Sex Stars of 1976

Who is Sylvester Stallone? Check back with us a year from now, if you don't already know the answer. (Or, if you can't wait, see his picture on page 189.) For just about the time that this issue of Playboy hits the stands, Stallone's first starring film, Rocky, will be hitting the screens. And once that happens, there's no way for the husky, unhandsome, 30ish Stallone--Sly to his friends--not to become a major star; indeed, almost the only new sex star of 1976. He managed to buck successfully a system that has been all too efficient in keeping new stars from emerging.

Stallone made his movie debut--along with Perry King, Henry Winkler and Susan Blakely--in 1974's low-budgeted, independent production The Lords of Flatbush. In it, he played the not overly bright Stanley, a member of a Brooklyn high school gang, who thinks he has knocked up his scrawny girlfriend. She insists on a wedding. The film's prize scene is in a jewelry store, where the girlfriend, accompanied by her girlfriend, shames Stanley into buying a $1600 ring he can ill afford.

The Lords of Flatbush, taken for distribution by Columbia, enjoyed a modest success and Stallone began to receive a number of equally modest offers--some television work and a minuscule (text continued on page 212)Sex Stars of 1976(continued from page 180) role in Cannonball, one of several demolition-derby movies that appeared in 1976. Meanwhile, he was busily writing the script for Rocky, the story of a club fighter in Philadelphia, a punk who, for walking-around money, leans on delinquent debtors for a loan shark. When Rocky gets a fluky chance at a championship bout, he pulls himself together to meet the challenge.

Stallone wrote the script with himself in mind. He subjected himself to a yearlong regimen of calisthenics so that he would be physically primed for the role. Many studios submitted bids for the script but not for Stallone. He wasn't, in studio parlance, bankable. (Which, incidentally, is a misnomer. No bank has ever considered a star, of whatever magnitude, to be collateral for a loan. A better word would be marketable--someone a major studio would buy as part of a package from an independent producer.) At any rate, the studios wanted Stallone's script for an established star. Stallone, however, was willing to wait, and eventually the independent production firm of Chartoff-Winkler bought the package--paying considerably less for Stallone and his script than other producers had offered for the script alone.

Out of Stallone's gamble has come a new star. Unfortunately, his story is the exception today. Both major and independent studios have become lamentably indifferent to developing new talent. Which means that whenever any film involving a multimillion-dollar investment is about to go into production, the same tired old names are trotted out. Not that they provide any guarantee of a profitable return: This year's The Missouri Breaks co-starred two of the biggest names in the business, Marlon Brando and Jack Nicholson, yet it merely broke even. Nor did Lucky Lady, co-starring Liza Minnelli, Burt Reynolds and Gene Hackman, rack up any box-office records.

Almost all the so-called bankables, you'll note, are men. At the moment, their ranks include Brando, Nicholson, Reynolds, Warren Beatty, Charles Bronson, Robert De Niro, Clint Eastwood, Steve McQueen, Paul Newman, Al Pacino and Robert Redford--and that's just for openers. Bring the budget down a couple of million and you can add such names as James Caan, Sean Connery, Dustin Hoffman, Elliott Gould. Ryan O'Neal and George Segal. But what do you find on the distaff side? Minnelli, Barbra Streisand and (yes) Tatum O'Neal, with possibly Ann-Margret, Goldie Hawn, Valerie Perrine, depending on the projected male co-star.

Perhaps the most common complaint heard around the studios in recent years has been, "There aren't any good roles for women anymore." The usual reply: "There aren't enough bankable females to play them." Which is part of the problem. Neither Minnelli nor Streisand (much less O'Neal) is physically or technically equipped to handle every role that comes along (as Minnelli rather pathetically demonstrated in Lucky Lady). Furthermore, even if he should take a fancy to a script in which the female role is clearly the stronger, a film maker might have difficulty signing up a marketable male co-star. Few in that category are eager to subordinate themselves to a woman who's less well known, however talented. Not when there are all those nice producers out there who want them for themselves alone.

Obviously, potential sex stars--male and female--are not suddenly in short supply, but these days, everything depends on "the deal." Both Lucky Lady and The Missouri Breaks were typical deal movies. A producer assembles enough salable elements--stars, director, script--in a package and he's in business. Whether or not his picture ultimately makes a nickel for the studio, he has earned his producer's fee--sometimes as much as ten percent of the budget--simply for putting the package together. Many producers today will refuse to handle anything under $1,000,000, regardless of its quality or potential. Such pictures, they claim, have all the headaches of a far more expensive movie--and what's in it for them?

What's in it for them, of course, is their percentage of the profits, should the picture take off. But it's a risk, and nowadays stars, as well as producers, would rather have the heavy money up front than gamble on a possibly profitable future. The top stars have it both ways--a fat salary up front, plus a percentage of either the net or the gross. Nicholson got $1,25,000 for his role in The Missouri Breaks, Brando $1,000,000. plus a healthy percentage of the gross, while Hackman received $1,250,000 for consenting to step into Lucky Lady after George Segal abruptly bowed out (at $750,000). Clearly, such multimillion-dollar contracts are profitable to the deal makers, but they can be suicidal for the studios that have to put up the money. After the twin disasters of Lucky Lady and At Long Last Love, which put a severe strain on its financial resources, 20th Century-Fox was saved by the surprising success of two relatively low-budgeted pictures, Mel Brooks's Silent Movie and The Omen, starring Gregory Peck (who had long ceased being referred to as one of the bankables).

Unfortunately, the prevalence of the deal and the studios' insistence on top stars to get pictures off the ground have had the dual effect of robbing audiences of new faces--and depriving those new faces of the job opportunities they need before they become old faces.

Such opportunities, alas, are going to be in even shorter supply, thanks to the new tax laws, which place severe restrictions on the kind of tax shelters that have been bringing new money into the industry. With these inducements gone, production is bound to sink to new lows.

Hope, however, springs eternal in the breast of every young actor. Waiting in the wings, as it were, are any number of contenders for that crucial thrust into the big time, foremost among them being Perry King, memorable as the matinee idol of the Twenties who seduces Raquel Welch in The Wild Party. Unfortunately for King, the film was a flop. He might have made the breakthrough in Mandingo, as the heir apparent to a slave stud farm in the Deep, Deep South (with prenuptial rights to any female slave who struck his fancy), except that the script required him to play the role as a crippled weakling. He refused to appear in the sequel, Drum; and Warren Oates, who inherited the part, apparently refused to play it as a cripple. King was wasted in Lipstick as Margaux Hemingway's hand-holding friend, the sort of role that used to fall to Ralph Bellamy: at this writing, he is shooting Andy Warhol's Bad in New York.

Sam Elliott, a refugee from television, was luckier as the muscular protagonist of Lifeguard who has to choose between the adulation (and occasional sexual favors) of the beach-bronzed teeny-boppers and a more regimented, but far more profitable, life as an auto salesman. It was Elliott who made the movie work, but how many people saw it? The same question may be asked of Keith Carradine, the guitar-playing love of Lily Tomlin's life in Robert Altman's Nashville, which gained critical acclaim but puny box-office receipts. Carradine was terribly persuasive in a none too likable role; he may have a better chance in the upcoming Welcome to L.A. His brother David, who brought kung fu to television, has been confining his big-screen activities to low-budget epics like Cannonball but, according to Hollywood scuttlebutt, makes his bid for authentic stardom as Thirties folk singer Woody Guthrie in Bound for Glory, a film that should be appearing on local screens before long.

Also high on the waiting list is handsome Jan-Michael Vincent, who never seems to want for work: In 1976 alone, he was seen in Baby Blue Marine, Vigilante Force and Shadow of the Hawk; but diat one plum role, the star maker, persists in eluding him. Just 31, and looking younger, he still has time. That he also has talent is demonstrated by the wide variety of parts he has played since his 1974 starring debut in Buster and Billie. He was particularly effective as the bullying, arrogant, ambitious cowpoke in Richard Brooks's Bite the Bullet, but the picture performed disappointingly, and probably for no one more so than Jan-Michael. Recently, though, he has moved from Columbia to 20th Century-Fox, which is starring him (above George Peppard, Dominique Sanda and Paul Winfield) in a big-budget science-fiction thriller. Damnation Alley.

Unhappily, no crystal ball reveals in advance how any picture will do--or what it will do for the people who are in it. On paper, the possibility of playing Clark Gable in Universal's pseudo-biographical Gable and Lombard must have seemed to James Brolin the opportunity of a lifetime, his one big chance to emerge from the shadow of Marcus Welby, M.D. Brolin has tried several times before, notably in Skyjacked and Westworld, but these did little for him. But to play Gable, the sexiest sex star of the Thirties--what more could any ambitious young actor ask? The answer is, plenty--beginning with a decent script. It didn't take a film historian to poke holes in Barry Sandler's screenplay; any movie buff could manage, and most of them did. What was worse, the role fitted Brolin like the suit of a man who has just lost 20 pounds. Universal's make-up people managed to make him look like Gable (at least from certain angles), and Brolin himself produced a reasonable facsimile of the well-remembered Gable speech mannerisms. But watching him in the film was a cross between catching a third-rate star in a hit show's touring company on an off night in Paducah and gazing upon Gable's effigy in the Hollywood Wax Museum.

Most of the newer fellows had even less opportunity. True, the talented Jeff Bridges did an outstanding job as the jaded Southern aristocrat who finds a slim purpose in life among the muscle builders and blue-grass musicians in Bob Rafelson's raffish Stay Hungry--but the audiences stayed away in droves. Jeff's no-less-talented brother, Beau, wasted himself as a psychotic young man who perhaps loves, perhaps hates his mother in Dragonfly (later retitled One Summer Love) and as a foppish martinet in Swashbuckler (which buckled more than it swashed). To all intents and purposes, the two highly personable Bridges boys were simply marking time in 1976.

So was Timothy Bottoms, with two low-keyed performances in two modest movies, A Small Town in Texas and Operation Daybreak. So was ex-evangelist Marjoe Gortner, who converted to movies on the basis of a documentary based on his life. Neither Bobbie Jo and the Outlaw nor the outrageously cheap-Jack production of The Food of the Gods (a sci-fi thriller in which Marjoe is required to subdue pony-sized rats) was likely to advance his reputation; maybe he'll do better with Viva Knievel! Michael Sarrazin's career was not enhanced a whit by his appearances in The Loves and Times of Scaramouche and The Gumball Rally; and Harvey Keitel, after his dynamic roles in Martin Scorsese's Mean Streets and Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, may have dropped back a few rungs after playing a nails-hard pimp in Scorsese's Taxi Driver, a 19th Century version of a cool PR man in Airman's Buffalo Bill and the Indians and a squarish ambulance driver in Mother, Jugs & Speed. Keitel, who has the high-octane energy to make it as a major sex star, runs the risk of slipping over into the category of dependable character actor. Perhaps his role in Welcome to L.A., which Altman is producing, will supply the answer.

There is a strange no man's land between the stars who are on their way up and those who have already made it. In this uncomfortable category fall people like Bruce Dern, Richard Dreyfuss. Kris Kristofferson, Roy Scheider and Michael York, all of whom have appeared in prestigious pictures, all of whom are recognizable "names." But it has yet to be proved that their names are what bring anybody to the box office. Dreyfuss and Scheider, for example, were together in Jaws; but no one doubts for a moment that it was Bruce, die plastic shark, that attracted the customers. Was it Dern or director Alfred Hitchcock who won audiences for Family Plot? If it was Dern, what became of all those fans when he starred in Won Ton Ton, the Dog Who Saved Hollywood? Where were York's fans when he starred in Logan's Run? Kristofferson was certainly sexy in The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea, which fared fairly well at the box office, but he seemed far more at ease in Vigilante Force, which went nowhere. Elliott Gould and George Segal are in constant demand, no matter how poorly their last films performed, but might not real pros like Tony Lo Bianco, Charles Grodin or Sam Waterston do as well? Who's to know? They are looked upon as reliable actors, not marquee attractions.

Nor has 1976 proved a banner year for black stars, most of whom were bred in the blaxploitation boom that followed in the wake of Shaft.Possibly, it's because the men who appeared in those pictures--Jim Brown, Richard Roundtree, Fred Williamson et al.--were not essentially actors. Brown and Williamson established their reputations in pro football; Roundtree, for all his muscles, had simply done some modeling in New York. Since the earlier films were basically action pictures, this lack of histrionic expertise could be forgiven, if not ignored altogether. With the success of Sounder, Lady Sings the Blues and Mandingo, however, emphasis has swung to "crossover" pictures, films created to appeal to both white and black audiences, with greater attention paid to plot and characterization. As a result, those star athletes who have muscles everywhere but in their faces--like heavyweight Ken Norton in Drum--are at an obvious disadvantage. Probably at the top of the heap now (literally so in Universal's logo for The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars and Motor Kings) is handsome, talented Billy Dee Williams, who earlier established himself in Lady Sings the Blues and Mahogany. He seems to be preempting the roles that ordinarily would have gone to Sidney Poitier. Also on the rise at the moment is Roger E. Mosley, who gave a powerful performance in Leadbelly but may be destined to join the ranks of James Earl Jones and Yaphet Kotto as a strong character actor, not a sex star.

The entire star-making situation is aggravated by the unconscionable length of time it now takes to get most major pictures produced. Ryan O'Neal spent the better part of a year in England and Ireland working on Stanley Kubrick's ill-fated Barry Lyndon before going into Peter Bogdanovich's Nickelodeon. With any luck, O'Neal should be visible onscreen again around Easter time. Al Pacino, always choosy about his roles, let nearly a year go by between Dog Day Afternoon and Bobby Deerfield, currently shooting in Europe for release next summer. Barbra Streisand, whose Funny Lady appeared in March 1975, will just make it under the wire this year with her long-delayed rock version of A Star Is Born, co-starring Kristofferson. As for Brando, no one is prepared to even guess the release date of Apocalypse Now, the trouble-plagued, multimillion-dollar epic that Francis Ford Coppola has been shooting in the Philippines since last March. Of the established stars, only Charles Bronson and Clint Eastwood appear with sufficient frequency to keep their credit lines intact.

On the distaff side, the scene is even scarier. According to Norma Connolly, national chairwoman of the Screen Actors Guild's Woman's Conference Committee, fewer than 40 percent of SAG's 32,500 members are female; yet their share of the jobs in movies and television is a mere 23 percent. Obviously, the scramble for women's roles is becoming intense and bitter. Perhaps that is why gorgeous Victoria Principal, after two unimpressive outings (Vigilante Force and I Will, I Will . . . for Now) in 1976, finally withdrew from the rat-race to become, of all things, an agent.

There are plenty of bright, eager, experienced young women for the casting directors to call upon whenever the occasion arises, if the occasion arises. The trouble is, they all seem to have been cut with the same cookie cutter; which cookie is chosen becomes primarily a matter of chance. Significantly, when a female role of any depth turns up, it generally goes to a European actress. Steve Shagan, for example, rewrote the callgirl character in his Hustle script to make her French, so that the role could be played by Catherine Deneuve. Ever since the exciting talent of Marthe Keller was revealed to American film makers last year in Claude Lelouch's And Now My Love (in which she played three generations of women), she has been besieged by the studios. Before the year is out, she will be delectably visible in The Marathon Man, followed next spring by Black Sunday; currently, she's back in France co-starring with AJ Pacino in Bobby Deerfield. The pale blonde beauty of Dominique Sanda graces not only Bernardo Bertolucci's five-hour marathon, 1900 (in which she plays opposite Robert De Niro and Donald Sutherland), and Bernardo Bolognini's The Inheritance (for which she won a best-actress award) but also 20th Century-Fox's otherwise all-American Damnation Alley--playing, against all probability, the only female left alive west of the Rockies (in Las Vegas, yet). During the past year or so, England's Charlotte Rampling has moved from Mexico (Foxtrot) to Hollywood (Farewell, My Lovely) to Canada (Orca, with Richard Harris). And Glenda Jackson would seem to have first crack at anything that's left, especially if it's a Great Dramatic Role (like her Hedda Gabler or her Sarah Bernhardt in The Incredible Sarah).

Why so many imported actresses? Because European film makers have always laid great stress upon their female characters, giving them personalities and identities. Consider only Liv Ullmann, so extraordinary in Ingmar Bergman's Cries and Whispers and Face to Face, so lost in her U. S. pictures Lost Horizons and 40 Carats. European stars are chosen by American directors not merely because they have a face but because they have a persona--an identity that emerges out of the roles they have been asked to play. The tragedy is that our native actresses don't have the same opportunities to display their talents or to stretch them. Perhaps American actresses today, like the opera singers of an earlier time, should go abroad to be discovered. After all, it worked for Eastwood and Bronson!

Still, there are thousands of young hopefuls who continue to knock on studio gates and dozens who have been persistent enough (or lucky enough) to be wait-listed for stardom. Tops among these at the moment is tall, tawny Lauren Hutton, nee Mary Laurence Hutton, former Playboy Club Bunny, former Vogue model and, up to 30 days a year, Revlon's maid of all work (at $200,000 annually, she doesn't do windows). Lauren, now visible in Gator and Welcome to L.A., is not at all convinced that a film career is her be-all and end-all. "The whole point in life," she told an interviewer recently, "is to travel and hope it shows on your face." She has turned down as many film jobs as she has accepted, explaining, "There's some garbage you can't eat." Garbage or not, at least she gets the offers, which she tries to fit in between modeling sessions and her own photographic expeditions up the Amazon or off in Bali.

Also out of the ranks of New York's fashion models comes tall, willowy Candy Clark, who, unlike Hutton, is determined to make it all work for her on the screen. Her film career dates back to a Thanksgiving party in New York when, suddenly, there was Jack Nicholson looming over her and inviting her to watch some scenes he was shooting for Carnal Knowledge. He also gave her name to casting director Fred Roos, who asked her to fly out to Hollywood to test for a role in John Huston's Fat City. "But I was doing all right as a model," Candy recalls, "and, besides, I'd have to pay my own way. So we compromised. I said I'd come if he'd take me to Disneyland and to the Academy Awards. He did, even though we sat behind a pillar in the third balcony for the Academy show." Three years later, she had a much better seat--as an Oscar nominee for her role as the teenaged blonde sexpot in American Graffiti. Next year, she may well be back there again, thanks to her tempestuous scenes opposite rock star David Bowie--the oddly compelling but most implausible leading man of the year--in Nicholas Roeg's The Man Who Fell to Earth, in which, for the first time, Candy went nude. "I never did it in New York," she says, "even though the price for nude models was $500 a day-- or was it per hour? But when I read the script, it seemed appropriate, so I did it. After this Harry Reems case [the Memphis Deep Throat trials, chronicled in October's Playboy], though, I'm not so sure. I only hope I don't land in jail somewhere."

Candy looks back on her career with other misgivings. "Perhaps I started too high," she says. "Huston, Roeg and George Lucas--they're hard to follow." By Hollywood standards, she lives modestly, driving a Volkswagen and turning down roles in movies--and especially in TV shows--that don't interest her. As a result, she has made only three pictures in five years. But, like dozens of other talented young actresses, she's determined to hang in there. What Candy can't understand--and with reason--is why she should have been paid so much less than her male co-stars this time out. "I was signed right after David," she says, "and, by rights, I should have had second billing. But they wanted to leave that open to attract another male star--Rip Torn. He got much more than I did, yet I had to do a lot of physical things, like picking David up and carrying him. And the nude scenes." In the best of all possible worlds, Candy would have received as much for her work as David Bowie did. But then, tills isn't the best of all possible worlds.

The list of models who have become movie stars is a long one, topped at the moment by Marisa Berenson and Cybill Shepherd but including (in addition to Lauren and Candy) such promising and attractive newcomers as Farrah Fawcett-Majors of Logan's Run and Jessica Lange, who took up where Fay Wray left off in Dino De Laurentiis' impressively budgeted version of King Kong. According to advance reports, old Kong does considerably more with his new girlfriend than just tote her up the side of a skyscraper. (Just what, given his disproportionate size, is difficult to imagine.) A few years ago, the discovery that the 99-and-44/100-percent-pure girl on its Ivory Snow boxes had become San Francisco porno queen Marilyn Chambers became a matter of some concern to Procter & Gamble. Although both corporation and Chambers seem to have survived the ordeal, Marilyn has been less than successful in a stab at a night-club career; she's now awaiting the start date for City Blues, a new (and non-X) movie to be directed by veteran Nicholas (Rebel Without a Cause) Ray. While waiting, she was imprudent enough to dance nude in a Los Angeles theater--and get busted for it.

Meanwhile, beauteous Catherine Deneuve, formerly one of France's most sought-after high-fashion models, has been supplementing her take-home pay from movie studios on both sides of the Atlantic by appearing in those Chanel ads, the sultriest 60 seconds on prime-time TV.

The year's most publicized recruit from the fashion salons, however, is six-foot, sexy Margaux Hemingway, the athletic, 21-year-old granddaughter of author Ernest and daughter of Jack Hemingway, a fish-and-game commissioner in Ketchum, Idaho (on the edge of fashionable Sun Valley). On a ski promotion tour to New York City, she almost immediately met Errol Wetson, who, impressed by her ail-American good looks and boundless vitality, offered to oversee her career--and her life. After sharing an apartment on Manhattan's Upper East Side, the two were married, in Paris, in June 1975. Within months of their meeting, Wetson had skyrocketed Margaux's modeling rates to $100 an hour by seeing to it that both her face and her frame graced not only the fashion pages but also the society sections of New York newspapers and national magazines. By the time the search for someone to play die fashion model who gets raped in Lipstick began, she had become the logical choice. Everyone knew her name and most people, especially women, could recognize on sight the cool, blue-eyed blonde with the dark lashes and the sultry lips--a kind of animated Grace Kelly. What was she really like? Lipstick (which also featured Margaux's younger sister, Mariel) left the question largely unanswered. But there can be no question that this handsome, spirited girl will have many more opportunities to prove herself. "I guess for me," she said not long ago, "movies are inevitable." And one can only ask, Why not? If movies weren't invented for girls who look like Margaux, what were they invented for?

Well, maybe for girls like Valerie Perrine, former lead dancer in Las Vegas revues. Catapulted into films with her galvanic portrait of Montana Wildhack, the fantastic foldout girl of Michael Sacks's sex fantasies in Slaughterhouse-Five, the winsome Valerie consolidated her position both as actress and as sexpot by playing (marvelously well) the role of Honey, a night-club stripper switched on to drugs by husband Lenny Bruce, in Robert Fosse's award-winning production of Lenny. This year's outing, in which she played Carlotta Monti opposite Rod Steiger in W. C. Fields and Me, was less felicitous. In fact, she hated the whole experience. "After that film was finished," she told an interviewer, "I was ready to quit the business. I cried all the time, and drank too much, and was so unhappy I behaved unprofessionally. I regret it now. I did something an actress should never do; I gave up trying. I got a bad reputation on that film." Perhaps within the industry; but for the critics and the public, her performance as Fields's long-suffering but understanding mistress was one of the film's few saving graces. As far as the industry is concerned (the public has yet to be consulted), Valerie more than redeems herself in the forthcoming Windfall, in which she plays a lady detective assigned to prevent Italian car mechanic Terence Hill from collecting a billion-dollar legacy in San Francisco. "I just love it," said Perrine of the film while on location in Sonoma, California. And the people she was working with--including Jackie Gleason--just loved her. "She was wonderful, cooperative and thoroughly professional," stated producer Steven Bach, "a producer's dream star."

Enhancing Valerie's dreams off and on over the past several years has been millionaire Jamal Kanafani, a Lebanese industrialist who, she avows, got her to cut down on her drinking after the Fields fiasco. "I love the way he treats me," she said recently. "I consider myself a very liberated lady. I support myself. I'm 32. I'm a free woman. Not the kind who has to burn her bra or wear Levis to prove it--really free. But here I am with this man, and when he's around, I hardly open my mouth unless spoken to. He makes me feel--do you want to know?--totally, absolutely feminine."

And then we have Jacqueline Bisset and Karen Black, two of the hardest-working young ladies in films at the moment. For Black, the high point came early in the year, when she played a reluctant accomplice to murder in Hitchcock's nimble, witty Family Plot, and managed to come off looking like a minor-league Marlene Dietrich. (Hitchcock had achieved the same effect some years earlier with Eva Marie Saint in North by Northwest.) Karen's low point had to be Crime and Passion, in which she plays Omar Sharif's partner in crime in an attempt to swindle industrialist Bernhard Wicki out of a great deal of money. Karen came on strong, but the script--allegedly improvised on location--didn't. In between was Burnt Offerings, in which Karen becomes increasingly enthralled by a malevolent mansion. The mansion has a swimming pool, and one evening Karen goes skinny-dipping with husband Oliver Reed; apart from that, it would be difficult to list the film's attractions.

Nor did Bisset fare much better with her roles in End of the Game and St. Ives, both rather staid productions for a girl who made her bow in a picture (The Sweet Ride) in the opening shots of which she lost the top of her bikini. Still to come is The Deep, Peter Benchley's follow-up to his highly successful Jaws. Will she lose more of her accouterments there? Probably not. The latest word from Bisset is "No more nudes." Not so petite Geneviève Bujold, who took a bold plunge for all to see in Swashbuckler, and also dueled with the swashbuckler himself, Robert Shaw, in a scene in which he insouciantly sliced, one by one, the ties holding her blouse together. The accomplished Canadian-born actress reveals even more in Alex and the Gypsy, in which a salient plot point revolves around her tattooed derrière. Nevertheless, as the nubile student with whom Cliff Robertson falls madly and, it turns out, incestuously in love in Brain De Palma's Obsession, Bujold reveals that she has other assest--notably, the ability to project a youthful sensuality estratordinary for an actress pushing 35. Bilingual, she is in constant demand here, in Canada and in France, and small wonder. She went directly from Swashbuckler into Alex and the Gypsy opposite Jack Lemmon, making it quite possible that the diminutive Geneviève will have four major films to her credit for the year.

There's an old Hollywood story, perhaps apocryphal, about a studio head who was famous for having all of his starlets go down on him. Finally, one of them achieved full stardom. The producer unzipped his fly in anticipation of the accustomed ritual, but the lady icily informed him, "I don't have to do that anymore. I'm a star now." We can hope that particular requirement is a thing of the past. But we can also rejoice in the fact that not all established stars are inhibited about mere nudity. One has only to recall Sarah Miles's scenes with Kristofferson in The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea, or Charlotte Rampling's in Yuppi Du with Adriano Celentano, or Romy Schneider's in anything, to realize that clothes are no longer a status symbol. Still clambering toward stardom, and shucking their garb en route, are pert Susanne (A Boy and His Dog) Benton; fashionable Marisa Berenson, who had precious little else to do in Stanley Kubrick's Briny Lyndon marathon; producer Robert Evans' great and good friend Barbara Carrera (like so many newcomers, an ex-model), glimpsed nude through the blurred lenses of Embryo; Veronica Cartwright, working for porno-flick director Richard Dreyfuss in Inserts; Sally Field, television's Flying Nun, getting her wings clipped--but good--by Jeff Bridges in Slay Hungry; Fiona Lewis, a tempestuous British import whose uninhibited charms graced both Lisztomania and the otherwise graceless Drum; Susan Sarandon, shacking up with emotionally disturbed Beau Bridges in One Summer Love; the perennial Barbara Seagull, who is once again Barbara Hershey, stripped and offered up for gang rape in The Last Hard Men; and Sharon Weber (who back in 1971 was Playboy's Playmate of the Year, Sharon Clark) in a memorable screen debut as the airline hostess who makes wild love with Sam Elliott in the opening scenes of Lifeguard, then backs off when she realizes that his whole life is made up of one-night stands.

But the big stars? Ann-Margret was indisputably herself in Carnal Knowledge--and carnal as all get-out in Ken Russell's Tommy--but in Tony Richardson's Joseph Andrews, according to advance reports, she limits herself to a wet see-through something. Nor is it yet possible to say how sexplicit her scenes with Bruce Dern will be in the French-based Twist. Raquel Welch has always promised more than she has delivered, and there is no reason to believe that anything will have changed in the remake of The Prince and the Pauper, in production in England. As for Liza Minnelli's going nude in A Matter of Time, or Streisand's stripping in A Star Is Born (both unfinished at this writing), not bloody likely.

Which leaves us with such European-based stars in the ascendant as the incredibly beautiful Isabelle Adjani, who deservedly won the New York Film Critics' award last February for her touching, but ultimately terrifying, performance of a girl by love possessed in Francois Truffaut's The Story of Adèle H. and a few months later proved no less effective as Roman Polanski's girlfriend in his eerie The Tenant. Tina Aumont, the shapely daughter of onetime matinee idol Jean-Pierre Aumont, is also on the rise, with two films (Salon Kitty and A Matter of Time) already completed for 1976 release and a major role in Federico Fellini's eagerly awaited version of Casanova.

Among the emerging Italian beauties must be listed the delectable Laura Antonelli, whose career was advanced by several long paces when she was starred by the late Luchino Visconti (above Lina Wertmuller's Giancarlo Giannini and our own Jennifer O'Neill) in his final film, The Innocent. Adapted from a story by Italy's favorite romantic writer, Gabriele D'Annunzio, the film casts Laura as an aristocrat's loveless wife who, after a brief affair with another man, stoutly refuses to abort the child of that union. Previewed out of competition at Cannes, it was one of the hits of the festival. Perhaps tops at the moment, however, is Mariangela Melato, Wertmuller's favorite actress (Love and Anarchy, The Seduction of Mimi, Swept Away ...). This is the year, of course, in which Wertmuller is being discovered with a vengeance by both American critics and American moviegoers. And with that discovery, inevitably, has come the recognition that blondined, curvy Mariangela is one of the sexiest all-purpose actresses around--strident and bawdy as the whore in Love and Anarchy, bitchy and aloof as the society lady Giannini brings to heel in Swept Away....

As noted last month, France relaxed its antiporn legislation in 1975 and has been inundated with sex films (most of them soft-core) ever since. When skin flicks first surfaced in the United States, most of the actresses who appeared in them chose to remain anonymous--or, at best, pseudonymous. Not so in France. In the past year or so, Jane Birkin, Corine Clery, Brigitte Maier and (above all) Emmanuelle's Sylvia Kristel have become superstars, apparently with the option of stepping over to the mainstream of film making should they so desire--or should a mainstream director desire one of them (as Roger Vadim did when he selected Kristel to appear in La Femme Fidèle).

To these should be added the name of blonde, Swedish-born Maria Lynn, who divides her time these days between Paris and her native land. Her co-star in at least two of her recent films, Bel Ami and Justine & Juliette, is our own, hard-pressed Harry Reems. Although Reems collected a paltry $100 for his stint in Deep Throat, he managed considerably better on subsequent Stateside pornos, and better yet when he ventured upon the Continent. All of this was cut short, however, when the FBI rapped upon his door one night in July 1974 and served him with papers extraditing him to Memphis for his part in "a national conspiracy to transport interstate an obscene motion picture." Obviously, Reems had not himself lugged prints of Deep Throat from Fort Lauderdale to Memphis. But, according to Judge Harry W. Wellford, the Nixon appointee hearing the case, "If it weren't for actors like Mr. Reems, we wouldn't have movies like Deep Throat."

The consternation of a Candy Clark, mentioned earlier, about her nude scenes in The Man Who Fell to Earth is spreading throughout the Hollywood community. A committee for Reems's legal defense includes such prominent names as Warren Beatty, Tony Bill, Dick Cavett, Louise Fletcher, Gene Hackman, John Houseman, Norman Lear, Jack Lemmon, Shirley MacLaine, Rod McKuen (who has also contributed office space), Steve McQueen, Mike Nichols, Jack Nicholson, Ryan O'Neal and Barbra Streisand. All realize that this precedent-setting trial, in which a performer is named conspirator in a work over which he has no control, could ultimately affect every one of them. As Nicholson put it: "Had the Reems case been national precedent when Carnal Knoivledge was released, I could have been subpoenaed and put in jail by some self-seeking religious fanatic functioning as a prosecutor in East Podunk. If similar prosecutions began happening around the nation, an actor would practically be afraid to say hello in a film unless there was a confessional screen between him and the person he was talking to." So fund-raising parties for Reems are now booming from coast to coast, and industry people are contributing out of their own pockets, because they are in agreement with die position taken by Reems's defense attorney, Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz. "To more and more film makers," Dershowitz said, "self-censorship will be the only logical course if they know that although it's legal to show their movie in most parts of the country, that same movie can get them indicted for criminal conspiracy in places like Memphis. And as self-censorship grows, the most restrictive local community standards will gradually dominate the rest of the country." And our sex stars will be reduced to sharing soda-fountain straws widi Andy Hardy.