Sex in the cinema

The history of sex and cinema is tangled up with a lot of things: religious leaders, Linda Lovelace, Marlon Brando, and a very beautiful actress named Hedy Lamarr who, in 1933, appeared totally nude in a film called Ecstasy. In the film, Hedy plays a newlywed who discovers her husband is impotent, and so she has an affair. At one stage, she runs naked through the woods, feeling ecstatic. Heady stuff indeed. Movies such as Ecstasy -- or the benign-sounding 1934 film Tarzan and His Mate that, amazingly, included nude scenes of Maureen O`Sullivan (or her body double) -- helped define and then end the sexual freedom of early Hollywood. The movies were once a wild place of nudity, double-entendre and Mae West, all of which ended in the 1930s with a censorship across the U.S. that prevented Ecstasy, along with the naked Jane, from reaching the screen. From 1934 until the 1960s, mainstream American cinema was regulated by the so-called Production Code, a voluntary set of rules that the studios adopted to place moral standards on movies. Screen sex, combined with several major Hollywood scandals, including the morals trial of actor Fatty Arbuckle, made the studios nervous that if they didn`t do something, the government would step in and do something worse. The code was promoted by the Catholic League of Decency, written by Father Daniel Lord, a Jesuit priest, and Martin Quigley, a Catholic layman, and enforced by Will H. Hays, a former campaign manager for president Warren Harding. Among many things, it banned "excessive and lustful kissing, lustful embracing, suggestive postures and gestures," along with references to sexual perversion, sexual relations between blacks and whites ("miscegenation"), and such profanity as "hell" and "S.O.B." It also said, somewhat wonderfully, that no motion picture shall be produced that will lower the standards of those who see it. In short, the Production Code would have effectively circumvented the career of the Farrelly Brothers. Not everyone took the code seriously, and several films were exhibited during those years -- in many ways the heyday of Hollywood -- that did not carry the code`s seal of approval. Howard Hughes` 1943 The Outlaw starred Jane Russell in a decolletage that was aided by a cantilevered brassiere that had been designed by Hughes himself. Mark Langer, who teaches cinema at Ottawa`s Carleton University, says one critic at the time wrote that Russell`s breasts "hung like twin thunderclouds over the entire film." The movie was a hit, and so, in her way, was Russell. Many other movies found ways around the code -- hell, Clark Gable even said "damn" in Gone With The Wind -- but it hung grimly on, a thundercloud over the movie industry, until 1953. A watershed in the history of sex and the movies occurred 50 years ago. The Hays office had refused to approve the 1948 Italian film The Miracle, in which Anna Magnani plays a pregnant peasant who thinks she is carrying the child of Christ (the movie co-starred Federico Fellini, a friend of director Roberto Rossellini). The producers fought the decision, and in 1953, the Supreme Court of New York ruled for the first time that movies are protected under the First Amendment provisions guaranteeing free speech. It took a few years for Hollywood to catch up. The old bombshells, like Jane Russell, were replaced with new ones, like Marilyn Monroe, but Doris Day remained chastely out of the bed of Rock Hudson and he stayed chastely heterosexual in public. But with the 1963 invention of sexual intercourse, the movies were ready to grow up and take off their clothes. Ecstasy was back, and everyone was either experiencing it or snorting some. The so-called Miracle decision came as the studio system itself was falling apart, abandoning the structure that made censorship easy, and as foreign films were coming into vogue. In 1967, the rather dreadful Swedish-made I Am Curious (Yellow) became the first mainstream movie to depict sexual intercourse, and it became a cult favourite. "Hit by hit, Hollywood adapts," Langer points out. "Wherever there is a marketplace, A-pictures follow." And the marketplace, as producers had known before they were so rudely interrupted by Will Hays, likes sex. There had already been some incursions. Who`s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? became the first studio movie to use the word "screw" in a sexual context. In 1967, Blow Up, Michelangelo Antonioni`s painfully hip dissection of swinging London, became the first mainstream movie to show full-frontal nudity. By then, American movies had replaced the Hays office with a rating system, giving a G rating to family films of the day -- The Sound of Music, the family-friendly blockbuster that was as chaste as anything made during the Production Code era, co-existed with all the dirty stuff in 1965 -- and awarding an X to naughtier fare such as Midnight Cowboy which, in 1969, became the first X-rated movie to win a Best Picture Oscar.

These films bespoke a new maturity in North American cinema, a breaking of the bonds in a post-war nation that had returned from Europe and Korea and Vietnam and was ready to take its place among the world`s adults, particularly the French, who gave us Brigitte Bardot and fancy kissing. In North America, the zeitgeist of the late 1960s and early 1970s bore the marks of an adolescent just recently allowed to go out on his own and ready to abuse the privilege. It was the age of birth control and free love, and when America went to the movies, the movies went to bed. Pornography, which had flourished underground all those years, surfaced in middle America. Linda Lovelace became one of the most famous performers in the world when her 1972 porno flick Deep Throat became an unlikely hit. Other sex films, including Behind the Green Door and The Devil In Miss Jones, followed. When Bernardo Bertolucci`s Last Tango In Paris opened in 1973, with its scenes of Marlon Brando having anonymous sex with Maria Schneider, film critic Pauline Kael exclaimed that the debut of the film represented an artistic revolution comparable to the premiere of Igor Stravinsky`s Sacre du Printemps, which had caused riots in the streets of Paris. The revolution was short-lived. AIDS short-circuited Kael`s vision, and while the 1970s were a landmark decade in American cinema, they turned out to be merely a bubble in the march toward revolution. Still, the sex never stopped. Movies, along with the rest of life, have pushed the boundaries ever since. The extreme examples can still causes sensations -- Gaspar Noe`s 2002 film Irreversible, with its graphic scene of rape, had people walking out of theatres -- but they are screened in mainstream cinemas. We have reached the point where, by invisible increments, we are able to see a major American movie star, Meg Ryan, appear naked in a mainstream film, the murder mystery In The Cut. There`s little of the joy of Hedy Lamarr in Ryan`s performance, but it signals a new threshold. This free-market display of nudity and sexuality doesn`t come without a backlash, but it goes in several directions. Movie-makers say violence is easier to get onto the screen than is sex and the rating systems keep changing to account for changing tastes. Meanwhile, back at the ranch, the American ratings people demanded that Warner Brothers digitally obscure nude bodies in an orgy scene in Stanley Kubrick`s 1999 swan song Eyes Wide Shut. Critics were up in arms, but Jack Valenti, who heads the movie association that runs the rating system, responded by saying that not a single parent had asked the orgy scene be left intact. An American video chain called CleanFlicks sells cleaned-up versions of Hollywood films: Titanic without the Kate Winslet nude scene, Basic Instinct without Sharon Stone`s open legs. The company charges up to $20 to rent the films, and business is booming. And there are signs of more reaction to a permissive, "liberal" Hollywood. The Southern Baptist Convention has called for a boycott of Disney studios because its films are perceived as being "gay-friendly" (the studio allows Gay Days at its theme parks.) Kay Armatage, who teaches film and women`s studies at York University in Toronto and also helps program the Toronto film festival, says there have always been such pressures on movie studios. "Even if there isn`t an official Hays Code office, there are people who look at whether you`re going to get an X or a PG rating or whatever, because those ratings absolutely translate into box office. If it`s an adult-only, or if it`s 18 or over, you have eliminated a huge demographic that you want to reach. There`s socio-economic forces as much as any other censoring forces."