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) - 1929-1930 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 |
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Un Chien Andalou (1929, Fr.) |
This shocking, and provocative surrealistic film, only 17 minutes long, by Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel, was banned in various countries, with its infamous eyeball razor-slashing scene, and these sexual assault images (pictured) of a man's (Pierre Batcheff) hands lustfully fondling or cupping the breasts of a clothed and then naked woman (Simone Mareuil); in the next image, the breasts disappeared and were transformed into buttocks - which the man continued to palpate |
  
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Glorifying the American Girl (1929)
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Paramount Studios and producer Florenz Ziegfeld created this Pre-Hays Code partly-Technicolored musical comedy; in one non-speaking scene during the colorful revue sequence in the film's final third in a segment titled Loveland, future Tarzan's Johnny Weissmuller appeared as Adonis wearing a fig leaf, while standing next to an unidentified semi-nude chorine - this was the first feature-length film to contain virtual nudity and revealing costumes in color! A censored, black and white version of the film was 9 minutes shorter | 
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Pandora's Box (1929, Ger.) (aka Lulu or Die Büchse der Pandora) |
Georg Wilhelm Pabst's early erotic and hypnotic silent film melodrama produced hateful critical reviews for its overt sexuality; this was the first film to present a well-developed lesbian character - the aristocratic countess; throughout the film Louise Brooks portrayed a tempting goddess named Lulu wearing silky dresses and billowy gowns, even though she sported a pageboy haircut (or black bob); in an early scene, the insatiable, free-spirited yet innocent 18 year old cabaret chorus girl and femme fatale Lulu (Louise Brooks) was caught backstage scandalously kissing obsessed and spell-bound wealthy newspaper owner Dr. Schon (Fritz Kortner) by his more socially-acceptable fiancee Charlotte Marie Adelaide (Daisy d'Ora); at the subsequent wedding party celebrating her marriage to Schon, virginally white-dressed (inappropriately), bi-sexual and amoral Lulu engaged in an intimate, flirtatious tango with black silken-dressed, chic lesbian aristocrat Countess Anna Geschwitz (Alice Roberts), and also flirted with Schon's son Alwa (Franz Lederer), causing her bridegroom to become insanely enraged and jealous; punished for unleashing Pandora's box of evil, she ended up dying at the hands of 'Jack the Ripper' (Gustav Diessl) in London's Soho on Christmas Eve with a gleaming knifeblade stuck into her stomach (off-screen) during an erotic embrace and kiss (her hand goes limp to indicate her death) |
    
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| In this second Marx Brothers effort, one of the original lines of Groucho's classic "Hooray for Captain Spaulding" song was censored and abruptly cut because of its sexual suggestiveness for the film's 1936 re-release, and is now only rarely heard: "I think I'll try and make her"; the excised line came after Mrs. Rittenhouse's (Margaret Dumont) line: "You are the only white man to cover every acre"; Groucho also uttered the following veiled comment about the nudity of native girls: "We took some pictures of the native girls, but they weren't developed, but we're going back again in a couple of weeks" |
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| This was the MGM film in which cinema's greatest silent star - an asexual, supercool, 24 year-old Nordic beauty named Greta Garbo - first talked - to a bartender in a coarsely-delivered line as the film's title character: "Gimme a whiskey, ginger ale on the side. And don't be stingy, baby!" In Garbo's transitional role to the talkies, she played the role of a former prostitute (with a veiled reference to being "in the house") whose sordid past could possibly ruin her chances for happiness |
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The Blue Angel (1930, Ger.) (aka Der Blaue Engel) |
This unstrained first film by director Josef von Sternberg featured the legendary Marlene Dietrich in a star-making role - with a plot that would often be repeated in their collaborations; the film told about a meek and repressed teacher Professor Immanuel Rath (Emil Jannings) who was tempted, seduced and destroyed by a sensual, carefree, and carnal top-hatted entertainer named Lola Lola (Marlene Dietrich) at the Blue Angel nightclub as he watched her; there, she sang a throaty rendition of "Falling in Love Again" astride a barrel on stage; she tilted her head to the side, leaned backwards, and grasped one gartered-stockinged leg on bare thighs with her arms; in her dressing room, the Professor kneeled before her and was commanded to slip black stockings over her legs |
  
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The Divorcee (1930) |
This film's original title was Ex-Wife (the title of the original and controversial 1929 novel by Ursula Parrott) - this pivotal Pre-Code film about divorce and infidelity, by director Robert Z. Leonard, was banned by the Production Code Administration as being too brash, racy and forward since it didn't condemn its sinful heroine; it featured Norma Shearer's Best Actress Oscar-winning role as a Manhattan ad writer with a man's name (Jerry) and a "man's point of view" who became a wayward 'loose woman'; at the start of the film, she agreed to get married only if she and her husband were equals, joking: "That's why we're gonna make a go of it - everything equal...75/25"; although happily married, she caught her unfaithful husband-newspaperman Ted Martin (Chester Morris) engaged in philandering and infidelity with an ex-girlfriend (the recently-divorced brunette Janice (Mary Doran)) who embraced him in their kitchen on their own third wedding anniversary; Jerry was devastated and disillusioned when Ted downplayed the incident: "There's no sense in overplaying it. There's nothing to it...It isn't the end of the world, darling" and "Please believe me, darling, it doesn't mean a thing, not a thing. It doesn't make the slightest difference. Come on, snap out of it"; on that same evening after he left for a week-long work engagement in Chicago, she matched Ted's unfaithfulness with her own sexually-adventurous, one-night stand tryst with their consoling, wealthy best friend Don (Robert Montgomery) after an evening of partying (the sex scene was off-screen, signaled by the closing of curtains to darken the bedroom); when her husband returned and repented, she wasn't ready to let the incident be covered up and forgotten so quickly: "You're like a little boy that's stolen some jam, been spanked and kissed and happy again"; when she admitted her own affair (with an unknown male) to her astonished husband to match the score: "I balanced our accounts, that's all...I didn't really intend to, but that's how it is," he wasn't as quick to understand ("It can't be true. Why, I always thought you were the most decent thing in the world. It can't be true"); she begged with him to forgive and try again ("I'll forgive you anything, dear. Can't you please forgive me?"), but Ted stubbornly packed up and explained how his vanity and honor were ruined; then she fatefully vowed to him as she lost her temper that she would become a sexually wanton 'bad girl': "I'm glad I discovered there's more than one man in the world while I'm young and they want me. Believe me, I'm not missing anything from now on...Loose women are great, but not in the home, eh, Ted?...The looser they are, the more they get. The best in the world! No responsibility! Well, my dear, I'm gonna find out how they do it. So look for me in the future where the primroses grow, and pack your man's pride with the rest. From now on, you're the only man in the world that my door is closed to"'; after their divorce and a series of sexual escapades (shown in a montage of close-ups of men's hands, rings, and off-screen dialogue), and two weeks on a yacht in the summer with married former beau Paul (Conrad Nagel) who was estranged from his wife Dorothy (Helen Johnson) with a disfigured face from a car accident, she decided not to join Paul as his new wife to live in Japan when Dorothy made a plea to have her husband back; in the conventional happy ending after Jerry was job-transferred to London, she selflessly returned and was reconciled to her husband where he was working in Paris; they decided to take a second chance on marriage at midnight, during a New Year's Eve celebration at a nightclub (she told him: "You're the only husband I ever had - and ever want. A new year in a minute, Ted. All the world gets a new chance" and he replied: "I'd give my right arm for another chance" and they clinched when she replied: "I like that right arm. How about putting it around me?"); the film was controversial at the time for its reversal of the hypocritical 'double standard', although it was considerably cleaned up - the husband's affair became a romance, and her own romances were considered dates |
       
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| 18-year old platinum blonde Jean Harlow shocked audiences here by starring as a sexy floozy with generous glimpses of flesh available through her slinky dresses; in this Howard Hughes WWI film, she delivered her famous line of dialogue to an awaiting uniformed soldier in her apartment after inviting him in - "Would you be shocked if I put on something more comfortable?" - with his response: "I'll try to survive" - and then she seductively entered her bedroom letting her wrap fall to reveal her backless dress; Harlow became screendom's first official 'bombshell' -- meaning hot and explosive |
 
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Madam Satan (1930)
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Director Cecil B. De Mille's bizarre battle-of-the-sexes film, a major box-office flop, challenged the code with a racy, gaudy, and over-the-top masquerade costume party sequence aboard a giant zeppelin; it was the famed director's second talkie (as well as his second film for MGM after Dynamite (1929)), and also his first-and last musical; the story told about 'caged bird' wife Angela Brooks (Kay Johnson) who learned about the infidelity of her cheating husband Bob (Reginald Denny) with leggy seductress Trixie (Lillian Roth) - a singing/dancing member of a traveling show business trio, so she decided to teach him a lesson; she flirted with him at the masked ball (wearing a peek-a-boo, nude-looking gown and half-mask) as a femme fatale to lure him away from pheasant-costumed Trixie; their encounter occurred just before lightning struck the mooring mast of the dirigible (a foreshadowing of the real Hindenburg crash years later), and partygoers were forced to either parachute or jump |
   
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Morocco (1930) |
In her Hollywood debut film (with Paramount and director Josef von Sternberg), Marlene Dietrich targeted her sexuality toward both men and women; as Amy Jolly, she scandalously wore a sexually-ambiguous men's tuxedo and top hat as a performer in a North African cabaret club - in an early scene she sang "Quand L'amour Est Mort" with smoky eroticism, took a flower from the hair of a young lady in the audience (asking: "May I have this?"), inhaled it suggestively, and then kissed the embarrassed woman full on the mouth - one of the earliest (if not the first) female-to-female kisses by a leading actress, in order to get the woman's attention and another man's attention; after tipping her hat and listening to wild applause, the bisexual (or androgynous) chanteuse tossed the flower to admiring foreign legionnaire Tom Brown (a young Gary Cooper) in the audience; in a slightly later scene, the seductive Dietrich, in a skimpy black dress and with a feathery boa draped over her shoulders, also performed: "What Am I Bid for My Apple?" - after doing brisk business throughout the entire crowd, she sold one to Tom, who bit into it lustily (filmed in close-up during his third bite), and then asked her to sit in his lap, after which she discreetly gave him her room key for a late-night "hot" rendezvous - where she demurely told him: "You'd better go now, I'm beginning to like you" - to which he responded: "I wish I'd met you ten years ago" |
   
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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