Sex in Cinema 1983

Any year that brings us not one but two James Bond movies—one starring the urbane Roger Moore, the other the unflappable Sean Connery—can't be all bad. On the other hand,any year that brings us better than a dozen cartoon-strip Star Wars spin-offs, in which not only the animation but also the plots seem computer produced, has a lot to answer for. Sex, it would seem, has been temporarily shelved in favor of special effects, at least in the mega-buck attractions that have been luring the kids to the wickets, with George Lucas' Return of the Jedi already pegged as one of the biggest grossers ever. True, in that opus, Princess Leia is briefly threatened with ravishment by the monstrous Jabba the Hutt (looking for all the world likea huge beached walrus); but the modus operandi of such a union is as baffling and unlikely as that of King Kong with Jessica Lange. And even though Carrie Fisher is garbed in a slinky, seductive gown, one has the feeling that old Jabba could do better than Leia, while her romantic interlude with Harrison Ford is as idyllic as a shampoo commercial—and just about as brief.

What seems to be happening is a deliberate return to films fashioned for the 12-year-old mentality, with everything geared for action and escape, not unlike (text continued on page 160) Sex in Cinema (continued from page 143)the Saturday-afternoon serials and Westerns of our youth (a comparison that Lucas himself would accept as valid). But where once, in the grisly years of the production code, moviemakers had a reasonable excuse for avoiding the earthier aspects of human behavior, today's motivation is essentially monetary. Lucas tapped a gold mine in Star Wars, and every prospector in town has been rushing in with pick and shovel to work the same vein. Staggering production costs, of course, have added to the trend. With today's bigger pictures in the $15,000,000-to-$40,000,000 price range, producers are hardly eager to take chances. They go where the money is. And today's bigspenders, all too obviously, are the kids who haunt the video-game parlors—and boast that they've seen Jedi a dozen times.

But that is only part of the story. Peering over the kids' shoulders is a significant portion of the adult population, sucked in by a wave of nostalgia for these action-filled adventures that remind them so strongly of the movies of their own childhood, though executed on a far grander, far more spectacular scale. Sociologists might well ponder the significance of this recherche du tempi perdu. Is it a search for a lost innocence? A gut-level response to the age-old battle between good and evil? A natural curiosity about the future? Or is it something more profound, a remote stirring of the myths that have shaped our culture? The studios couldn't care less. As long as the audiences keep turning up, they'll keep turning them out—as evidenced by Lucasfilm's top-budgeted sequel to Steven Spielberg's Raiders of the Lost Ark, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, currently in production.

Further evidence is to be found in the extraordinary number of remakes and sequels either released in 1983 or now before the cameras for next year's delectation. Octopussy is the 13th James Bond movie, Never Say Never Again the 14th. We've had Superman HI, Srnokey and the Bandit Part III, Jaws 3-D, Psycho II and Porky's II: The Next Day; we'll probably see Cannon-ball II, Conan: King of Thieves, First Blood II, Star Trek III: In Search of Spock and Rocky IV within the next 12 months–and, just possibly, The Godfather III and 2010: Odyssey Two may follow. From the comic strips, with more than a passing nod to Lucas (and to last year's Annie), will come Sheena, Queen of the Jungle, Dick Tracy, Mandrake the Magician—and Annie II .

What has all this to do with sex in cinema? Nothing, except by way of explanation of why therewas so little of it in the bigger-budgeted movies of 1983. Even Octopussy (rated PG) limits Bond's sack-time to a brief, oblique encounter with lovely Maud Adams. Oddly enough, the kind of sexiness we usually associate with the decorative handmaidens in the James Bond movies is to be found in excelsis in Pamela Stephenson's Superman III portrait of a not-so-dumb blonde, monopolist Robert Vaughn's coconspirator. The girls in Octopussy, on the other hand–with the toothsome exception of Kristina Wayborn, who spins herself out of her sari — are surprisingly decorous.

One searches in vain for even those divertissements, however, in such multimillion-dollar spectaculars as John Badham's thriller WarGames, in the 3-D Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone (a singularly zestless carbon of The Road Warrior), or in all four segments of Twilight Zone—The Movie. High Road to China, said to have cost $20,000,000, has the virtue of introducing TV's handsome Tom Selleck to the big screen but little else. Sel-leck, who displays much of the brash charm and presence of Clark Gable, is largely wasted in this hackneyed adventure movie, and his scenes with a shrewish Bess Armstrong never catch fire. All of these films, not coincidentally, were rated PG. Of the year's major high-tech productions, only Blue Thunder (also directed by WarGames' Badham) ventures into the R category—and that, presumably, because Roy Scheider parks his helicopter for a few moments outside the window of a shapely miss doing her aerobics in the nude.Even so, Thunder remains memorable less for its peekaboo sex than for its superbly staged dogfights over and among Los Angeles' far-flung freeways and sparklingly new skyscrapers.

Perhaps because their budgets were lower, comedies were given considerably more leeway to go for the outrageous—and for the R. Certainly, nothing in the year was more far out than Monty Python's The Meaning of Life. It's a wacky, often gross but marvelously entertainingfilm that lampoons everything—religion, education, war, sex, with a musical number on birth control calculated to incense both priests and physicians. In Still Smokin', however, Cheech and Chong demonstrate how to run bad taste into the ground. Their gags, centeringon drugs, excrement and animal intercourse, are raunchy enough but neither clever nor disciplinedenough to pay off—unless you're still smokin' the same stuff they are.

Similarly, it would take an especially staunch Steve Martin fan to be enchanted by his Man with Two Brains, in which he plays a skilled neurosurgeon who contrives to implant a sympathetic brain in the sexy body of his nagging, unresponsive wife (Kathleen Turner). Martin is a comedian who works best in the short bursts afforded by The Tonight Show, not in the sustained reaches of a feature film. In fact, he may be the kind of stand-up comic that The King ofComedy's Rupert Pupkin dreams of becoming. Pupkin, played by Robert De Niro, kidnaps talk-show host Jerry Lewis to get a spot on his show. The plot chills when Sandra Bernhard, a wealthy and not particularly attractive fan of the show, strips before the bound and gagged Lewis and attempts to seduce him. Lewis panics—and the entire audience is on his side.

In Doctor Detroit, comedian Dan Ayk-royd finds himself in much the same predicament as Matin: He's fine from moment to moment but is unable to sustain the laugh quotient—even when given a glitzy wardrobe and a huge shock of hair to mark his transition from college professor to reluctant pimp. His girls—Fran Drescher, blonde Donna Dixon, black Lynn Whitfield andOriental Lydia Lei—are all beauties; but Aykroyd never seems to relate to them (even though,offscreen, he married Dixon). Airplane II, Porky's II and Screwballs (which Variety aptly labeled Porky's 1-1/2?) all demonstrate the law of diminishing returns. Fitfully funny, occasionally raunchy, they seem determined to give sex comedies a bad name—as when, in Screwballs, a hapless young bowler manages to entangle the ball in his privates and goes on to score a strike.

Two comics who sold themselves solid in 1983, however, are Richard Pryor and young (22) Eddie Murphy. Pryor, who starred in his own salty Richard Pryor Live on the Sunset Strip and co-starred with Jackie Gleason in The Toy and with Christopher Reeve in Superman III, signed a five-year contract with Columbia for upwards of $40,000,000 to produce four movies of his own choosing—plus a guaranteed average of $5,000,000 for each of a minimum of three pictures that he stars in and a percentage of the gross. Who says it doesn't pay to be funny? AndMurphy, on the basis of his successes in 48 HRS. and Trading Places, was signed to a similar deal by Paramount—though he gets only about $1,000,000 per picture. But the kid'sstill young; he can scrimp along on that. Trading Places, in which Murphy co-stars with Aykroyd (with a sexy assist from Jamie Lee Curtis as a goodhearted hooker), proved to be the comedy hit of this past summer. Nobody seemed to notice that the competition, at least in the laughs category, wasn't keen. But The Wicked Lady, starring scrumptious Faye Dunaway in (and frequently out of) 17th Century costumes, at least suggested that the male sex has no corne on comedy. While Dunaway deadpans her way through this spoof of nocturnal highwaymen (and -women)in jolly old England, playing an elegant lady who robs stagecoaches by night, she makes the celluloid sizzle in her more passionate moments with Alan Bates—and that's more than Pryor or Murphy can do.

If sex has been ruled out as topic A in the big-budget movies, it's still to be found in fair supply in what might be termed the middle-income pictures—those with budgets that are comfortably large but not so stratospheric that they have to make it in the blockbuster category.Burt Reynolds' $5,000,000 pay check alone sends any film in which he stars into the upper brackets; but with considerable belt tightening in the other departments, his pictures generally end up as winners—and Stroker Ace promises to be no exception. As Stroker, he plays his amiable, fast-living self, a stock-car driver (one of Reynolds' own hobbies) who divides his time between winning races and maneuvering the virginal Loni Anderson, making an auspicious screen debut, intohis bed. It's hardly giving the plot away to reveal that he succeeds in both.

Richard Gere, on the other hand, instead of building on the strong, sympathetic role he created in An Officer and a Gentleman, has chosen for his follow-up a throwback to the cold, existential hero of American Gigolo. In Breathless, based on Jean-Luc Godard's 1959 classic (but transported from the boulevards of Paris to the streets of Los Angeles), he plays a guy on the lam. Hiding out in the apartment of UCLA student Valerie Kaprisk,he manages to convince her—and himself—that he really loves her. Their sex scenes together,including full frontal nudity by both parties, are pretty convincing in themselves, and Gere is now firmly established as an authentic sex star. French-born Kaprisky isn't bad, either.

One of the strangest films to come from a major studio this year is James Toback's Exposed, co-starring Nastassia Kinski and ballet great Rudolf Nureyev—strange because Toback (who also wrote the script) has cast the exotic Kinski as a Wisconsin farm girl and Nureyev as a concert violinist. Further, he lets Kinski, who becomes a top fashion model, perform an auztoerotic solo in her studio apartment, but Nureyev just fiddles around, at one point using his bow suggestively all over her lithe body. Kinski looks beautiful but understandably bewildered, whileNureyev performs with all the manufactured ardor of a ballet prince wooing the prima ballerina. The public was not enraptured. Nor did it respond with fervor to the belated appearance of MGM's The Hunger, despite some lesbian lovemaking between Catherine Deneuve, as an ageless vampire, and wide-eyed Susan Sarandon, improbably cast as a scientist studying ways to slow down the aging process. David Bowie, who desperately needs her expertise, disappears from the screen early on, having aged from 30 to about 80 in a couple of days; but while he's still fresh, his androgynous appeal makes a startlingly effective foil for Deneuve's bisexual eternal woman. Visually stunning, intellectually baffling, daringly erotic and insistently gory, The Hunger managed to fall between two stools, those of the art-house patrons and the horror-show fanatics, leaving a crimson stain not only on the screen but also on MGM's balance sheets.

Sheer sexiness accounts for the success of Paramount's Flashdance, a surprise hit of the summer season.As the critics were quick to point out, there was almost no story and the cast was notably lacking in marquee value. Who ever heard of Jennifer Beals and Michael Nouri? Nomatter. Beals has a lithe, trim body and moves well—even though she didn't perform the torchy, quicksilver dances that highlight the film. (Marine Jahan did them, uncredited, and seemsto be launching a whole new career on her belated recognition.) If the steamy dances have nothingto do with ballet, neither does Flmhdance have anything to do with art. It's a sex-greasedmoney machine that just happens to have hit the jackpot, an ordinary sexploitation movie that soared into the big time by virtue of the vitality and the blatant vulgarity of its choreography.

Unfortunately, those are not virtues shared by Sylvester Stallone's eagerly awaited Staying Alive, signaling the return of John Travolta's Tony Manero character from Saturday Night Fever. W'hile Travolta himself, slathered with baby oil to emphasize each rippling muscle and quivering tendon, seems fairly comfortable in his role as a chorus boy who's more heelthan toe, the story that he's been handed by writer-producerdirector Stallone and Norman Wcxler is simply a rock variation on a backstage saga that dates back to the original Broadway Melody— and maybe even beyond. Tony, still as ambitious and rambunctious as when he left Bay Ridge nearly six years ago, has trouble deciding between singer-dancer Cynthia Rhodes, who helps him land a job as dancer in a Broadway musical she's rehearsing, and the show's glamorous star, gorgeous Finola Hughes (who dances up a terrific storm). Both girls are beauties, so it's not hard to understand Tony's dilemma.

Moving down a notch, ever since Animal House and Porky's demonstrated how gross they could get without losing that all-important youth market, producers of sexploitation pictures have been vying with one another to establish new lows. The suggestively titled Joysticks is a good example, with a video arcade substituting for the drive-in of yesteryear as the kids' main place for hanging out and making out. As in its antecedents, there is a superabundance of soft-core sex, a superabundance of phallic jokes and a great deal off arting (which, despite Mel Brooks, has never been all that funny). Joysticks dimly reflects real life, insofar as the parents of River City (represented by stalwart Joe Don Baker) are determined to shut down the town's video parlor, while the youngsters are equally determined to keep it open. Porky's II has a similar plot premise, with the oldsters, rednecks all, objecting to a student production of Romeo and Juliet partly because of Shakespeare's "lewdness," partly because a Seminole Indian has been chosen to play Romeo. Once again, the kids are aroused—just as they were in the old Beach Blanket movies, in which the parents (if there were any) were always wrong. The glory days of Annette Funicello are also recalled, if withmore baring of breasts, in Spring Break, a look-see at the uninhibited doings on the beaches of Fort Lauderdale—wet-T-shirt contests, teeny-weeny-bikini contests and the like—when that resort area braces for its annual invasion by the college crowd; and in Spring Fever, with teenaged Carling Bassett as a would-be national junior tennis champ whois shunned because her mother (Susan Anton) is a Las Vegas showgirl.

That films in this genre don't necessarily have to be exploitational was, one would have thought, convincingly demonstrated by the critical and popular success of Martha Coolidge's Valley Girl. Although never at the top of the charts in either category, it explores seriously and well the culture conflict between a middle-class teenager (Deborah Foreman) and the Hollywood punker (Nicolas Cage) she meets at a party he has crashed. What makes their conflict all the more interesting is the fact that her parents (cameo appearances by Colleen Camp and Frederic Forrest) are ex-swingers. With an assist from the song of the same title, a liberal lacing of the Valley-girl patois, a fair amount of nudity and strong performances from the two young leads, Valley Girl emerges as a contemporary slice of life. Coolidge, formerly a documentary film maker, displays a strong feeling for character and place, as does writer-director Amy Jones in My Love Letters, with Jamie Lee Curtis playing a disc jockey who falls in love with an older, married man (James Reach).

It would be nice to be able to say that these efforts by distaff directors are opening our eyes wider to a woman's sensibilities. But pleasing as it is to see the directorial ranks swelledby newcomers from the opposite sex, the fact is that the year's most sensitive and probing studies of ladies in an emotional bind have come from writer-director John Sayles (he of the low-budgeted Return of the Secaucus Seven). First in Lianna, then in Baby, It's You, Sayles (who made his movie debut as a writer of exploitation features) displays an ability to get inside his characters that one more often associates with novelists than with filmmakers. Lianna is the wife of a college film professor. He has a roving eye; she has two kids to look after. Unsatisfied with her life, she insists on taking night classes at the university and soon is deeply in love with her teacher—a woman. The lesbian scenes are handled frankly butwith delicacy. Baby, It's You, made for Paramount on an obviously bigger budget, also centers on a woman—more precisely, a high school girl (Rosanna Arquette)—who is pursued relentlessly by a greasy-haired Italian (Vincent Spano) whose other obsession is to become Frank Sinatra. Eventually, she yields to his persistent wooing, only to find that he's still not her type. It's a story of the wrong guy for the wrong girl, and Sayles lets us understand what makes both of them tick. Still in his mid-30s, he's a director to be watched.

He might, for example, profitably try his hand at the latest plot wrinkle to surface on the silver screen—that of the young boy's being initiated into the joys of sex by an older woman. Mostly, these films have been concerned with turning the boy into a man (as if it ever were that simple); just possibly, Sayles might want to explore what the woman gets out of il. Whywould a beauty such as Sylvia Krislel want—or need—to give "private lessons" to a gangling adolescent in last year's movie of that title? When that admittedly minor entry racked up a gross of $12,500,000, producers didn't bother to ask; they simply lushed more of the same infront of the cameras, including Private School (with Kristel again on hand as a shy sex-education teacher at the Cherryvale Academy for Women, which is constantly being invaded by boys from the neighboring Freemount Academy for Men). In My Tutor, lush, 30ish Caren Kaye is hired by Kevin McCarthy to tutor his teenaged son (Matt Lattanzi) in French. Given to moonlit skinny-dips in the family pool, she soon has both father and son burning the midnight oil. But it's the boy who gets lo take the advanced course. In Class, lovely Jacqueline Bisset seduces her son's prep school roommate (though it's hard to imagine Bisset's ever being an older woman). In Ladies' Night (title at presstime), beautiful Lesley Ann Warren goes for young Christopher Atkins (of The Blue Lagoon), a male stripper.

It's a theme that has recurred throughout the year, often as a subplot in the innumerable teenage sex comedies such as Porky's II, Losin' It and The Last American Virgin, in which Louisa Moritz plays a housewife who inducts not one but three young boys into the mystic rite of passage. It turns up again as a subplot in Valley Girl, with housewife Lee Purcellas the seductress, and in The First Time-, with Jane Badler doing the honors. No doubt this trend represents some wishful thinking on the part of the (mostly male) writers of these films, but their eager acceptance suggests that an awful lot of young men are wishing the same thing.

While we're touring the wilder shores of love, it is interesting to note that homosexuality, which gained increasing prominence in the films of the past few years, all but disappeared from the American-made movies of 1983. Although not, as the German Querelie reminds us, from European screens. Rainer Werner Fassbinder's final film before his untimely death from a drug overdose, it's based on a novel by Jean Genet whose hero is a latent homosexual (Brad Davis), a sailor on shore leave. What obviously attracted Fassbinder was the opportunity to film with startling ex-plicitness the story's homosexual acts. Reminiscent of Genet is The Wounded Alan, an official French entry at the Cannes International Film Festival earlier this year. In it, young Jean-Hughes Anglade, living in the bowels of a large train station, develops a homosexual passion for hulking Vittorio Mezzogiorno and is himself stalked by homosexual doctor RolandBertin. There is at least the strong suggestion of a homosexual attraction between David Bowie, aBritish officer in a Japanese wartime prison camp, and Ryuichi Sakamoto, the camp's commander, inthe large-scale New Zealand-British-Japanese coproduction Merry Christmm, Mr. Lawrence, which scored a hit at Cannes. And from Italy—albeit in English—comes Montgomery Clift, an illuminating documentary on the career of that ill-fated actor that discusses withconsiderable candor his bisexuality and his later dependence on drink and drugs.

In contrast, when American movies touched on the theme at all this year, it was generally as just another titillating detail in such prison shockers as Bad Boys and Chained Heal.

Also down in 1983 was the number of horror films, which often manage to sprinkle more than a little sex into the gore. In 1982, according to Variety's count, "61 new fright pictures"—or approximately one third of the year's total product—"were released domestically." But by1983, the trend had begun to fizzle. Of the out-and-out shockers, only Psycho II made it to the big bucks, and on a relatively modest $4,000,000 budget at that. While not as electrifyingas the Hitchcock version, perhaps because we have all become a bit more casehardened through frequent exposure to scare pictures, Psycho II has more than its fair share of mayhem, plus a marvelously ambiguous performance by Tony Perkins, reprising his role as Norman. For once, it's asequel worthy of its predecessor.

Meanwhile, the parade of anything-for-a-chill cheapies continues to stagger along, augmented by a number of earlier entries exhumed to cash in on the cycle, such as the catchily retitled Dismember Mama, originally presented a decade ago as Poor Albert and Little Annie. Mania's nutcake hero makes his escape from a mental institution after his guardians refuse tolet him run stag films in his room and sets out to avenge himself on his wealthy mother, who has had him locked away. He's the kind of psycho who kills when the moon rises, and the big question is whether or not he'll go after little Annie, the housekeeper's daughter. Despite the title, Mama remains intact. In Mausoleum, it's sexy Bobbie Bresee who's possessed after wanderinginto the family crypt and is inspired to take off on a killing spree, using her abundantly revealed charms to attract her victims. A Taste of Sin is more in the Hitchcock mold, withSuzanna Love as a woman whose psyche became twisted when, in her childhood, she watched as her prostitute mother was tortured and killed by a sadistic GI. Now, though married, she plies her mother's trade near London Bridge and kills off her customers. When the bridge moves to Arizona, so does she—and so does the carnage. Curtains offers Samantha Eggar as a dedicated actress so determined to play a madwoman that she permits her director to commit her to an insaneasylum, where he abandons her. Mysteriously released and still determined, she makes her way to the director's baroque mansion, where seven aspirants for the same role are spending the weekend.Within no time,the cast is whit tled down (literally) to two, with lots of gore and some nudity along the way.

At once the most original and the most terrifying of 1983's low-budget horrors, Videodrome comes, as might be expected, from Canada's devilishly gifted David Cronenberg. Its happy conceit is that somebody in Pittsburgh is sending out video signals that consist mostly of women,in various stages of undress, being tortured. James Woods, who operates a cable-TV station in Toronto, is intrigued by the show and, aided by pretty Deborah Harry, attempts to track it to its source. It's a one-way horror trip, and apparently there are still customers eager to take it.

For audiences that prefer their horror less fanciful, Universal has obliged with Jaws 3-D, reprising pretty much the story, action and improbabilities of Jaws and Jaws II, but this time with glasses. Just when you thought it was safe to go into the water the damn things start slipping.

Monsters are by no means confined to horror shows, however. There are also human monsters, andsometimes they're even more frightening—like the sex maniac in Charles Branson's 10 to Midnight, who hacks young women to death oncamera. From Canada comes Cross Country, again featuring a deranged killer (Richard Beymer), a prime suspect in the brutal murder of a callgirl, who terrorizes a young model (Nina Axelrod) and her boyfriend (Brent Carver), whom he has casually picked up on the road, with his sedan becoming a cut-rate version of the old dark house.

On a considerably higher plane but still freighted with horror is The Lords of Discipline, based on Pat Conroy's novel about the sadistic treatment, climaxing in a narrowlyaverted castration, accorded the first black recruit at a Southern military academy in 1964. As is so often the case in films of this kind, the ultraviolence is denounced as obscene and demeaning, but the film makers—and the audiences—clearly enjoy each sick and sickening sensation. Cliacun a son grue.

Because Hollywood's mainstream movies have registered so low on the sexual Richter scale this year, the torch for torchi-ness has passed, almost by default, to more broad-minded (and, with the founding of "classics" divisions by nearly every major U.S. studio, more broadly distributed)foreign films. None of the foreigners, apparently, is more broad-minded than Brazil's Bruno Barreto, who directed luscious Sonia Braga in her earlier success Dona Flor and Her Tivo Husbands and now has managed to top that with the steamy Gabriela. Based on a classic Brazilian novel by Jorge Amado, it introduces Braga as the new cook in Marcello Mastroianni's small-town bar around 1925. Despite the woman's grimy, sweaty exterior, Mas-troianni is graduallycaptivated by her passionate sexuality. And before the film is over, she has taught all the womenin the town the meaning of sexual liberation. Of course, they don't all look like Braga—and Barreto has taken great pains to show us in intimate detail exactly what Braga looks like. Asthe August Playboy's Roving Eye reveals, the woman is not reluctant to display her charms.Some measure of her international popularity can be deduced from the fact that the great Mastroianni was willing to leave his native Italy, where he's now something of a god, to co-star with her.

Spain, which has been relaxing its official censorship in recent years, signaled the change byentering Carlos Saura's sensuous and often sexy version of Carmen at the Cannes festival this year. Graced with the (offscreen) presence of Joan Sutherland and Mario del Monaco, this isn't a canned opera, like Franco Zeffirelli's La Traviata earlier this year, but a rehearsal of the opera, with generous asides for the burgeoning love of choreographer Antonio Gades and Laura del Sol, the girl chosen to play Carmen. While incorporating most of the opera's highlights, this Carmen climaxes repeatedly with its sizzling flamenco numbers.

The French have also been helpful in heating up our screens, with gorgeous Isabelle Adjani represented by two—and possibly, before year's end, three—gratifying entries. In Next Year if All Goes Well, a rather bland romantic comedy, she displays a hitherto-unsuspected knack for comic acting as an independent young woman who, unable to get along with her live-in lover (Thierry Lhermitte), is quite willing to experiment. Adjani is on more familiar ground in Deadly Circuit (based on an American thriller, Eye of the Beholder); as a man-hating adventuress, she first seduces, then slaughters a series of rich young men. (She had an unhappy childhood, the script informs us, plus an impotent father.) Adjanishines again in One Deadly Summer, which she personally transformed into one of the hits of the Cannes festival with her performance as a girl seeking to avenge her mother's rape.

Nor can one dismiss Isabelle Huppert, who gave of herself so generously in the ill-fated Heaven's Gate, even though she's somewhat more circumspect as Philippe Noiret's easygoing mistress in the well-received Coup de Torchon—or Clean Slate (the distributors use both titles). Huppert is seen to better advantage as the wife of passive, possibly impotent Jean-Louis Trintignant in Deep Waters, in which she finds fulfillment in a series of extramarital affairs until friend husband grows murderously incensed. Best of all is her role in La Truile, directed by Joseph Losey; in it, married to a homosexual, she makes her way into high society through the good offices of financier Jean-Pierre Cassel and his wife, Jeanne Moreau. From that point, she's on her own, leaping from bedroom to bedroom with a fine abandon—though somehow, the film implies, managing to retain her virginity throughout. Whether she does or not, she's a joy to behold.

So is Clio Goldsmith, new to these shores, as a callgirl offered as a going-away present to mousy banker Pierre Mondy in The Gift. He's on his way to Italy for a final business trip,leaving behind in Paris his beautiful wife (Claudia Cardinale). Against a Venetian backdrop, all kinds of hell break loose—of the door-slamming variety so dear to the writers of French farces. The scenery is glorious, but when Goldsmith and Cardinale are in front of it, all else fades. Scenery, alas, proves to be the main attraction in the much-touted Forever Emmanuellt, a Franco-Italian production shot in the Philippines a few years ago andstarring its author (and director, though uncredited), lissome Emmanuelle Arsan. Most of the anticipated nudity, however, is supplied by co-star Annie Bell, a blonde bombshell who shucks her clothes with equal abandon in a Manila bedroom or on a jungle trek. Also disappointing was Roger Vadim's Surprise Party, a Gallic imitation of American Graffiti—though, as one might expect of Vadim, considerably sexier. But the director, who made a star out of BrigitteBardot in And God Created Woman and a sexpot out of Jane Fonda in Barbarella, hereseems just to be going through the motions as he fleshes out the loves, longings and lusts of kids in a provincial French town in the Fifties.

All of the malaise that Vadim may have felt in looking back to his glory days has been masterfully subsumed by Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni in his elegant, elusive Identification of a Woman. It's about a film maker (Tomas Milian) who is trying to put together a picture about an ideal woman; his ideal, however, refuses to come into focus. He's also trying to find such a woman to lend meaning and continuity to his own life, and his persistent exploration produces some of the steamiest sex scenes since Antonioni's own Blow-Up, made back in 1966. On the other hand, Italian director Marco Ferreri, making use of an international cast that includes Ben Gazzara, Ornella Muti, Susan Tyrrell and Katia Berger, concocts in Tales of Ordinary Madness sex scenes that are less steamy than seamy. Shot in Los Angeles and Rome, the film presents Gazzara as a hard-living, hard-drinking, hell-raising writer whose proclivities bend toward street punks and prostitutes.

Ferreri has followed Tales of Ordinary Madness, loosely based onthe life and works of Los Angeles writer Charles Bukowski, with Story of Piera, which is explicitly based on thelife of Italian actress Piera Degli Esposti and her incestuous relationship with her mother. The mother, played by Hanna Schygulla (who won the best-actress award at Cannes for her performance),takes little Piera along on her numerous assignations. The woman indulges herself freely, even though she's married to a respected professor (Mas-troianni). As the years go by, both husband and wife veer toward madness, and the man is institutionalized, while Piera (now played by the ubiquitous Huppert) becomes a famous actress. Visiting her father in the asylum, she reluctantly agrees to have sex with him. Meanwhile, the mother is also in a clinic. Piera visits her as well,and the film ends with the two of them, naked, embracing on a beach.

But sex scenes alone do not a sex film make. Sexuality is such a basic part of all of us that it not only colors our lives but motivates much of our drama. No one is more aware of this than British playwright Harold Pinter, and nowhere has he expressed it more clearly than in his scrip(based on his play) for Betrayal. To be sure, there's a bed scene (though the lady—Patricia Hodge—remains discreetly covered); but what Pinter has tried to do, byintriguingly telling his story in reverse, is describe the passions that can lead a woman to two-time a seemingly loving husband and a man to cheat with the wife of his best friend.

Working with a far more complex theme, one that also requires an unconventional editing structure, James Ivory in Heal and Dust intercuts the stories of two young Englishwomen of different eras—one (Julie Christie) thoroughly modern, the other her great—aunt as a young girl (newcomer Greta Scacchi)—to underline both the timelessness of India and the changing attitudes of Britain's colonials. Christie arrives in India to learn about her late great-aunt and discovers that, though married to a staid Britisher, she had had an affair with a handsome Indian potentate, precipitating a scandal. Meanwhile, Christie is having an affair of her own with a local youth, becoming pregnant in the process, as did the great-aunt before her. The difference is that where the great-aunt chose abortion and disgrace, Christie proudly decidesto have her child out of wedlock.

England's Nicolas Roeg is a director who probably couldn't tell a story in sequence if he wanted to—and he never has. Critics have already compared his latest effort, Eureka, to Citizen Kane, though less in terms of its content than of its style. As in most Roeg films, the central character, well played by Gene Hackman, is an obsessed man, a prospector for gold who strikes it rich early in the picture, buys himself an island in the Caribbean, then retires to it with his wife and comely daughter (Theresa Russell) and spends the rest of his life defending his possessions, driving his wife to drink and his daughter into the arms of a man (Rutger Hauer) he assumes to be an adventurer. The nature of his possessiveness is boldly suggested in a scene in which Hackman bursts in on Russell and her lover, both naked in bed, and furiously tries to drive the young man away. Although it's hardly intrinsic to his story, Roeg throws in a terrific Caribbean orgy to entertain the eye.

England, of course, has also contributed its fair share of lighter entertainments to the worlds screens this year and none of them more droll or deliciously wicked than Michael Palin's The Missionary, with Palin himself, a temporary fugitive from the Monty Python band, in the title role. Just back from Africa, he opens a home for fallen women under the patronage firstof the Church of England, then of aristocratic Maggie Smith, whose interest in the young man isn't wholly philanthropic. As luck would have it, he's soon seduced by the young ladies in his establishment as well—to his ever-decreasing chagrin and our ever-increasing amusement. Edwardian costumes and attitudes add to the charm. Another period piece, this one set in the 17thCentury, is The Draughtsman's Contract, a lusty, bawdy movie that is part murder mystery, part Restoration comedy. Anthony Higgins plays the artist summoned by aristocratic Janet Suzman to sketch her country estate, with her sexual favors implicit in the agreement. Her daughter soongets in on the act, too.

But the year's honors must be reserved for a film that contains a touch of just about everything mentioned above—lusty humor, some nudity, sharp and tender insights into human (including sexual) relationships, a bit of Gothic horror, a pinch of the supernatural, even a little farting. The film is Ingmar Bergman's touching autobiographical Fanny & Alexander, an apotheosis of his career as a director filled with his childhood memories of family, friends and his own nascent interest in things theatrical. The setting is Uppsala, his home town, in 1907 (about len years before Bergman himself was born). At an enormous Christmas party, we meet the entire Ekdahl clan, presided over by the charming patrician grandmother (Gunn Wallgren), a wise and worldly woman, a former actress who still controls the purse strings of the family-owned theater. Her second son (Allan Edwall) is a manager and an actor—but not a very good one—in the family theater and is the father of Fanny and Alexander; his untimely death propels his lovely wife (Ewa Froling), also an actress, into the sanctimonious arms of Bishop Vergerus (Jan Malmsjo). The youngest Ekdahl (Jarl Kulle) is a successful restaurateur, happily married—mainly because his wife (Mona Malm) has no objections to his carrying on an affair with one of the housemaids. (One of the pleasant surprises in this generally sunny film is the fact that wife and mistress get along quite comfortably, the wife even looking out for the mistress' welfare after her husband has made the girl pregnant.)

The film turns somber when Froling and her two children move into the bishop's puritanical household, where she soon discovers that she has married a sadistic tyrant. The solution, contrived by the grandmother's old lover and friend, a Jewish antiques dealer (Erland Joseph-son), is literally magical, a flash of cutting that leaves both the bishop and the viewer wondering just what has happened. Alexander spends a chilling night in the old Jew's house, wandering amongmarionettes that come to life, trembling as God Himself threatens to emerge from behind a door and meeting the man's disturbed androgynous nephew, who claims to have magic powers—perhapsstrong enough, it develops, to burn the bishop to a crisp.

As always in a Bergman movie, both the casting and the performances are beyond reproach; but outstanding in Fanny & Alexander is a newcomer to his familiar repertory company—the beauteous Froling. With her blonde leonine mane, full, sensuous mouth and straight yet lissome figure, she is reminiscent of the youthlul Melina Mercouri or Lauren Bacall, though far more feminine than either. Outstanding, too, is Gunn Wallgren (who, unfortunately, died of cancersoon after the picture was completed). Looking for all the world like Katharine Cornell in her prime, she presents an autumnal portrait of the grandmother that serves as a reminder that the fires of youth bank slowly. Nor can one overlook Pernilla Wallgren's busty maid, the object of Kullc's unconcealed lust; nor Mona Malm, Kulle's pleasure-loving wife—she's especially loving of the pleasures of the bed.

But the film has a further significance: It was partly funded by Swedish television and ended up as a five-hour film, from which Bergman carved this three-hour theatrical version. In Sweden, England, France, Germany, Italy, Japan—almost everywhere except in the United States—television, whether government-owned or privately operated, is emerging as a major sponsor of motion pictures. While it is common for American TV movies of the week to be released theatrically abroad, very rarely do they make it to Stateside moviehouses. With the advent of paycable, however, the pattern seems to be changing. Both studios and independents arc entering intodeals with cable networks for partial financing of their feature films. Obviously, sex films havea certain advantage where cable is concerned. Between cable and the rapidly expanding field of video cassettes, the producers of adult movies have never had it so good, often shooting their films in as many as three versions—hard-core for the porno houses, soft-core for cable and cassettes and R-rated for pictures that might have a crossover potential in regular theaters (like Chuck Vincent's Roommates, which swept this year's Adult Film Association ot America's Erotica awards). It's all very promising. But will any of the adult-film makers come upwith next year's Fanny & Alexander? Will President Reagan balance the budget?.

"Perhaps because their budgets were lower, comedies were given considerably more leeway to go for the outrageous."