the screen (although the producer swore that such was not actually the case), and another in which the male in an act of simulated coitus had slipped his undershorts below his buttocks. "Look, you'll get your $100,000 anyway, whether those two shots are in it or not," argued Bob Cresse, one of the veterans in the field. "Why kill the goose that lays the golden eggs for all of us?"

To keep their golden goose alive, skin-flick producers now resort to a series of stratagems and conventions that are not merely obvious but often hilarious. Although their pictures abound in sex scenes, one or the other of the partners always wears shorts or panties. A sequence, in fact, may start (and generally does) with a completely nude girl disrobing the man, but her panties may miraculously reappear later, only to disappear once again when the man, now in his shorts, begins to mount her. Penises are rarely in evidence -- and never in erection. Acts of fellatio or cunnilingus are always performed offcamera, the head sinking below the frame while the screen is filled with a close-up of the recipient partner writhing in ecstasy. Lesbian scenes, however, often play with both partners completely in the nude -- probably because no penetration is involved.

But always and without fail, the film's moral message is sledge-hammered home repeatedly, presumably for the benefit of any cops who might wander in to keep an eye on the proceedings. In The Muthers, for example, the moral is that parents who allow their children to run loose and unattended are inviting unspeakable tragedy. In The Daisy Chain, however -- from the same producer -- the moral would seem to be that parents who are overprotective of their children are also inviting unspeakable tragedy. Russ Meyer, whose Vixen is probably the raciest skin flick of the current crop, argues that his picture -- which intersperses intercourse scenes with a bit of "trenchant" dialog -- is really designed to combat racial bigotry and communism. And in All the Loving Couples, after a long night of wife swapping (and the inevitable Lesbian interlude), the film happily reunites all the pairs save one -- the caddish husband and wife who joined the party just to sell insurance. In social outlook, it would be difficult to find a more thoroughly conformist group of pictures.

About five years ago, a schism began to appear in what had started out as a fairly homogeneous nudie-film movement directed primarily toward make voyeurs. On the one hand, some producers opted to strengthen their story lines and production values, anticipating -- correctly, as we can see now -- that in time, they might be able to break into the major markets. On the other hand, there were those who looked at their audiences and decided -- also correctly -- that what they really paid to see was naked women. Why go to all the trouble of shooting a story, they reasoned, when all their customers really wanted was the sight of a girl taking her clothes off? As the cost of producing nudie features continued to mount, these entrepreneurs simplified their lives -- and their budgets -- by photographing on 16mm silent film a series of models disrobing and writhing about on beds or couches; a dozen girls added up to an average-length program. For the first year or so, these girlie films rather resembled the strip acts in burlesque; the girls spent most of the reel peeling, vouchsafing a quick flash of flesh at the very end of their routine. Before long, however, the flesh began to dominate and the bras came off fairly early in the ceremony. Escalating to keep pace with the acreage on view in big-budget features, the models soon began to remove not only their bras but their panties as well.

In 1969, still following the same format, this genre has advanced to the "split beaver," in which the girl's shift or dress is removed promptly at the beginning of the reel and, for the next ten minutes, the camera's gaze remains riveted on her labia majora and minora. Even more recently, some heterosexual activity has been introduced into these films -- rather tentatively in Los Angeles, where any glimpse of a penis is carefully excised, but all out in San Francisco, where the action in such houses as The Screening Room stops just short of the stags. Nudity is complete for men and women, and all forms of coitus are simulated in ways that leave nothing but a glimpse of plunging organs to the imagination. So completely do these pictures dominate what was once the nudie market in San Francisco that today the ordinary sexploitation feature is almost passé.

But 1969 has also witnessed another departure: the all-male nudie. Following much the same formula as the female strip films, their homosexual counterparts appear totally in the nude, flex their muscles a bit and exercise in ways that keep their genitalia bouncing. If more than one model appears in a single film, there is never any sexual play between them, although wrestling would seem to be their favorite indoor sport. Penises, however, are never more than semierect, and totally limp whenever kisses are exchanged. Occasionally in these films, a little charade is acted out -- invariably, at the expense of the female gender, which is impersonated by a transvestite. "Girls" such as Glory Holeden and Billy Butt have already begun to build a following, and their jokes on the sound track -- another innovation -- are rawer, spicier, more single-entendre than any gentleman's smoker ever dared attempt. While longer films are frequently produced with all-nude, all-male casts (Pat Rocco has become the Cecil B. De Mille of this genre), more often the features are simply clever take-offs on the Bette Davis and Humphrey Bogart movies of the Thirties, with the emphasis on transvestite camp, rather than on outright sexual activity. Significantly, the latter have proved more popular at gay bars and private clubs than in regulation grind houses.

The curious thing about the voyeuristic nudies of whatever gender is the alienation they induce. They play in houses to rarely more than 20 or 30 customers, all of whom seem to take special pains to sit as far removed from their fellows as they possibly can. While the five-dollar admission now charged by these specialized theaters may in some measure account for their limited patronage, it is undoubtedly more the pictures themselves that are responsible for the customers' lack of enthusiasm. They are too direct, too single-purposed; true eroticism involves considerably more than watching two people humping on a bed. But as sex films progress in subtlety, complexity and artistry, their audiences can be expected to increase in geometric proportion. This is a problem, however, that has haunted film artists ever since the medium left its swaddling clothes -- not how to show the mechanical act of fornication but how to stimulate the imagination of the spectator so that in his mind, in his senses, he is also a participant. At its best, sex is hardly a spectator sport for most people.

The fact is -- and the films of 1969 have made this very apparent -- that true artists are the only ones who dare go substantially beyond "customary limits of candor," because they are eager to expand the perimeters of sensory experience for all of us. It's no coincidence that the vast strides toward free sexual expression during the past decade have come from the work of such men as Michelangelo Antonioni, Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini and Jean-Luc Godard. Members of the Adult Film Producers Association and all the commercially oriented moviemakers have merely ridden on their coattails. And this remains the case today. Bergman, for example, climaxes his newest film, The Rite (made for Swedish television), with an eye-opening sequence in which Ingrid Thulin wears a gown that covers everything except her breasts, while most of the gentlemen wear gigantic dildos -- a first for films and certainly for television. Antonioni, directing Zabriskie Point for a late-1969 release, has already run afoul of the law for what are purported to be the wildest orgy scenes yet made for the American screen. Frank and Eleanor Perry, who earlier made David and Lisa, explore in Last Summer the burgeoning sexuality of the adolescent -- actually, four adolescents -- with great sensitivity and almost savage candor. Pier Paolo Pasolini's mystic Teorema exudes an eroticism that extends far beyond the occasional nudity and casual partner changing of its entire cast. And the American critic, essayist and novelist Susan Sontag has recently completed for Sandrews (the firm responsible for I Am Curious) the even more enigmatic -- and erotic -- Duet for Cannibals; it includes not only an orgy, complete with stag movies, but two couples who find something approximating sexual gratification only when one or more of the others is either looking on or is directly involved. These are serious artists, men and women who understand that the sexual drive is basic to all of us. By their insights, they give us new understanding of ourselves. For all the shoddy merchandise that has been fobbed off under varied legalisms, such people as these have been able to function and to express themselves this year with unprecedented freedom. And this is what makes it all worth while.