Sex in Cinema 1978

No Doubt About it; 1978 was the year in which the movies rediscovered women. Apart from the forthcoming Butch and Sundance: The Early Years, 20th Century-Fox's "prequel" to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, the decade of male-only buddy movies that began with Easy Rider and Midnight Cowboy would seem to be just about over. Occupying center stage--and capturing major awards during this past year--were such films as Annie Hall, Eyes of Laura Mars, The Turning Point, The Goodbye Girl and An Unmarried Woman, all of them focused on the female of the species. Not only that but the numerous disco-flavored offerings of the year--Saturday Night Fever, Grease, (text continued on page 236) Sex in Cinema (continued from page 180) The Buddy Holly Story, Hair--marked a definite return to the old he-she relationships.

Significantly, each of these relationships has left plenty of room for the woman to exhibit her independent spirit. In Coma, petite Genevieve Bujold, as an intern living with another doctor (Michael Douglas), begins to suspect some hanky-panky on the part of her hospital superiors. There are far too many comatose patients coming out of Operating Room Eight. Although she confides her suspicions to Douglas, he chooses to disbelieve, and she is forced to carry on her investigation alone. One place she visits is a secret experimental medical center where the nude, unconscious victims of the hospital's malpractices lie waiting for their ultimate, gruesome disposal. Fortunately, at the last possible moment--just as Bujold is being wheeled into O.R. Eight--Douglas wakes up to the possibility that his lady may be right.

In Coming Home, Jane Fonda--fresh from her portrayal of Lillian Hellman in Julia--essays a far more difficult role. The wife of a gung-ho Marine sent to Vietnam, Jane finds fulfillment with a paraplegic Vietnam veteran (Jon Voight). It's oral sex, and director Hal Ashby went to no pains to conceal it. Neither did he underscore it with explicit footage. It remains as an ineffable moment when two people in love communicate their mutual feeling in the only way that is physically possible for them. In contrast, her husband (Bruce Dern) is, on the night of his return from the war, eager only for a beer bust. If Coming Home's ultimate resolution seems both contrived and arbitrary, the film shines through Fonda's performance and the quality of womanhood she conveys.

In Looking for Mr. Goodbar, Diane Keaton plays a young teacher whose rigid Catholic upbringing is instrumental in forcing her into a search for sex. Although writer-director Richard Brooks has often been criticized for that, his picture also stresses the humiliation of a malformed youngster subjected to the scrutiny of friends and neighbors--and cursed with a "perfect" sister (Tuesday Weld), who breaks all the familial rules and gets away with it. For Keaton, visiting the neighborhood bars becomes a form of survival--a search not so much for "Mr. Goodbar" as for herself. The film's obviously inevitable tragic finale merely underscores the plight of any woman who doesn't know who she is or why. Although Looking for Mr. Goodbar had more than its share of censorship battles, it weathered them intact.

More than likely, when the Motion Picture Academy voted the fresh-faced Miss Keaton its Best Actress award for Annie Hall earlier this year, its members were taking into account as well her work in Mr. Goodbar, a film that otherwise they thoroughly detested. Providentially, Woody Allen gave her in Annie the kind of part they could relate to--the pretty, fluttery, indecisive girl who is the perfect foil for the equally indecisive Allen but in the end turns out to have a mind (or at least a will) of her own. In a fairly autobiographical role as an aspiring young singer and ladyfriend of the star, Keaton has never been more charming or more spontaneous, seeming to enjoy hugely each joke and situation (no matter how many times it may have been rehearsed). But the real surprise comes at the end of the movie, when, unlike the dim-witted heroines of the old Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton comedies (the prototypes of Allen's comedic style), she doesn't fall blissfully into his arms but turns him down flat. Not unpleasantly, but flat. Far more than Bella Abzug, Keaton is the real harbinger of today's liberated female.

So, too, is Paul Mazursky's An Unmarried Woman, which, albeit without emphasis, makes the point that you don't have to be a woman to write effectively about women. Jill Clayburgh, who emerges from it a major star, plays a housewife pushing 40 who suddenly learns that her solidly middle-class husband wants to leave her and shack up with a much younger woman. The film probes in depth her feeling of rejection, her bitterness, her withdrawal, her suspicion of other men. It also explores her relationship with her teenaged daughter (Lisa Lucas), who resents not only the father but any males who come to call. Finally, Clayburgh does meet a man she responds to, an artist (Alan Bates) who has a life and a career of his own. Their love is joyous and real; but when he proposes that she submerge her identity to the advancement of that career, she reneges. It's too much like what she has just been through. The purposely ambiguous finale finds Clayburgh threading her way through mid-Manhattan traffic carrying a huge canvas that Bates has painted. The guy is still very much on her hands.

In what promises to be one of the biggest hits of 1978, Warren Beatty's romantic fantasy Heaven Can Wait, the feminine lead--Julie Christie--gets Warren's attention by refusing to be intimidated. She stands up for ecology and the rights of her fellow English villagers with a spunk and a verve that prove irresistible. As for Beatty, he's marvelous as a Los Angeles Rams quarterback who meets an untimely death, then searches for a suitable body in which he can return to earth to win the Super Bowl.

The Greek Tycoon offers the gorgeous Jacqueline Bisset as a very thinly disguised carbon of another Jackie, also married to a Greek tycoon (Anthonay Quinn). It's one of those gamy, big-budgeted affairs--like The Betsy--that assure us that the filthy rich are really every bit as rotten as we are. Bisset plays her role as the widow of an assassinated American President with considerable hauteur and has one extraordinary scene when, outraged by her peasant like second husband's lack of respect for her intelligence, she tells him off with whatever dignity she can muster--and aims a kick in the direction of the family jewels. Quinn responds by slapping her around, and for at least that moment, the picture strikes a common chord. If it could happen to those expensive people in that expensive villa, it could happen to anyone. It's the one moment that tells us what The Greek Tycoon might have been if the script hadn't chosen to zero in on the man's constant womanizing and his problems with his philandering daredevil son (Edward Albert). Quinn is magnetic and magnificent, but the real movie would have been Wife of the Greek Tycoon. It could still be done. This version the U.S. Catholic Conference condemned as "trashy to the core in its shameless trafficking in actual events."

Oddly enough, Allied Artists' production of Harold Robbins' The Betsy erred in the other direction. It was still trashy enough in concept, and had just enough nudity, to warrant its R rating; but except for a few scenes, director Daniel Petrie eschewed the splashy vulgarity of the Robbins novel for a rather staid examination of the power plays across four generations of the Hardeman family, one of Detroit's top manufacturers of low-cost transportation. (But don't look for another roman à clef.) For once, Sir Laurence Olivier looks terribly ill at ease as he ages from 40 to 90 while carrying on a love affair with his delectable daughter-in-law (Katharine Ross), whose husband, a closet homosexual, conveniently commits suicide. And then there is the power-hungry Loren Hardeman III (Robert Duvall), whose mistress (Lesley-Anne Down) and daughter (Kathleen Beller) are both involved with handsome Tommy Lee Jones, the racing driver whom Olivier has hired to build the revolutionary, economical Betsy. Given such a premise, just possibly it was a mistake to attempt a silk-purse treatment. But you can't win: The Catholic Conference promptly condemned its "extravagant use of nudity."

There is considerably more nudity in Eyes of Laura Mars (as Playboy's August layout eloquently affirms), though producer Jon Peters would be the last to call it "excessive." Again, the key role goes to a woman--glamorous Faye Dunaway as a high-fashion photographer with a penchant for posing her models in simulated death scenes. The police begin to notice, however, that her simulations bear an uncanny resemblance to some of the more lurid murder cases they have on their hands. Dunaway, it seems, has a psychic connection with the actual killer. Although she can't see him, at moments of emotional stress--those when he's killing somebody, for example--she sees the scene through his eyes. Naturally, when he becomes aware of these extraordinary insights, Faye's life is immediately in jeopardy. It's a wholly unconventional thriller, based on an idea by Peters.

Robert Altman seems to have a sixth sense about the dramatic abilities of comediennes. In his Nashville, he gave Lily Tomlin her first straight role, and she ate it up; now he's done the same thing for TV's Carol Burnett, who turns in a surprisingly strong and moving performance in A Wedding. In this film, the controversial Altman casts his jaundiced eye upon that most cherished of American institutions, the marriage ceremony, and finds it wanting. In the course of a high-toned wedding (of Desi Arnaz, Jr., to newcomer Amy Stryker) and the reception that follows, Altman managesto take pot shots at just about every foible and pretension of what passes for fashionable society in middle America. A bare-boobed Mia Farrow declares that she has been knocked up by the bridegroom, her new brother-in-law (whose mother--elegant Nina Van Pallandt--needs a fix to get through the ceremony), while his uncle is attempting to seduce the mother of the bride (Burnett). As is his wont, Altman has rounded up a particularly snazzy cast for his comedy of bad manners, headed by Geraldine Chaplin (by now an Altman regular), Lillian Gish, Dina Merrill, Viveca Lind fors and Vittorio Gassman (as the Italian-born father of the groom who has married into the American dream and finds it a nightmare). They lend a highly attractive gloss to a picture of our contemporary society that is less cynical than worldly-wise. Whether one likes his work or not, Altman stands alone as the sharpest, most perceptive social commentator working in American films today.

Women again dominate the scene in Louis Malle's lush, provocative Pretty Baby, a movie that managed to incur the wrath of domestic, Canadian and British censors even before it went into release; the mere announcement of its theme--child prostitution in a New Orleans brothel--was enough to set them off. Actually, despite a scene in which a child's virginity is auctioned off to the highest bidder, the film is hardly a pedophile's delight. As directed by Malle from a screenplay by Polly Platt (based on a story that both of them concocted from research into New Orleans' fabled Storyville at the time of World War One), the film explores with a peculiarly French intensity the effect of a brothel upbringing on a beautiful 12-year-old girl (Brooke Shields, the top child model in America today). And, as critic Molly Haskell astutely observed, the effect is very much as if she had been brought up in the Catholic Church--she accepts it as a wholly normal way of life. If there is any criticism, it might be that Malle has made Frances Faye's brothel so civilized and snug that one resents it when, in a curiously truncated sequence, the citizens of New Orleans rise up to burn out the whorehouses. They seem like terrible spoilsports.

The center of Pretty Baby, however, is infinitely more complicated and interesting. Keith Carradine plays E.J. Bellocq, a photographer of that era who made his reputation photographing the prostitutes of the Storyville quarter in the nude. In the film, he becomes intrigued with Shields's mother (Susan Sarandon, in a spirited performance), then enamored of the girl herself after the mother marries one of her Johns and settles into the respectability of St. Louis. The child, sensing Bellocq's feeling for her, coolly moves in on him and soon they are married--mainly, one feels, so that he can take more nude photographs of her. The film, lensed by Ingmar Bergman's favorite cameraman, Sven Nykvist, has the ripe, sensuous look of the late French Impressionists--Monet and Renoir. One feels that, like those great artists, Malle is in love with his fleshy models. That may be the film's fatal flaw for American audiences: The director is making an aesthetic, not a moral, statement. (On the basis of its notoriety, however, an earlier movie in which Shields appears as a child murdered on the day of her first Communion--and originally titled Communion--was rereleased as Alice, Sweet Alice, and did fairly well, followed soon after by Tilt, with Shields as a 14-year-old pinball wiz cast opposite Ken Marshall as an aspiring young rock artist. Although a limited actress, the girl projects a nymphette sexuality not seen since the days of Sue Lyon.)

In fact, children were very much in evidence in the films of 1978, from the gaggle of fun-loving youngsters dangled as shark bait in Jaws 2 to the demonic Damien of Omen II, not to mention the telekinetic teenagers in Brian DePalma's The Fury--or, for that matter, the monstrous killer baby in It Lives Again.

On a somewhat higher plane were all the "growing up" movies, celebrating the rites of passage from adolescence to flowering manhood--usually by way of an extramarital bed. In Our Winning Season, Scott Jacoby's high school pals give him as a birthday present a visit to a winsome and knowing housewife (Joanna Cassidy) who enjoys augmenting the family income with such brief encounters. In Corvette Summer, Mark (Star Wars) Hamill, trying to trace the stolen Stingray that his class custom-built in its high school shop, falls in with Annie Potts, a would-be hooker on her way to make it rich in Las Vegas. They finally find the Stingray--and each other. In First Love, William Katt plays a young college student deliriously in love with Susan Dey, who is having an affair with a married man considerably older than herself. Although she is drawn to Katt (and is frequently in bed with him), She can't sort out which suitor she prefers. But when the older man rejects her and she seeks to return to Katt, he realizes that his "first love" is over--and isn't at all sure that the second time around can ever be as satisfying. Directed by Joan Darling from a New Yorker story by Harold Brodkey. it was at once the most sensitive and outspoken of all the growing-up movies--and the least successful at the box office.

Few critics failed to note the strong family resemblance between these pictures and George Lucas' runaway hit of 1973, American Graffiti, which enjoyed a hugely profitable rerelease during the past summer (with some five added minutes as a lure). Indeed, Joe Roth, the producer of Our Winning Season, said quite candidly, "Without American Graffiti, we could never have gotten our picture off the ground." While it took no crystal ball to predict that there might be an eager audience for these spin-offs, the enormous popularity of Saturday Night Fever--American Graffiti with a disco beat--took many critics by surprise. (Variety's generally astute Murf dismissed it in his review as "a fast play-off item in the undiscriminating youth market, where the totally deserved R rating may be a self-induced handicap.") The picture went through the roof from the moment it opened, catapulting television's Welcome Back, Kotter regular John Travolta to immediate superstar-dom. And then, late in spring, Grease sent his stock soaring still higher. (There will be a third Travolta feature, Moment by Moment, co-starring Lily Tomlin, before the year is out.) It's as if the heirs apparent to American Graffiti decided to drop the malt shop in favor of the discothèque

In Fever, the loose-limbed, sensual-lipped Travolta has created an enormously appealing figure as an unassuming young man who works by day at a nondescript job, who doesn't get along all that well with his working-class parents, but who shines on the disco dance floor every Saturday night--and after the ball is over, goes in for still more balling on the back seat of a car he shares with his good buddies. All remains jolly enough until he falls for a dancing partner (Karen Gorney) who aspires to better things: She wants to quit Brooklyn for Manhattan and isn't too choosy about how she does it. Through their maturing relationship, Travolta begins to grow up and away from his friends--particularly after the back-seat intimacies turn into a gang rape and prankish stunts on the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge result in the death of one of the gang. By the end of the film, Travolta has grown to the point where he is almost able to make a commitment to the girl he loves.

All of this, of course, is interspersed with blaring disco music, supplied mainly by the Bee Gees and enhanced by Dolby sound. And although, like Graffiti, it explores the rites of passage of America's teenagers, it differs from it in one profound respect. Where the earlier film proffered a fond farewell to the innocence of the Fifties, Fever suggests that while the youthful high spirits remain, the innocence is long gone.

Grease is a good deal closer to Graffiti, with songs and dances now accompanying the wall-to-wall rock-'n'-roll background music (though the sound is more disco -flavored than when Elvis reigned supreme). It's based on the Jim Jacobs--Warren Casey stage show, produced early in the Seventies as an evocation of the Fifties, that dimly remembered Eisenhower era when the world was seemingly at peace. Could Elvis the Pelvis really have been a threat to the American Way? Grease looks back to those cloudless days with the same frank nostalgia with which an older generation recalls the 1930 musical Good News, just before the Great Depression. (As a matter of fact, in both shows, the principals seem a bit superannuated for either high school or college. But then, weren't Bing Crosby and Jack Oakie still doing college musicals when they were well into their 30s?)

In Grease, Travolta plays a high school senior who has met Olivia Newton-John on summer holiday, fallen in love and, now that the holidays are over, never expects to see her again. But after boasting of his summer conquest to his schoolmates, he discovers that she is now enrolled in good old Rydell High. Although aching inside, he maintains his macho image with his friends by turning the girl off. That's the first misunderstanding. Then he wins a dance contest, in her presence, with a former love boat (Annette Charles). Second misunderstanding. And so it goes, until, prodded by his love for the girl, Travolta wins a drag race in Los Angeles' concrete river bottom, and his track letter as well. Olivia falls into his arms.

Obviously, it isn't the plot that has been dragging in the kid customers since last June--not, for that matter, is it the magnetism of Travolta and Newton-John, alone or in ensemble. Grease's charm has something to do with delight in an innocence discovered, false as that innocence may be. But at least that generation could pin its faith on ducktail hairdos, Elvis, Sandra Dee and the tear-stained lyrics of people such as The Flamingos and Sonny Til and The Platters(here recalled by Sha Na Na). Grease brings it all back with energy and conviction, plus two high-voltaged new stars whose ceiling is unlimited.

Mention should also be made of The Buddy Holly Story, an honest and touching memorial to one of the authentic rock-'n'-roll greats who never quite made it to the top of the charts because his career was cut short in a fatal plane crash in 1959. Nevertheless, with Gary Busey in the title role, singing the Holly originals with two young actor-musicians playing his backup group, The Crickets, the impact is stunning in its reminder of an enormous talent needlessly lost. Not coincidentally, the film also treats affectingly the loving relationship between the Texas-born Holly and his Puerto Rican bride (portrayed with warmth and sympathy by Maria Richwine, formerly a Los Angeles Playboy Club Bunny). Best of all, however, is the film's generous retracing of the rich Buddy Holly songbook.

Nostalgia is also the key to Neil Simon's star-studded--and hilarious--The Cheap Detective, at once a skillful blending and a send-up of The Maltese Falcon and Casablanca. The mind may boggle at Peter Falk playing Humphrey Bogart, or Louise Fletcher playing In-grid Bergman, but how about Jeepers Creepers--especially as belted out by Scatman Crothers--being "their song"? The screwball plot has to do with a vanished treasure--a dozen diamond eggs--and much of its humor derives from the bizarre sexual tortures described to Falk as having befallen the female suspects in his case. Eileen Brennan (in a rib-tickling carbon of Bacall), Madeline Kahn and Ann-Margret all manage to keep the screen palpitating until Falk stumbles through to his ultimate solution. There is every chance, by the way, that Simon will be onscreen again before the end of the year with his hit play California Suite, directed by Herbert Ross and starring Bill Cosby, Jane Fonda, Walter Matthau, Elaine May, Alan Alda, Michael Caine, Maggie Smith and Richard Pryor.

Less felicitously, 1978 was also the year that brought us the embarrassment of octogenarian Mae West's highly touted comeback in Sextette. As an international movie star who has just wedded--but not yet bedded--a young British nobleman (Timothy Dalton), Mae enthusiastically endorses the proposition that she is still sexually alluring to her former husbands and suitors (Tony Curtis, George Hamilton, George Raft and Ringo Starr among them), all to whom turn up determined to prevent the consummation of her nuptials. Perhaps they share a grandmother complex. There is also a subplot about an autobiographical tape that Mae has been dictating, the contents of which could cause governments to topple. It's as if West believed every scrap of her publicity over the past 60 years, then decided to build a script around it. The lines retain the familiar innuendo: "Is that a gun in your pocket, or are you just glad to see me?" But when Mae says it this time around, you're willing to believe that it's just a gun.

Other embarrassments of the year included The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover, written, directed and produced by one Larry Cohen. It depicts Hoover (well played by Broderick Crawford) as a homosexual drunk whe gets his kicks from listening to tapes of high Government officials having illicit affairs in FBI-bugged hotel rooms. In The Gauntlet, Clint Eastwood goes to extraordinary lengths to have Sondra Locke strip repeatedly (not that she has that much to show); while in The End, Burt Reynolds and Sally Field enjoy a romp that can easily be excised the moment the film hits TV. So, for that matter, can the "night out with the boys" sequence from Paul Schrader's Blue Collar, featuring both prostitutes and drugs--the moment when Richard Pryor, Harvey Keitel and Yaphet Kotto decide to embark on their life of petty crime.

Schrader, who also wrote Taxi Driver, is clearly a man with a mind of his own and a taste for the seamy. Even as this is being written, he is completing production on Hardcore, a film that he wrote and has been directing in such porn centers as San Francisco, Los Angeles and San Diego (where he staged an entire sequence in one of that city's sleaziest strip joints, which he took over for the occasion, girls and all). The story follows George C. Scott, a Grand Rapids businessman, whose only lead to his missing daughter is the information that she had played in a porno movie. Aided in his search by "parlor girl" Season Hubley, he poses as a porn-film producer to gain entry into the underworld of vice. "As I see it," the youthful Schrader explained on location, "this is a lot more than just a search story, or even an expose of the porno trade. We've made the Scott character a very religious man, so what you have here basically is the conflict of two moralities." (That those two moralities indeed exist may be best illustrated by the story told us by several workers on the film: When the Grand Rapids sequences were being filmed, the hardy Dutch Reformed local citizenry were told they were being done for a film to be called The Pilgrim.)

Not surprisingly, even while Hardcore was still in production, members of the Adult Film Association of America--a trade organization that includes most of the leading producers, exhibitors and distributors of sexploitation movies--began to file protests and urged its members to refuse Schrader any kind of cooperation, claiming that the movie misrepresents the way the adult industry operates. "I've actually seen the script," A.F.A.A. board chairman David Friedman has stated, "and, naturally, we're concerned. Schrader talks about a vice underworld, snuff films and the use of drugs and abduction to get girls for X-rated movies as if these things really exist. We in the business know they don't, but what about the general public? I'm afraid they're already primed to believe every vicious lie that this film says about our operation." For his part, Schrader concedes that his film "does not exactly show pornography in the best light." Despite the title, he insists that Hardcore will be rated R, not X.

As for the authentic hard-core, 1978 presented something of a paradox: The films were getting better, but the number of theaters that would book them wasn't increasing. (Friedman estimates that an X-rated movie today can anticipate at best 750 play dates in the American market, adding, "And the harder the core, the fewer the dates.") There are several reasons for this. Police crackdowns, such as the one in Boston's notorious "combat zone," took away many screens. Still more went when local theater owners, bowing to community pressure, concluded that the game was no longer worth the candle--particularly since the days of porno chic seemed just about over. To be sure, new entrepreneurs continued to enter the field, hopeful of survival; but there hasn't been a single big-box-office adult film in the Deep Throat mold for the past two years.

And, finally, there is the growing impact of video cassettes, which are rapidly turning America's living rooms (and hotel/motel bedrooms) into private movie theaters. This is proving a big plus for those who like to watch sexy movies but would just as soon avoid the possible embarrassment of being seen at one. "Now You Can Enjoy X-Rated Movies in the Privacy of your own Home on Video Cassettes!" headlines a full-page trade ad for International Home Video Club, Inc., which, illustrated by a portrait of Marilyn Chambers peering out of a TV tube, invites its participants to purchase "full color, uncensored video cassettes" of such films as Deep Throat, Behind the Green Door, The Devil in Miss Jones, Resurrection of Eve, Inside Marilyn Chambers "and many more!" The cassettes cost $99.50, compared with $49 to $79 per feature, charged by such majors as 20th Century-Fox and Allied Artists, who have already ventured into the field. Industry estimates (always on the optimistic side) predict that there will be 1,000,000 home-tape installations by the end of the year.

The economic implications of all this are tremendous. Emanuel L. Wolf, president of Allied Artists, stated that his company could "easily sell 100,000 tapes in its first year." With pictures such as Papillon and The Man Who would be King (Wild Geese, with Richard Burton, will be a future attraction), Wolf is looking forward to significant revenues of between $4,000,000 and $5,000,000 within the first year. No, less optimistic are the entrepreneurs of TVX, who list among their holdings not only most of the current hard-cores (Cry for Cindy, Dirty Lilly, Inside Jennifer Welles, The Journey of O, Seven into Snowy and Sex World among them) but also such upcoming attractions as Chorus Call (an X-rated Chorus Line rip-off) and Lady Gunslinger.

Meanwhile, what has been happening in that substratum of cinema called sexploitation, as Bruce Williamson has been duly noting in his "X-Rated" reviews in these pages, is that the girls have been getting prettier and the plots stronger. Eruption, for example, borrows its story (sans either acknowledgment or apology) from a combo of Double Indemnity and The Postman Always Rings Twice. Filmed in Hawaii, it stars sultry Leslie Bovee as the conniving wife of a wealthy executive, John C. "Johnny Wadd" Holmes as her eager coconspirator, and introduces nubile Susan Hart as Bovee's stepdaughter who wants a piece of the action (especially Holmes's). The denouement is hardly a masterpiece of Hitchcockian suspense, but then, that's not exactly the kind of cock this film is focused on.

Sex World, like Westworld and Futureworld, provides an amusement park that caters to special tastes--in this instance, the erotic fantasies of a busload of tourists who sign on as if they were going to spend the weekend at a fat farm. The big difference is that in Anthony Spinelli's Sex World, electronic circuits don't go berserk nor are its amusements supervised by the CIA. Everybody--including Leslie Bovee (again), the prodigious Johnnie Keyes and the ubiquitous Annette Haven--leaves this sexy spa with his or her fantasies fully gratified. Spinelli, who co-authored as well as directed the film, displays an impressive talent (particularly to anyone with the slightest awareness of the horrendous pressures under which these films are produced); and cinematographer Robert Marksman manages to keep it looking as if it cost at least five times more than it really did.

Take Off is a take-off on Oscar Wilde's venerable The Picture of Dorian Gray--only this time, the picture is an ancient stag reel in which Wade Nichols grows progressively older while his young incarnation boffs Leslie Bovee (yet again), Annette Haven (again) and Georgina Spelvin. It's fun because, in addition to ripping off Oscar, producer-director Ar-mand Weston keeps running Wilde with adroit lampoons of Cagney, Bogart, Brando, et al., always referring back to that reel in the parlor projector. Add a hand for cinematographer Joao Fernandez, who knows how to make a pretty girl look beautiful. As always, producer Radley Metzger (using his directorial pseudonym Henry Paris) lent a glamorous surface to Barbara Broadcast, starring Annette Haven (again). The girls are getting a bit repetitious.

So are the boys, for that matter. Sturdy Richard Locke, who starred in last year's Kansas City Trucking Co., was back this year in El Paso Wrecking Corp. (and seems destined to appear yet again in something to be called L.A. Tool and Die). It's a sort of homo-on-the-range movie, with Locke and good buddy Fred Halsted as truckers hightailing it to Texas--with numerous layovers en route.

El Paso and several other films like it were made specifically for the homosexual market. But, Anita Bryant notwithstanding, there were also films on homosexuality intended for the straight market. Outstanding, though flawed, is Paul Aaron's A Different Story, a movie I hat introduces Perry King and Meg Foster as a romantic team, then reveals that both are gay. Which would be fine as they begin to work out their problems (such as his cooking the dinner when her parents come to call). But then they marry, have a baby, and he begins to cheat on her with one of the girls at the office. And all of a sudden, it isn't "a different story" anymore; it's the same story we've all heard a thousand times.

More to the point is Midnight Express, the true story of William Hayes, a young American who was caught trying to smuggle hash out of Turkey and was sentenced to life imprisonment for his crime. As directed by Alan Parker, it's a very hard and demanding movie, never shunning the tortures and bestial indignities inflicted upon the inmates. Nor does the film ignore the incidence of homosexuality in a prison such as Sag-macilar, where the inmates have free access to one another's cells. Perhaps the film's most touching scene is the one in which Hayes (played by Brad Davis) rejects the proffered love of a fellow convict (John Hurt). He may masturbate in solitary confinement and even in front of his fiancée (Irene Miracle) when she bares her breasts to him, at his request, through a glass partition. But the homosexual encounter is treated tenderly, almost regretfully, as the young man decides that he can't respond to his best friend in any physical way. (Director Parker is no less sensitive to the complex sadosexuality of the prison's commandant when he shows him using a belt on a couple of urchins who may have been stealing, while his own children look on with well-bred disdain.) Midnight Express is, above all, a film that registers a tremendous plea for the dignity of every human being, regardless of what crime he may have committed.

As might be expected in this year of confrontations, there was also a documentary on homosexuality--135 minutes of oncamera interviews titled Word Is Out. The picture deals with 26 self-avowed homosexuals, male and female, who have come out of the closet to put their beliefs--and their reasons for them--on film. One can't but admire their candor. Word Is Out, a restrained and intelligent movie, doesn't have all the answers. What movie ever did? But it poses all the right questions in terms that can't be shunted off.

Possibly because so many of the American movies of 1978 have been enormous successes (since last June, industry sources have been predicting that this will be their most profitable year ever), the foreign films had relatively little impact. Certainly, there was nothing to rival the popularity of last year's Cousin Cousine; and the attempts of European directors to make films in English specifically for the American market--notably, Claude Lelouch's Another Man, Another

Chance, Ingmar Bergman's The Serpent's Egg and Lina Wertmuller's Night Full of Rain --were utter disasters. More successful (and properly so) was Luis Bunuel's incredibly youthful, exuberant That Obscure Object of Desire, an update of Pierre Louys' 19th Century novel The Woman and the Puppet. Stately Fernando Rey plays the puppet, an elderly aristocrat who is hopelessly ensnared by the charms of "the woman" (who, with typical Buñuel quirkiness, is played by two women--Carole Bouquet and Angela Molina--both charmers). Josef von Sternberg filmed the story back in the Thirties, focusing (naturally) on Marlene Dietrich as the classic castrater. Buñuel, now pushing 80, centers his story (also naturally) on Rey. It was runner-up for the National Film Critics award and won the National Board of Review's Best Foreign Film award.

Winner of the Academy's Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film was the French Madame Rosa. Although the prize was accepted by director Moshe Mizrahi, it was in fact a tribute to his star, Simone Signoret. Once one of the most beautiful women on the screen, Signoret has grown bloated with age and her delicate features have become coarse and "lived in." Which made her the perfect choice to play Rosa, a Jewish girl betrayed to the Nazis by her lover, who returns to Paris from Auschwitz as a prostitute. When the film opens, she is over 50 and has given up her life on the streets (for "aesthetic" reasons) to care for the children of other prostitutes in her section of Paris. One of them is Momo (Samy Ben Youb), an Arab boy, and the developing love and understanding between the two is always touching, never maudlin. As the ailing, aging, indomitable Rosa, Signoret gives the greatest performance of a lifetime filled with great performances.

From Brazil, of all places, comes what is unquestionably the most boisterous, brazen and sexy import of the year, Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands, introducing the voluptuous Sonia Braga as a ravishing young widow whose gambling, womanizing husband drops dead (of carousing) even before the main titles have left the screen. (We see him briefly in the streets at Carnival time, dressed as a woman, lifting his skirts and wagging an enormous dildo at the girls who surround him.) After a suitable period of mourning, Dona Flor accedes to the wishes of her friends and accepts the staid, respectable, middle-aged pharmacist who has been courting her. But his ineptitude in bed soon has her thinking longingly of her former mate; he may have beaten her, cheated on her and gambled away her money, but he made her feel marvelous while they were making love. And in a trice, the dead husband, naked as a jay bird--and visible only to her--is with her in the apartment, seeking to rekindle the old flames. He woos her ardently. Perched on an armoire, he derides the clumsy lovemaking of her new mate. Before long, he's in bed with her--and the husband. In the final shot, he's still naked but strolling out of church arm in arm with Dona Flor and her new husband, all three headed for the public square. It's a ribald variation on Noel Coward's Blithe Spirit, lustily brought off by 23-year-old Bruno Barreto, who wrote and directed.

Since Dona Flor, Braga has repeated her personal triumph with The Lady on the Bus, described as "a kind of Brazilian Emmanuelle," A runaway success in Brazil, possibly because of its extensive nudity, the film introduces her as a frigid young bride who, determined to find out whether she or her husband is at fault, rides the buses to pick up suitable mates for her experiments. Despite its daring theme, Bus is strictly soft-core; but it was the talk of the town at the Cannes International Film Festival last May and could well be here before the year is out.

Another triumph was scored at Cannes by the ltalo-French Bye Bye Monkey, which is just about as international as a film can get. Directed by Marco Ferreri and starring Marcello Mastroian-ni (both Italian), the cast includes Gerard Depardieu (French) and James Coco, Geraldine Fitzgerald and Avon Long (American)--and it was filmed in New York. Ferreri, of course, was responsible for last year's La Grande Bouffe, in which four men literally ate themselves to death after indulging in every other excess their minds could imagine. In this outing, Depardieu, employed at Coco's museum of ancient artifacts, is raped by a member of a women's lib consciousness-raising theater company. He adopts a chimpanzee that just may be a descendant of King Kong, to which Mastroianni leaves all his money before committing suicide. When his pet chimp is eaten by rats, Depardieu's grief is more than Coco can bear. He sets a fire that immolates both of them. The survivor is the female rapist, seen at the end playing with her daughter.

Somehow, that seems a fitting image for a fade-out on this "year of the woman." Clearly, women in film have made their presence known. Which recalls Pauline Kael's pertinent question at the Women in Film Awards luncheon in Beverly Hills last June: "Will you be as rotten as the men who run this industry?" she asked the assembled lady executives. "Are you just after jobs and power and gravy, or are you willing to make a difference?" The enthusiastic applause that greeted her remarks indicated that they would be trying for that difference. Whether or not they succeed may be a topic for next year's report.

It's a bird... It's a plane... it's

It may have been the year superman made it big in the movies, but it was also the year in which women returned, triumphantly, to the screen

Photos © Eric Knoll 1978