Sex In Cinema--1977

Love may be a four-letter word, but it wasn't the four-letter word we heard most often at the movies this year. Under tremendous fire from church groups, their own Motion Picture Association of America and, especially, from local politicos out to make a name for themselves, Hollywood studios in 1977 beat a noticeable retreat from the rampant nudity and semiexplicit sex scenes that had adorned their movies for almost a decade. If Black Sunday had been made a few years earlier, we would no doubt have seen, during that scene in which Israeli commando Robert Shaw discovers Palestinian terrorist Marthe Keller in her shower, everything that the Shaw character saw. Aiming for a PG rating (which, ironically, was denied because of excessive violence), the film's makers proffered merely a head-and-shoulders shot of Keller recoiling in terror. In Sam Peckinpah's Cross of Iron, a German platoon captures a Russian strong point that is manned by women. It's hard to believe that in the ten or so minutes reportedly cut from the (text continued on page 200) Sex in Cinema (continued from page 156) film--a sequence that includes a rape and the sadistic bludgeoning to death of a Russian soldierette, as well as the castration of a German soldier by a team of outraged female Bolsheviki--the action was not a good deal more explicit than the R-rated release prints would indicate.

But if total nudity and frank intimations of sex are fast disappearing from our films, explicit language is not. When last year's All the President's Men was granted a PG rating, the M.P.A.A. thought it had made it clear that Dustin Hoffman's repeated use of the word fuck, with numerous variations thereon, was not to be considered precedential (just as Clark Gable's "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn" was supposed to be nonprecedential in an earlier, more innocent time). It didn't happen that way. This year, films as varied as Woody Allen's The Front and Joseph E. Levine's costly spectacular A Bridge Too Far broke the M.P.A.A.'s sound barrier and won. True, Paul Newman had a fairly warm bed scene in Slap Shot, which also featured two busloads of hockey players and their female fans mooning out the windows of their vehicles; but the film's real shocker was the dialog, which caught accurately--some felt too accurately--the locker-room raunch of Newman and his teammates. Since the script was written by Nancy Dowd, an outspoken feminist (and probably was intended as a put-down of the macho male), there were those who weren't certain whether Dowd was attempting a turnoff or a rip-off. In Marty Feldman's PG-rated The Last Remake of Beau Geste, voluptuous Ann-Margret does a considerable amount of bed-hopping, but her charms at all times remain carefully under wraps. On the other hand, she is given to lines like "Screw the name of Geste!" In a wildly funny mock commercial that interrupts a desert battle, Feldman brings on a used-camel salesman whose business motto is "Let Hakkim Hump You." Similarly, while the latest James Bond episode, The Spy Who Loved Me, can boast the customary contingent of intercontinental charmers, the sexplay is largely by innuendo--and the innuendo is largely in the dialog. When he receives a summons from M to return to London, Bond, of course, is in bed with a beautiful blonde. "Tell him to pull out of there immediately," M says to Moneypenny. It's oral sex, but hardly in the Linda Lovelace tradition.

Not that the mainstream movies have suddenly become bereft of sex and nudity. They haven't. But during the past year or so, with many newspapers and TV stations becoming just as uptight about R-rated movies as about X-rated ones, an R can severely limit a film's box-office potential. As a result, the producers of both The Front and A Bridge Too Far (as had the producers of All the President's Men the year before) argued vehemently--and ultimately with success--before the M.P.A.A.'s Classification and Rating Administration that, despite the fucks and similar obscenities on their sound tracks, the social importance of their pictures warranted the broader audience that an R would exclude. For its part, the M.P.A.A. maintained that rather than change its present guidelines, which automatically assign an R tag to pictures using such language, it would prefer to consider the individual merits of each case brought to it on appeal. Which sounds reasonable enough until one begins to examine the guidelines themselves. By what possible yardstick do screw and hump warrant a PG, while fuck draws an automatic R? And if these are, indeed, vulgarisms, what are we to make of the scene in Fun with Dick and Jane in which Jane Fonda, squatting on a toilet, discusses domestic affairs with husband George Segal, wipes herself, flushes, draws up her panties and continues the conversation? It's all, according to the M.P.A.A., good, clean, PG-rated fun, though the setting was scarcely vital to the scene itself, which could just as easily have been played in a laundromat.

And yet the password around the M.P.A.A. continues to be good taste. The problem is, whose taste? In a recent interview, Charles Jarrott, director of The Other Side of Midnight, freely discussed his misgivings about taking on the film adaptation of Sidney Sheldon's sex-drenched best seller. "When you get offered a thing like this," he said, "you never know whether they really want you to plug the sex angle or not. Actually, no one said anything to me specifically about what I could and couldn't do. But I'm sure if I had tried to be very explicit, they would have told me, 'No way.' As a matter of fact, Frank Yablans [the producer] and I agreed that the last thing we wanted to do was frontal nudity. It was a matter of judgment. Explicit sex, you see, takes away a little of the fantasy, and Midnight was meant to play up to everybody's fantasy of sex."

Nevertheless, following Sheldon's story line of a young Frenchwoman (Marie-France Pisier) who learns to climb the ladder of success on her back, Jarrott found himself obliged to supply not only several sex scenes but a strong abortion sequence as well--all of which, despite his efforts to be tasteful, earned the film its R. In Jarrott's version, the abortion, which Noelle (Pisier) commits herself with a wire clothes hanger, takes place in a bathtub. Through a cloud of steam, we discern a clutching hand and a trace of blood in the water. "You don't actually see anything," says Jarrott, "except in the mind. We may have a close-up on the screen, but in the mind you're seeing it all. And it hurts, it really hurts." The scene stands as a shocker; but so does Pisier's big sex scene, in which, according to Jarrott, "I wanted to establish her as a great courtesan. So I have her do something in the scene with some ice cubes, and everybody wonders, What's with the ice cubes? I did it quite deliberately. I wanted her to do something that was beyond the ken of the average audience. I actually thought the studio would fall down on me for that one, but not at all. True, it's a sex scene. But it's different. It has humor in it." Not, however, enough to avoid a Condemned rating from the U. S. Catholic Conference, which found it "scrupulously faithful to its trashy origins."

This was also the year when everybody--but everybody--was cracking down on violence in both films and television. It used to be argued, back in the days of the Production Code, that the reason American films were so violent was that normal sexual outlets were being repressed. When the wraps finally came off, late in the Sixties, oddly enough, the films became more violent than ever. Today, while the sexual quotient is on the wane, violence seems to have again escalated. In Cross of Iron, Peckinpah fairly dotes on bodies being hurled into the air by high explosives and includes one particularly repulsive shot of a corpse being crushed beneath the treads of a tank. In Slap Shot, Paul Newman, the coach and ace player of a losing ice-hockey team, instructs his cohorts to go out and commit mayhem upon rival squads and imports a trio of Neanderthal nitwits to ensure the action. Black Sunday's sequence in which Bruce Dern tests the effectiveness of his weapon on the unsuspecting guard at an abandoned airstrip has to be one of the most coldblooded, chilling murders ever depicted. Not to mention the graphic horrors that routinely turn up in such excursions into the supernatural (all obviously inspired by The Exorcist) as Demon Seed, The Omen, The Sentinel and, of course, Exorcist II: The Heretic--which managed to send its audiences into hysterics, but of laughter, not of fear.

Just as last year considerable concern was expressed for the physical well-being of actresses appearing in the so-called snuff movies (actually, there was only one--and it was a fake), this year's concern seemed to center on films featuring the sexual abuse of children. Ever since Linda Blair's graphic masturbation scene in The Exorcist and Jodie Foster's portrayal of a precocious child prostitute in Taxi Driver, the tendency to feature children in sexual roles has been notably on the increase--and not only in the pornos, where films like Alice in Wonderland, Babyface and Baby Rosemary have taken to using young women who can pass as nymphets for their hard-core sex scenes. (As to the hard-core loops involving children as young as three in sexual encounters either with adults or with other children, according to David Friedman, chairman of the board of the Adult Film Association, "They've been coming into the field either from Scandinavia or from amateurs who are caught up in this whole pedophile thing. I can only say that no member of our organization, which includes all the major producers, distributors and exhibitors of adult films in this country, would touch them with a ten-foot pole.")

On the other hand, in first-run movie-houses, kids are playing what isn't really kid stuff. Jodie was amusing enough (and believable enough) as a night-club chantoosie and kept woman in the all-kiddie Bugsy Malone; but having her do a bedroom scene with Scott Jacoby in The Little Girl Who Lives down the Lane (not to mention poisoning Martin Sheen and arranging a fatal accident for Alexis Smith) is something else again--too much, in fact, for the Catholics, who noted that "the film offends because it condones teenage promiscuity and makes a 13-year-old the object of sexual titillation." Blair, of course (after her searing television stint as a child raped with a broom handle by a group of older girls in NBC's Born Innocent), was back in Exorcist II, her pubescent body flimsily wrapped in gauzy, transparent robes. And Paramount at present has in production Pretty Baby, with New York's most beautiful child model, Brooke Shields, as a 12-year-old prostitute in a New Orleans brothel.

Quite apart from the pedophilic set, however, there seems to be a large and ready audience for movies featuring cheerleaders, pompon girls or anything else that suggests nubile teenagers in scanty dress. The formula generally mixes lots of fast cars, sexy talk, a rape (or attempt thereof) and an auto-chase finale. In A.I.P.'s Joyride, which is one of the year's better ones, Desi Arnaz, Jr., Robert Carradine and Melanie Griffith drive from Los Angeles to Alaska for the fun and adventure they expect to find there. Instead, life along the pipeline proves so hard and violent that they turn to crime, joined by teenaged prostitute Anne Lockhart. From then on, it's one escapade after another, followed by the inevitable car chases. In Death Game, Sondra Locke and Colleen Camp play a pair of teenaged girls who terrorize San Francisco businessman Seymour Cassel for a long weekend, after having induced him into his bathtub for a bout of three-way sex. In such PG flicks as Grand Theft Auto and Super Van, the accent falls more heavily on the car chases than on the girl chases; but otherwise, the recipe remains unchanged.

For the most disturbing (and disturbed) teenage portrayals of the year, however, one must turn to the films starring the sad-eyed Sissy Spacek: Carrie, Welcome to L.A. and Robert Altman's interestingly failed 3 Women. As Carrie, Spacek plays a scrawny high school girl, derided by the older, more experienced girls in the gym's communal shower room when she gets her first period. Gifted with supernatural powers to destroy, she revenges herself on her schoolmates in a variety of nasty and deadly ways. But what one remembers most is the innocent, virginal girl wonderingly exploring the mysteries of her nude, ripening body with her own hands. In Welcome to L.A., aptly subtitled "City of the One Night Stands," Spacek plays Keith Carradine's live-in maid, who has a penchant for wearing only a skirt while doing the housework and even less when picking up money on the side with Carradine's horny friends. (Also in the film is Geraldine Chaplin as a restless, sexless Encino housewife who makes a determined play for Carradine's bod; she contributes what has to be the single most unappetizing and embarrassing nude scene of the year.) But Spacek's most complex and fascinating role to date is in 3 Women, in which she plays the inverted, inarticulate, enigmatic girl who gradually assumes the persona (as well as the apartment and gentlemen friends) of Shelley Duvall, her roommate. As is frequently the case with Altman's films, one is never quite sure what it all adds up to, but the gradual transformation of this shy and seemingly vulnerable creature into an arrogant, spiteful, man-hungry demon is the kind of work that Academy Awards are made of. Typical of the kind of excitement that her performance generates is the scene in which she is secretly reading Duvall's diary. As Duvall returns to the apartment, Spacek hastily conceals the book but overlooks its key. At the time, you hope desperately that Duvall won't notice it; later, you only wish she had. Whatever the ultimate meaning of 3 Women (the third is a kind of Earth Mother, played by Janice Rule), one senses that beneath its enigmatic surface Altman is trying to tell us something very deep and troubling about the role of the female in our society.

Nor are we sure just what Barbra Streisand was trying to say in A Star Is Born. There are those who think that Barbra can do no wrong, and for them the movie is a huge success. There are also some who think that Kris Kristofferson can do no wrong, and for them the pairing was like a Second Coming. But to a more dispassionate eye, neither the script nor the performances provide the slightest clue as to why a fading rock star, surrounded by groupies, would bother for a moment to lend a helping hand to a dowdy singer in a third-rate club. Or, for that matter, why, once they were married, the now glamorous and successful singer would be willing to put up with the moods, petulance and downright brutality of her lay-about spouse. When Judy Garland played the role some 20 years ago (and even more so when Janet Gaynor created it some 20 years before that), one felt the love and sympathy that flowed from those women for the sad wreckage of the man they had once admired. With Streisand, in this day of women's lib, it's hard not to believe that she's holding on to Kristofferson out of spite for breaking up her act in that seedy club. Somehow, despite the revealing gowns and a bathtub à deux, Streisand comes across about as sexily as an upended O-Cedar mop. Until she sings, of course.

On the other hand, whether singing her heart out or simply curled up in a corner with a good book, in New York, New York, talented Liza Minnelli projects an unprecedented warmth and allure. Looking and sounding more than ever like her mother, she seems to have acquired some of Garland's softness and vulnerability as well. No longer is she merely, like Streisand, a performer par excellence; as a singer married to an egocentric saxophone player who splits after she bears their baby, she touches one with her voice, her eyes, her entire body. And her co-star, Robert De Niro, is no less effective as her mean-spirited, competitive, male-chauvinist husband.

But no American film of 1977 has looked at the uneasy relationship between males and females with a more discerning eye than Woody Allen's endearingly semiautobiographical Annie Hall. In his witty and sophisticated marshaling of such cinematic devices as monologs delivered full-face into the camera or scenes from his childhood re-created with the adult Allen present in the frame, he is obviously paying tribute to director Ingmar Bergman (whose Face to Face is the movie he wants to take fresh-faced Diane Keaton to see on their first date). What is perhaps less clear is the fact that, in his own comedic way, Allen is also pursuing some of the ideological goals of the lugubrious Swede. Indeed, as Variety critic Joseph McBride observed, "This film could be called Scenes from a Relationship."

In Annie Hall, Allen has sought to expose the special angst--the "I'm not good enough for her / I'm not good enough for him" syndrome--that has undermined so many marital and premarital relationships. Allen opens his picture by quoting the Groucho Marx (and Sigmund Freud) line "Any club that would have me as a member, I wouldn't want to belong to"--and goes on to apply it to the women in his life: Carol Kane, Janet Margolin, Shelley Duvall and, especially, Diane Keaton. When Kane tries to coax Allen into bed, he prefers to talk about the two-gun theory in the Kennedy assassination. When he tries to rip the clothes off Margolin during a literary cocktail party, she cries, "Don't, there's someone from The New Yorker out there!" It's the battle of the sexes reduced to a no less deadly matching of wits. Certainly, we see it kill off Allen's relationships. And, as in Bergman's films, we come to realize that there are no villains. Allen, like Bergman, shows us the reasons people do what they do, and it becomes impossible either to hate or to blame--only to pity.

At the present writing, the usual crop of year-end biggies is still being readied for release. Will Mae West's Sextette reveal that life really begins at 80? Will Rudolf Nureyev, in Ken Russell's version of Valentino, be as exciting in a boudoir as he is in a ballet? How closely identifiable will Anthony Quinn and Jacqueline Bisset in The Greek Tycoon be with that other Greek tycoon and that other Jacqueline? How explicit will Richard Brooks be in the potentially grisly Looking for Mr. Goodbar? Will any of Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters be of a sexual nature? Will Equus on the screen attempt the same total nudity that we saw on the stage? Is Gene Wilder really The World's Greatest Lover? At the moment, the answers to all these portentous questions are still locked in the cutting rooms of the major studios.

One answer that is definitely not locked away in those cutting rooms is where we go for our raunch. At one time, back around the era of Myra Breckinridge and The Magic Garden of Stanley Sweetheart, the major studios seemed bent on closing the gap that existed between them and the more successful purveyors of pornos. They had all the advantages--top stars who would shuck their chiffons if the price was right, access to top properties that no porn merchants could afford and the capital to make it all possible. But the majors also had stockholders in middle America who preferred The Sound of Music to Beyond the Valley of the Dolls and boards of directors who preferred not to hear about Portnoy's Complaint. There was also their M.P.A.A., ready to stamp with an X any movie that offended its interpretation of "good taste." With notably few exceptions (Columbia's successful release of Emmanuelle, United Artists' involvements with Last Tango in Paris, for (continued on page 206) Sex in Cinema (continued from page 202) example, or Inserts, or Pier Paolo Pasolini's Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom-- which U.A. has steadfastly refused to release in this country), the majors have shrunk back from anything dealing with explicit sex. It's a field they have left clear for their less-well-heeled, hungrier competition.

If nature abhors a vacuum, hungry producers abhor it even more strongly. For at least six years, roughly between 1970 and 1976, the porn merchants ground out their fuck-and-suck classics as routinely as MGM once made its Andy Hardys or the Warners their Perry Masons. It soon became apparent, however, that in what had been considered a routine business, catering to a limited number of hard-core patrons, crossover films were possible. Deep Throat pointed the way, followed by The Devil in Miss Jones and the Mitchell Brothers' Behind the Green Door. Radley Metzger, a softcore producer, got into the act, posing as Henry Paris, with Score and The Opening of Misty Beethoven. Producers of the hard stuff are now reaching out to that wider audience that they know can be attracted to the porn palaces only if their films have something of the production values that they have become accustomed to in studio-made movies, something of the technical finish of those films and maybe one or two porno-star names as additional bait. It is worth noting that, early in the year, Paramount began production on First Love as an X-rated feature, then changed its corporate mind. In its revised version, the film, starring William Katt (of Carrie) and Susan Dey (of TV's The Partridge Family), will emerge as "an old-fashioned romance," according to Wayne Warga in an on-set interview for the Los Angeles Times. Quoting the director, Joan Darling, he reported, "This is a story about what it's like to be in love for the first time, in a physical way. There will be some nudity, but I might shoot the love scenes from the shoulders up; I don't know if it would be that much different." The makers of porno know.

The whole thing is not to cheat the viewers--to give them more, if possible, than they came in for. The Starlets, for example, like The Stewardesses a few years ago, is in 3-D (with glasses); but where The Stewardesses eventually got an R rating, The Starlets boldly exploits its X. It's been handsomely produced, with a bevy of singularly attractive girls, but its plot--the girl who makes it by sucking up to a producer--is hardly a novelty. Add 3-D (which the producers have somehow managed to escalate, calling it 4-D), and the result is a definite turn-on. The cocks acquire a roundness, the female orifices have an inviting depth to them that, despite occasional flaws in the photographic registration, creates an extraordinary sense of intimacy just short of participation. Breasts seem to dangle out of the screen, hovering over the audience; penises ejaculate straight into the camera, producing the effect of squirting into the theater. One is tempted to theorize that 3-D was specifically invented for the pornos.

But then, so was Jennifer Welles. Jennifer, blonde and 40ish, has starred in such New York--based pornos as Sweet Cakes, Honeypie and Little Orphan Sammy. She is a good deal like Mae West at the height of her prowess. Mae always seemed to be kidding sex, but on the square. She not only loved it, she flaunted it. "It's not the men in my life, it's the life in my men that I'm interested in," she once observed. Which would seem to be the philosophy underlying Inside Jennifer Welles, a biopic that Welles purportedly directed (even as West was presumed to have written her own screenplays). Actually, it was done by Joe Sarno, a veteran of the New York hardcore scene with an uncanny knack for finding angles to maximize the stag action in his films. It's handsomely mounted, professionally done, and is almost literally a compendium of the sexual fantasies of its star. She loves to screw kids? An adolescent delivery boy knocks at her door. She has always wanted to make it with a Chinaman? Half a dozen Orientals surround her for the film's finale. "Twenty minutes from now, we'll all be horny again," one of them remarks, via subtitle, after she takes her pleasure with them. In her prime, Mae West couldn't have done better.

The point is that, like Mae, Jennifer relishes her sexuality. She may be amused by it, but when she is being sucked or fucked, she fondles her breasts to enhance the sensuality of the moment. She seeks the encounter, whether it be with a cabdriver or with a projectionist who is showing a movie. She may be catering to the male fantasy that the lady is always available and willing, but what makes Jennifer Welles so fascinating is that the choice is always hers and that she can terminate an affair when she has achieved her own satisfaction. Starring in her own film (which she claims will be her last), she delivers the narration as if everything happened exactly as she describes it. Jennifer Welles just may be the most liberated woman of 1977 and Inside Jennifer Welles its most liberated film.

On the other hand, the female image being projected by the youthful Sharon Mitchell seems almost calculated to bring down the entire women's movement on her pretty neck. In Joy, she portrays an innocent high school girl who gets raped by a couple of Puerto Ricans and discovers that she really likes it--so much so that she becomes insatiable, climbing into the bathtub with her high school boyfriend, chasing men into alleys, seducing another on the subway and working her way up (or down) to four in a men's room. In fact, the film describes her as a female rapist--with rape as her little way of bringing joy to the world. In The Violation of Claudia, she plays a bored housewife who, at the instigation of her tennis instructor (who also happens to be a pimp), takes up prostitution for fun and profit. The point of both films seems to be that women enjoy rape and get their jollies from pursuing men--notions that run counter to the views of most contemporary sociologists.

After the surprise success of last year's Alice in Wonderland (which began as a porno but was toned down for an R rating and broad general release), it was inevitable that other children's classics be fucked up. Like Alice, this year's Cinderella is a musical (although none of its numbers is likely to end up in the Top 40). Its action, however, is more hard core than Alice's, with numerous lesbian interludes and a faggy fairy godmother. In this version, incidentally, it isn't merely a glass slipper that Cinderella has to fit. And although 7 into Snowy purports to be the "adult" version of Snow White, its producers at times seem to have the plot mixed up with that of Cinderella, and maybe those of one or two other stories as well. No matter; nobody sees these movies for the story. They come for the girls, like blonde, sensuous Abigail Clayton, one of the "better-looking breed of uninhibited actresses" covered (or uncovered) this past July in Playboy's The New Girls of Porn. Or like the gorgeous Catharine Burgess, who plays in yet another erotic adaptation of a fairy tale, Cinderella 2000. She's also seen, to better advantage, in Through the Looking Glass, a porno that has no connection whatsoever with the Lewis Carroll classic.

In addition to rummaging through the children's section of the library shelves, some few porn producers are fingering the classics of erotic literature. This year, for example, Alan Roberts produced and directed Young Lady Chatterley, a fast and loose adaptation of the once-incendiary D. H. Lawrence novel. (A considerably more chaste French version appeared in 1955, but its distributors had to carry the fight all the way to the Supreme Court before they could distribute it in this country.) In the present telling, a few flashbacks fill us in on the scandalous affair of the original Lady Chatterley and her virile gardener, but the center of attention is Harlee McBride, a London shopgirl who inherits the estate. Finding the diary of her departed ancestor, she enthusiastically relives all the more lurid passages. McBride brings a fresh and pleasing presence to the title role and the production, filmed on the old Harold Lloyd estate, has an opulence and a visual beauty far beyond the average sexploitation movie. As does the Mitchell Brothers' The Autobiography of a Flea, based on yet another of those anonymous 19th Century classics of erotic writing. The flea, in this instance, has taken up residence in Jean Jennings' shapely crotch, which proves an ideal vantage point from which to observe--and comment upon--the comings and goings of her numerous bed partners, including some local nobles, several clergymen (John C. Holmes among them) and her girlfriend's father. Directed by Sharon McNight, one of the increasing number of women who are getting their first chance at directing via the pornos, Flea boasts handsome settings, elaborate costumes, good-looking people and a forthrightly anticlerical bias. From Sweden have come Bel Ami, with our own Harry Reems in the title role (and, he claims, hard-core inserts that were added State-side without his participation), and Molly, a grand-scale adaptation of Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders starring beauteous Maria Lynn.

Even television and old movies have become grist for the pornographic mills. Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman turns up, loosely, as Hard Soap, Hard Soap, while the phenomenal success of Charlie's Angels on the tube inspired Joel Scott (of Sometime Sweet Susan) to try A Coming of Angels, with Abigail Clayton in the Farrah Fawcett-Majors role and Annette Haven and Lesllie Bovee to round out the venturesome trio. Radley Metzger's latest, once more released under his Henry Paris pseudonym, is Barbara Broadcast, with the comely Annette Haven as Barbara You-know-who and C. J. Laing (the Barbra Streisand of porn) giving new meaning to an indepth interview. Earlier this year, Bovee and Holmes essayed the Barbara Stanwyck-Fred MacMurray roles in a decidedly hard-core send-up of Billy Wilder's memorable Double Indemnity titled Eruption; and in Fiona on Fire, Amber Hunt assumes a porn equivalent of the Gene Tierney role in Laura. Wait until they discover the bondage possibilities of I Was a Fugitive from a Chain Gang-- with an all-female cast!

Despite continuing crackdowns from the cops and the heated protests of ultra-conservative right-wing groups, there is every evidence that the makers of these so-called mature entertainments are slowly getting their acts together. When Snuff appeared last year, members of the Adult Film Association picketed the theaters in which it was playing to protest a type of film they felt should never have been made. This year, A.F.A. officers voluntarily appeared before a Congressional investigating committee to pledge their organization's assistance in quelling the rising incidence of child pornography. At the association's First Annual Erotic Awards presentation, held in Los Angeles on July 14, Stanley Fleishman, its eloquent counsel, reported to the assemblage that its basic tenet, propounded when the organization was formed a little over ten years ago--that every adult should have the right to see the film of his choice--will probably become the law of the land before the year is out.

Unless and until that happens, the biggest problem remains the Supreme Court's unwillingness, or inability, to supply proper guidelines as to what actually constitutes obscenity. Its 1973 Miller decision, with its emphasis on "contemporary community standards," may have made it easier for prosecutors to haul films into court, but it also made it more difficult for them to make their charges stick because of the inevitable vagueness as to what the contemporary community standards really are. As to the film makers, whether they be with the major studios or in sexploitation's minor league, every picture becomes a gamble. Since it is all too likely that any movie not in the Disney tradition will offend the contemporary community standards of some community somewhere, the Court has, in effect, applied a firm, strong brake upon the medium's First Amendment right to freedom of expression.

Still, it must be said that American film makers operate with a greater degree of freedom than their confreres anywhere else in the world. Kissing is still verboten in Indian movies. The new Greek government has authorized the police to confiscate not only pictures with strong sex scenes but even those with "excessive nudity." Argentina's current, repressive regime has the authority to ban anything that it finds "offensive" (such as the excellent Rebellion in Patagonia, the true story of the brutal suppression of a worker-and-peasant uprising in the early Twenties, filmed three years ago, when another, more liberal government was briefly in power). In France, pornos have been permitted to be made for the past two years--but the government has slapped such a heavy tax on their exhibition as virtually to choke off the market. Political themes are also discouraged by denying production money to producers whose scripts are deemed inimical to governmental policy. In England and Sweden, violence is taboo. And in the Soviet Union and its satellites, nothing can be made that goes against the party dogma of the moment--and if the line changes, as it has been known to do from time to time, pictures can be halted in production or suppressed. Eroticism is officially condemned as a manifestation of "bourgeois decadence."

As a result, the flow of foreign films to these shores has markedly declined over the years. Where once the French, Italian and Scandinavian cinemas were demonstrably more liberated than our own, the balance has long since swung in the other direction. Today, if a European sex film is brought to this country, most importers find it necessary to heat up the action by cutting in explicit sex close-ups before releasing their picture into the highly competitive hard-core market.

As for films aimed at a broader audience, there is a growing tendency among the American studios to enter into co-production deals with their European counterparts in order to ensure top production values and the presence of internationally known stars. Perhaps most typical of these international deals is Lina Wertmuller's four-picture contract with Warner Bros. The first film, starring Candice Bergen and Giancarlo Giannini, went into production with the unwieldy title The End of the World in Our Usual Bed in a Hatful of Rain (later simplified to A Night Full of Rain). The story line concerns an Italian Communist journalist who keeps falling in and out of love with Bergen, and Wertmuller has described it variously as a social farce, a romantic comedy-drama and a political satire.

A resounding hit at the Cannes Festival in May was an Italian-Canadian coproduction, A Special Day. John Vernon and money seem to have been the principal Canadian contributions; Sophia Loren, Marcello Mastroianni and director Ettore Scola headed the Italian contingent. The "special day" is the day that Hitler visited Mussolini in Rome and virtually all Rome turned out to greet him--all except Loren, married to a Eascist, and Mastroianni, a homosexual in an adjacent apartment. In the course of the eventful day, she finds love, he finds--momentarily--his manhood; and all ends in pitiable bleakness as the husband returns home to lead his wife to the bedchamber and Mastroianni is picked up by the police as a "defeatist element." Still to come, but from all reports no cop-out on the sexual frontier, is the Italian-based production of Gore Vidal's Caligula, backed by Penthouse magazine and furiously rejected by its outraged author.

The moribund British film industry is in perhaps the greatest need of imported dollars to pump blood through its clotted veins. Its deteriorating studios, its disastrously restrictive movie unions and spiraling costs of production have made it virtually impossible to get any locally filmed product off the ground. (One exception would seem to be the low-budgeted Sebastiane, based on the life of Saint Sebastian; but its main attraction--in England, at least--was its abundance of nude young men on the screen.) The high point of the year's American-backed British productions is Tony Richardson's Joseph Andrews, a welcome return to the time and tone of his earlier Tom Jones. Joseph (Peter Firth) is an attractively simple-minded young man who is constantly being led astray by the lusty ladies he encounters in 18th Century England (including an alarmingly buxom Ann-Margret). It's an adroit film, clever without being cutting, sexy without ever resorting to porn. The social climate in early 18th Century England was fairly bawdy and Richardson has captured its bawdiness with humor and restraint. In Tom Jones, it took the better part of a reel to depict, over mounting platters of food, the growing mutual desire of Albert Finney, as Tom, and Joan Greenwood; here Ann-Margret says it all in the way she nibbles a stalk of asparagus.

Even more markedly British, with its ivy-clad country homees and well-tended lawns, its Pinteresque dialog and the highly civilized performances contributed by such British stalwarts as Dirk Bogarde, John Gielgud and David Warner, is Alain Resnais' Providence. The only thing is, it's French--a French film made in English, its polished cast supplemented by Ellen Burstyn and Elaine Stritch, and featuring a score by the veteran Hollywood composer Miklos Rozsa. As always, Resnais creates a fascinating confusion of time and place, of the real and the imagined in this sardonic study of a dying author who much prefers his bastard son (Warner) to his legitimate son, a chilly lawyer (Bogarde), and is trying to place both of them, along with their assorted wives and mistresses, in an autobiographical novel that he is writing. The framework for the film is a reunion of the clan at Providence, the family manor, during which we discover that the writer had been a notorious womanizer, that Bogarde holds responsible for his mother's suicide and that Bogarde also suspects Warner of making advances to his wife, Burstyn. The dialog is frequently funny, often bawdy and occasionally scatological, making it emphatically an adult family portrait.

Adult also, but more typically French, is Cousin Cousine, probably the most profitable of the year's imports. By saddling middle-aged Victor Lanoux with a neurotic, pill-popping wife (Marie-France Pisier) and the blonde, delightful Marie-Christine Barrault with a philandering husband (Guy Marchand), the film seems to give a nod of approval, even of sympathy, to adultery. Ironically, the relationship is not at all adulterous at the outset. The two meet at a family wedding, find a quick rapport and decide not to spoil a perfect friendship with sex. But when word gets around that the two are seeing each other with suspicious frequency, the immediate conclusion is that they have been sleeping together. Since they are suspected of it anyway, they decide they might as well enjoy them-selves--and do.

Irony, not sympathy, suffuses Francois Truffaut's latest, The Man Who Loved Women, which details Charles Denner's insatiable pursuit of any pair of pretty legs that crosses his line of vision, regardless of the age or marital status of their owner. He writes a book about his obsession, blaming it on a mother who neglected him to spend her time with other men--then proceeds to seduce his lady editor. In a final irony, he gets hit by a car while following yet another girl and, hospitalized, breaks his neck falling out of bed in a lunge after the nurse.

Claude Chabrol, that most Hitchcockian of French directors, demonstrates an odd change of pace in Alice or the Last Escapade, a frequently chilling trip into the supernatural. It stars Sylvia Kristel (late of Emmanuelle) as a woman who leaves her husband in a huff and drives away. On the road, her windshield cracks and she pulls up at an old dark house. It isn't Boris Karloff who answers the door, but she gets the weird feeling that somehow she has been expected--a feeling that is confirmed in her various encounters through the night and the following day. Ultimately, the car is fixed, she drives off--and the windshield cracks again. Returning to the house, she descends to a dark cellar, where she discovers herself and her car, smashed against a tree. Chabrol brings to the film his invariable technical panache, and also reveals that Kristel has far more than just a pretty face--or body, for that matter. Although Alice includes one nude sequence, Kristel's performance makes it amply clear that she wasn't chosen for that alone. Indeed, her ability to perform with her clothes on was confirmed a bit later in René la Canne, a raffish crook picture that became one of the year's most popular in its native land. In it, she plays the girlfriend of one of the robbers (Gerard Depardieu) but is willing to share her favors with his pal, a corrupt police inspector (Michel Piccoli), while operating a gaudy bordello.

Meanwhile, Just Jaeckin, Kristel's director on Emmanuelle, has come up with another of his handsomely photographed, discreetly soft-core pornos in Madame Claude (subject of a Playboy pictorial this past August). Madame Claude happens to be one of the best-known madams in Paris, with a reputation for infallibly supplying the right girl for the right occasion, whatever that might be. In the convoluted plot, the girls are used for everything from influencing Japanese politicians in behalf of the American Government to initiating into the mysteries of sex the son of a Greek shipping tycoon. It all gets to be a bit complicated, but the girls are bountiful and beautiful, so who cares?

For the most far-out French film of the year, however, one must turn to Walérian Borowczyk's The Beast. Borowczyk, of course, is the Polish-born director who upended the entire European sexploitation field two years ago with his ribald Immoral Tales. In his version of Beauty and the Beast, the Beast is real enough--the furry descendant of an aristocratic family with connections right up to the Vatican: and Beauty (Lisbeth Hummel) is an American heiress eager to marry a title. What makes the film a shocker is the fact that the Beast's great passion, until Miss Hummel enters the scene, is breeding his prize stallions onscreen with willing mares.

But the biggest revelation of 1977 has been the emergence of a youthful, vibrant, vital new cinema in West Germany. Best known are the works of the prolific director Rainer Werner Fassbinder, whose most recent film, Shadows of Angels, deals with Jewish manipulators in the postwar real-estate market. In contrast, his elegant, eloquent Effi Briest is based on a late--19th Century novel that, like Madame Bovary, dares to question the conventional role that society has assigned to women; while his Fox and His Friends ingeniously class-angles the plight of the proletarian homosexual. Fassbinder is a phenomenon--a prodigy on the order of Orson Welles.

Another young German to watch is Wim Wenders, whose Kings of the Road captured the Gold Hugo last November at the Chicago International Film Festival. In Kings, Bruno, the protagonist, is perfectly happy driving from town to town, delivering films and repairing broken-down projectors (and enjoying casual affairs with the theater employees he meets en route). And then comes Robert, a child psychologist, fresh from a breakup with his wife. The two develop a real camaraderie until they discover (quite unlike the boys in our own "buddy" films) that they can't get along without women.

And then there is Ex und Hopp (which would roughly correspond to our own phrase "No deposit, no return"), a semi-documentary tour of the homosexual bars and drug centers of Charlottenburg, in West Berlin. The film, with ample nudity and several sexual encounters, has already become a classic of the Berlin underground. Vanessa, by Hubert Frank, almost too obviously follows in the footsteps of Emmanuelle with its Hong Kong settings and lush photography. Vanessa (gorgeous Olivia Pascal), raised in a convent, gets to take over her family's chain of brothels in the Far East but remains virginal, despite numerous temptations set in her path. The Evolution of Snuff, by Richard R. Rimmel, is a documentary that proceeds from the assumption that even though an actress may not actually be killed in the production of a porno movie, the experience can destroy her psychologically--an assumption that Rimmel attempts to document through interviews with the people who make such films, including the actresses themselves (one of whom committed suicide shortly after talking to Rimmel). It's a particularly nasty kind of voyeurism, the kind that has it both ways: Clucking away self-righteously against what it's showing but existing only to show it. But then, that's one of the oldest dodges in the business. Everything considered, we might well be disappointed, but not surprised, that it has cropped up once more in the films of 1977.

"Bond, of course, is in bed with a beautiful blonde. 'Tell him to pull out of there immediately,' M says."

"Cocks acquire a roundness. Breasts seem to dangle out of the screen, hovering over the audience."