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) - 1969 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 |
Age of Consent (1969, Aus.)
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In Michael Powell's erotic comedy advertised with the tagline: "There Is A Time Of Beauty... There Is A Day Of Yearning... There Is An "AGE OF CONSENT"", young Helen Mirren (as teenaged granddaughter Cora Ryan) was featured in several revealing nude scenes as a model for New York painter Bradley Monahan (James Mason), including one where she snorkeled (and spear-fished) naked in the ocean |   
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Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice (1969)
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This satirical Paul Mazursky film reflected the 'free love' era of the late 60s sexual revolution (with the tagline "Consider the Possibilities"), with its story of encounter groups, permissive sex, mate-swapping, countercultural temptation and emotional openness among affluent adults; the two married couples: Bob and Carol Sanders (Robert Culp and Natalie Wood) and their best friends Ted and Alice Henderson (Elliott Gould and Dyan Cannon) had their marital vows of fidelity (and monogamy) challenged during a weekend swinging trip to Las Vegas; Dyan Cannon urged: "I feel like doing what we came up here to do...Orgy, have an orgy. Orgy. Orgy " after being asked what she wanted to do; the film was noted for its publicity - a view of couples in bed together discussing either group sex or seeing Tony Bennett; also the film ended with the Burt Bacharach song "What the World Needs Now (Is Love, Sweet Love)" |   
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Cherry, Harry & Raquel (1969)
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This Russ Meyer classic was his last independent movie before 20th Century Fox lured him to Hollywood; it was an action tale of sex-crazed individuals in an Arizona border town, featuring drug-dealing, shoot-outs, beatings and car-crashes; the female title characters were buxom nurse Cherry (Linda Ashton) (pictured) and big-breasted prostitute Raquel (Larissa Ely) (pictured); it was famous for an underwater lesbian scene; statuesque Uschi Digard (aka Astrid Lillimoor) (pictured) also starred as the German-speaking Native American ghost, Soul who posed nude against various desert locations |
   
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The Damned (1969, It.) (aka La Caduta Degli Dei or Fall of the Gods)
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Director Luchino Visconti's controversial film (originally rated X) profiled the Nazi Party's rise to power in the early 1930s, with its connections to sexual perversions (incest, pedophilia, homosexuality, murder, drug addiction and suicide) through its soap opera chronicling of the moral disintegration of one wealthy, upper-crust industrial family; its main decadent, over-the-top anti-hero character was heir Martin Von Essenbeck (Helmut Berger) - a dope-addicted, degenerate, sexually-aberrant transvestite teenager (performing a routine as Marlene Dietrich in Blue Angel drag in one sequence) who molested young girls (off-screen) and incestuously raped his own Baroness mother Sophia (Ingrid Thulin); the centerpiece of the film was the restaging of the historical bloodbath massacre of Brown Shirt SA soldiers (in June 1934) called "Night of the Long Knives" during a surreal drunken orgy (equated with Nazi evil) of soldiers, naked women, and men in drag at a lakeside resort |   
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This generation-defining, youth-oriented, counter-cultural road film classic told about two motorcyclist biker outlaws (drug-dealers) who embarked on a coast-to-coast odyssey across America; the film featured marijuana smoking, the hippie lifestyle in a Southwest commune including skinny-dipping, sex in a New Orleans bordello, and a psychedelic trip in a nearby graveyard |  
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Fellini - Satyricon (1969, It./Fr.) (aka The Degenerates)
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Best Director-nominated Fellini's R-rated epic was a colorful, visually-rich, and bizarre depiction of pre-Christian Rome and its pagan debauchery and sexual decadence (based on a satirical and bawdy work by Petronius); it centered on the homoerotic tension and sexual rivalry, in a fractured series of episodes, between two students: blonde Encolpio (Martin Potter) and Ascilto (Hiram Keller) - rivals for various males; the film was filled with repulsive characters and images, including an albino hermaphrodite worshipped as a healing demi-god and fortune-teller, a sick nymphomaniac, a battle with a Minotaur, the cannibalistic eating of Eumolpo (Salvo Randone), the public amputation of a hand, and a sexual threesome romp between the two homosexual lads side by side with a receptive Ethopian slave girl between them; the film's last voice-over ended mid-sentence |     
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Last Summer (1969)
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Director Frank Perry's insightful, probing, and realistic beach film (unlike the Beach Party films earlier in the decade) was about angst-ridden, self-doubting adolescent youth; it told about three affluent teens during a Fire Island, New York summer vacation -- pretty Sandy (Barbara Hershey), Peter (Richard Thomas), and Dan (Bruce Davison); the teen triangle was forever altered with the arrival of a troubled late-comer, 15 year-old outsider Rhoda (Oscar-nominated Catherine Burns), a slightly plump, homely teen who tragically came of age during a scene of sexual challenge when Sandy dared Rhoda to remove her top - and the group held her down during a forced rape; the film daringly explored teenage interest and curiosity about sex, pot experimentation, and revealing games of 'truth or dare'; in one scene, frustrated Sandy chided Peter - annoyed with his sexual obsession over her breasts: "God, if you're gonna be thinking about my breasts all the goddamn time!" with his defensive answer: "I don't think about them all the goddamn time. I was just thinking about 'em now"; the film was originally rated X by the MPAA when it was first released, but after some cuts were made to the rape scene, the film's rating was changed to an R | 
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This sleazy "women in prison" sexploitation film with full frontal female nudity (advertised as "the film that goes beyond X") emerged in the era of greater permissiveness after the abolition of the Production Code in the late 60s; it told of a Nazi concentration camp during WWII with a sadistic commandant who forced his female prisoners to be tortured and engage in perverse experiments and sexual depravity; its sensational content included orgies, S & M, and lesbianism, due to the fact that the inmates were forced to be prostitutes for off-duty German officers; this film inspired other WIP films of the next decade, including the infamous Ilsa - She-Wolf of the SS (1974) |   
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Haskell Wexler's fictional, experimental, and groundbreaking cinema verite docudrama film told about John Cassellis (Robert Forster) - a jaded news cameraman who worked against the backdrop of the actual 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago; it was originally rated X (later re-rated to R) because of violence, language and nudity; in one frequently-noted scene with brief full-frontal nudity, John romped nude with sultry nurse and girlfriend Ruth (Marianna Hill) around an apartment, and later became involved with widowed Eileen (Verna Bloom), a single mother from Appalachia; it was the first mainstream American feature film to show full male and female nudity - although the director battled Paramount and the censorship board and allegedly believed the film was Rated X for its controversial political tone and frequent obscenities rather than for its nudity |  
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John Schlesinger's film was a major milestone - this was the first (and only) X-rated (for adult-oriented, not porno) mainstream film (later reduced to R) to be voted Best Picture, with its A-list stars; its adult-themed story told of a naive, swaggering, transplanted male Texan named Joe Buck (Jon Voight) who struggled in the sordid 42nd Street area of NY to become a successful hustler or gigolo; upon his arrival in the big city, he vainly posed shirtless in front of his hotel room's mirror, and pasted up a beefcake poster of Paul Newman from Hud and a picture of a topless woman; his first 'trick' was fast-talking society girl Cass (Best Supporting Actress nominee Sylvia Miles) in a comedic sex scene in which they humorously activated channels with the TV remote control beneath their bodies - the climax came with the closeup view of the winning results of a slot machine jackpot - spewed-out coins; Joe's first homosexual client was a religiously fanatical and homosexual Jesus-freak Christian named Mr. O'Daniel (John McGiver) - during the encounter, Joe flashbacked to his boyhood when he was baptized in a river, and an incident when rednecks viciously assaulted him and his former girlfriend Annie (Jennifer Salt); another homosexual client was a bespectacled student in a movie theatre - while experiencing oral sex, Joe had memories of making love with Annie ("You're the only one, Joe"); the Texas stud was befriended by a limping and coughing homeless thief named Ratso Rizzo (Dustin Hoffman) and they experienced an unspoken homosexual relationship together which included frequent bickering; Joe also took socialite Shirley (Brenda Vaccaro) to bed for his first successful score, although he at first suffered sexual inadequacy until angered when she suggested that he was gay |      
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100 Rifles (1969)
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This late 60s western featured a strikingly-beautiful star - Raquel Welch as rebellious Yaqui Indian guerrilla leader Sarita; in one scene, she showered from a railroad water tank through her skin-tight, bra-less clothing to create a diversion during an ambush of a trainload of Mexican soldiers; also the curvaceous sex-star was featured in a steamy inter-racial love scene (reportedly the first of its kind) - a 60's era issue brought to the screen, with former National Football League player/Hall-of-Famer Jim Brown as Arizona lawman Lyedecker |   
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Ride a Wild Stud (1969)
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This sexploitation western was advertised with the tagline: "When Men Were Men and Women Didn't Forget It"; it told about how Confederate bandit William Quantrill and his raiders during the Civil War kidnapped, raped and imprisoned women in a brothel (the infamous "Pleasure House of Quantrill") where the heroine Marsha Wilson (Josie Kirk) was subjected to rape, wild orgies, and sexual attacks | |
Women in Love (1969, UK)
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Ken Russell's landmark film, adapted from D.H. Lawrence's 1920 novel by Larry Kramer, included a famous extended scene of nude male strength match of wrestling between local mine owner Gerald Crich (Oliver Reed) and school master Rupert Birkin (Alan Bates) in a locked room before a roaring fireplace; it was the first explicit scene with a homoerotic context that revealed male genitals in a commercial mainstream film - extremely daring for its time; after their match in which Gerald's strength overcame Rupert, the two sweaty men reclined on the floor side-by-side and talked: (Rupert: "But we ought to swear to love each other, you and I. Intimately. Perfectly. Finally, without any possibility of ever going back on it. Shall we swear to each other one day?" Gerald: "We'll wait till I understand it better"); their relationship was contrasted by their involvement with two sisters: Rupert eventually married teacher Ursula Brangwen (Jennie Linden) and Gerald had a stormy and temperamental love affair with 1920s emancipated, free-thinking, and ill-fated sculptress/artist Gudrun Brangwen (Best Actress Oscar-winning Glenda Jackson); in other scenes, Ursula and Rupert ran naked through a wheatfield and made love together; the film was notable because Glenda Jackson became the first performer to win an Academy Award for Best Actress for a role in which she appeared nude (with full and firm breasts since she was pregnant during filming) |   
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Women in Love (1969, UK)
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The outdoor picnic scene of Rupert Birkin (Alan Bates) describing how to eat a fig, with its many sexual implications: "The proper way to eat a fig in society... is to split it in four... holding it by the stump... and open it... so that it is a glittering, rosy, moist... honeyed, heavy-petaled, four-petaled flower. Then you throw away the skin... after you have taken off the blossom with your lips. But the vulgar way... is just to put your mouth to the crack... and take out the flesh in one bite. The fig is a very secretive fruit. The ltalians vulgarly say it stands for the female part, the fig fruit. The fissure, the yoni... the wonderful moist conductivity towards the center... involved, inturned.... One small way of access only, and this close-curtained from the light. Sap that smells strange on your fingers, so that even goats won't taste it. And when the fig has kept her secret long enough... so it explodes, and you see, through the fissure, the scarlet. And the fig is finished, the year is over. That's how the fig dies... showing her crimson through the purple slit. Like a wound... the exposure of her secret on the open day. Like a prostitute, the bursten fig makes a show of her secret. That's how women die, too." | 
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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