Sex in Cinema 1970

"The sound of silk on silk and silk on skin merges with their whispered endearments, their progressively more passionate breathing, and...." So begins one of the more subdued passages--describing a love scene between two women--from the script for Russ Meyer's Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, as written for the screen by Meyer and the young film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times, Roger Ebert. What Meyer and Ebert sought to do, under the aegis of 20th Century-Fox, was to enhance the barnyard-variety sexploitation movie with slick, big-studio production values and to dramatize their absurdly convoluted plot--something to do with the vicissitudes of an all-girl rock group trying to make good in dirty old Hollywood--with a smile of sophisticated contempt for the cliché characters and the soap-opera situations they encounter en route. No one connected with the picture pretended that its weird assortment of transvestites, nymphomaniacs, homosexuals and male prostitutes constituted "art"; but it did seem to add up to what audiences were buying in 1970. And, symptomatically, Fox rushed it to the screen in midsummer--along with Myra Breckinridge, both with their prints still damp--to avert the financial disasters racked up by such clean but costly entertainments as Hello, Dolly!, which was budgeted at a thumping $20,000,000; Dolls came in at a modest $1,500,000.

Throughout the year, as panic time descended upon the American motion-picture industry, the same story was being repeated at almost every major studio. The big, expensive films--Sweet Charity, Paint Your Wagon, Madwoman of Chaillot--were losing money on a vast scale. (Only the unabashedly old-fashioned Airport seemed to negate this trend and industry pundits are still trying to figure that one out.) Producers such as Darryl Zanuck declared flatly that any picture costing over $3,000,000 was suicidal on today's market, and some suggested that even the $1,000,000 movie might be a risky proposition. Accordingly, the studios shaved budgets and resolutely trained their sights on what seemed to be the two only sure-fire target areas left in the business--the so-called youth market and the sexploitation field. When these two could be combined in a single picture, as in MGM's Zabriskie Point, The Strawberry Statement and The Magic Garden of Stanley Sweetheart, or in Columbia's Getting Straight, the executives figured (not always correctly) (text continued on page 157) that they had achieved a foolproof parlay.

It was this kind of thinking that induced Darryl's son Richard to bring Russ Meyer into the Fox fold, even though Zanuck's firm had never been connected with an X-rated picture, and Meyer, creator of The Immoral Mr. Teas, etc., had never produced anything but X-rated skin flicks. Impressed by a projected gross of over $6,000,000 for Meyer's Vixen (which was made for about one percent of that sum), Zanuck invited Meyer to take over the slackening reins on the "sequel" to his studio's 1968 success Valley of the Dolls--a sequel that not even authoress Jacqueline Susann had been able to get off the ground. Meyer, who in the meantime had completed Cherry, Harry and Raquel on a budget of about $90,000, cheerfully accepted the challenge and, with Ebert, ground out a shootable script in six weeks. What nettled him, Meyer privately admitted later, was the fact that the kind of picture he had been able to make for considerably less than $100,000 outside the studios--no stars, no elaborate sets but plenty of skin--couldn't be done for less than $1,500,000 at Fox. Studio overhead, departmental charges and the accumulated costs of previous efforts to produce an acceptable script placed the film in an economic bracket that he, at least, considered risky.

Zanuck apparently had no such qualms, particularly since $1,500,000 has come to represent an average budget to a major studio. The script also promised a plethora of zesty action--a young couple making it on the back seat of a Rolls, a freaked-out party with another couple coupling in a bathtub, the previously cited Lesbian sequence and a female transvestite who indulges in ritual murders. Meyer, who knows a phallic symbol when he sees one, opened his film with an impressionistic, mysterioso series of moonlit shots in which a shadowy figure is pursued, then slain by an equally shadowy figure brandishing a samurai sword. Moments later, a sleeping girl is aroused by the barrel of a .45 tracing its way up her nude body and into her mouth. The girl's lips caress the muzzle until, with a start, she realizes that it's really a pistol--but then it's too late. There is an acid trip, a surfeit of hard rock and a bevy of the bouncy, bosomy girls who always seem to populate Russ Meyer epics--including Playmates Dolly Read and Cynthia Myers.

At a good deal more expense (an estimated $4,500,000), but for much the same reasons, Zanuck also signed Michael Same to direct a screen adaptation of Gore Vidal's mock-pornographic travesty on Hollywood, Myra Breckinridge. Same, a young hippie Englishman, had attracted some favorable critical attention in 1968 with Joanna, a determinedly Mod chronicle of the bed-to-bed hoppings (text continued on page 164) of a pert part-time art student and model in swinging London. With Myra, backed by an all-star cast that included Raquel Welch, Mae West, John Huston and critic-turned-actor Rex Reed--not to mention the full resources of the Fox lot--Sarne ran wild. Within the first ten days, he managed to alienate not only the entire cast and crew but his distinguished producer, Robert Fryer; he remained in charge, however, with the unflagging support of the studio head, Richard Zanuck. Welch and West weren't speaking after costume disagreements; Reed was speaking volumes--but mostly on the talk shows (and in last August's Playboy) and always in terms of genteel despair over the horrors being perpetrated by his director. Reportedly, Raquel refused to read some of her lines as written and to perform some of the grosser bits of business allocated to her--although, at least in the sneak-preview version of the picture, her opening words were, "Don't you ever forget it, motherfucker." For subsequent screenings, there was an odd modification: The "mother" was blooped out.

In Myra, Same lost no opportunity to be outrageous. Reed's surgical transformation into Raquel is performed with a kitchen knife by cigar-chomping John Carradine, surrounded by smirking, trollopy nurses. And at the end of the film, when Myra seeks to establish the authenticity of her claim to Buck Loner's Westwood acres, she does so simply by hiking her skirts and removing her panties. Meanwhile, she has anally raped a dimwitted young stud and attempted to seduce his adoring ladyfriend. There is an orgy sequence in which most of the female participants wear little more than body paint--and not too much of that--and a tasteless intercutting of clips from old movies, generally with single-entendre effect. When Mae West, as a talent agent whose office equipment consists mainly of one enormous bed, interviews a series of prospective clients, for example, Same edits in a gag from a Laurel and Hardy film, with Stan toting a huge pole across the screen. And when Raquel has her orgasm in the rape scene, he cuts to shots of a dam bursting. The dialog is equally uninhibited, with frequent references to balling and kindred sexual activities. At one point, when Mae is informed by a would-be actor that he is six feet, seven inches tall, she coolly surveys his impressive frame, then drawls, "Forget about the six feet, let's talk about the seven inches."

The films of 1970 would thus seem to have reached the ultimate phase of the liberating process described in this series of articles over the past five years. Complete frontal nudity, both male and female, is no longer taboo; nor is its presence now confined to low-budget exploitation shockers. Mike Nichols' costly anti-war black comedy, Catch-22, includes not only a vividly drawn brothel sequence with the girls wholly or partially stripped for action but a dream image of a totally nude Paula Prentiss standing with legs apart on a life raft. United Artists went a giant step farther when it released Allen Funt's What Do You Say to a Naked Lady?, in which his candid cameras recorded the mingled delight and astonishment--and the occasional consternation--of an assortment of men who unexpectedly discover a shapely nude in their midst. There is also a sequence with a group of women who find themselves in a room with a nude male model. Male nudity, which seemed an unbreachable barrier only a year ago, when Paramount clipped offending frames from If ... and sought to do the same in Medium Cool, emerged unabashed--and unsensationalized--in the fire-lit wrestling scene from Women in Love. Alan Bates wore only a beard and Oliver Reed was even more scantily clad in a mustache. Far from creating a furor, the scene was highly praised by many critics for its daring, its beauty and its consummate good taste.

In 1970, it was almost impossible to find a picture, other than from the Disney studios, that didn't include, in addition to partial or total nudity, at least one graphic bed sequence--and often, as in The Magic Garden of Stanley Sweetheart, with more than just one couple in the bed. Stanley featured its young hero in a high-spirited, pot-induced gambol with two Lesbians; and Beyond the Valley of the Dolls displayed an outsized bed large enough to accommodate four--a Lesbian, a male prostitute, a transvestite (female) and an 18-year-old innocent (also female). Miscegenation, another former taboo, caused scarcely a ripple when it cropped up this year in such films as The Grasshopper, The Liberation of L. B. Jones, Getting Straight, The Landlord, Slaves and Last of the Mobile Hot Shots. The last of these, based on a play by Tennessee Williams, received its X rating primarily for a sequence in which Lynn Redgrave depicts fellatio on Negro Robert Hooks--another first for a film from a major studio. But not the only one: Mike Nichols included a similar episode, with a GI and an Italian girl, glimpsed in a doorway as Alan Arkin walked the streets of Rome in Catch-22.

Not merely has nudity become commonplace and miscegenation acceptable but homosexuality for both sexes has also lost something of its stigma. Last year, when The Boys in the Band went into production, there was considerable comment about the producer's daring, and his sanity as well. Many were convinced that the picture could never be shown. By the time it appeared, critics were speaking mainly about its restraint and good taste, even though it was considerably more graphic in its explication of homosexual hang-ups than the stage version had been. One of the main characters in Otto Preminger's Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon is a crippled homosexual who makes what used to be called improper advances to a well-muscled Negro beach boy, but hardly a critic commented on it. The Christine Jorgensen Story, a semi-documentary account of the protagonist's surgical transformation from man to woman, with none of the clinical details neglected, emerged as merely a routine program feature. And Lesbianism, after The Fox and The Killing of Sister George, has become merely an extra added attraction. To rate an X these days, apparently, a producer must persuade his stars to fornicate with a pig (as in Futz) or with a chicken (as in End of the Road). Almost any strictly heterosexual relationships generally result in an R rating or even a GP (parental guidance suggested) rating.

As Myra testifies, language also took on an earthier tone in 1970. When, in the course of a riotous football game in M. A. S. H., one lineman cautions his opposite number, "I'm going to tear your fucking head off," the audience roars its appreciation--the line is so appropriate, so pertinent, so unexpected. But a former studio head, seeing the film in preview, registered total disbelief. "Less than a year ago," he said, "no one would have even dared suggest this." Today, the disbelief is gone. As if to emphasize how times have changed, the coxswain of a rowing team in The Strawberry Statement chants, "One, two. Fuck you." Bastard and son of a bitch have become terms of relative endearment, and words describing the genitalia turn up with increasing frequency in major productions. Cunt was freely used throughout The Boys in the Band and also in Para-mount's Tropic of Cancer, based on Henry Miller's classic--and long-banned--novel describing the bad old days in Paris. Recently cleared by U.S. Customs, after some nasty legal maneuverings to block its passage, was a Danish-made adaptation, in English, of Miller's Quiet Days in Clichy. "It was a time, and cunt was in the air," flashes on the screen as Country Joe sings over its main titles--and, sure enough, we see views of Paris with cunt and similar graffiti skywritten across the skies. Was it only 30 years ago that Clark Gable's immortal line, "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn," caused American censors to panic?

In 1970, America's would-be censors (continued on page 217)Sex in Cinema(continued from page 164) had considerably more reason to reach for the panic button. For one thing, the abandonment of all forms of censor control over film production in Denmark and the almost complete relaxation of sexual taboos in Sweden led inevitably to attempts by American film distributors to bring in some of the more obviously exploitable numbers. After all the brouhaha over I Am Curious (Yellow), Grove Press was able to get its sequel, I Am Curious (Blue), past the Customs authorities without a murmur--which may explain in part why it was notably less successful than its predecessor. On the other hand, Grove faced stronger opposition to Quiet Days in Clichy, and for a curious reason that is neither yellow nor blue. In the two Vilgot Sjöman films, what the courts like to call "redeeming social values" are clearly evident; both investigate contemporary attitudes in Sweden's socialist state, with sex merely one of the avenues of investigation. And even though, at least in the earlier film, the investigation proceeded into sexual areas that, at the time, went somewhat beyond "contemporary community standards" (another phrase favored by the courts), the sociological, semi-documentary approach precluded the possibility that it was intended primarily to appeal to "prurient interest"--which is the final court test as to whether or not a picture is to be considered obscene.

Throughout the year, importers continued to use these somewhat nebulous (and possibly specious) guidelines to get their pictures past Customs. Such films as Pornography in Denmark, Sexual Freedom in Denmark and Pornography: Copenhagen 1970 went through as "documents"; because they recorded an event or events that had actually happened, they had redeeming social values--even though, in each instance, the footage included completely graphic shots of sexual intercourse that matched precisely the activities featured in stag films. The one difference is that whenever the stag action commences in Pornography in Denmark or Pornography: Copenhagen 1970, it's clear that we are seeing a film within a film; the polite fiction is maintained that we're not looking at stag reels per se but at how they are presented in the film clubs of Copenhagen. Similarly, when we watch Lesbians performing totally nude in a Danish night club or, in Pornography in Denmark, drop in for a protracted visit to a movie studio where a stag film is in the process of being shot, we are repeatedly reminded that these are being shown purely for their "informational" value. Sexual Freedom in Denmark, on the other hand--some of which was actually shot in the U. S.--offers the stag action as part of a course in "sex education." Probably the most responsible of the films in this genre is the West German production Freedom to Love, written and directed by Drs. Phyllis and Eberhard Kronhausen, authors of such well-respected books as Pornography and the Law and The Sexually Responsive Woman. Topped by an orgy filmed in Amsterdam, the film also includes revealing filmed interviews with Britain's chief film censor, John Trevelyan, critic Kenneth Tynan and Playboy's own Hugh Hefner.

Sex education is an increasingly common pretext for getting pictures past Customs and for discouraging local police action. Early in the year, for example, the Los Angeles Customs office sought to bar the Danish-made Without a Stitch, claiming that it went considerably beyond contemporary community standards. A local defense attorney. Stanley Fleishman, easily disproved this by taking the jury to see I Am Curious (Yellow) and The Stewardesses (in 3-D), both of which had run unchallenged for more than six months in the Los Angeles area (although the Los Angeles Times had primly rejected The Stewardesses' proposed tag line for its ads: "It puts you in the cockpit"). What clinched Fleishman's argument, however, was the testimony of a female social scientist who averred that her clinic advocated precisely the same kind of sexual explorations undertaken by the unwed heroine of Without a Stitch to combat her frigidity--explorations that led the comely Anne Grete through half a dozen countries and more than a dozen experimental partners in the movie. "Of course, where possible, we do urge our patients to perform these experiments with their own husbands," the social scientist admitted. The picture was passed.

At this point, at least in the major cities, a thoroughly detailed sex education may be obtained by anybody over 21 who wishes to pay five dollars to see such films as Language of Love, He and She, Alan and Wife and Marriage Manual, most of which come from either Sweden or West Germany. In them, a wide variety of coital positions is demonstrated by living models--in some instances, including masturbation, fellatio and cunnilingus--while sex educators, gynecologists, psychiatrists and ordinary M. D.s lecture, both on screen and off, about the need for this kind of understanding of the sex act to make for happier marriages. In the Swedish Language of Love, for example, a young wife complains about her husband's premature ejaculations. Cunnilingus is the suggested solution of the quartet of experts assembled for this particular film; and when, later, the husband fills their prescription, the wife leaves no doubt about her complete satisfaction.

In such movies as Freedom to Love, of course, the redeeming social values are clear-cut and readily demonstrable. In the case of Language of Love, no less an authority than Dr. Wardell Pomeroy, coauthor of the Kinsey reports, was willing to take the stand and testify that the picture was not only educational but medically sound. Unfortunately, no such easy out existed for such serious but erotically explicit films as Quiet Days in Clichy, which neither pretended that its considerable sexual activity was offered as education nor was any more concerned with contemporary community standards than Miller's original book. Indeed, the film, like the book, might be interpreted as a frontal assault on those very standards because they represent a bulwark for bourgeois values that the author abhors. True to its source--far more so than Joseph Strick's Tropic of Cancer, in which Rip Torn impersonated the young Henry Miller in his Paris escapades--Clichy celebrates the zest for life, the frank enjoyment of women and the kind of euphoria seemingly induced by Paris itself that is Miller's wholly personal hedonism, as elaborated in his several books. He is clearly a man who would pass up a square meal for a rounded bosom any time--and much of the film is devoted to his hungry search for both. It features throngs of available girls, both pro and nonpro, a sequence in which a precocious 14-year-old shares the apartment (and the attentions) of the film's two protagonists, Joey and Carl, and an orgy that ends abruptly when Joey urinates in a bathtub he's sharing with two whores.

Some critics have begun to feel that it's time for the courts to reconsider their own imprecise definitions of what constitutes obscenity--particularly since so many producers of sex-oriented movies have already learned how to beat them at their own game. In a new Italian version of Venus in Furs, a rather handsome and literate updating of the famed mid--19th Century novel by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, the producers diligently studded the film--as if anticipating trouble in the American market--with perhaps half a dozen scenes in which a psychiatrist clinically spells out for the emotionally disturbed hero (and the courts) the progress of his case. It seems that as a child, he had witnessed a servant girl making love; on being discovered, the girl beat him, then cuddled him to her naked breast. From that time on, he could enjoy sex only after enduring or inflicting pain. The inserts, crudely done and even more crudely inserted into the completed picture, are not only redundant, they painfully mar the flow and artistry of the film itself. And yet the producers were undeniably well advised, at least from a commercial standpoint, to include them. When Venus in Furs was imported, its vivid flagellation scenes promptly caught the watchful eye of the New York Customs inspector, a jury found the film devoid of redeeming social values and ruled against its showing.

What the courts have been saying, albeit with no great consistency, is that where movies are concerned, sex can be educational, it can be sociological, it can be clinical; but the artistic representation of sex as a valid emotional and/or erotic experience remains suspect. The importance of the Quiet Days in Clichy decision, handed down this past July by Judge William P. Gray of the U. S. District Court, Central District of California, is the fact that for once the film maker's art and artistic intent (as well as his fidelity to the original novel) were central to the defense arguments. Not since the historic case of The Lovers in 1960 had such a defense even been attempted in the American courts. The literary values that ultimately stayed Customs' restraining hand on such acknowledged classics as Lady Chatterley's Lover, Ulysses, Tropic of Cancer and dear old Fanny Hill simply did not seem to pertain to film. The redemptive values of art qua art, belatedly recognized by the courts in the works of writers, painters, photographers and sculptors, had yet to be extended to motion pictures.

In rendering his decision, Judge Gray made it abundantly clear that he neither liked nor approved of Quiet Days in Clichy. Nevertheless, in summarizing his findings, he stated: "The court is unable to determine whether or not the film Quiet Days in Clichy goes substantially beyond customary limits of candor in the nation as a whole in the depiction or representation of matters pertaining to sex or nudity. Qualified, respectable experts have found that the film Quiet Days in Clichy has artistic merit and other social values. I am unable to find that it does not. Bearing in mind the increasing frankness in society in matters pertaining to sex and nudity, and the possible artistic merit of the film. I find that the film appeals to the normal interest in sex and nudity which the average person has in such matters, and that it does not appeal to the prurient, i.e., shameful, morbid interest of the average man." The Government did not file an appeal.

Most courts around the country, however, continue to apply the customary three-point yardstick--community standards, redeeming social values and absence of prurient interest--to measure a film's morality, with the result that today's producers and distributors of frankly sexploitational films are selling their wares by solemnly, if often hypocritically, stating that sex is the farthest thing from their mind, that their pictures are therapeutic, informational, moral, uplifting, even, on occasion, patriotic. The sex just happens to be there.

Confusing the issue still more is the fact that the courts' yardstick is actually closer to rule of thumb, subject to varying interpretations not only by juries but by jurists. One can sympathize with the 12 good men of Danville. Illinois, who, after deliberating eight hours on the merits of Russ Meyer's Vixen, sent out a note from the jury room, asking the dictionary definition of prurient. The layman on a jury is not expected to be a semanticist. But community standards and social values are even less precise phrases, and certainly less subject to dictionary definitions, as the Supreme Court itself has made clear. Justice William Brennan, who first enunciated the community-standards concept in the important Roth-Alberts decision of 1957, went on to explain that by community, he meant the entire nation, not a particular county or town. Then Chief Justice Warren wrote that there is "no provable 'national standard' and perhaps there should be none."

Today, with most court cases being fought on the community level, this question of whether community should be given a strictly local connotation or be widened to embrace the entire nation has become crucial. The theater owner in Danville who played Vixen, for example, was convicted on criminal charges, even though the same film had been running unmolested for months in Chicago, a scant 100 miles away, and could unquestionably have been shown without any interference whatsoever in the neighboring college town of Champaign, 30 miles to the west. For the people of Danville, however, Midnight Cowboy and Three in the Attic were "far out"; Vixen was the first frankly sexploitation-al feature ever to be booked into their town. Ironically, the theater owner later complained that in the six weekends that Vixen played his drive-in, "We did at least three or four times the business that we did with the Disney-type pictures these people say they want. If I give them what they say they want, I go out of business. If I give them what I know they want, I get thrown in jail." Naturally, the case is being appealed.

Not only is the showing of certain movies being increasingly harassed by the whims and vagaries of local judges, juries and ambitious district attorneys but also approval by a higher court in one part of the country is no guarantee that a picture can be exhibited unchallenged elsewhere. Probably no film in history had been subjected to more thorough examination by the courts than I Am Curious (Yellow) before it was admitted into this country last year. Even so, hardly a month has gone by without its being hauled before yet another tribunal somewhere--from Boston to Spokane. Russ Meyer, whose Vixen has been charged variously with obscenity, pornography and committing a public nuisance, estimates that since his picture was released in 1969. he has fought no fewer than 23 cases in state and municipal courthouses all over the country.

Although in most instances at present, convictions on the local level are almost certain to be reversed on appeal, the complexion of the highest Court has been rapidly changing since the beginning of the Nixon Administration, with each new appointment specifically designed to counter the liberalism of the Warren era. A number of leading civil-liberties lawyers have openly expressed the fear that, should a new test case dealing with obscenity and/or pornography in films reach the Supreme Court, many of the gains achieved in recent years would most certainly be rolled back--despite the Congressionally unpopular conclusion of a special L.B.J.-appointed Commission on Obscenity and Pornography that the latter is harmless and can even be therapeutic.

Meanwhile, the motion-picture industry's own voluntary film-rating system, adopted almost two years ago, has proved less than successful--except, perhaps, to the industry itself. Last March, the M (mature) classification was changed to a GP rating, in the hope of clarifying that particularly nettlesome category, and the age limit was raised to 17. But nothing was done about the far more controversial X rating, which has been increasingly used in movie ads as a lurid come-on. (One sexploitation film, Africanus Sexualis, actually advertised itself in some communities as XXX-rated.) Also, it was frequently quite difficult to see the logic behind giving The Magic Garden of Stanley Sweetheart, for example, an R, while Myra Breckinridge rated an X; to the general public, not privy to the councils of the Motion Picture Association of America, the sexual distinction between the two films would seem not only faint but dubious.

More seriously, although the Code authorities have repeatedly declared that their system is not intended to rate films for adults but merely "to furnish guides to parents to decide on the moviegoing of their children," newspaper publishers in some 40 cities across the nation have undertaken to bar all mention of X-rated movies from their columns and, in many instances, have even refused to run advertisements for such films. When the X-rated Midnight Cowboy walked off with several major Oscars at Academy time, the nationwide telecast probably provided many viewers in those cities with the first concrete evidence that the movie actually existed.

Recognizing these weaknesses in the Code, and fearing what they termed "a new public sympathy for censorship which can only result in a restriction of the responsible exchange of ideas in our society," the National Catholic Office for Motion Pictures and the Broadcasting and Film Commission of the (Protestant) National Council of Churches took an unprecedented step last May. After an 18-month evaluation of the Code and its operation, the two organizations declared, in a joint statement, that "as a guide to production, the Code and its standards are today a pure fiction. It is beyond dispute that the Production Code as such is dead." These two leading church groups went on to point out that the public has not yet been sufficiently educated to the true significance of the Code's symbols, that children are being admitted to R- and X-rated pictures, that advertising for R- and X-rated films is frequently deliberately misleading and that trailers for such pictures are often shown at theaters where G and GP films are running. Most importantly, from their point of view, pictures are being rated less for their basic values and effect upon the viewers than for such superficialities as language, extent of nudity and explicitness of sexual action. Their solution, after considering a number of alternatives, was the creation of an independent regulatory system that would bring back some of the force of the old Production Code and the development of machinery that would enforce compliance. Ominously, the report concludes, "BFC and NCOMP believe that the motion-picture industry has very little time to make these changes voluntarily, before public clamor for censorship secures legal sanctions which could be extremely harmful, both to the industry and to the public welfare."

What the report does not make clear, although this is perhaps the most sensitive area on the current film scene, is that the Motion Picture Association is powerless to impose its ratings or standards on the increasing number of producers operating on the fringe of the business. In fact, unless a foreign film is imported by one of its own member companies--such as United Artists, which released Fellini Satyricon, with its graphic depictions of the decadence that was Rome--the association has no control whatsoever. An independent producer or distributor may voluntarily submit his picture for a rating; but if he knows that it will probably be an X, anyway. there is little reason for him to go to the trouble and expense. Since the X is automatic for unrated pictures, he is free to publicize his film in any way he chooses. Small wonder that the general public is confused.

As a direct result, nudie films have grown considerably rougher in the past year. Although their makers prudently keep their ear to the ground and are probably even more delicately attuned to contemporary community standards than their big-studio counterparts, they can only conclude that they are safe to go and do likewise when they see what the majors are doing. In 1970, for the first time in the ten years he has worked the sexploitation field, Russ Meyer included a glimpse of male frontal nudity in Cherry, Harry and Raquel. Other films, such as Dave Friedman's Trader Horne, have become considerably more liberal in their display of female pubic hair and in their suggestions of fellatio and cunnilingus. A Lesbian sequence is now not merely commonplace but virtually mandatory in the sexploitation field (although male homosexual action is still relatively rare). But the irony is that where once the sexploiters led the way for the major studios, today they seem to be following respectfully in their wake.

The one taboo observed by big-studio producers and sexploiters alike, however, is overt penetration, whether vaginal, oral or anal. For the courts as well as for the Commission on Obscenity and Pornography, this remains the ultimate distinction between what is acceptable and what is hard core. The suggestion of any form of copulation is now countenanced by most higher courts; but the depiction of it, unless in the form of "sex education," is subject to prosecution. Despite this stricture, 1970 saw the development of literally hundreds of small, 16mm "arcade" theaters that are, quite openly, running stag films. In some instances, these are the classic stags described in Part Seventeen of The History of Sex in Cinema (Playboy, November 1967); but more often, they are brand-new and made specifically for this new market--often by the same people who operate the arcades.

What makes this possible is the creation of a legal fiction that the viewers are members of a private club (though in some cities, even this ploy has been chopped in favor of open admission). In most instances, membership cards are instantly available, for as little as a dollar, whenever tickets are purchased (at from three to five dollars). The cards state, in one form or another, "I declare that I am not a member of any censorship group or law-enforcement agency--Under Penalty of Perjury." Being over 21 is another admission requirement, although, in fact, most members of such "clubs" seem to be men well into their 40s and 50s. Another prerequisite, in those cities where the membership device is still employed: "I believe that motion pictures dealing candidly and frankly with sex and nudity are educational and have social value."

With these legal protections, the "clubs" have proliferated into a clear-cut and self-sufficient operation now known in the trade as arcades or minitheaters. Los Angeles is the undisputed leader, with well over 100. New York has three dozen, with additional scatterings in Detroit, San Diego, Seattle, Dallas, Houston and Honolulu. And San Francisco, where it all began, has perhaps two dozen--all of them, as of this writing, operating openly without the club gambit to protect them from the authorities, who seem strangely indifferent to this disregard for the letter of the law. Most of the theaters are small--converted stores with perhaps 50 seats or fewer. Some may have as many as 300 seats; more have between 100 and 200. Because the man who takes the tickets often runs the projector--and the candy concession, as well--operating costs are extremely low. In fact, perhaps the biggest budget item at this point is the creation of films to supply the houses. Because the operation is so new and relatively clandestine, there is not yet a viable distribution system to move prints from house to house or from city to city. But probably most of the exhibitors in this field would rather do it themselves.

Actually, the arcades are a logical extension of the growing schism in the nudie field that first surfaced five years ago. Some, like Russ Meyer, chose to beef up their plots, added more production values and ended up, if not always at 20th Century-Fox, at least on increasingly frequent occasions in neighborhood theaters and drive-ins. Others dropped all semblance of plot and concentrated on the naked girls. At first, the disrobing was protracted, much as in live burlesque. Soon, however, the flimsy nighties or shifts were shucked within the first few minutes of the performance--but the models carefully retained their panties. Then the panties came off, but the camera eye delicately refrained from peeping at the pubic area. Before long, however, pubic hair was also being exhibited, and this led promptly to the "split beaver," in which the camera was trained almost exclusively on the vaginal lips. Almost immediately, this was augmented by what the sexploitation houses like to call "San Francisco action"--films, generally heterosexual, featuring extensive foreplay but simulating coitus. The real thing was only a step away; and in 1970, it arrived.

It could hardly be otherwise, with strip joints in most major cities featuring topless--and often completely bottomless--entertainment under full protection of the law. Those film makers who catered to this same voyeuristic market had to come up with something stronger--or go out of business. Some operators of the beaver and San Francisco--action houses hit on the notion of taking the rougher reels and running them as a separate operation, although often on the same premises, for a restricted membership; and the private-club concept was born. Aiding it considerably is the fact that these theaters use 16mm almost exclusively. Since 16mm cameras are not only relatively cheap but portable, they can be carried into motels, hotels or private homes, away from the prying eyes of either unions or the police. And new 16mm film is now so fast that action can be photographed with existing light or with the addition of a single hand-held "sun gun." Thus, reels for this market can be produced at little cost and with relatively little risk. Sound, for the most part, is merely a collection of phonograph records supplied by the theater (when the projectionist remembers), although--again, thanks to inexpensive equipment--there have been attempts to record dialog as well, but more especially the sighs and moans of the participants in the act of love. Plots, where they exist at all, are minimal--as is the need for dialog.

In these films, all types of sexual activity are now on display. While two is generally the company, three is no longer a crowd when it comes to heterosexual action; any number can play. And where less than a year ago the erect penis was strictly taboo, today it is not merely erect but inserted--in every available orifice. In one technically quite accomplished reel, an attractive, shapely brunette, probably still in her teens, masturbates for fully five minutes directly into the camera, then unzips the fly of her cameraman and, in extreme close-up, sucks on his penis until well after the semen has come. Obviously, this required extremes of professionalism on both their parts.

Films appealing to the homosexual trade also appear to be proliferating--and growing rougher. A year ago, penises were never more than semi-flaccid; today they are often erect. A year ago, the male models who perform in these films avoided all contact with the genitals, except for seemingly accidental touching in the course of wrestling or similar rough sports. Today, they've gotten to the point of mutual masturbation. There is no reason to suppose that--barring an official crackdown--all-out homosexual activity will not be presented on screen within the next six months.

What has been happening in America--the loosening of existing censorial restrictions--is being paralleled to a lesser degree throughout the world. The Scandinavian countries, of course, have long since given up on all attempted restraints on their film makers, except to prohibit attendance by people under 15 at adult-rated pictures. Sweden, following the lead of neighboring Denmark, considered abolishing its Statens Biografbyra, for almost 60 years the official film-censoring bureau. West Germany, now the prime producer of "sex education" movies, maintains what is called a Voluntary Self-Control Board; but its head, Dr. Ernst Krueger, has said, "In the highest age bracket, for viewers of 18 or over, we have become relatively liberal about sex." French censors are admittedly far more concerned with politics than with eroticism.

When Italian film maker Franco Zeffirelli attacked his native industry last spring, declaring that "a film is now judged on the basis of how many nipples you can count by the end," he was tossed out of the Association of Italian Film Authors for his trouble. In England, where censorship is quasi-government-administered, the age for admittance to X-rated films was raised to 18 last July--and the widely voiced anticipation is that British films will soon become even bolder in their efforts to attract the 18-and-over public. India, virtually the last bastion of Victorianism, has traditionally barred not only nudity but even kissing from its films; but this year, at long last, these bans seem about to be lifted on imports, and a government-appointed committee has recommended that they be removed for domestic productions as well.

In Japan, the motion-picture industry operates under a Code of Ethics Commission that seems at least as permissive as our own Motion Picture Association. There is almost no form of eroticism that cannot be--and has not been--presented on the Japanese screen. Only the Soviet Union, Spain, South Africa and Pakistan retain full and vigorous control over their film industries--which may explain in part the lack of impact their product has had on the international market.

Despite this global loosening of restraints, however, the quotient of sexuality has been considerably higher in the American films of 1970 than in most of those imported from abroad, not including the sex-educationals. Perhaps the most stunning of the imports remains Fellini Satyricon, a hauntingly rich fresco of the obscene overindulgence of Nero's Rome. Its young heroes, Encolpius and Ascyltus, both ambisextrous, move motiveless through a series of episodes--fragments, really, like the shattered paintings that close the film--that flaunt a degeneracy so complete as to expunge all sense of eroticism. Eroticism, which relates to love, is present only once in the entire film, in a rather chaste and moving sequence in which a patrician and his wife commit suicide rather than fall into the hands of Nero's minions.

The rest of the film is filled with acidly etched images: a vast, tenement-like brothel with an incredible array of carnal pleasures offered in every room; an orgy with hundreds of naked men and women holding lighted candles in a large swimming pool, while their masters sup, poeticize and fornicate. A naked hermaphrodite is stolen from its sacred cave by the two anti-heroes and left to desiccate in a desert. One of the young men, now captive on a slave ship, is sequestered for the homosexual pleasures of its captain. Both Encolpius and Ascyltus are jealous for the affections of a venal, lissome pervert named Giton, who constantly plays the one against the other. What Fellini seems to be saying, in a phantasmagoric way, is that their times, in fact, parallel our times, and that the licentiousness of the pre-Christian era he so startlingly depicts is a bold foreshadowing of our own fate. "Rome in its decline was quite similar to our world today," he wrote last May. "There was the same fury for enjoying life, the same violence, the same lack of moral principles and ideologies and the same self-complacency."

While Fellini was preparing his Satyricon, his distinguished compatriots Michelangelo Antonioni and Luchino Visconti were at work elsewhere, Antonioni in Hollywood, Visconti, under the aegis (and largess) of Warner Bros., in Germany. Austria and Italy. Antonioni's Zabriskie Point--despite its desert love-in (photographed in discreet long shots) and some slightly more torrid scenes toward the end, when Daria Halprin encounters her boss's collection of weirdo friends at a mountain resort in Arizona--failed to generate either the critical or the box-office enthusiasm that MGM had anticipated. For all of Antonioni's artistry, it proved a painfully superficial account of the contemporary youth scene and a patently, even presumptuously biased attack on American materialism. In The Damned, Visconti was only slightly more successful in his depiction of the bloody dawn of the Hitler era. By dwelling solely on the degeneracy of those times--its protagonist is a transvestite, a child molester and, in the most literal sense, a motherfucker--Visconti achieved revulsion without revelation.

Closer to the mainstream of Italian film making is Pietro Germi's zestful Serafino, the story of a lusty young shepherd who divides his nocturnal attentions between his nubile cousin and the village whore. Almost tricked into marrying the cousin, he settles for the prostitute and her four children of dubious parentage when he discovers that the uncle, the girl's father, plans to use the marriage to control his inheritance. Germi, who earlier directed the frolicking Divorce--Italian Style and Seduced and Abandoned, creates his films with a keen awareness both of what is expected and of what is necessary. There is a gratifying number of sexual exploits on the part of his roguish hero, but Germi invariably--and humorously--cuts away before the action gets out of hand; as opposed to, for example, Rod Amateau's Pussycat, Pussycat, I Love You, filmed at Rome's Cinecitta studios by an American company with an international cast and crew. Thoroughly Hollywood in concept, this fatuous farrago purports to follow the Technicolored adventures of a writer who can make it with everyone but his wife. The color, at least, and the not-quite-costumed girls are gorgeous.

France was also in the doldrums, with Jean-Luc Godard increasingly hung up on New Left polemics and most of his New Wave contemporaries engaged in strictly commercial productions. For United Artists, for example, the talented Francois Truffaut filmed Mississippi Mermaid with Jean-Paul Belmondo and Catherine Deneuve. Filled with steamy scenes between its two attractive stars, the film lacked only one thing--a credible story. Story troubles also marred Claude Lelouch's tricky, often charming Love Is a Funny Thing, with Belmondo (again) as a French composer, married, who has an affair with a French actress, also married, while both are working on a picture in Hollywood. The bed scenes are handled with the taste and discretion one would expect of the director of A Man and a Woman, but this film lacks the romantic aura and in-depth characterizations of his earlier success. Not only taste but tension mark Claude Chabrol's La Femme Infidèle, in which a rather stolid husband gains the respect of his roving wife by murdering her lover; but, again, the tone seems overly cautious by today's standards. Of the older Nouvelle Vaguers, only Alain Robbe-Grillet, the novelist-turned-director, seems interested in sustaining the French reputation for sophisticated sex. His Eden and After concerns itself with a group of students who, out of sheer boredom, go in for simulated gang rapes, sex perversions and Black Masses at a café called The Eden. There is little of what might be called conventional plot--the action drifts casually from Paris to Tunisia, then back to Paris--but RobbeGrillet lets slip no opportunity for full front nudity along the way.

England, which achieved a major breakthrough in Women in Love, had little else going for it in 1970, with three of its leading studios closed and most of its production financed wholly or in part by American companies. Brotherly Love, for example, was strictly a Metro picture--and looked it. While Peter O'Toole gave one of his finest performances as a roistering nobleman with an incestuous passion for his married sister, Susannah York, and the action included a forthright attempt by O'Toole to seduce Miss York in her bath, the film nevertheless seemed wrapped in the cotton wool of another time and another place--specifically, Hollywood of the Forties and Fifties. And despite some modishly modern camera effects, the same might be said of My Lover, My Son, another of Metro's English ventures, in which beautiful Romy Schneider displays more than motherly affection for her fully grown but emotionally immature progeny.

Also under the Hollywood influence was John Boorman's Leo the Last, with the capable Marcello Mastroianni totally miscast as an effete British nobleman who divides his time between spying on his black neighbors through a telescope and attending sensitivity sessions with his well-heeled cronies. Dramatically, an inordinate amount of time is spent in a communal pool, where nude ladies and gentlemen seek to achieve spiritual freedom by bouncing up and down in the water. But if the sequence contributed little dramatically, visually it was the high point of the picture. James Bond made his annual appearance, this time with newcomer George Lazenby as a sort of road-company 007, in On Her Majesty's Secret Service; as usual, the girls were beautiful and, in every sense, bountiful. Monique, a low-budget, no-star British sex film imported by the normally astute Joseph Levine, proved more French than the French themselves have been this year: A husband with a frigid wife turns to their French maid for affection; so does the wife; when the husband finds the two of them in naked embrace, he transforms the situation into a highly satisfactory ménage à trois. Rated X.

If, on the whole, the European film makers were relatively staid in 1970, the exuberant offspring of the New York underground were not. Actually, the underground not only surfaced in 1970, it erupted--and nowhere more explosively than in Michael Wadleigh's Woodstock, a more-than-three-hour exploration of the sights and sounds of 1969's most famous love-in. For three days and nights, despite rain, mud and fatigue, Wadleigh's camera crews photographed not merely what was on stage at Woodstock but the freak-out that surrounded it. Kids got stoned. They bathed--or sunbathed--in the nude. They went out into the tall grass and made love, but always within earshot of the incessant rock beat. The cameras were everywhere, and everywhere there was something worth looking at, worth recording. If nothing else, Woodstock deserves to go down in history as one of the great love pictures of all time.

Meanwhile, in the 16mm cinémathéques--and often in 35mm art houses as well--another side of the underground unfolded. Young film makers are not infrequently approached to supply movies for the beaver and arcade operations. Sometimes they are also asked to do stag reels; they have the equipment, they know film technique, they are accustomed to working with nudes--and they work cheap. More than one underground film maker has supported his more artistic efforts in this manner. Hi, Mom!, by young Brian De Palma, treats this in a buoyant, comic way. In one of his film's four segments, the hero is instructed by the winner of the Golden Fig Leaf Award in the art of making stag films, then shoots a session through his own apartment window.

Events is more serious. Two young men, needing money to do a documentary on Lenny Bruce, agree to make a series of stag films for $10,000. The greater part of Events deals with the preparations, including fascinatingly improvised sequences--frequently au naturel--in which their girlfriends try to analyze their reactions to the proposed filming and their willingness to participate. One, Joy Wener (whose real name is, improbably, Joy Bang), opposes the whole idea. Another actually becomes stoned during the session. Others, including some professional models hired by the producer, participate with wholehearted enthusiasm. The climactic orgy is a composite of the filming itself, through multicolor gauzes, and the edited picture that the audience ultimately sees is flash-cut and multiple-imaged, but with fleeting glimpses of sexual action hitherto seen only in authentic stags. It is, without question, the most far-out experimental film of 1970.

That's no small feat, considering the competition. Also up from the underground is Coming Apart, a kind of Warhol movie that goes Andy one better: All the action is in focus and all the dialog can be heard. Milton Ginsberg, the director, starts from the simplest premise: A psychiatrist (Rip Torn, again), who is also a formidable lecher, decides to keep a film record of his activities. In a borrowed apartment, he sets up a concealed camera that looks into a large mirror, and thus covers the greater part of the room--including the couch on which most of his patients discuss their problems, quickly disrobe and submit willingly to "therapy." Uncompromising in its technique, Coming Apart is a vivid document of our erotically troubled time.

A somewhat similar statement is attempted, less successfully, in End of the Road, directed by Aram Avakian from a script he wrote in association with Terry Southern. Its protagonist, Stacy Keach, is a young teacher who has been released from a mental institution and resumes his career at Johns Hopkins, only to become involved with the adulterous wife of a gun-fetishist professor. While the wife has an affair with Keach, the professor masturbates in his study. There is frontal nudity, male and female, bestiality and an appalling abortion sequence in which the patient drowns in her own vomit-filled oxygen mask. After these and similar delights, the film makes a belated attempt at social commentary by bringing in President Nixon and the astronauts, but the effect is less pertinence than impertinence.

Without question, as far as sex in cinema is concerned, 1970 has been the crucial year. The big studios, the independents and the underground alike have pushed their new freedom to the limits, always testing to see how much farther they can go, largely ignoring the silent majority implacably building up on the right. Meanwhile, the push for national movie censorship continues to grow. What faces us in the year ahead rests in the answer to a simple question: Will these pro-censorship forces succeed or will audiences grow tired of the sexual excesses in so many films and cause them to fail through lack of attendance? The pendulum has already begun its reverse swing--and it's bound to hit somebody.