History of Sex in Cinema:
The Greatest and Most Influential
Sexual Films and Scenes
(Illustrated)
Part 5
|
|
History of Sex in Cinema: Part 5 |
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:
|
|
Greatest and Most Influential Erotic / Sexual Films and Scenes (chronological order, by film title) - Part 5 Intro | Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 | Part 13 | Part 14 | Part 15 | Part 16 | Part 17 | Part 18 | Part 19 | Part 20 | Part 21 | Part 22 | Part 23 | Part 24 | Part 25 | Part 26 | Part 27 | Part 28 | Part 29 | Part 30 | Part 31 | Part 32 | Part 33 | Part 34 | Part 35 | Part 36 | Part 37 | Part 38 | Part 39 | Part 40 | Part 41 | Part 42 | Part 43 | Part 44 | Part 45 | Part 46 | Part 47 | Part 48 | Part 49 | Part 50 | Part 51 | Part 52 | Part 53 | Part 54 | Part 55 |
||
|
Movie Title |
Brief Scene Description |
Example |
|
Red Headed Woman (1932) |
This huge pre-Hays Code box-office hit starred sexy Jean Harlow as unrepentant, promiscuous, red-headed golddigger Lil "Red" Andrews (she challenged with: "So gentlemen prefer blondes, do they?"); she was a calculating, man-baiting, morally-questionable, flirtatious, shameless 'bad girl,' bed-hopper and "dirty little home-wrecker" who traded her physical charms to get up the business and social ladders; the film was considered lurid and sensational because its content included marital infidelity, lots of implicit sex and promiscuity, violence, and sadism; in the opening scene, she asked about her dress: "Can you see through this?" - and after being told yes, she replied: "I'll wear it", and soon after bragged: "When I kiss 'em, they stay kissed for a long time"; in another scene after she had been face-smacked by married lover William 'Bill'/'Willie' Legendre Jr. (Chester Morris), she snapped back: "Ah, do it again, I like it, do it again!" and then forced a kiss on the outraged suitor; after gaining his sympathy by sobbing (with her breasts heaving) and being put on her bed in her locked apartment, she hid the key in her blouse - as he approached and the film faded to black; the film outraged moral purists and sped the enforcement of the Production Code only a few years later for the fact that she wrecked her rich boss' marriage by marrying him, and then shot him during a quarrel, and for its final sequence in which "Red" was again a few years later fleecing another rich old sugar daddy at the race track -- complete with a chauffeured limo driven by her lover Albert (Charles Boyer) - without any recrimination or punishment for her open sexuality |
    
|
| In 1932, this film was one of the boldest, most potent, raw and violently-brutal gangster-crime films ever made - its release was delayed for two years due to director Howard Hawks' and co-producer Howard Hughes' squabbles with industry censors over its sensationalism and glorification of the gangster menace; the film was heralded as an example of the kind of protection the Hollywood Production Code of Ethics could provide to the movie-going public when implemented in 1934, although it contained muted hints of an incestuous attachment between the title character (Paul Muni) and his sister Cesca (Ann Dvorak) - when he expressed extreme jealousy over her dating of other fellas; in the film's final shootout scene, Cesca expressed her oneness with her brother: "...you're me and I'm you. It's always been that way"; this film's sub-themes supposedly went uncontested - possibly, because some the most obvious references to incest were removed by Hawks himself |
 
|
|
| This was the fourth of the seven Dietrich/von Sternberg films together, with Dietrich starring as "coaster" Shanghai Lily on a train hurtling through war-torn China - she is a woman of easy virtue known for saying to ex-lover army surgeon, Captain Donald "Doc" Harvey (Clive Brook): "It took more than one man to change my name to Shanghai Lily" after she changed her name from Magdalen |
|
|
|
The Sign of the Cross (1932) |
Cecil B. DeMille's spectacular, pre-censorship epic displayed Rome's sins and depravities (homosexuality, orgies, nudity, and murder) in multiple ways and scenes; debauched Emperor Nero's (Charles Laughton in his first American film) wicked mistress Empress Poppaea (Claudette Colbert) bathed unabashedly in asses’ milk with her breasts bobbing on the surface, and there was an attempted corruptive seduction scene of virginal, blonde Christian Mercia (Elissa Landi) by temptress Ancaria (Joyzelle Joyner) during a lesbian-tinged dance of the "Naked Moon" that visibly aroused its audience; using a religious plot line, DeMille was able to film erotic scenes of semi-naked women condemned to slaughter in the Arena - including one rope-stretched female victim awaiting hissing crocodiles, and another flower-garlanded-tied nude female Christian martyr awaiting a devouring death in a Roman arena from a menacing silverback gorilla; the film's most decadent and debauched moments were cut by censoring boards, and deleted for the film's re-release in 1944, but then reinstated in the mid-90s video version |
  
|
|
The first Tarzan talkie starred Olympic swimmer Johnny Weissmuller as the 'ape man' Tarzan; it also featured Maureen O'Sullivan as lovely English girl Jane Parker who arrived in Africa for a dangerous expedition with her father (C. Aubrey Smith); in one of her earliest scenes before meeting Tarzan, she changed down to a revealing slip, and cleansed her face while looking in a mirror with cold cream to "preserve that schoolgirl complexion"; after being kidnapped by Tarzan and sleeping overnight in a tree (and supposedly enjoying sex with him), she got to know him (with their famous "Tarzan...Jane" dialogue), and she joined Tarzan for a swim in very brief attire; she flirted with him as he swam with her, dunked her again and again, and tried to coax him to return her to the bank; she also engaged him in a suggestively intimate and flirtatious scene, in which she caught herself: "I don't think you'd better look at me like that?...Far too attractive...I love saying things to a man who can't understand, who doesn't even know what kisses are?"; it was remade in a nude version with Bo Derek in 1981 |
    
|
|
Three on a Match (1932)
|
Director Mervyn LeRoy teamed with First National Pictures for this incisive melodrama, with themes of frigidity, adultery, alcoholism, child abuse, drug use, kidnapping, and violence; it told about three women who met as public school students (middle school) and reunited as adult friends ten years later ("to dish the dirt"): ex-reform school attendee and blonde show entertainer Mary Keaton/Bernard (Joan Blondell), smart business college grad and stenographer Ruth Wescott (Bette Davis), and beautiful wealthily-married mother Vivian Revere/Kirkwood (Ann Dvorak) to lawyer Robert Kirkwood (Warren William); the film's title was based upon a superstition that it was unlucky to light cigarettes from a single match ("Three on a Match Means One Will Die Soon"), especially for Vivian; dissatisfied and unhappy with her rich married life (it was implied that she had turned frigid with her husband), she told him: "I just seem fed up with everything...Everything depresses me, even this house," so she proposed going away for a much-needed break on an ocean cruise with her young 3 year old son Robert, Junior; she quickly became acquainted with sweet-talking gambler Michael Loftus (Lyle Talbot) onboard before the ship sailed who flattered her with attention: "I can tell you're a real woman. Not one of those stuffed brassieres you see on Park Avenue. Why, you've got all the works that make a woman want to go and live and love...You don't know what life is...Don't turn your back on life. Take it. Take it while you can" - she was convinced to leave the ship, run away with him before the ship left the port for Europe, and desert her husband (headlines read: "RICH MOTHER AND CHILD DISAPPEAR FROM LINER - Docking of Ship at Cherbourg Reveals Mystery"); she resorted to a life of boozing, partying and neglect of her child, while taking a phony name (Mrs. Killroy) and living in the ritzy Warwick Hotel in New York City; after her husband was told the whereabouts of Vivian and Junior by a concerned Mary, he took the boy home, sought a divorce from Vivian, and married show girl Mary; Vivian turned up destitute and desperate (and was presumably using cocaine - she wiped her nose tellingly), having spent everything she had, and an indebted Loftus found himself owing $2,000 to unscrupulous gangsters, so he attempted to blackmail Mr. Kirkwood over Mary's past (a conviction of grand larceny), but then decided to kidnap the young five and a half year-old boy with a ransom demand of $25,000; drug-addicted Vivian ultimately redeemed herself through suicidal self-sacrifice, when she alerted the authorities to her whereabouts with her kidnapped son where they were both being held prisoner by gangsters (they threatened to have Loftus kill the boy "in cold blood"), by scrawling a message in lipstick on her nightgown ("KIRKWOOD BOY 4TH FLOOR") and jumping out of a locked fourth-floor apartment window to her death |
        
|
| This produced/directed Ernst Lubitsch film, about a pair of sophisticated Parisian thieves (played exquisitely by Herbert Marshall as Gaston and Miriam Hopkins as Lily), opened with a scene in which sex and success in robbery were equated during a romantic, erotic dinner between the two; the pair's polite and quick-witted, but seductive game/duel of dinner-table pickpocketing and mutual theft stretched on further, as they declared their love for each other while returning precious purloined objects. Their obviously unmarried association was fueled by illicitly-acquired possessions that served as an aphrodisiac during foreplay, and the erotic attraction between the two criminal soul-mates heated up considerably - and led them to recline on the couch where he professed his love: ("I love you. I loved you the moment I saw you. I'm mad about you - my little shoplifter. My sweet little pickpocket, my darling") - the scene ended when the couple's images slowly dissolved, and magically vanished and disappeared, leaving an empty sofa in the twilight; the room's light was switched off, and a sign was hung on the door: "Do Not Disturb" - this was something that wouldn't happen in films after 1934 |
 
|
|
|
Baby Face (1933) |
Barbara Stanwyck starred in this lurid, potent "fallen woman" pre-Code melodramatic Warner Bros. film as Lily "Baby Face" Powers - a saloon bar-maid in a steel mill factory town (Erie, PA) who suffered a brutal upbringing in a speakeasy as "the sweetheart of the nightshift" who was continually pawed by drunks; in one startling scene, Lily's breasts were groped from behind by sleazy and corrupt local politician Ed Sipple (Arthur Hohl) and she retaliated by smashing a beer bottle over his head - one example of how her abusive bootlegging father (Robert Barrat) prostituted her to perform sexual favors; one of the film's censored lines delivered to her angered father (in italics) was explicit: "Yeah! I'm the tramp and who's to blame? My father! A swell start you gave me! Ever since I was 14, what's it been?! Nothing but men! Dirty rotten men, and you're lower than any of 'em. I'll hate you as long as I live"; after her father's death, she vengefully used the principles of Nietzche's Will to Power, told to her by cranky local cobbler Cragg (Alphonse Ethier), and moved to New York after sweet-talking a railyard brakeman (James Murray) and offering him sex to get free train fare (after a sly and seductive grin at him with this come-on: "now why don't we sit down and talk this thing over" - the workman's gloves came off before he dimmed his lantern in the boxcar); in the city, she used her provocative charms and feminine allure to land a job: (chubby Personnel officer Mr. Pratt (Maynard Holmes): "Have you had any experience?" Lily (rolling her eyes): "Plenty"); she became a carnal, calculating gold-digger, and literally seduced - and then discarded many male victims (including rejecting a young John Wayne as lowly office worker Jimmy McCoy Jr.) as she slept her way to the top (literally) of a banking corporation, the Gotham Trust Company, by going from floor to floor - the camera panned up the side of the building to illustrate her ascent; in one scene, she slipped through a door marked "Ladies Rest Room" for a squalid encounter with Mortgage Dept. boss Brody (Douglas Dumbrille); she eventually married the bank president Courtland Trenholm (George Brent) on the top penthouse level; the "pre-release" version of the film faced Production Code censorship challenges almost immediately that demanded four minutes of cuts, and Warner Brothers had to make numerous changes for the theatrical version by reshooting several scenes and adding new ones, and re-dubbing or changing dialogue (especially the scenes with the cobbler quoting Nietzche: "Exploit yourself. Be strong, defiant. Use men to get the things you want" was changed to "A woman, young beautiful like you are, could get anything she wants in the world, but there is a right and a wrong way. Remember the price of the wrong way is too great"); one censored line about seduction was delivered by Brody to Lily: "Stick around after 5", and another line between secretaries implied adultery: "You'd never think he had a wife and three kids"; the earlier version of the film had an ambiguous ending regarding the outcome of Trenholm's suicide attempt, but the theatrical ending (tacked-on, preachy and phony) included punishment of the protagonists and a conclusion in which Lily learned her lesson -- but the film still retained its sensational nature and offended some critics and conservative audiences |
    
|
|
The Barbarian (1933) |
This racy, pre-code, inter-racial romantic adventure MGM film (with a script by liberated screenwriter Anita Loos) starred Myrna Loy as American Diana 'Di' Standing who was vacationing in Egypt and attracting the attention of young Egyptian guide Jamil El Shehab (Ramon Novarro); it was noted for Loy's topless lounge-in-the-bathtub scene, although the actress later admitted in her autobiography that she was wearing a flesh-tinted body suit |
|
Bosko's Picture Show (1933)
|
Even animated shorts would often need to be censored, as was the case with this Looney Tunes Bosko cartoon, the last one produced by Hugh Harman/Rudolf Ising for Warner Bros/Leon Schlesinger Productions; the short 7-minute film was about Bosko hosting a theatrical stage show and sing-a-long while playing a "mighty Furtilizer organ"; in the conclusion, Bosko stood up on his bench and shouted out angrily: "The dirty f--k!", in response to a darkly-dressed, mustached, stereotypical villain named Dirty Dalton who was riding his bicycle to capture Bosko's girlfriend Honey, seen in a projected burlesque melodrama; Bosko proposed to save her from the dastardly cur; the offending phrase was changed to "The dirty cur!", and dubbed as "Stop, you cur!", and in some video versions captioned as "The dirty fox!" |  
|
Convention City (1933)
|
This First National/Warner Bros. pre-Code comedy film by director Archie Mayo was a casualty of the era - destroyed or lost unfortunately, after being censored for its objectionable, sleazy story and lewdness that displayed rampant drunkenness and adultery, implied bestiality (with a goat), and statutory rape; it starred Mary Astor as Arlene Dale, Guy Kibbee as small-town businessman George Ellerbe with an ill-fitting toupee, bosomy Joan Blondell as good-time "hostess" Nancy Lorraine, Dick Powell as young salesman Jerry Ford, and Adolphe Menjou as CEO Ted Kent, and told about unhappily-married, out-of-town conventioneers - the sales force of the Honeywell Rubber Company - pursuing extra-marital affairs and inebriation during their stay in Atlantic City, NJ | 
|
|
Design for Living (1933) |
Director Ernst Lubitsch's suggestive romantic sex comedy was based on Noel Coward's intelligent play about a sexy menage a trois among British upper-class bohemians; this film, released only six months before the Production Code began to be enforced, portrayed a young blonde, free-spirited 'modern woman' playgirl - a ravishing designer named Gilda Farrell (Miriam Hopkins), who was in love and in an unorthodox relationship with two Americans while sharing a bohemian apartment in Paris: struggling playwright Thomas Chambers (Fredric March) and undiscovered painter George Curtis (Gary Cooper); because of its risky and unacceptable subject matter and sexual interplay for its time (although completely toned down and handled with Lubitsch's brand of innuendo, sophistication and subtlety), it was forbidden for re-release or re-make for its 'gross travesty of marriage' in the film's second half |
|
|
|
This Czechoslovakian romantic drama by Czech filmmaker Gustav Machaty was once notorious, earth-shattering and scandalous - it told about a sexually-frustrated child-bride named Eva Hermann (19 year old Hedwig Kiesler, or later known as Hollywood glamour queen Hedy Lamarr) with an elderly, impotent, uncaring newly-wed husband named Emile (Zvonimir Rogoz); it was censored for Eva's nude bathing swim, naked forest romp through the trees to pursue her horse Loni (which had run off with her clothes), and love-making scene with virile engineer Adam (Aribert Mog) who helped retrieve the horse; it was the first theatrically-released film (non-pornographic) in which the sex act was depicted (although off-screen); it was unusual at its time for depicting obvious female sexual pleasure (ecstasy) during orgasm (simulated) from the effects of oral sex; the film was, arguably, the first to depict female orgasm on-screen; the orgasmic expressions were evident on Eva's face - caused by the director poking her with a safety pin; the film was confiscated by the Treasury Department (US Customs) when it was imported into the US - the first film to be blocked for censorship purposes |
   
|
|
Employees' Entrance (1933) |
Advertising copy for this audacious, Roy Del Ruth-directed Warner Bros' film about sexual harrassment proclaimed: "See what happens in department store aisles and offices after closing hours! Girls who couldn't have been touched with a 100-ft yacht -- ready to do anything to get a job!"; Warren Williams starred as Kurt Anderson, a ruthless, amoral, cut-throat scoundrel and the workaholic fanatical head of the Depression-Era Franklin Monroe & Co., the world's largest department store, with his own credo: "smash or be smashed"; he was known to seduce and exploit much-younger, naive employees who needed work; in one case, the despicable man was greeted by perky blonde employee Polly Dale (Alice White) that he didn't recognize right away and then remarked: "Oh, it's you. I didn't know you with all your clothes on"; he used her to pimp for him with board members and do his bidding; he also took advantage of homeless Madeleine West (Loretta Young) whom he hired as a sales girl/model - after she slept with him to assure her "career move" - once in his apartment after dinner when he pressured her to stay, and then later in a hotel room during a company office party when he ravished her while she was compliantly drunk; but then he set out later to destroy her relationship - and secret marriage - to top salesman and aspiring subordinate Martin West (Wallace Ford) |
   
|
|
Female (1933) |
In this daring, salacious pre-Code film from First National Pictures and director Michael Curtiz,
Ruth Chatterton - without apology - portrayed (uncharacteristically for
its time) a powerful, sexually-liberated and unrestrained, man-hungry female - a Drake Motor Car Company plant executive
named Alison Drake; she had no time for romance or love, since she had adopted a "hard and cynical" gender-role reversal for her own life: "It takes too much time and energy. To me, a woman in love is a pathetic spectacle. She's either so miserable she wants to die or she's so happy you want to die...You know a long time ago, I decided to travel the same open road that men travel, so I treat men exactly the way they've always treated women"; she admitted to married visiting friend Harriet Brown (Lois Wilson): "Oh, I see lots of men, but I've never found a real one"; she
used her handsome young male secretaries for leisurely one-night stand pleasures
and seduction at her lavish house (with servants serving vodka "to fortify their courage" and having them serenaded by organ music); during one seduction of new male employee George Cooper (Johnny Mack Brown), she asked him: "Are you naturally enthusiastic?" as she suggestively flung a pillow onto a couch and told him that she didn't want to be "entirely mental all the time" - she leaned back on the floor and asked: "You're not scared of me now, are you?"; in the mornings, she would work before breakfast at her home in a modified desk-bed; she regularly discarded male secretaries who began to show romantic feelings for her - for example, she told Mr. Briggs (Gavin Gordon) after he vowed that he loved her: "I'm a busy woman. I can't be annoyed with jealous or moody men about me," and transferred "sentimental" rejects like him to the Montreal office, with their transportation arranged by her older fatherly-male assistant Pettigrew (Ferdinand Gottschalk); frustrated by her many male secretaries, the no-nonsense Alison vowed semi-seriously: "From now on, I'll have nothing but women secretaries," although men she liked received a bonus added to their salaries; she was known to her employees as "Miss D," and by Pettigrew as a "superwoman" who thought: "She's the only honest woman I've ever met. There's nothing of the hypocrite about Miss D...Why, she's never met a man yet that's worthy of her. And she never will!"; she was ruthless in her business practices, and other married women feared her, cautioning at a party she hosted: "Better watch your husband"; this film explored a major role reversal of typical stereotypes, and the
dilemma professional women still face - the choice between career and
marriage; when she met "irresistible" pipe-smoking engineer Jim Thorne (George Brent) at a night-time shooting gallery and enjoyed hamburgers with him, she was surprised when he bluntly told her: "I don't take pickups home with me" - and then was further shocked that he was working at her factory the next day with a two year contract; after inviting him to her house for dinner, he wanted to talk about his designs, although she was "thinking about something else" - presumably sex with him; unlike her other secretaries, he was unaffected by the vodka and avoided her predatory traps, exasperating her: "Must you talk about automobiles?"; he straight-out told her when she flung a pillow onto the floor and invited him to sit by her: "I was engaged as an engineer, not as a gigolo, and I'm not holding my job by humoring any little whims of yours"; in order to win him over, Miss D. started to see Thorne as a strong and "dominant male" who preferred "gentle and feminine" women who would look up to him, so she decided to "strive to please" by becoming more submissive, gentle, and loving with him; her strategy worked -- he kissed her at a picnic, and the scene ended with a fade-to-black, signifying they had sex together; the day after when he proposed marriage in order to be "decent," she accused him of being "old-fashioned"; he argued back as he tore up the marriage license that he had brought with him: "Is it old-fashioned to want to be decent?...I suppose you think you're too superior for marriage and love and children, the things that women were born for. Say, who do you think you are? Are you so drunk with your own importance that you can make your own rules? Well, you're a fake! You've been playing this part so long you've begun to believe it. The great superwoman...You and your new freedom. Why, if you weren't so pathetic, you'd be funny"; remarkably in a drastic reversal, she soon capitulated to Thorne's assertion that women were born for "marriage and love and children" - as one of her executives had earlier predicted: "One of these days, she'll meet a man that will knock her right on her rear"; emotionally distraught, she broke down in a board of directors meeting, telling them that the job was too much for her: "This is no place for a woman. I know, I've always thought I was different. I've always tried to beat life the way men beat it, but I can't. I can't..." - and then pursued Thorne on the road, finding him at an outdoor carnival's shooting gallery; she confessed: "I can't go on without you. I'm not playing a part. I'm not a superwoman...Take me wherever you're going. I'll marry you, if you still want me to"; as the film ended, he was accompanying her to obtain loans from bankers in New York to save the business, and she gave up the leadership of the automotive factory to him, while expressing her hopes of raising nine children; once the Code went into effect in mid-1934, Joseph Breen placed
this film on his "no re-release" list, and the film was unseen
until the 1950s |
       
|
Flying Down to Rio (1933) |
This south of the border musical-dance film marked the first pairing between Fred Astaire (as Fred Ayres) and Ginger Rogers (as Honey Hale) as supporting performers; since it was a pre-Code uncensored film, it featured lots of see-through dresses, skirts and blouses, especially in the large-scale and racy Carioca dance sequences, and in the memorable Flying Down to Rio number atop bi-plane wings, in which skimpily-attired chorus girls performed wing-dancing and other stunts (the sequence was filmed in an airplane hangar with wind machines and a few planes hanging from the ceiling - enhanced with backdrops of Rio and Malibu Beach); even Ginger Rogers wore a fairly-transparent dress while singing "Music Makes Me"; the film also featured risque dialogue - early on in the film, one of the blonde chorus girls who was jealous of flirtatiously-successful Brazilian Dolores Del Rio (as Belinha DeRezende), asked: "What have these South Americans got below the equator that we haven't?"; in addition, the hotel manager character Hammerstein played by Franklin Pangborn was decidedly gay and played up the "sissy" elements of his role; in addition, the film was historically notable -- Dolores Del Rio was the first major star to wear a two-piece women's bathing suit onscreen (a brief scene showed a two-piece bathing "sun-suit" being modeled on a beach in Three on a Match (1932) a year earlier) |       Three on a Match (1932) |
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