Sex in the Cinema

You call it “the cinema.” I called it “the movies.” It was where I went every Saturday afternoon, holding my kid brother by the hand, carrying a paper bag full of lunch since it was a full program, which meant a “thriller–the short episode of a cliffhanger,” two features and a drawing. We were given a number when we bought our ticket (ten cents), and one of us was lucky enough to choose from a great pile of toys or dishes (that California pottery cheap stuff which is now collectible). And sex was the motivation because on Saturday afternoons, in our lower-middle-class workingman’s world, it was Saturday that parents sent kids to the movies to have a little wink-wink privacy.

Just to establish my credentials, I was already a regular movie-watcher-with-a-passion when I saw Clark Gable turn on his villainous captain in Mutiny on the Bounty (1935) and set sail for parts unknown with his native lover.

And when I say “lover,” it was definitely “parts unknown” because sex in the ’30s and ’40s, my adolescent years, was all imagination and inference, and as an “antique” movie-goer, I am qualified to say that sex with “parts unknown” was a lot sexier than today’s obligatory sex scene where the lovers, she of the perfect dimensions, globes of silicone breasts, smooth thighs, and he, buff, muscled, thick hair-on-the-head and hairless chest, carefully covering anything foridden to the code with a leg-over, hump methodically while she throws back her head and does the orgasmic thing. I loved the scene in When Harry Met Sally where she fakes the orgasm because today’s obligatory scene wouldn’t move anyone older than a pimpled 12-year-old pre-adolescent boy.

So let me start this discussion of “sex in the cinema” with the sexiest movie of my 16th year. I mean, earlier I had been tittilated by Tarzan of the Apes (1932) (Johnny Weissmuller) standing almost naked on the branch of a great tree, wearing only this little flap of animal skin covering his “something” because, in my day, in my unsophisticated Depression-Post Depression world, none of us knew what that “something” was. But we knew it was there, and when he swung from tree to tree, you could almost see it. Wow. Turn-on.

But in my 16th year, when sex in books was red-lined and kept in glass cases in the library and you needed a permit to read, we sat back in the darkened theater and saw Paul Henreid fall madly in love with “spinster” Bette Davis, Now Voyager(1941)–I mean madly. He couldn’t take his eyes from her, and she finds out that he’s married to a bitch of a wife–cold, unfeeling, a rotten mother who’s been neglecting her plain-Jane daughter, but of course he can never leave the bitchy wife because they are “married” and he is “obligated” since he is a man of honor, so Bette can stare into his eyes and he can profess love for her, and to prove her love, she will selflessly care for his daughter, but nothing will go farther. And she will be an “old maid” yearning for him. But in that final scene, oh we waited for that one scene, he looks at her with those yearning eyes, takes two cigarettes from his case, puts two of them in his mouth and lights them! And he takes one, which has his spit on it, and puts it in Bette’s mouth! His spitty cigarette in her chaste mouth! That was the most sexual exchange of fluids in my early adolescence. It touched your heart and your groin.

So I’ll launch this column (and hope it will be an exchange as you tell me your experiences with “sex in the cinema”) by saying that, in my opinion, sex in 2004 might be more explicit than sex in 1946, but it’s lost it’s power to move the heart…if you accept now in 2004 that heart and groin are still connected.

In Streetcar Named Desire (1951), Marlon Brando moved toward his sister-in-law with intention to rape–you know his intentions by the fact that he was wearing pajamas and his wife wasn’t there–and you heart-thumped through wild, mad, brutal sex with nothing but inference and the power of his performance. Which is what I’ll use as my opening argument, and you can let me know how you feel about it. Marlon Brando, in Last Tango in Paris (1973), (in which his explicit doo-doo sex is more shocking than sexual) at least used sex to play to the theme.

So let’s talk “Sex in the Cinema” from the ’30s to the now.