Sex in Cinema 1989

When it comes to steam on the screen, 1989 may go into the record books for the way it kept raunch under wraps. A generally conservative social climate and the ongoing AIDS menace are largely to blame. But that doesn't mean that films from now on will be limited to pure, polyunsaturated abstinence. The deal makers who decide what movies you'll see and how much they'll show are shrewd realists. They know that cinema without sex would be like rock music without a hard beat, team sports without balls, Warren Beatty without a date. So sex is still with us but is more often linked to some dramatic purpose, real or imagined. Such outspoken films as Dangerous Liaisons, The Accused, Casualties of War and the British-made Scandal have ample sexual content, drawn from history and yesterday's headlines. Even the year's top comedies for grownups--from the dark, highly praised sex, lies, and videotape to Cousins and the relatively outrageous Scenes from the Class Struggle in Beverly Hills--might accurately be described as studies of sexual mores, making statements that go well beyond mere sexploitation. It (text continued on page 138) seems fair to conclude that screen lust circa 1989 is changing in ways that strongly suggest a new wave of romance and moral responsibility.

There is no better example of serious drama spiked with intrinsic sex appeal than Dangerous Liaisons, British director Stephen Frears's lush period film based on a play based, in turn, on the classic erotic novel about jaded aristocrats on the make in 18th Century France. Released late in 1988, Liaisons was nominated for seven Oscars, won three and continued playing well into the current year. The academy picked Glenn Close and Michelle Pfeiffer as Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress contenders, respectively, but gave the statuettes to others, with nary a nod to John Malkovich for his mesmerizing performance as the master seducer, Valmont. Ultimately a loser in his battle of the sexes vs. Close's worldly marquise, he collects misery and death as the wages of sin.

This fall, director Milos Forman's Valmont will retell essentially the same story, with a noticeably more youthful cast. England's Colin Firth has the title role, with New York stage actress Annette Bening as the marquise. There has already been controversy over a proposed poster (probably nixed by now) showing Firth planting a kiss on teenager Fairuza Balk's bare bum. Young Henry Thomas, fondly remembered as E.T.'s best friend, comes of age professionally in his rendezvous with Balk, an amusingly poignant sequence between two bewildered children in a maison de plaisir full of erotic art. "But that's how it was," says director Forman, whose research went back to the original novel. "In those days, people were married when they were thirteen or fourteen years old." Let's hope that contemporary moral crusaders, seldom astute critics, will recognize Valmont as valid social history rather than kiddie porn.

Sexual abuse in various forms has been a timely theme, the pace set early in The Accused, with Jodie Foster's Oscar-winning role as a tarty small-town girl who is gang-raped in a gin mill and takes her case to court. On a more melodramatic level, in Kinjite, Charles Bronson plays a lawman trying to rescue a teenager who is abducted and ravished by an evil mobster specializing in the corruption of sweet young things. The Bronson character seems all the keener to crack the case after his own daughter is molested on a bus. Brian De Palma's chilling Casualties of War, based on an actual case, deals with the vicious assault of a captive Vietnamese girl (Thuy Thu Le) by American GIs. Sean Penn plays the remorseless squad ringleader, with Michael J. Fox as the conscientious soldier who risks his life to see justice done after the girl's death.

In today's Hollywood, retribution is swift for those committing crimes against women. Criminal Law stars Gary Oldman as a defense attorney with a conscience who turns against his client, Kevin Bacon, a rich, arrogant serial killer who mutilates his female victims because they've all had abortions. Winter People, a so-so Depression drama, stars Kelly McGillis and Kurt Russell, with Jeffrey Meek as a wild, lusty mountain brute who fathers McGillis' bastard child.

When Dennis Quaid, playing rocker Jerry Lee Lewis in Great Balls of Fire!, takes a child bride of 13 (Winona Ryder), the public turns against him. There's trouble in the bedroom, too, when Jerry Lee finds his blushin' bride somewhat too responsive on their first night together. "You don't move like no virgin!" he roars and puts his clothes back on. You won't catch Mel Gibson, of the famous buns, teasing a gal that way. In Tequila Sunrise, he makes it poolside and under water with Michelle Pfeiffer. In Lethal Weapon II, it's back to the shore in a modest mobile home and off with those skivvies again for some flesh pressing with actress Patsy Kensit before the gunfire resumes. Crime and passion, a perennial film combo, also figure prominently in Road House, starring prime hunk Patrick Swayze as a superbouncer. He cleans up a lawless joint and the town around it but finds time for some barnyard (and barn-roof) fun with Kelly Lynch as the local doctor who applies bandages after his brawls. There's said to be even more intense body heat between Al Pacino and Ellen Barkin in Sea of Love: Pacino, as a New York detective, makes waves with a really hot suspect in a murder case.

Scene for scene, probably the nudest major films this year were from England, with the well-publicized Scandal leading the pack. The bold Brits didn't produce quite the volume of voluptuousness they'd been exporting in recent years, but this censored, now-you're-X-rated, now-you're-not replay of the famous Profumo affair was titillating enough. Joanne Whalley-Kilmer as Christine Keeler and Bridget Fonda as Mandy Rice-Davies play the pair of swinging-Sixties, anything-goes girls whose games of musical beds brought down the government and got a Russian diplomat quickly recalled to Moscow. Except for one brief braless dance sequence in the night club where they meet, the star actresses talk like trollops but are seldom shown doing anything that would ignite a Parliamentary crisis. Pointedly excised from several early versions of Scandal were a few randy snippets that spell the difference between an R and an X, including one episode in which the club impresario summons Christine to his office for oral servicing. The strongest bits remaining are in an orgy scene peopled with nude masochists, lewd matrons (Britt Ekland among them as a lady "who had a thing with J.F.K.") and middle-aged satyrs on a spree, and even this sequence has been trimmed of male frontal nudity. John Hurt steals the show as Dr. Stephen Ward, the society osteopath who committed suicide when his aristocratic chums let him take the rap for their indiscretions.

Sammi Davis (the ubiquitous blonde Brit ingénue, not to be confused with our own Sammy), Paul McGann and Amanda Donohoe let it all hang out fairly often in The Rainbow, British director Ken Russell's filming of a D. H. Lawrence classic. It's a coming-of-age tale, a kind of prequel to Lawrence's Women in Love (also filmed by Russell), with Davis as a free-spirited lass who explores lesbian tendencies whilst skinny-dipping with her teacher/mentor (Donohoe); she also sheds inhibitions along with her clothes when pursued by McGann, an ardent soldier who finds her more seducible than marriageable. Davis and Donohoe, evidently Russell's favorite nymphs, also appear in his Lair of the White Worm, an outrageous adaptation of a novel by Bram (Dracula) Stoker. Donohoe stars as a vampire priestess in a stately 'ome where she spots victims for a weird giant worm that devours virgins. Her job requires some phallic worship and scant costuming, except for a silvery head-to-toe paint job. The Hollywood Reporter summed up Russell's hallucinatory fantasy as "demonic images, group sex and squiggly vipers."

Two relatively mature British actresses, Lynn Redgrave and Pauline Collins, throw off their natural reserve in a pair of comedies. Getting It Right features Redgrave as a worldly London adventuress who oversees the sexual apprenticeship of a virginal 30-something hairdresser (Jesse Birdsall). The same movie produces a striking change of pace for Helena Bonham Carter, the veddy proper heroine of A Room with a View, here cast as a bare-breasted, wealthy, decidedly kinky bird about town. Collins, in her theatrical performance as Shirley Valentine, won best-actress awards in New York and London for portraying a pleasantly plump 42-year-old Liverpool housewife who experiences women's liberation firsthand on a holiday in Greece. In the film version, Collins shows us what she merely talked about on stage--her nude swim and an afternoon of impulsive passion in a Greek fishing boat with Tom Conti as Costas, an ever-ready guide for sexually needy tourists.

Given the international flavor of contemporary film making, more and more movies become harder than ever to label as exclusively English, American or any other nationality. Bridget Fonda (Peter's (continued on page 187)Sex in Cinema(continued from page 138) daughter, Jane's niece), right on the heels of her stint in Scandal, reasserts her American roots in Shag as a boy-crazy schoolgirl revving up a lost weekend at Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. Upcoming starlet Ione Skye has it both ways, too, playing a hard-to-get all-American girl with family problems in Say Anything, in which she is finally got by John Cusack after being aptly described as "a brain...trapped in the body of a game-show hostess." Ione is also topic A in The Rachel Papers, a British youth comedy written and directed by Damian Harris (Richard's son) about courtship by computer. Here, she is idolized by a hacker named Highway (Dexter Fletcher), a firm believer in love at first byte, who finally persuades her to share his bed and bathtub. Uma Thurman, one of the sultriest new young American actresses, tops her role in Dangerous Liaisons with a brief but memorable appearance in The Adventures of Baron Munchausen. American-born director Terry Gilliam's cast for this 18th Century comic classic is mostly English, but Robin Williams steals whole chunks of it as a lewd, disembodied King of the Moon, disavowing pesky bodily functions such as "flatulence and orgasms." Uma also waltzes away with honors as a nude, breath-taking Venus on the half shell, whose unveiling just about stops the show.

American beauties Carey Lowell and Talisa Soto, former models, join Timothy Dalton's James Bond in Licence to Kill. Lowell's the good girl, Soto the villain's moll. But, like most of the belles set to ringing by the sexiest secret agent in cinema history, both go all the way with 007. For precedent setting, cut to Batman, the megahit made in England by director Tim Burton with Yanks Michael Keaton, Jack Nicholson and Kim Basinger starred. Reams, pro and con, have already been written about Keaton's low-key performance as the masked avenger, but it seems appropriate to footnote that he is the first big-screen comic-book hero to get the heroine into the sack on their first date.

Among other Yanks venturing abroad is Rebecca De Mornay, who'll soon be seen opposite Paul McGann (The Rainbow's swain) as a shrewd stock trader in Dealers, which plays like England's answer to Working Girl. De Mornay dominates it, taking chances on the big board but cutting her losses by sleeping with her boss and her archrival.

Elsewhere, the guys have it. In the Australian Echoes of Paradise, John (The Last Emperor) Lone plays a bronzed Balinese dancer who gives an unhappy married lady (Wendy Hughes) some nights to remember while she lazes in the tropics, trying to forget her husband's infidelities. U.S. actor Billy Zane, in a harrowing Aussie shocker called Dead Calm, hijacks a yacht and puts the skipper (Sam Neill) to sea, while he graphically rapes and terrorizes the man's wife (Nicole Kidman). Roving Mickey Rourke travels all the way to Italy to star in Francesco for director Liliana Cavani. Rather uncharacteristically cast as Francis of Assisi, a saint in the making, Rourke may walk into a hailstorm like that stirred up by last year's controversial The Last Temptation of Christ. Francesco has not yet been shown Stateside, though Variety cites it for "pious intent...with a good deal of nudity." In one instance, Rourke's young zealot renounces worldly goods by stripping to the buff in public and returning the clothes off his back to his well-to-do father. Lighten up, Mickey.

For film makers in 1989, lightening up seems hard to do, even when the subject is featherweight. There are, as always, exceptions to the rule. There's no dark side to such forthright spoofery as The Naked Gun or the supremely silly but so-so My Stepmother Is an Alien, the latter best remembered for extraterrestrial Kim Basinger's learning about Earth sex from visual aids on video. Escapism is also the goal of Earth Girls Are Easy, an amiably bubble-headed, nonexplicit comedy co-starring Jeff Goldblum and Geena Davis (Mr. and Mrs. off screen), whereby English director Julien Temple shows us what happens when three horny male space travelers are shipwrecked in a Valley girl's swimming pool. While it sounds cheeky, we haven't yet seen Erik the Viking, by Monty Python alumnus Terry Jones, with Tim (Bull Durham) Robbins in the title role as a naïve Norseman who believes there must be more to life than raping and pillaging.

Sex comedy sometimes takes a serious turn where you'd least expect it. Blake Edwards' Skin Deep stars John Ritter as a compulsive womanizer who seeks therapy after destroying his marriage with rash escapades. The film left audiences cold except for its now-famous dueling-dicks sequence--Ritter and a rival swordsman wearing glow-in-the-dark condoms as they do battle over a woman in a pitch-dark hotel room. Mark Harmon plays a similar sort of cad in Worth Winning, all about a smug charmer who bets his macho chums he can bed and betroth three beautiful women (Maria Holvöe, Lesley Ann Warren and Madeleine Stowe) within a stated time. He wins but loses. Never mind how.

Misusers of women tend to get their comeuppance in today's soberly sophisticated comedies. Witness sex, lies, and videotape, winner of the 1989 Cannes Film Festival's coveted Palme d'Or. Writer-director Steven Soderbergh, 26, skyrocketed to fame with his sardonic look at Yuppie love as practiced by a quartet of 30-ish young folk in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. James Spader (chosen Best Actor at Cannes) plays an impotent fellow who gets off sexually by recruiting women to masturbate or confess their darkest desires to his camcorder. His compulsive behavior jars the status quo, especially for an indolent housewife (Andie MacDowell). Turned off by sex, she's married to the tape freak's former school chum (Peter Gallagher), a philandering attorney currently involved in a steamy affair with his wife's hell-raising sister (Laura San Giacomo). Before it's over, all those involved in sex, lies have muddled through a funny but bruising game of truth and consequences.

Infidelity on film isn't half the fun it used to be. Again, there's a price to be paid for fooling around in Love Hurts, a rueful domestic comedy starring Jeff Daniels as a guy soon to be divorced and suffering a crisis of conscience after a bungled attempt to seduce a bridesmaid (Judith Ivey) at his sister's wedding. In Cousins, a rather tidied-up American remake of the blithely amoral French comedy Cousin, Cousine, romance prevails when Ted Danson and Isabella Rossellini discover they're made for each other only after their respective mates (played by Sean Young and William Petersen) have started sneaking off for an occasional zipless quickie. Extramarital rutting has dire consequences for Ed Begley, Jr., in She-Devil, to be released late this year. Director Susan Seidelman's version of a successful English novel and miniseries (The Life and Loves of a She-Devil) co-stars Roseanne Barr as the scorned wife plotting furiously comic retribution after Begley runs off with a gorgeous romance novelist (Meryl Streep).

Things work out better for the mischief-makers in Paul Bartel's Scenes from the Class Struggle in Beverly Hills, mostly a game of musical beds with some wry social comment to fluff it up. Jacqueline Bisset and Mary Woronov play two wealthy matrons who are the targets of a wager between their respective manservants (Robert Beltran and Ray Sharkey). Each man seduces the other's boss, then the fellas wind up having a homosexual fling together. But Scenes is less startling for its action than for its explicit language, as when Bisset remarks, "He can suck your box until your nose bleeds." Moans, groans and body English speak louder than mere words, though, in the otherwise discreet romantic-comedy hit When Harry Met Sally. ... As longtime friends who take years to become lovers, Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan have their flat-out funniest and sexiest scene in a restaurant where Meg argues that a woman can fake orgasm. She shows how, hilariously, after which an enthralled matron at a nearby table tells the waiter, "I'll have what she had." There is controversial violence but very little eroticism in Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing, except for one nude sequence with Rosie Perez as Lee's hot-tempered girlfriend getting cooled off with an ice-cube massage.

Comedies about unrestrained teen sex are generally yesterday's news, with the possible exception of any movie starring Patrick Dempsey. A gangly, unlikely Lothario, Dempsey keeps getting parts such as his title role in Loverboy as a Beverly Hills stud who earns his college tuition delivering pizza and servicing neglected wives at $200 a slice. Kirstie Alley, Carrie Fisher, Barbara Carrera and Kate Jackson flesh out his client list (Jackson plays Dempsey's mother, but that's one order he doesn't fill). Dempsey's partners are appreciably younger in Some Girls, in which he plays a fellow invited to spend the Christmas holidays with a family of wealthy eccentrics. While the head of household (Andre Gregory) does his book research in the nude, his wayward daughters (Jennifer Connelly, Sheila Kelley and Ashley Greenfield), fully or flimsily clad, tend to show up in Dempsey's bed on fairly slight provocation.

Many another film followed the pattern of Some Girls, going directly to video after a token theatrical release. The reasons are often immediately apparent on your VCR. A case in point is The Experts, latest in a series of flops starring John Travolta, this time playing a New York deejay who's drugged and shanghaied to a simulated Nebraska town deep in the heart of Russia. He's supposed to inculcate apprentice K.G.B. spies with American culture, which seems to mean shmoosing and teaching dance steps to a sultry secret agent played by Kelly Preston. Blonde bombshell Kelly Lynch (Swayze's favorite medic in Road House) delivers no more plausibility--but far greater erotic intensity--in Warm Summer Rain, as a would-be suicide who wakes up in bed with a stranger (Barry Tubb) and starts wondering what life is all about. No answers are found in L.A. Bounty, which brings back Sybil Danning as a female bounty hunter jiggling through a sea of sleaze. There's more tease than real titillation behind such promising video titles as Bad Girls from Mars, Lethal Woman, Screwball Hotel and Bedroom Eyes 2, albeit Lethal Woman stars 1982 Playmate of the Year Shannon Tweed and Eyes features Linda Blair and 1986 Playmate of the Year Kathy Shower, firing up a love triangle with an unscrupulous Wall Street trader (Wings Hauser).

The decline of porno chic, linked to a flesh flood of video quickies for adult voyeurs to take home, has all but destroyed the hard-core-film industry as such. The dwindling band of theaters showing X-rated movies can scarcely make ends meet, especially now that making ends meet in group gropes is both unsafe and far less fashionable than it used to be. Small wonder that established film makers and performers are switching to mainstream movies, preferring even mediocre Rs to undesirable Xs. Prototypical producer-director Chuck Vincent, once a top purveyor of hard-X features, is now charting new frontiers for the retired porn queens of the Seventies. In Bad Blood, Georgina Spelvin is officially billed as Ruth Raymond. Still, as a rich, capricious artist making incestuous moves on her long-lost son, Spelvin's up to modified versions of the old tricks she perfected as the star of hardcore classics such as The Devil in Miss Jones. Jane Hamilton (a.k.a. Veronica Hart) has the title role in Vincent's Cleo/Leo, playfully spoofing male chauvinism in a sex-change fantasy, with another reformed porn performer (Ginger Lynn Allen) in a supporting role. Sexual superstar Marilyn Chambers--whose Behind the Green Door slammed shut ages ago--more or less plays herself in Party Incorporated. It's an R-rated movie within a movie about someone like Chambers, singing and dancing but seldom nude as a latter-day Mae West--ish dame who arranges slightly racy parties to pay off her back taxes.

Foreign imports, historically a primary source of uninhibited sex on the screen, also seem to be buttoning up a bit. The class act this year was Denmark's Oscar-winning entry as Best Foreign Language Film, Pelle the Conqueror, which had been honored as the big winner at Cannes in 1988. Max Von Sydow stars as a dour Scandinavian peasant, occasionally slipping into bed with a voluptuous widow. But Pelle's bleak view of illicit passion is pretty well summed up in an episode concerning the master of the manor, whose wife effectively castrates him with a gunshot wound after he has brutally raped their young niece. Lust looks a shade more rewarding in Russia's Little Vera, starring Natalya Negoda, Playboy's cover subject whose pictorial brought reams of extra publicity to a movie that already had Soviet audiences in an uproar. Vera's nude scenes are mild by U.S. standards, but customers from Minsk to Moscow lined up to see a rebellious working-class girl doing whatever she damn well pleases. Glasnost went a giant step further when this summer's Moscow Film Festival included a sidebar event called Sex in the American Cinema--snappy title, that--with Liquid Sky, Earth Girls Are Easy and The Unbearable Lightness of Being among the much-discussed attractions. The U.S. release of Paganini, a Franco-Italian production by writer-director-superstar Klaus Kinski, is still pending. But advance word from Variety describes Kinski's biography of the great Italian violinist as "delirious...a willful orgy of excess." Cross your fingers. Klaus's daughter Nastassja co-stars with Timothy Hutton in another European production, Torrents of Spring, a love story based on a short story by Turgenev and already on its way to video stores. Nastassja reportedly upholds family tradition in a torrid tryst with Tim.

As always, the French can be counted on to deliver their fair share of sensuousness. The hottest Gallic import was director Catherine Breillat's 36 Fillette, starring teenaged Delphine Zentout as a sort of contemporary Lolita--a 14-year-old nymphet who tantalizes a 40-ish rake with promises and hand jobs but segues into real sex entirely on her own terms with a boy who's led to believe he has done the seducing. France's Miou-Miou, in the title role of La Lectrice ("The Reader"), is a strikingly cerebral sexpot. Hired by clients to read to them, she's eventually caught up in their lives as well, performing services that mix touchy-feely fact with fiction. Far more restrained, as French films go, is the scenic, subtly suggestive Chocolat, with Giulia Boschi as a colonial official's wife who cranks up a lot of sexual tension--but little else--over her obsession with a young black manservant in Cameroon, Africa. No such understatement holds back The Little Thief, another minisaga about a precocious teeny-bopper (Charlotte Gainsbourg), from a script left behind by the late French director Francois Truffaut, who called it "a female 400 Blows." Driven by impossible dreams she has apparently fed by seeing too many movies, his heroine lies, steals and hops in and out of bed with a married man and a cat burglar before landing in jail.

So where do we go from here? Probably, as always, two steps forward and one step back. Stern moralists continue crusading, while creative moviemakers go right on pushing the limits of what is allowed on the screen. The push may come to shove less often partly because of a new sophistication--a mature awareness that more graphic sex and language do not ipso facto make a movie better or worse. The sexual revolution has brought us light-years from the uptight Fifties, an era blithely spoofed in a recent documentary called Heavy Petting, a cautionary compendium of multimedia period propaganda saying no to S-E-X. Back then, an utterly bland bit of romantic fluff called The Moon Is Blue (1953) caused an uproar because someone spoke the word virgin on screen. Today, even a profamily sentimental comedy as mild as Ron Howard's Parenthood speaks openly about boners, masturbation and sexually active teens (Keanu Reeves and Martha Plimpton play the couple cohabiting after school). And the movie includes a scene in which doting Dad, Steve Martin, smashes up his car because his wife (Mary Steenburgen) impulsively volunteers to relieve his tensions with oral sex while he's at the wheel. That may not outdo 9-1/2 Weeks, but it ain't Ma and Pa Kettle, either.

Still to come this year or next are a number of promising prospects. Zalman King and Mickey Rourke, who worked together on 9-1/2 Weeks--King as producer, Rourke as star--are at it again with Wild Orchid, this time with King in the director's chair. Orchid is said to be a sizzling drama, with Jacqueline Bisset and gorgeous actress-model Carre Otis. They're two women visiting Rio de Janeiro to buy some real estate, with Otis in particular getting much more than she bargains for from Rourke. Blaze, slated for holiday release, has Paul Newman as Louisiana governor Earl Long, whose affair with striptease queen Blaze Starr made headlines in the late Fifties. A Canadian newcomer, Lolita Davidovich, plays Blaze and ought to kindle some excitement with those G strings and pasties. We have no clue to the erotic content of the Dick Tracy epic in the making, with Warren Beatty and Madonna, but early reports indicate the chemistry is potent. Bo Derek, directed by husband John in Ghosts Can't Do It, plays a woman in search of a surrogate lover to embody the soul of her late, lamented husband (Anthony Quinn). The object: conjugal bliss. The Dereks seldom play it cool and neither does writer-director Leonard Schrader, who wrote the screenplay for Kiss of the Spider Woman and is now winding up Naked Tango, adapted, as was Kiss, from a novel by Argentine author Manuel Puig. France's sultry Mathilda May co-stars with Vincent D'Onofrio and Esai Morales, and publicity blurbs say, "The story pursues the turbulent passions of a rich girl from Paris who falls under the spell of an enigmatic tango gangster." All of the above might be construed as predicting a scorching cinematic heat wave. Believe it when you see it.