Sex in the Cinema

There was me, that is Hunk, and my three mates, that is Zed, Croc, and Moose, Moose being also called The Loose Moose (even though he wasn’t particularly loose nor did he look remotely like a moose), and we were on our way to the King’s cinema in Old Market having made up our mucky little minds to go and see a couple of sex films.

The year was 1971 (I would love to say it was 1969, but that would be wishful thinking) and we were all far younger than the 18 certificate required us to be. I was feeling particularly nervous because not only would this be my very first time seeing naked women actually moving about, but, in strict observance of Sod’s Law, my mother had noticed the advert for this particular double bill in the Evening Post earlier in the week and she had chosen to bring it to my father’s attention as a particularly egregious example of the kind of thing the King’s had become notorious for: “Anatomy of Love and Wild, Willing and Sexy,” she read. “Oh Bill.”

I can’t remember what my father replied, but I didn’t dare catch his eye. I was about to betray them both, and if they ever found out, I was convinced they would have been mortified and wonder where they had gone wrong. I didn’t want to wish that pain on them. Maybe I could make it up to them later by getting into Oxford or something? (This latter is obviously a rationalisation many years after the fact, which just goes to show how guilty I still feel about the whole sordid business.)

Not that it felt sordid at the time. Well, it did, but that was probably what made it so exciting. That Friday night the King’s was packed, and inside it was as noisy as the kids’ Saturday mornings at the Rex, which I’d gone to once and never again. Some crappy Batman thing in black and white and a bunch of 1930s cartoons, the racist ones. And the behaviour in the stalls was so appalling, and the row so great, and the air so thick with flying popcorn, that I spent the whole time fretting the manager would come storming onto the stage to send everybody home after taking all our names and addresses to write to our unfortunate parents.

But the sheer size of the crowds that night at the King’s was also perhaps why we had no trouble getting in. We may all have been pimply and nervous-looking, but so were most of the poor old middle-aged virgins in the queue around us, and our money was as good as theirs. (In fact, in all the three years I went to tit films as an underage schoolboy we were only ever challenged once, by the ticket seller in the little Scala under the railway arch by Zetland Road junction. “How old are you?” she asked each of us in turn. She looked like our strict librarian at school, and struck a similar terror into all our hearts. “Eighteen,” we all falsettoed, like a nursery choir. We knew she knew we were underage, but what was she going to do – strong-arm us back out onto the street? The place probably couldn’t afford to turn away custom, even ours. That was the night we had little Toad with us, and as we clattered up the stairs having secured entry, he loudly assured us all that next time, to avoid a repeat of any such unpleasantness, he would bring his cousin’s driving licence. “He’s twenty-seven and he’s got a beard,” he added carelessly. Needless to say, that was the last time we let the stupid bastard come with us.)

As it happened, Wild, Willing and Sexy turned out to be a bit of a disappointment. I certainly can’t remember a thing about it now, other than that clickbait title, at a time when ‘clickbait’ had yet to become a thing. (If you look it up on IMDb you’ll discover that its original German title – of course it was German, if it hadn’t been that it would have been Scandinavian – was Liebe durch die Hintertür, which, as I would have been able to tell you even then, budding Oxbridge linguist that I was, meant ‘Love Through the Back Door’. Thank Christ they didn’t call it that, my mother would have had a fit.)

But it was the main feature, Anatomy of Love, that still lives with me all these decades later, standing proud like a lonely beacon in a desert of otherwise forgotten, flaccid, exhausted metaphors. It took the form of a cod academic lecture by some uncomfortable-looking fake doctor reading badly off an autocue, describing how you were meant to go about the act of physical love-making. Or he might have been a real doctor with no screen presence giving you the genuine low-down, it didn’t really matter. “Semen is harmless if swallowed,” he reassured us at one point. Good to know, I remember my fifteen-year-old self thinking, and why on earth was that ever likely to become an issue? But certainly someone was taking it seriously – I swear I saw a middle-aged lady, sitting next to her husband a few rows in front of us, scribbling notes in the dark. At least I think that’s what she was doing in her lap, because like the rest of us she was really only there for the main event, which was an extended sequence of a pretty, sunburnt couple getting it on. Twice.

In my memory I’m pretty sure they used the same sequence to bookend the film, front and back. There is an outside possibility they only did it once at the start of the film and me and the lads stayed on to see the whole thing round again, but I don’t think we would have been allowed to stay out that late, and anyway I expect the cinema staff would have needed to clear everyone out and hose the seats down between showings, so I’m pretty sure it must have been the same twenty-minute sequence both times. And not even a director’s cut or edited highlights second time around. Not that there was any need; no re-editing could have made this couple look any better. And we saw every bit of them except, of course, their private parts. Basically, the cinema was still forbidden to show anything you could have seen hanging off a Greek statue in the public square at Athens over two thousand years ago.

Never mind, each was still as blond and beautiful as the other, perfectly proportioned with flawless skin so brown it was almost purple, and – this above all – they performed their demonstration both times to a full orchestral rendition of Ravel’s Bolero, which struck me even at the time as nothing less than a stroke of aesthetic genius, a good ten years before Dudley Moore and Bo Derek turned it into even more of a cliché in “10”. (Claude Lelouch would be among the many directors to re-use it again in Les Uns et les Autres in 1981, though there, it served another function in the narrative and was not present merely to underscore the erotic charge of the images it accompanied.) It certainly kick-started my greater appreciation of classical music. And maybe the best thing about it is that, even now, whenever I hear that piece, Anatomy of Love is not the first thing I think of – which, if it means anything at all, perhaps suggests there might be hope for me yet.

And I say this in all humility, because although this may have been the first smut I ever saw in the cinema, it was far from being the last. And while I feel burning shame about the whole grisly business to this day, I still contend it wasn’t my fault. It so happened that the British Board of Film Censors, in their wisdom, was about to introduce the AA certificate for films they deemed unsuitable for people under the age of fourteen. The A certificate we had been chafing under for years had been bad enough, when children were required to be accompanied by an adult. What self-respecting child wanted to be sat next to their parents when a couple of actors started getting jiggy? Perhaps the argument had always been that it was meant to protect younger, unformed minds from adult themes of moral ambiguity or unacceptably harsh violence, though if you were paying any kind of attention at all, by the turn of the decade we all knew full well the only thing they were trying to protect us from was sex.

Despite the much-vaunted explosion of freedom in the sixties, the big screen seemed to have been unbelievably slow in catching the zeitgeist – or at least being allowed to fully represent it. Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush (1968), for instance, was an X, mainly because of a few seconds’ worth of Judy Geeson’s delectable naked bottom. And I only know this from catching it on TV many years later as I’d been too young to see it in the cinema. But by 1970 the tide had built up too much for the paltry dams of certification to stop it, so for the rest of the decade, that frenetic period when I did the bulk of my cinema-going and growing up, prey to all kinds of influence, my moral compass spinning like a strobe light in a strip club, in the films I saw, naked women were about as ubiquitous as car chases.

Looking at you, Hammer Studios. Without Countess Dracula, Ingrid Pitt’s greatest contribution to the cinema might have been her brief turn as a tavern maid whose disguise so impressed Richard Burton in Where Eagles Dare. And it’s a chicken and egg argument as to which came first, the new cinematic freedom or the plague of lesbian vampires; without Lust for a Vampire we would have seen rather less of the luscious Yutte Stensgaard, and without The Vampire Lovers we might not have got to know Madeline Smith quite so well (although Up Pompeii made up for that the following year).

(I was never a complete creep, mind. I did not, for instance, patronise the endless sequences of sex comedies for their own sake, like the Confessions series, or the Adventures franchise, or the oeuvre of Mary Millington. No, I was more hypocritical than that: I only sought out films where there was not only a plot and a budget, but a good chance one of the actresses I fancied might briefly strip off as a natural part of her day, like Stephanie Beacham did in The Nightcomers (1971). There was also a short-lived but vivid spate of films set in the stone age starring such legendary beauties as Victoria Vetri, Imogen Hassall and Carol Hawkins (When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth, 1970), and Julie Ege (Creatures the World Forgot, 1971). I was hedging my bets, of course, because the women were already running round in fur bikinis anyway, like Raquel Welch in One Million Years B.C. (1966), but what can I say, I was fifteen and randy. And the scenery of the Canary Island always looked as hot and romantic as the women themselves.)

So while X films more or less fell off a cliff into an abyss of depravity, the AA certificate itself soon came to be synonymous with nipples – you could generally expect to see at least a couple, usually Jenny Agutter’s. Oh, you think she’s all Call the Midwife and wimples? Far from it. The Kate Winslet of her day, this winsome waif progressed swiftly from The Railway Children in 1970 – what real man can suppress a lump at the memory of her heartfelt, steam-shrouded cry of “Daddy, my Daddy”? – to Nicolas Roeg’s Walkabout (1971), for which she was deemed old enough to be filmed swimming nude, for quite a long time, in an outback billabong.

I don’t know if the censors asked too many questions at the time, so stunned were they by the soaring aestheticism of the flick and the intellectual rigour of its theme, whatever that was supposed to be. But the so-called art film has always been adept at bending rules to suit its own murky purposes. Sue Lyon was only fourteen when she was cast as Lolita in Kubrick’s 1962 adaptation of Nabokov’s notorious novel, and though she did not, of course, appear nude at any point, that’s still her nubile young body sunbathing in a two-piece swimsuit in the shot where Kubrick only lingers on her for as long as it takes to give all the male gazes in the audience the chance to see exactly what it is about her that James Mason’s Humbert Humbert is going to find so fatally attractive.

Intellectuals are good at slipping in flesh under the guise of art, and will never cop to the idea that maybe they’re just putting in smut to up the box office. Just look at anything by Peter Greenaway, for instance. Godard’s Le Mépris (1963), to give another random instance, opens with several bracing shots from above of Brigitte Bardot lying naked on a bed on her front. (Dorsal female nudity in 1963? That’s a bit early, you might think. But remember this was a nouvelle vague film. The French had a risqué reputation to keep up, so they were doing this sort of thing years before we ever got round to it or, indeed, produced enough actresses willing to be talked into going along with this kind of pretentious bollocks.)

At least the iconic BB was a grown woman and probably capable of taking care of herself by the time her extravert sexuality set her firmly on the road to riches, but elsewhere age was always going to be an issue if you cared enough to look. Olivia Hussey and Leonard Whiting were both teenagers when Franco Zeffirelli apparently insisted they film their bed scenes naked as Romeo and Juliet in 1968. Even at the time this must have caused some concerns. At least one would hope. But what if it didn’t? So does that leave a permanent stain over the whole lovely Renaissance masterpiece? Those colours, the music, all that emotion? And if it doesn’t, why not? Shouldn’t it?

And all such moral ambiguity comes before we even get onto the whole vexed question of why, round about this time, sex and violence became so firmly yoked together in the minds of the clean-up campaigners. It’s probably because they both spring from and speak to our most basic urges – both sides of the same coin perhaps. It is surely wrong to want to hurt someone else, but if we didn’t have the desire to mate with others ahead of them, the species would quickly die out. And I suppose evolution depends on the survival of the fittest. So why does the same level of shame not accrue to both? You don’t see blokes wearing their dirty macs to boxing matches do you? And there’s more bodily fluids flying about in the ring than in any X film I’ve ever seen. Maybe it’s just another sign of masculine hypocrisy. Women can’t tell jokes, according to these kinds of Neanderthal, they can’t play football, and they shouldn’t go round bashing other women in the ring, but they’re good enough to get their kit off while they slide around a greasy pole in a g-string stuffed with fivers. Guys who think that, they’re the ones, in my view, who ought to be flinching when they catch their own eye in a mirror, not us overgrown schoolboys who went to see Straw Dogs (1971) half a dozen times at the Gaumont, trembling all the way, and it wasn’t because I was scared my dad would suddenly walk in and catch me there like Alan Strang’s dad did in Equus – no, my father was a gentle man with not a kinky bone in his body, so I can’t blame my condition on any antecedent, this is a perversion I’m just going to have to shoulder alone.

Speaking of Straw Dogs, my favourite bit, I have to admit, was the moment where Susan George takes her jumper off, not the rape, though the kinetic violence in the final twenty minutes was also immersive enough to be tremendously exciting. But even then, something somewhere was telling me I shouldn’t have been enjoying any of this quite so much, which was, I suppose, what made it such a turn-on. A friend later expressed faint disdain when I told them I’d seen this particular shocker quite so many times; but why, I wondered (silently ashamed) should seeing a film so frequently be any different to repeatedly enjoying any other work of art? How often do we listen to our favourite albums, or reread our favourite novels? We’re only ever after the same buzz it gave us the first time. On the other hand, I would probably be the first to admit that singing along to the final scene of Strauss’s Elektra because it transports you to an ethereal realm of radiant pleasure is on a different plane of experience to, say, pausing Perfect Friday (1970) for the umpteenth time just to catch another glimpse of Ursula Andress’s arse.

Maybe I’m just too much of a vulgarian to see beyond the crude enticement of the gutter attractions that sell so much of these things. But on the other hand, while the cheap and cheerful smut-fests were just that, excuses to flash the flesh with no beating about, so to speak, the bush, there was always in the background the steady drip of the pseudo-intellectuals, whose hypocrisy, no matter the artform, has never known any bounds, and who are never above spicing their stuff with a little of what the public fancies just to sweeten their pills. Intellectuals put sex in everywhere, pretending they’re not as obsessed with it as the rest of us drones, and because they’re intellectuals they can always call it art, not smut. A key text here might be Aria (1987), a loose compendium of ten short scenes set to various pieces of classical music, each by a different director. Now, I’ve seen this so you don’t have to – and in fact you probably haven’t even heard of it, because it was a total bomb, and even the enthusiastic efforts of nearly half the auteur-directors to plaster their segments with wall to wall succulent flesh was hardly enough to entice ordinary punters to sit still for two hours listening to a bunch of rowdy orchestras making noises.

Many of the usual suspects are represented, of course. Nicolas Roeg’s then wife Theresa Russell for once keeps her clothes on, but on this occasion goes to the opposite extreme of dressing up as King Zog of Albania, so I’m not quite sure what that was meant to be all about. Godard’s segment shows a bunch of weightlifters in leotards being danced around by a couple of young women in the buff. Australian director Bruce Beresford, briefly breaking off from his string of accomplished hits like The Getting of Wisdom, Breaker Morant and Driving Miss Daisy, somehow persuaded a young Elizabeth Hurley to go to Bruges in winter to be filmed shagging the bloke who played Herr Ulrich in the first series of Auf Wiedersehen, Pet. Bridget Fonda, in her first credited screen role, crops up just long enough to get her kit off before slashing her wrists in a bath, while Ken Russell’s contribution shows an accident victim hallucinating before undergoing life-saving surgery. As you do. It goes without saying that this victim is a young woman, naked throughout, and played by popular glamour model Linzi Drew. What – men don’t get run over, Ken, is that what you’re saying? Got you.

Russell, of course, always was a populist, but the question of sexism becomes even more blurred when you get into the realm of these would-be artiste-auteurs, those directors whose reputations, like a student’s duvet, are by now so encrusted with tributes that to level any kind of criticism against them at all is to risk being accused of heresy and philistinism or worse by those who feel their insights are so much more valuable than yours simply because they happen to write criticism or have a PhD in film studies. Take Stanley Kubrick. Never seems to be all that interested in hearing what women have to say, does he, old Stan? Margaret Tyzack was the only woman to have any lines at all in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) (unless a couple of the chimps in the opening sequence might have been female), but he certainly let it all hang out a few years later in A Clockwork Orange, where not only are there plenty of knockers flying around but there’s also lots of sexual violence too, always a male’s most transgressive fantasy. (At least, I hope it is because if it isn’t, and there’s something even worse, then it’s not going to be something I want to see depicted in any kind of cinematic entertainment, thanks very much.)

I enjoy A Clockwork Orange for its technical polish, but it’s too long, too graphic, and I resent the way it still mainly appeals to the perennial teenage boy in me. (And I don’t like the idea that at the end, the savage little bastard is going to be able to carry on living his life – enjoying love, light and Beethoven like before, without being made to atone for all the death, destruction and suffering he had previously caused other people. “I was cured all right.” Crap. There was no coming back from the ugly depths he’d plumbed.) And what, really, is the difference between Alex’s misogyny and the director’s? Malcolm McDowell’s Alex slavers over his victim’s bodies with a knife, the director uses a camera lens. Remember that first drooling shot we get of the sun-drenched Lolita? You can’t help thinking the director would probably have much preferred to present her nude like an Ingres odalisque if he thought there was any way he might have got  away with it. There was an unnecessary full-frontal female scene in The Shining (1980), of course, but you accepted it there because it made about as much sense as anything else in that overrated and disjointed bunch of cobblers. And I understand Tom Cruise and his then wife Nicole Kidman both appear in all their glory in Eyes Wide Shut (1999), though I haven’t seen that and have no intention of doing so because from what I’ve heard its meaning remains deliberately elusive, and if even the auteur can’t decide what he’s meant to be saying, why should I have to rack my brains trying to decide for him? (Barry Lyndon (1975), on the other hand, is famously and luminously beautiful from the first frame to the last, so my beef is not so much with the director as just some of his artistic decisions. He can get it right sometimes, so why doesn’t he always?)

Obviously, these pseuds are going to get away with it more because they can always plead their nudity is incidental, not the main point, which is why there are always going to be more screen adaptations of DH Lawrence than there will ever be of, say, EM Forster or John Galsworthy or HG Wells or Rudyard Kipling or AA Milne or Arnold Bennett or JB Priestley or Henry James or Kenneth Grahame or Ford Madox Ford or Aldous Huxley. (“What, Joely Richardson running about in the woods again with nothing on?” “Lawrence, mate, isn’t it? Crucial to the plot.” “Still tits and bums though isn’t it… mate?”)

And mostly female, thank God. Speaking for myself, if I have to watch someone disporting themselves starkers on screen I’d far rather it was someone like Britt Ekland or Lynne Frederick or Jane Asher or Jacqueline Bisset or Emmanuelle Béart, who have all on occasion bared their all for their art, than their male counterparts, who if they shed anything at all, are never required to show quite so much. And all because it’s still a male-dominated industry. And even if it weren’t, men are still always going to want to see naked women more than women are going to want to see naked men. And even if the sexes were equal in that regard, there’s something about the classically beautiful female figure which, in this age of the digital image, is deemed more desirable than the male. I suspect the sculptures of the nude male form in ancient Greece outnumbered their female equivalents several times over; in our times it seems it is the comely female body which is the more highly valued, even if it is not quite accorded the same levels of aesthetic respect that were vouchsafed their ancient Hellenic predecessors.

And still that hypocrisy is continued, even at the highest levels. Just recently Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer featured at least one if not two of the most gratuitous nude appearances of any major film I know – more pointless even than the sainted Jenny Agutter’s shower scene in John Landis’s An American Werewolf in London (1981) – and when even the so-called adults in the room start thinking like horny teenagers, one begins to despair. That’s why I still prefer the likes of Spielberg and Scorsese and Howard and Zemeckis and Coppola, who have enough faith in their talent that they don’t need to fill the screen with cheeky flesh just to keep you watching. (Even then, the director’s cut – or it might even be one of the director’s cuts of Apocalypse Now (1979), has a bit of sex involving not only the playboy bunnies but, at a later point, the planter’s wife. But these scenes are rightly not in the official cinema version because they aren’t necessary and there is enough going on as it is, what with the hunt for Kurtz and the bombs going off every five minutes and the smoking and the war and all, that we can do without such extra stimulation thank you. Maybe Coppola himself considered it was a bit much, the guys copping off with quite so much nookie in the middle of the jungle, in a war zone. All those horny soldiers and it was only our guys off the boat who ended up nailing the Playboy models? What are the chances?)

But whether a scene was vital or gratuitous, the questions I always found myself asking about it at the time (or at least, face-savingly, now) were always the same: Do I wish the scene wasn’t there? Frankly, no. Would I rather not have seen it? Not at all. Does the memory of these feelings now make me feel guilty? You betcha. Which is wherein lies the whole ethical problem, because these scenes, whether they crop up in some trashy horror movie about vampires sucking each other off or get shoe-horned into some would-be searingly polemical tour de force about the human condition, are inspired by and feed into the same tacky impulse. As a viewer you’re not being asked to respond to a character, you’re simply getting turned on by the performer’s body. And it doesn’t matter if they’re only doing it for the money, or because the director somehow managed to convince them that at this point in the plot it is somehow absolutely vital that they flash their pubes – ultimately it’s all exploitation. We are being invited to admire at leisure something we have no real reason or right to witness at all, and rationalise it how you will, somewhere deep down that has surely got to be more wrong than it can ever be right.

(Author’s note: This is not an accurate representation of anything that actually goes on in the film.)

But that was then, this is now, and if the sight of a single soft, comely, supple body is going to leave you in two minds, how much more conflicted are you going to feel when a second, harder, male presence enters the scene? One who is apparently permitted to bend and order the first to his will, seemingly at will, with no restraint – except, of course, in those movies where restraint is the whole point of the exercise. Hard-core pornography can be had today at the click of a mouse, and my generation has been the first ever to be faced with the potential impossibility of ever again being able to look themselves in the shaving mirror every morning without irony.

I well remember my first encounter with the proper hard stuff and the effect it had. In the early autumn of 1976 I found myself in Cologne in Germany at the fag end of an induction session for my year abroad, teaching. With some time to kill before my train to Göttingen where I had been posted – Göttingen, that placid, inoffensive little medieval town in Lower Saxony, that byword for intellectual progress for hundreds of years, that crucible of science and the arts – I found myself in a sex shop behind the cathedral. Hundreds of miles from home, in a country where no one knew me, I felt I needed something familiar, something safe to see me through the five-hour journey back to the birthplace of Max Planck and Robert Bunsen, where Heine had studied and the Brothers Grimm had once been on the university staff, and in the square just outside the town hall there’s a beautiful little statue called the Gänseliesel, the Little Goose Girl, her innocent eyes cast modestly down. So I paid my money and went in the back to watch a couple of porn movies. I figured they would probably be little more than a step up from what I was used to, same old decorous kind of semi-fumbling, I thought, just maybe a bit stronger, but with even ropier dialogue.

Turned out I was wrong. There was nothing semi about the fumbling, and what dialogue there was, was functional to a fault.

On my way out a short time later, the nice man who’d taken my money going in looked at me in surprise. “Train to catch,” I mumbled. “Too bad,” he said. “Maybe stay a bit longer next time?” It was the gentle sincerity with which he said this that got to me, the mature understanding between two fellow travellers who knew the world and their tastes and accepted each other’s human failings in the warm embrace of camaraderie and international brotherhood, where the harsh divisions between classes and countries which kept peoples apart might finally find their solutions through the peaceful influence of fisting, fucking and fellatio. As I pushed my way blindly out of the door, I was certain of only one thing.

I was cured all right.