Sex in Cinema

Is Sex Necessary? asked humorists James Thurber and E. B. White in the title of a jaunty book written at the tag end of the Roaring Twenties. The answer was breezily affirmative, but hordes of uptight moralists might argue their conclusion today. With conservatism and surveillance rampant across the land, Congressional antismut crusaders and social critics are seeing blue not just on screen but in song lyrics, art exhibitions and the scripts of TV series.

Little wonder, then, that 1990's moviemakers were caught in a maelstrom of controversy, chiefly battling the M.P.A.A. (Motion Picture Association of America) over its outdated ratings system. The M.P.A.A.'s rating group, a host of right-thinking volunteers presumably making the silver screen safe for young people, initially plastered its much-feared X on films as various as Zalman King's blatantly erotic Brazil-based Wild Orchid, (text continued on page 148) Spain's Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!, a British-made shocker called The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover and a U.S. independent drama about murder and incest, Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer. Lawsuits, loud protests and vehement accusations of double standards and unfairness ensued. The best way to escape censure, it appears, is to make motion-picture sex harmlessly bawdy, as in Another 48 HRS., or squeaky-clean but suggestive, as in the comic-strip epic Dick Tracy.

The dispute focused on the contention by liberal film makers and critics that the M.P.A.A.'s existing five categories should be expanded to six, with an A added to the abominable X. The A (for adult material) would ostensibly spell out the difference between movies for thinking grownups and mere pornography, since distributors of adult videos have increasingly appropriated the X-or even trebled it to XXX-to make their sleaziest stuff sound even hotter. The M.P.A.A. and its C.E.O., Jack Valenti, stood firm, resisting change on the ground that since the C.A.R.A. (Classification and Rating Administration) system is voluntary, makers of movies such as Tie Me Up! and Henry may choose--and, in fact, have chosen--to send them out with no rating at all. The M.P.A.A. further describes its ratings board, made up of parents, as a group of mere guidance counselors charged to tell us "which films American parents will likely consider unsuitable for children."

In May, the National Society of Film Critics sent the M.P.A.A. a letter pointing out "the alarming increase in the application of the X rating to films of nonpornographic intent" and again endorsing "the institution of a new M.P.A.A.-copyrighted A rating--for adults only."

Miramax Films Inc.'s ad director, David Dinerstein, chimed in with his own view: "An unrated film carries the scarlet letter by default. It's a stigma. Cincinnati's Post and Enquirer refused display ads for both Tie Me Up! and our unrated Cook, Thief movie. Of course, [Cincinnati] is where the Mapple-thorpe photo exhibit was [temporarily] closed and the museum director indicted. We had to take out print ads for Cook, Thief in Cincinnati giving a telephone number you could call for information about quote, unquote, an interesting new film.'"

Following vehement protests that included a petition from eminent American movie directors (among them Spike Lee, Barry Levinson and John Sayles) who urged the creation of a new category, the M.P.A.A. said it was holding its ground.

There's no doubt that Cook, Thief, which may or may not benefit from any new ruling, has horrified some viewers with its graphic depictions of nudity, sex and cannibalism. It's set in an otherwise upscale restaurant that attracts an obviously depraved clientele. Helen Mirren, as the thief's errant wife, picks up a bookish customer (Alan Howard) and couples with him in the ladies' room, the bakery, the cheese cupboard and just about everywhere else before her husband has the lover murdered. He's served basted, well done and garnished, a human roast. While some critics interpreted all this as an attack on Margaret Thatcher's England, most viewers missed the connection. Dinerstein nonetheless resents the film's having been "pulled off the screen in a variety of locations--from Memphis to St. Louis to Mont-pelier, Vermont. Even the San Francisco Chronicle ran our ads in the porno section, next to such titles as Earthquake Girls. Our ads were completely nixed in New Orleans. And in New York, the local NBC-TV station would carry promos for Tie Me Up! only after 11:30 P.M. ABC and CBS turned us down, wouldn't let us advertise at all." Tie Me Up!'s alleged excess is a somewhat explicit scene between a kidnaped former porn queen (Victoria Abril) and the ex-con (Antonio Banderas) who abducts and seduces her.

New York attorney William M. Kunstler, a famed champion of liberal causes, pleaded the Tie Me Up! court case for Miramax, denouncing the X as "a form of censorship." He submitted as evidence equally torrid scenes from 9'h Weeks, the 1981 remake of The Postman Always Rings Twice and The Accused--all R-rated.

"Sure, that's a serious movie," Dinerstein allows of the last. "But Jodie Foster was gang-raped on a pinball machine. Would we rather see people in love making love or see people being gang-raped? Which does not mean we favor censorship of any film."

Countering Miramax was lawyer Floyd Abrams, retained by the M.P.A.A. for his credentials as a First Amendment expert. "It's not often I'm accused of being on the wrong side," says Abrams. "But an aggrieved moviemaker ought not turn to the Government in any way. Taking this question to court is in itself a threat. They call the M.P.A.A. decision 'arbitrary and capricious.' Alternatively, they say the court should require the establishment of an A rating. For the court to make such a decision seems to me a plain and blatant violation of First Amendment rights. In brief, the M.P.A.A.'s position is that it does not make decisions about quality-saying what is sleazy, what's mature or what's pornographic. It's merely saying kids shouldn't see it. Determining a particular movie's merits is the critic's job."

Miramax' suit was denied by New York Supreme Court Justice Charles E. Ramos, who nevertheless had some pretty harsh words for the M.P.A.A. and its rating system, which, he said, demands that American films "deal with adult subjects in nonadult terms, or face an X rating."

The X was also appealed for director Wayne Wang's quirky Life Is Cheap ... but Toilet Paper Is Expensive, which finally got The New York Times to accept its ads with a self-applied A rating, and legal action was threatened over the X-ing of the thriller In the Cold of the Night when its producer-director refused to excise "a three-minute nonex-plicit love scene" (not the slightly less graphic one featuring Playmate Shannon Tweed).

While the legal motions proliferate, motion pictures keep plugging along, taking chances, as always, to see how far they can go. Most go with the flow, yet film maker John Waters, a man who's accustomed to run-ins with M.P.A.A. raters, insists that they habitually count and evaluate the "fucks" when assessing a movie. "You can say 'Oh, fuck,' but not 'I wanna fuck,'" he claims. Waters cut his Cry-Baby, with Johnny Depp, Patricia Hearst and reformed porn star Traci Lords, to get a PG-13 (parents strongly cautioned--may be inappropriate for children under 13) rating. "I didn't want an R, for God's sake," says Waters. "Not with a teen idol like Johnny Depp as my star. I'm not that crazy. So I wound up with one fuck and two beeps, making fun of the whole business. Anyway, in my early films, like Pink Flamingos, I'd often take an X or no rating. My Xs were not for nudity or sex but for things that weren't even on the books. You can't have somebody in drag eating dog shit and get away with it." Except for a musical sequence about tongue kissing, Cry-Baby is markedly less outrageous.

Other mainstream American moviemakers exhibited restraint on demand, which means they trimmed when the M.P.A.A. indicated they'd better do so. Mickey Rourke and newcomer Carré Otis were hard at it when the literally climactic closing sequence of Wild Orchid was filmed, but the releasing company, to avoid an X, insisted that director Zalman King snip at least a few frames of Rourke and his sultry leading lady (off screen and on, according to all reports). After having its sexual charge pruned, there wasn't a hell of a lot left in Orchid to see. But that wasn't the end of the film's trials: The actors sued the distributors for the (continued on page 157)Sex in Cinema(continued from page 148) allegedly unauthorized release for publication of nude photos (some appeared in Playboy). The company filed a cross-complaint charging breach of contract and "calling into question Rourke's and Otis' professional conduct during the filming and promotion of the film."

Wild at Heart, by writer-director David Lynch, won cheers and boos along with France's coveted Palme d'Or when it was picked as the best movie at this year's Cannes Film Festival. Lynch, the hot creator of Blue Velvet and the controversial TV series Twin Peaks, declared himself ready to make trims if necessary to obtain an R before the film's August opening in the U.S. "One or two things will have to go," said Lynch regarding his sexed-up, comic road movie about a wacky girl (Laura Dern) and a sailor in heat (Nicolas Cage). A spokesperson for the releasing company later reported that Wild at Heart had to be resubmitted "five or six times" in order to obtain its R, though "the issue was violence, not sex, and after citing Total Recall as an example of an R film with a lot of violence, we didn't cut anything ... we merely added footage plus an optical effect over three frames." That's for an epic described by Time as "a standard slice of poisoned American pie," while Newsweek called its "smutty-boy shock tactics" both spectacular and funny.

A few movies invite trouble by their very nature. Sandra Bernhard's Without You I'm Nothing, the multicharacter movie version of her outrageous one-woman stage show, won its R by cutting some footage of Bernhard, bewigged and blonde, flagrante delicto with a black hairdresser named Joe. Nervous bookers, militant black groups and advertisers sensitive to its title also created problems for the Canadian-made How to Make Love to a Negro Without Getting Tired, based on a touchy satirical novel about two black males with a penchant for white women in bed. The august New York Times refused to carry ads listing the full title, cutting it to How to Make Love ... Without Getting Tired, or sometimes just How to Make Love ... The women Denzel Washington beds in Spike Lee's R-rated Mo' Better Blues are black, but he has a bad habit of mixing up their names. This understandably piques Clarke, a sexy singer (Cynda Williams), and her rival, Indigo, a schoolteacher (Spike's sister Joie Lee). At least they have conventional occupations. Many of the year's meatiest female roles were hookers, from Julia Roberts' Vivian in Pretty Woman to the play-for-pay girls portrayed by Jennifer Jason Leigh in two films. Her explicit, seemingly wholesale rape in the closing scenes of Last Exit to Brooklyn prompted at least one California theater to scratch showings of that downbeat shocker. There was less vehement reaction to Leigh's other topless appearance--in Miami Blues, a bloody shoot-'em-up featuring Leigh as the hired tart who falls in love with Alec Baldwin.

While Bad Influence initiated no legal hullabaloo, its links to real life and reel life could only benefit a lurid melodrama co-starring James Spader (who attained stardom in sex, lies, and videotape) and Rob Lowe, of all people. On screen, Lowe plays a ne'er-do-well who entraps Spader with a compromising video. It was all strikingly reminiscent of Lowe's own legal problems, since resolved, over video-taping himself and an allegedly underage female companion in an Atlanta hotel room. Video-taped lovemaking also figures in Flatliners, with William Baldwin (Alec's brother) as the horny medical intern whose fiancée breaks their engagement when she learns about his unsavory habit of recording all his conquests on a camcorder.

Elsewhere, the characters' sex drive was an essential element in countless serious films, from Enemies, a Love Story, featuring Ron Silver as a weak-willed Holocaust survivor with three contemporaneous wives, to Presumed Innocent, starring Harrison Ford as a public prosecutor on trial for murdering a colleague (Greta Scacchi) who has pleasured quite a few partners on her climb up the professional ladder. Sea of Love (with Ellen Barkin and Al Pacino) is about the search for a female serial killer who knocks off her male prey at the moment of climax. More erotica is promised in such imminent releases as Philip Kaufman's Henry and June (starring Fred Ward as novelist Henry Miller, with Uma Thurman as wife June, during one period of Miller's flaunted infidelity with Anais Nin, played by Maria de Medeiros) and White Palace (with Susan Sarandon as a seasoned hash-slinging waitress who brings back life and lust to sensitive young widower James Spader).

Also focusing on sexuality is the vivid Longtime Companion, perhaps the landmark drama to date about AIDS. More is said than shown in this episodic tale, which follows a group of Fire Island homosexuals as they live, love, work and die with dignity under duress. Bruce Davison and Campbell Scott are among the stars who chortle over the first gay embrace on a colleague's daytime TV soap, and the gallows humor of the piece persists when someone asks what happens after you die, to which a pal answers, "We get to have sex again."

Far removed from the real world, kinks abound as usual in phantasmagorical penny-ante shockers such as the X-rated Frankenhooker, about a young lover (James Lorinz) who gets a new body for his late, lamented girlfriend (Patty Mullen) by collecting spare parts from what's left of a few prostitutes he has blown to kingdom come. There's more sick humor to alleviate the horrors of the flesh in Toxic Avenger III and Flesh Gordon Meets the Cosmic Cheerleaders. Top-of-the-line thrillers or violent action flicks on the order of Total Recall with Arnold Schwarzenegger (featuring Playboy cover girl Sharon Stone as his treacherous, lethal woman) or William Friedkin's The Guardian (Jenny Seagrove as a bewitching, sometimes nude baby sitter is the main attraction) exude the same askew carnality--but with a touch of class. Even a macho star vehicle as cautiously tooled as Days of Thunder includes a bit in which Tom Cruise, as an injured racing driver, commits a sexual faux pas. Having been tricked once before by his buddies, who hire a bimbo to impersonate a policewoman who unzips his fly and feels him up, he thinks the beautiful neurologist (Nicole Kidman) examining him in the hospital is also a fake--and presses her hand to his crotch.

Merely talking dirty works for many of the year's film makers, who seemingly prefer tell to show. Words outdo deeds even in Pretty Woman, a comic smash hit with Julia Roberts as a gorgeous L.A. prostitute finding true love with her John, a rich corporate raider (Richard Gere). We don't see much of Julia at work except when she discreetly goes down on her client while watching a rerun of I Love Lucy, but she gives good tart talk. When Gere, on hearing her asking price, muses, "A hundred bucks an hour? That's pretty stiff," she gropes his groin and retorts, "No, but it's getting there."

Verbalizing her job as a hooker in a generally so-so comedy called In the Spirit, Jeannie Berlin bluntly describes making triple-X movies. "I was a fluffer," she says. "I sucked cocks for five dollars apiece ... but I never swallowed." Director Tony Bill's Crazy People was funniest at spoofing honesty in advertising. In addition to the Jaguar ad pictured on page 141, there's a poster promoting a sleek Porsche as a sports car "a little too small to get laid in, but you get laid the minute you get out."

In certain subtitled foreign films, the words are right up there on the screen to spell out in plain English any ribaldries that might otherwise slip by, as in Louis Malle's French May Fools ("She opens my fly and gets going, gloves and all"), the aforementioned outspoken Tie Me Up! ("Don't laugh--it'll slip out") and others illustrated here.

Foreign-made films, as usual, were generally a shade less inhibited--those controversial movies already cited from Spain and Britain being prime examples. There's nudity as well as audacious irreverence in Denys Arcand's Jesus of Montreal, made in Canada, in French, the winner of 12 Canadian Genie awards--among them one as best actor for Lothaire Bluteau, who plays the modern Jesus in a Passion play and gets pulled down from his cross stark naked when the cops arrive. Current French films expose the dark side of human nature, as in Monsieur Hire (Michel Blanc plays a Tom peeping at Sandrine Bonnaire), Story of Women (Isabelle Huppert as the last abortionist guillotined in France), Camille Claudel (Isabelle Adjani going mad as the sculptor Rodin's rejected love) and more. Mama, There's a Man in Your Bed has a light if not quite credible edge, with Daniel Auteuil as a French tycoon who falls in love with his plump black cleaning woman (Firmine Richard). According to Variety, actor and sometime director Claude Berri reveals his "pot belly and genitals" in the title role of Stan the Flasher, but thus far, there's no sign of a U.S. release for this dubious French-made breakthrough about an impotent exhibitionist.

Winner of the Oscar as Best Foreign-Language Film this year was Italy's disarming Cinema Paradiso. While all the performers excel, the real star of Giuseppe Tornatore's love-in for film nuts is a movie palace in a small Sicilian village. Here the local priest (Leopoldo Trieste) censors every movie by ringing a bell each time the action warms up on screen. The Icicle Thief, another droll Italian entry, features a Chaplinesque moviemaker (Maurizio Nichetti) who can't always distinguish reality from filmed fiction--and gets mixed up with a woman in a bathtub.

The year's most publicized Spanish film comes, as usual, from writer-director Pedro Almodóvar, whose Tie Me Up! set off an uproar with its unabashed sex and violence. Yet the film's raciest scene is probably one with Victoria Abril in her bath, looking very pleased while a tiny wind-up scuba diver makes his way underwater toward her crotch. Almodóvar's current celebrity may have led to the timely U.S. release this year of his 1982 Labyrinth of Passion. Unrated and hailed by The Hollywood Reporter as one of the director's "most titillating and outlandishly comic works," Labyrinth's heroine is a pop singer called Sexilia (Cecilia Roth), who falls for a promiscuously homosexual male musician from another group. Roughly twice as far out, however, is Alejandro Jodorowsky's Santa Sangre, starring the director's son Axel as a young man whose mother goes into show business as a sort of seer after she has had her arms chopped off. She's mutilated for flinging acid on the crotch of her whoring husband (Guy Stockwell, Dean's brother), who also likes to throw knives at a tattooed lady strapped to a rapidly turning wheel. Rated R, folks.

The usual torrent of British-made sex epics slowed to a trickle in 1990, with the glaring exception of Peter Greenaway's admired or detested The Cook, the Thief, etc. Much of the U.K. crop is multinational, such as David Hare's arresting Strapless, with Americans Blair Brown and Bridget Fonda. Brown stars as a physician who goes abroad, meets Germany's romantic Bruno Ganz and learns something about men. She also sees how interns and nurses get it on playing doctor in their off hours. In the comic The Tall Guy, Jeff Goldblum is a Yank actor in London, where he, too, cavorts with an amorous nurse (Emma Thompson) whose headlong passion just about destroys her flat. The Misadventures of Mr. Wilt stars Griff Rhys Jones as a nerd who gets his kicks with an inflatable doll, while Eric Idle and Robbie Coltrane, donning habits in Nuns on the Run, must content themselves with voyeurism in the shower room of a Catholic girls' school.

Futuristic breeding methods figure in Volker Schlondorff's The Handmaid's Tale, based on the novel by Margaret At-wood. Natasha Richardson stars as the fecund captive handmaid selected to get pregnant in this bleak psychosexual drama co-starring Robert Duvall as a member of the ruling elite, Faye Dunaway as his jealous wife (who lies under Natasha while she's being serviced) and Aidan Quinn as the guard who's Natasha's lover. Sex is even less exhilarating in Chicago Joe and the Showgirl, with Kiefer Sutherland in the true story of a GI who was hanged in wartime England at the end of his six-day spree with a Cockney slut (Emily Lloyd). Murder and maiming are their chief kicks, though they do like to watch GIs getting blow jobs as bombs fall in the middle of the blitz. More explicit lust is promised in Dark Obsession, a fall release co-starring Gabriel Byrne and Amanda Donohoe, two top British performers who've seldom exhibited qualms about taking off their clothes.

What does all this portend for the future? There are some signs of an evolution in taste that even diehard bluestockings will be unable to stop. While the traditional porno theaters are virtually a thing of the past, adult home video is still booming and having a major impact on what many Americans are ready, willing and even eager to see. At this year's International Film Festival in Houston, some competing entrants were appalled when a hard-core porn video called Night Trips was given the Silver Award as second-best theatrical feature made for tape/cable release-acing out such hefty competition as Turner Network Television's remake of Dinner at Eight, starring Lauren Bacall. Shot on film instead of today's more commonplace tape, Night Trips stars Tori Welles as a scrumptiously voluptuous heroine whose sexual fantasies are visualized via electronic "mind-scan images" transmitted via wires attached to her groin. "X-rated or not, it's a fine film," said a spokesman for the moviemakers. Houston's festival judges agreed, citing the movie's sharp sepia photography, music, editing and evocative dream sequences.

Another somewhat surprising success is director Stephen Sayadian's Dr. Caligari, rated R, which has played in a slew of theaters and is on its way to video stores. It's quite a remake of the 1919 silent classic, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari: The revitalized Caligari is the original doctor's granddaughter (Madeleine Reynal). Co-authored by frequent Playboy contributor jerry Stahl, the author of Café Flesh, Sayadian's visually striking spoof concerns the doc's experiments with the hypothalamus, which controls primal urges. Quite a few urges are expressed before she's finished.

Meanwhile, even older movies once considered controversial are being re-edited and re-released to find new audiences in theaters as well as on video. The French film Going Places, featuring Gerard Depardieu, Miou-Miou and the late Patrick Dewaere, was first shown here 16 years ago. In a new, uncensored version, the movie then hailed by critic Pauline Kael as "a sexual Keystone comedy " is dated but still scores as a lyrical, erotic explosion of antisocial high spirits. An impulsive homosexual encounter between the two male leads is one of the film's highlights, and the shocks keep multiplying. An ex-convict (Jeanne Moreau in a telling cameo) shoots herself in the vagina after her first post-prison sexual encounter, a threesome; a pretty young wife (Brigitte Fossey) lets one of the lads nibble at her breast on a nearly empty passenger train. Another film considered a daring milestone in mature, offbeat eroticism when it was first shown in 1976, the Japanese In the Realm of the Senses (also known as The Empire of the Senses back then) has come back on video with previously trimmed footage restored-and is still a jolt with its portrayal of a man and a woman pursuing sexual pleasure to the point of actual extinction: coming and dying simultaneously.

Despite a promising title. Naked Tango has already been described by film maker Leonard Schrader as merely sexual in essence. "I have no intention of making an X-rated film," he told a Los Angeles Times interviewer. "The less you show, the greater impact you have." One hopes Naked Tango will have more to offer than, say, Lambada or Lambada: The Forbidden Dance, two earlier terpsichoirean fiascoes that made all the wrong moves, virtually ending a trend before it got started.

Meanwhile, director Paul Schrader (Leonard's brother and the man behind such films as Hardcore and American Gigolo) is preparing to release The Comfort of Strangers, described as "an erotic thriller" with a real kick. Adapted by playwright Harold Pinter from an Ian McEwan novel, Strangers is set in Venice, with Natasha Richardson and Rupert Everett as a couple getting it on at great length when their clothes are stolen in a palazzo owned by a mysterious, weird Venetian couple, Christopher Walken and Helen Mirren (the errant wife of Cook, Thief...). What begins as a steamy duo evolves into an even steamier ménàge à quatre, meant to illustrate' "the consequences of letting go."

Brian De Palma's upcoming film version of Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities may deliver some flammable side effects--with Tom Hanks as the self-styled Master of the Universe, a Wall Streeter ultimately undone by financial high-jinks, a hit-and-run accident and a persistent hunger for his married mistress (Melanie Griffith). There's also Hot Spot, which places Melanie's real-life husband, Don Johnson, in ultraclose encounters with that breath-taking screen beauty Virginia Madsen. And the ever-material Madonna, after her personal coup vamping Warren Beatty's Dick Tracy, is finally set for the musical Evita's film version, in which she will presumably make that Argentine first lady a one-woman tropical heat wave. Whatever else happens, these are movie icons whose steamy presences testify that sex at your local Cineplex is here to stay--as sure as thrills, spills, laughter, lines around the block and buttered popcorn.

"A spokesperson reported that 'Wild at Heart' had to be resubmitted 'five or six times' to obtain its R."