Sex in Cinema-1976

In the Race for the Box-Office Buck between the Naked and the Dead, the public seemed to prefer its bodies Bloodied

There Can Be little doubt that 1976 will go down in the annals of cinema as the year in which movie companies exploited the peculiar links between sex and violence for all they were worth. As successful prosecutions of sexually oriented fare made the forthright approach to sex that was visible only five years ago in Carnal Knowledge increasingly problematical, film makers sought a safer, yet commercially sound means of heating up their product. Seemingly, they found it in rape, murder and mutilation.

This repellent device, however, may not endure long. Chicago's Mayor Richard Daley proclaimed a crackdown, having his city council rubber-stamp (by 46 to 2) an ordinance designed to restrict violent movies to audiences 18 and over, and other cities are following suit. Not surprisingly, the language of Daley's ordinance paralleled the Supreme Court's 1973 formulation defining obscenity, however loosely.

That sex and violence are linked by more than mere linguistics was demonstrated early in the year by the release of Snuff, an Argentine-based sex movie that recalled the Manson murders. Snuff is climaxed by a sickening sequence (added Stateside) in which the female star is presumably killed oncamera, then eviscerated. At first, rumor had it that this was an actual killing, that pornography had reached its ultimate conclusion. "If they can show the sex act on the screen," argued proponents of the censorious Morality in Media organization in a fine example of muddled logic, "why not the act of murder as well?" Most of us fail to see the inevitability of a connection between homicide and intercourse. For every person who is murdered, literally millions are (text continued on page 164)Sex in Cinema-1976(continued from page 144) quite happily bedded. But Snuff seemed to play directly into the hands of the procensorship forces in America. Allan Shackleton, the film's distributor, was at first more than willing to lend credence to the story that a murder had actually taken place--that a young woman had been drugged, then butchered for the benefit of the camera. A kind of whispering campaign kept the question of "snuff movies" (as if there were more than one) alive for months. When the film finally opened in New York this past February, the morbidly curious turned out in droves. Although critics unanimously panned it, and editorial writers deplored it, the picture racked up a record $66,456 in its first week. Only when the authorities let it be known that if a murder had actually been committed, everyone associated with the film could be held criminally liable did the distributors change their tune. Receipts declined accordingly.

The question of what the American moviegoer does want--or will tolerate--in the way of sexual explicitness has seldom been fuzzier than it is at present. And this confusion, naturally enough, is reflected in the Motion Picture Association of America's rating system. Early in the year, Robert Redford, as producer of the film All the President's Men, personally appealed the decision of the M.P.A.A., which had originally given the picture an R rating because of Dustin Hoffman's numerous variations on the word fuck. The rating was subsequently changed to PG--parental guidance advised. Although Jack Valenti, head of the M.P.A.A., flatly stated that "this judgment applies to this specific film only," the infiltration of four-letter words into PG- and R-rated movies can hardly be ignored. Similarly, frontal nudity is now permissible in the PG classification, with Smile, Gator, Embryo and Lifeguard as random samples. Even homosexuality, once an almost automatic guarantee of an X rating, now turns up in the PGs. What happened in Bobbie Gentry's ballad Ode to Billy Joe to cause Billy Joe to fling himself off the Tallahatchie-Bridge, we learn in the song's 1976 film version, was that Billy Joe had had a previous homosexual relationship--rated PG. And although ratings are presumed to take into account violence as well as sex, one wonders at the PG accorded The Return of a Man Called Horse. Not only does Return reprise the pectoral-penetrating Sioux initiation rites of A Man Called Horse (this time with about a half dozen young braves hanging from the ropes along with Richard Harris); it includes a couple of rapes, the horrendous spectacle of an Indian slashing his own eyes with a knife and an edifying few moments in which Harris solicits information from a staked-out foe by building a small bonfire in his crotch.

The real gripe about ratings, many feel, is that they are inconsistent. A major company, it's believed, stands a far better chance than an independent one of having a rating changed. Twentieth Century-Fox, for example--faced with the possibility of having Charlton Heston, of all people, appear in an X-rated film--was able to get the X originally applied to The Last Hard Men changed to an R, without cutting the film. Redford's experience with All the President's Men has been mentioned. And the R given to Paramount's Survive! seems fairly lenient. The film, which recounts the grim fate of a rugby team whose plane crashes in the Andes, presents in grisly detail the players' efforts to survive by eating the flesh of their dead comrades, down to such niceties as how to strip the meat from a corpse.

Also open to question is the R the M.P.A.A. awarded to Drum, a picture so relentlessly violent that Paramount declined to release it, even though it had been made as a follow-up to its successful (and also violent) Mandingo of the previous year. We are once more at Falconhurst, a stud farm for slaves, but now it's 20 years later--getting on toward the Civil War. Yet history has a way of repeating itself, especially in the movies. Once more, we see a bare-knuckled fight in the courtyard of a New Orleans brothel. Once more, we're offered rampant nudity and considerable miscegenation; this time, we also have the sight of the concupiscent teenaged daughter of Warren Oates (who has replaced Perry King of the original cast) unbuttoning the flies of all the sturdier male slaves--while threatening to cry "rape" if they squeal on her. There's an ugly fight between an unarmed Drum (Ken Norton) and a huge, knife-wielding black, egged on by the villainous white homosexual John Colicos, whose advances Drum has rejected. As in Mandingo, Norton and his pal Yaphet Kotto are stripped naked, hung by the heels and whipped for a minor infraction of Falconhurst's rules. There are repeated calls to "castrate the niggers" and in the bizarre finale--a slave revolt in which shovels and scythes are pitted against rifles and revolvers--Drum manages to avenge himself against Colicos by (apparently) crushing the man's balls and twisting off his penis.

Drum is not the only 1976 film in which a man finds himself literally dismembered in the sexual sense; castration bids fair to become a cliché in foreign films, as we shall see later on. Most major American studios, however, found a less risky, potentially profitable combination of sex and violence in rape, something they could exploit with relative impunity. Naturally, the film makers come out against rape, but, as Cecil B. DeMille used to observe, you can't be against sin without showing what sin is.

Perhaps the most powerful example of the rape genre is Lipstick, directed by Lamont Johnson (who subsequently admitted that the film's ending was excessive and overly brutal). Within the first half hour, fashion model Margaux Hemingway is raped by a mild-mannered music teacher (Chris Sarandon, who was Al Pacino's transsexual "wife" in Dog Day Afternoon). When the case goes to court, the defense argues that if a woman flaunts her sex for profit, she deserves whatever she gets. The court agrees, freeing Sarandon to attempt another rape, this time on Margaux's younger sister (played by her real-life younger sister, the enchanting Mariel Hemingway). Margaux intercepts at the last possible moment, shooting Chris in the crotch with a rifle. Meanwhile, however, thanks to the ugly trial publicity, she has lost friends, admirers and jobs. It's impossible not to suspect that when she blasts off at Sarandon, she's not only protecting her little sister--she's getting some of her own back.

This theme, that outraged virtue is in itself an excuse for violent action, recurs frequently in the films of 1976. In The Last Hard Men, James Coburn, an escaped con at the turn of the century, captures lawman Heston's nubile daughter (Barbara Hershey) in retaliation for the killing of his Indian wife. Coburn's vengeance: a gang-bang of Hershey while the father is forced to look on. Action in Jackson County Jail gets under way when ad executive Yvette Mimieux, her car and possessions stolen by young hitchhikers, is thrown into jail for lack of identification--and is promptly raped by her jailer. She kills the man, then goes on a crime spree with fellow inmate Tommy Lee Jones. In Trackdown, a low-budgeted melodrama, no sooner does young Karen Lamm arrive in Los Angeles than she is robbed and raped by a gang of chicano hoods, then sold to a Sunset Strip vice lord. Oddly enough, the girl decides that she really likes the luxuries that accompany a life of sin--until she's slugged and kicked to death by one of her more sadistic clients. Then her brother (Jim Mitchum, looking for all the world like father Bob) hunts down the villains remorselessly, dispatching them, singly and in bunches, to their particularly unattractive deaths.

The pattern, of course, is one set by the success of Charles Bronson's 1974 smash, Death Wish, which also began with rape and murder and ended with Bronson's resorting to vigilante action because the cops were unable to cope. (continued on page 166)Sex in Cinema-1976(continued from page 164) Such a lack of confidence in the crime-fighting abilities of our ordained forces of law and order is endemic to this entire group of films, all of which betray a profound right-wing bias. Trackdown, in fact, goes so far as to state that the police find their hands tied by the civil libertarians. In Breaking Point, starring towering Bo Svenson, the cops can't even protect a witness to a gangland killing. When the Mafia begins to brutalize his family, Svenson emerges from the Canadian hide-out provided by the police and proceeds to settle the score--by means including the apparent castration of one of the gang's more obstreperous members. Goodbye, Norma Jean, purporting to be the biography of Marilyn Monroe, bases her lifelong aversion to sex on an early encounter with a motorcycle cop who rapes her instead of citing her for speeding. After that, it's men. men, men (and one woman), but neither she nor they gain much satisfaction from their encounters.

Prostitution, of course, has long been a popular cinematic subject; but in 1976, it seemed to be hotter than ever. It, too, was generally tied to violence, as best epitomized in Martin Scorsese's brutal, brilliant Taxi Driver. Psychotic hackie Robert De Niro's lapse into madness and mayhem is triggered when the teenaged prostitute (Jodie Foster) he has befriended and wants to help decides that she really prefers life on the streets with her pimp. At first, De Niro attempts to vent his rage on the only authoritarian figure he knows, a liberal Presidential candidate. Thwarted by Secret Service bodyguards, he goes berserk, shooting down the pimp, the manager of a shabby midtown hotel that rents to prostitutes, even one of the girl's clients. Since the last was a gangster, the slaughter ironically turns De Niro into a hero, at least for the moment. Incidentally, cabby De Niro derives, it seems, nearly all his entertainment from the hard-core stag movies shown along Manhattan's raunchy Eighth Avenue. When he takes WASPy Cybill Shepherd out on a date, he escorts her to something classier--a soft-core porno house on 42nd Street--and can't understand why she's upset by the show.

In Robert Aldrich's Hustle, the heroine (Catherine Deneuve) is a high-priced callgirl, symbol of a society that puts a price tag on everything. During her layoffs, she consorts with police lieutenant Burt Reynolds, but the relationship is uneasy: He can't quite put her profession out of his mind, while she--much like Karen Lamm in Trackdown--is unwilling to forgo its pleasant perks. When Reynolds' investigation into the drug death of a teenaged girl leads to a wealthy lawyer (Eddie Albert) whose connections extend from a porno ring to city hall, his conscience briefly surfaces--only to be snuffed out in the film's abrupt and arbitrary finale. The implication is that the callgirl, at least, has been true to herself, while the cop is forced into compromises between his conscience and his career. In the low-budgeted The Commitment, the wife of a confirmed gambler becomes a prostitute to cover her husband's debts; in the more substantially financed The Duchess and the Dirtwater Fox, Goldie Hawn plays a San Francisco saloon singer who isn't above a little play for pay on the side.

The point is not so much that the screen today is proliferating with prosties but that--at least in the movies--prostitution seems to have lost its traditional stigma. To be sure, there were easy ladies, often goodhearted ones, onscreen before; during the Thirties, they were often played by such top stars as Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo and, of course, Mae West. But in the end, most ladies of ill repute either died horribly or were ignominiously carted off to jail. No longer. In Hustle, Deneuve, not the more scrupulous Reynolds, is the survivor. The Duchess and the Dirtwater Fox contrives to bring Hawn and George Segal, who plays an inept gambler and an even more inept bank robber, together for what is presumably a happy ending: They have each other and the loot.

This change in outlook is reflected more precisely in the documentary Mustang: The House That Joe Built, a feature-length study of the maison de joie known as Mustang Bridge Ranch, a complex of trailers near Reno, Nevada, which is described in the film as the nation's largest brothel. Nevada legalized prostitution in 1970, and Joe Conforte--a squat, flamboyant, cigar-chewing impresario--has benefited enormously thereby. The film argues persuasively that treating prostitution as just another business not only minimizes the risk of gangster infiltration but carries certain health benefits as well. (What it never quite succeeds in minimizing is the fact that the girls at Mustang, on 11-hour shifts, seem to be every bit as weary and exploited as their sisters who prowl the streets in states less enlightened than Nevada.) As a first look at the inner workings of a house of prostitution, however, this film by Robert Guralnick is impressive for its "doesn't everybody?" attitude and for its lingering image of Conforte comfortably raking in the dough.

Another cultural change may be noted in the Martin Poll--Lewis John Carlino production of The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea (subject of a vivid Playboy pictorial last July). Traditionally, a movie widow has mourned for her dearly departed, raised her sons to respect his memory and steadfastly renounced all fleshly joys. Not so in The Sailor. Basing his script on a Japanese novel by Yukio Mishima, Carlino transferred the action to an English seacoast town where the bereaved Sarah Miles masturbates before a photograph of her late husband--while being spied upon by her 13-year-old son. The voyeurism continues when Miles meets up--and beds down--with ship's officer Kris Kristofferson. The boy responds to their impassioned lovemaking in a fashion that is part Japanese, part Oedipal Greek. With his school cronies, who feel that a sailor should remain true to his calling, he manages to dispose of this rival for his mother's affections in a singularly dispassionate yet bloodthirsty way. "Like the act of love," ads for Sailor read, "this film must be experienced from beginning to end. Therefore, no one will be seated once the picture starts." I rather doubt that this stricture has been rigorously enforced by the theaters, but the acts of love depicted by Miles and Kristofferson remain the most uninhibitedly erotic this side of the porno houses, and the film itself is an enlightened attempt to broaden the experiential range of American moviegoers.

Unfortunately, too many of this year's movies, at least those distributed by the major companies, relegate sex to the dirty-joke category. Paramount's The First Nudie Musical is just that. Nudity alone is supposed to lure the suckers, since the movie exhibits no evidence of wit, style or inspiration. Mother, Jugs & Speed--with Raquel Welch as the titular Jugs--attempts to combine the bold irreverence of M*A*S*H with an action-oriented, Bullitt-style plot, and fails on both counts. I Will, I Will . . . for Now, directed by Norman Panama, is a sex comedy from the Fifties replete with the wrong couples in the wrong bedrooms; this time, the setting is a supposedly "with it" sex clinic. The film is an embarrassment, made more so by the stellar presences of Elliott Gould, Diane Keaton, Paul Sorvino and Victoria Principal.

Once again, it took a documentary to indicate how far we really have traveled. Sandstone is an X-rated (but far from pornographic) study of the lifestyle in a Southern California retreat that encourages the full and free exploration of all forms of human sexuality. Tucked away in the mountains above Malibu, Sandstone was started in 1969 by John Williamson, a former space engineer; and while its initial appeal may have been to psychologically aware and sexually jaded members of the upper middle class, by the time film makers Jonathan and Bunny Dana began this documentary, Sandstone's roster also included a number of blue-collar people. (Such class distinctions, not immediately apparent when the members have their clothes off, are revealed through oncamera interviews with prospective initiates in their own homes.) Particularly impressive is the lack of self-consciousness with which the people at Sandstone, often nude, discuss their emotional hang-ups, not to mention their lack of inhibition when the camera prowls around them in the free-form grope-and-grapple session that closes the film.

Significantly, Sandstone played in Memphis during the repressive porno trials described by Richard Rhodes in last month's Playboy, and without any interference from the local authorities--which may mean that the distinctions between hard-core films and open, honest exploration of human sexuality and eroticism are growing a bit clearer. It's probably much too early to say, since neither the courts nor the industry's own M.P.A.A. have come up with substantive guidelines as to what actually constitutes pornography. Just possibly, however, the public is beginning to make its own definitions. Last year, Columbia undertook the distribution of the French-made, X-rated Emmanuelle--and did very well with it, earning a substantial $10,000,000 in the American market, where it played mainly in art houses and neighborhood theaters, avoiding the porn palaces. Following Columbia's lead, Paramount this year acquired a sequel, Emmanuelle--Joys of a Woman; Allied Artists took on The Story of O (also a French import) and United Artists gave us the British-based Inserts, starring Richard Dreyfuss.

Of the three films, Inserts is certainly the most ambitious, with Dreyfuss, fresh from his successes in The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz and Jaws, playing an over-the-hill director, a Wunderkind of the Twenties reduced by drugs and alcohol to making pornos in the early Thirties. The film, written and directed by youthful John Byrum as a kind of tour de force, takes place entirely within one room of a Spanish-style Hollywood mansion soon to be razed to make way for a freeway. Dreyfuss--called simply Boy Wonder--uses its baronial living room as his sound stage, with a set consisting mainly of one large bed. On it, he is shooting a stag movie--until his star (Veronica Cartwright) O.D.s and he is forced to manufacture a substitute out of his sponsor's giddy girlfriend (Jessica Harper). She wants to know what "inserts" are and, emboldened by brandy, he demonstrates. (In film language, an insert is an extreme close-up of some specific detail in a larger scene. It also has a sexual connotation, of course, and Byrum is not one to let us forget it.) For all its sexual activity--including the director's discovery that he isn't as impotent as he had supposed once he starts shooting inserts with his producer's lady--the film remains strictly soft-core, ironically so, because the inserts that might have made it hard-core are never shown. Inserts was a curious career choice for Dreyfuss but, because of its low budget (about $250,000), a moneymaker for United Artists.

Nor did Paramount make out badly with Emmanuelle--Joys of a Woman, once again starring lissome Sylvia Kristel in a continuation of her heady adventures in the Orient with her sexually liberated husband--and with just about every reasonably attractive male or female she happens to encounter there. As in the earlier film, the sexplay is virtually nonstop, the women are handsome and Robert Fraisse's color cameras strikingly depict both the Far Eastern settings and the far-out happenings taking place in front of them.

Allied Artists fared less happily with its French import The Story of O, based on the famous erotic novel by the pseudonymous Pauline Réage. This classic tale of a masochistic young lady who submits to chains, beatings and similar forms of self-abasement in her search for sexual fulfillment was so tentatively filmed that her torments often seemed like tickles. To make matters worse for Allied, a low-budgeted independent production, The Journey of O, very sex-plicit, had preceded Story into the market place by several months--and delivered what Story merely promised.

For independent purveyors of adult entertainment, 1976 proved to be a particularly rough year, especially after the Memphis trials. Federal harassment took all forms, even to fining shipping companies for handling pictures that had been labeled obscene. As a result, many producers began playing it safe--or safer. One of them, Louis Sher, eschewing further involvement in the field after an earlier Memphis hearing, became a major backer of the Broadway hit Shenandoah--which is just about as safe as you can get. Porno veteran Bill Osco, who began his career shooting stag loops, apparently filmed his X-rated musical-comedy version of Alice in Wonderland (with Playboy cover girl Kristine De Bell as Alice) as hard-core, then subsequently chickened out. Masks, opticals and blowups now conceal much of the action. Some hard-core producers sought to upgrade their pictures by beefing up the stories, as in Expose Me Lovely (with its obvious indebtedness to Farewell, My Lovely) or Angel Above, Devil Below, in which, with a nod to The Exorcist, a girl is possessed by the Devil, who persists in talking dirty through the lips of her vagina. (Another talking box, coincidentally, appears in the French-made Pussy Talk.)

Other sex-film makers sought to give their product class by paying the mounting fees asked by the porno superstars--Terri Hall, John C. "Johnny Wadd" Holmes and the like. Radley Metzger, classiest of the skin merchants, actually transported his cast for The Opening of Misty Beethoven to locations in Paris, Geneva and Rome, photographing in fashionable villas and handsome formal gardens his uninhibited (and uncredited) adaptation of George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion. A sex writer and researcher (Jamie Gillis) makes a bet that he can take a Parisian hooker and within a year transform her into the most talked-about and sought-after international jet setter. For a Parisian prostitute, Misty (the shapely and probably pseudonymous Constance Money) seems oddly untutored; but by the time the picture is over, of course, she has mastered every trick in the book. Just what Paris, Geneva and Rome had to do with it is a bit of a mystery, especially since the greater part of Misty's education takes place in bedrooms; but it can't be disputed that the film's handsome production values--plus a dildo scene that picks up where Myra Breckinridge left off--contributed to making this one of the more successful hard-core entries of 1976.

But the most obvious gambit, and the one most frequently resorted to as the year wore on, was for sex-film producers as well as major companies to play down the sex scenes and hype up the violence. In Cambist Films' Ilsa, Harem Keeper of the Oil Sheiks, scenes of torture, dismemberment and exceedingly bloody death (including the insertion of a high explosive into the vagina of one of the sheik's hapless ex-harem favorites) far outnumber the sex sequences. San Francisco's Alex deRenzy, a pioneer in American skin flicks, this year offered up (with a self-imposed X) Femmes de Sade, in which San Francisco prostitutes and their pimps wreak a lurid vengeance upon the ex-con who has been terrorizing their fellow workers. In Farewell Scarlet, Terri Hall (seen last year to better advantage in The Story of Joanna) is murdered during an orgy, with a dildo stuffed down her pretty throat. The Naughty Victorians reverted to that period favorite A Man with a Maid to recount how four outraged ladies avenge themselves upon the pedagogue who has abused and seduced them, with the help of some of his schoolboy pupils.

Perhaps the year's kinkiest release was the Mitchell Brothers' long-heralded Sodom and Gomorrah, an epic about those sinful sister cities of the Scriptures featuring a cast of hundreds, all looking like extras in those Biblical pageants that J. Arthur Rank used to produce for English Sunday schools, right down to the crepe beards and papier-mâché settings. There, however, the resemblance ceased. According to the Mitchells, the impotent King Bera of Sodom has decreed that buggery is the only acceptable form of intercourse in his kingdom; anything else is punishable by death--for the woman, death by impalement on a sharpened log rammed up her vagina. Even though Jim and Artie Mitchell like to insist that their movie is just campy good fun, the fun wasn't jolly enough to recoup the film's $300,000 production cost.

All of which would seem to suggest that by 1976, the bloom was well off the porno peach. While the hard-core audience for hard-core movies continues to exist, all the added frills--such as the Paris locations (again) for Metzger's The Image or the $60,000 that Osco reputedly sank into the musical score for Alice in Wonderland--merely upped the budgets, not the box office. Indeed, in the wake of the Memphis decisions, many communities that had previously adopted a live-and-let-live policy toward adult films suddenly turned to crackdowns, if not shutdowns. In California, the state supreme court, by a 4--3 ruling, extended its "public nuisance" statutes to include motion pictures, thus reversing a long-established policy. To contain such "nuisances," several cities--following the lead of Boston--have sought to limit the number of theaters in which sexually explicit movies may be shown by restricting them to a kind of red-light district. In Boston, it's known as the Combat Zone; Seattle recently adopted similar legislation. Ironically, New York City would love to do so as well--but not around Times Square (where it exists de facto already).

Many newspapers now follow the lead of the Los Angeles Times, which sequesters all X-rated movies, regardless of their nature or source, into one section of the paper and prints both copy and pictures in tones of watery gray. Among other Times stipulations--no open mouths, no prone positions and no quotes (not even quotes that the Times's own critics might have written). The odd thing is that none of these measures really satisfies the crusaders who want to cleanse the screen of all sexual material, nor does any of them act as a deterrent to patrons. Even in those cities where both newspapers and TV stations exert a total blackout on X-rated pictures, somehow the word still gets around.

Meanwhile, across the ocean, France--which relaxed its strictures against hardcore porn in the spring of 1975 but promptly hit this emerging home industry with staggering taxes--has become the new European center for sophisticated sex movies. Of France's 4328 moviehouses, 129 have now been licensed to show hardcore. At one point last year, as much as 40 percent of the total box-office take in France was reported to come from sex films. And while their plots and approaches are reminiscent of American movies of five or six years ago, the French girls--Brigitte Ariel, Jane Birkin, Corine Clery, Sylvia Kristel, Penelope Lamour, Brigitte Maier--are gorgeous. Small wonder that the American contingent at the Cannes Film Festival was seen with its tongues, and its checkbooks, hanging out.

The hottest item at Cannes this year was the Franco-Japanese production The Empire of the Senses. It's an extraordinary film. Directed by Nagisa Oshima, whose previous works have been more social than sexual, it depicts the consuming love between a serving girl (and onetime prostitute) and her oversexed employer, a restaurant owner. Although the man is married, the two perform a marriage ceremony (before a group of geishas) and proceed to live together as man and wife, performing their conjugal rites literally around the clock. Even so, the man slips off occasionally to see his wife and also has the energy to perform--at the girl's behest--with an aged geisha. But as their love games become more arduous, she takes to strangling him to spur him on to the peak of passion, first with her bare hands, then with a silken cord. And when, in one of these impassioned moments, he dies, she cuts off his penis and scrotum so that they will be eternally hers.

A postscript informs us that all of this really happened in Tokyo in 1936; but it hardly matters. The main thing is that Oshima makes it seem true--a Wagnerian Liebestod between two ordinary people whose love for each other blots out all other reality. And while the sex scenes are as frequent and explicit as in any porno I have ever seen, they have a totally different quality about them. This isn't business-as-usual sexploitation; this is sex as the ultimate expression of an overpowering love--a love that can kill to experience the ultimate ecstasy. The performances (by Eiko Matsuda and Tatsuya Fuji) are perfection, and each shot has been designed as if for a print by one of the great Japanese masters of 18th Century erotic art.

The climactic castration in L'Empire des Sens is mercifully brief and only belatedly bloody. But it is hardly unique--witness the aforementioned ball breaking in Drum--and may actually be part of a disturbing trend, most notable in European movies. In Maitresse--directed by the avant-garde, often surreal Barbet Schroeder--petite Bulle Ogier, operating a sort of psychological massage parlor for masochistic misfits, icily nails a client's penis to a board. In The Last Woman, a Franco-Italian production directed by Marco Ferreri (whose previous contribution was The Grande Bouffe), Gerard Depardieu, a factory worker estranged from his wife and shacking up with a young beauty, becomes so desperate over the girl's constant belittling that he commits the penultimate suicidal act: He cuts off his penis with an electric carving knife.

The debasement of the male, the pricking of the macho principle, as it were, is probably as graphic in these films as it will ever be. In his own demonic way, however, Roman Polanski has added a few touches to the portrait in his French-made The Tenant. In it, Polanski himself plays the central character, a paranoid clerk who moves into the apartment of a girl who has committed suicide by leaping from its window. Gradually, he begins to assume her identity, smoking her cigarettes, wearing the makeup he finds left behind in her apartment. Frightened by sounds he hears in the walls, driven mad by his hallucinations, he finally abandons himself entirely to her identity and, wearing her clothes, leaps from the window even as she had done. Few directors are more skilled than Polanski at making fear palpable: and in this instance, it's the fear of a man so repressed that he must lose himself in the fatal guise of a woman.

But it remained for the films of Italy's Lina Wertmuller to show us how vulnerable, and yet how durable, the male really is. An avowed disciple of (and former assistant to) Federico Fellini, Wertmuller emerged with the almost simultaneous release here of Swept Away . . . and Seven Beauties--not to mention her earlier works, The Seduction of Mimi, All Screwed Up and Let's Talk About Men--as one of the world's great film makers. Even John Simon agreed.

Ardent feminists view Wertmuller's pictures as denigrating to the female performers. They point to the debasement of Mariangela Melato by a brutal Giancarlo Giannini in Swept Away . . . and to the recurrence of prostitution in her films (Love and Anarchy is almost entirely set in a Roman brothel). What they seem to resent especially is the fact that the foremost woman director of our day isn't out making "women's films"--whatever they may be. As so often happens when someone is building a case, these critics see what they want to see and ignore the rest. To be sure, Wertmuller seems to have a penchant for attractive, working-class males (generally played by her favorite actor, Giannini). And usually they indulge in a good deal of sexist strutting and swaggering at the outset of the picture (or in Swept Away . . . in the middle). But see what happens to them in the end: In the last scene of Mimi, Giannini, for all his macho efforts to keep three families going simultaneously, is humiliated and deserted by the girl he wants more than anything else. Giannini, who held total dominion over Mariangela Melato as long as they were on that desert isle in Swept Away . . ., returns to his drab home and his drab life and mutely picks up his drab wife's bag. More often than not in Wertmuller films, the male character is humbled and broken while the female rises triumphant. And if they are triumphant whores--so what? Wertmuller would say they were doing their own thing--and doing it well.

All of this is perhaps best summarized in Wertmuller's most recent film, Seven Beauties, with Giannini as a strutting Neapolitan dandy during the last years of Mussolini's power. He is, in addition, a fool--and a survivor. He kills and dismembers a man who, he insists, dishonored his sister by calling her a whore (although she really was a whore). When he is captured and brought to trial, his pride prevents him from copping a plea of insanity, which suggests to the judge that he really is insane, so he's sent to a hospital instead of a prison. At the hospital, however, he's caught raping a mentally disturbed woman and given the alternative of jail or the army. He chooses the army. Up to this point, Wertmuller has artfully emphasized the man's macho characteristics--his honor, his pride, his sexual prowess, his Latin charm. Then, almost remorselessly, she strips away the façade. At the earliest possible moment, Giannini and a pal go A.W.O.L., only to be picked up by a German patrol and sent to a concentration camp as deserters. In his desperation to stay alive, Giannini truckles to the officers, offers his pitiful sex to the beefy camp matron in exchange for a few scraps of food, is even willing to shoot down his friend on the given order. At the end of the film, he returns to Naples and finds that all seven of his sisters are now prostitutes; but after his own ignominious ordeal, he is in no position to protest.

If in synopsis Seven Beauties sounds like a grim, unremittingly neorealist tract, it's because no words can fully convey the verve and vitality of a Wertmuller movie. Dark as the plot may seem, much of it plays like a comedy, ranging from dry wit to subtle irony to flat-out pratfalls. Above all, Wertmuller has a tremendous insight into people--their strengths, their weaknesses, the things that make them human--and a rare ability to communicate those insights to her audiences. As a result, her films swirl with a sense of life and joyous celebration, even though, like a platinum blonde, they may be dark at the roots. Just possibly, Lina Wertmuller might be the healthiest thing that has happened to movies in all of 1976.