Sex in Cinema 1982

An oft-anthologized short story by Irwin Shaw is The Girls in Their Summer Dresses; a collective title for the films of 1982 might well be The Boys in Their Summer Dresses. Clint Eastwood, it would seem, is the only major star who hasn't as yet climbed into drag. The tone was set, of course, by Blake Edwards' comedy hit Victor, Victoria. In it, not only does gay, graying Robert Preston wind up the show performing a wild kind of Carmen Miranda impersonation in a night club, he also persuades the prim and proper Julie Andrews, playing an indigent singer, to disguise herself as a man and go on to stardom as a female impersonator--much to (text continued on page 206)Sex in Cinema(continued from page 160) the consternation of James Garner, a macho Mobster from Chicago who finds himself unaccountably drawn to him/her. In The World According to Garp, towering John Lithgow plays a transsexual, a former football star who feels far more at home in his new identity. (It's probably the first time that the screen has treated a guy in drag with such compassion and dignity.) Steve Martin switches twice in Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid, at one point matching up (more or less) with Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity and later subbing for Jimmy Cagney's mother (!) in White Heat. In Garry Marshall's spirited parody of TV hospital shows, Young Doctors in Love, chunky Hector Elizondo spends much of his footage in blonde wig and frilly dresses to outfox some Syndicate hit men, while Cheech and Chong employ the same pretext to elude a couple of irate Arabs in Things Are Tough All Over. And even as this is being written, Dustin Hoffman is in New York shooting Tootsie, which reads like a reverse Victor, Victoria, with Hoffman masquerading as a woman to land a part in a soap opera; the film should be out before the end of the year.

While most of those instances of switch-hitting were admittedly played for laughs, they are also indicative of the new and more relaxed acceptance of alternative lifestyles that has entered American movies since the phenomenal success in 1979 of France's La Cage aux Folles, which, with a gross of almost $7,500,000, was one of the most popular imports ever to play in U.S. theaters. In the past, apart from the pansylike gentlemen portrayed by the likes of Grady Sutton and the late, great Franklin Pangborn, American films tended to shy away from any direct reference to homosexuality--and when they did tackle it, as William Friedkin did in Cruising (1980), the results were often sensationalistic and exploitative. Although a scattering of sympathetic homosexual characters have turned up in such recent pictures as Fame and Happy Birthday, Gemini, to move a homosexual to center screen and focus an entire film on his coming out was, as one 20th Century-Fox executive expressed it just before the release of Making Love, ''daring and bold. . . . It took daring to make Gentleman's Agreement and Guess Who's Coming to Dinner in the past,'' noted Fox vice-president Irv Ivers. ''This is it for the Eighties.''

Actually, as more than one critic subsequently observed, the reference to the Stanley Kramer movie was particularly apt. In Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, the Sidney Poitier character was so rich, so famous, so sought after that even the Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan would probably have welcomed him into his home. In Making Love, the characters move on almost as elevated a plane. Michael Ontkean plays a successful young doctor; his wife, Kate Jackson, is a rising TV executive--even Harry Hamlin, the cruising gay who forces Ontkean to recognize his true proclivities, is nothing less than a famous author. Discreetly directed (by Arthur Hiller, of Love Story fame) and stylishly mounted, it's a movie any homosexual would be pleased to take his mother to see.

Actually, far more daring was Robert Towne's Personal Best--primarily because it didn't make any big deal about the lesbian relationship between track stars Mariel Hemingway and Patrice Donnelly. Their love scenes are tender yet graphic, but because Towne (who wrote and directed) makes us aware of them as people, not as sex objects, their intimacies seem as natural and unforced as do his numerous shots of the women's team, undraped, in the shower and the steam room.

The sight of Michael Caine planting a kiss on Superman Christopher Reeve's curvy lips caused scarcely a ripple during the unspooling of Deathtrap, based on Ira Levin's long-running Broadway mystery, even though the key to the presumed murder is the revelation that Caine and Reeve are lovers. Nor were there shouts of protest (even from the gay community) when, in Partners, straight cop Ryan O'Neal is ordered to mince as a homosexual, while gay cop John Hurt is brought out of his closet to help O'Neal hunt down a murderer of male models.

Not that the movies have abandoned their more traditional titillations--notably liberal doses of nudity. Oddly enough, it's those pictures aimed primarily at a late-teen audience that today expose the most skin. Perhaps the rationale is that the older folks have already tired of the stuff or that they can always go off to an X-rated porno palace to get their jollies. To be sure, nudity is still to be found, almost casually, in many of the adult-oriented movies of 1982--in the Mexican bordello to which Jack Nicholson traces Elpidia Carrillo in The Border, in Ray Sharkey's hot love scenes with gorgeous Ornella Muti in Love ? Money, in Paul Schrader's Cat People, which reveals Nastassia Kinski and Annette O'Toole frequently in the altogether, and in Butterfly, in which the well-touted Pia Zadora is forever falling out of her frocks.

There's even more casual nudity in the French-Canadian import Quest for Fire, in which a trio of half-naked primitives, during what would appear to be a world-wide search for something burning, rescue a distressed damsel. She's sprightly Rae Dawn Chong--daughter of comedian Tommy Chong--who seems to be clad in nothing more than whitewash and some streaks of charcoal. Rae Dawn not only teaches her saviors the secret of making fire but also shows the most presentable of the trio (Everett McGill) how to make love in what would now be called the missionary position.

Quest, based on a classic French novel, had serious anthropological aspirations. Not so such myth-and-magic derivatives of Excalibur as Conan the Barbarian and The Sword and the Sorcerer--with The Beastmaster, Fire and Ice, Krull, Sorceress and several Hercules spin-offs yet to come. Here the target audience is clearly the late teenager and the young adult, with the old beach-blanket formula of tits and sand transformed into tits and sword--plenty of sex, plenty of gore. Throughout Conan, it's a tossup as to who displays more beefy pectorals, Arnold Schwarzenegger or his cinematic love interest, statuesque Sandahl Bergman The Sword and the Sorcerer, shot on a far slimmer budget, overcompensates by spelling its sword fights with orgies and--when all else fails--anachronistic sequences of nude women in bondage. The effect is rather like medieval porno.

Young Randal Kleiser's nude-filled Summer Lovers is the sun-kissed saga of a swinging threesome set against eye-boggling backgrounds of the Greek isles. Peter Gallagher and Daryl Hannah, fresh out of school, arrive on Santorini for eight weeks of unwedded togetherness. First they doff their backpacks, then their swimsuits. Gallagher's eye soon wanders to petite Valerie Quennessen, playing an uninhibited French archaeologist, and before long she has moved in with the two Americans. (There's no hint of a lesbian relationship between the girls; they both love Peter.) Whenever the doings in their little whitewashed apartment threaten to become a bit too complicated, Kleiser cuts to the beaches, with their bevies of nude sun worshipers and skinny-dippers. Kleiser, who previously directed Grease and The Blue Lagoon, seems to have a fairly good idea of what today's youth audience is after--and it ain't Andy Hardy.

Speaking of The Blue Lagoon, Embassy came up with something called Paradise that was virtually an instant replay of Kleiser's 1980 movie--so close, in fact, that Columbia sued (unsuccessfully) to enjoin its distribution. Unlike Lagoon, Paradise doesn't waste time with the kid stuff. Its two teenagers, Willie Aames and Phoebe Cates, improbably stumble upon a vast oasis out in the middle of nowhere; the place seems equipped with just about every modern convenience except clothing. In Zapped!, a good-humored send-up of Carrie, Scott Baio, as the telekinetically gifted hero, uses his powers not to kill his fellow students but to strip them of their clothes at the school prom. Sounds a good deal healthier than what Sissy Spacek did to her classmates in the earlier film.

And then there are the innumerable spin-offs of Animal House, the runaway hit of 1978. National Lampoon, the producer of Animal House, itself has no fewer than five currently in the works, including National Lampoon's Class Reunion. The raunch is clearly on the rise in this youth-oriented field, and nudity right along with it. As proof, there's Mel Simon's production of Porky's, which went through the roof this past summer. Porky's, for any late-comers, is the name of the dive where teenagers hang out hoping to make out with Cherry Forever (Susan Clark), a hooker who promises more than she delivers. Playboy's Bruce Williamson rightly pegged the film as a ''crotch-level salute to horny adolescence,'' with most of its humor hitting distinctly below the belt. Writer-director Bob Clark opens his movie with a kid measuring his erection; following are such subtleties as a middle-aged lady trying to pull the ''reproductive organ'' off a guy who had stuck it through a hole giving onto the women's showers. (The boys spend a lot of time peering through that hole--and so does the audience.) But because its high-spirited high schoolers, boys and girls together, are an attractive lot and because it delivers everything it promises (sleazy laughs and plenty of southern exposure), Porky's became one of the box-office phenomena of a phenomenal box-office year.

It's still too early to talk about the box-office return on the new Cheech and Chong movie, Things Are Tough All Over, but the duo are also teenage favorites, and their newest outing gives them the chance to appear in dual roles--as Pedro and the Man, and also as a pair of Bedouin brothers who eventually decide to make the boys porno stars. Cheech and Chong have never been shy about appearing in the buff (vide Cheech ? Chong's Nice Dreams), and neither are their wives--Rikki Marin and Shelby Fiddis, who appear as French pastries--nor bosomy Evelyn Guerrero, this team's sexy version of the Marx Brothers' Margaret Dumont.

Unable to afford the likes of Cheech and Chong, the producers of such fare as The Beach Girls and Goin' All the Way concentrate on cheerleaders, girls' basketball teams and other assorted athletic types who need to shower occasionally. (The sex in these movies is generally very sanitary.)

On the other hand, each year there are some few films that reach out to teenagers on their own level, tying them in to what they know and care about. Alan Parker's Pink Floyd The Wall, a visualization of one of the band's most popular albums, is a case in point. The Wall focuses on the inner conflicts of Pink, a tremendously successful rock star portrayed by rock star Bob Geldof. It's scarcely kid stuff, especially when Pink's innate fear and hatred of women are vividly illustrated by animations of ordinary objects suddenly transformed into enormous vaginas that threaten to devour him.

Even more directly beamed at the teenage market have been the startling number of science-fiction pictures released in 1982, with Steven Spielberg's E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial leading the way; it promises to become the most profitable movie of all time. Also high on the list are such varied entries as Blade Runner, Megaforce and The Road Warrior, each offering disturbing glimpses of a post-nuclear world dominated by violence and destruction, and Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan and Disney's Tron, which take a decidedly more cheerful view of the gadgetry that lies before us.

Although the horror films and the monster movies are closely allied to science fiction not only in their reliance on special effects but also in their targeted audience, many have a kind of corrupt sexuality about them, especially when the monster comes from within, as it does so often these days. Such old-time movie creatures as King Kong, Godzilla and 1951's original Thing could crush you or mangle you, but at least they were right out there where you could see them. Not so John Carpenter's current Thing; like the title character in Alien, it lives within its host. When it splits out, as it does from time to time in the movie, it assumes many horrifying shapes--a severed head on crablike legs, a suppurating embryo with double rows of teeth. Its attack is horrendous, like a rape, as it forces itself into its victim's body.

To a greater or lesser degree, that psychological rape occurs in just about every horror movie made these days. It's at the very core of Fox's The Entity, based on Frank de Felitta's widely read novel, which perhaps best exemplifies the sexual nature of those psychic attacks. In it, Barbara Hershey, a young widow living alone with her three small children, finds herself suddenly, savagely attacked and ravished by a brutal, unseen force that invades her room and penetrates her on her own bed. Poltergeist's little Heather O'Rourke is captured by unknown forces emanating from inside her TV set; although nobody in the picture makes the point, her abduction is clearly a case of child molestation (accompanied by spectacular special effects). Supernatural possession is also the key to The House Where Evil Dwells, a Japanese-based ghost story in the grand tradition that requires the shades of a love triangle to go on haunting the house in which they died in 1840 until they're properly exorcised. Flash forward to the present, when American journalist Edward Albert, wife Susan George and daughter Amy Barrett move into the house and (with an assist from Doug McClure) begin to relive the events of more than 100 years ago. A Zen monk attempts the exorcism but not before George, possessed by the spirit of her 1840 predecessor, wriggles out of her dress and proceeds to attack, both Albert and McClure.

Possession, in the deepest sense, lies at the core of Paul Schrader's Cat People, a remake of a classic horror film of 1942 with a significant difference. In 1942, everything was suggested--the transformation of man (and woman) into the predatory black cat of the title, its nocturnal prowlings, even the legendary origins of the cat people. Not so in Schrader's film. A highly stylized opening sequence shows an enormous black panther mounting a sacrificial virgin, and from that pairing come the cat people--people who assume the form of humans most of the time but revert when sexually aroused to their feline killer condition. When Nastassia Kinski, one of them, falls in love with zookeeper John Heard, the jungle drums are already sounding. While Heard is still making up his mind between Kinski and his former lady (Annette O'Toole), the film moves on to its most powerful sequence--the harassment in a swimming pool of a naked O'Toole by a prowling black cat. Nor can one easily forget Kinski's brother (Malcolm McDowell) shacking up with a New Orleans prostitute, then mangling her. All of which leads to the film's denouement: When Kinski finally gives in to her love for Heard, is she condemning him to a similar fate? Cat People has everything--incest, bestiality, oral sex, kinky sex, straight sex. Everything except the slightest compassion for anyone caught up in the toils of its chilling plot.

Often chilling, too, are such strictly exploitationist items as Bloodsucking Freaks, Forbidden World, A Stranger Is Watching, Vice Squad, Visiting Hours--the list is endless--in which nubile young women are subjected to rape, sadistic tortures and horrible deaths. In Forbidden World, blonde June Chadwick, trying to communicate with the film's giant spiderlike mutant, is rewarded by having the thing stick one of its slimy tentacles up her crotch and out the back of her neck. In Bloodsucking Freaks, sadistic showman Seamus O'Brien dispatches nude women by guillotine or power drill for pleasure and profit. This isn't precisely new; the phenomenon, tracing back to Friday the 13th (1980), was noted rather extensively in last year's Sex in Cinema--along with the suggestion that ''most writers today really don't like women very much.'' What is most phenomenal, however, is the numbers in which these sick, low-budget horror shows keep coming. At the American Film Market held in Los Angeles last spring, more than 60 such features--better than 25 percent of all the pictures up for grabs--were screened for prospective distributors and exhibitors. That's a drop from 1981, when 95 new horror films were lensed, but until that backlog is absorbed--or until audience apathy sets in, whichever comes first--the unseen slasher will continue to strike, the special-effects monsters will continue to destroy and the writers of this trash will continue to dream up new ways in which women can be demeaned, degraded and disposed of.

Obviously, it's the market that says it all. For a time, we heard a great deal about so-called women's pictures--films that dealt sympathetically and under-standingly with the emerging consciousness of women as decision makers or opinion makers in our society. Suddenly, that trend has disappeared. In Hollywood, the standard explanation is that there are just a handful of bankable female stars--Jacqueline Bisset, Jane Fonda, Barbra Streisand, maybe Jill Clayburgh and Glenda Jackson if they're teamed with the right male lead. But the fact that a number of their profeminist films, such as Clayburgh's First Monday in October, didn't fare too well at the box office probably had a lot more to do with the disappearance of the genre than the defeat of E.R.A. (or perhaps it was symptomatic of the defeat of E.R.A.). Clayburgh was back again this year, albeit briefly, in Paramount's I'm Dancing as Fast as I Can, playing a pill-popping film maker. So who cares? Shoot the Moon co-stars Diane Keaton and Albert Finney as a couple whose marriage is falling apart. The film demonstrates that she's far better at coping than he is, but since Finney is depicted as a total psychotic anyway, it's not much of a contest. Jane Fonda's Rollover, a melodrama about high finance, got lost somewhere in the computer print-outs.

Looking to the major male stars, one can only be struck by the asexuality of their 1982 releases--Burt Reynolds excepted, of course. Reynolds has a certain image to live up to, and he manages quite nicely in both Sharky's Machine and The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, no doubt because both offer him his favorite role--the freewheeling law officer who prefers to put pleasure before business. The pleasure is provided by lovely Rachel Ward in Sharky's, by Dolly Parton as the buxom madam in Whorehouse. But Sylvester Stallone is still happily married to Talia Shire in Rocky III, with nary a curvy blonde to distract him from defending his title against brutish Clubber Lang (Mr. T.). When wife Tuesday Weld walks out on him in Author! Author!, leaving him with five kids, playwright Al Pacino finds temporary surcease with movie star Dyan Cannon--but not enough to move the film out of the PG category. Richard Pryor rates a nod in Some Kind of Hero for shacking up with gold-hearted prostitute Margot Kidder, but the script is too concerned with Pryor's problems with the Army to develop that aspect of the story. And Clint Eastwood's Fire fox, a saga of Cold War espionage in which Clint is smuggled into the Soviet Union to steal a supersophisticated fighter plane, deprives him of any female companionship whatever--even that of Sondra Locke. In Charles Bronson's Death Wish II, the action gets under way with the gang bang of his Mexican housekeeper and the kidnaping, rape and suicide of his catatonic daughter; after that, bent on hunting down the culprits, Bronson has no time at all for his ladyfriend, radio reporter Jill Ireland.

For any deeper appreciation of what really goes on between the sexes, it was a good idea to look abroad this year. Australia, for example, continues to display the artifacts of its remarkable renaissance with Don's Party, made in 1976 by Bruce Beresford but released here only this year. With a deep bow to Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, it's about 11 friends who assemble for an election-night party. As the night and the drinking go on, the aggressions, the pretensions, the libidos all hang out. Superbly performed, the film is an all-out attack on both the social values and the sexual mores of the upper middle class. That also seems to be the motivation behind John Duigan's Winter of Our Dreams, which unites Judy Davis (of My Brilliant Career) with Bryan Brown (of Breaker Morant). She's a prostitute and a junkie who wants to kick the habit and leave the profession; he's a onetime activist whose idea of noncomformity is to introduce the girl into his home. (His wife has a younger lover, anyway.) Marred by a toopat ending, it's still fascinating as a glimpse of the seamy side of Sydney's street life and for its insights into relations between the sexes down under. It's apparent, for one thing, that women's lib barely exists there; it's a man's world, and many of the better films, from My Brilliant Career to the current Monkey Grip, are centered on women who have the strength and courage to break out of the conventional mode. Monkey, featuring a brilliant performance by Noni Hazelhurst, concerns the efforts of a thoroughly liberated divorcee to help a junkie while maintaining her own freedom to be with other men. The rarity of that kind of independence is, by implication, underscored in Beresford's Puberty Blues, in which the high school girls' highest aspiration is to root (have sex) with their favorite beach boys.

Despite the rising tide of competition from down under, the French still enjoy a comfortable edge with the art-house crowd, people who want films that are more mature, more intellectual, more artistic than those they usually get from Hollywood--with a little bit of sex, too. While the 1982 vintage was hardly outstanding, we did see the controversial Beau Père, featuring a relationship between a 14-year-old girl and her lecherous stepfather; Just Jaeckin's new, stylishly mounted version of Lady Chatterley's Lover, with lovely Sylvia Kristel as the lady in question; and Memoirs of a French Whore, co-starring Miou-Miou and Maria Schneider, the frank, autobiographical account of prostitute Jeanne Cordelier's attempts to quit the profession. Pierre Rissient, a noted French publicist turned film maker, sensitively probes in Five and the Skin the psyche and the sexual fantasies--and the debaucheries--of a Frenchman living in Manila. But it's first-time director Jean-Jacques Beineix's Diva that continues to be the year's most popular French entry on the American circuit. Hailed by most critics, it's a scintillating little thriller that begins when a postal delivery boy illegally tapes the voice of his idol, statuesque soprano Wilhelmenia Wiggins Fernandez, and his cassette gets mixed up with the taped confessions of a murdered prostitute that indict some of the most powerful politicians in Paris.

Popular in Italy--a runaway success, in fact--was Madly in Love, co-starring athletic Adriano Celentano and beautiful Ornella Muti in a joyous variation on Roman Holiday. Muti plays the spoiled princess of a mythical kingdom, Celentano a Roman bus driver who falls in love with her--and the two live happily ever after. Doing well in this country after its premiere at the Chicago and New York film festivals is Passione d'Amore. It's a kind of ironic Beauty and the Beast in which handsome officer Bernard Giraudeau, in the midst of a torrid affair with lovely Laura Antonelli, is suddenly transferred to a post at which the only available woman is a horrendous hag (Valeria D'Obici). But, as the girl in Perrault's fairy tale learned years ago, beauty is simply in the eye of the beholder. Passione raises the question of how important looks are in a male-female relationship but doesn't attempt an answer.

The big films from Germany were Das Boot--World War Two as seen from inside a German U-boat--and the Oscar-winning Mephisto. At $12,000,000 the most expensive German movie ever made, Das Bool's sexual activity is limited to a roistering land-based party before the youthful seamen shove off, resulting in a short-arm inspection at sea; after that, it is strictly men without women. Mephisto, a Hungarian-West German coproduction, also harks back to the Hitler era, telling the story of an ambitious actor (well played by Klaus Maria Brandauer) who uses women ruthlessly to advance himself in the artistic circles of the Third Reich. Black actress Karin Boyd registers strongly, if briefly, as the actor's spirited mistress.

Death from drugs this year claimed the incredibly talented and prolific Rainer Werner Fassbinder, but not before he had completed one of his best films, Veronika Voss--based, ironically, on the life of actress Sybille Schmitz, who died of drug addiction. More successful in the American market place, however, has been a movie that Fassbinder might have made--Christiane F., the true story of a 13-year-old prostitute and drug addict and how she got that way. Directed by young Ul-rich Edel, it's so shocking that French censors recommended that it be shown only to children--as an object lesson.

And from Brazil comes I Love You, which, if nothing else, confirms dark-eyed Sonia Braga (previously seen here in Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands) as an international sex star of the first magnitude. (She is, in fact, currently working with Marcello Mastroianni on Gabriela for an MGM/UA release.) One critic suggested that I Love You might better be titled Last Bossa Nova in Rio, and he's not too far wrong. Braga and Paulo César Pereio find each other after both have been through unhappy love affairs and test each other for the next 90 minutes. She's terrific. He--well, let's just say he's not likely to make it as an international male sex star.

The fine line that separates art-house erotica such as I Love You from domestic porno such as Roommates is growing finer all the time. Basically, it comes down to whether or not actual penetration show are shown. In Roommates, they are (though, presumably, an R-rated version is being prepared for exposure on cable TV). But the makers of hard-core sex movies have finally discovered that they can no longer make it on fucking alone. There's just too much competition out there. What all of them are looking for is the crossover film, the movie that will appeal to both the raincoated regulars and the carriage trade. For a while, at least, Roommates seemed to be the answer; it played in New York at two nonporno houses. With escalating production costs, patronage by the ''irregulars'' has become increasingly important. There are now genuine porn stars: Samantha Fox, Veronica Hart, Annette Haven, Chelsea Manchester, John Leslie, Ron Jeremy, Richard Pacheco and--welcomed back to hard-core--Harry Reems. But the triple-X field, through its Adult Film Association of America, is aiming not only for acceptability but also for respectability. The A.F.A.A. even stages, in Los Angeles, its own annual version of the Academy Awards, handing out not Oscars but Eroticas. You could see more flesh in a Disney movie than there was on display at this year's postawards dinner, held at Los Angeles' classy Hyatt Regency hotel. Although Screw magazine's Al Goldstein made a colorful entrance at the cocktail party earlier, suspended from a crane in Superman tights and chains, the ballroomful of black-tied exhibitors and distributors and their sedately gowned wives looked for all the world like a scene from a service-club convention. Meanwhile, in X-rated moviehouses and in darkened living rooms across the country, spectators were presumably having a good deal more fun watching the action on cinema screen or on video cassette. There's a message here somewhere.

''Oddly enough, it's those pictures aimed primarily at a late-teen audience that today expose the most skin.''