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

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)

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

Scarface (1932)

Shanghai Express (1932)

The Sign of the Cross (1932)

Tarzan, the Ape Man (1932)

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

Trouble in Paradise (1932)