Sex in Cinema

Just the facts of life, ma'am: Dan Aykroyd, as Dragnet's straight-arrow Sergeant Joe Friday--nephew of the immortal TV cop played by Jack Webb--bemusedly checks out the action in a strip joint (left).

Highbrow Distribs Get Wise: Sex Sells" declared a Variety headline earlier this year. This is news? Sex is being used to flog everything from soap to running shoes (sales of one brand of footwear shot up 70 percent following a particularly steamy ad campaign), but Hollywood has been slow in getting the word: The erotic temperature of major-studio releases had been plunging steadily downward since 1972's Last Tango in Paris. Finally, in 1987, the mercury is inching back up, with a nudge from an unexpected source. Mother England, of all places, has been inundating her former colony with films that overflow with brazen bedroom antics, kinky sexual practices and what the Monty Python gang loves to refer to as "naughty bits." This (text continued on page 146) from a country where a coy stage comedy called No Sex Please, We're British had been running since 1971; its closing this year may have been sending a message.

The Anglo trend started well over a year ago, when Alex Cox's lurid punk-rock tragedy Sid and Nancy came storming in as a sort of counterpunch to the graceful, sweetly romantic humors of A Room with a View, an example of the traditional garden-variety English cinema. Other rooms with other views were on the way. Terry Jones's Personal Services, an outrageously outspoken comedy, makes hey-nonny-nonny fiction from some known facts about the life and times of a notorious London madam named Cynthia Payne (played by Julie Walters in a startling switch from her 1983 role in Educating Rita). Services, often as sad as it is funny, offers many bizarre fringe benefits--among them Alec McCowen, as a retired military commander whose hobby is transvestism, and Danny Schiller, soberly portraying an elderly housemaid whose gender remains undetected until Walters bursts in upon her/him in the loo and exclaims, "Dolly, you've got a willie!" Another eye opener from England is Prick Up Your Ears, an adaptation of John Lahr's biography of Joe Orton, the flamboyantly bent English playwright who was bludgeoned to death by his live-in lover in 1967. Gary Old-man--the burnt-out Sid Vicious of Sid and Nancy--bears a remarkable resemblance to Orton, who was an outspoken, promiscuous advocate of pleasure at any price, by way of casual pickups in pubs and public toilets, back in the days when no one was worrying about safe sex.

Homosexuality, a staple subject for English authors acquainted with hanky-panky in boys' schools from Eton and Harrow to Oxford, recurs as a theme of two films for more mannerly than Prick Up Your Ears. Withnail and I is an eccentric comedy about two London actors, barely surviving the Sixties, off on a country weekend with an old queen played hilariously by Richard Griffiths. He's Withnail's uncle hell-bent on seducing his nephew's chum. In Maurice, the people who made Room with a View bring another E. M. Forster tale to the screen. This novel, not published until after Forster's death, concerns a rejected pederast who finds comfort in the arms of a hot-blooded young gamekeeper on his former boyfriend's estate. It sounds like a boy-meets-boy reprise of Lady Chatterley's Lover.

Far be it from director Ken Russell to promulgate any foolish notions about British reserve. His Gothic is a portrait of the poets Byron and Shelley on a dope-induced wild weekend in Switzerland circa 1816. Julian Sands, the ardent swain of Room with a View, plays Shelley as a sexed-up, spaced-out aesthete who climbs onto the roof in a thunderstorm, stark-naked. Everyone has demons to exorcise during a house party so weird that Shelley's mistress (later wife), Mary Godwin (played by Natasha Richardson, daughter of Vanessa Redgrave), allegedly drew on it when she wrote Frankenstein. Unabashed nudity is the rule in Captive, in which Irina Brook (daughter of British director Peter Brook) stars as the titular victim, a Patty Hearstwhile heiress who is abducted, blindfolded, stripped and suspended upside down from the ceiling before she chooses to join the young rebels holding her. The real rebellion, of course, is against her father the tycoon, played by Oliver Reed. Reappearing as a rowdy survivalist in Nicolas Roeg's Castaway, Reed advertises for a female companion to spend a year with him on a desolate tropical island. Enter lovely Amanda Donohoe, a girl bored with the workaday business world. Donohoe sheds her clothes the moment they're alone in their island paradise, though getting her to shed her sexual inhibitions takes months of sun-tanning and solitude. Concentrated sensuality, of course, is S.O.P. for Roeg, whose steamy love scene between Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland in 1973's Don't Look Now has become a classic.

Another film with a strong erotic slant is Half Moon Street, co-starring Michael Caine and Sigourney Weaver. He's a lusty English lord; she's an American moonlighting as a London callgirl while doing research in Middle Eastern affairs. If you believe that, you probably believe that the Ayatollah Khomeini is going to win the next Nobel Peace Prize. Half Moon is saved from total eclipse mainly by Weaver's habit of pulling her clothes off in reel after reel.

Other current and choice examples of eroticism with an English accent range from The Fourth Protocol (Frederick Forsyth espionage, featuring Pierce Brosnan and Joanna Cassidy as a couple of K.G.B. agents who connect for a zipless kiss-kill encounter) to Car Trouble (Julie Walters again, as an unlucky lady who is trapped with her paramour while conducting some extramarital dalliance in a runaway automobile). Youth gets its knickers off in such breezy excursions as Wish You Were Here!, starring teenaged newcomer Emily Lloyd, who earned raves from critics at the Cannes Film Festival for her vibrant performance as a sexually precocious girl growing up in postwar Britain. Lloyd's bittersweet odyssey as Lynda, who hardly ever says no, is rumored to have been inspired by director David Leland's extensive interviews with madam Cynthia Payne while researching his screenplay for Personal Services. We learn, among other things, that in and around Brighton, a condom used to be called a plunker. A dismal factory town in Yorkshire is the setting for Rita, Sue and Bob Too! The title identifies a naughty threesome made up of two rather dowdy, easy English dumplings (Siobhan Finneran and Michelle Holmes) and the loutish young husband who drives them home from baby-sitting jobs. They usually detour through the moors to take turns having the indefatigable Bob "joomp" on their well-padded bones. Whether Rita, Sue or Bob's wife will wind up with exclusive rights to his stud services is the weightiest question raised by this impudent comedy.

The earliest indication that American moviemakers were edging back into screen sexuality actually carne late in 1986, when director David Lynch's Blue Velvet emerged as a major sleeper. It didn't hurt when Oscar nominee Woody Allen went public, calling Lynch's kinky cult epic the best picture he'd seen all year. But by that time, Velvet had already begun to build a following for its dark, obsessional vision of small-town U.S.A. Beyond the white-picket fences, Lynch discovers a moral cesspool where teenagers Laura Dern and Kyle MacLachlan learn about the seamier side of existence from a torch singer (Isabella Rossellini, frequently unclad) and a demented, sadistic drug dealer (Dennis Hopper). Such awful truths would have landed Blue Velvet in the underground-movie ghetto a decade ago, but the film became a modest mainstream hit and has zoomed to best-sellerdom as a video cassette.

Screen sex subsequently burst into headlines with Angel Heart, directed by Alan Parker (an expatriate Brit, incidentally). This eerie occult thriller set in Cajun country stars Mickey Rourke, reasonably fresh from his controversial stint in last year's 9 1/2 Weeks, this time with sultry Lisa Bonet. The media spotlight fell on Lisa, because her steady job is playing a wholesome teeny-bopper on TV's top-rated Cosby Show. Angel Heart casts her as a New Orleans voodoo priestess, her black magic culminating in a heavy-breathing, blood-spattered carnal encounter with Rourke. The sequence was due to earn the film an accursed X until Parker agreed to trim ten seconds of the love-scene footage. Midway through the Angel Heart brouhaha, Motion Picture Association of America spokesmen began to wonder aloud whether they ought to thicken the alphabet soup of the M.P.A.A.'s ratings system with a new A for adult, supposedly to indicate a mysterious moral posture somewhere between R and X. Happily, A is still in limbo.

Spicing violence with sex seems to be all the rage down in Cajun territory. No Mercy goes easy on the erotic angle but has Kim Basinger soaking wet in the bayous while handcuffed to Richard Gere, who's trying to spring her from bondage (continued on page 166) Sex in Cinema(continued from page 146) to a very bad egg. Things get considerably wilder in The Big Easy, another trip to New Orleans, where Dennis Quaid and Ellen Barkin--playing a corrupt cop and a suspicious prosecutor--settle most of their differences on a mattress in a couple of torrid scenes that look as though they might make the earth move.

While Lethal Weapon gives the women who dream about him a gratifying glimpse of Mel Gibson's buns, sex is hardly as central to the plot as it is in two other hot suspense dramas, Black Widow and The Bedroom Window. Widow stars Theresa Russell as a sexpot serial killer who loves men, leaves 'em stone-dead and enjoys a nude swim between jobs. She also enjoys a kiss, hinting of lesbian excitement, with Debra Winger, playing an FBI agent who seems to be on her case in every sense. In The Bedroom Window, Steve Guttenberg beds his boss's wife (Isabelle Huppert) just before she glances out and witnesses a sex maniac's assault. Several reels later, he's got the frightened victim (Elizabeth Mc Govern) upstairs sharing his shower. Some steam also rises in No Way Out, all about sexual politics in Washington, D. C., with Kevin Costner and Sean Young as two beautiful people whose first zipless fuck in a limo indirectly triggers a crisis at the Pentagon. Still more celebrity skin is served up by British-born director Adrian Lyne (the man behind Flashdance and 9 1/2 Weeks) in Fatal Attraction. This cautionary tale casts Michael Douglas as a New York lawyer who learns about the wages of sin after a weekend wallow with a psychotically possessive editor (Glenn Close). Early reports suggest that these major stars are at it everywhere, including the kitchen sink, where they--and the water taps--are turned on for an impromptu orgy.

Witchery, occult rituals and outright horror spice not only Angel Heart but many other films of 1987. Murders in a medieval monastery keep Sean Connery preoccupied in The Name of the Rose, while his lusty young aide whips off his cassock and yields to temptation with a mute peasant girl in the chapel. Going to the Devil is treated less seriously in The Witches of East-wick, George (The Road Warrior) Miller's slaphappy screen version of a John Updike best seller. Jack Nicholson sets the tone as a sort of gonadal Mad Max who introduces himself by saying, "I'm just your average horny little Devil." Cher, Susan Sarandon and Michelle Pfeiffer play the New England suburbanites on his hit list. Weird doings elsewhere assume sundry shapes and forms, from Burnin' Love (a spoof with Barbara Carrera as a sultry Salem witch) and A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (Freddy's back, at one point reappearing as a bare-bosomed creature of the night) to My Demon Lover (featuring a saphead hero who turns into a warlock or God knows what when sexually aroused).

If there's no other way to heat up a movie, hire a stripper. That formula works for Kandyland, which is all about ecdysiasts--featuring Sandahl Bergman and Playmate Kim Evenson, Miss September 1984--and for The Big Town, with Diane Lane as a Fifties stripper dancing down the runway to catch Matt Dillon's eye. Even when sex appeal seems secondary, a scene set in a topless joint often appears obligatory. In Best Seller, James Woods and Brian Dennehy discuss premeditated murder while go-go girls do their thing. Both Beverly Hills Cop II and Dragnet use the ever-popular tits-and-ass gimmick. And in Summer School, Mark Harmon plays a teacher who discovers one of his male students doing bumps and grinds in a Chippendales-style club.

Dragnet may also be remembered as the first major movie to make casual note of the condom revival: Vice cop Tom Hanks, shacked up with a policewoman, checks his bedside packet of rubbers, finds it empty and decides he may as well crawl out and report for duty. Another comedy, the upcoming It Had to Be You, begins with Joe Bologna and Donna Dixon abed, the condoms pointedly visible nearby.

Lewdness made laughable, of course, adds up to moderate titillation with minimal risk of censure. Hollywood likes that. Mel Brooks's Space-balls does the job with dirty words rather than dirty deeds, figuratively goosing Star Wars. Something Wild does it with Jeff Daniels and Melanie Griffith, as an ill-met couple going from bed to worse during a mad, mad weekend on the road. Making Mr. Right achieves it with John Malkovich, as a well-hung robot whose misadventures include getting his ass on backward. Roxanne gives Steve Martin, a fire chief and latter-day Cyrano de Bergerac, the chance to meet Daryl Hannah while she's locked out of her house wearing nary a stitch (though well concealed by shrubbery). Mannequin lets Andrew McCarthy fondle his dream girl, a department-store dummy; in Ishtar, Warren Beatty gropes for Isabelle Adjani's breasts to make sure she's not a male terrorist. The Secret of My Success introduces sex by letting Michael J. Fox, an inside trader, trade favors with his boss's lickerish wife. And we mustn't forget Kim Basinger, again--first, roaring drunk and ready as Bruce Willis' partner in Blind Date, then up to her pretty neck in trouble when she tries to get back some compromising nude photos in Nadine.

In American films, real romance is still rarely more explicit than the fun stuff. Today's directors mostly prefer telling to showing, and many still dote on such clichés symbolizing physical passion as exploding rockets or express trains penetrating tunnels. That sort of schmaltz used to be treated as a joke in the James Bond movies, though The Living Daylights, 007's latest, has a genuinely romantic twist--with Timothy Dalton a monogamous Bond limiting his sexual dalliance (as discreetly as ever) to one partner, Maryam d'Abo. There's a sign of the times.

Recent kid stuff seems a cut above the rash of tiresome youth movies of the past few years. Now, in place of Porky's IV, we have The Lost Boys, a reasonably hip, sophisticated spoof about vampires making out in a California beach town. Adventures in Babysitting is featherweight but engaging foolery about a Chicagoland baby sitter (Elisabeth Shue) whose troubles begin, sort of, because someone thinks she resembles a Playboy Playmate. Dirty Dancing deals with sex, abortion and putting on a show at a Catskill resort, where Patrick Swayze and Jennifer Grey (Joel's daughter) maintain the rhythm. At least three new movies treat the subject of very young men getting it on with older women: River Phoenix, in Jimmy Reardon, is no sooner out of the sack with his mom's chum (Ann Magnuson) than he discovers that his dad's been phoning her, too; C. Thomas Howell's swinging partner in A Tiger's Tale is luscious Ann-Margret, no less; and In the Mood stars Patrick Dempsey as Ellsworth "Sonny" Wisecarver, who became a headline-hogging hero during World War Two by eloping with two mature women before he reached sweet 16. The Brat Pack? It's over. Sean Penn was sentenced to jail (not for Shanghai Surprise, his misbegotten duet with Madonna), and Rob Lowe plays, quite convincingly, a retarded boy who's seduced by a Texan tart in Square Dance.

Variety's aforementioned hit list of horny highbrow features also paid proper homage to the French. Betty Blue, a sizzling 1986 holdover, was followed by L'Année des Méduses (Year of the Medusas). Here, Valerie Kaprisky, best remembered for starring in the remake of Breathless opposite Richard Gere, plays another nymphet enjoying an endless topless summer on the Riviera, making l'amour the merrier with just about any male who gives her a second look. Other French entries well worth a glance are Scene of the Crime, which reveals enough of durable superstar Catherine Deneuve to discourage any serious challenge to her title as the most beautiful woman alive, and Rendezvous, introducing Juliette Binoche as a promiscuous budding actress whose sex partners include a Romeo (Lambert Wilson) who comes back from the dead to bed her.

The most controversial Italian entry is indisputably Marco Bellocchio's new version of the French classic Devil in the Flesh. The widely publicized scene that got the movie an X rating has heroine Maruschka Detmers performing unmistakable fellatio on her teenaged lover. More distracted than shocked, New York Times critic Vincent Canby called Bellocchio's defiant hard-core sequence "a fatal gaffe," noting that "the camera butts into the action, like the director of a porn film, to show the audience things that only a pushy third party would ever see." Canby also asked (somewhat naïvely, perhaps), "What about AIDS?" More Italian cinematic pizzazz is evident in Lina Wertmüller's Summer Night, starring Mariangela Melato as a very rich bitch who arranges to kidnap the handsome terrorist leader (Michele Placido) who's been snatching, and collecting ransom on, all her high-and-mighty friends. Do I have to tell you that the billionairess and the chained brute wind up in bed together? Still, the critical consensus was that Wertmüller and Melato had made essentially the same movie, and made it better, in their 1975 hit Swept Away. . . .

Spain added to the fire with The Law of Desire, a mad homoerotic comedy about unrequited love and murder, and Padre Nuestro, starring Fernando Rey as an aged, dying cardinal who goes back to his roots to settle some old scores. Chiefly, he wants to make peace with an illegitimate daughter (Victoria Abril), a practicing whore who boldly flaunts her family ties--and all her other assets--as the bastard child of a churchman. From Sweden comes My Life as a Dog, a refreshingly warm-blooded comedy about a city-bred boy who has to move to the country to discover budding breasts, see-through lingerie and a nude model. An engaging handbook on how to muddle through when your mom and your pooch die.

French-Canadian moviemaker Denys Arcand's The Decline of the American Empire, despite its sharp subtitled wit, was edged out of an Oscar for best foreign-language film. Even so, this sexual Donny-brook in academe--four women vs. four men at a country-weekend dinner party where vitriol seems to be the main dish--is already slated to be remade in English, with big names and every verbal barb still tipped in curare.

Elsewhere in the Commonwealth countries, nothing quite measures up, sexwise, to the bristling bundles from Britain. Australia's holdover blockbuster "Crocodile" Dundee does allow Paul Hogan to be confronted by Manhattan's transvestite hookers and other Naked City fauna. Kangaroo, out of D. H. Lawrence, reveals Judy Davis and her husband, Colin Friels, in a wild, wet love scene on the beach. Another husband-wife team, Rachel Ward and Bryan Brown, plays a mismatched couple in The Good Wife, with Ward as a repressed wilderness woman who first sleeps with her brother-in-law, then throws caution to the wind in her passion for a ne'er-do-well bar-keep (Sam Neill).

Down in the cinematic nether world of X-rated adult films, porno chic has almost lost its theatrical setting. Nationwide, the number of moviehouses booking hard-core has shrunk drastically, for the most part because of competition from home video. The multipronged attack that killed the golden goose is variously attributed to AIDS, Meese-commission militants and an influx of amateur entrepreneurs. In an early-summer headline, Screw magazine posed the question "Is Hard-Core Porn Doomed?" The answer was a qualified no, though managing editor Manny Neuhaus pointed out that its fans have turned to tape or cable TV. "In terms of film, we sort of wrote off the whole industry as nothing we'd pay serious attention to. Even with cassettes, it's all packaging. They're selling boxes, not contents. There are more transients and less talent in the business than ever."

Jim Mitchell of San Francisco's Mitchell Brothers, pioneers in hard-core, is just as vehemently negative: "Anyone can make a porn movie today; 50,000 are being made every weekend by guys with Betamaxes." In their own O'Farrell theater, once a skin-flick palace par excellence, the Mitchells are primarily running live-sex shows. "Although we played it here," says Jim, "we never even made a regular release print of Behind the Green Door: The Sequel. There was no point. The market's a half inch deep. People look at sex films now the way they look at a ball game: There may be 160 games a season, and the customers don't choose between a good ball game and a bad one. They just want to watch 'em play."

Inquiries everywhere produce essentially the same downbeat theme with minor variations. Arrow Films' Deep Throat II is a spirited, screw-loose sequel in which the character originally played by Linda Lovelace returns from the dead to possess the mind and tongue of her daughter, Laura Liplock (Krista Lane), wife of an antiporn crusader. Throat II has been touted as one of 1987's major successes--for home viewing only. "We never released it theatrically, despite lots of requests," says an Arrow publicist, "but we may release it later, probably in an R-rated version. For hard-core in theaters, the dollars just aren't there anymore."

Even the infamous "Dark Brothers," who made hard-core about as hard as it gets, have given up and gone into making non-X movies under their real names, Walter Gernert and Gregg Brown. Producer-director Chuck Vincent has made the transition from pure sex to sexploitation to suspense. His latest is Deranged, a straight hallucinatory shocker featuring three former porn regulars: Jane Hamilton (a.k.a. Veronica Hart), Jamie Gillis and Jerry Butler, billed here as Paul Siederman. Butler has joined a growing roster of performers who are giving hard-core the cold shoulder because of AIDS. A ten-year veteran with more than 300 films and videos under his belt, so to speak, Butler tells interviewers he'd rather be safe than sorry but adds, "I have yet to hear of an on-camera person who died of AIDS, at least on the heterosexual side of the business." Producers report, however, that more and more performers are demanding that condoms be used. "That's a start," says one, "but I don't think the public is accepting it very well."

L.A. producer Richard Mailer, with an adult-video feature titled The Huntress, is making positive moves to counter such resistance. Like last year's breakthrough Green Door from the Mitchells, Miller's cassette not only endorses safe sex but flaunts it. The slick packaging includes complimentary condoms in primary colors, presumably for the use of aroused viewers caught unprepared.

What people may prefer to hear about are upbeat movies such as Miami Spice, which will be shown theatrically before its release on cassette. This confident spin-off of guess what is recycled for girl watchers who'd rather see what Amber Lynn and Sheri St. Clair take off than what Don Johnson puts on. The same distributors expect to reap big profits with a video titled Traci, I Love You, starring Traci Lords. The subject of the sex industry's most damaging scandal a year or so ago, Traci is now officially 19 and is renouncing the flicks that made her a top porn queen when she wasn't yet old enough to see an R-rated picture on her own. She's back in business on a different tack, launching a workout tape called Warmup to Traci.

Mainstream moviegoers can hope, at least, for more joy of sex in the months ahead. The British are still pushing the envelope, with a comedy due very soon from Stephen (Prick Up Your Ears) Frears called Sammy and Rosie Get Laid. Promising title, and advance word indicates that the promise is kept. Aria, a hugely ambitious English production, gives carte blanche to directors Robert Altman, Jean-Luc Godard, Ken Russell, Bruce Beresford and at least half a dozen more to let their imaginations soar while shooting a favorite operatic selection--which turns out to mean, for example, Tristan and Isolde recycled as a young couple's erotic idyl in Las Vegas.

Looking to our own shores, we'll see Bruce Willis in Sunset, as a Tom Mix character messing around in Hollywood way back when; Cher on deck in Moonstruck, as a New York Italian gal who goes passionately overboard for her dull husband's youngish brother; Kathleen Turner in Julia and Julia, having wet dreams about Sting; Rebecca De Mornay in Roger Vadim's reworked And God Created Woman, a succès de scandale that 30 years ago launched Brigitte Bardot. This new Woman is said to retain little or no body English translated from the French. A hotter prospect is probably the imminent sequel to Angie Dickinson's pistol-packin' 1974 sizzler Big Bad Mama, with Angie playing Mama to February 1986 Playmate Julie McCullough. Whatever will be, we'll see. But chances are we'll be seeing the uncut, full-throttle versions of current films only when we buy or rent them on tape. Angel Heart uncensored is already on sale. Ditto Working Girls, a fictionalized docudrama about a day in the life of three prostitutes in a businesslike Manhattan brothel that won both critical and audience acclaim. The list goes on. Certainly sex sells. But in future, the sexiest movies may be like flirtatious. frizzed-up floozies--no matter how they advertise their wares, you won't really know what you're getting until you take them home.

Witching may make it so: From occult rites to deviltry, strange things are happening.

Jack Nicholson has a hell of a time playing Satan to the comely coven of Cher, Susan Sarandon and Michelle Pfeiffer in The Witches of Eastwick (background shot), but Dennis Hopper is a far scarier personification of evil as torch singer Isabella Rossellini's nemesis in Blue Velvet (below), already a hit on the video-cassette charts.

Freddy never looked like this before! In his latest outing (A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors), the monster metamorphoses into female form (near right). In Necropolis (far right), Leeanne Baker goes four up on Freddy as a sort of ghoul-dugger wet nurse (amazingly well preserved for her purported 300 years). Sylvia (Emmanuelle) Kristel is the count's bloodthirsty ex in Dracula's Widnow (below right).

She's a sweet young thing on TV's Cosby Show and A Different World, but Lisa Bonet projects raw passion as a mambo priestess in Angel Heart (below left); her love scene with Mickey Rourke almost earned the movie--which is based on a William Hjortsberg novel serialized in Playboy back in 1978--an X. More kinks are due in Aria; below right, weird antics from Rigoletto, one of its ten segments set to opera music.

Star power lends a little something extra to the steamier movie scenes of 1987.

Surely, she's seen one of those before. Whoopi Goldberg goes into the closet for Burglar (far left). In Half Moon Street, Sigourney Weaver--turning to prostitution to make ends meet--sheds her clothes in reel after reel; with diplomat Michael Caine (near right), she does it for love. This being the Eighties, both budding-romance and monkey-business contacts become entangled in terrorist plots. At far right, Summer School teacher Mark Harmon discovers one of his students (Ken Olandt) moonlighting as a male stripper in a Chippendales-style nightery.

Superhunk Rob Lowe and sexy Kim Cattrall do a Calvin Kleinad imitation in Masquerade (background); Kathleen Turner's a time traveler again in Julia and Julia, dreaming her way back to her past--and into an affair with Sting (below).

Movies for the young at heart: more class, more sass and nary another Porky's in view.

In the more innocent age depicted by Neil Simon's autobiographical Brighton Beach Memoirs, Jonathan Silverman gets his jollies by dropping stuff so he can sneak a peek up cousin Lisa Waltz's skirt (top). Lou Jacobi essays the May-December routine with Monique Gabrielle (above left) in an episode of Amazon Women on the Moon. Andrew McCarthy gets to cop a feel in Mannequin (above right), but the lady (played by Kim Cattrall, again) is a mere dummy. It's the reel thing, however, for horny teen moviegoers Emily Lloyd and Lee Whitlock in Wish You Were Here (right).

Beatrice Dalle, the manic-depressive titular character in the highly charged French film Betty Blue, appears in one of her deepest indigo moments in the background shot. Its mood contrasts sharply with the animal energies displayed in Dirty Dancing (above), an American coming-of-age picture set in the summer of '63 at a Borscht Belt resort. Cutting a mean rug in the foreground are Cynthia Rhodes and Patrick Swayze, who portrays the hotel's resident stud and dance instructor.

Do foreigners do it better? Well, they definitely do it with greater frequency--on film, anyway.

The flames in the fireplace aren't the only ones ignited in Italy's L'Attrazione (background), featuring Stefano Sarelli and Florence Guerrin. But the most controversial Italian import of 1987 is Devil in the Flesh, released with an X in the U.S.; the scene below, with Maruschka Detmers going into action on 19-year-old neighbor Federico Pitzalis, earned it.

In Spain's Padre Nuestro (above left), Fernando Rey plays a dying cardinal who's trying to make things up to his illegitimate daughter (Victoria Abril). His Eminence's rebellious bastard doesn't make things easy for her dad; she's a flamboyant prostitute who flaunts her unorthodox parentage by styling herself La Cardenala. The French drama Rendez-vous (above right) introduces Juliette Binoche as an aspiring actress in heat and hoping to be discovered in Paris, where her sexual partners include Wadeck Stanczak (he's the one in the saddle on the stairs) and Lambert Wilson (foreground), a talented fellow who even manages to rise from the grave for love.

Topless fun in the sun is the principal attraction of the frothy French release L'Année des Méduses, starring Valerie Kaprisky. At left above, she dallies with a pair of German tourists (Barbara Nielsen and Antoine Nikola). Meanwhile, the seemingly indestructible Emmanuelle marches on, with this pair of amorous ladies among the visual aids of Emmanuelle 5 (left).

The colorful poets Byron and Shelley are irresistible fodder for director Ken Russell, Britain's wild man of the cinema. In Gothic (above), Shelley (Julian Sands), his wife-to-be, Mary (Natasha Richardson), Byron (Gabriel Byrne) and his mistress (Myriam Cyr) get down and dirty. Rita, Sue and Bob Too! (near right, top) features a randy threesome--Michelle Holmes, Siobhan Finneran and George Costigan--the last about to "joomp" the Union Jack and the birds. Prick Up Your Ears, the grim life-and-death story of homosexual playwright Joe Orton, stars Gary Oldman (in center, near right, chatting up a pair of pretty boys). Truly far out is Personal Services (far right), based on the misadventures of a madam who catered to a well-connected--and kinky--clientele.

For the ultimate blind date, take a trip to a desert island: That's what Brits Gerald Kingsland and Lucy Irvine did, and the movie Castaway is based on their conflicting accounts. The strangers in paradise are portrayed by Oliver Reed and Amanda Donohoe; reels unspool before they finally get horizontal (right), but audiences are treated to many delightful views of Amanda unclad (background).

More sex, please, we're British: At last, cinematic eroticism is joyously OK in the U.K.