History of Sex in Cinema:
The Greatest and Most Influential
Sexual Films and Scenes
(Illustrated)
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History of Sex in Cinema: |
See also the multi-part Sexual and Erotic Films in Cinema, The Most Controversial Films of All-Time and the Best and Most Memorable Film Kisses of All Time in Cinematic History. Key to Icon Symbol:
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Greatest and Most Influential Erotic / Sexual Films and Scenes (chronological order, by film title) - 1965-1966 Intro | Pre-1920s | 1920-1928 | 1929-1930 | 1931 | 1932 | 1933 | 1934-1937 | 1938-1943 | 1944-1946 | 1947-1952 | 1953-1954 | 1955-1957 | 1958-1959 | 1960-1961 | 1962-1963 | 1964 | 1965-1966 | 1967 | 1968 | 1969 | 1970 | 1971 | 1972 | 1973 | 1974 | 1975 | 1976 | 1977 | 1978 | 1979 | 1980 | 1981 | 1982 | 1983 | 1984 | 1985 | 1986 | 1987 | 1988 | 1989 | 1990 | 1991 | 1992-1 | 1992-2 | 1993 | 1994-1 | 1994-2 | 1995-1 | 1995-2 | 1996-1 | 1996-2 | 1997-1 | 1997-2 | 1998-1 | 1998-2 | 1999-1 | 1999-2 | 2000-1 | 2000-2 | 2001-1 | 2001-2 | 2002-1 | 2002-2 | 2003-1 | 2003-2 | 2004-1 | 2004-2 | 2005-1 | 2005-2 | 2006-1 | 2006-2 | 2007-1 | 2007-2 | 2008 | 2009 | |
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Movie Title |
Brief Scene Description |
Example |
Darling (1965, UK)
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Director John Schlesinger's film was shocking and cutting edge in its day with scenes involving loose sexuality, betrayal, bisexuality/transvestism, serial bed-hopping and infidelity, age difference, pregnancy and abortion; it told the life story, in flashback and voice-over (in an article being prepared for a women's magazine), of jet-setting Italian princess Diana Scott (Best Actress Oscar-winning Julie Christie) living at an Italian villa after marrying a prince; she had an upper middle-class upbringing, and grew up spoiled because she was always considered a beautiful "darling"; a carefree, hedonistic London Swinging 60s amoral fashion model and playgirl after being discovered on the street by a reporter, the cool, emancipated beauty was married to immature Tony Bridges (Trevor Rowen) - it was a failed marriage (he sought an official divorce in the midst of the many affairs she was having) - duriing which time she met and fell in love with married, cultured, hard-working television journalist Robert Gold (Dirk Bogarde); they had a secretive affair and first slept together in a hotel room, when he told her: "It's the first time I've felt real for a long time"; he left his wife Estelle (Pauline Yates) and children and moved into a London apartment with her; during this time, she also experienced a flirtatious fling with dissolute horror movie executive Miles Brand (Laurence Harvey), who gave her a bit part in his movie Jacqueline; soon after, however, she became pregnant with Robert's child - and then aborted ("I realized it was going to be the ruination of my career, messing up people's lives: you know, mine, Robert's, everybodys") - and told Robert: "I don't want anything to do with sex again as long as I live"; she separated from him briefly while recuperating in the country with relatives, and then returned to him, but found herself bored and unfulfilled; she had sex with playboyish Miles in his plush apartment (although appeared to take discomfort in oral sex), and then accompanied him as a jet-setter to Paris for one of his wild decadent parties with his transvestite cross-dressing friends (the participants played a "truth game" - dancing in a circle in the light of a projector, while disrobing); when she returned to London, possessively-jealous Robert was angered by her lying and infidelity, and told her in the film's most famous line: "Your idea of fidelity is not having more than one man in the bed at the same time. You're a whore, baby, that's all. Just a whore"; after Robert broke up with her and moved out, calling her "trivial and shallow," she platonically partnered with homosexual photographer Malcolm, becoming the "Happiness Girl," and soon was in Italy filming candy company commercials at the villa of refined Italian widower Prince Cesare Della Romita (José-Luis de Vilallonga), a rich yacht owner with seven children; during her stay in Italy, she went on a holiday to Capri with Malcolm, and cautioned him: "We are not complicating our holiday with any disgusting sexcapades" (although they both had separate one-night flings with a male waiter); later she confided in Malcolm: "I could do without sex. Don't really like it that much"; the Prince vainly proposed marriage to her, but after her return to London, she broke her sleazy association with Miles and decided to accept the Prince's marriage proposal; she found her loveless married life in the villa affluent, but utterly boring and frustrating - she walked through the many rooms to her bedroom, stripping as she went, and unhappily threw herself on her bed; during her husband's business trip (?) to Rome, she contacted Robert and returned to London one last time to sleep with the "easily seduced" love of her life (she fancifully told him: "This is a miracle. We're still a couple...Thank god it's never too late. Two people really belong to each other. Doesn't matter what happens...We both learned our lesson and won't make any more mistakes. I know we can be so happy"), but he dashed her dreams of reuniting: "We're not going back to anything, you know. This was just for old times' sake" and rejected her profession of love and request for "one more chance"; as he drove her back to the airport, she half-heartedly threatened to commit suicide by throwing herself from the moving car: "If I can't be with you, I don't want to be alive," but resumed her princess-duties upon arrival; the film ironically ended with her life story on the cover of IDEAL WOMAN magazine, on sale at corner newstands in London |
        
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The Defilers (1965)
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This disturbing, low-budget, definitive grindhouse "roughie" film (by producer David F. Friedman, now split from Herschell Gordon Lewis) from director-cinematographer Lee Frost was deliberately made to counter the "nudie-cutie" film with its added violence and griminess; it was reportedly based on a true story - about two wealthy, spoiled, misogynistic and hedonistic men (Carl Walker, Jr. (Byron Mabe) and Jameison Marsh (Jerome Eden)) ("There's only one thing in this whole crummy, square-infested life that counts...KICKS!") who decided to kidnap a young, naive yet sexy blonde Los Angeles newcomer and aspiring actress named Jane Collins (Swedish actress Mai Jansson); they held her prisoner in the dark basement of an abandoned warehouse where they made the defenseless woman their sex slave and psychologically and physically abused her |
  
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Doctor Zhivago (1965)
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The potent, twisted scene in director David Lean's magnificent epic in which the womanizing, brutal lawyer Victor Komarovsky (Rod Steiger) commanded beautiful 17 year-old Lara (Julie Christie) to turn around so he could admire her shapely form in a striking red dress he had bought for her to wear ("You've grown up a lot, haven't you?") - to seduce her to enter into an illicit affair with him as his mistress; later, a brutal scene occurred after Victor had met Lara's fiancee, idealistic revolutionary Pasha Antipova (Tom Courtenay) - Victor slapped her and told her: "You are a slut" and violently forced himself on her to dissuade her from marrying Pasha - Victor snidely commented after he had assaulted her: "And don't delude yourself this was rape. That would flatter us both"; soon afterwards, the guilt-ridden Lara tracked Victor down and shot him at a Christmas party |
  
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Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1965)
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Russ Meyer's best and most popular work was an overly dramatic, trashy, semi-fantastical, and violent (but without nudity) sexploitation film that originally failed at the box office - it starred three buxom go-go dancers by night who went on a murderous desert rampage by day on motorcycles: the blonde Billie (Lori Williams), the masochistic and lesbian-leaning Rosie (Haji), and the villainous, tough, and masculine dominatrix Varla (Tura Satana) who wore black leather; she memorably growled at a dumb gas station attendant when he said he wanted to 'see' America while looking at her chest: "You won't see much of it lookin' there, Columbus!"; although a flop and initially reviled by feminists as "juvenile sexism", this cult film has been reassessed as a pro-feminist "female empowerment" epic - the female characters were cunning, powerful, supercharged, aggressive and sexually predatory, while the males were either weak, decrepit, sexually impotent or mindless brutes; a timid, bikini-clad woman named Linda (Sue Bernard, Playboy's December 1966 Playmate) was drugged, kidnapped and taken hostage-captive after witnessing the karate-chopping, back-crunching murder of her cleancut racer boyfriend Tommy (Ray Barlow) in the salt flats; the finale included a knife throwing/stabbing and Linda running Varla over with her sportscar |   
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Juliet of the Spirits (1965, It./W.Germ/Fr.) (aka Giulietta Degli Spiriti)
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Fellini's first color film was a surrealistic, garish marriage drama that starred his own wife Giulietta Masina as the title character; she learned that her husband of 15 years, Giorgio (Mario Pisu) was committing adultery with a fashion model mistress; as a result, she suffered the terrorizing torment of voices and images from the spirit world and of her past; when offered sexual passion and temptation provided by her hedonistic, buxom party-girl neighbor Susy (Sandra Milo) in a bordello-styled mirrored bedroom (with a chute-slide to a nearby heated pool) with her studly nephew - the wronged Giulietta denied herself the pleasures of the flesh after experiencing a frightening, fiery vision of a martyr; through self-discovery and an examination of her own emptiness by film's end, she found emancipation and independence (or loneliness) as she walked off toward the nearby woods |  
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Orgy of the Dead (1965)
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This was an prime example of schlocky scriptwriter Ed Wood's notoriously bad nudie horror films - it told about horror book writer Bob and his buxom redheaded girlfriend Shirley (William Bates and Pat Barringer) who spent a night in a cemetery after a car wreck for inspiration on the topic of necrophilia; the film was advertised as being shown "In Gorgeous Astravision" and in "Shocking Sexicolor" and featuring NAKED Spirits and TOPLESS Dancers; Wood's buddy Criswell starred as The Emperor of the Dead, the rambling leader of the 'twilight people' - amidst a bevy of topless and naked zombie-like, graveyard 'creatures of the night' (hired LA strippers) and his Vampira/Elvira clone named Ghoulita, doing interminable stripteases in the fog, as he served as the emcee and provided absurdist and odd commentary, such as: "Torture! Torture! It pleasures me!", "To love the cat is to be the cat!", "A kitten was born to be whipped" |   
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The Raw Ones (1965)
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Producer/director John Lamb's nudist film (extoling the virtues of a naturist lifestyle) was the first to openly show genitalia -- now allowed after a 1963 legal decision that ruled such displays of private parts were not obscene; this was an essential linkpin between the non-genital 'nudie-cutie' films of the late 50s, and the hard-core porn films of the 70s | |
Repulsion (1965, UK)
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Roman Polanski's first English language film starred Catherine Deneuve as Carol Ledoux - a virginal, fragile and repressed young Belgian beautician left alone in an apartment who began to have psychosexual hallucinations: two rapes (one hallucinatory with the loud ticking of a clock on the soundtrack, and one real), two murders, and grasping phantom hands groping her from the wall; reportedly, the film was the first to feature an orgasm heard on-screen (in a scene in which Carol heard her sister Helen's (Yvonne Furneaux) love-making to a married lover through the wall) |  
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The 10th Victim (1965, It.) (aka La Decima Vittima)
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Marcello Mastroianni and Ursula Andress (famous for her appearance as the first "Bond girl" in Dr. No (1962)) were paired in this futuristic satire and science fiction cult film from director Elio Petri; the buxom star played the role of Caroline Meredith who was noted for her double-barrelled brassiere from which she fired twin guns during a striptease act in a masochist's club, on her way to racking up her 10th victim to achieve a perfect score in a sanctioned and organized murder hunt-game called "The Big Hunt"; the bra-weapon was an inspiration for Mike Myers' Fembots in Austin Powers — International Man of Mystery (1997) | 
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The Agony of Love (1966)
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Director William Rotsler's B-movie - a grim, soap-opera-ish exploitation film that pre-dated Luis Bunuel's Belle De Jour (1967, Fr/It.) (with Catherine Deneuve) - had a similar tawdry plot; this 'nudie-roughie' told about lonely and frustrated affluent suburban housewife Barbara Thomas (Pat Barrington with a black wig) who was bored and desperate for affection from her workaholic businessman husband Barton (Sam Taylor), so she secretly rented a private city apartment and turned to prostitution (calling herself "Brandy"), orgies, and S&M ("Do it, do it, hurt me... dirty me!"); as a callgirl, she indulged in her cravings for sex, money (in a fantasy nightmare sequence), and affection -- until her husband became one of her escort service clients for an orgy |
  
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Alfie (1966, UK)
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This was the original Alfie film - Lewis Gilbert's sex-comedy/drama about a hedonistic, misogynistic, Cockney ladies' man title character (Michael Caine in his first major lead role, an Oscar-nominated one) - a working class playboy/Casanova who loved (and left) many women, including Ruby (Shelley Winters); it was considered daring and shocking in its time, with an examination of taboo subjects and the consequences of the sexual revolution in the swinging 1960s | 
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The Bible...In the Beginning (1966)
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John Huston's Old Testament film didn't cover the entire Bible - just the first 22 chapters of the Book of Genesis, including a 20-minute opening sequence including the story of Adam (Michael Parks) and Eve (Ulla Bergryd) with both characters modestly nude - although they were discreetly and strategically photographed with long shots and out-of-focus buttocks; the Garden of Eden sequence followed the Creation of 'mankind' from reddish-brown dirt, and then the pair ate the forbidden fruit from the Tree of Knowledge, and were banished - clothed and no longer innocent |  
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Michelangelo Antonioni's first English-language film was set in mod 60s London; this breakthrough film was often noted for introverted fashion-glamour photographer Thomas' (David Hemmings) orgasmic, frenzied camera-shoot scene with various 'birds' including writhing model Veruschka as he straddled her on the floor and pointed his phallic camera at her; also the film included the teasing/wrestling threesome orgy scene on purple backdrop paper with two naive teenaged groupies (blonde Jane Birkin and brunette Gillian Hills) who wanted their pictures taken and then disrobed - with the first fleeting view of pubic hair in a mainstream film (seen in both an uncensored and censored view here) for American audiences; the film also featured Vanessa Redgrave as topless Girl Jane (in some video versions) begging (and offering her sexual favors) for Thomas' roll of incriminating film that he shot in a public park - showing evidence of a murder; in another love-making scene, next-door neighbor Patricia (Sarah Miles) (while her husband was on top making love to her) wordlessly entreated Thomas in their flat to stay in view nearby so she could achieve orgasm; when Antonioni refused to cut the few glimpses of nudity in the film, it was released without the MPAA's seal of approval, and engendered even greater popularity for the arthouse film; it received Academy Award nominations for Best Director and Best Original Screenplay |      
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A Man and a Woman (1966, Fr.) (aka Un Homme et Une Femme)
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Director Claude Lelouch's simple and pleasant romance was the Palme d'Or winner at Cannes and Oscar-winner of Best Foreign Language Film; it was about a beautifully-filmed, sl0w-building affair between two single parents who had both lost their spouses: race-driver Jean-Louis Duroc (Jean-Louis Trintignant) and film production assistant Anne Gauthier (Anouk Aimee); eventually by film's end, they consummated their love in a non-explicit, bitter-sweet scene that alternated between B/W and color images (including flashbacked, guilt-ridden, melancholic memories of Anna's husband of her past) | 
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One Million Years BC (1966)
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This British-made film (made in the Canary Islands) conjured up the iconic image of a shapely, Amazonian cavegirl Loana (Raquel Welch) - wearing a two-piece fur-trimmed, animal-skin bikini outfit; the reigning sex queen's 'primeval woman' poster was a major best-seller |  
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Mike Nichols' acclaimed debut film adaptation of Edward Albee's play contained blasphemous raw profanity and curse words (such as "Up yours!," "goddamn," "for Christ's sake," "screw you," "bastard," "Hump the Hostess," and "son of a bitch") and lots of sexual innuendo (the game "Hump the Hostess," etc.); it displayed brutal sexual tensions between its four characters (and the sado-masochistic, loving-hating, vulgarities-spewing couple of Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor) in an all-night drinking fest; the MPAA ratings board gave the film a seal of approval after Warner Bros. appealed and made a few cuts of the most extreme profanity (such as "screw you"); the film was a direct challenge to the anti-profanity clauses of the Hays Code, especially after acquiring an astounding 13 Oscar nominations and 5 wins - including its entire Oscar-nominated cast of four (also including George Segal and Sandy Dennis); it was the first film to be released with a "Suggested for Mature Audiences" warning | 
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Introduction: In the following illustrated compilation are some of the most significant films in the history of sex on the screen. The influential film milestones and their memorable sexual/erotic scenes are thoroughly described. Including portrayals
of sex and/or nudity, these films were often considered quite erotic, groundbreaking,
unique and/or controversial at the time. The following listing of these influential, memorable and classic
sex scenes and films takes into account all of
the available surveys of this type of material, and attempts to provide
an informed, detailed, unranked, chronological (by film title) grouping of the
most influential and groundbreaking films and scenes. Some of the most notorious (or infamous) films are quite
mediocre, usually made as an excuse to display nudity or eroticism of a star performer.
- Milestone Films With Scenes That Were Especially Notorious, Infamous, Controversial, or Scandalous