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

Baby Face (1933)

The Barbarian (1933)

Bosko's Picture Show (1933)

Convention City (1933)

Design for Living (1933)

Ecstasy (1933, Czech) (aka Ekstase or Extase)

Employees' Entrance (1933)

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)

Footlight Parade (1933)

For the five years before the Hays Production Code of 1934 went into effect, Busby Berkeley featured barely-clad bathing beauty starlets (clothed to appear naked) in his extravagant productions; especially in this film, he was able to display the female form through kaleidoscopic abstract designs, many with legs wide open or body parts seen in close-up; teasing, gold-digging, scantily-clad smiling chorus girls and views of dressing rooms were also featured in other Warner Bros.' and Busby Berkeley musicals of the same time period, including Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933), 42nd Street (1933) and Dames (1934); this film had the racy and naughty "By A Waterfall" sequence with dozens of legs of floating swimmers being unzipped and zipped; in the "Honeymoon Hotel" sequence, married (?) couples (all named Smith), along with honeymooners Dick Powell and Ruby Keeler, had to put up with a lecherous baby (Billy Barty) who almost shared their wedding night - a segment that was heavily edited by censors

Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933)

I'm No Angel (1933)

This was large-breasted Mae West's next film after She Done Him Wrong (1933) and featured more of the same - smart, sexy and snappy dialogue, one-liners, and double entendres; in the film's opening on the midway on a raised catwalk, she paraded past a crowd of leering men in a sexy gown and purred to the spectators: "A penny for your thoughts. Got the idea boys. You follow me?"; she also said in the course of the film: "When I'm good, I'm very good, but when I'm bad, I'm better" - and "Well, It's not the men in your life that counts, it's the life in your men"; she portrayed a floozy lady lion tamer and carnival queen named Tira who made it big on Broadway and hustled men out of their money; while on the phone with millionaire leading man Jack Clayton (Cary Grant, reuniting with West in their second film together), she advised him, coyly: "Hey, you'd better come up and see me" in one of the film's oft-misquoted lines; West's films single-handedly saved Paramount Studios from financial ruin, although they brought intense criticism from the Catholic League of Decency

King Kong (1933)

This was the ultimate Beauty and the Beast monster film, extensively censored for its violence; the film's subtext was the introduction of the feminine into a man's world and into uncharted territory, and the release of the primal male beast upon the civilized world (NYC); the film was considered slightly scandalous for its inter-racial 'love story' of a giant black ape with a white blonde woman - their forbidden love resulted in Kong's subsequent punishment - death; sexy screamer Fay Wray (as Ann Darrow) was featured as the object of male affection and of the desires of the giant hairy Beast -- and the Empire State Building was the ultimate phallic symbol from which the beast was toppled; the white blonde woman was regarded as a more valuable virginal substitute for Kong by the natives of Skull Island who regularly sacrificed half-naked, garlanded black virgins (white woman Ann was worth the equivalent of six native women, acc. to the tribal chief); the film even contained sexual double entendres, as in the scene when film-maker Denham (Robert Armstrong) told First Mate Jack Driscoll (Bruce Cabot) that he feared his crewmember had been emasculated and gone "soft" (or impotent) and "sappy" over Ann's Beauty, as the Beast would do later: "It's the idea of my picture. The Beast was a tough guy too. He could lick the world. But when he saw Beauty, she got him. He went soft. He forgot his wisdom and the little fellas licked him"; in addition, the film had some sex-related sequences: (1) a braless Ann went to costume herself for the screaming film-test with Denham, soon returning and wearing a revealing, off-the-shoulder "Beauty and Beast costume", and (2) after being looked at, smelled at, and bathed by the monstrous ape, Ann swam away after plunging off Skull Mountain and lost the top of her dress (in a split second shot); censors did away with other scenes of doomed sailors being eaten by giant spiders, of natives being crushed in Kong's mouth or trampled into mud, of a woman being snatched from her NY apartment's bed (and held upside down over the street and then released after being mistaken for Ann), and the scene of the ape peeling down the blonde beauty's clothing - these were all censored and cut; in the remake King Kong (1976), a curious Kong fondled a topless 'Fay Wray' character (Jessica Lange) - a scene which was re-instated

Ladies They Talk About (1933)

Mary Stevens, M.D. (1933)

Our Betters (1933)

Penthouse (1933)

Queen Christina (1933)

Roman Scandals (1933)

She Done Him Wrong (1933)

The Sin of Nora Moran (1933)

The Story of Temple Drake (1933)

This was a tricky and daring film adaptation of William Faulkner’s notorious 1931 short story Sanctuary that required the re-naming of the film; the plot was about a young, upper-class, pampered, flirtatious and promiscuous 'bad-girl' southern belle named Temple Drake (Miriam Hopkins), the daughter of a Mississippi judge, who was kidnapped and then raped by ruthless, degenerate bootlegger-gangster Trigger (Jack La Rue) in a farmhouse and then taken to the city to serve as a kept woman (not completely unwillingly) in a house of ill repute; the actual rape scene was not explicit - basically communicated by a candle (in the original tale, it was a corncob) approaching Drake's bed followed by a scream and quick fade to black, but the film's taboo subject matter was considered so shocking in its day that it was attacked by the press even before its release; in the film's shocking climax in a courtroom, she finally admitted on the stand that she had killed Trigger; this film was responsible for spurring the rapid passage of the restrictive Production Code

Torch Singer (1933)