Sex in Cinema 1979

Unless things change drastically in the weeks ahead, 1979 seems hardly likely to go down in history as a milestone year for sex in cinema. Oh, it's still there. Given the nature of the medium, it could scarcely be otherwise. But, like gasoline, it's in short supply. You have to search it out, then wait interminably for the limited quantities available. Monsters have replaced mammalia and gang wars, genitalia. Superman, despite some sexy innuendoes, is a safe PG; we were promised an X-rated Superwoman, but it was effectively blocked through legal action by DC Comics and Warner Bros. Meanwhile, we must make do with such sedate fare as Miss Piggy's attempted seduction of Kermit the Frog.

Actually, despite the Motion Picture Association of America's efforts to hold the line, stray moments of nudity are turning up with increasing regularity in PG-rated movies: a locker-room sequence in Goldengirl, some bedroom intimacies with Lesley-Anne Down and Harrison Ford in Hanover Street, a quick run-through by a naked Beverly D'Angelo in Hair. At this point, Richard Heffner, director of the M.P.A.A.'s rating board, seems to have conceded that incidental nudity, in and of itself, is not necessarily a no-no. On the other hand, (text continued on page 198)Sex in Cinema(continued from page 174) What the board terms "a sexually derived expletive" produces an automatic R, no matter how inoffensive the context may be. The R can be appealed--and has been, successfully, for such films as Stevie, Norma Rae, An Almost Perfect Affair and Same Time Next Year; but when Diane Keaton suggested to Woody Allen in Manhattan that he "fuck off," the appeal board twice decided to let the R stand.

During the past year, the M.P.A.A.'s rating board has come increasingly under attack, and not without reason. Criticism has focused not just on the so-called language rule (a policy, incidentally, that board director Heffner himself opposes, saying he would prefer to base ratings less on text than on context) but on the whole theory behind the X rating, which by this time has become established in the public's mind as having a sexual connotation. Many producers are either finding ways around the X or openly opposing its use. Ads for Richard Pryor Live in Concert (not submitted for a rating) carried the warning, "This film contains harsh and very vulgar language and may be considered shocking and offensive." Bill Sargent, producer of the show, reported that that didn't seem to keep the customers away. Nor did Russ Meyer offer his Beneath the Valley of the Ultra Vixens for the M.P.A.A.'s scrutiny; instead, with a certain tongue-in-cheekiness, he preceded his film with the cautionary title "Parental guidance suggested."

And many major motion-picture companies have been resubmitting their formerly X-rated products for reclassification simply because they have come to realize that the X has the effect of severely limiting their distribution. Television won't touch them, and in some 40 cities newspapers refuse to accept their ads, even when the X is applied to a film that isn't specifically sexual. The issue was joined earlier this year when United Artists appealed the Xs previously applied to two imports by the late Pier Paolo Pasolini, The Canterbury Tales and The Arabian Nights. Granting the "mature" nature of those films, the company argued that the X has been so widely used to designate pornographic movies that neither the general public nor most newspapers are able to differentiate between "adult" and "porn." What the company was asking for, significantly, was not the milder R rating for its two films but the abandoning of the X as an M.P.A.A. symbol. Similarly, George A. Romero, writer-director of the slick, sick Dawn of the Dead (which abounds in stomach-churning horror but has no sex scenes whatsoever), refused either to submit his film to the M.P.A.A. or to take a self-imposed X. "The X rating has come to mean in the public mind sex and obscenity," he contended, suggesting that an A (for adult) might be more appropriate to a film such as his. Other sources recommended making the X more specific--XS (for sex), XV (for violence) and XL (for language). To date, however, the M.P.A.A. has been resisting all change, feeling that its present alphabet has at least the virtue of familiarity.

Unfortunately for Jack Valenti and his organization, it's a virtue that becomes more obscure every time a review board crosses its own lines of demarcation to reclassify a film on appeal--and even more so when it crosses for some and not for others. Same Time Next Year, for example, uses the same four letter word and in very much the same tone as does Manhattan, but on appeal was rerated PG. It can hardly be argued that there's a deeper moral issue involved in Manhattan; it may feature Allen having an affair with teenaged Mariel Hemingway while his good buddy, Michael Murphy, is enjoying adultery with Diane Keaton, but Same Time Next Year regales us with highlights from 25 years of an ongoing double adultery between the ever-sparkling Ellen Burstyn and a graying Alan Alda.

What alarmed most viewers in 1979, however, was neither the Anglo-Sax onisms nor the Anglo-sexisms of films but their violence--violence that overflowed from the screens into the theaters and often into the streets in a veritable flood of youth-gang movies of which Paramount's The Warriors only happened to be first. Onscreen within weeks of one another were Boardwalk, Boulevard Nights, Over the Edge, Ravagers, Sunnyside, Walk Proud and many more. Their theme was ominously, oppressively similar: The only people you can trust are the buddies in your own gang. Each gang has its own turf, which outsiders may traverse at their own risk, but members of rival gangs--never. The Warriors foreshadowed this with special emphasis. When a youth-gang chief is gunned down at a Bronx rally, the blame is placed (falsely) on the Warriors, a gang from Coney Island. Never has the subway ride from the Bronx to Coney been more harrowing, since to reach home the Warriors must pass through the turfs of at least a dozen rival gangs, all lying in wait. Symptomatically, while there's a sexy girl, Deborah Van Valkenburgh, in the cast (and featured prominently in the movie's TV commercials), she has almost nothing to do in the picture. Nor do Pamela Ludwing in Over the Edge and Stacey Pickren in Sunnyside (in which she's cast opposite Joey Travolta, who isn't likely to give brother John many sleepless nights).

What made these films so frightening was the fact that, despite their varying quality (and some, notably The Warriors and Boulevard Nights, were quite well done), the youth audience embraced them with a ferocity unheard of since Wild in the Streets and the American International Pictures motorcycle epics of the late Sixties. Their showings were accompanied by shootings and stabbings, theaters were vandalized, gang wars reignited. Chicanos, complaining that the docudrama-styled Boulevard Nights portrayed their people in a bad light, set up mass picket lines--which were marred by knifings and shootings. Pickets came out again to protest the casting of Robby Benson as a chicano in Walk Proud; they wanted one of their own. And because that much-prized, much-feared youth audience was flocking to these pictures, regardless of their quality, theater owners spent the summer tossing on the horns of a classic dilemma: What do you want to do, sell tickets or avoid trouble? For those who plunked for selling tickets, the distributors offered to provide security officers--usually at shared cost.

The most obvious money-making alternative to the gang-warfare cycle was the monster syndrome touched off by the runaway success of Alien last spring. Again, it's important to note that Alien didn't create the species, no more than did U.A.'s recycled Invasion of the Body Snatchers, which preceded it by a few months. It just means that something's in the air, something that producers sniff as much as two years ahead of time and roll their dice on. These days their sniffing has so little to do with sex. Although Body Snatchers vouchsafes a brief shot of a nude Brooke Adams as her body is about to be snatched by the dreaded pods, most of the film is concerned with Donald Sutherland's frantic attempts to ward off the invasion. (Significantly, unlike Don Siegel's classic 1956 version of the same story, this time there would seem to be no escape from podhood.) In Alien, we find two girls, Sigourney Weaver and Veronica Cartwright, aboard the doomed space freighter; but although both are reasonably attractive, none of their male shipmates (on an 18-month re-entry!) displays the slightest interest in having an intergalactic affair. Toward the end of the movie, Weaver does an improbable strip down to damp T-shirt and bikini shorts, but it's far too little and much too late.

As noted earlier, George Romero's Dawn of the Dead, for all its cannibalistic zombies running rampant in a Pittsburgh shopping mall, is as devoid of sex as a 50th-anniversary convention of Franciscan friars. Not so Romero's Martin, which anticipated the current spate of Dracula movies and has become an overnight cult movie, reaping its rewards via weekend midnight showings coast to coast. Martin, which has to be one of the sickest films around, features a vampire who draws blood not with his teeth but with razor blades. But how does one explain the appeal of this to the teenaged audience that turns out to see it week after week, especially since Martin (who is really 84) goes to great lengths to explain on a local radio show why he's unable to make it with girls--in the usual way, of course?

Again, it's that curious thing of homing in on a trend before the trend develops. Romero doubtless knew about the extremely successful Dracula revival in New York, starring Frank Langella, in a version of the Bram Stoker perennial that Universal subsequently brought to the screen with considerable stress on the count's sensuous appeal. He may even have known that American International was doing the George Hamilton rip-off Love at First Bite, in which Count Dracula, evicted from his estate by Transylvanian Communists, files to New York to nuzzle fashion model Susan St. James, who admits to her psychiatrist (Richard Benjamin) that she enjoys being bitten on the neck. She calls it "a dynamite hickey."

But could Romero also have known that in Hollywood, practically at the same time, the veteran John Carradine was playing a broken-down Dracula in something called Nocturna? ("In my youth, I had magnificent fangs," he confides. "I was hung like a walrus.") Could he possibly have known that over in England, the venerable Christopher Lee was abroad with yet another Hammer production, Count Dracula and His Vampire Bride--not one of the best? Or that in Germany, the terribly serious Werner Herzog was doing a version, including the delectable Isabelle Adjani as Lucy Harker, based on F. W. Murnau's silent classic, Nosferatu the Vampire? Or, for that matter, that in Romania, Doru Nastase had directed a historical opus, Vlad Tepes--depicting the redoubtable count as a folk hero--which turned up at the Cannes festival in May as The True Life of Dracula?

Films, like bananas, come in bunches; and when the bunches are as fully packed (and as eagerly gobbled up) as the youth-gang and monster movies of 1979, they become food for sociological speculation. One is forced to conclude that the same vibes that generated their production have struck a sympathetic chord in the mass audience. Perhaps it has something to do with the pervasive feeling that this world is slipping out of control and there's precious little we can do about it as individuals. We can't fight OPEC; hell, we can't even control our own politicians! What we can do (or at least some of us) is form into tight little bands and challenge anyone who dares invade our turf. It's an updated, urbanized form of vigilantism, more virulent than in the days of the old West, because, while the forces of law and order have again broken down, the enemies are less tangible, more cosmic. This absence in the real world of an immediately identifiable villain, a Darth Vader in black mask and cape, may also have a lot to do with the current popularity of monster movies. In those films--Alien, The Dark, Prophecy--the evil that we sense but can't see is suddenly personified; and no matter how sinister or powerful or Hydra-headed those creatures may be, most of the movies in which they appear end on the reassuring note that it's with in our power to dispose of them.

With all this going on as subtext, these films seem to be able to do without sexual activity. Indeed, only in the diverse variations on the Dracula theme does sex rear its lovely head--usually to get bitten on the neck. As noted earlier in Love at First Bite, the sex in these movies veers toward the kinky, sadomasochistic variety. In Nosferatu, beautiful Adjani presumably makes the supreme sacrifice by inviting the vampire into her bed and entertaining him there until after the rise of the morning sun, upon which they both expire.

Curiously, sex also plays at best a minor role in several of the year's finest, most respected pictures. There's none at all, for example, in the explosive, prophetic China Syndrome, which opened only days before the tragedy at Three Mile Island. In the Academy Award--winning The Deer Hunter, Robert DeNiro briefly, almost reluctantly beds down with lovely, lonely Meryl Streep. He's reluctant because she was the girlfriend of his buddy Christopher Walken, who's still off somewhere in Vietnam.

Apocalypse Now, at least in the work-in-progress version that Francis Ford Coppola agreed to unspool at Cannes last spring, contains only one sequence that might be defined as sexy--a bizarre scene in which a planeload of Playboy Playmates descends into the Vietnam jungle to put on a show for the GIs, who are forced to watch it from across the kind of pit that separates visitors from the animals at a zoo. In Norma Rae (which won her the Best Actress award at the Cannes festival), Sally Field plays a factory worker in a Southern textile town who's initially willing to go to bed with anyone who will show her a good time and break the monotony of her life. But then Ron Leibman, a Jewish union organizer from New York, turns up, and Sally becomes his first convert. It's like getting that old-time religion. She marries Beau Bridges and the sleeping around stops--though it's clear from her sidelong glances at Leibman that she hasn't stopped thinking about it. Field has a field day as an independent spirit who learns what it means to be liberated.

On the feminist front, the talented Jane Fonda has backed up her Coming Home Oscar with three scores--Comes a Horseman, California Suite and The China Syndrome. Still another,The Electric Horseman, with Robert Red ford, is due before the year is out. Comes a Horseman, an ecology-minded Western, may be the least of the four, but in it Fonda proves, with the help of James Caan, that a though-minded, hard-riding female can also be a loving and lovable woman. As a New York divorcee come to Beverly Hills to reclaim her child in Neil Simon's California Suite, Fonda displays a brittle wit and accurately timed one-upmanship over her screenwriter exhusband (Alan Alda). But her greatest strengths are to be found in The China Syndrome, a picture that she helped make possible by joining forces with Michael Douglas' production company. Fonda had been planning to do a film based on the notorious Karen Silkwood case; but when that fell through, she eagerly espoused the antinuclear sentiments of Douglas' script. How much she had to do with the evolution of her own role--that of a TV newsperson unhappy with being consigned to "happy talk" when she has a hard-news story in her grasp--is impossible to say. It's obvious, though, that in this film she's responding directly to all the male put-downs she's ever encountered. It's a searing performance that arises out of sheer conviction. If this sounds like an unaccustomed paean to Ms. Fonda, it's only because she's the most accomplished, varied and courageous actress of our time.

Superstar Barbra Streisand, however, has her problems in The Main Event, in which she plays the reluctant manager of an even more reluctant boxer (Ryan O'Neal), whom she acquired as a tax write-off. There's a delicious role-reversal sequence in which, after having seduced her boxer into bed, she departs the next morning, with him begging to save his good name. Barbra (continued on page 224)Sex In Cinema(continued from page 200) is unquestionably the lady in charge in this movie; but sometimes she makes her heroine intuitively bright and at other times incredibly klutzy.

On the other hand, as her own producer (with Jon Peters), Streisand's choice of a story with a boxing background reveals that her instincts are solid. Never before have sports been so strongly in evidence as in the films of 1979. What makes this so paradoxical is the fact that, until Rocky, it was almost axiomatic in Hollywood that movies about sports lost money. Unquestionably, Rocky not only disproved that theory but established the pattern for most subsequent sports-themed films--including Sylvester Stallone's own, enormously successful Rocky II, which the muscular star also wrote and directed. And why not? It's virtually a reprise of the earlier movie--same cast, same runs through the streets of South Philadelphia, same fight with Apollo Creed. The only difference is that this time he's married to Talia Shire, who's about to have a baby, and now when he goes the distance with the champ, it's not just for self-respect: He needs the bread.

The Champ, directed by Franco Zeffirelli, stars Jon Voight as a broken-down boxer, once married to Faye Dunaway, who only wants to give their little boy a good home. It's tear-stained merchandise (the kid really loves his dad), but the bruising, climactic. fight easily equals the one in Rocky II. In Every Which Way but Loose, an easygoing Clint Eastwood picks up extra change by taking on challengers in bare-knuckles brawls--when he isn't off in hot pursuit of twotiming Sondra Locke. (It was a drastic but ultimately profitable career change for Eastwood after establishing himself indelibly as the grim, hard-eyed Dirty Harry.) In the subsequent Escape from Alcatraz, Eastwood switched again, from rogue cop to the mastermind of a jailbreak from a maximum-security prison whose scrapes are less with the law than with a brawny homosexual con whose advances he had spurned.

Players moves the action from the center ring to the center court at Wimbledon for a world-championship playoff between Dean-Paul Martin (Dean's son, himself a tennis pro) and tennis champ Guillermo Vilas. Flashbacks keep reminding us how Martin got there--mainly by hustling everybody, including Ali MacGraw, who shares with him her bed and the tennis court in her Cuernavaca villa between flights to Monte Carlo at the behest of Maximilian Schell. After all, it turns out, Max is paying her bills. Martin's on-again, off-again affair with MacGraw never gets any hotter than the film's PG rating would indicate, and it's all sandwiched between so much tennis that you're better off watching ABC's Wide World of Sports.

Goldengirl offers the novelty of a flashforward--to the 1980 Moscow Olympics, with emphasis on the 100-, 200- and 400-meter sprints. Goldengirl (statuesque Susan Anton) is in training to win all three, backed by a consortium that plans to exploit her commercially after she does so. The girl is too psyched out to mind, but she's befriended by her agent (James Coburn) and demonstrates her gratitude by breaking training for a whole night with him. Her sprints at the end are intercut with actual footage from a previous Olympics, but the real interest in this movie lies neither in the races nor in its foolishly complicated plot. It's in Anton herself, a stunning tawny blonde who comes on like Farrah Fawcett-Majors, only more so--more hair, more smile, more teeth. She even sings! With luck, her next film outing will give her something to sing about.

If 1979 brought us a movie on just about every sport you can think of--basketball (Fast Break), bowling (Dreamer), pinball (Tilt, in which the precocious Brooke Shields demonstrates that she's beginning to grow in everything but talent), pro football (North Dallas Forty, with Nick Nolte splendid as an over-the-hill grid star who's just beginning to grow up), running (Running), wrestling (Take Down)--so, too, was there a romanza built around virtually every affliction known to man, with Ice Castles enjoying the best of both possible worlds. Not only does it have an iceskating background but its youthful heroine is partially blinded in a freak accident just as she's being groomed for the Olympics. Will boyfriend Robby Benson desert her, now that she won't be rich and famous? Did Don Ameche desert Sonja Henie? There are some fascinating glimpses of behind-the-scenes maneuverings at the rinks, and LynnHolly Johnson (late of Ice Capades) shows great promise as an actress. As a romantic duo, however, Benson and Johnson don't melt any ice.

Despite a sappy script, Amy Irving and Michael Ontkean have a lot more going for them in Voices. She wants to be a ballet dancer; he wants to sing in night clubs. Problem: She's deaf. But Ontkean fixes the speakers so that she can feel the beat through the floor boards, and all's well that ends well, as some scriptwriter once observed. Next problem? In The Promise, Kathleen Quinlan gets her face crushed in a car accident while eloping with Boston blue blood Stephen Collins. His icy mother (Beatrice Straight) offers to pay for the plastic surgery on the promise that Quinlan will never see her boy again, because she's from the wrong side of the tracks. She emerges from the operation looking more like Kathleen Quinlan than ever, so she's miffed that Collins, who thought she was dead, doesn't recognize her when they meet a year or so later. It's the kind of movie we thought they didn't make anymore.

In The Bell Jar, based on Sylvia Plath's semiautobiographical (and prophetic) novel, Marilyn Hassett plays a suicidal college girl brought to New York as the guest editor of a woman's magazine. Her contacts, including a bitchy female editor and a dykey fellow student, induce a nervous breakdown that her all-American jock boyfriend (Jameson Parker) not only is unable to prevent but probably contributed to. Hassett, we finally discover, hated her mother, loved her long-dead father. In Old Boyfriends, it's Talia Shire's failed suicide that triggers what little plot there is--a recherche du temps perdu in which the woman, rather morbidly, goes back to see whatever became of her old beaux. One (John Belushi) had shamed her in high school by bruiting it about that he had scored with her; she gets even. Her first love, it turns out, died in Vietnam, but she succeeds in seducing his brother (Keith Carradine). One winds up wondering what she and the movie are trying to prove.

Old Boyfriends was written (with an assist from brother Leonard) by Paul Schrader, who also wrote Taxi Driver and, earlier this year, both wrote and directed Hardcore. Hardcore, as we mentioned last year in this space, ran into immediate opposition from the Adult Film Association of America, whose members produce most of the "mature" entertainments purveyed in this country, because its plot narrowed to a search for a scabrous producer of snuff movies. (The same device has turned up, more recently, in Sidney Sheldon's Bloodline as one of the kinkier aspects of a prime murder suspect in that film.) The A.F.A.A. contended that no such films exist. Bruce Williamson, who has been keeping tabs on X-rated merchandise for Playboy these many years, declared last May that he had never seen a bona fide snuff movie, and added fervently, "I hope none exist." To which I can only add that in the 15 years that I've been preparing this series for Playboy, neither have I--and so do I.

The fact is that George C. Scott's excursion through the porno nether world in search of his missing daughter is dispiriting enough without it. A stern Calvinist from Grand Rapids, he discovers that the girl--who went to California on a church-sponsored outing--has been found playing in hard-core movies. (Scott's agony as the evidence is unspooled for him by detective Peter Boyle has to be one of the year's thespian high points.) He is still marvelous when, dressed in dungarees, he prowls the hot spots of San Diego and enlists the support (for cash) of parlor girl Season Hubley. Disbelief creeps in when he sets himself up as a porno producer in Los Angeles--and even more so when, on his own, he crashes the emporium of the presumed producer of snuff movies. What could have been--and should have been--an examination of two clashing cultures, Scott's scriptural upbringing and Hubley's pragmatic, amoral philosophy, is ultimately dissipated in the melodramatics of the final chase. When Scott rediscovers his daughter, she rejects him--just as he rejects Hubley, the only one who has really helped him. It's a nihilistic finale to a movie that had every possibility of making an interesting statement about our mixed-up morality.

For that statement, look to Woody Allen's extraordinary Manhattan. What Allen seems to be saying in this multilayered salute to the city he loves is that we're all living too easily, grabbing at whatever brass ring of happiness is presented to us without considering the consequences to ourselves, or to those who may love us. It's a serious, sobering film, even though there's an overlay of Allen's scatty humor--"You're so beautiful," he tells Diane Keaton in a taxi, "that I can't keep my eye on the meter."

In Manhattan, Allen is a successful, insecure writer of television comedy shows who's sleeping with a 17-year-old senior from the Dalton School (Mariel Hemingway) who adores his "wry sense of humor and astonishing sexual technique." But when Philadelphia-born, Radcliffe-trained Keaton is dumped by Allen's best friend (Michael Murphy), he promptly switches his affections to her, even though Woody is at the opposite pole of every one of Diane's aesthetic and intellectual pronunciamentos. In an endearing sequence of shots, however--in the Museum of Modern Art's sculpture gardens, at the Hayden Planetarium, beneath the Queensboro Bridge just before dawn--she edges her way into Allen's life, though still not certain she has Murphy out of her system. Meanwhile, in a beautifully modulated scene played at a soda fountain (with the girl sipping on a malted), Allen breaks off with a tearful Hemingway. It's a kind of "marriage-go-round" without the marriage. When Murphy decides that he wants Keaton after all, she dumps Allen.

In the old days, this kind of incessant bed switching would have been considered highly immoral; but that isn't the kind of morality that concerns Allen. There isn't the slightest raising of an eyebrow when Murphy carries on an adulterous affair with Keaton nor, for that matter, over Allen's sleeping with a teenager (who, the script makes clear, has already had several lovers--and she's almost 18). What does concern Allen is the toll that this hedonism takes on the people involved.

Clearly, in Manhattan, Allen is presenting a deeper and more meaningful vision of morality for our time--not a morality that seeks to preserve imposed conventions but one that questions the right of one human being to hurt another in the quest of his own gratification. Underneath, it's every bit as serious as last year's Interiors, but this time blended with the wit and charm of his Annie Hall. To put it bluntly, it's a masterpiece; one would have to turn to the European cinema to find its rival.

One would look first, of course, to Ingmar Bergman, a director revered by Woody Allen. In Autumn Sonata, however, we find Bergman at his second best, despite superb, wrenching performances from both Ingrid Bergman and Liv Ullmann, cast as mother and daughter in a film that seeks to probe the bonds between the two. Bergman (Ingrid, that is) plays a concert pianist, a sophisticated, imperious creature who years ago had given up the joys of domesticity for a series of extracurricular affairs. Shaken by the death of the man she had lived with for seven years, she accepts the invitation of her daughter (Ullmann) to visit and recuperate. But Ullmann's show of filial devotion barely masks her deep-seated resentment of a woman who is more beautiful, more talented and more self-sufficient than she. In a series of flashbacks, we see why she remembers Momma with less than perfect love--but we also see that the daughter is a petty, self-righteous bitch who is getting a morbid kick out of flinging the past in her mother's face.

Much less somberly, Italy has suddenly leaped into the cinematic spotlight, notably with two pictures starring the elegantly fleshy Laura Antonelli, who has become Italy's hottest sex goddess since the palmier days of Lollobrigida and Loren. In The Innocent, directed by the late Luchino Visconti, Antonelli plays opposite Giancarlo Giannini, as her husband whose attentions have wandered to Jennifer O'Neill. When the wife has an affair, however, he suddenly is hungry for her again--only to find that her liaison has borne fruit, which damages his pride and dampens his ardor until the child is eliminated. Not surprisingly, the U. S. Catholic Conference condemned the movie flat-out for its marital infidelity, infanticide, suicide and "extravagant, at times ludicrously so, use of nudity"--none of which hurt the film's chances in the American market. The alluring Antonelli scored again in Wifemistress, this time with veteran Marcello Mastroianni as her husband. Hiding out from the law, he keeps an eye on his supposedly invalided wife from a window across the way and discovers, to his chagrin, that his absence has turned her into a very busy body--which, between frequent house calls from her passionate young doctor and a little lesbianism with shapely Olga Karlatos, is kept very much in evidence. Unfortunately, the film gives Mastroianni little opportunity to do more than look frustrated. He fares better in Stay as You Are, in which, after spending a night with gorgeous Nastassja Kinski, he discovers that the girl just might be his own daughter by a former mistress. What to do? Mastroianni struggles manfully with his conscience, but the girl is so desirable that he ultimately decides to continue the affair, incest or no. After all, it's possible that she isn't his daughter.

The top French import of the year, according to both the critics and the box office, was Bertrand Blier's Get Out Your Handkerchiefs, a decidedly Gallic comedy in which Gerard Depardieu, unable to arouse his attractive young wife (Carole Laure), hands her over to a total stranger (Patrick Dewaere) who might have better luck. It doesn't help; she goes on listlessly knitting sweaters for both men. But when a 13-year-old schoolboy rouses instincts in her that are far from maternal, he's rewarded with a lot more than just another sweater. Also coming on strong is La Cage aux Folles (on this side of the Atlantic as Birds of a Feather), with Ugo Tognazzi and Michel Serrault as two gentlemen sharing a transvestite night club in St.Tropez. All goes well until Tognazzi's son, from an earlier liaison, turns up with a fiancée whose strait-laced parents want to meet their prospective in-law before giving their consent. The fun comes from this odd couple's frantic efforts to convince the parents that there's really nothing at all odd about them. A midsummer box-office hit in Paris (which means that the chances are good we'll be seeing it here soon) was Claude Lelouch's A Nous Deux (To Us), starring Catherine Deneuve as a woman who, after being raped, makes a business out of being "the other woman" for wives wanting a divorce and blackmailing the men with whom she's had affairs.

For the past several years, considerable critical attention has been focused on West Germany and the emerging new German cinema, spearheaded by the prolific Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Werner Herzog, Volker Schloendorff and Wim Wenders. Their pictures have won an overwhelmingly favorable reception from critics at international festivals, but public response, especially in this country, has been negligible. That may change with Herzog's Nosferatu (mentioned earlier), backed in part by 20th Century-Fox, and Wenders' Hammett, which he's preparing for Francis Ford Coppola, to be filmed on the actual sites visited by Dashiell Hammett when he was employed as a Pinkerton agent. Much hope is also centered on Schloendorff's The Tin Drum, the most expensive German production to date, cofinanced by France, Poland and Yugoslavia. Based on Günter Grass's novel, it's a wide-ranging allegory on German history, from near the turn of the century to 1959, as seen through the eyes of a sardonic, sensuous and willful dwarf. Rumor had it that the role would be played by the diminutive Roman Polanski, but the final choice went to an undersized 12-year-old, David Bennent, whose dimensions made it possible for him to crawl under tables (and peer up women's skirts) as witness to the hypocrisies of his times. The Tin Drum shared (with Apocalypse Now) the Golden Palm at this year's Cannes Film Festival.

Important, too, is Woyzeck, which Herzog directed (back to back with Nosferatu) from the famous play by Georg Buechner, with Klaus Kinski in the title role as a lowly orderly in the Imperial German army who knifes his prostitute mistress to death in a jealous, helpless rage when she takes up with a superior officer. Uncommon international partners, Israel and West Germany, have financed Menahem Golan's The Magician of Lublin, based on the novel by Isaac Bashevis Singer and starring Alan Arkin (as a Jewish magician with an irresistible charm to women), with a bare-breasted Valerie Perrine, Maia Danziger and Shelley Winters among the women unable to resist.

This year, however, the focus of critical attention has shifted to the emerging cinemas of Canada and Australia, whose film makers seem suddenly to have found their own voice and style. In Canada, it came through a drastic liberalizing of the rules governing foreign (largely American) participation in productions underwritten by the government-backed Canadian Film Development Corporation. Recent pictures financed, at least in part, by the Canadian government include Agency (with Robert Mitchum), Meatballs (starring Saturday Night Live's Bill Murray), It Rained All Day the Night I Left (a Canada-France-Israel co-production starring Tony Curtis and Lou Gossett) and Running, with Michael Douglas. It's a system that seems to be working well fór the Canadians, since it leaves them free to underwrite such less obviously commercial efforts as Mourir à Tue-Tête (A Scream from Silence), a film about the making of a film on the trauma of rape, and Summer's Children, a low-budget movie concerning the incestuous relationship of a young man and his sister.

Thanks to an accent that falls gratingly on every ear but their own, the Australians are not quite so able as the Canadians to pretend that their product is international, despite the occasional presence of an international star in their casts. This year, however, with the formation of the government-funded Australian Films Office, the Aussies are beginning to press firmly into the American market--and, with pictures such as The Last Wave and Picnic at Hanging Rock, to some measure succeeding. Oddly enough, the Australians began to think globally, at least as far as films are concerned, about 1973, when the success in England of two "nudie-cutie" movies, The Adventures of Barry McKenzie and Alvin Purple, encouraged them to raise their sights. (Australia has always been a profitable market for American-made hard-R merchandise, while Australian television abounds in nudity and four-letter words.) Typical of the newer product is Snapshot, a thriller set in the demimonde of fashion photography in Melbourne, where an attractive hairdresser's assistant (Sigrid Thornton) is trying to make it big as a model. Apparently, a pretty girl with large ambitions meets the same vicissitudes in Melbourne as anywhere else in the world. Everyone, including lovely Chantal Contouri, wants a piece of the action, and there are just enough nude shots of Thornton to explain why.

If the Australians and the Canadians are beginning to find their own identities on the screen, England, the mother country, has just about lost hers. It's becoming increasingly difficult to differentiate between an authentically British production (Moonraker, for example) and one that's simply British-based (such as Superman)--particularly since they're aimed at the same audience, which is both British and American. Their international casts, crews and financing only confuse the issue further. So why bother? These days, it's hard enough to separate Superman from James Bond, especially since in his latest outing--his 11th--007 actually engages in a little levitation and a weightless roll in the atmosphere with beauteous Holly Goodhead (Lois Chiles). ("He's attempting re-entry," explains M, Bernard Lee, when closed-circuit television reveals their amorous dalliance aboard a spaceship.) Unlike the earlier films in this series, Moonraker's nudity is confined to those silhouetted cuties in Maurice Binder's striking title designs, and the sex to Moore's insouciant one-liners whenever he's introduced to yet another of villainous Michael Lonsdale's seemingly inexhaustible supply of nubile minions who, like those drugs in a cold capsule, are released every few minutes to revitalize a flagging plot.

Oddly enough, there's a lot more nudity (and often considerably more sex as well) in a number of the British-based movies that are essentially action pictures. In Force 10 from Navarone, for example, Barbara Bach, a former woman in Bondage, plays a Yugoslav Partisan who pretends to be the mistress of the Nazi commandant. For reasons that have little to do with sanitation, she takes a bath in full view--his, and ours. Both The Great Train Robbery and Hanover Street offer ample opportunities to inspect the charms of the ravishing Lesley-Anne Down, whose star is rapidly rising. The World Is Full of Married Men suggests that it is also full of extremely available women, including Carroll Baker, Sherrie Cronn and Georgina Hale. Written by Jackie Collins (often described as the Jackie Susann of England), World takes a strictly feminist look at the double standard as it crops up in the glamorous milieu of advertising and fashion models. And for those who may have missed the sun-ripened assets of Joan Collins in last year's The Stud, in which she carries on with a considerably younger man, she's back to flaunt them again this year as The Bitch.

Which returns us, albeit circuitously, to this continent, where the generation gap continues to gape. The Canadians handled it well with In Praise of Older Women, with young Tom Berenger as the nascent seducer who finds much to praise about such older women as Karen Black, Marilyn Lightstone, Helen Shaver, Alexandra Stewart and Susan Strasberg, all of whom shine as beacons along his primrose path. No beacons in Moment by Moment, however--just two stars who fail to twinkle. It probably looked great on paper: Lily Tomlin as a Beverly Hills housewife, separated from her skirt-chasing husband and living in their super Malibu pad, who gets picked up by this beach boy, played by John Travolta, the hottest thing in town. Unfortunately, not only was there no chemistry between the two but the plot kept getting spongy just when it should have been tough. Wisely, soon after the reviews of Moment by Moment appeared, Travolta announced his withdrawal from the cast of Paul Schrader's American Gigolo, which, opposite an older Lauren Hutton, promised more of the same. Much the same premise underlies An Almost Perfect Affair, with young Keith Carradine as an American film maker who has just done a documentary on the execution of Gary Gilmore and wants to show it at the Cannes festival. To ease it past the French censors, he enlists the aid of Monica Vitti, the 40ish wife of Italian producer Rat Vallone. What Carradine intended to be simply a one-night stand elongates into the almost perfect affair of the title. And then there's Wanda Nevada, in which Peter Fonda escorts a petulant Brooke Shields on a gold hunt in the Grand Canyon. The script repeatedly suggests that she'd settle for Fonda but, no doubt with at least one eye on the censors, refuses to explore the consequences.

But there's one movie in 1979 that tries, successfully, to bridge the generation gap: Hair. When Hair had its stage premiere back in 1967, it came as a summation of all the youthful rebellious attitudes of the Sixties. Audiences were attracted by its originality, its score, its high energy--and, no doubt, by the promise of a little skin, which was still a novelty in those days. But no one thought there was a movie in it. Movies--and especially movie musicals--cost too damned much to take on themes that might possibly offend anyone anywhere. Perhaps the people at United Artists were correct in assuming that the protesters of the Sixties had become the ticket buyers of today; at any rate, the movie recaptures a moment in time in terms that we all can understand. It's still antiwar and anti-establishment. There's still a bit of incidental nudity in it. But, essentially, it's a celebration of the rightness of those youthful convictions, set forth in terms that audiences a dozen years later can respond to.

There's one more movie that I want to include in this annual roundup of Sex in Cinema, and I've saved it for last not because it comes from Playboy Productions but because it doesn't slip conveniently into any of the categories discussed thus far. In Saint Jack, Peter Bogdanovich as director and Ben Gazzara as star have created a nether world in which a pimp can be a man of conscience, in which the good guys aren't necessarily all that good or the bad guys all that bad. The story is set in Singapore, where Gazzara wants to open a brothel. When his operation is smashed by the local underworld, he cynically takes on odd jobs, revolting finally when a U.S. Intelligence agent (played by Bogdanovich) offers him $25,000 to entrap a U.S. Senator with a secret fondness for boys. Gazzara plays, superbly, the kind of role that would have been offered first to Humphrey Bogart if he were still alive and well; his supporting cast, headed by the superlative Denholm Elliott as an old British hand beginning to suffer from jungle rot, includes at least half a dozen well-stacked Oriental beauties--notably, Monika Subramaniam--who are his main stock in trade. But the point is that there are moral choices to be made, and the movie eloquently tells us why and how a man can sink so low and still make them. Saint Jack is a credit to everyone concerned--and should promise, at the very least, an Oscar nomination for Gazzara.

"What alarmed most viewers in 1979 was the violence that overflowed from the screens into the streets."

"Will Robby Benson desert her, now that she won't be rich? Did Don Ameche desert Sonja Henie?"