1. Screen Sexuality: Flesh, Feathers, and Fantasies

JOHN BAXTER

NО ART so blatantly offers sexual satisfaction to its audiences, requires its performers to fulfill so precisely the public’s communal fantasies, or possesses in such abundance the tools to achieve its aims as does the cinema. With their physical advantages over the other arts for involving the audience emotionally and sensorially the movies can cater to private fantasies in a way the stage seldom approaches, while their accessibility to a mass audience creates a two-way traffic in myths and sensibilities which has allowed filmmakers to perfect their understanding of these fantasies and develop methods of catering to them. One checks one’s inhibitions at the movie theater box office as completely as one discards a raincoat. Stripped of large parts of its sensorium by the controlled atmosphere, reduced light, and characterless smell of the building, the mind is doubly responsive to the physiological sedative of the flickering screen. Candy and soft drinks further lull the sense of taste, and the ubiquitous plush reduces tactile values. Sinking into the warm and limpid fluid of our subconscious, we fall easy victims to our unexpressed desires—creatures over which the filmmakers have a precise and detailed control. As we seldom are in our beds, we are in the movies able totally to exercise our sexual imagination, our senses uncluttered by the necessity to relate psychologically or physically to a partner or to our environment.

In our search for sensual fulfillment, we are aided by a community of performers unsurpassed in their drive to satisfy; the screen actor’s need for our appreciation is equalled only by our own hunger. In Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s All About Eve, the ruthless young Eve Harrington justifies her absorption in success with an almost messianic statement of an actor’s aims which for most honest performers must stand as a credo. At its conclusion, she sums up with the ultimate seduction of the stage: “If there’s nothing else, there’s applause—like waves of love coming over the footlights and wrapping you up. Imagine to know every night that different hundreds of people love you.” Love is an aptly chosen word; it evokes the sexuality implicit in any public performance, an act which must, by its very reliance on submission to a communal will, place performers in a quasisexual relationship to their watchers. Though far from unique to actors—countertenors wryly describe the reaction of concert audiences to their high falsetto singing; at the first note, all eyes automatically drop to the crotch, returning to the face only after they have established that the singer is indeed male—the response reaches its peak among movie stars. Tom Stoppard perfectly isolates it in Rosencrantz and Cuildenstern Are Dead; abasing himself before the passing pair of travellers, the leader of a peripatetic acting troupe advertises a compendium of performances ranging from the loftily artistic to the pornographic. “We can do you ghosts and battles, on the skirmish level, heroes, villains, tormented lovers . . . we can do you rapiers or rape, or both, by all means, faithless wives and ravished virgins—flagrante delicto at a price, but that comes under realism for which there are special terms. Getting warm, am I?” All the variations of sexual experience are offered as his troupe’s price for the only reward it values, an audience. “We’re actors” he justifies blandly. “We’re the opposite of people.”

Considering the opportunities offered by the conditions of movie-going and the enthusiasm of its performers, the cinema has made only fitful attempts to exploit this potential. Actors more than anxious to reveal themselves for the approval of an audience have often been asked to expose their bodies but seldom their sensibilities, so that the most vivid sexual symbols of our time, their attraction emphasized by advertising and publicity which underline their availability as partners in sexual fantasies, generally appear to us on the screen obscured by trivialities of plot and blatant falsifications of personality. Having established in the star system one of the most potent methods of guiding each member of the audience to a particular ideal, a character on whom one could rely in every film for a precisely measured and identical effect, the American popular cinema hampered its own efforts by offering audiences purely physical titillation. In battling with censors for the right to expose slightly more skin or express sexual desires in marginally more explicit dialogue or plot, Hollywood missed the fact that audiences prefer a release offered by means of character. When films succeed erotically, it is generally because purely cinematic means have achieved an effect at which dialogue can only strain. The erotic release offered by Gone with the Wind rests almost entirely on the skill of its directors and cinematographers; after Rhett grabs the rebellious Scarlett in his arms and storms up the red plush stairs towards bed and near rape, our expectations are perfectly answered by the next scene when, after a discreet dissolve, Scarlett wakes alone in a sunlit bed cuddled in white linen and stretches with cat-like contentment. As the two scenes emphasize, copulation is an act of color and mobility followed by calmness, relaxation, and ease—even the most explicit depiction of their moments in bed would not have offered us, the audience, any greater satisfaction. In sex, as in comedy, timing is all.

All the more disappointing, then, that so much screen time has been wasted on the merely descriptive at the expense of evocation. The introduction of censorship in the American cinema encouraged producers to expend most of their energy in devising excuses to expose a few further inches of skin or purvey marginally more graphic lines of dialogue; the arguments over whether Rhett should be allowed to say as his last line in Gone with the Wind “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn” often obscures the advances in screen sexuality achieved by the film. Before 1934, Hollywood led Europe in an adult depiction of sexuality. In 1931, Paramount could make a boldly pansexual appeal in its advertising for Morocco by publicizing Marlene Dietrich, already becoming famous for her affectation of male clothes and for her bluntly Lesbian nightclub sequence in Sternberg’s desert melodrama, as “The Woman All Women Want to See.” Sadism and a delight in the corruption of innocence could be precisely conveyed in Ulmer’s The Black Cat with the vicious Boris Karloff sleeping like a Cocteau prince in his veiled bed accompanied by the blonde wife of his arch enemy Bela Lugosi, who returns to flay his enemy alive at the climax in a retribution regarded by filmmakers and audience alike as entirely reasonable. Without exposing more than a soft white throat, Norma Shearer in A Free Soul and Claudette Colbert in Honor Among Lovers displayed all the erotic assurance and sexual pleasure of the emancipated woman, both realistically offering themselves to men they found physically attractive, unconcerned by the inconveniences of marriage or social obloquy.

But the promise faded in the mid-thirties as the censors, in listing specifically the themes, scenes, and often the dialogue producers were not permitted to use, focused Hollywood’s attention on means of defying these restrictions. Advertising now achieved its effects by misdirection, replacing a simple statement of intent with some remarkable falsifications. Since Jean Harlow could no longer display her generous sexuality on the screen—most film stories presenting her as a wisecracking New Yorker with at most a competitive interest in men—MGM sustained the sexual illusion in her advertising, distributing stills in which, clad in a black negligee, she exposed stockinged legs and appreciatively fondled her ample breasts in a masturbatory style that was to become typical of Hollywood publicity. By the forties, no star, however ill-favored, could begin work unless the press had been inundated with publicity shots of her cuddling up to propellers, ship’s wheels, and other phallic objects, just as even the most pigeon-chested actor had to expose his torso to the scrutiny of the world. The gap between advertising and the thing advertised widened as the thirties wore on. Fan magazines followed the trend, shrilly publicizing articles the content of which had little relation to their headlines. “The Story Jean Harlow Never Told” in Photoplay turned out to be a description of how she had contracted conjunctivitis from working under hot lights and was forced to wear dark glasses for some months, and so circumspect was Motion Picture about the open secret of Ronald Colman’s affair with Benita Hume that it was not until after their marriage in 1938 that an article remarked that they had occupied adjoining Benedict Canyon houses for some years, adding coyly, “In the shared fence there is a gate ... its hinges are not rusty.״

Locked in a competition with the censors on the issue of female nudity, Hollywood ignored almost entirely the cinema’s countless erotic possibilities. In fact, the necessity to dilute sexual scenes both psychologically and photographically had the reverse effect of making the occasional achievements almost entirely unerotic. Jane Wyatt’s naked dive into the pool in Capra’s Lost Horizon and the visually rich opening of Sternberg’s Blonde Venus, with naked female bodies surging under the surface of a lake, are so softened by the necessity to avoid censorable nipples and pubic hair that they entirely miss their effect. Just as the bleak disinterest of a stripteaser’s expression can cancel out entirely the appeal of her act, so the very skill lavished on the construction of a nude scene disperses its erotic appeal, a point brought home in the less professional pornographic films, often exciting in direct proportion to the gaucherie of their performers, and occasionally in the commercial cinema; a rare example is Roger Corman’s Teenage Caveman, where a nude bathing scene by minor—indeed, one might say non— actress Darrah Marshall is done with such obvious embarrassment that a shop- worn cliche’of popular cinema becomes momentarily believable, a sharp contrast to similar scenes in the period’s jungle films, where the meticulous obscuring of the stars’ bodies in their obligatory bathing scenes is as stylized as the passes of a matador, though considerably less erotic.

The new liberalism of the sixties brought home to filmmakers the longdelayed realization that, though nudity can be exciting to a film audience, it is not what the cinema does best. The filmgoer, rendered a voyeur by the very nature of the medium, prefers the unguarded and the suggestive to the explicit. Filling the screen with naked flesh, they soon realized, offered as little satisfaction as filling one’s bed with women or men; and on stage, Hair, Oh Calcutta, and the resultant explosion of sexual extravaganzas proved conclusively that, on the contrary, mass nudity often resulted in a de-eroticizing of the material. The field was open for a return to the less specific, a re-opening of that dialogue with the audience’s subconscious which had been so stimulating a feature of the early sound cinema; but, paradoxically, the filmmakers turned not to these proved methods but to a further extension of the illustrative sex characteristic of the censor-fearing thirties.

Turning its back on the visual, screen sex became almost entirely literary, exploiting the stage’s new freedom of dialogue by transferring intact many of the other medium’s usages, moving further from visual evocation into a schematised symbology. The most widely publicized erotic moment of early sixties cinema was a scene in Tony Richardson’s Tom Jones where Albert Finney and Joyce Redman munch their way lasciviously through a full meal from oysters to roast before clambering into bed. Critics praised Richardson’s “indirection,” missing the fact that, like the stony text of volumes on “The Nude In Art,” it described an erotic moment without evoking its eroticism. In The Thomas Crown Affair Norman Jewison had Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway repeat the same situation—and he himself the same mistake—in a symbolic chess game, all wet lips, heavy breathing, and phallic bishops. The accepted arbiter of taste in their word-ridden field was Ingmar Bergman, whose aptly-dubbed “outspoken” attitude to sex under- lined the absorption with description. His films of the fifties and sixties offer little nudity, but his characters agonize constantly about the burden of sex, the deception of the flesh. Such a form served Bergman’s dour temperament, and his films do reflect an aspect of sexual need. But it was the formalized sexuality of early films like Waiting Women which the Europeans admired; its wryly visual depiction of a seduction, in which the man passes through a half-open door a glass of wine, a letter, a provocative figurine, and finally himself, precisely echoes the literary mode of the time. Unfortunately, the most perfect of Bergman’s statements on this theme, the rich and bitter Persona with its interlocking erotic obsessions and the stark but stimulating scene in which Bibi Andersson describes in pornographic detail a beach orgy with a girlfriend and two young boys, had no imitators in the English-speaking film. Dialogue and literary symbolism were acceptable only as long as they obscured sexual need rather than expressed it.

The worst products of the American erotic film have a bleakness which seems to reflect self-disgust, a hostility directed not only at the sex act but at the necessity to consider any human values. While pretending to cater to an audience, many films merely exploit it like pornographers, sharing the pornographer’s contempt for his “marks.” To paraphrase a comparison between farce and comedy, “Pornography is heartless; eroticism sees all, knows all, understands all.” (And to continue the comparison with humor, erotic film of today, which is to say erotic film at its least inspired, is more often on the level of the elaborately plotted dirty joke than the wry wit of Porter or Coward.)

This attitude had its gestation in the late forties, a cynical period which formed many modern movie preoccupations. It was characteristic of the time that the movies should have given more space and understanding to deviation than to conventional eroticism. While married couples could not, according to the dictates of the Breen office, be seen in the same bed together, sexual sadism had one of its most potent expressions in Henry Hathaway’s Kiss of Death, with a psychopathic Richard Widmark who leers, “Girls are no good if you wanna have some fun;” cheerfully pushes old ladies downstairs and harries the helpless Victor Mature, surely chosen for this role because of his feminine features and full, trembling mouth. Cornel Wilde in Joseph H. Lewis’s The Big Combo and Dana Andrews in Laura exposed a self-destructive obsession with unattainable and, in the latter case, apparently dead women in a way that one still could not do with a conventional girl next door. In Don Siegel’s The Line Up, the killer Dancer could say with remarkable directness, “People of your kind, you don’t understand the criminal’s need for violence,” while the problems of adolescence had no more meaningful examination than musicals like She’s Working Her Way Through College.

One director stands out in this period for his attention to and skill in the combination of eroticism with, if not conventional, at least believable personalities. King Vidor’s characters are never ordinary—few people of the late forties’ cinema were that—but one could accept their motivations as expansions rather than perversions of the real. Architect Howard Roark in The Fountainhead, Ruby in Ruby Gentry, Rosa Moline in Beyond of the Forest and Pearl Chavez in Duel in the Sun struggle with emotions that are larger than life rather than alien to it, and since Vidor almost always provides entirely sexual resolutions for their conflicts in his films of the late forties and early fifties, they sing with a dark sense of the flesh and its needs. There is a sense of tragic inevitability in the fate of Pearl and Lewt in Duel in the Sun and Ruby and Jim in Ruby Gentry; their final duels to the death, both ending with the woman cradling the corpse of her murdered lover, seem ininitely more acceptable than the wild fantasies of Douglas Sirk which were to dominate the fifties, films like Written on the Wind, in which no character seems to behave according to even vaguely acceptable motivations but rather in response to a harrying sense of destiny, while the relationship of Roark and Dominique in The Fountainhead can scarcely be bettered in its depiction of sexual need. This is filmmaking out of the blood, flesh and desire, not abstractions. Vidor conceives the relationship between Gary Cooper and Patricia Neal as entirely carnal—significantly, they fell wildly in love during the production, a fact which he clearly exploited—and the conflict between two assertive, greedy people achieves a unique electricity. Scene after scene plays on our appreciation of their lust; reviewing the workers in a quarry, Dominique strides along the lip of a cliff, skirt flaring against the white sky as Roark, arms knotted against the shuddering of a jackhammer, drives it into the leaning slope of the stone. Arriving at a penthouse party, she enters without that inevitable female prop, a handbag, her empty hands telegraphing a masculine confidence and willingness to grapple with her adversaries. Vidor may be extravagant, even on occasions laughable in his essentially silent movie sensibility, but deep feeling and a respect for human needs underlies his best work of the forties and early fifties in a way which makes him unique.

For the rest, sexual matters were discussed almost entirely schematically and categorized according to their use of certain pat and totally unreal themes; should a couple Do It Before They Are Married; or a woman Tell Her Husband All? Is it better to Marry For Money Or For Love?—the same terminology as the fan magazines and the romances, and with as little relationship between the overt themes and their treatment in films. The summation of this trend, and the sixties’ greatest hit, is Mike Nichols’s The Graduate, whose hero Ben Braddock wanders through life isolated from all sensuality; drifting through an airport corridor under the titles to the tune of “The Sounds of Silence,” a hymn to noninvolvement, clumping glumly across the floor of a swimming pool in a wet suit, alone with the sounds of his own body, floating on the same pool, sundazed and asleep, even coupling desultorily with his girlfriend’s mother, he impinges only partially on the world of feeling people. When finally he does erupt into this world, it is with a brief, agonized cry at being deprived of the woman he wants, and when this infantile outburst of emotion has its effect, Ben descends again into the amniotic soup of his own featureless mind. For all its sense of the flesh The Graduate is finally antierotic, anti-sex, anti-life.

The sexual heroes and heroines of recent American movie history are a grotesque group, the females either androgynous wisecrackers like Judy Garland, her massive homosexual following attesting to the ambivalence of her attraction, or grotesques like Marilyn Monroe, a pulpy parody of femininity personifying the soft-porn ideal of the рте-Playboy world. Tom Ewell’s blushing appraisal of her (unseen, of course) nude photograph in The Seven Year Itch and his resulting sexual fantasies, all reminiscent of the whisky and cologne advertisements later to provide the plush girlie magazines with their working capital, stands as an apt encapsulation of a period in which talking and joking about sex was as far as the movies cared to go. Its men too have little relation to real life; Dean and Brando, shy, soft, and pouting, imitated by such manufactured teenage idols as Troy Donahue and countless boy-next-door pop stars. Loveless love and sexless sex grappie in a maze of issues to which neither was relevant.

Eroticism on the screen does not, and can never reside either in themes or in documentary realism, but rather in a use of the shared fantasies evolved over decades by a collusion between filmmakers and audience. It is not true, as some critics claim in mitigation of the failure of some films to achieve their intended erotic effect, that sex is purely subjective, that what may excite one person will leave another cold, though movies which attempt to bludgeon or reason the audience into excitement are bound for the most part to appeal only to a small section of those who see them. Erotic effects, like those of comedy, can be calculated, if the filmmaker has a shrewd and mature understanding of the materials with which he is working and of the myths out of which he achieves his effects.

There are three ways in which the greatest directors of erotic films have exploited the opportunities of the cinema for sexual excitement. All trade on the involvement of the audience and the suspension of disbelief, but never cynically or merely to manipulate its response. Like comedy, screen sexuality demands from filmmakers a readiness to expose themselves in return for the satisfaction of pleasing an audience. Directors are no different from actors in their willingness to turn out their souls at the request of their public, but unlike the actor, a filmmaker has the higher responsibility of retaining a sense of proportion. Stoppard’s actors in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead wildly offer everything in return for applause; the director and screenwriter must curb this response in themselves and their performers in order to ensure fidelity to psychological realities or, on a mundane level, to the work as a whole. Above all, good erotic film demands compassion from those who make it, and an acknowledgement of shared experience common to both audience and artist.

Paradoxically, the work of the most erotic filmmakers is not always sensual; the greatest test of a director’s understanding of and respect for the sex urge is whether he makes films out of it rather than about it. “Deepest feeling always shows itself in silence,” says Marianne Moore; “not in silence, but restraint.” Though not primarily an eroticist, David Lean has a precise and compassionate understanding of sex in all its forms, not merely its outward manifestations, though on occasion he can produce sequences which reveal sexual desire and satisfaction at their most blatant and exciting. Sarah Miles’s coupling with her lover in the forest in Ryans Daughter plays dazzlingly on our common experience of sex, the flickering flare of light through the trees perfectly echoing the gathering pleasure of orgasm in a way that no amount of choreographic grinding could have achieved. Lean’s real genius, however, shows in his ability to introduce the sexual element into nonerotic scenes; Omar Sharif has revealed that, in directing him in the scene in Doctor Zhivago where he watches Cossacks sabre-charge a political demonstration, Lean told him to imagine that he was making love to a woman and trying desperately to delay his climax as long as possible. The whole scene was then taken merely on Sharif’s face, creating an effect of mingled desperation and perverse excitement that lifted what could have been a mundane set-piece of violence onto another level.

Few American directors have the humanity to show sex as a force related to life rather than its sole point, and those that do generally regard it with a dispassionate, often mocking eye. Alfred Hitchcock, the most precise of Hollywood directors in his observation of sexual behavior— Mamie, Vertigo and Psycho are almost alone among American films in having stories based entirely in sexual be- havior and erotic need—is bitter and self-hating in his work, betraying a revulsion for any such unseemly display of human feeling. His characters posture ridiculously like microbes on a slide while his microscopic camera, as at the opening of Psycho, moves inexorably towards their most private and exposed moments; Janet Leigh relaxing in bed with her lover or Anthony Perkins glued to his peephole watching her undress are united as victims of Hitchcock’s lens. Cold blondes obsess Hitchcock, and he loves to explore the erotic attraction of their ice-maidenly appeal, as striking, he has said, “as blood on snow.” Eva Marie Saint, Tippi Hedren, and particularly Kim Novak sail coldly through his films, dragging their helpless men behind them like scavengers desperate for some morsel of affection. In common with the most heartless work of Vadim, Corman, and other fifties filmmakers with an interest in the erotic, Hitchcock’s characters often reveal themselves as worshippers of the emotionally and, on such occasions as in Vertigo, the physically dead. His work has the heartlessness of farce—we are victims of a cruel and inhuman intellect who sees our feelings as absurd and our posturings as ludicrous.

It has been left to European directors, mainly the French, to explore sexual behavior with some respect, even without the presence of affection and without relying on titillation, though the publicity surrounding their attempts to depict sexuality with at least a vestige of realism has often distorted their work by overemphasizing the aspects which seem to English-speaking audiences most shocking. Louis Malle’s Les Amants (The Lovers) galvanized the world in 1958 with its much publicized scenes of Jeanne Moreau and Jean-Marc Bory sharing a bath, a sequence whose eroticism was underlined because the couple were casual lovers in the first heat of a relationship which lasts only until the next morning when Moreau, liberated by the experience, abandons both bourgeois husband and louche lover to set out on her own voyage of self-discovery. In the furor, few critics mentioned the remarkable range of eroticism covered by Malle; the bath is more a companionable romp than an example of sexuality, and though the film does have its explicit moments the variety achieved by Malle makes it a primer of screen sex. The camera becomes an observer, lingering with frank interest on their first coupling as the boy’s head moves over her shadowed body, allowing it to disappear from the frame when its goal can be a secret to no viewer; only then does it return to the woman’s enraptured face and the hand fallen with open palm on the bed, a potent symbol of complete surrender. As if to mock the conventions of bedroom sex and nudity, Malle takes his lovers into the garden for the film’s most sensual moment, a gliding journey through the moonlit garden with the camera floating languorously around their glowing figures as they discover the delight of mutual attraction.

In this and later films like Le Souffle au Coeur (Murmur of the Heart), Malle draws a clear distinction between eroticism and sexual behavior, a skill other French directors share. Eric Rohmer’s characters in Le Genou de Claire (Clare’s Knee), Ma Nuit chez Maud, La Collectionneuse and L’Amour en L’Après-midi (Chloé in the Afternoon), men and women alike, pursue sexual satisfaction with a single-mindedness that precludes human contact, and end up with little to show for it but the golden ring of the achieved end. Almost Hitchcockian in his control, Rohmer discards erotic effects in favor of more pointed observation of behavior. In La Collectionneuse, the young man surprises a casual girl friend in the throes of sex, but instead of lingering on the coupling pair Rohmer shares the character’s embarrassment by retiring after one discreet glance. Zouzou’s attempt to seduce her upright and happily married friend in Chloé in the Afternoon is regarded with a similar detachment, reflecting the hero’s clinical disinterest in her body. These are, as Rohmer has stressed, “Moral tales,” in which a cautionary point takes precedence over entertainment, but it is characteristic of his work that he offers the lesson without mocking his characters or their needs. Eroticism knows all, understands all. . . .

Of all French filmmakers, perhaps Jean Renoir has shown the most elegant and understanding appreciation of human sexual foibles, managing to combine, as few other directors have done, both the erotic and the psychologically perceptive. The moment in his American film The Southerner when sharecropper Zachary Scott shares a cigarette with his wife Betty Field as they relax in bed at the end of a hard day has the instinctive respect for a moment of common affection and physical ease which the work of native American filmmakers never achieves, while in his delightful fragment Partie de Campagne (A Day in the Country) the seduction by two slick city men of a buxom woman and her nervous virgin daughter is observed with all the psychological insight of Rohmer, combined with a sensuality at which most directors merely strain. The girl’s brief struggle and dazed surrender under the willows remains touching no matter how aware one becomes on sustained viewing of Renoir’s technique, and the moral point of the film’s conclusion when the two lovers, both now married, meet embarrassedly some years later on the same spot, is no less effective for the sympathy that Renoir shows for them all, even the girl’s loutish husband, an unimaginative city boy dominated since childhood by environment and his elders.

Most modern French directors, in contrast, have adopted a Hitchcockian detachment rather than a Renoiresque respect; François Truffaut in particular regards sexual foibles with contempt, notably in La Nuit Américaine (Day for Night) where his film crew characters screw with all the emotionalism of rabbits. The coldest and most Hitchcockian moment in Truffaut’s work is that of Le Peau Douce (The Soft Skin), where Françoise Dorleac, enjoying a “dirty weekend” with her middle-aged lover at a country resort, plays precisely on his sexual tastes as a means of revealing her superiority over him. “Do you see that one over there,” she says, pointing to a slightly overdressed woman chatting to a friend; “Women who wear leopard skin like to do it,” and smiles thinly to see the revelation fan his jaded lust. It is a moment of truth made all the more unpleasant for its lack of feeling.

Erotic film need not rely entirely on the balance of psychological insight and shared experience shown by Renoir; the commercial film remains tied to the patterns of mythology which it must exploit or fail at the box office. But there are areas in which imaginative directors can expand their technique to achieve new erotic effects. The most tawdry films can often be the most sexually exciting, and the least likely relationships can produce remarkable erotic tensions. The movies have few more sensual moments than those in Jack Arnold’s Creature From the Black Lagoon where the heroine’s white-clad body attracts the attention of the gill-man lurking on the floor of the mysterious lagoon. As she swims unconcernedly on the surface, the monster becomes a demon lover twisting beneath her on a parallel path, imitating her explicitly seductive motions in a stylized representation of sexual intercourse until excitement drives him to rise and clutch at her fluttering legs.

Occasionally, the electricity of a particular film or series of films can depend entirely on a unique relationship between an often indifferent director and star. Without the participation of his then-wife Brigitte Bardot—and sometimes when she withheld something of herself from the films they did together, as in Les Bijoutiers de Clair de Lune (Heaven Fell That Night)—Roger Vadim produced mediocre films, as did Bardot when she worked with other directors, but in collaboration their exploitation of the erotic possibilities of film was masterly. Vadim is at best a decorator with a feel for surfaces. His worst films have the unreal slick- ness of TV commercials, their lush flock wallpapers and greasily slick walls dissipating all atmosphere, all eroticism. In La Curée (The Game Is Over), the couplings between Peter McEnery and Jane Fonda, reflected in a flexing plastic wall to the accompaniment of biliously twanging Indian music, seem a funhouse parody of sex, while even with its Gothic imagery and inspired Jean Prodromides score, his vampire film Et Mourir de Plaisir (Blood and Roses), starring yet another of his wives, Annette Stroyberg, is at its most hilarious in an inserted dream sequence of naked bodies and red rubber gloves where Vadim is trying to be his sexiest. With Bardot, however, some shared lust communicated itself to the audience, and throughout Et Dieu Créa La Femme (And God Created Woman), and Le Repos de Guerrier (Warrior’s Rest) one has the sense of eavesdropping on a personal obsession.

The Vadim/Bardot films illustrate the second, and perhaps most readily acceptable aspect of successful screen eroticism, the use of a wider sensorium. Sex does not lie entirely, nor even partially, in simple description, but in an evocation of mood. Vadim sensed the erotic potential of certain simple effects and used them in all his films. Perhaps the most powerful was the juxtaposition of white cloth with a tanned body. From Bardot’s first famous appearance, in Et Dieu Créa La Femme sunbathing naked on a Riviera patio amid drying sheets, Vadim knew he was on to a good thing and used it both in this film and later. Bardot wanders down to interrupt the wedding party dressed only in a sheet, and in Le Repos de Guerrier she captivates her lover by displaying herself provocatively against the same white linen. The trick was a minor one and was used to equal effect by Louis Verneuil in Une Parisienne with Bardot, but its disproportionate success illustrates the impact which can be achieved by a director and star with even the slightest intuition concerning their own natures and those of the audience.

Fabric in its aural and tactile as well as its visual nature can be powerfully erotic. One thinks of the electric crackle with which Bette Davis undoes a taffeta bow while seducing Richard Barthelmess in Cabin in the Cotton (an effect richly, almost comically sustained by her husky singing of “Minnie the Moaner” and calm cornpone comment “I’d kiss yah but ah jes׳ washed mah hair”) and of Lola Albright’s stripteaser in Cold Wind in August slipping into a whispering silk blouse before setting out to seduce young Scott Marlowe. In Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Rouben Mamoulian plays on the same contrasts in the bedroom confrontation between Fredric March and Miriam Hopkins, where her plump leg swings negligently from under the bedclothes and her frilly underwear contrasts with Dr. Jekyll’s elegant full-dress suit. All these movies show a heightened response to the possibilities of materials and a polished sense of shared erotic experience.

During the late fifties, tactile values assumed increased importance, particularly in the Asian cinema, whose photographers pioneered a new interest in textures. Sand on the naked body seemed in particular to interest them, and Woman of the Dunes achieved its greatest moments in the closeups of a woman washing from her lover’s skin the grains of sand which speckled it. Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima Mon Amour exploited the same effect in its opening love scene, in which the bodies of Emmanuelle Riva and Eiji Okada—later to star in Woman of the Dunes —were covered with sliding sand to accentuate, as Bunuel had done with ants in L’Age D’Or, the skittering of nerves beneath the surface, and to provide in Resnais’s case a chilling transition to the blistered skin of atom bomb victims. This explicitly erotic use of texture contrasts hilariously with the “beach party” films then enjoying a vogue in America; their teenage stars, notably Annette Funicello, Sandra Dee, and Jimmy Darren, leaped athletically about the sands of California with never a grain clinging to their pneumatic bodies and taut costumes. This dry, sexless environment, with its preoccupation with relationships, offered no purchase for the few flecks of sand which might have given these rubbery bodies an erotic life or their characters a believable sexuality.

Psychological fidelity and the exploitation of the full panoply of our senses are two vital tools in the full exploration of sex on the screen. But the most important of the techniques available to erotic filmmakers is also the most complex and generally requires a total understanding of both its predecessors for full effect. Sexual symbolism has been misused so often in the film with its excessively literary obsession with metaphor that its deepest and most significant form has fallen into disrepute. It is easy for us to smile at a broad simile like Hitchcock’s recurrent use of a train plunging into a tunnel to indicate sexual intercourse, but it is less simple to appreciate, as Freud and particularly Jung revealed, that certain subconscious archetypes carry the seeds of man’s deepest erotic emotions and that the language of dreams rather than that of the body is the best means of exploring these preoccupations. Elliptical, often confusing, this symbology is our surest insight into the subconscious, a fact that a few filmmakers have discovered and exploited. Used in isolation, it can be as cloying or barbaric as a piece of music written entirely for brass: the films of Ken Russell, a director with a deep and instinctive appreciation of such symbology, are cases in point. Few films of recent years have explored sexuality more effectively than Women in Love, and its best images—the corpses of two lovers curled naked in the mud of a drained lake; the clash of flesh in the nude wrestling match between Gerald and Birkin, echoed by a delirious free fall of the latter towards his mistress in a wheat field; notably Gudrun’s lascivious dance to the cattle and final swooning collapse at Gerald’s feet—are dazzling exercises in erotic symbolism. But frequently the dream Ianguage is not wedded to compassion for or understanding of the characters, and their excesses became for some viewers exhausting and intolerable.

Erotic film reaches its peak when an intimate understanding of sexual symbology is combined with the use of a wider sensorium and a compassionate appreciation of character; the result is best expressed in the words of Fellini’s Duke de Villalonga in Juliet of the Spirits as he offers Juliet a glass of sangria: “They say it takes away all thirsts from those who drink it—even that thirst which is never acknowledged.” Only a few filmmakers have reached this peak. Fellini himself, even at his best, seldom achieves this sense of the unexpressed, though the ambiance of Juliet and notably Sandra Milo’s nude glide into her bath boudoir come close. By far the most important master of screen sexuality is Josef von Sternberg, whose films outdistance in every respect the efforts of other Hollywood directors. Partly through chance, a little through good judgment, Sternberg brought together under his control the richest assortment of ingredients ever offered to a director of erotic film. Through his relationship to and absorption with Marlene Dietrich, he had a subject on which he could lavish all his directorial and photographic skill, while Paramount, during the thirties a company preoccupied with the perfection of visual technique through effects of photography and decor, provided a perfect experimental laboratory. His best work also precedes the days of Breen office influence, and though he did encounter trouble with Blonde Venus in 1932 —in a huffy memo rejecting his first script, the censor commented that Paramount more than any other studio seemed preoccupied with sexual exploitation—he was able in Morocco and Shanghai Express to achieve erotic effects never attempted elsewhere. But the ace in Sternberg’s pack was his instinctive knowledge and understanding of sexual symbolism and of the archetypes psychologists had iso- lated as expressing man’s dreams of sex. In common with Bunuel, whose relationship with the surrealists provides a direct link to the work of Jung, Sternberg grasped that connection between certain animals, objects, and personae and the evoking of our deepest erotic emotions.

For Sternberg, the bird, one of Jung’s most potent sexual archetypes, a creature in whose connotations of flight and physiological comparison to male and female genitalia much of the unacknowledged language of reproduction is encapsulated, became a lifetime preoccupation. He called Dietrich “my bird of paradise” and dressed her always in feathers, plumes, and boas. His films abound in all manner of birds, used both for decoration and with precise symbolic effect; imperial eagles spread their wings and dip their phallic necks over the Russian court of The Scarlet Empress and dominate both the Roman senate in I Claudius and the courtroom in Blond Venus. Doves coo in her home in the latter film, and in The Devil Is a Woman caged birds aptly symbolize her capture of the besotted Lionel Atwill. No film more effectively displays the remarkable synthesis of all these elements than Shanghai Express, Sternberg’s greatest work and one which explores every avenue of screen sexuality. Shanghai Lily’s black plumes decorate her costume and serve Sternberg’s need to evoke the bird comparison, but they are also used to dazzling effect in suggesting the constant motion of the train on which the film is set; brushed by a draught, shaken by the carriage’s slight undulation, they are in constant stirring movement.

Shanghai Express has no subject but sex, and all its confrontations between Shanghai Lily and her old lover Doc Harvey, played with willowy disdain by Clive Brook, revolve around their mutual desire less for love, which both have left far behind as a preoccupation of the trivial-minded, but for immolation, a total mutual devouring of one another. Their best scenes are barbed adagios of painful memory; chatting on the observation deck of the speeding train, Lily and Doc review their parting and the desolation which followed. Opening his watch, Doc displays the photograph he has always carried of her, a face half-drowned with sex, blind with desire, and though she responds passionately to his advances, allowing herself to be kissed as, in a brilliantly placed insert, Sternberg shows the train capturing a message from a hook placed by the track, her flip disregard for his appeals keeps her totally in control. “Wouldn’t you have changed anything, Madeleine?” he begs as they discuss the empty years since their parting, and she remarks tartly, “I wouldn’t have bobbed my hair.”

Shanghai Lily is the ultimate sexual heroine, the woman of such self-contained feelings and personal insight that, for all her understanding of and love for Harvey, she can always remain in control of her own emotions. Her attraction to both men and women is eternal and immutable; no director can hope to achieve again so archetypal a character, and no film so sexually potent a scene as that in which Lily and Doc make their peace. Strolling along the corridor of the speeding train in her black negligee, Lily slips into Doc’s compartment and begs a light for her cigarette. Her relaxation has a fatigue that is hauntingly like the aftermath of sex, and though nothing is said, desire is as palpable as the tendrils of smoke in the still air. Reluctantly, agonizingly, Doc yields a half-statement of belief in her explanation of the events that divide them, a symbolic surrender to her stronger will, and she returns to her room. Leaning against the door, she drags on the cigarette, and the camera moves in to show a shocking tremor of her body and hands, a sign perhaps of the train’s motion but equally of her own excitement, or distress. The exhaled smoke flares before her face, she looks up into the light—triumphant, fulfilled, alone. In this sequence, Sternberg and the cinema come to the heart of our sexual needs, revealing our natures to ourselves in a way which carries the movies to the peaks of art. At such moments it is possible to feel that the price of contempt and derision demanded by the screen in return for a fleeting insight is not too high to pay.