Sex in Cinema -- 1975

Sooner or later, whenever cocktail conversations got around to the topic of movies this year, somebody would bring up one film--Warren Beatty's Shampoo--and one specific scene from that picture, a sequence filmed at Beverly Hills' posh Bistro restaurant, supposedly on the night of Richard Nixon's 1968 ballot-box triumph. During a spectacularly banal dinner party thrown by well-heeled local Republicans, Julie Christie, playing the mistress of financier Jack Warden, is asked by a movie producer (portrayed by movie producer William Castle) what she would like.

"What would I really like?" asks Christie. Castle nods. Pointing to Beatty, who plays a Beverly Hills superstud hairdresser, she replies, "I'd like to suck his cock." And she disappears beneath the table long enough to put her wish into action.

Two points about that scene pretty well sum up the sexual mores of current films. Christie's language is more explicit than ever used to be heard in first-run movie-houses; but the sexual activity itself is more suggested than carried out (text continued on page 142) before the camera. Consequently. Shampoo won an R rating from the Motion Picture Association of America's Code and Rating Administration. So did Harry and Tonto, in which a teenaged boy calls Ellen Burstyn a "cunt," but Art Carney's encounter with a Las Vegas hooker is discreetly shrouded beneath a rapidly closing convertible top. As far as industry officialdom is concerned, apparently, you can talk about sex all you want to; just don't show it.

You can show skin--in fairly copious amounts. The M.P.A.A.'s R has been extended to include full frontal nudity, female (as in The Wild Party) and male (as in Mandingo). Nude flashes are, apparently, admissible even in PG-rated (parental guidance suggested) films--Jaws, for example. But the film makers themselves have grown cautions. If a movie like Bite the Bullet--with its brothel on wheels awaiting the riders at the end of each lap of a long-distance horse race set early in this century--had been made, say, in 1970, it would surely have included at least a few nude scenes of the girls in action. Not this year. In Posse, another turn-of-the-century Western, when Kirk Douglas is proffered the hospitality of a frontier boardinghouse madam, he accepts the bed but politely refuses the boarding. Not too long ago, Douglas would never have dreamed of rejecting so attractive an offer.

Both producers, Douglas himself and Bullet's Richard Brooks, elected to go for a PG rating rather than the stiffer R or X, because they knew that they could reach a wider audience that way without doing undue violence to their basic concepts. Today, thanks to newspapers that refuse ads for X- and R- rated movies--and even some communities that ban them altogether--the X is hated, the R feared by most moviemakers. Ironically, however, the rating that they dread most is the G, which signifies that the fare is OK for everybody. Anyone who has ever attended a sneak preview of such a film can testify to the groan that goes up from an audience when the G is flashed on the screen. Producer Robert Radnitz, whose pictures prior to the current Birch Interval had been wholly and wholesomely G, correctly summarized the situation when he said, "You might wish to make a serious film that just happens to have no sex or violence. . . . Not all stories of a serious nature contain these ingredients. At any rate, you make the film and end up with a G. That very G will by its nature put off initially a good part of the audience that might otherwise want to see that film."

Nobody ever seriously considered giving, a G to Rollerball, Norman Jewison's inspired peek into a future free of wars, hunger, nationalism and racism. According to the film, rollerball, a new and lethal contact sport incorporating the rougher aspects of ice hockey and the roller derby, was invented to sublimate the violent tendencies of most human beings.

But, possibly because Rollerball, in addition to its vivid depiction of the world's most deadly game, also includes some mildly erotic love scenes, Richard D. Heffner, the newly appointed head of the M.P.A.A.'s Code and Rating Administration, was in favor of giving the film an X. Fortunately, calmer minds prevailed and the film ended up with an R. Even so, the disparity between the mild sexuality cum violence of Rollerball and the nonsexuality cum violence of the PG-rated Jaws touched off a minor shock wave of renewed criticism of the ratings system.

Certainly, by 1975 the churches had tired of the ratings game as played by M.P.A.A. rules. As early as 1970, both Protestant and Catholic organizations had served notice on the Motion Picture Association that they were unconvinced of the effectiveness of its Code and Rating Administration. The Catholics, who broke with the M.P.A.A. four years ago, issue their own C (for condemned) ratings for the major companies' films (among them this year, Shampoo, Mandingo, Night Moves and Rancho Deluxe) they find wanting; while the Protestant National Council of Churches has abandoned its long-established practice of giving prizes to meritorious films, because, as the council admitted, the awards simply didn't seem to be doing much good.

Within the industry, the secrecy surrounding the ratings process created a fertile field for rumors, most of them hints of high-level pressure. Did Universal's influential Lew Wasserman, for example, lean on the code administration to get a PG rating, rather than an R, for Jaws? And isn't the M.P.A.A. more lenient in rating its own members' films than those of independent producers? Most small producers, especially in the exploitation field, ignore the code administration altogether, preferring to take a self-imposed X rather than go to the expense of showing their wares to the M.P.A.A.--and ending up with an X anyway.

Those in the industry speak of a soft X (such as Emmanuelle) and a hard X (such as Deep Throat). There is also the soft R (Godfather II, for example) and the hard R (Shampoo or Mandingo). But what does the general public know--or, for that matter, care--about these fine distinctions? The R and the X, whatever the neat discriminations in the minds of the Code and Rating Administration members, have come to spell S-E-X in the minds of the ticket buyers. And if, to them, the X--intended merely as an "adults-only" label--stands for forbidden fruit, the R has come to mean merchandise they can sample with some assurance of seeing sex and/or violence.

To many critics, including this one, the most important American movie of 1975 is Robert Altman's R-rated Nashville. While there is no possibility that it will ever overtake Steven Spielberg's PG-rated Jaws at the box office, what Nashville has to say about the American way of life--its strengths and its weaknesses--has a cutting edge that could have been dulled to insignificance if its makers had opted for a milder rating. For example, Lily Tomlin plays a Gospel singer married to a rising, opportunistic young lawyer (Ned Beatty). They have two deaf children, whom she raises and loves. But in the hectic five days leading to the political rally that climaxes the film, a youthful admirer (Keith Carradine) comes into Nashville and propositions her. She accepts. More importantly, we know why she accepts. We know about her heartbreak and frustration, about her husband's insensitivity, about all the factors that leave her vulnerable to a young lover.

Or there is Gwen Welles, playing a waitress at the Nashville airport restaurant--a girl with no talent but a burning desire to appear at the Grand Ole Opry. Believing it may lead to her big break, she agrees to perform at a stag party--hoping that a sexy dress and a couple of socks stuffed into her bra will help put over her songs. But the assembled politicos don't want the socks, they want the real thing. Humiliated, the girl strips to the buff and gives it to them. Still another Nashville actress, Barbara Harris, plays a kewpie-doll nitwit who, although married to a self-respecting dirt farmer, runs about offering herself to everybody who might get her onto the Opry stage. Sad-eyed Shelley Duvall (who impressed the critics earlier in Altman's Thieves Like Us) turns up as a would-be groupie who will shack up with anything that sings; while Geraldine Chaplin plays a BBC reporter who will ditto with anything that moves.

Nashville boasts no fewer than 24 major roles, and these are only some of the people who make the film so persuasive and intriguing. Altman's movie is, above all else, a commentary on the quality of life in the United States today. And, in keeping with the trend we mentioned at the outset, no little of that commentary is delivered in bald, four-letter words.

Indeed, a critical, even cynical questioning of America's lifestyle and sexual mores motivated a surprising number of the year's outstanding films--most of them R-rated. Shampoo, like Nashville, has political overtones; but the primary thrust of its Warren Beatty-Robert. Towne screenplay is directed against the luxury-oriented, bedroom-obsessed Beverly Hills society of the late Sixties, with Beatty casting himself as a macho stylist who uses his easy access to the town's better boudoirs to promote a salon of his own. Shampoo, like a latter-day La Ronde, finds Beatty sleeping with Lee Grant, whose husband, Jack Warden, is keeping Julie Christie, who used to be Beatty's own big heartthrob. The perfect circle is disrupted, however, by the fact that Beatty also finds time for a giggly (Continued on page 187)Sex in Cinema -- 1975(continued from page 142) young actress (movingly played by Goldie Hawn), who thinks he loves her alone, and also has a quickie fling with Grant's momhating daughter (Carrie Fisher). Although, after Shampoo's suds are rinsed out, one has the feeling that none of the characters is really worth spending two hours with, the film admirably catches the sense and style of a permissive society dancing--or screwing--on its own grave.

The Day of the Locust, another film with a showbiz setting, looks even further back in time. Nathanael West's novel, written during the depressed Thirties, depicts Hollywood as the Sodom and Gomorrah of the Western world, the corrupt center of an industry that tainted everyone whose life it touched. The ultimate goal of West's hero, a studio designer, was to paint an apocalyptic mural of the destruction of Los Angeles by all those who, having been fed on Hollywood's dreams, have come to realize their betrayal.

No one who has seen the film will soon forget the cold, sensuous allure of Karen Black's Faye Greener, the bungalow-court cutie with both eyes fixed on stardom. She uses men like a toothbrush, to polish her assets--and is not above doing a stint in a bordello (a very high-class bordello, of course) if it will improve her cash flow and her contacts. Ultimately, after rejecting the honorable advances of the young artist, Faye settles in with an affable, affluent--and impotent--accountant from the Midwest (Donald Sutherland). He does everything possible to advance her career, but Faye wants more--specifically, a muscular musician named Miguel (Pepe Serna) and an even more muscular stunt man named Earle (Bo Hopkins). She quickly contrives to turn the home she shares with Sutherland into a raunchy maison à quatre. The climax comes at a movie premiere, when Sutherland, made aware of his cuckoldry, goes berserk, tramples a child and precipitates the burning of Los Angeles as originally envisaged by West. The film never quite manages a full integration of its surreal climax with its earlier, realistic passages--perhaps because those passages are etched so strongly. Nevertheless, The Day of the Locust remains one of 1975's most earnest and, however flawed, skillfully wrought films.

Also Hollywood based, and far more flawed, is The Wild Party, which focuses upon the frantic efforts of a silent-movies comedy star (James Coco) to sell his latest picture--which he has financed himself--just as the talkies are coming in. To promote the film, he stages the wild party of the title. As wild parties go, this one proves fairly tame, despite the homos, lesbos and concupiscent producers who stalk Coco's opulent Hollywood mansion. Raquel Welch is outstanding as Coco's mistress, a minor-league talent who hangs in there because she remembers with gratitude how kind he was when things were better. The preproduction notion that Coco is actually playing Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle, and that the film in some way relates to the fateful party that ended Arbuckle's career, can be dismissed entirely. The only possible relationship between Arbuckle and the character played by Coco is that both were stout silent comics. But the film, shot almost entirely in Riverside, California's, rococo Mission Inn, does capture the feel of a very special time and place with unusual sensitivity.

So, for that matter, does Bob Fosse's compelling screen version of Lenny, with Dustin Hoffman not so much impersonating as being the foulmouthed, quickwitted and ultimately tragic Lenny Bruce, and Valerie Perrine, in an incandescent performance, touchingly vulnerable as Honey, the night-club stripper he married, then nearly destroyed by turning her on to drugs. Typically for current films, the sex scenes in Lenny (including one in which Lenny, in bed with Honey and another girl, slowly turns the threesome into a lesbian duo, with himself as interested spectator) are vividly laid out; but since none of this is ever presented with the explicitness of hard-core porno, the film is rated R. The irony of Lenny is that the Julian Barry screenplay reproduces verbatim many of Bruce's scatological night-club monologs--the very ones that got him busted back in the Sixties for "talking dirty." The same words that caused Bruce to be hounded by the authorities and to squander his fortune on vain legal maneuvers to stay out of jail can now be heard by any child in any moviehouse, provided he or she is there with an "accompanying parent or adult guardian." Lenny Bruce, the film implies, did not die in vain. By re-creating vividly (and in glossy black and white) not only the look but also the repressive temper of Bruce's era, Lenny serves as a salutary reminder of how far we have come in little more than a decade.

Three films from the past year (two of them American, one Swedish) afford promise that women, too, have come if not the long way, baby, promised by the cigarette ads, at least some distance along the road to recognition as fully dimensional human beings, with sexuality one of those dimensions.

Probably no movie has more clearly documented the plight of the fairly intelligent, reasonably informed and wholly cowed housewife than John Cassavetes' A Woman Under the Influence. Although the title suggests booze or drugs, the actuality is far more pernicious. She is under the influence of what George Bernard Shaw once described as "middle-class morality"--being a good wife and a greater lover to her blue-collar husband (Peter Falk), a combination of mother and scout leader to their kids, a gleaming vessel of respectability to all her relatives and a jolly good fellow to all hubby's pals. She breaks vividly, understandably under the strain of multiple role playing. Gena Rowlands, in certainly the most complex and demanding female characterization since the halcyon days of Bette Davis and Katharine Hepburn, fully earned her Academy Award nomination.

The Oscar was won by Ellen Burstyn for her skillful realization of another moving female role, in Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (directed by Martin Scorsese, of Mean Streets fame). Alice is the widow of a yahoo truck driver, a man who liked his meals on time and a quick snatch of sex--and, please, no conversation--before rolling off to sleep. Stranded in New Mexico with a 12-year-old kid and virtually no money, the woman, child in tow, sets off for California with the vain hope of resuming her career as a piano-bar singer. Even she admits she was never very good at it, and eventually (continued on page 190)Sex in Cinema - 1975(continued from page 187) she becomes a waitress in a Tucson hash house. There she's discovered by rancher Kris Kristofferson, who happens along and, after his fashion, woos her. But when he starts slapping her kid around (a treatment that, incidentally, the kid richly deserves), Alice draws the line. The woman is beginning to have some sense of her own identity and of what she wants out of life. And when she finally accepts the rancher as a prospective husband, it is on her terms, not his.

A number of critics have complained about this finale, some (mostly male) seriously doubting that the Kristofferson character could have been brought so readily to heel, others (mostly female) feeling that Alice's eagerness to remarry is a kind of sellout. Nevertheless, the film did extremely well at the box office--giving its audiences an opportunity to concern themselves with the fate of a woman fast approaching middle age, encumbered with a bratty child, abused by the men in her life, yet bravely reaching out toward her own form of self-determination. The most talked-about sequence in the film is, again, notable for its salty dialog. It's a session of dirty-mouthed girl talk between Alice and a fellow waitress (Diane Ladd) that takes place in the ladies' washroom of the diner. Out of this scene came not only Burstyn's Oscar but a Best Supporting Actress nomination for Ladd, in a sure indication that at least some few out there knew what the girls were talking about.

It remained, however, for Sweden's oft-married Ingmar Bergman to make, in Scenes from a Marriage, the definitive statement about wedlock as an institution and what it does to the people institutionalized thereby. At the film's opening, the ten-year marriage of Marianne (Liv Ullmann) and Johan (Erland Josephson) has already begun to fall apart. To him, the union is nothing more than a comfortable rut. She, a successful divorce lawyer, resents catering to her husband's thoughtless whims--being more mother than wife. One day, abruptly, Johan tells Marianne he is leaving for Paris, accompanied by a 23-year-old with whom he has been having an affair. Divorce ensues, followed by second marriages--and more affairs--for both. The finale finds Marianne and Johan once more in bed together. Although legally joined to others, they seem more genuinely in love than at any time in their own marriage. It is the institution, Bergman appears to be saying, that stifles love; only outside the relationship are the partners able to look at each other with understanding and insight. In Scenes from a Marriage, this is particularly true of the woman, who, once freed of the chores of domesticity, radiates the strength and quiet assurance of a person wholly in control of her own destiny.

Most films of 1975 are less successful in their treatment of the emerging woman. Sheila Levine Is Dead and Living in New York, loosely based on Gail Parent's best seller, describes a girl (Jeannie Berlin) who chooses to make it on her own in Manhattan, without the assistance of her well-to-do Harrisburg family. No sooner is she installed in her own walk-up, with a swinging roommate and a lesbian neighbor, than she succumbs to the charms of Roy Scheider at a singles bar. For Scheider, it's a one-night stand; for Sheila, it's the real thing. And for the rest of the film, this supposedly liberated girl is seen making herself over into a suitably sexy lure for the man of her dreams--who just happens to be a doctor, or the man of every Jewish mother's dreams. In George C. Scott's ill-fated independent production, The Savage Is Loose, the story of a shipwrecked family on a tropic isle, the wife and mother, lovely Trish Van Devere, is clearly intended to epitomize all that is best in womanhood. She's strong and supportive and has a mind of her own. But by the film's climax (which won the film an R rating, hotly contested by Scott), she has been reduced to a sex object for both her husband and her now-grown son.

The Stepford Wives, a glossily mounted horror story, has a still worse end in store for its female characters. The principal one, doe-eyed Katharine Ross, removes herself with her family from the perils of Manhattan to the exurban charms of Stepford, Connecticut, where life seemingly can be beautiful. Certainly, most of the wives she meets are beautiful--and dutiful and dull. When her best friend, a vivacious freethinker (Paula Prentiss), suddenly turns into a platitudinous robot, mouthing the same TV-commercial homilies as all the other Stepford wives, Ross becomes frightened. And rightly so. It seems that the males of Stepford, chauvinist pigs all, have discovered a process for turning their wives into literal living dolls.

Other films treat women not precisely as robots but certainly as stereotypes. In Bite the Bullet, apart from a briefly glimpsed Mexican wife and mother, every woman in the film--including, improbably enough, Candice Bergen--is either a madam or a whore. The girls in Shampoo are all eagerly on the make, either for Beatty or for someone wealthier than he, but preferably both. As is de rigueur for Clint Eastwood movies, each of the females in The Eiger Sanction--Vonetta McGee, Heidi Bruhl, Brenda Venus and a whole classroomful of pulchritudinous art majors--can hardly wait to spread her legs whenever Clint so much as casts a glance in her direction. The heroine (Stockard Channing) of Mike Nichols' The Fortune is a sap, a sanitary-napkin heiress who runs off with two con men--Beatty (again) and Jack Nicholson--who are almost as dumb as she is. In Smile, an often hilarious put-down of American beauty contests, the numerous contestants--shepherded by former contest winner Barbara Feldon--are depicted as shallow, superficial, spiteful and, above all else, manipulatable. In Jacqueline Susann's Once Is Not Enough, Alexis Smith, "the fifth-richest woman in the world." acquires Kirk Douglas as a beard for her long-standing relationship with reclusive actress Melina Mercouri, then tries to marry Douglas' nubile daughter January (newcomer Deborah Raffin) off to wealthy socialite George Hamilton, in whom she fears Mercouri may be growing interested. As for January, she has a father fixation, which causes her to attach herself to a Hemingwayesque, Pulitzer Prize-winning author (David Janssen) who happens to be impotent. Vivacious Brenda Vaccaro steals this film (the rap, at worst, should be petty larceny) with a snapping performance as the man-hungry editor of a fashion magazine who makes her way up fortune's ladder on her back.

Mercifully, the cycle of blaxploitation pictures seems to have run out of steam in 1975. Not only is the quantity down but also, though one would scarcely have thought it possible, the quality. A new low was established by The Black Gestapo, which, in depicting actor Charles P. Robinson's rise to power in a kind of Black Panther organization, loses no opportunity to display the most sickening forms of, sadomasochistic violence, including a horrifyingly explicit castration sequence. Once in command, Robinson uses his "People's Army" to exploit the local brothels and drug traffickers precisely as had his white gangster predecessors.

Violence was again central to the development of the Hong Kong-based Cleopatra Jones and the Casino of Gold--although this, at least, could boast the statuesque Tamara Dobson--a superb athlete as well as a superb looker--combating the evil minions of "Dragon Lady" Stella Stevens. Violence, rather than sex, also dominates the footage of Sheba, Baby, which seems a waste, considering that Sheba is the luscious and shapely Pam Grier, whom more than one critic has described as "the black Raquel Welch." In this movie, while covering her victim with a silver .38, she simply kicks the shit out of anyone who tries to get near her.

But this tough-momma image seems to be confined pretty much to the black lovelies onscreen. What used to be called the fairer sex will still be the weaker one in the future--at least in the future limned by Norman Jewison in Rollerball. By the dawn of the next century, the film suggests, women will all be beautiful in the very special, cool way of Vogue fashion models. As Penelope Gilliatt noted of these women in her New Yorker review, they serve as "continuous-smile receptionists or as computer attendants, and the posts have obviously been won for them by the whiteness of their teeth. Never were so many capped teeth together in one movie."

Comedy, not one of 1975's strong points, brought us an icily evil Faye Dunaway and a beautiful but bumbling Raquel Welch in The Four Musketeers. Woody Allen's sophisticated farce Love and Death features lovely Diane Keaton, his favorite straight person, as a coldhearted Russian peasant girl who maneuvers him before one of Napoleon's firing squads. Also in the cast is gorgeous Olga Georges-Picot, as a nymphomaniac countess who lures the susceptible Allen into her bed, full knowing that the consequences will be a deadly (for Allen) duel on the morrow. The Mel Brooks-Gene Wilder screenplay for Young Frankenstein calls for Teri Garr to play the good doctor's sexy assistant as if she were Harry Reems's nurse in Deep Throat, with the same depth of characterization, if fewer of the sex-clinical details. Nor does the script do justice to the talents of Madeline Kahn, who has to be the best comedienne since Judy Holliday; it gave her little to do but react. In Boston, members of the National Organization for Women picketed Young Frankenstein, protesting the fact that Kahn seemed to enjoy being raped by Dr. Frankenstein's larger-than-life-sized monster (Peter Boyle) at the film's--and presumably the monster's--climax.

When an interest in women's rights slipped over into the field of the sexploitation movie, it was not so much understood as utilized. There it provided a handy hook on which to hang sexual displays with "redeeming social value," in the currently popular legal phrase. Take Linda Lovelace for President, for example. "She does for politics what she did for sex," reads the ambiguous tag line in the film's ad campaign; but where the mere idea of a woman's stumping for the nation's highest office might have shocked an earlier generation, any objections raised to Linda's campaign are clearly directed at its unorthodox methods. And then there is Carlos Tobalina's ambitious, two-hour-long Marilyn and the Senator (which has absolutely nothing to do with either that Marilyn or that Senator). As is increasingly the case in the skin-flick trade, the film concerns a strong-minded woman (here, CIA agent Nina Fause) using whatever means are at her disposal to get precisely what she wants. In this instance, it's wealthy Senator William Margold, who is married to attractive Heather Leigh, who keeps an eye on her husband's philanderings through closed-circuit television.

Probably the most successful explicitly sexual American film of the year, however, is Radley Metzger's The Private Afternoons of Pamela Mann, dealing with the activities of a bored housewife (Barbara Bourbon) who's rebelling against her work-obsessed husband. What she doesn't know is that her husband is equally obsessed with sex and spends his evenings viewing films of her dalliances. Marital bliss comes when they begin viewing--and performing--together. (Metzger, one of the most tasteful directors of sexploitation films, had eschewed such triple-X fare until last year, when he "heated up" Score after its disappointing initial engagements in a softer version. He directed Pamela under the pseudonym Henry Paris, lifting the veil only after it and his subsequent Naked Came the Stranger, based on the literary hoax by "Penelope Ashe," became runaway hits.)

Russ Meyer, another sex-film pioneer--his The Immoral Mr. Teas dates from 1959--has never been reticent when it comes to having his name attached to his movies, preferably above the title. His ad copy for his latest, Supervixens, reads in part: "An all-out assault on today's sexual mores; and more ... a frontal attack against women's lib ... blasting through the male machismo syndrome ... kicking the hell out of convention, hang-ups, convictions, obsessions. The whole bag ... cops, robbers, sexually aggressive females, rednecks, sick men of war, unfaithful wives, impotence, athletic prowess, the 32-second orgasm, momism, cuckolding, breast fixation vs. fellatio ... even death and reincarnation! And," the ad breathlessly concludes, "seven incredible broads!" If the blurb sounds slightly excessive, the film is even more so--the sexiest, goriest and in many ways the funniest movie Meyer has ever made.

The year 1975 brought us not one but three movies based on the life and times of Xaviera Hollander, Holland's noted exponent of piece (for pay) in our time. The Happy Hooker, with Lynn Redgrave in the title role, was well summarized by Variety's Sege, who termed it an "R-rated treatment of Xaviera Hollander's X-rated antics." Xaviera herself appears in a second R-rated movie, My Pleasure Is My Business. Far less tame is Larry G. Spangler's The Life and Times of Xaviera Hollander, which Manhattan Civil Court Judge Louis Kaplan, in ordering the print destroyed, described as "80 to 90 percent explicit sex."

There are indications, however, that the era of porno chic is just about over. A few films--like last year's Memories Within Miss Aggie--may break through to the $1,000,000-plus big time, but with neither the regularity nor the spectacular grosses of only two years ago. There are now approximately 2250 houses (out of about 18,000) that will still book X-rated merchandise; fewer still will do so if there is any suggestion that the picture might be hard-core. What the exhibitors look for are those breakthrough films, the successors to Deep Throat and The Devil in Miss Jones, that will reach beyond the habitual fans, those men carrying raincoats, and catapult the film into the stratosphere of multimillion-dollar profits. Pamela Mann, Sometime Sweet Susan, the Mitchell brothers' costly Sodom and Gomorrah just might make it; but the general public's curiosity about X-rated merchandise seems to have been sated. Audiences can no longer be wooed merely by the quantity or variety of sexual acts on the screen; by this time, the average adult has seen them all several times. And although the young people who are willing to play in the pornos are growing more attractive all the time, very few producers know or care much about quality. Today, so many porno pics are being ground out that the market is undergoing a recession much deeper than that affecting the economy at large.

Under those circumstances, there was considerable raising of eyebrows within the industry when Columbia Pictures, which had never before handled an X-rated movie, undertook the distribution of the French box-office hit Emmanuelle. Although soft-core (as are most French sex films), Emmanuelle definitely deserves its X--a fact that Columbia cannily exploited in its advertising campaign with the catch phrase "X was never like this." Perhaps it wasn't, though the film's rambling tale of the sexual awakening of the young wife of a French diplomat, conducted chiefly under the auspices of an aging sensualist, includes--in addition to almost incessant nudity--such staples of the sexploitation field as lesbianism, masturbation, cunnilingus and just plain fucking. There is even a night-club sequence in which a performer--despite, one might suppose, warnings from the Surgeon General--engages in vaginal cigarette puffing. But because the girls in the movie radiate fashion-magazine good looks and the photography (mainly on location in Bangkok) is exceptionally lush, Columbia felt free to state in its ads, "It's the first film of its kind that lets you feel good without feeling bad."

It was, apparently, a gamble that paid off. By booking the film into art houses rather than regulation porno palaces, and by emphasizing that the film is erotic rather than explicit, Columbia succeeded in luring to the theaters a wide cross section of customers--including women--who wouldn't be found dead within ten miles of a hard-core feature. In its first six months of national distribution, according to Columbia president David Begelman, Emmanuelle grossed approximately $8,500,000; the end is still nowhere in sight.

Actually, scores of relatively well-made soft-core pornos are turning up in Paris these days. They account for fully 40 percent of the entire market, and there's every possibility that this figure will go up if, as is anticipated, hard-core--"stiff," the French call it--is permitted. After Alex deRenzy's compilation of old stag reels, A History of the Blue Movie, opened in four Paris theaters toward the end of April, distributors were reportedly stocking up on such American entries as The Devil in Miss Jones, Behind the Great Door and, of course, Deep Throat. Meanwhile, as outlined by Bruce Williamson in Sex in Cinema--French Style (Playboy, June), France's film makers themselves have been far from idle. Just Jaeckin, the former fashion photographer who directed Emmanuelle, has followed with an adaptation of the classic, long-banned sex novel Story of O, with Corinne Cléry as the subjugated heroine and Udo Kier (cast by Paul Morrissey in the Andy Warhol retellings of the Dracula and Frankenstein classics) as her perverted captor. And the delectable Emmanuelle, Sylvia Kristel, not only appears opposite Jean-Louis Trintignant in Playing with Fire, an Alain Robbe-Grillet concoction about a white-slave gang operating out of a classy bordello that caters to the sadomasochistic trade, but also recently completed Anti-Virgin, a film continuing the initiation of the insatiable Emmanuelle into the wonders and varieties of sex.

Roger Vadim, to whom sex and celluloid are practically synonymous, re-creates in Charlotte (formerly titled The Murdered Young Girl) the events leading up to a thrill killing in which the murderer strangles the girl, tears her eyes out, then makes love to the corpse. As an added fillip, if one were needed, Vadim provides a sequence in which Sirpa Lane tenderly wraps her lover's penis in ropes of pearls and diamonds. Still in production at this writing is Spermula, with its intriguing promotional teaser, "Not all female vampires live on blood alone"--and the added realism of perfume sprays ejected into the auditorium at strategic moments.

French film makers, as if sucking on an aching tooth, seem to be returning increasingly to the sad events of World War Two. The best-known example in the U. S. is Lacombe, Lucien (superbly directed by Louis Malle), which traces the transformation of a slow-witted peasant boy (Pierre Blaise) into a Nazi bully who blackmails his way into the bed of a patrician Jewish tailor's daughter.

The Germans have their Adolf Hitler, a documentary supposedly put together out of newsreels and hitherto unseen foot-age culled from archives of the SS. Both Hitler and his wife of record, Eva Braun, are shown cavorting in the altogether. According to film maker Ludwig Kerscher, the SS, ever vigilant, had placed secret cameras in the walls of Berchtesgaden, Göring's Karinhall and other spots frequented by top Nazi officials. Despite denazification, German governmental figures took a dim view of Herr Kerscher's exposé, charging improper invasion of privacy. At last report, Adolf Hitler had yet to be seen either in or outside Germany.

What can be seen is Might Makes Right, a new work by Germany's prodigiously talented and prolific Rainer Werner Fassbinder. A kind of German Peter Bogdanovich, Fassbinder at 30 has managed to make 30 pictures while functioning as a part-time critic on the side. In Might Makes Right, a study of German gays, he also plays the lead--a young man from the working class who uses his sexual proclivities to better himself socially. Completely free of any sensationalism or explicit love scenes, the film is remarkable in its suggestion of, if we may use the term, a gay-community pecking order as rigid and class-conscious as that of conventional society itself.

Thanks to a liberalization of the German censorship laws in November of 1974, Germans may now see pictures that are considerably rougher than those of a year ago. A peculiar aspect of the new ruling, however, is its insistence that hardcore pornography cannot be shown for profit. To dodge this, a new theater chain, known as Pam, has sprung up since the first of the year. Admission is free, but patrons are expected to buy beer and schnapps while watching the movies. Incidentally, pornography, by German definition, includes not only sexually explicit films but also those featuring sadomasochistic violence. Death Wish, with Charles Bronson, barely made it past the German censors.

Italy also seems to be on the verge of liberalizing its censor regulations, although films like Last Tango in Paris remain under ban. During 1974, however, such soft-core imports as Flesh Gordon, Deep Throat II and Emmanuelle were admitted--and paid off handsomely. With these films as precedents, Italian producers have been emboldened to go and do likewise. As we go to press, Linda Lovelace is in Rome preparing to co-star in Laure with Emmanuelle Arsan, the author of Emmanuelle, who will also write and direct the new venture. Black Emmanuelle is also before the cameras; while Pier Paolo Pasolini, whose earlier films include Decameron, The Canterbury Tales and 1001 Arabian Nights, currently has in production Salo or the 120 Days of the City of Sodom, based on a work by the Marquis de Sade updated to the final weeks of Mussolini's dictatorship.

To reach the profitable international market, Italian producers have taken increasingly to supplementing homegrown talent with well-known names from abroad. Luchino Visconti's Conversation Piece, co-starring our own Burt Lancaster with Italian actress Silvana Mangano and Germany's Helmut Berger, features guest appearances by France's Dominique Sanda and Italy's Claudia Cardinale. Lancaster plays an American professor, living alone in Rome, whose privacy is invaded when a countess (Mangano) insists on renting his upstairs apartment, for her lover (Berger). In Woman and Lover, Joe Dallesandro, the favorite stud in Andy Warhol's extensive stable, plays (in his usual deadpan style) a terrorist who seduces a farmer's wife, delighting her with the greatest orgasm she has ever known. Catherine Deneuve, Fernando Rey, Tina Aumont and Giancarlo Giannini top the cosmopolitan cast of Drama of the Rich, based on a genuine crime passionnel that rocked Italy at the turn of the century.

The year's best-known instance of internationalism, Italian style, is Michelangelo Antonioni's The Passenger, which Carlo Ponti produced for MGM--without a single Italian in the cast! Jack Nicholson stars as a frustrated reporter who assumes the identity of a dead British salesman and sets out to savor a new existence. The salesman, it develops, had actually been trafficking in guns for Third World revolutionaries, and Nicholson soon finds himself being hounded all over Europe by secret agents, security officers and his estranged wife, who wants to know how he died. Accompanying Nicholson on his travels is the shapely Maria (Last Tango) Schneider, a casual pickup with a taste for adventure. Unfortunately, most critics agreed, this hybrid has neither the pace of American movies nor the warmth of the Italians at their best.

No such problems beset Ken Russell's British-based production of the rock opera Tommy, which boasts a huge transatlantic cast headed by Ann-Margret, Oliver Reed, Tina Turner, Jack Nicholson (again) and top rock stars Roger Daltrey, Elton John, Eric Clapton and Keith Moon. Russell, as always, underscores the erotic in this musical odyssey of a young man (Daltrey) who is psychologically maimed in childhood by the shock of witnessing his father's murder at the hands of his mother's lover. Reed, the brutally domineering lover, oozes a swaggering virility that makes credible the total submission of Tommy's mother (Ann-Margret), while Ann-Margret herself strips off the veneer of conventional morality in the most uninhibitedly sensuous performance of her career--rivaled here only by Turner's glittery, seductive incarnation as the Acid Queen.

Perhaps the most ambitious all-British picture of the year is Ken Hughes's adaptation of Alfie Darling, with rock singer Alan Price taking over the title role so memorably--too memorably, in fact--created by Michael Caine almost a decade ago. Caine's insouciant portrait of a conscienceless heel-hero made it easy to understand why every bird was ready to tumble into his nest. Price, playing a lecherous truck driver, comes on so strong that one can scarcely empathize with any chick--and there are many, notably career girl Jill Townsend--who falls for his line. Despite a conscious effort to update the material by having Price's pal. Paul Copley, marry a black girl, Alfie Darling is never so appealingly with it as was its predecessor.

For the most part, in fact, sex in British films has degenerated from the high style exhibited by the original Alfie, O Lucky Man and A Clockwork Orange to the standardized clichés of low-budgeted comedies like Confessions of a Window Cleaner or horror films like Vampyres ... Daughters of Dracula, featuring statuesque Marianne Morris and the sultry Anulka Dziubinska (Playboy's Miss May 1973) as a pair of lesbian descendants of the bloodthirsty count. Still to come (or still promised, at any rate) around Christmastime is Stanley Kubrick's long-awaited production of Barry Lyndon, starring Ryan O'Neal. Begun over two years ago for Warner Bros. Barry Lyndon will probably serve to remind us of what British coproductions used to be.

Random samplings from many nations--Australia, Belgium, Canada, Greece and Holland are good examples--would indicate that the sexual content of their films in 1975 approximates that of our own in 1969--1970. They have grown bolder, under, more explicit in language--though still not hard-core. Early this year, censors in Quebec became the center of a curious cause célèbre when an actor, Donald Lautrec, held up the release of a movie titled The Apple, the Stem, and the Pits because its producers had cut in a shot of a zucchini to represent the male organ at a climactic moment. Lautrec protested that his own organ should have been pictured. When, subsequently, it was, the Quebec censors held up the film even though they had already passed two other less well-publicized movies in which the penis is displayed in erecto.

Here in the United States, the scene is equally confusing. Although the Supreme Court has handed down several stern antipornography decisions (always, interestingly, by a five-to-four vote), it has to date avoided writing into law anything that might define what is and what is not pornographic. While the FBI was redoubling its efforts to prosecute those who shipped reputedly obscene movies across state lines, the Justice Department refused a request for $116,000 to fund, at California Lutheran College, the National Legal Data Center--an organization created to expedite prosecution of obscenity cases. Boston's zoning commission approved a two-block area on lower Washington Street where adult-movie theaters, porno bookstores and peep shows could operate unmolested; but in Chicago and Albuquerque, five adult-movie houses were wracked by bomb blasts; and in Los Angeles, an ancient Red Light Abatement Act was revived to fight the smut menace.

Clearly, at this point, the American public is ambivalent about the degree of sexuality it wants to see on the screen. For some, anything is too much; for others, too much is not enough. It is a debate that is bound to continue, especially if Americans become aware of the hidden costs of an ongoing prosecution of sex in the cinema. How many hundreds of thousands of dollars have been expended in the innumerable (and generally unsuccessful) attempts to bust Deep Throat, not to mention dozens of other, less notorious pictures that go to trial nearly every day all over the country? How many hours a week does the local constabulary spend in moviehouses (often at the behest of an ambitious D.A.), trying to determine whether or not a movie is obscene, instead of sallying forth to combat crime on the streets? How many FBI agents have been detailed to entrap distributors of eight-millimeter stag reels, posing as small-town collectors so that the ensuing trials can be held in communities presumably less amenable to such material than New York, Los Angeles or San Francisco? And how much are these trials costing, in prosecutors' salaries, witness fees and per-diem payments to jurors?

We may never add up the total bill laid on our doorstep in this all-out assault against an ill-defined crime, but one might well ask: How much does today's hard-pressed taxpayer want to spend to have someone else tell him what he can see at the movies?