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.

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:

- Milestone Films With Scenes That Were Especially Notorious, Infamous, Controversial, or Scandalous

Example

Illicit (1931)

Mädchen in Uniform (Germany, 1931), aka Girls in Uniform

Mata Hari (1931)

Monkey Business (1931)

Night Nurse (1931)

Possessed (1931)

Director Clarence Brown's and MGM's film-noirish drama demonstrated the unfairness of the double standard for a single woman engaged in a years-long affair without marital vows; Joan Crawford starred as lowly paper-box factory worker Marian Martin in Erie, Pennsylvania who was defiantly independent, telling her hometown suitor and fellow worker Al Manning (Wallace Ford): "You don't own me...Nobody does. My life belongs to me"; she also told her mother (Clara Blandick): "If I were a man, it wouldn't frighten you. You'd think it was right for me to go out and get anything I could out of life, and use anything I had to get it. Why should men be so different? All they've got are their brains and they're not afraid to use them. Well, neither am I!"; she ascended out of poverty by associating with wealthy attorney Mark Whitney (Clark Gable), now separated from his wife - she became his self-sacrificing mistress outside of marriage in a Park Avenue apartment ("A woman can do anything and get anywhere as long as she doesn't fall in love"), but he refused to marry due to his scandalous first marriage; in the film's most notable scene, the two beautifully-attired stars kissed as Marian's white fur shoulder drape dropped to the ground - causing them to arrive late at a party; when he ran for governor, she had to change her name to Mrs. Moreland and pose as a rich divorcee for respectability's sake ("Well, it's a harmless way to make your position a little more pleasant"), while Mark was advised to drop her; as an "honest woman" expressing her love and noble sentiment for Mark so that his political career wouldn't be jeopardized, she told him that she had used him, and was going to marry Al - she expressed how her low-status ("common, smelling of sweat and glue") was a hindrance, and that she would return to the "level that I came from"; by film's end, Mark realized her devotion to him (and vowed to be with her forever) after she publically confessed (at his election rally) in an impassioned speech that her love for him was real, but that she had walked out of his life so that he could effectively serve the people

Public Enemy (1931)

Released before the Code was strictly enforced, this seminal gangster film portrayed the lead anti-hero character Tom Powers (James Cagney) as a sexually magnetic, cocky, completely amoral, emotionally brutal, ruthless, and terribly lethal individual - a two-fisted bootlegger; he was successful in materialistic ways, acquiring notoriety, power, wealth, and dames, including flashy and glamorous but mysteriously cool blonde Gwen Allen (Jean Harlow); while wearing expensive clothes in her apartment at The Congress Hotel, she told him in a steamy and seductive love scene, to the tune of I Surrender Dear on the radio, why she was attracted to him, as she cradled his head to her breasts: "Oh, my bashful boy. You are different, Tommy, very different. And I've discovered it isn't only a difference in manner and outward appearances, it's a difference in basic character. The men I know, and I've known dozens of them, oh, they're so nice, so polished, so considerate. Most women like that type. I guess they're afraid of the other kind. I thought I was, too. But you're so strong. You don't give. You take. Oh, Tommy, I could love you to death"; its most famous scene, however, was the startling misogynistic grapefruit-in-the-face scene earlier with moll girlfriend Kitty (Mae Clarke) - crudely transforming all previous norms; when he came to the breakfast table in a grouchy and irritable mood, he asked: "Ain't you got a drink in the house?" and when rebuffed with her reply: "Well, not before breakfast, dear", he felt insulted: "I didn't ask you for any lip. I asked you if you had a drink"; then after she told him: "I know, Tom, but I-I wish that...," he became even more grouchy: "There you go with that wishin' stuff again. I wish you was a wishing well, so that I could tie a bucket to ya and sink ya"; she provoked him with: "Maybe you've found someone you like better," causing him to impulsively pick up a grapefruit half from his plate and contemptuously push it into her face to end their relationship; the studio added this cautionary yet ineffective postscript to punish the anti-hero's transgressions: "The end of Tom Powers is the end of every hoodlum...."

The Smiling Lieutenant (1931)

This early, pre-Code Ernst Lubitsch musical set in Vienna, about a love triangle, provided an apres-sex breakfast scene on an outdoor terrace between Maurice Chevalier (as Niki, an officer in the Royal Guard) and Claudette Colbert (as violinist and bandleader Franzi) when they sang "Breakfast Table Love" - preceded by a scene of their amorous intentions the night before (in which the couple hungrily exchanged double entendres) - the scene faded to black (for an off-screen night of love-making) after he convinced Franzi to stay for the night through breakfast (he told her: "Don't make me wait 24 hours. I'm so hungry...Why not breakfast tomorrow morning?" although she vainly replied: "First tea, and then dinner, and then we'll see, maybe breakfast"); in the film's final scene, after the Lieutenant had married the sexually-repressed Princess Anna (Miriam Hopkins) and Franzi had given her a lesson on wearing modern lingerie and fashions ("You listen to me, you foolish little thing. If you don't watch out, some day a girl will come along and take him away from you..." and then played on the piano instructions on: "Jazz up your lingerie!" before they burned her old-fashioned underwear and clothing), the randy Lieutenant sang suggestively toward the film audience before he closed his bedroom door; he signified his saved marriage and renewed love-making interest for the Princess (singing "I must report for duty right away") after he tossed their checkboard onto the bed, signaling that he would rather be in bed with her than just playing a board game (a substitute for marital sex)

Strangers May Kiss (1931)

In this pre-Code MGM melodrama, free-spirited modern woman Lisbeth Corbin (Norma Shearer) was jilted by her lover, foreign correspondent Alan Harlow (Neil Hamilton) who disclosed he had a wife in Paris while in Mexico with her; when he left for China on a job assignment and they broke up, she engaged in short-term, promiscuous love affairs with men all over Europe, and told her good-natured, platonic friend Steve (Robert Montgomery): "I'm no longer the good woman in your life, Steve... I'm in an orgy, wallowing, and I love it"; in Spain, he had heard rumors of her loose and immoral ways in Paris, to which she replied: "And, of course, like a true knight, you refused to believe it?" - with his answer: "Well, the first six or seven hundred times I did"; she endangered her prospects of engagement/marriage to Alan, her true love, when he returned after divorcing his wife, but then learned of her promiscuous indiscretions (it was rumored that "she changes her men with her lingerie, that girl"); although the film ended happily (unbelievably), it was changed from the plot of the original Ursula Parrot novel upon which it was adapted by John Meehan, with Lisbeth committing suicide after years of waiting in vain

Tabu: A Story of the South Seas (1931)

F.W. Murnau's lush tale (documentary-style drama) of ill-fated (star-crossed a la Romeo and Juliet style) native South Seas love and island life (and the breaking of a sacred tabu) included a sequence of girls swimming partly naked, and of flower-garlanded, bare-breasted native dancers

Many other films followed in the wake of Murnau's Tabu in this popular and lucrative 'bare native' film sub-genre - there were a number of exotic Bali pictures released as exploitation films in the early-to-mid-30s, such as Balinese Love (1931), Goona Goona (1932) (aka Kriss), Isle of Paradise (1932), Virgins of Bali (Land of Love and Romance) (1932), Wajan (1933), and Legong: Dance of the Virgins (1935).

Betty Boop's Bamboo Isle (1932)

The character of Betty Boop was one of the few animated characters that was portrayed sexually; normally, she wore a strapless, thigh-high gown (and visible garter) and was based on a combination of flapper icon Clara Bow's 'It' Girl, Mae West's curvaceous figure, and popular Broadway star and 'Boop Boop A Doop Girl' Helen Kane; in this 1932 animation, the provocative, adult-oriented, cartoon vamp-character introduced 'sex' into animated films; she displayed a bit of breast with her hula outfit (a simple grass skirt and floral lei) and performed a sexy hula in this pre-code animation.

She also had her dress blow up in another animated short; unfortunately, the cute, titillating 'boop-oop-a-doop' Betty was destined to be censored with the advent of the enforceable, conservative and puritanical Hays Production Code in 1934 that required her to be more fully dressed, and she would soon disappear from the screen altogether

Bird of Paradise (1932)

Blonde Venus (1932)

This film was the most outlandish of the Dietrich/von Sternberg pictures, and a prime example of a film's script that was forced to be revised three times before production because of its alleged 'ridicule' of the sanctity of marriage; in the first scene, Helen Faraday (Marlene Dietrich) skinny-dipped with other playful women - her nudity teasingly obscured by tree branches when spied upon; Ned's (Herbert Marshall) glimpse of her led to their marriage and a son named Johnny (Dickie Moore); after an adulterous affair and engagement to playboy millionaire Nick Townsend (Cary Grant), she would have to suffer the consequences as a 'fallen woman' - which meant the loss of a glamorous career as a cabaret singer on the stage in Paris to become a prostitute in New Orleans to pay for her impoverished, ailing husband's radium poisoning treatments

The film was highlighted by her bizarre gorilla-suited "Hot Voodoo" number, to the beat of an African drum, in which she first took off her gorilla head and suit to reveal herself, and then sang the throaty song wearing a blonde Afro wig while surrounded by archetypal 'black' dancers -- the song's lyrics included: "...That African tempo has made me a slave, hot voodoo - dance of sin, hot voodoo, worse than gin, I'd follow a cave man right into his cave"

Call Her Savage (1932)

The Dentist (1932)

Faithless (1932)

Freaks (1932)

Frisco Jenny (1932)

Grand Hotel (1932)

Night After Night (1932)

Polly Tix in Washington (1932)
and
War Babies (1932)

Red Dust (1932)