Sex in Cinema 1986

Screen Moguls, who pride themselves on being able to spot trends, must be having nightmares trying to figure out what's been going on in America's popcorn palaces this year. In an increasingly prudish social and political climate suggesting to some the dawn of a new ice age, has sex--once prized as an audience lure--actually become box-office poison? The answer, seemingly, is yes--and no. On the one hand, 9-1/2 Weeks--by any standard, one of the most unabashedly erotic movies of 1986--met with a tepid response from the filmgoing public. Blasted by the majority of critics, Adrian (Flash-dance) Lyne's stylish but decidedly skin-deep version of an autobiographical novel by Elizabeth McNeill (Playboy published an excerpt in April 1978) costarred Kim Basinger and Mickey Rourke as a couple edging into the sadomasochistic games people play. Controversial from the start, Lyne's film was dumped by one uneasy distributor, was cut and recut, debated and delayed. What finally came out under MGM's label ultimately became as celebrated for the sizzling footage taken out of it as it was for the hot stuff left in. Audiences could only guess at what was missing that gave the European release greater box-office clout. In Italy alone, 9-1/2 Weeks racked up record-breaking grosses with little added beyond (text continued on page 132) two key scenes that seemed nastier, but not much naughtier, than the rest. In one, Rourke forces Basinger to crawl across the floor, picking up paper money. In the other, he challenges her to a possibly deadly game of pill swallowing. The U.S. version, after pruning, shaped up as a fairly elementary course in bondage, with some stunning compensations: Basinger in a striptease sequence to make your tail bone tingle; the cooled-out love scene when Rourke caresses her torso with an ice cube; Kim blindfolded while Mickey pops gooey delicacies between those gorgeous lips; etc. All with merely minimal nudity, understand. This is a swank Yuppie fantasy, not a skin flick, and will probably achieve its greatest success as a videocassette classic for horny homebodies. Or semihorny homebodies; MGM/UA Home Video's cassette attempts to walk the line between the U.S. and international release prints by including some, but not all, of the controversial footage.

As if to contradict the sex-doesn't-sell pundits, along came about Last Night ..., full of nudity and bedroom action, which found an eager audience as well as a slew of favorable reviews. This engaging, trendy hit about Chicago's semiswinging singles, freely adapted from David Mamet's one-act play Sexual Perversity in Chicago, shows and tells plenty. As a couple who meet for a one-night stand but end up living together, Demi Moore and Rob Lowe manage to climb out of their clothes often enough--in bed, in the shower or in the kitchen, while prowling around naked for a midnight snack. Gingerly photographed, to be sure, with plenty of fast cuts from the now-you-see-it-no-you-don't school of editing. Otherwise, little was omitted from Last Night en route to the big screen except the sex in its original title--and that turned into a real problem. Warned by exhibitors and admen that a movie called anything like Sexual Perversity would be refused advertising space in some cities, Tri-Star Pictures quickly succumbed to pressure and ditched Mamet's title. In the film industry, unadvertisable and untouchable are roughly synonymous.

Two more of the year's top grossers, Sydney Pollack's Oscar-winning Out of Africa and Steven Spielberg's The Color Purple, both late-1985 releases, were front runners at the box office, but both depicted the flaming passions of the original material on which they were based at a temperature well below lukewarm. Africa starred Meryl Streep as the fiercely unconventional Danish author Isak Dinesen (nom de plume for Karen Blixen). Justly acclaimed as one of moviedom's great actresses, Streep has become almost as famous for playing love scenes fully clothed. Small wonder that Africa's smoldering romantic highlight is the moment, out in the untamed wilderness, when Robert Redford, playing Blixen's dashing real-life lover, washes Meryl's hair. Wow. (Streep fans did see a bit--but not much--more of her in 1986's Heartburn, in which she's bedded and betrayed by Jack Nicholson.) Spielberg was even more restrained in filming his pretty but pallid Color Purple, based on the best-selling novel by Alice Walker. A central motif of the book is an explicit lesbian love affair between the heroine, Celie (Whoopi Goldberg in the film), and a liberated blues singer named Shug (Margaret Avery). Moviegoers unfamiliar with Walker's uninhibited original might never suspect that Celie and Shug actually go to bed together. After allowing them a sisterly kiss, Spielberg shows us a set of wind chimes all atinkle to symbolize what happens between two lusty women in love.

The way of all flesh, for an increasing number of American moviemakers, seems to follow a direct line from the shooting script to the cutting-room floor. This creeping self-consciousness prompted public comment from Kathleen Turner, an outspoken actress who warmed up Body Heat and Crimes of Passion before her torrid teamwork with Jack Nicholson in Prizzi's Honor. Last spring, Turner let off some additional steam to a London newspaper interviewer: "America is so puritanical and hypocritical ... it seems that anything to do with sex is taboo. Should I pretend I am scandalized about playing a prostitute or pretend that 224,000,000 Americans don't have orgasms? Good sex belongs in the cinema just as much as a good gag."

We say hurrah for Turner; but meanwhile, the scissors snip on--their prime target, the nude scene. Many were shot but few chosen for The Men's Club, a dead-serious but disappointing fall release starring Roy Scheider, Treat Williams, Frank Langella and Harvey Keitel as a bunch of macho buddies who meet for a session of male bonding and wind up in a brothel. The editorial ax also befell a scene in Fire with Fire, co-starring Virginia Madsen and Craig Sheffer. She's a Catholic schoolgirl, he's an inmate from a nearby detention camp for wayward boys; and their climactic assignation in a graveyard crypt reportedly revealed more graphic glimpses of lost innocence than preview audiences cared to see. With or without skin, the entire movie turned out to be expendable. Ditto Hell Camp, a survivalist epic featuring Tom Skerritt, Lisa Eichhorn and so much gratuitous nudity and violence that the distributors have apparently shelved it as a file-and-forget fiasco.

In one strikingly frank sequence in 8 Million Ways to Die, a nude Alexandra Paul, as a doomed hooker, entices Jeff Bridges by purring seductively, "I want to show you something ... the streetlight (continued on page 137) Sex in Cinema (continued from page 132) makes my pussy hair glow in the dark ... cotton candy." Yet this tough-minded melodrama about an alcoholic ex-cop involved with dope, whores and homicide is said by insiders to have been considerably cleaned up for mass consumption. Sex was eradicated in toto from On the Edge, with Bruce Dern as a veteran California runner bidding for a comeback in a big race. This time, healthy exercise outpaced erotica so thoroughly that director Rob Nilsson cut every trace of a romantic subplot between Dern and Pam Grier, and Pam's role went with it. Even Extremities, starring Farrah Fawcett as a vengeful woman who subdues a vicious would-be rapist (James Russo), is so discreet that the camera politely looks away when he orders her to undress.

A handful of high comedies have managed to combine pillow talk with fairly candid photography. Most lavishly praised of the lot is A Room with a View, director James Ivory's Edwardian period piece adapted from the novel by E. M. Forster. Maggie Smith heads the fine English company as a maiden lady chaperoning her cousin (Helena Bonham Carter) on a trip to Italy, where the girl is impulsively seized and kissed in a sunlit Tuscan meadow by a handsome, passionate young swain (Julian Sands). The veddy British suppression of basic biological urges, at least in polite society, is played like chamber music when Room with a View moves back to the stately homes of England. Momentarily shedding its elegance, Ivory's masterly comedy of manners features an exuberant bit of male nudity--when the hero, the vicar and the heroine's younger brother, all skinny-dipping and romping around a country pond, bump into a trio of proper Edwardians out for a stroll.

Nick Nolte, briefly showing his backside beside the swimming pool in Down and Out in Beverly Hills, provides further evidence that the film flashers of 1986 are apt to be masculine. Director Paul Mazursky's recycling of a French comedy, another blockbuster hit, offers Nolte, buns and all, as a derelict who is taken in by an affluent California householder (Richard Dreyfuss) and becomes a kind of sex therapist for the entire family. He seduces his benefactor's wife (Bette Midler), their daughter and the Hispanic maid, who had previously been her employer's private stock. As a Beverly Hills matron rediscovering orgasm while pretending to learn relaxation exercises, Midler gives her all and has plenty left over. In Ruthless People, a far ruder and raunchier slapstick farce directed by the waggish trio responsible for Airplane!, Midler stars once more, as a kidnaped heiress whose husband (Danny DeVito) won't pay her ransom. Here, only the language is explicit, except for a lovers'-lane bit featuring a play-for-pay hussy with heaving bosoms. A video tape of her heaving them at a client in a parked car becomes a tool for blackmail, helping thicken a plot that shrewdly capitalizes on midsummer madness.

In Wildcats, with Goldie Hawn playing a female football coach at a Chicago high school, the team jocks take it all off--helmets carefully placed over crotches--in a deliberate attempt to shake their new boss's composure. Do you doubt for a moment that Goldie gets them back into those jockstraps, thence onward and upward to win the all-city championship? While Paula Kelly strips down to her glittery G string in Richard Pryor's autobiographical Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life Is Calling, Pryor handily steals the show with an instant replay of Kelly's act, doing bumps and grinds in pasties and false eyelashes.

Summer also brought Sweet Liberty and Legal Eagles. The former, written and directed by and starring Alan Alda, concerns a college professor whose historical novel is savaged by a rowdy Hollywood film crew. Saul Rubinek portrays the director who has a sure-fire formula for churning out hits: Defy authority, destroy property and take people's clothes off. On the third count, Alda himself fudges with some self-conscious cuteness that the Reverend Jerry Falwell's maiden aunt might not wag a finger at. Michael Caine, as a womanizing superstar, and Michelle Pfeiffer, as his career-minded leading lady, who has a brief fling with Alda, give Liberty a welcome smattering of spicy sophistication. In Legal Eagles, Robert Redford and Debra Winger--as Manhattan lawyers colliding over a slight case of art fraud and murder--create viable sexual chemistry from time to time. Although the picture is reminiscent of a vintage Hepburn-Tracy comedy, its formula feels forced. Part of the problem is Redford, a cinema icon too squeaky-clean to bed Daryl Hannah (as a zany SoHo performance artist) on his own initiative. She has to make the move. Redford succumbs, then spends the rest of the movie being coyly sheepish about it. Oh, where are the studs of yesteryear?

The one hot-weather movie that has unequivocally spanned the generation gap is Rodney Dangerfield's Back to School. While Rodney manages to discover a nude beauty behind a shower door and even seduces an English professor (Sally Kellerman), his low-grade humor as a gross collegian is more verbal than visual but good for guffaws from every age group. Otherwise, youth films have carefully veered away from the 1985 bumper crop of movies dwelling ad nauseam on puberty rites. Since teeny-bopper sex hasn't pulled them in this time, Hollywood is trying to woo the kids with everything else, from hockey to horror to dewy-eyed innocence. Writer-producer-director John Hughes, the acknowledged high priest of teenage America's mores, made out with Pretty in Pink (which catapulted Molly Ringwald onto the cover of Time) and Ferris Bueller's Day Off, two substantial successes dealing with such momentous subjects as prom night and playing hooky. Youngblood, with Rob Lowe as a hockey player on the rise, swiftly came and went; Lowe's bedroom shenanigans with his coach's daughter didn't seem to help.

One of the oddest of all efforts to please every age group was Howard the Duck. Howard gets into bed with his favorite human, Lea Thompson, shortly after she has discovered a tiny condom (or ducky rubber?) in his wallet. Their affair isn't consummated, nor did the horny Howard score high with viewers of any feather.

Youth may be served the most generous dollops of sex, drugs and punk rock in Sid and Nancy (reviewed in this issue), Alex Cox's grim, graphic drama about the Sex Pistols star who killed his girlfriend and subsequently died of an overdose. Not much of a turn-on in any department.

Lewdness is uncomfortably combined with horror in Vamp (Grace Jones plays one of the surprises in store for three college boys who go to find a stripper for a frat party and discover a colony of vampires). The chills are tongue in cheek in The Toxic Avenger, a cult favorite about a skinny little nerd (Mitchell Cohen) who's the object of ridicule at a health club. After accidentally landing in a truckload of toxic waste, he emerges from the yucky green stuff--hideous but humongous and invincible--to right wrongs, captivate a blind girl and tear asunder the beautiful bodies of health nuts who had once sniggered at him in the sauna (among them former Playboy Bunny Jennifer Baptist). At this writing, Friday the 13th, Part VI: Jason Lives was still unreleased but a sure bet to offer the usual quotient of horny couples in jeopardy when that bloody perennial, Jason, is brought back to life by a bolt of lightning. Psycho III is not likely to be taken seriously by anyone old enough to recall Hitchcock's 1960 original, but this sequel to a sequel, with Tony Perkins directing and starring, does bring some flaming youth out to the Bates Motel to shed their clothes and their inhibitions, followed by the usual bloodshed. The (continued on page 167) Sex in Cinema (continued from page 137) wages of sin?

There have been other throwbacks. Police Academy: Back in Training is precisely as gross as its predecessors, but the third time around, no one seemed to care. Reform School Girls features Wendy O. Williams, Sybil Danning and the obligatory shower-room sequence--in which, inexplicably, Wendy and Sybil don't appear--parodying all those earlier epics about nubile tarts behind bars. Smooth Talk, based on a Joyce Carol Oates story, is conventional but memorable for a limpid, perceptive performance by Laura Dern (daughter of Bruce) as a 15-year-old girl whose sexual awakening is accelerated by a swaggering stranger (Treat Williams). The camera, however, records this virgin's moment of truth by showing us an empty convertible parked in a meadow--the defloration is presumably under way out of sight in the tall grass. So much for the strong stuff. The titles told just about everything junior Jacks and Jills needed to know about High School, Wimps, Valet Girls, Class of Nuke 'Em High (more toxic avenging), Girls School Screamers and Sizzle Beach U.S.A., movies probably destined to be rushed into the video-tape stores after pit stops at local drive-ins.

For the over-30 crowd, infidelity has been a recurrent plot theme, perhaps conveying a subversive hint that all is not so well in our holier-than-thou society. Both Heartburn and Down and Out in Beverly Hills make marital hanky-panky a pivotal issue. So does Woody Allen's Hannah and Her Sisters, a cunningly orchestrated and superbly acted human comedy about many urban foibles, including those of Hannah (Mia Farrow), her errant mate (Michael Caine) and her sister (Barbara Hershey), with whom he's having an affair. Just Between Friends co-stars Christine Lahti and Mary Tyler Moore as two women whose palship is strained when the newly widowed housewife (M.T.M.) discovers that her closest friend was her late husband's lover. In Twice in a Lifetime, Gene Hackman plays a 50-year-old steelworker who takes up with an attractive barmaid (Ann-Margret), dumping his mid-life crisis squarely into the laps of his loyal wife (Ellen Burstyn) and family. One compelling sequence of the post--World War Two drama Desert Bloom lands Jon Voight in hand-to-hand combat on the home front when his wife (JoBeth Williams) learns he has made a pass at her slinky sister (Ellen Barkin). There's a quick-as-a-wink flash of nudity at the very outset of Violets Are Blue, with Sissy Spacek and Kevin Kline as youngsters just out of school. And that's as blue as it gets visually, even though years later, Sissy, now a world-famous photojournalist returns to woo Kline away from his wife (Bonnie Bedelia). None of these films depicts its adulterers flagrante delicto, but all did, at least briefly, lure substantial numbers of adults away from the home wreckers at work on Dynasty and Falcon Crest.

Gay love stories, treated with heartwarming humor and maturity, emerged as another major trend of 1986. Director Bill Sherwood's Parting Glances asserted itself as a stunning, outspoken sleeper about a homosexual couple in Manhattan. Facing a temporary separation, Michael and Robert shower together, visit friends (most notably, a sardonic chum who is stricken with AIDS), go to a party and clear up some of the mixed signals that befog the air between all lovers, gay or straight. There's less subtlety in producer-director Donna Deitch's Desert Hearts, a lesbian romance set on a dude ranch near the divorce mills of Reno. Sometimes overwrought, sometimes downright corny, Hearts also has a tentative touchy-feely love scene that gets right under the skin of its female protagonists. In this finely tuned tango for two exceptional actresses, Helen Shaver plays the uptight Eastern divorcee reluctantly attracted to a vivacious change girl (Patricia Charbonneau) from one of the local casinos. Their graceful scenes together make up for a few clumsy moves elsewhere.

The homosexual lovers in My Beautiful Laundrette, made in England and cleaning up on both sides of the Atlantic, have no statement to make about alternative lifestyles. Their matter-of-fact romancing is merely a fringe benefit of an impudent comedy more often concerned with the way Pakistani immigrants adjust to London, where one of the lads (Gordon Warnecke) takes over a run-down coin-wash joint and invites his punk paramour (Daniel Day Lewis) to help.

Far and away the most blithely sophisticated gay film of the year is Doña Herlinda and Her Son. Made in Mexico, where it still has not opened commercially, the movie drolly spells out the play-by-play manipulations of a placid, wealthy matron who refuses to despair over the fact that her doctor son, Rodolfo, has a male lover. Doña Herlinda invites the boy to live with them. She also arranges for her son to meet a nice girl, marry and father a child, then adds wings to her house so that everyone can be happy in a multisexual ménage à cinq. Among the movie's many scenes of intimate fondling from bed to sauna, the brashest shows Rodolfo locked in carnal rapture and urging his lover to hurry because he has just learned that his wife has gone into labor. Almost as audacious is Ménage (originally titled Tenue de Soirée), which jolted audiences at the Cannes festival and was promptly acquired for U.S. distribution. Directed by Bertrand Blier, its hero is Bob (Gérard Depardieu), a gay burglar who becomes obsessed with a balding, middle-aged man named Antoine. Soon Bob lures both Antoine and his wife (Miou-Miou) into a life of crime and finally has his way with Antoine, whose wife doesn't seem to mind. "Getting it up the ass isn't so serious," she observes, "but getting to like it is." There's little explicit action, though the film's language is no-holes-barred from beginning to end.

Foreign imports have traditionally outstripped America in exploring the outer limits of eroticism, and the current year's crop is no exception. Besides the examples already cited, we'll be seeing France's Betty Blue, a Parisian sensation with sultry Beatrice Dalle in a bizarre seriocomic love story by Jean-Jacques Beineix (who made Diva). Often unclothed as a perennial baby doll whose boyfriend (Jean-Hugues Anglade, also tout nu a good share of the time) adores her despite her pouting, peevishness and occasional fits of violence, Dalle has already been hailed abroad as the new Bardot--though Betty Blue starts off with a highly explicit sex scene to which the original BB might have said non. Marthe Keller and a slew of top French actresses appear nude or seminude in Femmes de Personne, a soap-operatic "woman's picture" set in a medical center. If asked to go equally far in a relatively minor film, nine out of ten Hollywood starlets would be making noises about firing their agents. Greece's Bordello, featured in the Greek edition of Playboy, caused a furor at home with its uninhibited displays of flesh and tomfoolery. Freely based on the life of Madame Hortense (the character portrayed by Lila Kedrova in Zorba the Greek), proprietress of a notorious Cretan brothel in the 1890s, Bordello is described by director Nikos Koundouros as "a film about schizophrenia and necrophilia." Film buffs and voyeurs may check it out in a festival collection of Greek movies currently touring major U.S. cities.

From Italy, La Venexiana is a good bet to stir Stateside interest, if only because this filmed erotic classic stars Jason Connery (son of Sean) as a handsome young blade seeking love and adventure during a night on the town in Venice. Among his conquests is a sex-starved widow portrayed by Laura Antonelli. Laura manages to see a lot of Connery, who shows considerably more of himself than Daddy ever has. Another newsworthy Italian epic was Devil in the Flesh (Il Diavolo in Corpo over there), director Marco Bellocchio's remake of a landmark French film that was considered sensationally sensuous back in 1946. "Sparks fly in all directions," according to Variety's reviewer, who cited "an electrifying performance" by Maruschka Detmers as a young woman having a torrid liaison with a high school boy (Federico Pitzalis). During a celebrated oral-sex scene, Bellocchio reportedly left his two stars to themselves and let the cameras roll. Still, it's doubtful that we will ever see the results uncensored.

Down under, the bustling Aussies produced yet another version of Devil in the Flesh, its sexual content undivulged at this writing. Meanwhile, New Zealand star Bruno Lawrence paraded around starkers, as they say, in a postapocalyptic drama called The Quiet Earth. No big deal? You won't catch Paul Newman dropping his drawers for art, and Richard Gere's once-famous buns have been largely under wraps since Breathless.

Hard-core pornography is the one movie realm in which Americans are the unchallenged leaders, in quantity if not always in quality, despite the militant efforts of the Reagan Administration to bring a permissive society to heel. It's too soon to tell, of course, whether the U.S. Supreme Court decision supporting state laws against sodomy will have a ripple effect of repression. Theaters showing X-rated movies have been shrinking in number, forced out of existence not by Edwin Meese but by video stores, where the same sexual schlock can be taken home on rental tapes and viewed for a fraction of the cost, not to mention in more convenient surroundings. A turnaround appears to be in the making, however, with the glutted cassette market producing a new breed of knowing consumers who demand more for their money than mass-produced smut. Jimmie Johnson, president of California's Pussycat Theater chain, predicts, "The business is going to wind up with major exhibitors, because today's producers are learning it's necessary to shoot on film, then showcase a movie in theaters before releasing it on cassette, for the simple reason that the prestige of a theatrical first run in major cities boosts cassette sales. We're shaking the bad apples out of the tree, eliminating lousy theaters and cheap quickie films. Now the major question is, Will the courts let us survive?"

In 1986, one of the hottest-selling adult videos was Taboo American Style, winner of the Adult Film Association of America's award for best picture of 1985. Actually a four-film series with superior production values, Taboo is a raunchy family saga that closely follows the format of TV's steamy nighttime soaps, adding fellatio, cunnilingus, varied positions, hand jobs and whatever else it takes to keep customers titillated. Instigator of the action is Raven, as Nina Sutherland, a jerk-'em-around Jezebel who becomes a Hollywood superstar and sex object handled by her dad, brother and numerous supporting players, if not quite a cast of thousands.

The cream of the 1986 porn crop includes Blonde Heat, starring Seka as still another insatiable Hollywood icon. Likely to succeed, too, is Every Woman Has a Fantasy Part II. A slick, randy retread of last year's smash hit about wives in a consciousness-raising group that evolves into something like hands-on sex therapy, Every Woman Part II drops the group for some experimental gropes by an actor (John Leslie) and his wife, an author (Lois Ayres), who spice up their love life with role playing.

Another revisited classic, The Devil in Miss Jones III: A New Beginning, has even less to do with the original. Starring Ayres again, as a deceased slut on an odyssey through hell, this hot-and-heavy hard-core flick is typical of the Dark Brothers--aggressively anal and odious, as well as patently offensive in its attitudes toward women. Not surprisingly, Miss Jones III ends abruptly with a plug for Miss Jones IV: The Final Outrage. However, the headiest excitement in current X films is likely to be Behind the Green Door--The Sequel, which has confronted the menace of AIDS and herpes by promoting "safe sex" in its orgies (as reported in Playboy After Hours in June) through the use of condoms, spermicides and latex gloves. Better safe than sorry, indeed, though such prophylactic prudence--also on view in The Red Garter, a Hyapatia Lee vehicle--may well raise hell with the traditional come shots so dear to the hearts of dirty old men. While San Francisco's Mitchell Brothers could not hire Marilyn Chambers for the follow-up to their history-making Green Door sexual fantasy, they found a substitute, Missy Manners, to perform as Gloria--a stewardess with a feverish imagination, who picks up where Chambers left off in 1973.

From now through year's end, what is displayed on screen should tell how the scales are tipping between freedom of expression and Government-sanctioned repression. The Meese commission's report on pornography (already disclaimed and derided as the most salacious book of the decade) may well intimidate Hollywood, yet the erratic pendulum of public opinion unfailingly swings both ways. The commission's investigators who equate sex with violence conveniently ignore the obscenity of violence itself, but the moguls making and selling movies will no doubt continue to measure community standards by box-office receipts.

There are already some indications of easing attitudes. As we went to press, Top Gun, with Tom Cruise zooming to stardom in a rowdy action drama about U.S. Navy combat pilots, was the year's top-grossing film. It's instructive that its producers, after the first wave of previews, felt it necessary to keep the film on ice while they added some mildly steamy love scenes between Cruise and co-star Kelly McGillis. In a matter of days, No Mercy should arrive at your local theater, teaming Kim Basinger, as a Cajun gal, with Richard Gere in a pairing that may contribute further warming effects to an off year. After that, Basinger has a third imminent shot, this time opposite Bruce Willis in Blake Edwards' Blind Date, written by the author of Ruthless People. In a temporary move from MTV to 52 Pickup, with Roy Scheider and Ann-Margret, Vanity is generously unveiled as a prostitute caught up in a case of blackmail and murder. Lovers of exotic adventure can whet their appetites with Joan Chen in Tai-Pan, based on James Clavell's epic novel about intrigues among the ruthless European traders ravaging the China coast more than a century ago. Chen ("the Elizabeth Taylor of the Far East") plays May-May, Bryan Brown's ambitious mistress, barely veiled in her working clothes as a concubine. So there's hope. But all in all, 1986 will most likely have to be logged in our books as the Year of the Prig.

"The director has a sure-fire formula for hits: Defy authority, destroy property, take people's clothes off."