Sex in Cinema 1973

The Rumblings had been heard for some time: a distant thunder, ominously persistent, punctuated by occasional flashes of lightning as a movie was closed here by overzealous sheriffs or a theater was burned there by bluenose vandals. Vocal minorities called for the arrest, prosecution and conviction of "the pornographers"; and, in response, a crescendo of court cases--many of them instigated by the FBI--rose from coast to coast. The Supreme Court had been sitting for more than a year on a number of obscenity cases, the Justices either reluctant or unable to reach a decision. Then, on June 21, the lid blew off. In a series of five stunning blows, the Nixon Court reversed almost 20 years of standards and practices established by the Warren Court in dealing with sexual materials, and in every branch of the film industry, the panic was on.

Ironically, although the major thrust of the Court's decisions was clearly aimed at the producers and distributors of hard-core films, books and magazines, it immediately became apparent that these were the people best able to take care of themselves. Within hours of the Supreme Court announcement, there was a meeting of the Los Angeles branch of the Adult Film Association of America, whose members are the main purveyors of such "adult" entertainment. At the session, a few producers announced that they were withdrawing from the field and a few more stated their intention of going soft core--but most simply expressed relief that they had already managed to unload their inventories without sustaining a loss. They alone had correctly seen--and hedged against--what was coming.

Assessing their future, they felt that they could continue to operate successfully soft core within the state of California (the Court's decision on U.S. vs. Orito merely upheld the right of Congress to regulate the transport of obscene material in interstate commerce) and that their counterparts in New York might well do the same there. No other state, in their opinion, could be similarly self-sustaining. But their deepest concern, they said, was that if they--who regard themselves as legitimate entrepreneurs in the porno field--were to move out, "the Syndicate" would promptly move in. There were, indeed, rumors that it already had. Gerard Damiano, writer-director of Deep Throat, had been quoted in The New York Times as declining to comment on why he'd sold his interest in that top-grossing film; he said he didn't want his legs broken. "With the exception of Deep Throat, they've left us pretty much (text continued on pag 158) alone," said one member of the Adult Film Association. "After all, there's more action, and less risk, in a single night at Vegas than in this entire field. But if it's forced underground, the prices will start going up and they'll be here. And when that happens, I don't want to be around."

Because most films for the porn market continue to be turned out on extremely low budgets (generally $15,000 or less), their producers can afford to stay in business even if their income is restricted to what they can earn in New York or California. What faces the major studios as a result of the Supreme Court's rulings is infinitely more complex and dispiriting. In the case of Miller vs. California, the Court turned over to the states the problem of establishing "contemporary community standards," offering as guidelines to what could and should be banned what it chose to call "a few plain examples":

"(a) Patently offensive representations or descriptions of ultimate sexual acts, normal or perverted, actual or simulated.

"(b) Patently offensive representations or descriptions of masturbation, excretory functions and lewd exhibition of the genitals."

"At a minimum," the Court went on to explain, "prurient, patently offensive depiction or description of sexual conduct must have serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value to merit First Amendment protection." To the states was left the question of what might or might not be considered "patently offensive" within their own borders. To the major studios was left the frightening possibility that before the year is out, they might be faced with as many as 50 separate interpretations of what constitutes a "patently offensive" representation of sex. Within days of the decisions, Steve Krautz Productions had announced that it was delaying the filming of Last Exit to Brooklyn, a novel dealing with homosexuality, and every studio was reexamining its current inventory to find ways of transforming a possible R into a probable PG.

Publicly the majors, via the Motion Picture Association of America, were talking tough. After a meeting July 31 to discuss the matter, M.P.A.A. president Jack Valenti issued a statement: "It is the M.P.A.A. judgment that the High Court will clarify its earlier decisions and narrow the broad definitions of obscenity to fasten securely the principle that there is a difference between commerce in ideas and the commercial exploitation of obscene material." The M.P.A.A., he continued, is joining with other organizations, including the American Library Association, in setting up a media coalition that "has set as its goal an informational program for the Congress, state legislatures and local governing authorities to make clear that ideas and free speecli are not to be abused by disfiguring definitions of obscenity which can be used to indict legitimate artistic and creative efforts."

The studio heads who attended that meeting agreed to let Valenti do all the talking for attribution. Privately, though, several speculated that trouble may be brewing at the exhibitor level. If exhibitors are afraid to show major films, something will have to give. But, cautioned one executive, it will be at least 12 months before the studios will know for sure "which way the ball will bounce." One effort to aid exhibitors and distributors is under way: The M.P.A.A. is lending legal assistance to them in selected cases. The association's attorney, the high-powered Louis Nizer, is already representing the defendants in the appeal of the Carnal Knowledge case from an adverse supreme court ruling in Georgia.

Significantly, though, apart from United Artists' import of Last Tango in Paris, no major company had permitted an X-rated movie on its premises since A Clockwork Orange, which was released early in 1972 and subsequently laundered to an R. One important reason was the fact that more and more newspapers were refusing flat-out to advertise X features in their pages or, like the Los Angeles Times, had taken to lumping together all Xs, regardless of merit or origin, on the same page. As a result. United Artists simply withdrew its Last Tango ads altogether from the Times--apparently without doing much damage to its weekly grosses.

To a great many defenders of sexual candor on the screen, Last Tango in Paris was justification enough for their position. Previewed for a single performance as the grand finale of the New York Film Festival in October 1972, the print was hustled back to Italy, where it remained, surrounded by legal controversy, and did not make its commercial debut here until February 1973. Wisely, United Artists centered its advertising campaign on Pauline Kael's glowing New Yorker review, written at the time of the festival, in which she compared Last Tango to Igor Stravinsky's epochal Rite of Spring. The classical allusion was apt. What Stravinsky had done to liberate the ballet from stifling conventions back in 1913, Bernardo Bertolucci seemed to be accomplishing for the screen almost 60 years later. And the scandale that attended the Stravinsky premiere was fully echoed in the reactions--critical, political and personal--evoked by the film wherever it was shown, either here or abroad. In its native Italy, after a four-day hearing last June, the film was banned and its two leads, Marlon Brando and Maria Schneider, were fined and given suspended sentences. Since neither was in Italy at the time, the latter was purely pro forma, but indicative. United Artists was to encounter much the same opposition as it sought to open the film around the U.S. To many a judicial eye, it looked like just another porn film.

Actually, Last Tango in Paris left little to the imagination in terms of sexual activity and nothing whatsoever in terms of sexual language. It featured full frontal female nudity, masturbation, sodomy and fornication (in an impressive array of positions) and a range of four-letter words that would certainly boggle the minds of all but the most sophisticated pornographers. Two factors, however, clearly differentiated it from the hordes of hard-core films that have been crowding the screens in recent years: One was the absence of any explicit close-ups of the sexual act; there was no depiction of penetration, as it is delicately described in the courts. The other was the almost self-evident fact that every bit of the film's extensive eroticism is related to its serious central theme. Still standing after the Supreme Court's decisions is the basic caveat that any work being judged must be considered "as a whole."

"As a whole," Last Tango is the moving story of a thoroughly demoralized ex-fighter, ex-actor whose unfaithful wife has committed suicide. Now middle-aged and alone, Paul (Brando) is fearful of the future, and even more fearful of emotional commitment. Wandering the streets of Paris, he comes upon an apartment for rent--a seedy place with tattered castoffs piled in the corners. While Paul is inspecting it, Jeanne (Mile. Schneider) arrives; she and her fiancé are to be married in a week and they need a place. Within moments Paul, still wearing his trench coat, is upon her, lifting her skirt, dragging down her panties. They have sex while standing, the girl's legs locked firmly about Paul's middle. Their sudden passion spent, the two make a pact. The apartment will be their rendezvous; they will continue to meet for sex, but only for sex--no emotions, no names.

Paul, with his insatiable hunger and the fear of approaching impotence, keeps the game going and Jeanne, although enduring virtually every form of sexual humiliation, is masochistic enough not only to participate wholeheartedly in his aberrations but even to find herself falling in love with him. Later, Paul recognizes, if not necessarily his love for the girl, certainly his need for her. He takes her to a tango palace, where, in a brilliantly stylized sequence, he drunkenly proposes to her. She rejects him, however, and announces her intention of going through with her wedding to her young film director. When Paul follows her home, she shoots him dead. Still not knowing his name, she calmly sets about preparing her alibi.

The plot may sound slender, its incidents lurid; but Bertolucci, at 32 Italy's most creative director, had a wholly moral, even a moralistic message in mind: Sex without love, he tells us, carnality without commitment, can end only in tragedy. Paul might have been saved his tortured wanderings, Jeanne her torment, had they accepted this simple fact. There is a particularly touching scene between Brando and his dead wife's former lover (Massimo Girotti) in which Paul begins to realize how little he knew the woman, and another at her bier in which all the things that he should have said to her while she was alive come pouring out. In both instances, one realizes it is much too little and far too late. But these scenes afford piercing insights into the character of Paul and, hence, lend a peculiar validity to the entire enterprise. It is this psychic penetration of the characters, rather than the absence of any physical penetration by the performers, that sets Last Tango apart. Clearly, Time's reviewer overstated the case when he declared, shortly before the film's New York opening: "Tango proclaims the liberation of serious films from restraints on sex as unequivocally as the 1967 Bonnie and Clyde proclaimed liberation from restraints on violence." But then, back in January of this year, there were precious few who could foresee the repression forthcoming from the Nixon Court.

Perhaps some of this early euphoria could be traced to the voters of California, who in November 1972, by a tally of better than two to one, had turned down Proposition 18, a measure that would have enforced strict guidelines on pornography and obscenity. Even John Wayne, one of the more conservative inhabitants of the movie capital, spoke out against the measure. "You don't cut off your foot because you have a sore toe," he told TV viewers in a widely seen commercial. In the courts, juries--possibly more reliable indicators of "community standards" than politically appointed or elected judges--generally were turning in not-guilty verdicts on X-rated merchandise charged with obscenity. In Binghamton, New York, for example, a jury of ordinary citizens found Deep Throat not obscene--although a few months later, in a separate trial in New York City, criminal-court judge Joel Tyler made it clear that he didn't agree In Chicago, Throat went through two mistrials--one when the jury declared itself deadlocked, the second when the judge disqualified himself--in April of this year. The proprietors of the Town Underground Theater, where the picture was booked, may well have wished the verdict had come in before the Supreme Court decisions. In July, post-Court, they meekly entered a plea of guilty to obscenity and paid a fine of $10,000. But that was July. Back in February, looking through what turned out to be a clouded crystal ball, the showbiz bible Variety was informing its readers that, as far as New York was concerned, at least, sexy movies would no longer be "in the same category as peep shows, massage parlors and street crime, (continued on page 168) Sex in Cinema -- 1973 (continued from page 160) and that marks a victory of significant proportions for the exhibitors and distributors of theatrical sexplay and product in the midtown area." Despite the thunder on the right, it seemed at the dawn of 1973 that the era of permissiveness would continue.

Last year ended and this year opened with two films that posed for the M.P.A.A. its classic dilemma: what to do about sex and violence. The ratings imposed on those films--Sam Peckinpah's The Getaway (PG) and Billy Wilder's Avanti! (R)--left little question where the Production Code Administration's affections lay. The Getaway, which Peckinpah directed with his accustomed quota of violence, minimized nudity. Avanti!, which had no violence whatsoever, maximized nudity. Juliet Mills's extremes of fleshiness were displayed at frequent intervals and Wilder had the bad taste (for some American audiences) to zoom in on an Italian mother suckling her child. The voyeurism was compounded when Jack Lemmon and Miss Mills took a nude swim, to the delight of some passing Italians. With a basic plot that seemed like a French bedroom farce played alfresco (the two fall in love while in Ischia to claim the bodies of their parents, who had been having a clandestine affair), the bits of incidental nudity seemed not only intrusive but inserted solely for titillation. They came across, almost embarrassingly, as an aging director's attempt to be "with it."

The same could be said of Robert Wise's Two People, which was patently sympathetic to the plight of a GI deserter (Peter Fonda) on his way back from Morocco to the States to turn himself in. Just before leaving Marrakesh, he runs into fashion model Lindsay Wagner. At first, he does everything in his power to turn her off, but during a layover in Paris, the two talk interminably about their problems, and finally they go to bed together. Wise, who directed The Sound of Music, seems belatedly to have discovered S-E-X--and reveled in it sufficiently to earn an R. Even Stanley Kramer, perhaps the squarest of Hollywood's veteran producer-directors, apparently felt impelled to insert a plethora of four-letter-isms into the mouths of his two expert leads, George C. Scott and Faye Dunaway, to lend a touch of contemporaneity to the old-fashioned melodrama tics of his Oklahoma Crude. Because the story is set in a period shortly before World War One, the language falls on the contemporary ear as irritatingly anachronistic. Since its only offense was linguistic, however, the film pulled a PG.

Throughout the recent liberal period, the Motion Picture Association, and particularly its Code and Rating Administration, was in a peculiarly ticklish situation. Essentially a creature of the industry, it has conceived of itself not as a censor but as a bulwark against censorship; its rating system, designed to advise concerned parents as to the suitability of films for various age groups, has consistently been defended by M.P.A.A. president Valenti as a buffer against repressive Federal legislation. What has given both Valenti and his code administrator, Dr. Aaron Stern, their biggest headaches has been the controversial X--a rating, incidentally, of which neither man wholly approves. Although rarely given to pictures produced by the major companies that are members of the association, it has been handed out with some frequency to independents who submit their films for ratings--and, with even greater frequency, has been self-imposed by fly-by-night producers of sexploitation pictures who have known full well that they would end up with an X anyway. As a result, films such as A Clockwork Orange and Last Tango in Paris have found themselves in the same category not only with such celebrated hard-core features as Deep Throat and The Devil in Miss Jones but also with a tedious procession of 16mm merchandise of no artistic pretensions whatsoever. Because the code has lumped together fare so varied, the public, not surprisingly, has tended to do the same--a fact that plays directly into the hands of antismut organizations--the Citizens for Decent Literature, Morality in Media and Operation Moral Upgrade.

Since so much of its emphasis is directed to measurement of the degree of nudity and sexual activity in films under its scrutiny, the code administration has come under fire for apparently disregarding what some consider immorality in the theme rather than the visual detail of a work. More than a year ago, the National Council of Churches withdrew its support (tentative, at best) from the code-and-rating program and, since that time, the U.S. Catholic Conference has grown increasingly vociferous about what it has termed "the M.P.A.A.'s refusal to provide parents with reliable information on the visual and thematic violence contained in many current motion pictures intended to appeal to young audiences." Specifically condemned by the conference were films such as Lolly-Madonna XXX, many of the blaxploitation movies and the current crop of Kung Fu epics--notably, Deep Thrust and Fists of Fury.

It's on this rock that the code administration is foundering. If there are no nipples or genitalia in evidence, a picture clearly intended for a mature audience may well end up with, at the very least, a PG rating. Thus, Hillard Elkins' production of Ibsen's A Doll's House, that great precursor of women's lib, emerges with a G, as if it were another Disney movie--simply because Nora--played by Claire Bloom (Mrs. Elkins)--and her husband are never glimpsed in bed together. On the other hand. Paul Mazursky's Blume in Love, which seems in many ways a 20th Century extension of the Ibsen drama, presumably earned its R because Susan Anspach and her husband, George Segal, are seen in bed--and on a floor--together. It's worth noting that Catholics have become far more tolerant of this sort of thing than the code people, and far more critical of G or PG pictures that, because of either their basic themes or their excessive violence, seem more appropriate for adult audiences. In a sense, then, the code has played into the hands of the very people it was trying to fend off. By failing to distinguish between mature themes and graphic sexuality, by being more lenient with violence than with sex and, above all, by failing to evaluate in any way either the seriousness of intent or the varying degrees of explicitness in X-rated movies, the Code and Rating Administration left that area open to others--namely, the church groups, the Supreme Court and the various state legislatures.

It's still too early to suggest what the legislatures will rule and what effect those rulings will have on the type of pictures with which 1973 opened--those auguring well for a "new maturity" to replace the "new permissiveness." Women's lib, for example, had sufficiently settled itself into the nation's consciousness this year that a considerable group of films began to articulate its aspirations--not satirizing them, as in 1972's embarrassing Stand up and Be Counted, with its leering image of avid libbers eager for sex at any price. Up the Sandbox, while hardly a classic in the genre, attempted to convey the emotional crisis of New York housewife Barbra Streisand facing the advent of a third, and unwanted, child. In Pete 'n' Tillie, Carol Burnett forced a reluctant Walter Matthau into wedlock with the line "The honeymoon's over. It's time to get married." When their child developed a fatal illness, it was she, not the husband, who assumed the responsibility. In the romantic comedy A Touch of Class, Glenda Jackson, a caustic, wisecracking career woman, captivates George Segal despite her superior knowledge of Italian auto gearboxes. In Blume in Love, previously touched upon, the wife walks out on Segal--and ultimately returns to him on her own terms. Significantly, 1973 furnished not one but two versions of A Doll's House--the aforementioned one starring Claire Bloom, the other (directed by Joseph Losey) with Jane Fonda.

Nor were the decks stacked solely to favor the feminists. One of the more touching films of the year was Scarecrow, in which Gene Hackman and Al Pacino, (continued on page 170) Sex in Cinema -- 1973 (continued from page 168) two penniless (and not too bright) drifters, develop a mutual affection that, while devoid of the sexual overtones of Midnight Cowboy, suggests ultimately a male-female dependency. This is made even stronger by the fact that Pacino's deserted wife not only rejects him but lies to him about the death of the child he has never seen. In The Heartbreak Kid, a Neil Simon comedy deftly directed by Elaine May, young Charles Grodin--while still on the honeymoon--jilts his candy-munching schlepper of a wife (Jeannie Berlin) for the cool, WASPish charms of Cybill Shepherd. Perhaps the most penetrating portrait of the wild American male on the loose was to be found in writer-producer Steve Shagan's Save the Tiger, with Jack Lemmon indelibly cast as a wealthy Beverly Hills dress manufacturer contemplating a little arson to make ends meet. What he also contemplates, in the course of 36 extraordinarily crowded hours, are the generation gap, as personified by a gregarious Sunset Strippy, Laurie Heineman, and the steady erosion of all the values his own generation had lived by. Rarely has an American film worked so ruthlessly to expose the ethical dry rot at the core of the business community (including the use of callgirls to improve sales) or to invite compassion for an individual so thoroughly corrupted.

Obviously, these are all "mature" films, which is not to imply that they are either uniformly excellent or uniformly erotic. They have, however, been created from an adult perspective, which does suggest that the sexual needs, hang-ups and frustrations of their protagonists are given more than passing consideration. Unfortunately, the legal language has yet to be invented that can differentiate between these and Last Tango in Paris--or, for that matter, Deep Throat.

Violence, not sex, was the main ingredient in what turned out to be 1973's only significant new screen trend--the importation of golden hordes of Kung Fu epics from Hong Kong. In this instance, the trend would seem to be toward a more savage kind of violence, to the almost total exclusion even of a nominal love interest. (As any student of Krafft-Ebing can tell you, however, this does not preclude its having an erotic effect on the audience.) Kung Fu is a mixture of karate ritual and plain dirty fighting--kicking, butting, taking giant leaps with both feet aimed at the opponent. It turns the human body into a lethal weapon, its object to maim and destroy. And the victims of the Kung Fu experts, at least as demonstrated in such films as Five Fingers of Death. Fists of Fury and The Chinese Connection, can expect to die a particularly gory death. Faces are mashed to a pulp, arms torn from their sockets and then, for the grand finale, the camera zeroes in as huge gouts of blood gush from the broken mouth of the dying man. But the action itself is swift, graceful and resourceful, and its effect--particularly when such Kung Fu experts as Lo Lieh and the late Bruce Lee are taking on an entire squad of opponents singlehandedly--is oddly exhilarating, even if the prolonged death throes on which these films morbidly dwell inevitably produce an immediate comedown.

Despite the incursions of the Kung Fu films into the action market, the black-oriented blaxploitation pictures, with their unflagging accent on nudity and violence, continued to thrive, with something like 50 reaching the screen in 1973. Many of them--Shaft in Africa, Slaughter's Big Rip-Off, The Soul of Nigger Charley, Super Fly T.N.T.--were simply follow-ups to previous successes, utilizing the same characters, the same stars and often substantially the same plots as their predecessors. Nigger Charley, with its post--Civil War setting, once more casts Fred Williamson and D'Urville Martin as escaped slaves helping other slaves to freedom and killing whoever stands in their way. In the Shaft sequel, Richard Roundtree trucks off to Ethiopia to break up a modern slave ring that's smuggling young blacks into France for cheap labor. Super Fly T.N.T. finds Ron O'Neal retired from drugs and into gunrunning, coming to the aid of his black brothers in mythical Umbia, a country being ruthlessly exploited by Whitey. In all of them, the stalwart and often flamboyant hero is given time off from bad behavior for extensive romantic dalliance with such stellar black beauties as Vonetta McGee, Sheila Frazier, Gloria Hendry and Pam Grier.

Curiously, while the studios were becoming increasingly chaste and cautious in their ofay productions, the nude scenes in their black pictures continued unabated. In Coffy, for example, when statuesque Miss Grier sets off on a one-woman vendetta against everyone responsible for destroying her kid sister through drugs, her methods are simple and direct: She lures her willing prey into her bedroom with the promise of sex, then blasts their heads off. Vengeance also sparks the action in Hit Man, with Bernie Casey bent on tracking down the porn-movie ring that murdered his brother, and Miss Grier (again) as a would-be porn queen eager to advance her career. The Mack, a grim study of the vicissitudes of a black pimp, includes generous footage devoted to the sexy fillies in his stable, frequently in fashionable undress. And Ganja & Hess, one of several spin-offs of last year's successful Blacula, concentrates more on the bodies than on the blood of the female vampire victims.

Heading the list of the year's kinkier movies would have to be Warners' long-delayed release of William Peter Blatty's best seller, The Exorcist, that grim excursion into the black arts and the demonic possession of a sexually obsessed child. Production problems--making the child levitate, her bed quiver, her room tilt--were blamed for the repeatedly extended shooting schedule. But behind the scenes, apparently, lay other problems as well: how to deal with the child's sexuality (which, in the novel, includes vivid verbal obscenities) without ending up with an X, and how to suggest that the child was possessed by the Devil without encountering obstacles from the ever more vocal U.S. Catholic Conference. At the present writing, we can't say how--or if--director William Friedkin managed to cope with either of these prickly details; we know merely that Warners has scheduled the trouble-laden film for a December release.

Kinkiness of another kind was to be found in Brian De Palma's cool and deceptively comic Sisters, in which a schizoid Margot Kidder repeatedly hallucinates herself into becoming her evil dead Siamese twin, then sets off on knife-wielding rampages whenever she becomes emotionally involved with a man. Partly sophisticated, partly sexploitative, the film reaches its apogee in an extraordinary sequence of drug-induced regression, set in what seems to be the gymnasium of a madhouse, in which her doctor/husband tries--not only vainly but fatally--to explain away the guilt feelings that turn her every sexual encounter into a murderous assault. Curtis Harrington's The Killing Kind features a young man (John Savage) who turns psychopathic after being forced to participate in the gang rape of Sue Bernard (in a happier incarnation, our December 1966 Playmate). In Payday, an often repugnant revelation of the scabrous pop-music scene, complete with drugs, groupies and payola, Rip Torn presents a frighteningly convincing portrait of a ruthless, cynical and wholly amoral back-country balladeer--a smiling monster who keeps his troupe together with pills, sex and bribes as long as they are useful, then discards them with brutal finality once their utility has passed. In one shocking, symptomatic scene, he balls a new pickup, Elayne Heilveil, on the back seat of his Cadillac while his buxom mistress, Ahna Capri, slumbers beside them, then dumps the mistress by the side of the road when she protests.

There were real-life monsters as well this year, as Manson, a feature-length documentary, vividly reminds us. Apparently made with the Manson "family's" cooperation, and with ample footage devoted to the sexually communal life style at the Spahn ranch, the film becomes most disturbing when several of the Manson girls chatter informally and wholly without remorse about the motivations behind their cold-blooded killings. (The Mansons also turn up, by implication, in the Italian-made Night of the Flowers, with beautiful Dominique Sanda as mistress of the far-out revels on an elegant estate. The reference is clearly to Sharon Tate, her hedonistic entourage and their grim fate.) No less sick is Ciao Manhattan, a seamy semidocumentary on the illfated life and times of former Andy Warhol superstar Edie Sedgwick. Pieced together from film shot before her druginduced death in 1971, the film--like its ravaged star--develops a peculiar fixation on Miss Sedgwick's siliconed breasts as she lolls about seminude in a drained swimming pool, surrounded by blowups of herself in happier days.

The erotic cartoon, which leaped into prominence with last year's Fritz the Cat, was reprised several times over in 1973. Steve Krantz and Ralph Bakshi, the creators of Fritz, followed it with Heavy Traffic, a freewheeling combination of cartoon and live action that looks at just about every aspect of the contemporary scene with a knowing leer. An halo-French production company brings us Little Dick, the Mighty Midget, in which the hero, whose endowments belie his name, is pursued from one erotic adventure to another by a wicked witch named Drytwat, who knows she can be transformed into a beauty only by frequent doses of Dick. Still awaiting release in America is the English animated short Snow White and the Seven Perverts. Although unseen at the time of writing, it is clearly no sequel to the Disney classic.

Meanwhile, the porno-film makers of America--some of them, at any rate--were seeking to haul themselves up by their jockstraps. Self-interest, no doubt, had something to do with it. Both last year's Deep Throat and this year's The Devil in Miss Jones demonstrated that reputable psychiatrists and critics were willing to appear in the courts as expert witnesses for films that had "redeeming social value"--especially it that value was primarily artistic. The Devil in Miss Jones, written, directed and edited by Gerard Damiano (who, as noted earlier, performed the same chores on Throat), opens with the suicide of its 30ish, virginal heroine (Georgina Spelvin). She has slashed her wrists because her life has been drab and empty beyond endurance. But the suicide, she explains to the official interviewer in an anteroom of hell, has been the only blasphemous act of her life, and it seems a bit unfair to her that she be committed to fire and brimstone without having tasted the joys of at least one of the deadly sins. The interviewer is understanding and sympathetic and asks her which of the sins she would choose. Her answer is "Lust!"

What follows, of course, is virtually a catalog of eroticism; anal and oral sex, lesbianism and fetishism (including one particularly repellent interlude with a snake). At the end, it seems that hell for Miss Jones will be an eternity of frantic masturbation, locked in a cell with a man who has no interest whatever in relieving her uncontrollable hungers. (Considering the length of Miss Spelvin's fingernails, there is always the possibility that she might die again of self-inflicted wounds, but then where would she go?) The point is, however, that The Devil in Miss Jones is triggered by a valid dramatic device, offers a central character with well-defined needs and desires and reaches a finale that is so graphic--and moralistic--in its delineation of the horrors of Hades that it might well occupy a corner of Bosch's special vision of hell in The Garden of Delights. Furthermore, the pseudonymous Miss Spelvin, while far from a conventional beauty, brings to her role an identification and intensity that transmute her strange odyssey into an emphatic experience--a little weird, a little sad and rather frightening. As Roger Ebert wrote in the Chicago Sun-Times, "Miss Spelvin is not only the best but possibly the only actress in the hardcore field." She's now exhibiting her talents in a new release, The Erotic Memoirs of a Male Chauvinist Pig, shot in--of all places--Philadelphia.

Another porn entry, the Mitchell brothers' Behind the Green Door (premiered in 1972 but given its widest screen exposure this year), may have left something to be desired in terms of plot and character development, but--with lissome Marilyn Chambers, the lady of the Ivory Snow soapbox, performing incredible sexual feats on a flying trapeze--it achieved a level of eroticism unprecedented for this field. The Mitchells followed with The Resurrection of Eve, this time registering advances in both eroticism and dramaturgy. Mature Pictures Corporation, a veteran in the field, undauntedly proffered High Rise as its next "adult" entertainment. Well photographed, proficiently edited and with an engaging musical score, it details the sexual encounters of a young woman a (Tamie Trevor) whose psychiatrist has advised her that she needs a wider range of experience if she's to satisfy her mate. After exhausting the possibilities of an entire apartment building that apparently leases only to certified swingers, we learn at the finale that her mate is the psychiatrist.

Screw magazine, which for the past few years has been rating porn pictures on its own special measuring device, launched into production for itself with It Happened in Hollywood--and promptly awarded it an unprecedented 101 percent on the "peter meter." Lavishly made (by porn standards) on a $32,000 budget, the film follows the rise of Melissa Hall--or Felicity Split, as she was billed before deciding to go straight--from ex--telephone operator to stardom in an Academy Award--winning hard-core version of Samson and Delilah. As in Deep Throat, the laughs leaven the lubricity; Variety described the film as "a pornographic version of Laugh-In."

Even in hard-core homo films--the subculture of a subculture--one could glimpse, at least in the early months of 1973, a new striving toward quality. Wakefield Poole, whose low-budgeted Boys in the Sand was perhaps the first to suggest that something for the boys might not be a girl, followed up in late 1972 with Bijou, with Bill Harrison as a straight construction worker swiftly led astray during an all-male orgy in a Greenwich Village pleasure palace. The photography, including a number of imaginatively manipulated psychedelic effects during the orgy itself, was technically well above average. And Fred Halsted, who established himself in this limited field with 1972's sardonic sadomasochistic L.A. Plays Itself, reasserted his promise and prominence this year with Truck It, a comic counterpointing of the sexual innuendoes of contemporary ads with fun and games in the rear of the hero's pickup truck (in which he drives around naked as a jay bird).

Overall, porn fare had reached the point where, according to the Reverend Malcolm Boyd, a notably liberal Episcopal priest and prolific author, "Hard-core features are as good as the Johnny Carson show and much better than the sniggering, locker-room kind of humor used by Bob Hope, among others."

That was last March. Obviously, last June the Supreme Court failed to agree with him.

Where does all this leave the lower courts? If the Production Code's primary distinction between an X and an R is not the degree of maturity in a film's theme but the quantities of flesh and sexual activity displayed in the development of that theme, then there is every reason to believe that the courts will follow suit. No "expert," for example, could convince a judge of the dramatic validity of The Devil in Miss Jones if said judge were convinced that the mere depiction of fellatio constitutes an obscenity. All the critics in the country may sing the praise of Miss Spelvin's characterization (and many have), but it is her performance of sex acts that concerns the courts. For all their obligation to consider each work "as a whole." the courts are not essentially concerned with art but with morality--or, in the current phrase, community standards. Whatever, in the court's opinion, may offend these standards will get busted, regardless of its stature as art. And in the new wave of legal actions anticipated between now and the end of the year--a logjam of more than 5000 cases awaits in the Federal Courts alone--the effects upon the film makers are almost too predictable. The hard-core producers, as noted earlier, are already turning to soft core. But what if Last Tango in Paris is barred in enough communities? Will Bertolucci be granted the same artistic freedom by the financial backers of his next film? Will Stanley Kubrick have the leeway he enjoyed while making A Clockwork Orange? Can Mike Nichols ever make another landmark film like Carnal Knowledge, since the split decision of Georgia's supreme court labeled it obscene? Peter Bogdanovich's The Last Picture Show and even the PG-rated Paper Moon, which the civic officials of Dallas ordained must be advertised with the caveat "not suitable for children under 18 years old," ostensibly because cussing, smoking Tatum O'Neal upset their standards of juvenile propriety, have both run into difficulties. How will this affect his future scripts? It will affect them seriously, in the opinion of producer-director Robert Wise, who sits on the board of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and is an advisor to the National Endowment for the Arts. Said Wise: "I regard the Supreme Court's action as a giant step into the dark void of the past. The way I see it, we may have to show in moviehouses all over the country what would have been the TV version of a picture, with all the bad language and nudity edited out and the dissolves at the start rather than the end of the love scenes. I would hate to think that the values of the lowest common denominator would become the standard for pictures everywhere, but I'm afraid that this will become more and more the case. I was in Denver recently, for example, when the authorities there were adopting their own local obscenity bill. Their first target for discussion was the book and the movie of Love Story! I find a strange and unpleasant coincidence in the fact that many of President Nixon's recommendations on obscenity, as submitted to Congress, were turned into law by the Court soon after. Especially since the biggest obscenity of all--Watergate--is visible on the tube right now."

Veteran director George Cukor, who's been around Hollywood since the debut of sound on film, shares Wise's concern--even though his own works, such as My Fair Lady and the Hepburn-Tracy comedies of the Forties, have been unexceptionable. Cukor expressed a fear that the industry's situation might return to what he termed "the wilderness of the early talkies, when censors in various states and communities snipped away at their own discretion--whatever that was. I don't see," he continued, "how you can make a picture that will please everybody. I deplore vulgarity and cheap sex, and all those obligatory sex scenes; but, on the other hand, I feel that every American should have the privilege to see or not to see whatever he wishes. I view it as a matter of taste, not morality--and I hope to Christ this whole censorship thing will soon die out."

Not many think it will. Actually, what has been happening in the United States this year is only a reflection of what seems to be a worldwide reaction to the permissiveness of the previous decade. In Europe, which had a history of classification predating the M.P.A.A. ratings in this country, the resurgence of official censorship is already well advanced. Traditionally, the European film maker has been the world's freest (except, perhaps, when he sought to tackle politically sensitive subjects, such as the French presence in Algeria or Indochina). Certainly, in the area of sexual relationships, the Europeans used to speak out loud and clear on themes at which our own fettered film makers could barely hint. Indeed, it was the importation during the Fifties and Sixties of works by such directors as Michelangelo Antonioni, Ingmar Bergman and Federico Fellini--and their ready acceptance by American audiences--that emboldened our native industry to defy, and ultimately to discard, its own Production Code.

As in the United States, Europe's official crackdowns are apparently politically motivated. After all, there are precious few judges or lawmakers willing to go on record as being opposed to "decency." In Italy, for example, where Last Tango has been banned since last June, the censors have made no bones about the fact that their previous action against Pier Paolo Pasolini's version of The Canterbury Tales was taken not merely to set a precedent for actions against such currently popular Rabelaisian romps as Decameron 300, The Other Canterbury Tales (not by Pasolini) and Hot-Blooded Stories of Unfaithful Wives and Penitent Husbands; it was also aimed at discouraging more films in a similar vein--a form of prior restraint designed to raise the hackles of any civil libertarian. Censor bans were also instigated on such American entries as Deliverance and Portnoy's Complaint.

In France, where governmental funding is made available to stimulate film production, the charge has been heard increasingly that these subsidies are, in fact, a handy device for throttling those pictures that the French Censor Board would rather not see made--a device made simpler by the requirement that all scripts be submitted to the censors in advance of production. As things now stand, however, the Censor Board can't prevent a picture from being made, but it can make things extremely difficult for those who reject its suggestions. André Cayatte, a lawyer turned director, has long specialized in films critical of capital punishment, the jury system and the social order in general. His most recent film, Where There Is Smoke There Is Fire, dealing with political chicanery in a small-town election, was refused government aid. Advance aid was also denied a script titled Impunity, which was reportedly based on a true incident in which a young man died while under police interrogation. As a result, the film will probably never be made. The censors have also been accused of harassing the production of pictures they don't like and of holding up the release of completed films. Claude Chabrol's current essay on the fine art of murder, Red Wedding Night, for example, was delayed for over a month--according to Chabrol, because of its unflattering description of a Gaullist politician. As if to underscore the point, this past May--some 15 years after its initial release--the Censor Board finally passed Stanley Kubrick's Paths of Glory (but only in a subtitled version). On the other hand, unlike their Italian counterparts, the French censors passed the Italo-French coproduction of Last Tango with the sole proviso that it not be shown to anyone under 18.

In both West Germany and England, long considered bastions of the liberal outlook as far as films are concerned, there is now a concerted drive to limit sexual candor on the screen. Germany is presently considering new and explicit laws defining what constitutes hard-core pornography--sexual abuse of children and sex acts with animals, for example. In England, where hard-core entertainments have pretty much been relegated to the film clubs (private-membership clubs that operate free from censorship), a new organization calling itself Festival of Light has been fanning public opinion in much the same manner and terminology as our own Citizens for Decent Literature, casting doubts on the British industry's system of self-censorship and urging more stringent regulations at the local level, with the film clubs as the ultimate target. As a result, not only have local councils gotten into the censorship act but the British Board of Film Censors has stiffened its own standards. According to a Variety report, in the past three years it has rejected outright more than 60 pictures, the bulk of them in the past year. Not coincidentally, this same board saw fit to excise ten seconds from Last Tango's sodomy sequence. Even in Japan, where hard-core "eropro" films have been an important part of the movie scene for the past ten years, police crackdowns have been escalating--with an added irony that three of the producers busted for alleged pornography were members of the Administration Commission of the Motion Picture Code of Ethics, the Nipponese equivalent of the M.P.A.A.'s Code and Rating Administration.

As in the United States, it's still too early to perceive the effect of these repressive measures on the films themselves. The pictures that have been appearing here throughout 1973, and presumably will continue to appear through much of 1974, were all initiated in a more liberal era. Indeed, the Cannes festival of 1973 might well be regarded as the high-water mark of this epoch, for in two crowded weeks it unspooled an enormous backlog of daring and controversial pictures from all over the world, many of them apparently destined to add fuel to the procensorship flames. Certainly, no sooner had the French entry, La Grande Bouffe (The Great Feed), been unveiled at Cannes than it became the center of a storm that ripped through the ranks of the French intelligentsia. Many found the film a questionable choice to represent France because it was written and directed by an Italian, and the two major roles went to Italian actors, Marcello Mastroianni and Ugo Tognazzi. These were the mild faultfinders. More objected violently to the central theme, a suicidal orgy among four men resolved to eat and fornicate themselves to death. And others questioned the details: the belching, the vomiting, the farting and--when the constant round of dishes was interrupted by the arrival of several callgirls and a plump schoolteacher--the sexual excesses to which they gleefully submitted. Its proponents, on the other hand, found the film a thoughtful, imaginative, forceful attack on the affluent society, pointing out that the four men all die horrible deaths for their self-indulgence.

Another French entry that garnered considerable attention at Cannes was La Maman et La Putain (The Mother and the Whore), a three-and-a-half-hour investigation of what can happen when a young man, living with and supported by a woman, introduces another girl into their ménage. The girl, seeking some kind of security, pushes her way into his life, even to the extent of going to his home and sleeping with the two of them. The woman is less than pleased, and the film ends--inconclusively--with the young man proposing marriage to the girl. Jean-Pierre Leaud, François Truffaut's favorite leading man, invests the role of this ambiguous hero with considerable charm and tenderness, but the major acclaim went to newcomer Françoise Lebrun as a Polish-French nurse whose appetite for sexual experiment leads to the breakup of Leaud's pleasant form of existence. Vivre Ensemble (Living Together), with Anna Karina as both director and star, presents the former Mine. Godard in a role that might have been lifted from a Godard movie--a freethinking, loose-living young lady who ensnares a rather too proper schoolteacher with her uninhibited ways. They live together, move to New York and have a baby, while he slowly disintegrates through drugs and drink. What makes the film remarkable--and mature--is that there is no selfpitying on either side. Similarly, in impossible Object--one of those incredibly cross-pollinated productions that are becoming so common today--American director John Frankenheimer, his wife, Evans Evans, British star Alan Bates and the glamorous French actress Dominique Sanda have contrived an international love story that is remarkable not only for its insight into delicate sexual relationships but for its basic honesty. Bates is a writer living near Paris with his American wife and family. He meets Mile. Sanda, also married, in a museum, and they fall in love. What follows is part real, part fantasy, as the writer embroiders with his imagination the jealousies and passions touched off by their involvement--in scenes lavishly illustrated in a January 1973 PLAYBOY pictorial. Although Impossible Object is a French production, it was shot in English, no doubt to attract audiences beyond the normal art-house circuits. With its engaging cast, intriguingly offbeat story line and discreetly handled touches of nudity, its prospects are bright.

Italy's main contribution to Cannes this year was Film d'Amore e d'Anarchia (Story of Love and Anarchy), yet another glimpse of Italy under fascism. As written and directed by Lina Wertmuller, the film centers on a plot to assassinate Mussolini, the would-be assassin (Giancarlo Giannini) biding his time in a handsome Roman bordello. But the longer he waits, the more attached he becomes to one of the inmates (Lina Polito), eventually falling in love with her. It's an adroit blending of sex and politics, and its moral seems to be that the two don't mix. Neither do sex and religion, according to the Japanese entry Gaki Zoshi (The Water Was So Clear). A first film by Yoichi Takabayashi, it tells of a Buddhist priest's growing desire for the young girl he has brought into his household. When he finds her making love before the altar of his temple (to a young man who had previously raped her), his desire becomes an obsession. At one point, he masturbates before that same altar, then dedicates himself to constant prayer. But when the girl goes off with her young man, the priest dies. Critics at Cannes stressed the film's visual poetry: The story is told entirely without dialog.

Sex, as usual, was very much on the mind of Sweden's Vilgot Sjöman, whose Troll, screened out of competition at Cannes, caused a considerable stir. Less graphic than his I Am Curious (Yellow), it nevertheless deals candidly with a freewheeling couple who have no sex life together because the wife is afraid she might die of it. When a priest explains that they must either consummate their marriage or get a divorce, the husband tries various ploys--including an attempt to rouse the wife by watching another couple make love. He ultimately succeeds, but the effort seems to wipe both of them out. The film won praise for its lightness and wit. Even Brazil, whose entries are not usually a highlight of any festival season, came through with a superior work in Toda Nudez Sera Castigada (All Nudity Will Be Punished), a mordantly witty look at a widower who marries a prostitute and, albeit unwittingly, is soon sharing her with his son. The bitter humor sprang from the fact that both father and son were initially desolate over the first wife's death, and from their attempts to maintain the appearance of respectability even while acceding to demands of the flesh.

But by far the most resounding succès d'estime of the festival was scored by Lindsay Anderson's O Lucky Man!, which Warners rushed into distribution here within weeks of its introduction at Cannes as the British entry. Almost three hours long, the film stars young Malcolm McDowell (of A Clockwork Orange) as a sort of youthful Everyman, an ambitious coffee salesman who hopes to rise in a fiercely competitive world on the basis of his Pepsodent grin, his china-blue eyes and his lack of commitment to anything or anybody except himself. Women (notably Rachel Roberts and Helen Mirren) are fair game in the course of his upward mobility, and they are more than willing to help--even though, all too often, his plans go singularly awry. To the accompaniment of pungently worded soft-rock ballads by Alan Price, McDowell wanders through a series of predicaments that ultimately embrace every stratum of modern society as viewed genially, but not at all ingenuously, by the director. There is corruption in big business, the police, the sciences, the army. Even the poor, so often sentimentalized in films of this sort, are pictured as mean, grasping and unfeeling. It is an extraordinary film--funny without losing any of its underlying seriousness, serious without ever forgetting its sense of humor. There is also one marvelously sordid bit of erotica: a sex act in a seedy night club performed while the distracted young salesman transacts a shady business deal.

In assessing its artistic and social importance, one British critic described O Lucky Man! as "a watershed film." Viewed historically, it may also prove to be a watershed of another sort. Today's film makers--the best of them, at least--are revealing a new maturity, a new seriousness of purpose, a new profundity as they view the world around them through their increasingly sophisticated lenses. One has only to think of such disparate offerings as Ingmar Bergman's Cries and Whispers, with its lost and loveless sisters recalling their pasts as they wait for one to die; or François Truffaut's jolly but jolting Such a Gorgeous Kid Like Me, a black comedy about a girl who makes it to the top by doing in most of her male admirers; or the sheer intelligence of Eric Rohmer's Chloé in the Afternoon, in which a married man can imagine that his admiration of other I women is merely the extension of his love for his wife--until forced, by a young girl, to choose between her and his wife. This time the wife wins. Then one thinks of such films as Carnal Knowledge, Paper Moon or even Shaft in Africa coming under attack immediately after the Supreme Court's decisions. At this point in time, as they like to say at the Watergate hearings, O Lucky Man! could, indeed, be a watershed film--with the water flowing downhill all the way. To quote the television news commentators: "The situation will probably get worse before it gets better." On balance, 1973 may have produced a bumper crop of films, but it was hardly a good vintage year.