Sex in Cinema-1981

There's an old story about a lecherous Yiddish actor who spent an amorous night with one of his more devoted female fans. Next morning, the girl asked him if he could spare a little cash. The actor became indignant. "What!" he exploded. "You've just slept with a star, and now you ask for money!"

"But," she explained, "I'm starving. I need bread, bread!"

"If it's bread you need," boomed the actor, "go fuck a baker!"

In 1981, the studio heads knew they needed bread, and plenty of it. Production costs had risen astronomically. A series of disastrous strikes--beginning with the actors and musicians in 1980, then spreading to the writers in 1981--had seriously curtailed production. Enormously expensive pictures, exemplified by United Artists' $45,000,000 fiasco, Heaven's Gate, left an industry that had always pinned its faith on the dollar uncertain of where to turn next. The studios needed bread; they just didn't know whom to fuck.

One sign of this became apparent very early in the year. In 1980, Paramount had picked up, for a minimal sum, a low-budget horror item titled Friday the 13th, in which a bunch of nubile girls were horrifically disposed of in a haunted summer camp. It made a fortune; at $16,500,000, it was 20th on Variety's authoritative list of the top rental films of the year. Other studios were not slow to take note. Paramount itself released Friday the 13th Part 2, cashing in on the phenomenon by virtually duplicating the original. Columbia imported from Canada the grisly Happy Birthday to Me, MGM contributed He Knoius You're Alone and Universal, The Funhouse.

There have been more--many more--in what will no doubt go down in film chronologies as the goriest year ever. More frightening than the films themselves, however, is what they tell us about the (text continued on page 176) audiences that pay to see them. It's not plots they're buying, it's the sight of people being hacked, slashed, skewered, dismembered, disemboweled, disfigured.... And who are the victims, more often than not? Girls, that's who.

It seems especially to be the fate of bright, attractive, liberated women in films these days--TV personalities, camp counselors, herpetologists, photographers, you name it--to become the special targets of deranged killers, whoever (or whatever) they may be. In the halcyon days of Fay Wray and Helen Twelvetrees, a horror-film heroine had merely to look dumb and scream on cue. Today, the dummies are dispatched fairly early on; it's the bright, spunky ones who are saved for last.

It's hard to avoid the impression that, in the ongoing war of the sexes, male writers and directors of these films are working out their own aggressions against the opposite gender. To be sure, the woman in peril has long been a cliche of the horror genre. She's so much more vulnerable, so much less well equipped to defend herself than we men--that has been the thinking. And it continues: In both versions of Friday the 13th, the campfire girls are as disposable as Kleenex. But when a woman who's a real woman is endangered, as is Lauren Bacall in The Fan or as is Nancy Allen in Blow Out, the latest from her husband, Brian De Palma, writers appear to take a fiendish delight in prolonging the agony until, in effect, the audiences seem to be cheering the killers on. The movies have become a form of blood sport--and a very profitable one. In Variety's weekly listings of the top 50 pictures in the U. S. market, at least half a dozen are invariably what they term horror pics.

Since most of the killings in these films occur when a girl is engaged in", or is about to become engaged in, a sexual act, it's also hard not to believe that their perpetrators don't consider themselves divine avengers, that there is still a puritanical ethic operative that decrees not merely an A branded on the bosom but a slashed throat or a disembowelment awarded for choosing the primrose path. And if a woman survives, it's always despite the most horrendous mental and physical torments. It's easy to conclude that most writers today really don't like women very much.

That is also confirmed by the numerous spin-offs from the likes of National Lampoon's Animal House and Meatballs, with their heavy accent on sexual horseplay. In today's theaters, for better or worse, it's mainly the young adults who inhabit the market place. And their numbers can make a dumb movie like Cheech & Chong's Nice Dreams an enormous success. In its first week, Nice Dreams rated first on Variety's list. As H. L. Mencken once said, "No one ever went broke by underestimating the taste of the American public."

Perhaps the success of Animal House and Meatballs was disorienting. They made money beyond anyone's anticipation. The studios, mainly because they weren't sure why all of this was happening, began picking up these empty-headed entertainments like mad. It was a gold rush, with a superabundance of bouncing tits and asses the only conceivable guideposts to the new bonanza. Stripes, for example, alternates scenes of nude female mud wrestling with shots of girls taking well-deserved showers, neither having much to do with the central story of cabdriver Bill Murray's reluctant induction into the U. S. Army. Nice Dreams goes a step further; not only is there the ever-present female flesh that one has come to expect in these pictures but Cheech himself goes nude for a protracted sequence, leaping out of voluptuous Evelyn Guerrero's window when her husband bursts into the bedroom at a crucial moment. From Australia comes Pacific Banana, in which handsome airline pilot Graeme Blundell is avidly pursued by bevies of naked girls (including the exceptionally attractive Deborah Gray), but in vain. As the title song explains, when he wants his banana "to go up, up, up, instead it goes down, down, down"--and Blundell sneezes. A lot. And from sexually liberated Sweden comes Dusan Makavejev's raunchy Montenegro (also known as Pigs and Pearls), starring our own Susan Anspach and the Ingmar Bergman regular Erland Josephson. Makavejev, it will be remembered, is the veteran Yugoslav director whose audacious WR--Mysteries of the Organism brought new and startling perceptions to the field of adult films back in 1971. In his new comedy, which is in English, Anspach plays a sexually neglected housewife who leaves home and hubby for a liberating fling in Stockholm's hotter night spots, then returns to settle old scores. At least in Sweden they're not making their sex comedies solely for retarded juveniles.

Aimed at a broader--and certainly broader-minded--audience was Mel Brooks's impudent and outrageous History of the World--Part I--history in a pig's eye. It's refreshingly vulgar, raucous stuff, with plenty of leering on Brooks's part and plenty of good-looking girls for the audience to ogle (supplied in the Roman sequence from Playboy's seemingly inexhaustible stock of models and Playmates). Even in its audacity, however, Brooks's History isn't a strip show; there's no nudity and very little profanity. Brooks is audacious where it counts--in the realm of sacrosanct shibboleths. For all the farting in the film, there are also great gulps of fresh air.

Or take Richard Pryor's Bustin' Loose, which has also been doing quite well where it counts. Stripped of Pryor's colorful language (which, fortunately, it hasn't been), the picture might have played like a Disney special. Burglar Pryor, who happens to be a good mechanic, is forced by his parole officer to assist Cicely Tyson in her effort to relocate a bunch of emotionally disturbed kids from Philadelphia to Seattle. It becomes a kind of African Queen relationship between the strait-laced Tyson and the loose-limbed Pryor, greatly aided by his half-muttered one-liners.

Caveman brings us Ringo Starr as a primitive with brains--at least with brains enough to appreciate the lineaments of co-star Barbara Bach, whom he subsequently wed. It's another Animal House derivative, just as gross and vulgar as the original, a film that puts a premium on comic-book primitivism, that prizes a fart over a well-turned phrase. (Actually, in this movie, there are no well-turned phrases: The vocabulary is limited to about a dozen grunted words.) But it's fun, mainly because it doesn't take itself seriously, and because there's not only Bach but also sultry Shelley Long to enhance the scenery.

Blake Edwards' S.O.B. (Standard Operational Bullshit), a mordant satire on Hollywood based largely on Edwards' own experiences while making the 1970 fiasco Darling Lili, advances the curious notion that a costly failure can be turned around simply by transforming it into a sexy comedy, complete with an erotic ballet and a quick flash of the star's bosom. Whether or not Edwards intended it as tongue in cheek, obviously that's hardly the answer--not in this day and age, when an exposed breast has become just about as common as an exposed Polaroid. Considering that in this instance the breast belongs to the hitherto prim and proper Julie Andrews, the momentary exposure holds a touch of novelty, but it's hardly enough to salvage either Edwards' fictional film within a film or S.O.B. itself--no more than lovely Isabelle Huppert's frequent nude scenes, not to mention those of the girls in her frontier bordello, were enough to keep Heaven's Gate from becoming another all-time disaster.

The fact is that, whatever successes the fast-track boys may have enjoyed, most of the really big hits of 1981 were far longer on action than on sex. Heading the list (and seemingly destined to become one of the box-office champions of all time) is the George Lucas-Steven Spielberg collaboration, Raiders of the Lost Ark, a fast-paced adventure movie from the two men responsible for Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third (continued on page 270)Sex in Cinema(continued from page 176) Kind. Harrison Ford, playing a shy, bespectacled archaeologist in the classroom, becomes in the field--well, Superman, except that he can't fly.

Ford, whose association with Lucas dates as far back as American Graffiti, here emerges as a major addition to the very thin ranks of credible action heroes. He's not as handsome as Errol Flynn, Cary Grant or Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., were in their salad days, yet his verve and aplomb vividly recall those valiant swashbucklers. And in Raiders, he's teamed with feisty Karen Allen as the girl he put behind him years ago but never quite forgot. Allen insists on accompanying Ford on his wild adventure and, instead of lousing up everything in the dubious tradition of action-adventure heroines, actually saves Ford's neck when he tangles with the Nazis. She may panic at the sight of a viper in her shoe, but the film makes it clear that snakes give Ford the shakes, too. It's a nice switch. In keeping with the ethos of the genre, there isn't much love stuff between them; but, as they say, they have a good relationship.

So do Clark Kent and Lois Lane in Superman II, another of the year's box-office triumphs--especially after Lois finally comes to recognize that the mild-mannered Kent is, in fact, her adored Man of Steel. Much of the plot for this second outing hinges on Superman's realization that before they can consummate their mutual passion, he must renounce his Krypton-bred powers and turn mortal. He tries it for a while; but, once again, the world is in danger--this time from three evil Kryptonites (Terence Stamp, the giant Jack O'Halloran and leather-clad Sarah Douglas), all of them equipped with the strength, the speed and the prescience of Superman himself. Will Superman give up his mortal happiness to save humanity one more time? Stay tuned for Superman III.

Meanwhile, Superman II remains a grand entertainment, loaded with tongue-in-cheek action and tickled up with slier, subtler one-liners than the original. Christopher Reeve continues to impress, both as the Man of Steel and as the clumsy, diffident Clark Kent, but it's Margot Kidder who dominates the movie as pert Lois Lane, girl reporter. Dropping withering one-liners, she can be hard as nails one moment, swoony as a groupie the next--and seductive all the time. The first time around, one was never quite sure what Superman saw in that petulant, demanding little creature; in Superman II, whether because of superior writing or a more skillfully pointed performance (or both), Kidder becomes the kind of girl that any man, Super or not, would want to take off with.

Surprisingly, the latest caper of that somewhat more earth-bound superman, James Bond, also places the accent on sensational stunts rather than on sex-sational bed partners. For Your Eyes Only is 007's 12th outing for the astute producer Albert Broccoli, who perhaps thought it time to change the formula; gone are the squadrons of scantily clad girls, the backup of ingenious gadgetry and most of Bond's risqué bons mots. In fact, once you get beyond Maurice Binder's always eye-catching title design, that's it for erotica. The girl in this movie (Carole Bouquet--a beauty) doesn't even like Bond most of the way; she's more interested in avenging the machine-gunning of her parents on their yacht--which just happens to be Bond's mission as well. Even though Roger Moore invests the role with his customary panache and the film's action passages are never less than terrific, its effect is a little like hoping for champagne and ending up with a cream soda.

This would seem to be the year for superheroes, however--past, present and imaginary. Outland stars former Bondsman Sean Connery in a reprise of Gary Cooper's implacable sheriff from High Noon--only this time the story's set in outer space. Both Flash Gordon and Popeye joined Superman in deserting the comic strips, though neither did nearly so well for itself or its maker. And out of the mist of legend come such staunch and heroic figures as King Arthur and Sir Lancelot (Excalibur), valiant young Perseus (Clash of the Titans) and the doughty Galen (Dragonslayer).

In most legends, the patterns are not only simple but similar: A golden youth sets out to slay one or more mythic beasts, all for the love of a lady and invariably aided by an elderly soothsayer. (George Lucas knew so well what he was doing when he created the Alec Guinness character, Obi-Wan Kenobi, for Star Wars.) Ralph Richardson performs this role in Dragonslayer; he's a magician who realizes that the time for magic is running out as the Dark Ages draw to a close, but who nevertheless passes on his waning art to his young apprentice, Peter MacNicol. It seems that in the neighboring kingdom there lives a fearsome dragon that the local king appeases by offering up each year two fresh virgins, selected by lottery. His subjects are understandably upset--particularly since the king protects his own daughter by keeping her name out of the drawing. MacNicol, though still a novice at sorcery, rises to the occasion, aided by spunky Caitlin Clarke (whose father had kept her out of the draft by pretending she was a boy) and by the princess (pretty Chloe Salaman), who despises her father's sneaky way of sparing her life. But the dragon scenes are, indeed, awesome, and Clarke, making her screen debut, displays the sensuous charm and verve that mark her as a major discovery.

In Clash of the Titans, the venerable seer is portrayed by Burgess Meredith, he of the dulcet TV sales pitches, with a wry assist from Laurence Olivier as Zeus, the illegitimate father of Perseus (Harry Hamlin). Andromeda (Judi Bow-ker), chained to a rock much of the time, isn't a big help; but Perseus can save her from becoming breakfast for the dread sea monster, The Kraken, if he can deliver the severed head of the Medusa. Young Hamlin has an awful lot of obstacles to overcome, including his own diffident performance. Thanks to Pegasus, his winged (if heavy-footed) horse, he just makes it under the wire.

Far closer to the magic core of legend is John Boorman's dark, moody recreation of the days (and knights) of the Round Table in Excalibur. It's the Dark Ages as seen through the wise and wicked eyes of Merlin the Magician (wonderfully played by Nicol Williamson), a born troublemaker. He sets the tragedy in motion by transforming the lustful Uther Pendragon into a facsimile of the Duke of Cornwall, so that Uther can sleep with Cornwall's new bride. Merlin's sole condition: "What issues from your lust must be mine." What issues, of course, is Arthur, who, when he reaches 18, is empowered to withdraw from the stone in which it lies embedded the invincible sword Excalibur, the sword that makes him king.

Arthur (Nigel Terry) marries the beautiful Guenevere (Cherie Lunghi); but Merlin, ever eager for mischief, leads him to believe that she has betrayed him with his most trusted knight, Sir Lancelot (Nicholas Clay). She hasn't, of course--at least not until Lancelot lies terribly wounded after a duel in defense of her honor. She comes to bind up his wounds but remains to make tender love by an idyllic lake. Meanwhile, Morgana (Helen Mirren), Arthur's power-hungry half sister, having mastered Merlin's evil arts, transforms herself into Guenevere and sleeps with the king. She wants a son who will one day murder his father and rule the kingdom, with herself the power behind the throne. That son is Mordred (Robert Addie) and, in the manner of legends, he succeeds. In his dying moments, however, Arthur is able to wrest from him the great sword, leaving himself the once and future king.

All of this not merely works--it's a masterpiece. It's a masterpiece because in this film, unlike others in the genre, Boorman lets us feel the humanity of the people. It's Arthur's too easily roused suspicions of his wife's chastity, then his brooding vengeance that transform the halls of Camelot into a dungeon.

It may be sheer coincidence that three major motion pictures depicting the heroisms of distant ages arrived on the screen virtually simultaneously, but since all three have gone on to become outstanding box-office attractions, one can only conclude that they are touching some responsive chord in their audiences--the same chord, no doubt, that has also been sounded by the likes of Raiders of the Lost Ark, For Your Eyes Only and Superman II. Perhaps it's simply a Hegelian reaction to all the antiheroes who've been populating our films for so long--the killers on the run, the psychotics and psychopaths whose mothers abused them or whose wives didn't understand them, the loners living on the fringes of society. Maybe people need to believe again in such basic virtues as honesty and loyalty. If we can't find heroic figures in our real world, it's sometimes necessary to make them up.

In a sense, every movie is like a trial balloon. Because it generally takes a good two years to develop a picture from the idea stage to a release print, there's no possible way of testing the waters first. So when a film hits it big, as today's superhero films seem to be doing, one can't really congratulate the producer on his prescience. In the absence of other guidelines, producers are prone to spot what they conceive to be trends and rush a picture into production in the hope that the trend will still be going strong two years down the road. Altered States, based on the late Paddy Chayefsky's controversial novel, affords a perfect example, blending, as it does, psychological horror with science fiction, two trends that have been standing the test of time quite well. And fortunately, too, for in its troubled pre-production phase, this $15,000,000 film switched studios, director and special-effects expert. To make matters worse, Chayefsky, who also wrote the screenplay, demanded that his name be removed from the credits, publicly stating that he felt director Ken Russell had mangled his concept. Which is undoubtedly true; Russell is notorious for going for the effect rather than the substance. This time he chose to play up the horror aspects of altered consciousness, retrogressing his psychophysiologist hero (William Hurt) into a primitive, apelike killer. As in all of Russell's work, the film has an audacious, unique "look" to it from its very first shot of Hurt floating head down in a glass tank of warm water, eyes staring, electrodes attached to his naked body, and all brilliantly illuminated from within the tank. An experiment with hallucinogenic drugs leads to the equivalent of a light show, and the transformation of man into ape is impressively recorded. In addition, Hurt has a lovely, understanding wife (Blair Brown), an anthropologist whose strength, patience and physical presence help bring him back to the present. (Russell has never been one to resist a little nudity in his films, and the redheaded Brown is definitely worth looking at.) For all these reasons, Altered States proved to be a film with a strong appeal to the crucial youth audience.

Sometimes, however, what seems on paper to be the perfect package just fails to ignite. Back Roads, for example, reunited diminutive Sally Field, fresh from her Norma Rae triumph, with Martin Ritt, her director on that film. Co-starring is Tommy Lee Jones, who scored so heavily in Coal Miner's Daughter last year. This new story, with Field as a hooker and Jones as a failed boxer, never seemed to jell. Field, playing her role with a leathery toughness, made fine use of her provocative body, but Back Roads sank beneath the waves, leaving scarcely a ripple.

Or consider The Postman Always Rings Twice, based on James M. Cain's steamy novel of adultery and murder that had been filmed twice before (once in Italy as Ossessione). Postman's producers trumpeted well in advance of its release that only now could Cain's sordid tale of lust in the dust be brought to the screen as faithfully as Cain himself could wish; indeed, they promised that it would be the hottest movie ever to come from a major studio, and with major stars (Jack Nicholson and Jessica Lange). Bob Rafelson, the director, declared that he intended to shoot it as an X, then cut it for an R rating. By all accounts, that's exactly what he did--but he didn't realize how much of the hard stuff would have to go to get the R. Between the elisions and the cutaways, this Postman is just about as sanitary as the John Garfield-Lana Turner version released by MGM in 1946.

It's just possible, in fact, that the earlier version was really the sexier. Of course, in 1946, no one would have dreamed of attempting to film even what remains of Nicholson and Lange's impas-sionate grapplings atop a kitchen table; but there was a good deal more of what used to be called sheer animal magnetism between Garfield and Turner than ever surfaces between the present pair. Although Lange puts on a heated show of passion, you keep expecting her to turn away from Nicholson whenever he makes a grab and mutter, witheringly, "Why don't you get a shave?" To me, this Postman never rang the bell once.

Nor was there much bell ringing for the John and Bo Derek version of Tarzan, the Ape Man--though the Edgar Rice Burroughs estate sought, vainly, to ring the bell on its very release, claiming that the Dereks' adaptation improperly reduced the Burroughs character to the status of a supporting player. In a compromise move, and despite John Derek's outraged howls of "artistic integrity," MGM agreed to release the film minus about three and a half minutes of cuts dictated by New York Federal Court Judge Henry Werker--cuts, incidentally, that centered almost exclusively on Bo's extensive nudity. It's a new wrinkle in censorship, and one that we hope won't be repeated. Once the reviews appeared, however, it was clear that what remained was essentially an animated reprise of Playboy's September Bo Derek layout (sans, of course, the poster pull-out)--which, in all probability, is all that the Dereks were aiming for in the first place.

Still of major topical interest this year has been the subject of women's lib, whether presented through the lips of a subordinate player, such as Lisa Eichhorn's sodden but self-aware wife in Cutter's Way, or through the freshly opened eyes of a sprightly trio of office workers in Nine to Five. Eichhorn articulates clearly her awareness that she is being used by the men in her life (Jeff Bridges and John Heard) but, unable to change anything, she chooses drink--and possibly suicide. The girls in Nine to Five (Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin and Dolly Parton) have a different out; at a pot party, each fantasizes what she'd like to do to her supremely male-chauvinist pig of a boss (wonderfully played by Dabney Coleman). The irony is that soon after, their fantasies seem to be coming true. They string up Coleman in a room, then proceed to run his office more efficiently and effectively than he ever managed to do. (There's a further irony, unintended, in that the movie, produced by Fonda's IPC Films and based on a story by Patricia Resnick, stereotypes the male character every bit as viciously as the female ones libbers complain about.)

Fonda handed the larger, flashier roles to Tomlin, perfect as the office-wise veteran, and to Parton, making her film debut as Coleman's blonde but far from dumb personal secretary. Ultimately, in fact, Nine to Five is Parton's movie; with her intriguing combination of innocence, humor, sexuality and down-to-earth clean common sense, she could well inherit Judy Holliday's mantle.

Tomlin also appeared, less advantageously, in The Incredible Shrinking Woman, playing an average, harassed, mid-American housewife whose devotion to brand names leads to her (literal) downfall. Tomlin and her favorite writer-producer, Jane Wagner, are obviously trying to say something about the plight of women in our consumer-oriented society, but the message keeps getting lost.

Jill Clayburgh hasn't abandoned the profeminist scene she illuminated so well in An Unmarried Woman and Starting Over. In First Monday in October, she's back as our first female Supreme Court Justice--over the roaring protests of Justice Walter Matthau. Matthau, a liberal cast in the William O. Douglas mold, doesn't object so much to the fact that Jill's a woman as to the fact that she's an Orange County conservative. Their first clash, interestingly enough, is over a porno movie, The Naked Nymphomaniac. Clayburgh, viewing the film in its entirety, is ready to convict the hapless film maker on the grounds of moral debasement. Matthau, who hasn't even seen the movie and hates pornos, eloquently defends it on First Amendment grounds. First Monday, based on the Jerome Lawrence--Robert E. Lee hit play, doesn't attempt to resolve the conflict; it merely states the opposing views with clarity and conviction. (For the record, the three-minute porno insert was made by two veterans of the adult-film field, director Dave Friedman and cinematographer Lee Frost, from a script supplied by producer Paul Heller. "We didn't think that Freddie Koenekamp, our cameraman, could make it look tacky enough," Heller explains. Friedman says he shot about 3500 feet, of which less than 300 feet turns up in the finished film. That was enough to earn it an R rating.) It should also be noted that although the film was released in August, it was actually in the can months before President Reagan nominated Sandra Day O'Connor to the highest Court.

Not that 1981 has been totally lacking in strong male-female relationships--or relationships between males and strong females. In Eye of the Needle, in steamy bed scenes reminiscent of his earlier Don't Look Now, Nazi spy Donald Sutherland woos and wins handsome Kate Nelligan, married to a crippled, embittered R.A.F. pilot. When she discovers Sutherland's true identity, and learns he has murdered her husband, she takes out after him with hatchet and gun--though she still loves the guy.

But, inevitably, the ultimate word on female phenomena (as well as phenomenal females) came from Italy's Federico Fellini, whose City of Women is an apocalyptic vision of the emerging feminist movement between the Sixties and the present, filtered through the dream/nightmares of a middle-aged man (Marcello Mastroianni) trying to comprehend and adjust to these new challenges to the once-dominant role of the male. Mastroianni, like Fellini, loves women--he just doesn't understand them. What Fellini has done in this film, often with hallucinogenic brilliance, is to create a series of fantastic dreams for his sensuous protagonist--an encounter with Don Juan, just celebrating his 10,000th conquest (a hark back to "the good old days"), unnerving meetings with lady pugilists and wrestlers whose sheer phys-icality dismays the aging man, with sexually alluring women who remind him of his past pursuits and, cropping up everywhere, reminders by shrill feminist voices that while the game may still be fair, it will no longer be so easy.

Fellini has set his finale in an abstract roller-coaster setting not unlike Bob Fosse's glittering but ominous fun house in All That Jazz. But where Fosse's film welcomed death as the final surcease lor his womanizing, pill-popping, self-abusive hero, Fellini's roller coaster becomes the symbol for an enormous womb, ever luring men on for another wild, exhilarating, terrifying ride through life. City of Women attempts no final assessment of the feminist movement; but it forthrightly establishes it as a dominant and disturbing fact of contemporary society, and with all the verve and artistry of Fellini at his best.

On the domestic front, the search for deeper relationships and self-realization goes on, especially among middle-aged males. In All Night Long, it's chain-store executive Gene Hackman, who, having been demoted to the night shift at one of his company's drugstores, decides to find out for himself what it's all about, Alfie. He gives up his job, his home and his wife (Diane Ladd) to launch an affair with a neighborhood floozy (Barbra Streisand) who, he knows, is already involved in an affair with his own son (Dennis Quaid). Hardly memorable, except as a reminder that the "middle-aged crazies" are still with us. In Falling in Love Again, Elliott Gould, owner of a clothing store in California, fantasizes while driving cross-country to a class reunion in the Bronx what his life might have been. His wife (Susannah York), it seems, also has a few ideas on that score. Atlantic City gives aging numbers runner Burt Lancaster a new lease on life as that once flyblown resort is transformed by the cash flow of its posh gambling casinos. Lancaster, sexier than he has been in years, has been taking care of (and being taken care of by) bedridden Kate Reid; suddenly, he finds romance with the irresistible Susan Sarandon, an oyster-bar waitress who's hoping to strike it rich as a blackjack dealer in the casinos.

Far and away the year's most conspicuously successful "relationships" film has been The Four Seasons, written and directed by its popular star, Alan Alda--with a deep bow, it should be noted, to Bernard Slade's Same Time, Next Year, in which Alda co-starred two years ago. The plot contrivances are notably similar, even though the time frame has been collapsed. Three couples take their vacations together four times in the course of the film; in the process, relationships deteriorate (and, in one memorable skinny-dipping scene, the clothes come off).

Intended for a younger generation, Franco Zeffirelli's Endless Love had to do endless battle with the Classification and Rating Administration of the Motion Picture Association of America before its initial X rating was reduced to an R. Although the director maintained that there was no frontal nudity in the love scenes between Brooke Shields and Martin Hewitt, playing a 15-year-old and a 17-year-old, respectively, the specter of kiddie porn was repeatedly raised--augmented by a sequence in which Shirley Knight, as Shields's mother, attempts to seduce young Hewitt. Oddly enough, the director declared himself in accord with the ratings board. "The community is now extremely sensitive on the child-pornography issue, and rightly so," he stated. Heavily cut, the picture was released in July.

Apart from the disappointing La Cage aux Folles 11, homosexuality wasn't terribly prominent in the films of 1981. The Alternative Miss World is a British-made documentary of an all-star drag-queen beauty contest; Squeeze introduces us to New Zealand's homosexual night life; and Germany's Taxi to the Loo, which won the prestigious Max Ophuls Prize in Saarbrücken earlier this year, is a quasi-autobiographical film by Frank Ripploh, a gay teacher, about a gay teacher on the prowl for exotic sexual experiences. Made on an infinitesimal budget (about $40,000) by Ripploh and friends, the picture has already created storms of controversy in Germany, where Volk can't decide if it's pro- or antigay. Similarly, lesbianism has been fairly well muted on the home front. Exceptions come from such imports as England's Richard's Things, with Liv Ullmann tracking down the girl with whom her late husband had an affair, and then proceeding to do likewise; or France's Voyage en Douce, in which the gorgeous Dominique Sanda and Geraldine Chaplin, both on the lam from their husbands, discover each other. Although the writing leaves you never quite sure what's real and what's just girlish imaginings, the visuals are plenty specific.

But if it's specifics you're after, it's time to turn to the hard-cores, the Xs. For one thing, they're looking a lot better these days. The plots are more developed, the photography more imaginative, the girls more attractive, the gentlemen--well, longer. Also, and this is strangely refreshing, the sex is straight and to the point. It may not be love beyond compare, but at least it's free of the kinky sadism that characterizes so much of the product from the major (concluded on page 280)Sex in Cinema(continued from page 276) studios--like the drug-crazed prostitute (Pam Grier) in Fort Apache, the Bronx, who secretes a razor blade in her mouth to castrate her clients, or the guy getting shish-kabobed in Happy Birthday to Me, or the knife-wielding assailant (Michael Biehn) who slashes up some of Lauren Bacall's best friends in The Fan. True, a sexual pervert kills a callgirl who has taunted him in Amanda by Night, perhaps the most densely plotted adult movie to date, but what the film dwells on is the fact of her death, not the how.

For the most part, however, these films remain simon-pure romps in the fields of male-fantasized sex. A Scent of Heather introduces us to a virginal convent girl of the last century (Veronica Hart) whose arranged marriage to a gardener's son is just short of consummation when he learns that she may, in fact, be his sister; this leads to ardent extramarital couplings on both of their parts. (As is so often the case, Heather is available in two versions. The "hot" Heather runs 99 minutes, the "cool" Heather, 80 minutes. It's the cool one that will probably turn up on pay or cable TV.) Bad Girls owes at least part of its inspiration to Deliverance. Four (authentic) photographic models decide to camp out in some rugged Northern California terrain and shoot pictures of one another. Their not-so-innocent fun ends abruptly when they are captured exploring an old castle that proves to be headquarters for a ring of "masters" who condition captive girls to be their sexual slaves. Not quite so exciting as boiling through white waters in a canoe, perhaps, but still racy stuff.

Games Women Play is a second cousin once removed to Arthur Schnitzler's La Ronde (uncredited, of course). In Manhattan, a small circle of friends exchange bed partners with tremendous zeal and zest in a kind of odd-man-out competitiveness. Games features a frantic

gang bang on a poker table, where the ante isn't the only thing that's up. Dracula Exotica, starring the improbably proportioned Vanessa Del Rio, brings the count to New York, where he is immediately assumed by the CIA to be a Russian spy. The agent assigned to the case (Samantha Fox), as it happens, bears an uncanny resemblance to Dracula's lost love of 400 years ago. She returns his love, knowing well the consequences. As the poster proclaims, He came for a bite...and ate the whole thing. Randy, the Electric Lady, starring curvaceous Desiree Cousteau, is steamy science fiction, with Cousteau as a woman whose orgasmic juices produce colossal climaxes when consumed by others. Captured by an international spy ring, she's forced to go on producing Orgasmine--the agents' key to world conquest. In Talk Dirty to Me, the well-endowed Jamie Gillis conquers women by doing just that.

At least 80 of these films appeared in 1981, most of them produced on budgets ranging between $100,000 and $200,000--up sharply from the $25,000--$35,000 average of as little as five years ago. And it shows, not only in production values but in the quality of the performances. Whereas in the past the performers were paid off at $100 a day, now the top stars in the porno field--including Lesllie Bovee, Marilyn Chambers, Desiree Cousteau, Samantha Fox, Veronica Hart, Annette Haven, Seka ("the Marilyn Monroe of porn"), Jamie Gillis, John C. Holmes, Ron Jeremey and John Leslie--are drawing down $1000. [For more on this subject, see Tuning In to Channel Sex on page 222.] The only trouble is that they tend to be--you'll forgive the expression--overexposed, playing leading roles in six to ten films each during the past year.

But the producers aren't too concerned. Their movies today account for about 15 percent of all theatrical-ticket sales, better than 40 percent of all sales in the booming video-cassette market. In fact, unlike their "straight" competition, which waits at least 90 days after the release of a movie before making it available on cassettes, most X merchandisers go immediately into cassettes, often using theater popcorn stands as their point of sale. The movie in the theater becomes, in effect, the trailer that helps the customer decide whether or not he wants to buy. Pay and cable TV are also broadening the market place for erotica, often with minimal cutting. In Los Angeles recently, ON TV, a subscription operation, ran last year's Jack 'n' Jill with everything intact but the cum shots. It looks as if sex is being returned to where it belongs--the home. Let the Moral Majority make of that what it will.

"Kidder becomes the kind of girl that any man, Super or not, would want to take off with."

"For the most part, these films remain simon-pure romps in the fields of male-fantasized sex."