Sex in Cinema-1974

If that old saw about actions speaking louder than words has any merit, the Mrs. Grundys of America—the pressure groups, legislators, judges and district attorneys who have been busily trying to enforce what they thought were local standards of taste in films—were sadly out of touch with their constituents in 1974. A sort of double standard seems to permeate our society—perhaps emanating from the top, where a President mouthed sanctimonious platitudes in public and conducted expletive-ridden vendettas in private. Never before had an American President concerned himself so directly—and vocally—with morality in the media, primarily as represented by films, television and the press, while practicing a personal morality very much his own. Nixon's "stop-the-smut" lead was assiduously followed up by the Congress, the Supreme Court, the FBI, the Postal Service, various state governments and, on the local level, by extraordinarily repressive police actions. In the wake of the June 1973 Supreme Court decisions advocating illy defined "community standards" as the basis for prosecution of obscene or pornographic movies, no fewer than 37 states, in 250 separate bills, undertook to establish just what those standards might be. Without even waiting for such clarification, police crackdowns escalated dramatically. In Fort Worth, Texas, a zealous district attorney, contending that theater seats were accessories to a crime if people sat in them to watch an X-rated movie, ordered that the seats—along with the projectors and the film—be ripped out and held as evidence. The film, of course, was Deep Throat.

And thereby hangs the paradox. The best test for determining whether the citizens of a community deem any product—be it soap flakes, breakfast cereal or cinema—acceptable or unacceptable is whether or not they're willing to lay out their cash for it. According to Variety's annual listing of American movie grosses, Deep Throat's estimated take from the ticket-buying public in something over one year was in excess of $4,000,000. That's an educated guess—probably on the low side, since, as Variety notes, "Porno distribs are plain nervous about providing an exact accounting in the wake of the Deep Throat conviction in New York, where the fine imposed was based on a multiple of the estimated profits." Somebody, somewhere, obviously wanted to see Deep Throat—enough somebodies, in fact, to make it one of the most profitable releases in recent years, considering its low production (text continued on page 166)Sex in Cinema-1974(continued from page 144) cost of $25,000. Despite this evidence of acceptance, no movie has ever before been subject to so many prosecutions. Which is why its long-delayed sequel, Deep Throat II, was brought out this year as a soft-core feature with, believe it or not, an R rating: lots of suggestion, no action. Deep Throat II died at the box office, Linda Lovelace notwithstanding. The public knew what it wanted, and it was Lovelace as a fellatrice, not as a dramatic actress.

A grass-roots example of the cultural chasm between what the more puritanical of American society says the public wants and what that same public actually supports with its pocketbook is provided by the case of Al Woodraska. Back in June of 1973, Woodraska took over a bankrupt theater in the small town of Harlan, Iowa. Woodraska wanted to run family-type pictures—the kind that his audiences professed to prefer—in his theater. In his first nine months of operation, Woodraska booked but one X-rated movie, Last Tango in Paris. It was his only money-maker. Rather than make a switch to stronger fare, Woodraska appealed to the area's churchmen for help, and they cooperated with pulpit endorsements. Woodraska booked such films as The New Land and Gospel Road, only to have attendance waver between sparse and nonexistent. Gospel Road, Woodraska reported, attracted a total audience of three ministers and their families, one priest and two nuns. And so, albeit reluctantly, Woodraska last April inaugurated a policy of running one X-rated movie a month. "I'm not about to lose my shirt," he explained. And, at last report, he hasn't; the X-rated fare is putting his operation comfortably into the black, with receipts running about double those for features rated PG or R.

For the clearest indication of the gap between public preachments and practice, though, one need look no further than the year's number-one box-office smash, The Exorcist. Released in the last days of 1973, it has been playing to S.R.O. houses ever since, and has probably been the topic of more talk shows, magazine think pieces and cocktail conversations than any other film in the past decade. Opinions are vastly divided. Some wonder why its rating was R rather than X. Many have found it pornographic, even declaring it would hasten the decline of the West. Or, as Beverly Hills psychiatrist Ralph R. Greenson put it, "The Exorcist pours acid on our already corroded values and ideals. In the days when we all had more trust in our Government, our friends and ourselves, The Exorcist would have been a bad joke. Today it is a danger."

But even though the "danger" has been carefully pointed out—a even though audiences know they will hear foul language, that they will see blood and vomit and witness a young child masturbating with a crucifix, even though they know that the picture has made some people ill and caused others to faint—still the crowds continue to come. Why? No small part of it, we suspect, has to do with curiosity—the same curiosity that brought them out for Deep Throat and for last year's Kung Fu epics. They wonder how much of what they've heard is true, how far the movies can go, how much they themselves can take.

That's not to say The Exorcist hasn't a lot more going for it than curiosity value. The film has a quality of involvement all too rarely found in contemporary cinemas. There are the superlative technical effects—the rotating head, the rocking bed, the icy breath. Even more important are its puzzles—the relationship of the opening sequences at the archaeological digs in Iraq to what happens soon after in Georgetown; whether what we are witnessing is a true possession or a kind of group hysteria; and why the Devil should have singled out the guiltless daughter of a divorced movie actress for his foul visitation. In her rages, the child spews streams of green vomit into the face of an aged priest (Max von Sydow) and, in what is surely the film's most shocking moment, smears her mother's face with blood from her torn vagina. Obviously, it's not a film for the faint of heart, and writer-producer William Peter Blalty has been roundly criticized for exploiting the public's morbid fascination with horror.

What seems more pertinent, however, is the fact that both his book and his film seem to have latched on to the public's mounting interest in the black arts. The people who continue to flock to The Exorcist are enthralled by the film's postulate of an absolute evil, mindless and irresistible. Subsequent variations on the theme—and rest assured there will be many, beginning with Black Exorcist, Help Me ... I'm Possessed, the Italian-made Antichrist and a German quickie, Magdalena—by the Devil Possessed?—will soon indicate whether the phenomenal popularity of The Exorcist was a one-time happening, based on the strength of William Friedkin's meticulous direction, or whether Blatty had stumbled upon something that echoes strongly the malaise pervading our entire social order.

Meanwhile, before the year is out, audiences will have ample opportunity to contrast the effects of demonism with those of catastrophe. Triggered by the success of Airport and The Poseidon Adventure, the studios have rushed into production such multimillion-dollar, multistarred ventures as Airport 1975, Earthquake, The Hindenburg and The Towering Inferno, all designed to place mortal men—and women—at the mercy of forces over which they have no control. Inevitably, this rash of disasters recalls such late-Thirties fare as Hurricane, San Francisco (about an earthquake), In Old Chicago (the 1871 fire), The Good Earth (a locust plague) and Boom Town (oil-well explosions).

In another parallel with the Thirties, the movie heroines of 1974 are portraying characters that resemble to a great degree those played by the Rosalind Russells, Claudette Colberts and Jean Arthurs of that decade. They were working girls, those Depression-era women—newspaper reporters more often than not—and even in those prefeminist days, they used their brains more than their sex appeal to advance the careers of their mates, or mates to be. Today's women's lib ladies may deprecate those performances as female Uncle Tomism—especially since the reward for their efforts was usually a wedding ring and retirement—but for the better part of a decade, the movies did provide heroines who were bright, attractive, aggressive and able. And they seem to be on the way back. Peter Bogdanovich's wacky 1972 comedy What's Up, Doc? probably paved the way for their return. It was a fast-paced, freewheeling adaptation of one of the best of the Thirties screwball comedies, Bringing Up Baby, which had co-starred Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn. In Bogdanovich's version, Barbra Streisand played the Hepburn role, opposite Ryan O'Neal—and apparently liked it, since her more recent choices of script have reflected a growing interest in the liberated woman. Up the Sandbox, another comedy, was specifically—perhaps too specifically—liberationism, with Streisand as a harassed housewife who daydreams fantastic escapes (including a wild confrontation with a hermaphroditic Fidel Castro) from her deadening daily chores. In The Way We Were, her shrill, inflexibly idealistic Katie Morosky provides the film's driving force, contrasting sharply with the smooth but ultimately spineless Hubbell Gardiner of Robert Redford. In her most recent picture. For Pete's Sake, Streisand turned even more firmly to the zany format of the Thirties. As a Brooklyn housewife married to cabby Michael Sarrazin, she sets out to promote $3000 for him so that he can make a killing in pork-belly futures. This leads to a tedious series of encounters with a loan shark, the madam of a brothel, Mafia killers and cattle rustlers; but the point is that while the comedy may be inept, Streisand is not. Like the stars of 40 years ago, she is the one who brings off what her husband is unable to accomplish. Barbra may lack the style, the charm, the class, the sophistication—and the looks—of Hepburn or Carole Lombard, but she lacks none of their cool self-sufficiency or their aggressive self-confidence.

A similarly strong female character appears in one of the year's few nonexploitational black films, Claudine, with Diahann Carroll in the title role originally written for the late Diana Sands. Claudine, the housemaid for a white family, is wooed by Roop (James Earl Jones), the virile neighborhood garbage collector. Their romance is complicated by the fact that she has six children (but no husband) and lives under the suspicious eye of the welfare bureaucracy, and that Roop is already supporting three offspring from previous liaisons. It's a tale that, clearly, could have happened with minor variations in any low-income family, regardless of color. In a Whitey version, the courtship might have been more suave—with fewer buckets of fried chicken followed by quick scrambles into the hay, less vocal appreciation of the girlfriend's cute ass. Still, it's reminiscent of such earlier white family pictures as With Six You Get Eggroll; in fact, it might well be titled With Six You Get Soul Food. But the point is that Claudine represents, without being at all militant about it, the essence of today's liberated woman. She wants sex, but she wants it on her own terms. Above all, she knows her own mind and her own worth and refuses to settle for less. Claudine—one of the box-office hits of the past summer—demonstrated to wide audiences, many of them perhaps for the first time, that a truly liberated woman is still one hell of a dame.

By one of those curious quirks of scheduling that sometimes make it seem as if all the major companies had been working simultaneously on the same picture, 1974 has also produced a spate of boy-and-girl-on-the-lam movies—Badlands, Dirty Mary Crazy Larry, Sugarland Express, Thieves like Us and Two, just for openers. All had echoes of Bonnie and Clyde, with heists and shoot-outs, but several—notably, Sugarland Express—featured girls who were more determined, more dynamic than their young men. It is a cunning, willful Goldie Hawn in Sugarland Express who springs her rather dimwitted husband from jail, then maneuvers the capture of a young cop and his prowl car. With the cop as hostage, they set off to kidnap Goldie's baby from a foster home. Within minutes, they have half the prowl cars in Texas—and two from Louisiana—on their tail in a chase that can end only in violence. Sugarland Express is based on an incident that took place in Texas in 1969, although the real-life mother actually got her baby back through the courts. Another example of headlines turned to screenplay is Terrence Malick's Badlands, a fictionalization of the Fifties exploits of teenage mass murderer Charlie Starkweather and his girl. The sole redeeming feature of the hero, played by Martin Sheen, is a carefully nurtured resemblance to the late James Dean. Sheen plays a smalltown garbage man (refuse collection must be where it's at this year) who callously slaughters anyone who stands in his path, beginning by shooting and incinerating the father of the 15-year-old girl (Sissy Spacek) he has decided he wants for himself. The girl, it soon develops, has as little compunction about taking human life as he, and willingly joins him on a murder spree that carries them from Texas (again) to Montana, via the Badlands of South Dakota.

Even more popular than the heterosexual runaway thriller, however, is the type of feature that began with Easy Rider and Midnight Cowboy—films in which what we used to call love interest has been almost entirely eliminated and all the attention focuses upon the relationship between two men. In films such as Scarecrow, Papillon, Thunderbolt and Lightfoot and the Oscar-sweeping The Sting, the buddy system reigns supreme. Papillon permits Steve McQueen to escape from Devil's Island just long enough to take up with one native girl (Ratna Assan, introduced to Playboy readers in a February 1974 pictorial); his partner, Dustin Hoffman, never makes it at all. Except for a cameo appearance by sexy singer Claudia Lennear (also seen in Playboy, this past August) as a fanny-swinging payroll clerk, Thunderbolt has scarcely a woman in the credits (although Jeff Bridges does pick up a couple of one-night-stand cuties for himself and partner Clint Eastwood, and the film provides one startling glimpse of an anonymous, totally nude lady standing in a picture window and diverting Jeff from his landscaping labors). Many critics, in fact, saw the Eastwood-Bridges relationship as one with homosexual overtones; these writers made much of the fact that in one lengthy sequence, Bridges climbs into drag to further a safecracking operation. The Sting, for all its phenomenal popularity, had little to offer the practicing heterosexual—Eileen Brennan, looking particularly slovenly as Paul Newman's live-in, brother-keeping landlady; Dimitra Arliss, even less appetizing as Robert Redford's onetime bed partner (and would-be assassin); and Sally Kirkland as a sexy stripper who, unfortunately, flounces out in the early reels.

To these might well be added such specifically "men's pictures" as The Last Detail, Busting, S*P*Y*S and The Super Cops. In The Super Cops, for example, virtually the only female in an extraordinarily large cast is Sheila Frazier, seen briefly as a black prostitute who helps Ron Leibman and David Selby break up the drug traffic in Brooklyn. Zouzou, the bomb-throwing anarchist in S*P*Y*S, generously permits CIA agents Elliott Gould and Donald Sutherland to share her flat one night when they are in need of a hide-out. When Sutherland tries to move on into her bedroom, however, he finds that she's already sharing it with two other male comrades. Prankishly, he suggests that Gould take the bedroom while he sleeps on the couch—fully expecting that his pal will be promptly expelled. He isn't—in fact, he does not emerge until morning, having obviously spent an active night. Whereupon Sutherland grabs a quickie with Zouzou on the kitchen table before sauntering forth with Gould to resume their bumbling espionage efforts. In Busting, which pairs Gould and Robert Blake as vice-squad detectives, the women represented are a high-class callgirl (Cornelia Sharpe) and a junkie in a massage parlor (Erin O'Reilly)—hardly types one would take home to mother.

Best of the year's male movies, at least for our money, was the warmhearted and perceptive The Last Detail, with Jack Nicholson and Otis Young on shore-patrol duty, assigned to escort prisoner Randy Quaid—whose only crime was an unsuccessful attempt at dipping into the donations box meant for the C.O.'s wife's favorite charity—from Norfolk, Virginia, to the naval brig at Portsmouth, New Hampshire. A great camaraderie springs up between the men, especially when they decide to force-feed the hapless Quaid with a taste of the life he will be missing for the next eight years—including, of course, women. At least in this film, scriptwriter Robert Towne gave the girls, even though their roles are minuscule, a bit of a break. One (Luana Anders) is an intellectual kook and the other (Carol Kane) a two-bit whore, but Towne has drawn them with sympathy and affection. They know they haven't a great deal to give to the unfortunate Quaid, but they give what they have without stint or reservation. The scene in the prostitute's room, with Quaid crushed because he has come too quickly, is perhaps the most affecting in the entire picture. It's made so by the solicitous way in which the slender, pathetic girl seeks to reassure him that it's all right, it can happen to anybody, it'll be better next time. And the shy, prideful smile on Quaid's face when he rejoins his pals tells us that indeed it was.

Nicholson, who deservedly won an Academy nomination for his work as the randy, pugnacious Buddusky in this film, returned in even better form a few months later as a Raymond Chandleresque private eye in Roman Polanski's Chinatown, again with a script by Robert Towne. The plot of this thriller, set in 1937, is every bit as complex as that of a good mystery, involving the land grabs that rocked Los Angeles when new dams and reservoirs were being proposed and greedy local politicos were buying up vast tracts in anticipation of windfall profits. But while the premise and the stunning period settings have the smell of reality, it's the performances that give this film its punch. Faye Dunaway, who earlier had smudged her face and straggled her hair for Stanley Kramer's Oklahoma Crude, appears here radiant, svelte and slightly sinister as the wife of a murdered water commissioner who might have been responsible for her husband's demise, and may have similar plans for Nicholson. John Huston, as her father, is marvelously craggy and crotchety, and is responsible for the film's most bizarre plot twist: He turns out to be the sire of Faye's teenaged child. Ultimately, though, it's Nicholson who carries the film. Even though he goes through most of it with a bandage over his nose, after one of Huston's bully boys (Polanski himself, in a bit part) has slit it as a warning, he still transmits the kind of voltage that crackled in such Bogart classics as The Maltese Falcon and The Big Sleep. At one point, in fact, it looked as though half the movies of 1974 would feature private eyes or cops, past and present. Following rapidly upon one another were such pictures as Serpico, Magnum Force, The Laughing Policeman, Walking Tall, McQ, The Midnight Man, a successfully promoted rerelease of Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye, which had been rapidly yanked out of circulation when its initial 1973 ad campaign bombed, and the soon forthcoming Freebie and the Bean.

Breaking away from that well-worn cops-and-robbers theme was the year's most highly touted—though not its most successful—picture, The Great Gatsby. It went into production solely because Robert Redford agreed to play the title role: that of a parvenu to Long Island society, of humble origins and suspect background, longing for the love of the beautiful but married Daisy Buchanan (Mia Farrow). Although the romantically handsome Redford would have seemed better suited to the Bruce Dern part as Daisy's husband (and vice versa), putting the Redford name above the title seemed a better financial bet—even though it did send the picture a little off kilter. There are more sexual sparks in the relationship between the wealthy Dern and the working-class Karen Black than between Redford and Farrow, despite a protracted flashback to their first meeting during World War One. In both liaisons, however, passion is discreetly suggested rather than overtly shown, as if this were still, in fact, 1923.

Warren Beatty, who, like Redford, had been conspicuous by his absence from films during most of 1973—and who, again like Redford, owns an enviable reputation as a sere-fire box-office draw—returned to the screen as an investigative reporter in Alan J. Pakula's production of The Parallax View (and may be seen again before the end of the year in his own production of Shampoo, in which he plays a fashionable hairdresser and shares billing with his longtime traveling companion, Julie Christie). Parallax, like Chinatown, is a murder mystery with clues leading to high places. Unlike Chinatown, however, it fails to unravel its plot strings to their ultimate end—and, indeed, it isn't until the death of TV reporter Paula Prentiss, shortly after the film's sole bed scene, that Beatty realizes there are even any strings to be unraveled. After that, the youthfully handsome Beatty comes on strong—stronger by far than his scriptwriters.

Up to the time of this writing, however, the strongest, most provocative film to be unveiled this year has been Francis Ford Coppola's The Conversation. Winner of the Cannes festival's top award in April, it is a penetrating inquiry into the morality and mentality of the men who conduct electronic eavesdropping. Coppola swears the film was conceived half a decade before Watergate, and it is, indeed, devoid of politics except by implication. As one critic observed, "Five years ago, the film might have been considered science fiction." Conversation explores the shabby, paranoid soul of one Harry Caul, a nondescript man of formidable technical expertise and no principles, played by Gene Hackman. So secretive is Harry that he leaves his mistress because she wants to know his home telephone number. His lovemaking, by the way, is shown to be as brusquely businesslike as everything else he does, although the scene in which a callgirl (Elizabeth MacRae), hired to steal his precious tapes, seduces him in a vacant loft is one of the most suggestively sexy scenes of the year. (Considerably more explicit were the tender marital lovemaking in Don't Look Now, with Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland, and the torrid mating of Warren Oates with Isela Vega in Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia.) That encounter with the prostitute, however, is the only time Caul lets down his guard. And Coppola's emphasis of the man's singularly joyless sex life succeeds in making Harry at once more human and more terrifying.

Also terrifying, but on a different level, can be the experience of the lone white spectator at a black exploitation movie, when he notes just how enthusiastically the audience responds to the "hate Whitey" theme common to most of them. Obviously, after years of seeing members of their race portrayed as domestics or simple-minded clowns, blacks take a fierce exultation at the sight of Truck Turner beating the daylights out of a red-neck or Jim Kelly karate-chopping a white hood down to size. Shouts of "Right on!" invariably accompany these confrontations, and there is even greater approbation whenever the hero puts the Man down verbally. But the strain is beginning to tell on the actors and scriptwriters; after all, how many variations on Shaft and Super Fly can there be? One reason for the blaxplos' continuing success might be that they, unlike the major-studio product slated for white audiences, still feature plenty of nudity and sex liberally mixed with violence. Audiences predominantly made up of black males cheer scenes in which black women, generally portrayed as junkies or prostitutes, are beaten, razored or raped with just as much enthusiasm as they applaud honkie put-downs. Even gentlemanly Sidney Poitier found it necessary to rough up an unfriendly madam in the course of Uptown Saturday Night, while in the less pretentious "action" films the girls are either accommodating their men in the sack or being readied for a one-way trip to the morgue. A sociologist would probably argue that black males see their traditionally matriarchal females as oppressors almost as much to be feared—and rebelled against—as the white mas.

Occasionally, a tough black girl does win out. The voluptuous Pam Grier, whose Coffy last year was pure cream at the box office, seems to be equally on target with this year's Foxy Brown. As before, Pam's athleticism is matched only by her lack of inhibition, and in this film she uses both to avenge the death of her intended, an undercover narcotics agent. Her thirst for vengeance leads her to the upper echelons of organized crime, where she survives beatings, two rapes and a lesbian encounter before she finally gets her man. After castrating him, she packs his private parts in a pickle jar and drops them off at his girlfriend's. Virtue triumphs again.

Foxy's villain, of course, is white. Strangely, so are the producers and most of the writers and directors of blaxploitation films. Is it a sense of guilt, one wonders, or a death wish on their part to produce these examples of reverse racism? Or are their motives purely commercial—the ceaseless pursuit of the fast buck? Of course, it can be—and is—argued that there are precious few black writers, directors or qualified technicians. Decades of discrimination within the industry—sometimes tacit, more often overt—have seen to that. And even when black talent has come to the fore, it is still generally harnessed to producing whatever the white-dominated studios and distribution companies think will be profitable. Is there that much difference, after all, between black director Gordon Parks, Jr.'s, Three the Hard Way and white director Larry Cohen's Hell up in Harlem, or between black writer Oscar Williams' script for Truck Turner and white writer Mark Haggard's chores on Black Eye? All four of these films revel in bruising action, confuse promiscuity with sex and exalt a rabid black chauvinism. The sad irony is that—with the previously mentioned exception of Claudine—the handful of pictures that have tried to appeal to the black viewer while breaking out of the exploitation mold, such as Five on the Black Hand Side and Willie Dynamite, failed to make it with audiences either black or white.

For the record, however, there was one black breakthrough of sorts in 1974. Although their casts are often interracial, porno movies have seldom clicked in black communities (possibly because while black chicks frequently get balled in them, black studs rarely get to do the balling). In Lialeh, which showcases the musical talents of Aretha Franklin's composer-arranger, Bernard Purdie, we have the first black-oriented hard-core feature, a sort of vaudeville in which the sex scenes are sandwiched between musical numbers and comedy routines. Kicked off in New York by a heavy promotional campaign that included a 50-foot billboard on Broadway (another porno first), the film drew heavy press coverage and—even more important—heavy black patronage. Now that an audience has been established, presumably follow-ups are already in the works.

The only thing that might hold them back is the same consideration that gives pause to the entire porno field: uncertainty as to how the courts will act. A year and a half ago, it was possible to say that distinct advances were being made in both the artistry and the level of eroticism in hard-core movies. More money, time and attention to production values had been going into these films, although they were still modestly budgeted by major-studio standards. Some few pictures, such as Snapshots, The Resurrection of Eve and Memories Within Miss Aggie, actually played down the hardcore footage to give added emphasis to mood, character and plot. In Miss Aggie, directed by Gerard (Deep Throat) Damiano, some viewers professed to find echoes of Ingmar Bergman, particularly since most of the film deals with the sexual fantasies of an aging spinster, a virgin living not quite alone on a bleak, desolate farm. The stylishly stylized approach to sex that marked the orgy sequence in the Mitchell Brothers' earlier Behind the Green Door was even more extensively apparent in their Resurrection of Eve—along with Ivory Snow's own Marilyn Chambers and an unnecessarily convoluted plot. Just this side of hardcore, Radley Metzger's Score—based on an off-Broadway play in which a wealthy bisexual couple initiates two innocents into homosexual delights—is probably the most elegantly accoutered, self-consciously arty sex film ever made. (For some bookings, five minutes of boy-boy hard-core have been inserted.)

Although these films continued to appear through 1974, they did so in steadily dwindling numbers. As this goes to press, the only "class" hard-core item in production is the Mitchell Brothers' Sodom and Gomorrah, which mixes Biblical verse with the ancient-astronaut theories of Erich von Daniken and is reputedly exceeding $300,000 in production costs. Sodom may well be the last of the bigtime pornos, although Art and Jim Mitchell refuse to admit they're going out of business with a bang. Barney Rosset of Grove Press has been shooting X- and R-rated versions of a $150,000 film loosely based on the kidnaping of Patricia Hearst and her subsequent conversion—in Rosset's script, through sexual experiences, of course—to the cause of the Symbionese Liberation Army. Meanwhile, however, hard-core production in Los Angeles, once a primary source of sex movies, has virtually disappeared. The city has cracked down on producers, distributors, participants and film laboratories so vigorously that few are willing to run the risks of making, appearing in or even developing them. Those L.A.-based film makers who have decided to remain in business are silently switching to sadomasochistic violence or waiting for the anti-sex pendulum to reverse its swing.

Leaping into the breach, New York City has taken over as production and exhibition center for both hard- and softcore porn. The market reachable without risky resort to the U.S. mails is rich, consisting not only of all five city boroughs but of Long Island and the Upstate towns as well. Enterprising producers have also been known to pack their product in a suitcase and hand-deliver it to locations in northern New Jersey, Philadelphia and Boston. (The current practice, however, is to service the New York outlets, then sell prints to whoever is willing to take a chance on shipping to the rest of the country.) The New York-based pornos—Sleepy Head and Fringe Benefits are two recent examples—are quite different from their sunkissed California cousins. Not only are they mostly shot indoors but they betray their limited budgets by resorting to extended dialog passages before the action begins—after which the only sounds to be heard are heavy breathing and sucking noises. They are also grainy, badly lit and feature a stock company that is rapidly becoming, one might say, overexposed—headed by Georgina Spelvin, Tina Russell, Darby Lloyd Rains and the ever-ready Harry Reems. (Georgina and Harry might possibly be slowed down by their recent FBI obscenity busts; they were arrested along with the aforementioned Damiano and producer Herbert Nitke on Federal charges stemming from a Memphis case reportedly involving both Deep Throat and The Devil in Miss Jones. Georgina, devoted fans will recall, was Miss Jones; Reems appeared in both pictures.)

Not too surprisingly, in view of all the heat being generated by the fuzz on this side of the ocean, a goodly number of the entries in the current pornofield are European—hailing especially, such as 1001 Danish Delights, from the Scandinavian countries. What may be surprising, however, is the fact that most of these films—including Delights—have had to be sexed up in order to compete in an American market where audience taste, as it were, has been whetted by Deep Throat. Europeans, apparently, are still not ready to go that far. Last June, Throat was barred by British customs for even a one-night-only showing before the National Coordinating Committee Against Censorship, a project that had been approved by the Greater London Council. Again, although Throat was unveiled to turnaway crowds at this year's Cannes festival, knowledgeable observers of the French film scene feel that it's still ten years ahead of its time for Gay Paree. And while West Germany liberalized its sex laws late in 1973, it retained a ban on hard-core films, with stiff fines and/or prison sentences meted out to offenders. Last summer, Berliners were being treated to a movie called The Devil in Miss Jonas, a German-made picture that closely followed the plot line of Miss Jones but skipped all the specifics. Both male and female nudity have become commonplace on the German screen, but the sex act itself is strictly verboten.

Symptomatically, the highlight of this year's Berlin Film Festival, held in midsummer, was a midnight special screening of a French sex movie, Contes Immoraux (Immoral Tales). Day after day, the Berlin papers ran ads and articles decorated by lush nude shots from the film and synopses that delicately hinted at incest, rape, oral sex and unspeakable blood orgies. As a result, the vast Zoo-Palast, the main festival theater, was sold out nearly a week before the showing and crowds jammed the entry for more than an hour before curtaintime, fearful lest they miss one spicy second. What they saw, as directed by Walerian Borowczyk, were four totally unrelated short stories, ranging in time from the present back to the 15th Century and in theme from youthful dalliance to the wanton bloodlust of the 17th Century Hungarian countess Erzsebet Bathory, with the unique ménage à trois of the Borgias (fun-loving Lucrezia, her cardinal brother and their Pope father) as a grand, superincestuous finale. Actually, the only thing these Immoral Tales had in common was a trick of cutting away from the crucial action. Scenes that would seem obligatory are curiously lacking, as is the depiction of any explicit sexual activity. It is as if one were doing a TV commercial minus all reference to the product. The predominantly German audience, which had obviously been primed for more, left the theater complaining bitterly that they could see that much in their own films.

Which is true. European production at this time is literally dominated by softcore sex films; they make up the bulk of all commercial releases in Germany, France, the Netherlands and the Scandinavian countries and figure prominently in the product of England and Italy. They go out not, as in the United States, to a certain number of self-designated exploitation houses, but into ordinary commercial runs. Generally well made, with adequate budgets and popular performers in their casts, they turn up as regularly in European theaters as do Westerns and police shoot-'em-ups in your friendly neighborhood moviehouse over here. Full frontal nudity, both male and female, is commonplace. In West Germany, sex shops and sex cabarets featuring live acts abound—although they're off limits for anyone under 18. But there are restrictions on what can be shown and, just as in this country, those restrictions have been left purposely vague. The sexual abuse of children, sex between humans and animals, sadistic acts— these have been specifically spelled out as forbidden, but no border line between soft- and hard-core has been delineated. As a result, producers walk that line very charily. After all, a year in prison for making something that the authorities may ultimately decide is obscene sets up a risk factor that no businessman in his right mind would knowingly flaunt. Consequently, we have such films as Das Bullenkoster (The Miner's Wife), a German entry about the wife of a man whose back troubles cause her to look elsewhere for solace. In the U.S. market, that solace was supplied by obviously spliced-in explicit footage.

Still, the sex-movie market, whether hard- or soft-core, is scarcely the principal standard by which most Americans judge foreign-made films. Although it has diminished in recent years, there remains a segment of this country's movie-going public that looks to Europe for its art films, professing to see in them the artistry lacking in the domestic product. It's for this market that American distributors anxiously scan the major European film festivals for pictures they can import—if the price is right. Perhaps the major premiere at this year's Cannes festival was that of Federico Fellini's Amarcord, a highly personal, even autobiographical look back in anger to the years of his youth in Fascist Italy, replete with pubescent fantasies about the village whore and an unattainable "older woman" (aged maybe 18), contrasting with a disconcerting real-life encounter with a buxom lady tobacconist whose enormous breasts, he fears, will suffocate him. Warner Bros., which handled the European release of this film, also held the option for the American market—but at an asking price of $2,000,000, decided to let it pass. Even though Warners' pickup from last year's festivals—Day for Night, François Truffaut's frank and funny ode to big-studio moviemaking, complete with on- and offscreen romances—proved relatively successful in its Stateside release, it could by no means justify that high a tab. Eventually, Amarcord went to Roger Corman (who last year picked up Ingmar Bergman's Cries and Whispers) for considerably less.

Other festival hits of 1973, such as France's La Grande Bouffe and The Mother and the Whore, passed virtually sight unseen in their American release this year—the last accelerated in its unceremonious exit, perhaps, by the fact that in some cities, notably Chicago, the word whore had to be transmuted into a question mark (or, more ingeniously, translated into its Yiddish equivalent, noffka) in order to get by nervous newspaper ad managers.

Also a standout at Cannes this past spring was Pier Paolo Pasolini's earthy, erotic (and, at 155 minutes, interminable) version of 1l Fiore Delle Mille e Una Notte (The Arabian Nights). Hewing to the style of his earlier Decameron and Canterbury Tales, it seeks to supply a realistic counterweight to classic yarns that have lost their immediacy and meaning simply by becoming classics. Nominally. The Arabian Nights is listed as an Italo-French production, filmed in Italy with French artistic and financial participation; but the French participant is tied in with the American firm of United Artists, which means that there is also American money involved (as there was last year with Last Tango in Paris). Even more complicated is the case of The Night Porter, which is financed by the French and Italian branches of United Artists but which is being released in the United States by Avco Embassy. The Night Porter features Britons Dirk Bogarde and Charlotte Rampling in the lead roles as a former storm trooper and an erstwhile victim who was his lover in a concentration camp—and becomes so again when they're reunited in postwar Vienna. Paramount was unlucky when it purchased the American distribution rights for the Italian-based black film Three, Tough Guys, execrably dubbed, with Lino Ventura, Isaac Hayes and Fred Williamson in the title roles; and for Alfredo, Alfredo (also dubbed), in which Dustin Hoffman gets caught up, not quite comically enough, in the complexities of Italy's changing divorce laws. As the oversexed drugstore clerk he marries, gorgeous Stefania Sandrelli (of The Conformist) outshines Hoffman all the way. The same studio fared no better in its sponsorship of a French-made sequel to the minor 1971 entry Friends titled Paul and Michelle, which fails utterly to illuminate the not-so-burning question of whether a rather priggish young man can ever quite make amends to the provincial girl who has borne his illegitimate child. Tune in next week.

With the costs of film making continuing to rise, however, international coproduction has become a way of life. The financial advantages—in terms of partial government backing, tax rebates and quota exemptions—are so substantial that they are often vital to whether or not a picture gets made. A good example is the new Claude Lelouch film, Toute une Vie, a Franco-Italian venture. Largely autobiographical, it traces the career of a descendant of a film pioneer through three generations (including the present, in which his daughter falls for a young man who makes porno movies). At two and a half hours, the film is both over-long and overpersonal; but since Lelouch directed the profitable A Man and a Woman, it's a fair gamble. The profit motive no doubt also accounts for Paul Morrissey's two French-Italian co-productions of sex-cum sadism pictures, Andy Warhol's Frankenstein and the forthcoming Andy Warhol's Dracula.

But perhaps the most extraordinary cross-fertilization of the year was the Franco-Canadian production of Sweet Movie, written and directed by the Yugoslav Dusan (WR-Mysteries of the Organism) Makavejev. Unveiled first at Cannes, it immediately polarized its viewers. Some found its imagery—lovers writhing in a bed of sugar, a girl suffocating in a bath of chocolate, a horrendous supper party at which the diners vomit, urinate, defecate and otherwise relieve themselves—not only shocking but scabrous; others delighted in the movie's central conceit that the richest man in the world, who wanted to marry a virgin, would be blessed with a golden phallus. Most of the film, which moves between Paris, Amsterdam and Canada, has to do with the deflowering of the girl of his choice. Equal vigor, and even more candor, was displayed by the Dutch film Turks Fruit (Turkish Delight), directed by Paul Verhoeven in 1973 and first presented in the United States by Los Angeles' enterprising Filmex in the spring of 1974. At once scatological, ribald and sexually explicit, the film is a love story that both thumbs its nose at and deplores the constraints and conventions society imposes on young lovers.

Around the world, film makers are using their medium to challenge the social order and to effect change; but each year their fight grows more difficult. An American, Conrad Rooks, spent five years planning, negotiating for and filming his adaptation of Hermann Hesse's cult novel, Siddhartha, in India with a topflight cast of Indian actors. Because it includes kissing (prohibited in Indian films) and a nude love scene (even more forbidden), the picture will probably never play in its country of origin. (In fact, Film World, an Indian movie magazine that dared to print a still from Siddhartha on its cover, was barred from the Indian mails for some six months this year.) In Greece, the repressions of the recently replaced puritanical junta went so far as to scissor A Clockwork Orange, delete the butter sequence from Last Tango in Paris and even ban Jesus Christ Superstar from Greek screens.

In fact, despite recent setbacks, it begins to look as if the last bastion for relatively free expression on the screen is right here in the United States, where a Mel Brooks can make anti-Nixon jokes (and even get yoks out of bigotry and miscegenation) in Blazing Saddles; where a Woody Allen can poke fun at the dangers of futuristic Big Brotherhood in Sleeper; where the defamed Lenny Bruce can be posthumously defended in a major picture, Lenny; and where the creative Ralph Bakshi, in Coon Skin, can deal seriously with the American black's struggle for civil rights by means of a ribald, satiric send-up (combining live and animated action). The antiwar, antiestablishment direction of Arthur Hiller's just-released Playboy Production, The Crazy WoÈld of Julius Vrooder, is unmistakable. Yet to come before year's end is The Black Godfather, in which Redd Foxx can be expected to kid the pants off another well-entrenched institution, the Mafia.

But such iconoclasm requires the continued existence of an unfettered screen. There is at the moment too much in our society that deserves criticism, too much that invites lampooning, too much that demands a realistic reappraisal, too much of everything, in short, at stake to permit film makers to shrink timorously into their shells. With only the loose guidelines of the 1973 Supreme Court decisions about community standards to go on, any picture can still be busted. No one knows for certain whose movie will be the next Carnal Knowledge, found obscene in Georgia in a decision that was reversed, all too imprecisely, by the U. S. Supreme Court this past June. The Court shed no greater light on what it considered obscene than it had in the Miller case of 1973. The Motion Picture Association professed to be satisfied with the Court's overturning of the Carnal Knowledge conviction, but the exhibitors (who are, after all, the ones on the firing line) were not. Less than a month later, the National Association of Theater Owners, representing virtually every key exhibitor in the business, issued a statement that put forward, for the Court's consideration, three standards of its own to be used in determining whether or not a film is obscene:

1. Children should be protected from films specifically produced for adult audiences.

2. Adults should be free to see, hear and read what they want, but not have "objectionable materials" foisted on them.

3. Those who create, present or distribute materials should be entitled to the same protection as the materials. (In other words, if the film itself cannot be busted, neither can the actors who perform in it or the owner of the movie-house where it's shown.)

To protect the freedom of the screen, the entire motion-picture industry—and we, the motion-picture audience—should settle for nothing less.