Sex in Cinema--1971

One year ago, in Playboy's November 1970 issue, we wrote, "The pendulum has already begun its reverse swing--and it's bound to hit somebody." The pendulum referred to was the degree of permissiveness granted to films shown in the United States, and the allusion was to those who believed that movies had gone too far in their depiction of sexual activities. In May of 1971, that pendulum made its first strike. Jack Valenti's Motion Picture Association of America, the industry's own appointed guardian of movie morality, lost the support of both the National Council of Churches (Protestant) and the National Catholic Office for Motion Pictures. In a rare joint statement, they affirmed that "the pressures from motion-picture companies are too great, and the specter of Governmental regulation is too remote, for the industry as a whole to take seriously its task of self-regulation at present." The churches weren't urging national censorship--far from it. But they were arguing that, simply for their own good, the film companies should "develop a workable, dependable and credible system of self-regulation as an alternative to Governmental censorship."

The churches had good reason to suspect the functioning of the M.P.A.A. and its rating game. The year had hardly begun when MGM, chafing at an R (restricted) for its costly and prestigious Ryan's Daughter--which featured some fairly graphic groping beneath the covers between Robert Mitchum and Sarah Miles and even more explicit encounters between Miss Miles and Christopher Jones--appealed the rating and, without losing a frame, had it altered to a GP (parental discretion advised). Even so, Metro's chief, James Aubrey, Jr., a bad winner, declared that he would pull his firm out of the association within the year (he didn't). Similarly, Columbia, which prided itself on (text continued on page 171) never having distributed an X-rated movie, preserved its integrity by bringing pressure on the M. P. A. A. to change its X to an R for Jack Nicholson's Drive, He Said, despite extensive frontal male nudity, even more extensive female nudity and one scene of clearly implied sodomy.

The fact is that whenever a major company exerted itself sufficiently, the ratings could be changed--sometimes at the cost of a few discreet cuts to save face for the M. P. A. A., sometimes by simply throwing its weight around. The Motion Picture Association is, after all, the creature of the industry itself, and therefore highly susceptible to the wishes of its employers. Significantly, Stephen Farber, a young and decidedly disenchanted former member of the association's Code and Rating Administration, not only admitted this but noted further that "in spite of the board's claim that they were obliged to give a studio the rating it wanted, they didn't feel this obligation toward independent producers of sex films, who might mutilate their films and still find themselves stuck with an X because 'their intention was to make a sex film.'" In other words, the ratings--particularly the GP and R categories--have become meaningless. Small wonder that the churches have lost confidence in the Motion Picture Association.

But beyond this, the pressure from the right has continued to escalate. Charles Keating, Jr., whose Citizens for Decent Literature has, in the past year especially, concentrated its fires of hell and damnation on motion pictures, issued an appeal to raise $235,000 to fight those "slick pornography lawyers" who have the effrontery to defend the freedom of the screen. Ominously, but probably correctly, he noted in his appeal, "Today, changes in the U.S. Supreme Court show that the time is right to get strong cases against pornography into the courts." As if in confirmation, Stanley Fleishman, a Los Angeles civil-liberties lawyer who has become one of the fiercest champions of free expression in all media, privately expressed his concern that an obscenity case coming up at this time "is not likely to receive as open and favorable consideration as it might have during the years of the Warren Court." At one point this past summer, the court calendars in Beverly Hills alone were almost 50 percent devoted to obscenity cases--and in at least one instance, the trial of (text continued on page 186) Sex in cinema(continued from page 171) Sexual Freedom in Denmark--which ended in a deadlock--nine of the 12 jurors had previously served on such cases.

Most telling of all, however, is the simple, indisputable fact that the general public is no longer responding uncritically to the lure of vast quantities of uninhibited sex up there on the wide screen. The handwriting was already on the wall last year, when 20th Century-Fox was forced to declare a $1,000,000 loss on its all-star ode to transsexualization, Myra Breckinridge. Despite that studio's most intensive publicity campaign since Cleopatra, there just weren't enough camp followers to make it pay off. (Russ Meyer's Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, released almost simultaneously, did show a profit--but its costs and, hence, its profit margin, were substantially lower than Myra's.) Also disappointing were such determinedly with-it movies of 1970 as The Strawberry Statement, The Landlord, The Magic Garden of Stanley Sweetheart and R.P.M. The mass audience was plunking for such old-fashioned entertainments as Airport and Love Story, and producers have been trimming their sails--and their films--more carefully ever since.

Because it takes anywhere from 12 to 18 months for most movies to go from incubation to delivery of prints, the full effect of this revelation is not likely to become apparent until well into 1972. Portnoy's Complaint, for example, was being readied for production at Fox until the red ink on Myra suggested a prudent halt. Warner Bros. promptly picked up the property, but it didn't go before the cameras until last June and probably won't be released until next spring or summer--by which time no one is prepared to say what the market will be. Meanwhile, what we have been seeing is a long series of pictures conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that if it makes a buck, fine. But there is no disguising the hostility or, at best, indifference that has greeted many of these efforts.

Perhaps the most controversial film of the year was Jack Nicholson's Drive, He Said, which was unveiled to a storm of boos and hisses at the Cannes Film Festival last spring and garnered little critical approbation when it opened here a month or so later. Produced by Bert Schneider and Bob Rafelson, the wildly unconventional team that was earlier responsible for both Easy Rider and Five Easy Pieces, it is, on the surface, at least, yet another reversion to the university drug scene that clogged the screens in 1970, when this picture was begun. But with a difference. This one means what it says. Despite strong overtones of Getting Straight, which it often resembles in story line, Drive, He Said makes no compromises to win over its audiences. Its protagonist, a star basketball player (William Tepper), makes out for a time with the bored wife of a faculty friend, but ultimately she rejects him. His revolutionary-minded roommate (Michael Margotta), usually high on drugs, goes berserk at the film's finale, assaults the wife (Karen Black), then runs naked across campus, releasing caged snakes, scorpions and rats en route. A rejection of all forms of authority and conformity throbs through the picture and gives it a weird, compelling life.

Filmed at the University of Oregon, the picture was first threatened with legal action by the school's administrators, who apparently had not read the script but felt they had been duped (although everything about the picture suggests an Eastern college). The producers were next faced with an X rating from the Motion Picture Association because penises are abundantly in evidence in an exuberant locker-room sequence and again when Margotta, without so much as a fig leaf, unleashes the biology department's experimental menagerie--not to mention the unclad girls who frequently stroll before the lens and a scene of anal copulation between Tepper and Miss Black on the front seat of a Volkswagen that leaves little to the imagination. But the overriding seriousness of the film's theme and treatment, attested to by a number of expert witnesses--including a Catholic priest--ultimately convinced the association to change its X to an R. Drive, He Said was probably the most far-out film to come from a major company in 1971.

But there were others not too far behind. Early in the year, Metro, rather surprisingly, put into general distribution an X-rated British documentary, The Body, that opens with an extended traveling shot along a line of people, most of them nude, depicting man's (and woman's) progress from the cradle to the grave. Although the film was obviously conceived as a sincere and ambitious educational feature, demonstrating with clarity, imagination and often an exciting use of internal photography the functions of our various organs, it included--naturally--the processes of both impregnation and childbirth, as well as one sequence in which a young couple engage in mutual oral gratification. So--just as naturally--Metro billed it as a sex movie, thus simultaneously turning away its proper audience and profoundly disappointing anyone who bought a ticket in anticipation of 90 minutes of hard core.

Metro was also responsible for director Roger Vadim's first American picture, the allegedly comic Pretty Maids All in a Row. Vadim, better known for his sensuality than for his sensitivity (and also for his predilection for marrying his leading ladies), showed once again that he has a keener eye for feminine curves than for camera angles. Pretty Maids asks us to accept a graying Rock Hudson as the popular football coach and student counselor of what seems to be, apart from its football team, an all-girl high school. The girls--among them JoAnna Cameron, Margaret Markov and one with the evocative name of Joy Bang--are uniformly luscious and uniformly compliant. Hudson samples the charms of eight of these pretty maids in his office, flashing on a Testing sign whenever he is thus engaged. The trouble is that this satyric scholar resorts to throttling three of his undergraduate inamoratas. But under his tender ministrations, they die happy, a smile on each of their pretty, vacuous faces. Although there is nudity in abundance, the sex acts are merely suggested, thus winning the film its R rating.

Probably the hardest look at the sexual peccadilloes of the American male in this or any year was to be found in Mike Nichols' brutally candid Carnal Knowledge. Working from a witty and incisive script by Jules Feiffer, Nichols simultaneously probes and flays his two main characters, Jack Nicholson and Arthur Garfunkel, as they make their lecherous way from a college campus in the late Forties to Midtown Manhattan today. The film is divided into three sections, each centered on a different woman. In college, where Garfunkel is tentatively wooing Candice Bergen, Nicholson, his friend and roommate, boldly cuts in and beds her. Nevertheless, she marries Garfunkel. A decade later, Nicholson shacks up with a buxom model (played by Ann-Margret), meanwhile supplying dates for his pal, whose marriage by this time has begun to pall. In the final sequence, Nicholson, now nearly impotent, winds up paying for the ritualistic lovemaking proffered by Rita Moreno.

It's significant that the male characters continue through the film, but each of the women is onscreen only for her own particular sequence. Since their men treat them as objects, it's wholly appropriate that, although they may still be mentioned--generally disparagingly--they are no longer seen once their utilitarian value has passed. There is a depth of bitterness about the relationships in Carnal Knowledge that few American films have ever displayed and none has exceeded. Love as a romantic ideal still exists for Nichols and Feiffer, but they regard it as something remote and unattainable. Their reality is a world in which the male views every female as a more-or-less desirable combination of tits and cunt (the words are used frequently), each with her own special techniques for castrating her males. It's a glum world, a frightening (continued on page 264) Sex In Cinema(continued from page 186) world, because neither the men nor the women derive any lasting pleasure from their frantic lovemaking. And lovemaking without love becomes, as in the final sequence, a commodity to be bought and sold. Women's libbers could hardly agree more, although they probably hate the picture for showing it like it is instead of the way they want it to be.

Carnal Knowledge came as the culmination (though not necessarily the conclusion) of a series of movies that, generally in the guise of comedy, have been reconsidering--among other things--the venerable institution of marriage. There was a time when the screen insisted that everything after the wedding bells was unadulterated bliss. Part of the shock of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, at least in its screen incarnation, was its revelation that married life could be sheer hell. Then, as wife swapping entered the vocabulary (and immediately became the theme of several low-budget exploitation pictures), the major companies began to consider the possibilities in such films as Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, Divorce--American Style and, this year, I Love My ... Wife and Doctors' Wives. Invariably, however, the proper pairs ultimately sorted themselves out and the marriage was saved, just as it always had been in the past.

Carnal Knowledge is exceptional in that it suggests, quite casually, that there was nothing worth saving in the Gar-funkel-Bergen marriage and nothing in the Nicholson-Ann-Margret relationship worth marrying. Not coincidentally, Jules Feiffer's script for Little Murders also takes a rather dim view of connubial bliss, and not only in his devastating glimpses into the home life of the Chamberlains and the Newquists. When Marcia Rodd proposes to Elliott Gould, it's because, as she puts it, "I want a strong, vital, self-assured man that I can protect and take care of."

Robin Stone, the hero of Jacqueline Susann's The Love Machine, is clearly the kind of strong, vital, self-assured man that no woman has to protect or take care of, although in the course of Jack Haley, Jr.'s racy filmization of the novel, quite a number try. Most prominent among the ladies making the effort is Dyan Cannon, as the oversexed wife of a television-network executive (Robert Ryan) who is less effective in the bed than on the board. Clearly the ball-breaker type, Miss Cannon discovers Robin (John Phillip Law) as a newscaster on her husband's network and has him promoted to the head of that department less because he is newsworthy than because he is newsworth. But when she discovers that his attentions have strayed, she proceeds to have him ousted on a morals charge--as a homosexual! His swish photographer pal (David Hemmings), who has been supplying Robin with girls, provides the pretext. The film, true to the novel, includes a gamut of sexual encounters with glamorous models, ambitious career girls and even an outsized whore (whom Robin beats furiously in an all-too-rare fit of self-loathing for his indiscriminate appetites). But however tawdry and treacly, it's all handled with a veneer of polish and sophistication; and what with the luxury of its settings, the boldness of its language and its behind-the-scenes revelations of how a TV network supposedly operates, The Love Machine has every possibility of becoming the Airport of 1971.

Columbia reportedly paid more than $1,000,000 to Jacqueline Susann for the rights to her novel, gave her husband, Irving Mansfield, the title of executive producer and used Jackie herself for a bit part as a television newscaster. Fox has been somewhat more reticent about revealing the sum paid to Irving Wallace for his best seller The Seven Minutes, but it turned the filming over to that shrewd, fast-shooting ex-king of the nudies, Russ Meyer, who willingly relinquished that title after last year's Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. The Seven Minutes, like The Love Machine, contains only an occasional flash of nudity. It is concerned, instead--as is Meyer himself--with the question of what constitutes the candid treatment of sex and what is to be construed as pornography. The costly running battles that Meyer has fought with the censors over his previous works have seemingly come into focus in this story of an ambitious district attorney (Philip Carey) who busts a bookstore for selling an allegedly pornographic novel, The Seven Minutes. (The minutes referred to are those it takes a woman to achieve orgasm.) All is cleared when the presumably deceased author (Yvonne De Carlo) takes the stand and reveals that her book has had a positively therapeutic effect on an impotent young man charged with the brutal beating of a girl while under the influence of her lascivious literature. On the surface, Meyer's treatment is his customary tongue in cheek; but beneath his slick handling of obviously exploitable material is the indication that he really means every anticensorship barb he shoots out.

More frankly exploitational were such films as Avco Embassy's The Sporting Club, a horror story set in a Midwestern upper-class resort whose privileged members enjoy blood sports not limited to wild fowl and game. An all-out orgy climaxed this ugly film's festivities until the distributors toned down their prints for release. In Impulsion, architect Alejandro Rey returns from a business trip to find his wife in bed with his best client. After murdering the man, he returns from another trip to find her balling his teenage son. (by a previous marriage). In B.S. I Love You, young Peter Kastner, playing a producer of television commercials, wends his way upward through the advertising jungle by bedding his boss (Joanna Barnes) as well as her nymphomaniacal daughter (JoAnna Cameron). Melvin Van Peebles' Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song, with its self-imposed X rating, for all its anti-Whitey indignation tends to emphasize its hero's prowess in a succession of beds. Where's Poppa? offered its famous "tush" scene, with Ruth Gordon hungrily kissing the bared behind of her son, George Segal. John Cassavetes' Husbands supplied its trio of foot-loose males on a drunken toot in London with an equal number of agreeable bed partners. In most of these pictures, nudity is rampant, and in all of them, sexual activity is central to the development of the story.

But along about the middle of the year, the studios began to get the message desperately being flashed not only by their own M.P.A.A. but by box offices all over the country. Excessive erotica was out. An X or even an R on an expensive picture could cost them millions at the till. The studios began making "voluntary" cuts--even when the film makers protested. Von Richthofen and Brown, a tepid account of aerial combat in World War One, had originally been spiced with such moments as the pilot making out with a girl on the wing of his plane. Ironically, when it--and other such amorous interludes--disappeared, there was little left to the movie. Universal's Two-Lane Blacktop, the subject of a gaudy prerelease layout in Esquire, emerged with most of its gaudiness excised. Similarly, Cinema Center's The Christian Licorice Store, which had gone into production as the most with-it and far-out picture of the year, proved a tame and routine offering once its sex scenes had been clipped. Even films already in release, such as Carnal Knowledge and The Sporting Club, were subjected to additional scissoring in the interest of public acceptance. The pendulum was taking its toll.

Symptomatically, Universal, which enjoyed a modest success and wide critical approbation with its film Taking Off, decided to cool it a bit after the initial engagements. One of its comic highlights was a madrigal, Ode to a Screw, sung deadpan into the camera by a girl who, with marvelously Elizabethan sang-froid, repeats the word fuck several dozen times. Universal bleeped out the offending word for showings in more sensitive areas following its first runs. Taking Off, directed by Czech-born Milos Forman, was but one of the many films of 1971 that prolonged the youth cycle begun a year ago. In Forman's picture, the daughter of a middle-class couple (delightfully portrayed by Buck Henry and Lynn Carlin) runs off to Greenwich Village to make her way as a folk singer. At the end of the film, she returns with her intended, a particularly hirsute rock musician, to the bosom of her family--after her parents have been exposed to a pot party and an experimental game of strip poker. Queried by the father, the musician explains that he earned $290,000 last year--but adds bitterly that his taxes will help support the very establishment he has been singing against.

If Forman's film is gently satiric, Making It (the titles of these youth-oriented movies are distressingly similar) offers a more astringent view. Kristoffer Tabori makes it with just about everybody on his college campus, including the 30ish wife of his phys-ed instructor and an 18ish coed who soon believes she is pregnant. She isn't, but his mother is, by a since-deceased inamorato; and boy is the forced to look on while Mom is aborted because the doctor assumes that he was responsible for her condition.

Unwanted pregnancy is also the theme of Friends, in which two teenagers, Sean Buy and Anicee Alvina, run off to the south of France and discover the delights of unmarried love--until Anicee is unfortunate enough to have a baby. In Summer of '42, another of 1971's numerous coming-of-age movies, 17-year-old Gary Grimes loves 22-year-old Jennifer O'Neill from afar. When she learns that her husband has been killed in the war, she makes poignant love to the boy in a long, silent and strikingly sensual scene. Perhaps the highlight of the film, however, in both humor and audacity, is a sequence in which young Grimes embarrassedly outwaits all the other customers in a drugstore so he can buy a packet of prophylactics without attracting attention. (A scene in Carnal Knowledge has Garfunkel actually displaying a condom on the screen--a movie first.)

Red Sky at Morning closely follows the pattern of Summer of '42, with the exception that young Richard Thomas is initiated into the mysteries of love by a girl his own age. And in Glen and Randa, a low-budget enterprise by Jim McBride that's making its way through the art-house circuit, teenagers Steven Curry and Shelley Plimpton (who spend the first 20 minutes of the film running through a wilderness without a stitch) learn all about sex, if nothing else, in a world supposedly devastated by the bomb. At the film's end, with Randa alarmingly pregnant, Glen devises a decidedly unorthodox coital position that, with an assist from grizzled Woodrow Chambliss, permits him to continue his lovemaking despite her abdominal encumbrance. When love finds Andy Hardy these days, the accent is on the hardy.

Further pointing up the as-yet-unnarrowed horizons of the permissible is a new emphasis on penises. As few as two years ago, Robert Forster's heavily shadowed but still obviously nude romp through a sequence in Medium Cool was enough to earn the picture an X. Today, far more protracted--and unshadowed--male nudity (as in Drive, He Said) garners an R. In The Last Movie, Dennis Hopper strips his private parts of their last vestige of privacy when he uses them to ravish an obliging chick (while a passing priest looks on with less shock than envy).

But beyond the occasional viewing of a penis, several 1971 offerings centered their entire plots on the male organ. This was hardly surprising in the case of a film like Pinocchio, a rather clever--if obvious--adaptation of Collodi's fairy tale that rendered it no longer suitable for the kiddies. It was produced specifically for the sexploitation market and abounded with bouncy, bosomy girls, all anxious to sample Pinocchio's outsized endowment (which, incidentally, was never exposed to the camera). But it was the highly respectable Cinerama corporation that presented The Statue, in which no less a star than David Niven sets off in jealous pursuit of the man who modeled for the penis on the larger-than-life statue of himself carved by his wife, Virna Lisi. Since the statue resembles him in every other respect, he is certain that the part in question belongs to one of her lovers. And in Percy, imported from England by MGM, the hero (Hywel Bennett) spends much of the film searching for the anonymous donor of the penis transplant that gave him a new lease on life. Along the way, as in Pinocchio, he encounters innumerable bed partners--Elke Sommer, Britt Ekland, Adrienne Posta and Sue Lloyd among them--all eager to sample his new "Percy." As a sort of reverse to the coin, Anne Heywood is seen in I Want What I Want as a rather girlish young man who does a Christine Jorgenson and emerges as a very womanly young woman. For anyone interested, the surgical details are spelled out in extenso.

Homosexuality also figured prominently on the screen this year. Until 1970's The Boys in the Band, the homosexual had been generally represented cinematically by rabbit-faced Franklin Pangborn or by W.C. Fields's recurrent nemesis, Grady Sutton. Either he was a figure of fun and derision or he was barred from the screen altogether. Today, the homosexual is often portrayed sympathetically--although he may also be a figure of fear. In The Love Machine, David Hemmings is at first amusingly bitchy; later, he becomes Robin's lethal foe. In Get Carter, a gutsy crime melodrama starring Michael Caine, the ferocious beating that Carter takes early in the film is clearly inspired by his betrayal of an earlier homosexual relationship. Villain, also British made (and also for MGM), offers Richard Burton as a homicidal homo with a special affection for the razor. In addition, he has a nasty penchant for beating up his pimping lover, Ian McShane, before making love to him. Gene Shalit, NBC's acerbic movie critic, pondered aloud Burton's own penchant for such roles, after his appearance last year as a homosexual barber in the disastrous Staircase. "He certainly didn't learn it at home," purred Shalit.

On the other hand, Ken Russell's opulent film biography of Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky, The Music Lovers, makes that tragic composer's homosexuality the key to both his greatness and his misery. Although in love with the fluttery Count Chiluvsky, Tchaikovsky--played by a bearded and teary-eyed Richard Chamberlain--marries the neurotic Nina Milukova (Glenda Jackson) in the hope of straightening himself out. The marriage is a preordained failure, as clearly indicated by a scene in which a nude Miss Jackson writhes on the floor of their train compartment in a vain attempt to rouse the ardor of her new husband. After their divorce, she progresses to nymphomania and madness, epitomized at the finale by a weird sequence in an asylum where, like a caged animal, she whirls among the waving, outstretched arms of the male inmates in the surrounding cells. Tchaikovsky himself has a lurid homosexual fantasy in which he shoots the heads off all the female members of the cast to the cannon booms of the 1812 Overture, then commits suicide. The Music Lovers may leave something to be desired as biography, as history and as a valid study in abnormal psychology, but it's marvelously baroque moviemaking.

Similarly, until a few years ago, the theme of homosexual love (albeit unrequited) that runs through Thomas Mann's Death in Venice was enough to bar this splendid, tragic novella from the screen. Last year, after The Damned demonstrated that even the most overt forms of depravity could secure important play dates in this country, director Luchino Visconti was commissioned to begin production of Mann's neglected classic. Death in Venice is a gentle story--indeed, less a story than a character study of the moral disintegration of an aging composer (Dirk Bogarde) through his growing infatuation for a beautiful 14-year-old Polish boy (Björn Andresen). The boy, aware of his power, does no more than grant the man a fleeting smile, but this is enough to make the composer stay on in Venice despite a spreading cholera epidemic. Done with exquisite taste, and with a perfect re-creation of its Venetian pre-World War One settings, it is a film of rare beauty and even rarer understanding of the power of a homosexual attraction.

But the year's most flagrant display of homosexuality is to be found in John Herbert's adaptation of his controversial prison drama, Fortune and Men's Eyes. Herbert made the film, like the play, deliberately shocking in order to point up the need for prison reform, particularly in the area of placing first offenders among hardened criminals and known perverts. Young Wendell Burton, given six months for the possession of marijuana, is locked in a cell with three experienced convicts--Queenie, Rocky and Mona. Queenie, as the name implies, is a flaming fag who immediately wants to set the boy up as the "old lady" of a con who can protect him. But Rocky, in a frightening sequence set in the prison shower room, forcibly buggers Burton and makes him become his lover. There is a chillingly graphic gang-bang in a recreation hall and dialog--especially Queenie's--even more explicit as the innocent boy is gradually shaped into a homosexual tough. The action, every bit as sordid and sadistic as it sounds, climaxes with an obscene parody of a Christmas pageant in which Queenie, in drag, dances a striptease for the assembled prisoners and staff during which he wantonly exposes himself full in the face of the warden's wife. Fortune and Men's Eyes makes The Boys in the Band look like Laurel and Hardy in Pardon Us.

The screen image of the Negro has undergone an even more significant change within the past year or so. Was it only three years ago that Stanley Kramer was hailed as an interracial trail blazer for permitting Sidney Poitier to kiss (however discreetly) Katherine Houghton in Guess Who's Coming to Dinner? Traditionally, blacks have been portrayed on the screen as asexual, wholesomely exemplified by Poitier among the nuns in Lilies of the Field. Last year's Watermelon Man, of course, showed Godfrey Cambridge married to a white woman--but that was because he thought he was white as well. In 1971, all that seems to be changing. The black is now playing himself as himself and luring into the moviehouses vast numbers of black patrons who are positively reveling in the very idea that a man of color might have a sex life as interesting and varied as his Caucasian counterpart's. The trend is perhaps best illustrated by Melvin Van Peebles' Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song--independently produced, directed and starred in by Van Peebles--which has gained an enormous following in the black community. Gordon Parks's Shaft, starring Richard Roundtree in the title role, has also captured considerable support, despite extensive pruning by MGM. As originally filmed, its detective hero--a kind of blackface Bogart--is seen balling his mistress in the opening sequence, just as a girl is being kidnaped on the street outside. The screams of the girl mingle with the orgasmic moans of the mistress. Although this scene is missing from the picture as released, Roundtree has ample opportunities to display his sexual prowess in the footage that remains uncut. Uncle Tom has all but disappeared; Tom Cat is taking his place.

The ladies of women's lib also forced their way onto the screen in 1971, with Jane Fonda--one of the movement's more ardent spokeswomen--scoring particularly as the shrewd, intelligent, manipulative (and manipulated) callgirl in Klute, a superior murder melodrama. Julie Christie, the opium-puffing bordello madam in McCabe & Mrs. Miller, also does much to dispel the myth of male superiority--even to the point of demanding a cash payment in advance from her business partner, Warren Beatty, before he can sleep with her. The hard-core porno market, inevitably, has contributed its mite: The Sensually Liberated Female, produced by something called the Institute for Adult Education, demonstrates how women can get along without men--by masturbating, with or without mechanical assistance. And from New York's underground Newsreel Films came The Woman's Film, a 45-minute compilation of oncamera interviews that argue the case for women's lib in ways that are variously impressive, irresistible and downright irritating.

Another provocative theme that's been receiving major coverage in the press, although scant attention on the screen as yet, is the growing proclivity of young priests to desert the holy Church in favor of holy matrimony. Last year, there were Act of the Heart and Pieces of Dreams, both of which explored the subject with a romanticism bordering on sentimentality. There is a certain irony in the fact that the two films that dealt with the topic this year, a good deal less tearfully, were both made in Italy, a Catholic country; our native film makers, apparently, are not nearly so anxious to take on the religious establishment. Perhaps producer Carlo Ponti's own well-publicized difficulties in legalizing his marriage to Sophia Loren had something to do with his decision to back Dino Risi's bitter and cynical comedy, The Priest's Wife, which co-stars Signora Ponti and Marcello Mastroianni. At any rate, there is no disguising its anticlerical intentions, particularly when, after having impregnated Miss Loren, priest Mastroianni is first advised by a superior to keep her as a mistress if he likes, then dissuaded from leaving the Church by promotion to a cushy job in the Vatican. Although the film is played for laughs--apart from a touching visit to a married, disillusioned and defrocked priest--and it's made clear that Sophia is the pursuer, not the pursued, the script is dotted with enough sharp jabs at the clergy to make any good Catholic squirm.

Far more pointed (which is perhaps why, at presstime, it hasn't yet been shown in the United States) is Marco Vicario's The Married Priest. The story of a handsome and virile young Sicilian cleric (Lando Buzzanca), it emphasizes his growing inability to cope with the sexual temptations he encounters in Rome--and especially those proffered by a comely callgirl (Rossana Podesta). At first, as her spiritual father, he tries to reform her; but since marriage is the only kind of reformation that interests her, he lays plans to leave the Church. Again, the Church hierarchy intervenes, suggesting hypocritical ways in which he can, in effect, have his cookie and eat it, too. Actually, The Married Priest goes considerably further than The Priest's Wife in delineating the pleasures to be derived from such an arrangement, as personified by such tempting postprandial delights as Magali Noel, Barbara Bouchet and Silvia Dionisio. Despite pained outcries from the Catholic newspapers, both films were immensely popular in Italy.

Nor have the nuns escaped scot free. One of the year's more startling releases was Warner Bros.' X-rated The Devils, written and directed by Ken Russell (of Women in Love and The Music Lovers). Based on Aldous Huxley's The Devils of Loudun and John Whiting's stage adaptation of the novel, Russell's script depicts graphically the well-documented debauchery in an Ursuline convent in the year 1632. The randy Father Grandier (Oliver Reed) is the object of the nuns' overwrought affections. His very presence wracks the good sisters to undreamed-of heights of eroticism--particularly Sister Jeanne (Vanessa Redgrave), whose humped back and canted head make her the least likely candidate to share his virtually communal bed. Whereupon the sister claims that she has become possessed by the Devil, and a sadistic young priest is dispatched by Richelieu to take care of both Grandier and the sister. By the time he arrives, the nuns are running naked and hysterical through the convent, heaping obscenity upon obscenity. (A Warner minion, sent to England shortly before the film's release, eliminated some closeups of nuns masturbating, nipple sucking and engaging in oral copulation, but the action that remains in the long shots is more than merely suggestive.) Perhaps the film's most shocking moment comes when the official exorcist, a brawny and intense young man, seeks to flush out the Devil from Sister Jeanne's lustful body by pumping a noxious, bubbling brew between her legs with a giant bellows. Its moral seems to be, as Grandier hauls himself to the stake on his broken legs, that any man who succumbs to his humanity by messing around with women must expect to come to a bad end.

By a curious coincidence, Jacques Rivette's The Nun, based on Diderot's 18th Century classic anticlerical novel, La Religieuse, opened in New York almost the same day as The Devils. The coincidence is heightened by the fact that the film had been made--and banned--in France in 1966. In it, Anna Karina, sent to a convent by parents who would rather avoid the expense of a dowry, revolts against the cruelty of her superiors and the monotony of life behind the walls. Although deeply religious, the girl is transferred to another, more worldly convent--where she promptly enkindles the Lesbian desires of her mother superior (Liselotte Pulver). By now a bit mad, Sister Suzanne flees to the world outside, only to find it even more corrupt. The story ends with her suicide. The French had banned the film originally at the insistence of the Catholic Church, though Rivette's essential bitterness--like Diderot's--seems directed less against the Church than against selfish, mean-spirited parents who hypocritically consign their daughters to the religious life rather than spend their money to rear and educate them to a proper place in society. In Silvio Clementelli's The Lady of Monza, Anne Heywood suffers an even worse fate than Sister Suzanne. As Sister Virginia, she is raped, gives birth and is sealed alive in a brick cell.

Meanwhile, as outlined by John Bowers in Playboy's The Porn Is Green last July, there has been a vast upswing in the American porno market--a blossoming, however, that is not precisely a boom. For one thing, thanks to the enormous expansion of the minitheater operations (over 100 in Los Angeles alone), exhibitors are now beginning to complain about "overseating"--a neat euphemism for the fact that there are considerably more seats in the hard-core theaters than there are customers to fill them. Consequently, where once they were getting five and six dollars a ticket, many houses have now reduced their prices to two and a half and three dollars, with further discounts for couples (heterosexual, that is). One Los Angeles theater, the Xanadu, offers "six hours of continuous hard adult erotica"; others tout free popcorn. And in Texas, there's a theater that, in addition to its marathon hard-core entertainments, provides free coffee and sandwiches for its more indefatigable customers.

If the exhibitors are beginning to feel the pinch, the producers of porn pictures are being hit even harder. Because production values are hardly a primary consideration in this field, it has been invaded by a small army of amateur and semiprofessional film makers who can--and do--supply stag reels and hard-core features for astonishingly little money. But in their all-out competition for the dollar, they have been consistently pushing down their rental prices, thus cutting sharply into the profit margin of what is already a very risky production operation. In addition, the operators of porno houses have already earned the reputation of being extremely unreliable about giving the producers an honest accounting of their take, or even about making any payments whatsoever. And the porn producer is hardly in a position to sue. Lowell Pickett, a San Francisco hard-core film maker, recently stated that the only way he could afford to expand his production arm was by creating his own chain of theaters. "Otherwise," he said, "I'm at the mercy of the exhibitors"--and he indicated that the quality of their mercy is decidedly strained. Or, as Harold Marenstein, a New York producer, succinctly put it, "Not only are you lucky to see any rental money; you're lucky to get your print back."

But the field has certainly increased in visibility, if not in viability. Last December, the same enterprising Pickett introduced San Franciscans to the First International Erotic Film Festival, a week-long affair that attracted considerable attention not only in the local press but nationally and internationally. In January and February, he played highlights from the festival at the Sutter Cinema and he plans to repeat the experiment early next year on an expanded basis, possibly in San Francisco's historic Palace of Fine Arts. Meanwhile, Ken Gaul, former managing editor of Screw, will stage the First Annual New York Erotic Film Festival this month. Last March, Bill Osco, a Hollywood hard-core producer, opened his Harlot at a Beverly Hills art house as a benefit for the Los Angeles Free Clinic, with all the lights, limousines and television coverage normally reserved for prestigious studio premieres. Even the hard-core homosexual houses are expanding their operations. New York's Park-Miller (formerly the Henry Miller) Theater just off Times Square, with an estimated weekly gross of $30,000, now stages an annual amateur homo-film festival that just about packs the house. Deciding that "gay is beautiful," last summer, two Chicago theaters--the Bijou and the Newberry--began showing only fag films.

Perhaps the most revealing index to the new permissiveness in the field of sexploitable entertainments, however, is the fact that domestic production has at this point completely displaced the European in audience favor. Last year's Without a Stitch, imported from Denmark, was the last foreign-made sexploitation feature to score in the American market. I Am Curious (Blue), Her and She and Him, Nana and The Laughing Woman all proved to be major disappointments to their distributors. And even after fighting Quiet Days in Clichy through the American courts for the right to show it in this country, Grove Press turned the picture back to its Scandinavian producers early in the year after it had garnered a meager $75,000. The sole film to come from Europe in 1971 that carried anything stronger than the domestic fare was Denmark's Animal Lover, purportedly a documentary on the subject of bestiality. It showed, with documentary candor, a particularly unattractive farm girl having sexual relations with a pig, a stallion and a dog. When Animal Lover was successfully prosecuted in notoriously tolerant San Francisco (with a penalty of six months in jail and a $1000 fine for the theater operator), enthusiasm for the subject promptly waned throughout the country. An American essay in the same field, Deviations on Gratifications (which perhaps unintentionally forms the acronym DOG), got no farther than Los Angeles.

The strongest entry in the 1971 sexploitation sweepstakes was undoubtedly Sherpix' The Stewardesses, which to date has grossed $10,000,000 at the box office. Its primary novelty is the short-lived 1953 vogue for 3-D movies, here applied to the nudie field. Although abundantly fleshy, The Stewardesses is far from pornographic, merely recounting the sexual misadventures of a group of airline hostesses once they get on the ground. There is considerable group groping and considerable nudity, but sex acts are merely implied--which may explain its success with audiences who would never dream of entering a hard-core house. Indeed, after its initial engagements in sex houses in San Francisco and Los Angeles, Sherpix refused to go the way of all flesh any longer. In Boston, it played the huge downtown Music Hall Theater with a special 70mm print. In Milwaukee's respectable Riverside, according to Variety, "Pic did $36,000 in one week, biggest take at that house since The Swiss Family Robinson in 1954."

If the border line between a nudie like The Stewardesses and a hard-core film is not always clear to the novice, there were a number of pseudo documentaries in 1971 to help fix the boundaries. A History of the Blue Movie and Hollywood Blue, for example, were simply compilations of old stag reels--often the very ones that were kept under lock and key at the Kinsey Institute only a few years ago. Fitted to commentaries drawn largely from our own findings, as published in Playboy in November 1967, they had the sole merit of bringing the stags out of their sniggering sub rosa world of legionnaire smokers. As documentaries, and hence with the redeeming social value that has considered necessary to discourage legal action, they were shown without interference in virtually every large American city.

Hollywood Blue, produced by Bill Osco, attracted extra attention by including two shorts that seemed to mark the cinematic debuts of two young performers who later rose to stardom. One depicts an encounter in a park between a sailor and a Marine, and its stag action leaves little to the imagination--including the identity of the future star. As Joyce Haber put it in a "blind" item that ran in her syndicated Los Angeles Times column last February, "Discussing whether the boy in question is really the star of today has been the very 'in' game at New Hollywood parties for weeks. I'm here to tell you that the 'game' is unnecessary. To see that scene in Hollywood Blue is to get the answer-- but fast." An inspection of the still on page 173 of this issue might seem to confirm Miss Haber's positive identification; but it's worth remembering that both Miss Haber and the correspondents of Variety were all too ready to accept the heroine of The Appleknockers and the Coke Bottle, another of the shorts in Hollywood Blue, as Marilyn Monroe--simply because the film's commentator said so. Although the truth will probably never be known for certain, since the film was obviously made about the same time as the famous MM calendar photo, many feel that the girl isn't Marilyn at all but a look-alike named Arline Hunter, who enjoyed brief popularity in girlie magazines of the early Fifties as "the poor man's Marilyn Monroe."

Not all the porno documentaries of 1971 have consisted of clips from stag reels. Making the Blue Film, like Alex de Renzy's Pornography in Denmark last year, shows something of the actual filming of stag movies, extended interviews with several of the uninhibited performers in these films, plus excerpts from more of the stags of the past. Kama Sutra 71 opens with a kind of slide-lecture travelog of the famed erotic art that adorns several of India's ancient temples, then gets down to business with an Indian man and maid demonstrating--against sleazy Hollywood backgrounds--the techniques and positions described in that well-known handbook of love. Famous Homosexuals of History is just what the title implies, tailored for the gay trade. But perhaps the year's most absurd effort in this direction is The Flanders and Alcott Report on Sex Response, which, to the accompaniment of unctuous pseudoscientific narration, reveals how a dozen or so young men and women got over their various sexual inhibitions. If the "patients" in this film had any inhibitions to start with, they certainly overcame them with incredible alacrity.

Hovering between porn and cinéma vérité is Lawrence Hauben's Venus, a self-consciously arty account of the film maker's six-week affair with actress Sally Kellerman. The picture has three basic shots. One shows Sally fixing her face interminably at a vanity mirror and making small talk with Hauben about the film he proposes to make. Another is a rather claustrophobic view of Hauben's pad, accompanied by a tape-recorded telephone call in which Sally is pleading with him to come back to her (to which he replies cryptically, "You work at a very emotional and subjective level"). And the third is an even more cramped view of his bed, with the two of them balling in various positions. The picture, shot perhaps two or three years ago but only just revised for release, reveals Miss Kellerman as vain, vulnerable and very human--and Hauben as a creep exploiting for all it's worth his brief intimacy with a girl who has since become a star.

The American Dreamer, with Dennis Hopper in the title role, is the opposite side of the same coin. Film makers Lawrence Schiller and L. M. Kit Carson are obviously hero-worshipers. Hopper is a star, and they respect everything that made him not only a cultist actor but a cultist director. And Hopper, apparently responding to their admiration, gave them everything they could hope for--including a naked stroll through an Arizona town and a bathtub scene with two groupie types soaping him down. Both Venus and Dreamer, in the name of documentary, represent an invasion of privacy that makes one wonder if their subjects knew or cared that their privacy was being invaded--or if that might have been what they wanted all along.

The newest twist in the porno field, one that began to appear at the end of 1970, is the introduction of a story line to set up and carry the stag action. Often, the stories are as uncomplicated as a nursery tale. In Mona, the trail blazer in this field, the heroine is a nymphomaniac (it's as simple as that) and the narrative merely follows her as she gives oral gratification to assorted young men in a variety of unlikely places, including an art theater during a performance. In Love, Yolanda, an aging but still sexy actress, managing the career of her niece, arranges for her to meet a succession of eligible young men and finally throws an orgy for her as a sort of coming-out party--because "that's the way you get jobs in the movies." The heroine of Harlot attends Hollywood High, but the kind of homework she enjoys has nothing to do with classroom assignments. She may be averse to paying bus fares, but she's more than generous in rewarding anyone who gives her a ride home from school. The film's highlight is a three-way grapple--strictly hard core--atop a Los Angeles office building, caught by a helicopter with a telephoto lens. Interestingly enough, the performers in these films--generally young and attractive--are beginning to shed the anonymity that has traditionally surrounded stag-film making, and such "stars" as Fifi Watson, Fran Spector and Mary Rexroth are now building their own followings in the porn circuit.

But while all these films intersperse hard-core action with the narrative footage, many of their producers are already beginning to have second thoughts. Not only is the hard-core market severely restricted, it's also subject to constant and costly harassment through police raids and vice-squad crackdowns. Court cases can drag on for weeks, with legal fees mounting by the hour. (One San Francisco exhibitor was recently fined $1000 for showing a porn movie but declared that the trial transcripts alone cost him over $1200.) Because dramatic films are far more expensive to make than straight stag reels, since they involve actors (as opposed to performers), sets, costumes and considerably more complicated shooting for dialog sequences, their producers are being forced to look beyond their original field. Bill Osco and Howard Ziehm, for example, began their Flesh Gordon as an opulently budgeted stage movie but ultimately re-edited it for general release. The producers of films such as My Secret Life, based on the anonymous memoirs of an exceedingly promiscuous Victorian gentleman, are happy to accept an X rating, because it (quite fairly) points up the film's erotic content. At the same time, because the specifics of the gentleman's secret life are spelled out on the sound track rather than on the screen, the film was able to open in New York at Loew's State II on Broadway. Had it been the other way around, My Secret Life would have remained secret, indeed.

Typical of today's market is Leo Productions' handling of the San Francisco--made Cozy Cool. A gangster adventure picture with perhaps 12 minutes of stag action in its almost two-hour running time, it was released in two versions--one X and one R. In the R version, although all the sexual activity relevant to the plot is retained (the heroine has been instructed to reach orgasm with a rival gangster at precisely 1:20, so that he won't notice his safe is being blown), the details of penetration, as well as close-ups of fellatio, have been removed. As in the soft-core sexploitation films--and in most Hollywood movies--the sexual acts are implied rather than depicted. While it remains to be seen whether Cozy Cool will enjoy the best of both worlds, the very fact that it has been edited in two versions further emphasizes the cooling of the market for hard-core material. The trouble, it would seem, is not that the public is repudiating sex per se but that it's now beginning to reject those pictures that offer nothing but sex. Significantly, it's the hard-core market--particularly as represented by the "sex-education" documentaries--that's being hit the hardest.

One development that this entire field is watching with unconcealed interest is the booming video-cassette market. "Cassettes will be the greatest pornography road-show library going," predicts Joe Solomon, an independent distributor of sex films. Several producers, including such front-runners as Russ Meyer and Radley Metzger, admit that they've already been approached by one or another of the cassette manufacturers--but most add that, to date, the offers have not been accompanied by hard cash. Recalling the early days of television, when pictures sold for a fraction of what they might have earned a few years later, most of the film makers have adopted a wait-and-see policy. No doubt, this attitude is augmented by their awareness that at least half a dozen cassette systems, all totally incompatible, are presently vying for position. There is real fear that in making a deal with one company or another, they might be backing the wrong horse--and at the wrong time, as well. On the other hand, producers freely say that once the cassette market settles down, many of their more pressing problems will be over. Pictures will then be rented or purchased by consenting adults for showing in the privacy of their own homes, thus minimizing the ever-present threat of police and vice-squad raids on X-rated moviehouses. And the makers of sex films, whether of the nudie or hard-core variety, will have access to the wider audiences (and additional income) they could never hope to reach through commercial television.

Presumably also awaiting this happier day are any number of European pictures produced with one eye on the home market, the other on the American distribution that so unexpectedly evaporated during the past year. In Denmark, Drs. Phyllis and Eberhard Kronhausen followed their Freedom to Love with an even more forthright documentary variously titled Why Do They Do It? and simply Why. The film, made in three sections, involves straightforward interviews with a white and black Lesbian couple, with two heterosexual couples who make a living by performing their sex acts in public, and with a country girl who, in both the literal and the figurative sense, takes care of animals. Although the film's scientific thrust is underscored by the fact that the filming took place before a large audience of Copenhagen university students, no American distributor has yet bid for the picture. Nor has anyone picked up Denmark's entry for last year's Academy Awards, Lone, a sensitively directed, semifactual story of a promiscuous teenage girl that climaxes with a clinically detailed account of her abortion, shot in huge and disconcerting close-ups of clamps, forceps and probes being forced up her vagina.

In Germany, where the film scene is particularly depressed, most theaters in major cities are now running sex films almost exclusively, and the majority of movie companies are hoping to stay in business by supplying them. Successful films of the past year or so have included such titles as The Monk with the Whip, The Oldest Profession in the World, Count Porno and His Girls and To the Main Thing, Darling, all of which are practically self-explanatory. A new series on teenage sex, inaugurated with Schoolgirl Report, moved on this year to Girls and Gynecologists. Notwithstanding its educational-TV title, the informative aspects take second place to the exploitative. In each of the seven cases treated--one the victim of multiple rape, another with venereal disease, a third suffering because she believes her breasts are too small--the girls turn up nude for their examinations, and then the film switches to graphic flashbacks to display the origins of their troubles. In Grimm's Fairy Tales for Adults, the tales have been perverted with a vengeance. Prince Charming must rouse his Sleeping Beauty sexually; and the Wicked Queen doesn't want Snow White's heart, she wants her sex organs--to eat. Snow White (Marie Liljedahl, who once played in Inga) not only writhes naked amid frogs and snakes, she also performs fellatio on a bull. OK, which was Germany's official entry for last year's Academy Awards, is another of the European films that is having trouble finding American distribution. Its purportedly antiwar theme centers in excruciating detail on a squad of American GIs in Vietnam who gang-bang, then murder a native girl.

Despite all this, even Germany for a time debated whether or not to invite, to its Berlin Film Festival, Pier Paolo Pasolini's Decameron, based on Boccaccio's ribald classic. Cannes, which is hardly the world's most puritanical festival, had earlier rejected it; and the Germans themselves were of two minds right up to the deadline. Described by a Variety correspondent as "the most sexplicit picture of the year and probably in the history of Italian cinema," the film is reportedly a multiepisode treatment of Boccaccio's bawdy tales, one of which involves a young man who, pretending to be deaf and dumb, becomes the stud of his local convent. Despite Pasolini's reputation, there is considerable question as to whether it can ever play American theaters, even though it took one of the top awards at Berlin, where it was finally admitted.

France, increasingly hamstrung by ever-tightening censorship, managed to produce few films in 1971 that generated any real excitement. Significantly, one of the best, Louis Malle's Le Souffle au Coeur (The Murmuring Heart), which won accolades at the Cannes festival, was deemed objectionable by the French precensor board because it includes a youthful initiation into a brothel, a juvenile seduction and a scene in which the teenage hero makes it with his mother. As was true of Malle's earlier The Lovers, none of this is played for shock value but, rather, as an insight into the growing awareness of a 14-year-old boy. The film hasn't been released in this country.

The English studios were in such deep trouble in 1971 that virtually any picture of interest--The Music Lovers, Get Carter, The Devils--was made for, and prepaid by, an American company. One of the kinkier of these, produced by Hammer Films for fun-loving American International, was The Vampire Lovers, a rather skillful interlacing of sex and horror. Instead of the familiar Lugosistyle vampire, we see the living dead represented by curvaceous Ingrid Pitt, a sultry brunette fatally drawn to creatures of her own sex (though the fatality is unfailingly theirs). Miss Pitt, who recurs in the film as Carmilla, Mircalla and Marcilla, also departs from the vampire norm by nipping her victims not on the neck but on the breast, which adds not only a touch of Lesbianism but also a frisson of voyeurism whenever the doctor must examine a shapely corpse for the telltale marks. And where a stake through the heart was formerly good enough to dispatch the doughtiest vampire, now nothing less than decapitation suffices.

From Belgium came another vampire tale, Daughters of Darkness, described by its director, Harry Kümel, as "a Gothic fairy tale for full-grown adults." They had better be. In it, the lovely Delphine Seyrig (of Last Year at Marienbad) arrives out of season at a plush Ostend hotel with a most voluptuous companion, and the two girls begin to terrorize a young honeymoon couple. (The groom, we discover, is something of a terrorist himself: In a sudden transport of rage, he beats his bride with his belt.) We also discover soon enough that Miss Seyrig is a vampire, the Bloody Countess of the 16th Century, who owes her youthful good looks to some 800 virgins in whose blood she has bathed in her time. While still sucking the blood of virgins in nearby Bruges, she begins for some reason to concentrate on the no-longer-virginal girl at the hotel, and her companion becomes equally interested in the young husband. It is sex cum sadism to its last exquisite detail, when the vampire and the bride bash in the face of the husband and enjoy his blood together.

The Italians travel the sexual-sadistic route in Il Gatto a Nove Code (The Cat o' Nine Tails), this one obviously beamed at the American market by reason of its co-stars, James Franciscus and Karl Malden. A mystery melodrama written and directed by Dario Argento (who last year filmed the spine-tingling The Bird with the Crystal Plumage), it includes incest, homosexuality, vast doses of sadism--knifings, garrotings, a death plunge down an elevator shaft--and the cool beauty of Catherine Spaak as she offers herself, nude, to Franciscus. It was rated GP for the United States.

And this points up not only a major weakness in the coding system of the Motion Picture Association of America but the next battleground on which the pro-censorship forces here seem likely to regroup. For a long time, it has been argued that the reason American pictures have been so violence prone is that they have been sexually deprived. If love cannot be freely expressed, so ran the argument, it finds ultimate expression in acts of sadism and masochism. Back in the days when the Production Code, with its arbitrary "Thou shalts" and "Thou shalt nots," ruled the screen, this seemed true enough and explained a great deal about our movies. For the past few years, however, the Code has, in effect, been suspended. There is very little of sex, love, nudity or perversion that can't be shown on the American screen--and not necessarily with an X rating.

But for all the permissiveness of the American screen today, violence has not disappeared. Quite the contrary. It has grown stronger, more prevalent, more obscene. In The Grissom Gang, most of the cast is machine-gunned in glorious Metrocolor before the film has run its course. In The Hunting Party, Gene Hackman takes an obviously perverted pleasure in stalking an outlaw gang with a high-powered rifle, splattering them all over the landscape, then vengefully shooting his unfaithful wife (Candice Bergen) in the crotch. In The Beguiled, a group of convent girls and teachers avenge themselves on their seducer, Clint Eastwood, by sawing off his leg--in close-up. Throat cuttings, wrist slashings, genital smashings, knifings, beatings, amputations, shotgun blasts that sprinkle the scenery with gore--these have become a customary ingredient of today's standard screen fare. And, more often than not, rated GP. Where the European censors are far more apt to award an X for excessive violence, the M.P.A.A. remains obsessed with sexuality and nudity; and the net effect of this has been to render its rating system somewhat less than satisfactory as far as either "parental guidance" or the churches are concerned.

And so, to the backlash against the new permissiveness in sex onscreen that began last year, there is now added the mounting fear that our movies are growing too violent for their own--or our own--good. Without question, these two issues are being linked by the pro-censor forces in their redoubled efforts to gain the support of otherwise liberal moviegoers in moving to shackle not only violence but sexuality onscreen.

Also without question, the M. P. A. A.'s rating system, with its imprecise classifications and blinkered concentration on nudity, has helped create this situation. For true decency implies more than the mere absence of lewdness, just as true obscenity extends beyond simply the explicit depiction of sexual behavior. Sex and violence belong on the screen if they are there as an intrinsic part of the film maker's artistic and moral statement about his world. But neither art nor morality can be legislated. They can only be encouraged and supported by those enlightened audiences who see beyond the surface of the action into the spirit that motivates it. The saddest fact is that the industry, if only in its own self-interest, has failed to take the initiative to make this happen.