Sex in Cinema 1972

If Any Single Film could be said to epitomize what happened to sex on the screen in 1972, it would have to be Ernest Lehman's production of Portnoy's Complaint. Not coincidentally, since its gestation period spans all of four years, it could also be said to summarize the changes in basic concepts of how to handle sex in the movies between 1968 and the present. Lehman, an award-winning screenwriter turned producer, had been offered the book early in 1968, when the era of permissiveness in films was just getting under way--aided in no small degree by his own dam-bursting adaptation of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?--and the old Production Code was being honored more in the breach than in the observance; it was soon, in fact, to be displaced altogether by the present system of ratings and classification. Reluctantly, Lehman decided to pass. "I had no idea then how to turn it into a movie," he said later, "but I knew it would make one hell of a picture." When, after some months, a treatment did occur to him, his studio (20th Century-Fox) lost no time in trying to obtain it.

Portnoy's Complaint appeared in book form while Lehman was already laboring on the first draft of the screenplay and, as he put it, "What I thought was just another nag turned out to be Seabiscuit." Philip Roth's novel took off to sensational reviews and landslide sales, which initially augured well for the forthcoming production. But, as luck would have it, when Fox's first two X-rated movies--Myra Breckinridge and Beyond the Valley of the Dolls--opened almost simultaneously in June 1970, the roof fell in. Both pictures, designed to reflect new, liberated standards, were so thoroughly lambasted by the press that they served to focus criticism on Fox as the industry's number-one sex offender. Feeling that his studio couldn't afford another X, Fox chairman Darryl F. Zanuck scrubbed Portnoy.

Partly through the good offices of Darryl's son Richard, who had been ousted from Fox in a bitter family fight, Portnoy finally went before the cameras for Warner's in June 1971 and--as written, produced and directed by Lehman--was released exactly a year later. But in that year, a great deal had happened within the industry. Just as shooting was starting, the Motion Picture Association of America replaced Eugene G. Dougherty, the head of its embattled Code and Rating Administration, with a distinguished New York psychiatrist, Dr. Aaron Stern--who had previously served the M. P. A. A. as a consultant. Although, inevitably, he was soon being called a censor and a czar by those unalterably opposed to any form of control over the medium, Stern himself consistently took the position that he would never force a studio to snip a foot of film from a finished picture. As it developed, he had little need to. The outcry against "dirty movies," a still-small voice in the late Sixties, had mounted to a roar by 1972 (thanks at least in part to the incessant prodding of Charles Keating, Jr., and his Citizens for Decent Literature). Across the country, newspapers were threatening to ban all advertising and publicity for X-rated pictures; and by mid-1972, in some communities, the ban had extended to the Rs.

More importantly, the box offices were beginning to reflect this concern. And whereas in 1970 and 1971 producers were often actively seeking an R to attract the "adult" trade, by 1972 the R had (text continued on page 170) become a danger signal, with possible losses of revenue running to hundreds of thousands of dollars. Unlike his predecessor, who had bowed to studio pressure in changing the original R classification given Ryan's Daughter to a GP and in upgrading Drive, He Said's X to an R, Stern preferred to stand pat on his ratings--or to let a review board in New York make the changes. In theory, any film could still be released. But producers who had begun their pictures in the headier atmosphere of a year or so ago now found themselves making deep "voluntary" cuts to earn a GP--or, at worst, an R--from Stern's administration.

Stern himself, Lehman recently stated, had encouraged him to make Portnoy precisely as he had envisaged it in his script, without any compromises. "He liked the script very much," Lehman recalled, "and regarded it as an adult film. The words he used were 'intrusive and disturbing.' Aaron and his wife came over to my house one Sunday afternoon and we talked about it for hours, while I explained to him exactly how I planned to shoot it. Of course, I thought I had an X going in, and so, if I had really wanted to, I could have shown whatever I chose. Doing it this way, where nothing at all is actually seen, was entirely my own decision. Those porno films that force you to look at everything make me physically sick. But with no mention of a rating, Dr. Stern urged me to make the film my own way."

Without being privy to the inner councils of the Code and Rating Administration, it is, of course, impossible to know for certain by what yardstick films are measured for the Code's four categories. After more than a year of Stern's administration, however, a rough formula (continued on page 208)Sex in Cinema(continued from page 170) appears to have emerged: G would seem to mean no nudity or strong language; PG (changed early in 1972 from GP) means occasional flashes of a bared breast and sparing use of four-letter words; R is for extensive or frontal nudity; and X is for any sexual activity beyond that. As far as language is concerned, Stern was heard to say that he would permit one use of the word fuck in a PG picture, but beyond that, the film would be rated R. "All the ratings can do is give a quantitative measurement of how much sex and violence a movie contains." he has stated. "So much of either and a film becomes PG; so much more and it's an R, and so on."

Language, as a matter of fact, is especially indicative of the Code's new leniency. Words such as bastard, screw, bugger and even the aforementioned solitary fuck are now admissibly PG in a medium that had barred their use until five or six years ago. On the other hand, while the language of sex may be permissible, the act of sex is still relegated to the Xs. Which is what lends a special significance to Portnoy, since its period of filming corresponds almost exactly to Stern's first year in office. When production began, everyone--including Lehman--was certain that it would have to end up with an X. It didn't. It got an R. And the reason is that while just about every sexual diversion short of bestiality is fairly clearly implied, nothing is ever explicitly shown. The sexual activity is handled with, to use the Code Administration's favorite phrase, "good taste." For any reasonably sophisticated viewer, however, there can be little doubt about just what is going on. Indeed, after an early preview, Lehman himself deleted a kind of voice-over narration (Portnoy's conversations with his penis) because he felt it superfluous.

Nevertheless, very few films this side of the porn circuit have yet dared to use the language of Portnoy's Complaint. Although considerably toned down from Roth's original text, it still strikes the ear with a frequency and a pungency that are in their own way as precedent-setting as Elizabeth Taylor's shrieked obscenities in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? As Alexander Portnoy, Richard Benjamin describes his masturbatory practices in scatological detail--jacking off with an apple, or a piece of liver, or his sister's soiled panties. His approach to his supercompliant companion-to-be, Karen Black, is equally direct: "I want to eat your pussy," he tells her on their first encounter. Miss Black, as a fashion model who calls herself The Monkey, explains that she earned her peculiar sobriquet because "a position I once invented made a guy I knew think of a monkey." At one point, she refers to Portnoy as an "uptight Jewish prick." At another, she inquires of him, "What's that bulge in your trousers, a chocolate éclair?" In a flashback early in the film, as Alex recalls his first sexual experience with an "easy" girl in the neighborhood (Jeannie Berlin), she stimulates him to an ill-timed (or ill-aimed) ejaculation, then screams, "Son of a bitch, you got jism all over the couch!"

Portnoy's Complaint, billed as a comedy, opened to almost uniformly bad notices. Was it because the language was too explicit or because the visuals weren't explicit enough? Or might it have something to do with the spreading reaction against pictures whose primary concern is sex? No doubt the people at Warner's are still trying to puzzle that one out, while balancing it against the performance of their outstanding hit for 1972--Stanley Kubrick's X-rated A Clockwork Orange. Based on Anthony Burgess' far-out novel, which involves drugs, juvenile delinquency, sex and more than a bit of the old ultraviolence, it was an admittedly iffy proposition from the start. If anyone other than Kubrick had suggested it, the film undoubtedly would never have been made. But Kubrick did suggest it, it was made and--X rating or no--Warner's has been listening to the cheery clink of the cash registers ever since.

What Burgess (and Kubrick) postulates is a society in the not-too-distant future in which there has been some kind of totalitarian take-over--a rather loosely supervised welfare state whose beneficiaries live in shabby but adequate tenement blocks and pursue a shabby but adequate existence, even though the rubbish does have a tendency to pile up. But the kids are in revolt. Some drink themselves silly in drug-spiked milk bars; others find in drugs the stimulus to wreak havoc. There is a frightening scene in the film in which Alex (who is brilliantly played by Malcolm McDowell) and his three "Droogs" drop in on a bunch of bully boys just as they're about to gang-rape a girl. No innate gallantry prompts Alex to break up the attack, merely the desire to hit somebody with chains. A few minutes later, the quartet stages a rape of its own, slicing the dress of a woman from her pinioned, writhing body as her husband looks helplessly on. In another display of far-out violence, Alex dispatches an eccentric, art-loving woman by smashing a giant plastic sculpture of a penis and testicles directly into her mouth. At one point, he lures two teenaged girls to his room to listen to records, then jumps them for three or four minutes of speeded-up, but wholly uninhibited, humping; it's as if Mack Sennett had made a stag film.

But Alex--oh my brothers--betrayed by his Droogs, is captured by the police and sent off to prison, where his heart is made heavy by the pretty-boy homosexuals who lust after his youthful bod. At the earliest opportunity, he agrees to a mind-bending form of aversion therapy that will force him to associate sex and violence with physical pain--his own. As far as the authorities are concerned, the refined tortures of the Ludovico treatment are certified as 100 percent successful when a voluptuous blonde stunner, wearing only the briefest of panties, makes lascivious advances upon Alex while the young man cowers in agony at her feet. But a clergyman protests that he has been deprived of his God-given free will; the freedom to exercise a moral choice, even if used for evil or reprehensible ends, argues the clergyman, is preferable to having mankind reduced to the level of the robot or the Pavlovian dog. This seems to be Kubrick's position as well, since A Clockwork Orange ends on a note of triumph as the old malevolent glint returns to Alex' eyes and he can once more joyously fantasize lurid, blood-flecked orgies to the tune of "the Ninth of Ludwig van." One critic called it "an intellectual's pornographic film."

Although Kubrick probably anticipated a certain amount of resistance to his movie on the grounds of excessive sex, nudity and violence, he could hardly have foreseen that A Clockwork Orange would also be singled out as the focal point for an attack upon the entire film industry by the outraged and increasingly vocal members of the women's liberation movement. Kubrick intended his mockery as a condemnation of Alex' society, but some of the ladies didn't see it that way. The attack was joined in an article by Beverly Walker, a film producer and former publicist, in Women and Film this past summer. In it, Ms. Walker charged, among other things, that "the film flaunts an attitude that is ugly, lewd and brutal toward the female human being: All of the women are portrayed as caricatures; the violence committed upon them is treated comically; the most startling aspects of the decor relate to the female form." To make her charges stick, Ms. Walker proceeded to a minute comparison of the Burgess novel and Kubrick's adaptation of it. "In the book," she wrote, "the girl the gang was trying to rape was fully clothed and...ten years old. She escapes from the gang when Alex and his Droogs appear upon the scene. In contrast, Kubrick uses all amply endowed woman, shows her fully nude, breasts swaying and pubic hair displayed as she weakly struggles for her freedom." Describing the milk bar, which is wholly Kubrick's contribution, she wrote, "Words are inadequate to describe the mockery of the female here. The machines that divvy out the milk-plus are rainbow-bewigged sculptures of kneeling women, legs spread apart, breasts jutting out, faces impassive. To get a glass of milk-plus, one simply puts in some money, presses a button and out it pours from--where else?--the female breast. The tables, too, are made from sculptures of the female form. The patrons casually place glasses or feet upon the 'belly' of the woman-table. Woman-as-servant has never been so lewdly evoked."

While many of the female critics, such as Pauline Kael, rejected the film on purely philosophical grounds, few displayed the kind of gut reaction, the call to arms, evinced by Ms. Walker. "We should start to think in terms of economic boycotts of films in which women are exploited mercilessly for the box-office dollar," she wrote, drawing a parallel with Paramount's The Godfather, from which the Italian Anti-Defamation League succeeded in persuading the company to expunge the word Mafia.

From Stern's point of view, it was primarily the relatively brief ménage à Irois sequence that earned A Clockwork Orange its X rating--even though, as he admitted on The David Frost Show, he found it "very painful" to do so. "Kubrick, whom I went to visit right after the rating was completed, but before it was publicly announced," Stern explained, "understood that if that scene played R, then makers of the skin-flick products, if you will, need only speed up the action and they, too, would have the right to an R rating. It would undermine the integrity of the whole structure by that kind of dilution of this important category....The rating system operates in terms of precedent when applying guidelines to a category. Consequently, any element explicitly expressed in a given film--even of the highest quality, such as Kubrick's Clockwork Orange--must be permitted to play in a film of far less quality....You can play any ideas in the R category as long as the visuals...protect the category from invasion by the X."

Following these guidelines, The Godfather proved to be phase two in the evolution of the films of 1972. Based on Mario Puzo's enormously successful novel, the movie--runaway hit of the year--bore down heavily on gangland violence, lacing it with almost a minimum of sex. In fact, the sexual aspects of the film--Don Corleone's daughter marries a sadist who beats her; one of his sons bangs a young guest up against the wall during the wedding reception; and another son moves into a Las Vegas emporium where he's more than willing to provide girls to anyone who feels the need for them--take second place to its numerous savage beatings and killings. Most of the members of the "family" appear to be happily wedded and bedded; when they spring into action, it's to ward off the encroachments of rival factions in their established territories of liquor, prostitution, the waterfront and--belatedly and reluctantly--narcotics. Perhaps the most frightening character in the film is the non-Italian consigliere, played by Robert Duvall. Completely asexual, he conceives the most horrendous and sadistic reprisals--such as placing the severed head of a prize stallion in the bed of a movie producer who is reluctant to award a role to a protégé of the Don.

It may be purely coincidental, but as the tides of sex are receding, the temperature of violence in our movies--and particularly of sick, sadistic violence--seems to be mounting. Even before The Godfather, we saw, as a kind of mirror image, the cops at work and play in such films as The French Connection and Dirty Harry. To be sure, Gene Hackman shacks up with a leggy bicyclist in The French Connection; but the film leaves no doubt that he really turns on only when he's slamming a suspected pusher against a wall or wading into a bunch of kids who, by stealing the tires off a car, might be botching up one of his stake-outs. When he's in single-minded pursuit of a suspect--as in the film's spine-tingling car chase through the pillars of the el, or in its climactic shootout--it is with a total disdain for the life or limb of any innocents who might possibly get in his way. In Dirty Harry, it's difficult to determine who is the more psychopathic, detective Clint Eastwood or the deranged killer he is pursuing. And in Boxcar Bertha, a Thirties melodrama with Barbara Hershey, the railway cops are depicted as all-out sadists.

What seems to be happening in 1972 is a return to the movie morality of a decade ago. Sex (rated R) is acceptable if it's merely talked about, as, in Portnoy's Complaint, or clearly intimated, as in The Last Picture Show. If it's actually shown, as in A Clockwork Orange, the chances are it will be rated X. Violence, on the other hand, may have been rated R in The Godfather, but it's drawn a PG and even a G in many a 1972 movie. The notion that sex is bad, violence good in the ratings game has been pointed up in many of the year's releases. Prime Cut, starring Gene Hackman and Lee Marvin, was edited down to less than 90 minutes--mostly at the expense of the sexy scenes featured in Playboy's June pictorial, but not at the expense of such grisly sequences as Hackman's putting a rival gangster through a sausage machine or Lee Marvin's being chased through a wheat field by a man-eating thresher. Early in The Wrath of God, there is a scene in which some Central American bandidos string up Ken Hutchinson to witness the gang rape of a comely Indian girl (Paula Pritchett). In a single long shot, we can see that her blouse has been stripped away; but in the close-ups of the release print, she is fully clothed. Symptomatically, a porno film that appeared a year ago as Cozy Cool has been re-edited to remove all of its hard-core sequences, reshot to emphasize its possible gangland connections with The Godfather and reissued as Losers Weepers. Even more blatantly, soon after the success of The Godfather was firmly assured, the makers of a film covered here last year under the title Impulsion excised a scene in which a woman seduces her teenaged stepson on a pool table and released it as The Stepmother, rated R. Having been cleaned up, it is also cleaning up.

On the other hand, if sex is treated with at least a modicum of humor, it can draw a clean bill of health. What's Up, Doc? sets Barbra Streisand in amorous--and hilarious--pursuit of Ryan O'Neal; but since any hanky-panky came after the fade-outs, it was rated G. In The Last of the Red Hot Lovers, derived from Neil Simon's hit play, Alan Arkin arranges signally unsuccessful assignations with Sally Kellerman, Paula Prentiss and Renee Taylor. Because Arkin did nothing more than spin his wheels, the film was rated PG. For similar reasons, so was Play It Again, Sam, Woody Allen's plaintive tribute to the Bogey era--although it must be admitted that the sad-faced comic also contributed some pretty pungent dialog. "Is it possible," he ponders at one point, "that she didn't have a single orgasm in the two years we were married? Or was she faking that night?" Allen reprised a few months later with his version of Dr. David Reuben's best seller, Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex but Were Afraid to Ask. As it happened, there was precious little that Allen was afraid to ask--but a good deal that his producers were afraid to show. Less concerned with cover and concealment were the makers of Warner Bros.' Get to Know Your Rabbit, with Tom Smothers as a naïve junior executive who drops out of the world of big business into the gamier world of show business (with no less a personage than Orson Welles as his mentor). Rabbit was intended as a good-natured spoof, but its nudity won it an R. Another spoof--this one tackling sexploitation films themselves--was Jeanne and Alan Abel's Is There Sex After Death? starring Buck Henry. Perhaps because of its cheerful blatancy--climaxed by exclusive coverage of an International Sex Bowl staged in Houston--it blithely imposed its own X.

Essentially, what all this seems to mean is that the rift between the skin-flick film makers and the major studios is once again widening. In 1970 and 1971, the majors seemed to be increasing the sexual content of their films at the same time the cheapo sexploitation film makers were tailoring their product for the mass market. The Stewardesses, with a gross now estimated at $26,000,000, indicates how close they came. But, as the saying goes, one swallow does not make a spring--and the sexploitation film makers swallowed deeply, indeed, when they discovered that their patrons were not responding to their efforts to turn respectable. If audiences could see such stars as Ann-Margret, Karen Black, Jane Fonda, Glenda Jackson and Vanessa Redgrave in the altogether, why should they pay two or three dollars more to gaze upon the nudity of some anonymous nobodies? Also, it should be remembered, nudity itself has become something of a commonplace. It's on the stages of our major cities, on films or in the flesh (or both) in hundreds of saloons and bars across the country. Many night spots in the more permissive communities have even begun to offer the attraction of "live sex acts" on their stages. Simply to exist, sexploitation moviemakers had to take the plunge one way or the other.

The plunge was made. Distributors such as Donald Davis of Hollywood Cinema Associates, who hitherto had prided himself on never having touched hardcore stuff, found that they had to go all the way--or get out of the business. In Dial a Degenerate, Davis rounded up a parcel of stag loops, coaxed his talented (and attractive) partner, Ann Myers, to provide a continuity, shot some additional narrative material (mainly with Miss Myers, who's always fully clothed) and came up with one of the more successful entries on the hard-core circuits this year. The rationale of the movie is simplicity itself. Subscribers to the service dial the petite Miss Myers and request their favorite fetish, from listening to dirty words to panty sniffing, crotch peeping, tittie fondling, finger fucking or being beaten with whips. She responds with vivid descriptions, most of which are even more vividly illustrated by the aforementioned stag loops. (Actually, the only time she--or the film--fudges is when a subscriber phones for a man and a bear. Her description is graphic, but what the film shows is a man with a toy bear. Even so, in its press kit, Hollywood Cinema Associates assures exhibitors that "we have handled this picture in such a way that you can get it cool or get it hot, whatever your needs might be.")

Viewing the cool version of one of these movies is an exercise in frustration. One must endure all the inanities of plot, the inadequacies of acting, the frequent amateurism of camerawork and editing in eager anticipation of a few titillating moments that have already been excised. In the case of a picture like Bizarre Sex Practices--another in a seemingly endless series on sex education--the elisions become even more painfully obvious; since there is no story line, the very raison d'être for the film has been removed. The sound track earnestly expounds on dildos, masturbation, anal intercourse, half a dozen different positions and at least as many fetishes, but the film discreetly cuts away from the more revealing sections of the actual demonstrations. Which, at least in the instance of Bizarre Sex Practices, is rather a shame, for the production is--if you'll pardon the expression--well mounted and well photographed and features two very attractive models. (The female half of the team, Laura Cannon, appeared in Playboy's October 1971 takeout on The Porno Girls, in which she listed her occupation as sex star. In Bizarre Sex Practices, she is correct in both senses.)

The top domestic grosses in the hardcore porno field, however, were registered by Deep Throat (in which the highly experimental, if anonymous, heroine suffers from an affliction that prevents her from "hearing bells" until, after considerable searching, she finds a young man with the endowment to cure her problem--which is that her clitoris is located near her Adam's apple) and by School Girl, American-made winner of the grand prize at Amsterdam's Adult Film Festival earlier this year. Significantly, both are very well made, indicating an increasing amount of selectivity and discernment on the part of hardcore patrons. Deep Throat, apart from its intriguing title, attracted audiences by mingling laughs with the lubricity, a satirical score with the sex--even though, as one critic noted, it didn't "quite live up to its advance reputation as the Ben-Hur of porno pix." School Girl, quite simply, achieved a degree of eroticism all too rare in the field.

One of the phenomena of 1972 is the upswing in fully plotted, totally graphic homosexual films. Several cities--New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles among them--now support full-time gay theater operations. New York has played reluctant host to a gay film festival. And earlier this year, the prestigious Museum of Modern Art presented, as part of its survey of new works by young German film makers, a picture with the formidable title It Is Not the Homosexual Who Is Perverse, but the Situation in Which He Lives. Boys in the Sand, a beach-boys variant on Boys in the Band, set the level for American films in this genre, going beyond its progenitor by including sequences of hard-core action as the boys enjoy themselves. It was followed by such equally nonevasive features as L. A. Plays Itself, All About Alice and Bob & Daryl & Ted & Alex, as well as the shorts Tuesday and The Sex Garage (both of which were pinched by the New York police). From Andy Warhol's prolific factory came the transvestite Women in Revolt, a satire on women's lib.

But enhancing the sexual quotients of the hard-core porno films, A. C. or D. C, became an increasingly risky proposition in 1972, as police action was stepped up all over the country. Although the theaters playing these pictures are far more careful to observe their self-imposed (and self-protective) Adults Only signs than many of the houses running X- or R-rated Hollywood products, the mere fact of their existence seems to act as a goad to law enforcers. New York, which had been playing it cool for several years, suddenly began heating up in the fall of 1971, when members of the Public Morals Squad of the N. Y. P. D. swooped down on the First Annual New York Erotic Film Festival and made off with two features and two shorts. (Only one, a homosexual item, was eventually found guilty as charged; the fine was $250.) New York's finest struck again on December 30, closing down three theaters in a single night, arresting their personnel and making off with the prints. Before long, the police were raiding the labs where the films were processed as well as the theaters in which they were shown. In a particularly bizarre move to halt the traffic, agents from the district attorney's office opened a porn shop at Eighth Avenue and 50th Street; while selling obscene books, magazines and movies to their customers, they compiled secret lists of suppliers that led to the indictment of 12 men and six corporations.

A similar zeal was displayed in Los Angeles, where one enterprising member of the police department actually invested $5000 in the production of a hardcore feature so that, as one of its producers, he could be on hand when the stag action was being filmed--and make the bust. More zealous yet was Los Angeles municipal judge George W. Tram-ell III, who, on April 21, personally led raids on 17 of Hollywood's porn theaters and bars, issuing warrants from curbside. In that single night, Tramell and his men seized 19 projectors and 46 reels of film, made four arrests and issued 20 citations, then struck again a few weeks later. In a similar case, 13,000 reels of alleged sex films were confiscated in a series of raids; but, as the Federal District Court of Los Angeles subsequently noted, "Only random cursory attempts were made to determine whether the material seized conformed to the specifications of the warrant and most of the films seized were not viewed at all." Even so, despite the Federal court's order to return the films to their owners, Judge L. Thaxton Hanson refused.

One way or another, the repressive patterns of New York and Los Angeles are being duplicated throughout the country. The dockets of the San Francisco courts are heavy with obscenity cases. At one point in 1972, the Sutter Cinema in downtown San Francisco had no fewer than eight separate suits pending. Although San Francisco juries are notably reluctant to convict, the costs to the defendants of such cases--estimated at anywhere from $500 to $35,000, depending on their length, gravity and the number of expert witnesses called in--constitute a serious and expensive form of harassment. Philadelphia's Mayor Frank Rizzo, ordering a raid on two local porn houses, instructed his police to "bang 'em hard, men, go all out." The managers of the two theaters, the Xstacy and the Devon, were promptly arrested on charges of putting on an obscene exhibition. In Chicago, Federal officials began a grand-jury investigation of several dozen adult movie theaters, with a view toward prosecution on charges of transmitting pornography across state lines. (The maximum rap is five years in prison and a $5000 fine.)

A film version of the hit Broadway revue Oh! Calcutta! with several nude interludes was scratched in Atlanta after only two performances; seven people were arrested after the solicitor general personally led the raids on the three theaters playing the film in that city. Maryland's would-be censors took to the legislature a complicated bill that would license all moviehouses and provided for revocation of those licenses if there were any violation of the bill's purposely vague language. In Boston, operators of drive-ins were informed that they would have to shield their screens from the casual passer-by if they wanted to continue to show X-rated movies. Since the costs for such installations in two drive-ins alone came to $3,900,000, their owners decided to forgo the X product.

The fact is that courts throughout the United States are now being crowded with cases involving what many regard as victimless crimes--crimes whose victims, far from feeling victimized, know very well what they're paying for and have no objection to doing so. Significantly, a Field Research Corporation survey held in California last spring revealed that only one in four Californians felt that pornography should be outlawed; a mere 2.4 percent viewed it as one of "the two or three most serious problems facing the country today." Unfortunately, this liberated attitude is not currently reflected in the courts, where from 30 percent to 50 percent of the pending cases in many communities involve alleged obscenity.

Despite the flood of court actions--which may well be attributable to an election year--enough time has now elapsed to permit some perspective on the spread of sex films in the United States. The pattern is well established. The first few, generally quite mild, are obstinately fought by various local groups, generally affiliated with the Citizens for Decent Literature. When the cases come to trial, more often than not the defendants are exonerated--especially if it's a trial by jury. More films come in and they tend to get rougher. If the police attempt to intervene, public curiosity is aroused and the hard-core popularity prolonged. If the films are left to find their own level--as they were in San Francisco, Los Angeles and, later, in New York for quite a while--the audiences tend to level off and distributors begin to complain of "overseating" (their euphemism for underdemand). But when the police grow active again and their raids make the headlines, the audiences are once more curious: Maybe something is happening now that they hadn't seen before. There is a brief resurgence in attendance--at least until they realize that the stuff the cops are busting now isn't really that much different from what they were hauling in a few years back. Attendance drops again. What keeps the phenomenon alive, and politically viable, is that it occurs in well-defined waves in various parts of the country and at various times. What began in San Francisco and Los Angeles spread to New York and Boston. From there, it seemed to head into the Midwest, with cities such as Minneapolis and Chicago as its epicenters. At the moment, the major thrust is in the South--Houston, Dallas, Atlanta. But what is hot in Atlanta in 1972 was cold potatoes in San Francisco four or five years ago.

If nothing else, the producers of films for this highly specialized market are stern realists. They know what the market will bear and they know its limitations. They not only budget accordingly--usually in the $10,000-to-$25,000 range--but limit the sexual activity to what they consider the societal norm of the moment. The irony is that each time they advance the sexuality in their films (from simulated fellatio to actual fellatio, for example), their audience shrinks. The number of theaters that will risk playing their product falls off and they are forced to shoot both hot and cool versions, hoping--not unrealistically--that the theaters playing it cool will turn hot in another year or so. But they are also aware that their pictures will probably reach only a relatively small audience.

Sex--as this series itself attests--has always been an important ingredient in film making, but one in which the law of diminishing returns quickly asserts itself. Today, with audiences being given the choice between the blatant sex of the porn market and the spicily implied sexuality of most Hollywood features, they'll settle for the spicy implications every time. They would rather see Raquel Welch, as Hannie Caulder, race all over the West wearing a poncho that threatens to reveal all than San Francisco's favorite porn girl, Mary Rexroth, in a flick wherein the threat promptly becomes a rather boring reality.

Of course, there will always be movies in which sex scenes are essential and, no matter what the Production Code's numerous critics may contend, such scenes can now be put on the screen as fully and as frankly as the director feels is appropriate--provided, of course, he can also convince his studio to accept the appropriate rating. Much of Sam Peckinpah's well-aired quarrel over the cuts in his double-rape scene from Straw Dogs, in fact, was not with Dr. Stern and the M. P. A. A. but with the heads of ABC-Cinerama, which financed the picture. In Peckinpah's view, after the wife (Susan George) has half acceded to the attack by her former lover and, indeed, seems almost to enjoy it, the full horror of rape was to come from the second attack, when the lover casually turns the girl over to his pal. According to Peckinpah, in the original cut, this sequence was considerably prolonged (with penetration from the rear, incidentally), including close-ups of the girl's agony. Had it remained, the film would have gone out with an X. ABC-Cinerama wanted an R and, over Peckinpah's protesting body, got it.

But even the R category affords the film maker considerable latitude under the Stern administration. Alfred Hitchcock obviously felt that the several nude scenes in Frenzy were integral to his story because the villain of the piece (Barry Foster) was a particularly kinky sex murderer who apparently got his jollies from watching women the after he raped them. (Throttling them with a necktie gave him something to do with his hands.) The R permitted not only this but also the rather grisly scene in a potato truck in which Foster attempts to remove his stickpin from the fingers of a nude corpse. Similarly, in Slaughter, house-Five, Billy Pilgrim's fancied flights to distant Tralfamadore would have seemed pretty silly if his favorite sex goddess, Montana Wildhack--a men's-magazine centerfold girl and nudie-movie starlet--had been forced to turn up fully clad. The Tralfamadorians, somewhat reluctantly, provide Montana, played by newcomer Valerie Perrine (see Playboy, May), with a wardrobe and also give her and Billy a "night canopy" for their all-glass house so that they can make a baby with a little privacy--and avoid an X. In Deliverance, an honest and intelligent adaptation of James Dickey's thoughtful novel, the very nub of the picture is the fact that one of a quartet of canoers has been buggered by a mountain man in the back hills of Georgia. The buggery is shown--not explicitly, but certainly graphically enough; but since this sexual assault motivates all the subsequent action in the film, it could hardly have been passed over in a casual aside. As anticipated, all of these pictures ended up with Rs.

Obviously, with sex films once again passing through a period of transition, it is impossible to make any easy generalization. The R classification has been created specifically to permit film makers to deal with serious ideas and adult situations with a minimum of compromise. But, as Stern is ruefully aware, the latitude of the R must also be extended to film makers whose aims are essentially exploitative. This was especially visible in the early months of 1972, when pictures begun a year or more ago were still coming to the screen. In Such Good friends, for example, Otto Preminger has Dyan Cannon go down on James Coco while he's struggling out of an enormous corset with one hand and talking on the telephone with the other--a scene intended to be funny. In The Groundstar Conspiracy, Michael Sarrazin and Christine Belford are viewed consummating their passion through a one-way mirror for the greater glory of the CIA. In Hammersmith Is Out, Elizabeth Taylor enjoys as literal a roll in the hay with Beau Bridges as has ever been committed to celluloid. In Blindman, an R-rated spaghetti Western, 50 prospective brides for as many Texas settlers have been abducted south of the border and, naked or near naked, penned up to service the lascivious tastes of the Mexican soldiery, which are consistently nasty. Even Radley Metzger's Little Mother, a thinly veiled account of the rise of Eva Perón, won an R despite its abundance of breasts, pubic hair (all female, incidentally) and simulated intercourse.

What has confused and disturbed many people around the country is the fact that the ratings seem to be connected with the amount of sexuality in a movie, not with--as claimed--its suitability for specific segments of the viewing public. A film like Blindman, for example, although rife with the most sadistic forms of violence that one might conceive, probably got its R less for its sadism than for its numerous rapes and high quotient of nudity. One can only conclude this after recognizing that any number of pictures that have less sex but an equal amount of violence--films as varied as Ben, Blood Orgy of the Site Devils, Chato's Land, The Cowboys, The Culpepper Cattle Co., The Doberman Gang, Joe Kidd, Puppet on a Chain, The Thing with Two Heads and The Wrath of God, to name but a few--were awarded a PG. The Code people repeatedly point out that this means Parental Guidance Suggested, but for most parents, PG simply means "Ok for the kiddies." Understandably, they've become increasingly irate at the kind of material turning up in that category.

On the other hand, many parents were growing no less incensed over the notion that some anonymous committee of raters in Hollywood could dictate to them what their own children could and could not see. Oddly enough, Stern himself agrees with this group and has said privately that he would like nothing better than to see the X rating abandoned altogether. The meaning of the X, he feels, has become obscured because so many sexploitation films are never even submitted to the Code and Rating Administration; they simply take an automatic X by default. As a result, a hard-core porn film such as Personals or The Morning After that goes into release with a self-imposed X ends up in the same category as A Clockwork Orange. What Stern would like to accomplish is the introduction of a completely new method of signifying that a sexploitation film has been neither seen nor classified by his administration.

Even so, while admitting that his classification system is less than perfect, Stern takes considerable pride in the fact that the screen is open to truly adult fare as never before. In Paddy Chayefsky's The Hospital, for example, George C. Scott has a long speech about the tragedy of not being able to have an erection, then discovers with tremendous joy (and the cooperation of Diana Rigg) that this infirmity is instantly curable with the right remedy. "If I had to eliminate that speech about the significance of erection to get a PG instead of an R," Chayefsky told a reporter, "I would have taken the R." Fortunately, he didn't have to do either. To Find a Man, also rated PG, deals with a teenaged girl (Pamela Martin) who needs an abortion and, rather than turn to her unsympathetic parents, enlists the aid of a bookish, sexually unaware youth to procure it. In One Is a Lonely Number, beauteous Trish Van Devere, whose husband has deserted her, experiences all the pangs of a young divorcee, including a prolonged affair with a married man. Even Cabaret, despite its subplot involving homosexuality, ended up with a PG. "Any ideas can be treated freely on the screen today," says Stern, "so long as they are handled with good taste." Just what constitutes good taste is, of course, a matter of--taste. And another of the charges frequently levied against the Code and Rating Administration is that it has tended to be far more stringent in rating the low-budget independents than in rating the films of companies affiliated with the M. P. A. A. So much so, in fact, that many of these independents prefer to accept an automatic X rather than go to the expense of having the administration do it for them.

The independent producers of Fritz the Cat did go through the M. P. A. A. raters--and failed in their appeal to get an R. Thus, 1972 became the year of the first "X-rated and animated" feature-length cartoon. Fritz, based on the popular, youth-oriented Robert Crumb comics, is at once witty, irreverent, vulgar and provocative. The sex action, always handled with high humor, is as explicit as one can get in a cartoon, with Fritz sharing a bathtub with some teenaged groupies or being overwhelmed by an enormous, amorous black lady in Harlem. Perhaps the most curious aspect of Fritz the Cat is the fact that, while teenagers can freely follow his exploits in the Crumb underground newspapers, they are barred by the X from seeing him on the screen. Nonetheless, the adult audience did well by Fritz.

But the real box-office bonanza of 1972 came from the sustained support for black films, featuring black actors and black themes, on the part of black communities throughout the United States. Merely a profitable phenomenon in 1971, it had grown into a major fact of economic life for the studios by 1972. Inspired by the unanticipated successes of last year's Shaft and Sweet Sweet-back's Baadasssss Song, MGM, inevitably, reprised with Shaft's Big Score, starring again the dynamic Richard Roundtree, and also released Cool Breeze, introducing Thalmus Rasulala and Lincoln Kilpatrick. Warner's sought to recapture the rapture of Cotton Comes to Harlem by again co-starring Godfrey Cambridge and Raymond St. Jacques in Come Back Charleston Blue. The same studio also gave Gordon Parks, Jr.--son of Shaft's director, Gordon Parks--his first directorial chore with Super Fly, starring Ron O'Neal as a pusher trying to make one last deal, and took the more forthright step of presenting the powerful biographical documentary Malcolm X. Paramount, which may have entered the field prematurely with Uptight, sought to compensate with The Man, The Legend of Nigger Charley and Black Gunn (starring Jim Brown). Twentieth Century-Fox contributed Sounder, Martin Ritt's sympathetic study of a Negro farm family during the Depression. Characteristically, American-International offered the eminently commercial Blacula, with the first Negro vampire (William Marshall).

Perhaps more revealing than the attempts of Caucasian corporations to woo the minorities, however, has been the response of the black communities to their offerings. Curiously, blacks have not precisely showered approval upon films sincerely made by blacks for black audiences, such as The Bus Is Coming, filmed in California for a few thousand dollars. But they identified completely with Yaphet Kotto as Bone, a strapping buck who forces his way into the Beverly Hills mansion of Andrew Duggan and Joyce Van Patten, threatening extortion and/or rape, then ends up being seduced by the white woman after he has begun to sympathize with her husband. Clearly, the blacks have chosen their own heroes--Roundtree in Shaft's Big Score, Christopher St. John in Top of the Heap, Kilpatrick in Cool Breeze and St. Jacques in Come Back Charleston Blue, all of them cops or private eyes, handsome and independent, who talk tough and act tough in the presence of honkies. Next to come--Shuttlecock, with David Broadnax as a sort of black James Bond, and St. Jacques shooting his way out of some Texas intrigues in Book of Numbers, which he is also producing and directing. One can only hope, now that blacks are moving into positions of authority, that they will soon begin to present their brothers on the screen not merely as superspades but as fully dimensioned human beings.

As for the imports of 1972, the day would seem to be just about over when foreign pictures could still give American film makers many pointers on frankness or sophistication in the handling of sexual materials. To be sure, our Customs people are still standing guard at our ports, valiantly stemming the tide of European smut that might otherwise sully our screens. But a random sampling of the sex films now being made abroad, such as provided by the Cannes film festival last May, suggests that the tide might well be running in the other direction. Whereas in the past, American distributors in the sexploitation field attended Cannes to pick up their product, this year Sherpix president Louis Sher (whose firm has handled such class items as Mona, School Girl and The Stewardesses) reported an overwhelming seller's market for the American offerings, even in such relaxed production centers as Scandinavia, West Germany, Belgium and France. Indeed, interest in American films ran so high at Cannes that when two of the Sherpix presentations, Mona and Adultery for Fun and Profit, were double-billed at Le Star, fights broke out because there were far more viewers than seats.

Of all the films unspooled at Cannes, none was received with greater enthusiasm than Federico Fellini's Roma, a generous, kaleidoscopic, semidocumentary salute to the city that Fellini both hates and adores. Many felt that they were in the presence of a masterpiece and extolled its visual splendors and its humanistic concerns--including an extended memoir on Rome's class-conscious houses of prostitution. Cannes also had an early look at Polish director Jerzy Skolimowski's black comedy King, Queen, Knave, based on Vladimir Nabokov's novel and filmed in West Germany with a cast headed by Gina Lollobrigida and David Niven--which, if you throw in its American financing, makes it just about as international as you can get these days. In it, La Lollobrigida seduces a young orphan boy with the intention of inducing him to kill her husband (Niven) so that she can inherit his fortune. The film's high point comes when Lollobrigida--still beautiful, still sexy--attempts to teach the child the art of love. Another Polish émigré at Cannes was Roman Polanski, represented by his (and Playboy Productions') Macbeth, with its controversial violence and nude sleepwalking scene.

Among the imports, the outstanding success of the year, both artistically and financially--at least at the time of writing--was registered by veteran Vittorio De Sica's mellow, sensitive The Garden of the Finzi-Continis. Dealing with two Jewish families, one very patrician, one middle-class, in Ferrara just as Italian fascism is passing into its anti-Semitic phase, it centers on the unrequited passion of a young student (Lino Capolicchio) for the headstrong, life-loving daughter (Dominique Sanda) of the aristocratic Finzi-Continis. There are delicate hints at a homosexual attraction between Capolicchio and Sanda's ailing brother, a suggestion that the relationship between brother and sister may not be totally innocent and a startling scene--startling because it's so precisely limned in a film that is largely muted--in which the girl gives herself to a virile young soldier. The winner of an Oscar as best foreign film, Garden would be an important picture if it did nothing more than familiarize American audiences with the Garbolike features of Miss Sanda.

In a notable American debut, Peru's Armando Robles Godoy offered The Green Wall, a moving and affecting tale of a small family living precariously on the very edge of the Peruvian jungle, distinguished by an honest and forthright depiction of conjugal love. For a more restricted clientele, two other imports served notice that the last word has not yet been said on either sex or violence. El Topo, made in Mexico, was written, directed and scored by Alexandra Jodorowsky--a cosmopolitan Chilean who, in Paris, had come under the influence of the exiled Spanish playwright Fernando Arrabal. El Topo is the French theater of cruelty made cinematic. In frightening and frightful images, Jodorowsky has created a modern morality play set in the old West. Its blood-spattered plot, a grotesque parody of Clint Eastwood's spaghetti Westerns, moves erratically through mass killings, horrifying tortures, a particularly gory castration, a strangely erotic duel in the desert between the two women who claim El Topo as their own; and then, after he has been left for dead, a transformation that makes him the god of a tribe of deformed pygmies (one of whom he marries). It is an odd, unpleasant, but totally compelling experience.

A few months after El Topo had opened, Jodorowsky's mentor, Arrabal, was playing the same underground circuit that gave El Topo its start. His Viva la Muerte!, filmed in North Africa, is wholly autobiographical--the almost clinical recollections of when, as a boy, Arrabal realized that his mother had betrayed his Loyalist father to the Franco forces at the end of the Spanish Civil War. The images are often hideously obsessive, dwelling in Bunuel fashion on sores, deformities and sudden, senseless cruelties. At one point, the boy fantasizes himself urinating from a bell tower over the town he feels has turned against him. At another, he has a nightmare in which he sees his mother defecating through a grille upon his father in a cell below. And yet the boy also has erotic yearnings for both his mother and his young aunt--and the film projects these with equal explicitness.

It is unlikely that pictures like El Topo and Viva la Muerte! will ever reach a really wide audience in the United States. People say that they go to the movies to be entertained, and it's only the minority that can derive entertainment from the metaphysical hysteria of a sadist or the nightmarish hallucinations of a masochist. But it's even more unlikely that pictures like El Topo and Viva la Muerte! will long be permitted distribution here if several of the cases currently pending before the Supreme Court undermine the present Court's interpretations of obscenity and pornography. As this is written, it's far too early to make predictions, but one thing can be said with certainty: If Richard Nixon is re-elected, he will soon afterward have the opportunity to make two more appointments to the High Bench that will assure him a Supreme Court fully responsive to his views. And his views in regard to censorship were made abundantly clear to all when he rejected out of hand "The Report of the President's Commission on Obscenity and Pornography," initiated by the Johnson Administration. Stern and his Code and Rating Administration are fully aware that they are holding the thin red line between their industry's policy of self-regulation and the gung-ho swing to state or even Federal controls--with, for Stern, the added fear that the present X will harden into law before he can eliminate it. And if this should happen, Portnoy's Complaint will be nothing compared with our own.