The Unique Eroticism of the Opening Hotel Scene

Mentioning La Dolce Vita (1960) for showing a pretty tawdry existence for its main character led me to rewatch its ending which (simplest interpretation) provides Mastroianni's character with a vision of an angelic young girl who represents a purer life that's he's lost or that is no longer open to him. That scene is up on youtube (in a beautiful 720p version) and worth watching:
https://youtu.be/pIkFea5aO1g
It's striking that many of the great films from 1960 end (either the last shot or the second to last shot) with a character looking directly into the camera ('breaking the 4th wall'): at least Psycho, Breathless, La Dolce Vita, Les Bonnes Femmes. And The 400 Blows from 1959 contains probably the most famous 'looking directly into camera' final shot of all.

Greater intimacy of the actor with the camera, thereby confronting the audience more, seems to me to be part of film growing up around 1960 almost as much as greater sexual frankness was.

A very nice analysis. Thanks!

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Thanks for reading. I'm over on a thread or two enjoying my Arbogast musings(must mean something), I figured I should check in on another part of this famous movie.

Funny, how little we linger on the shower scene around here. It is what it is, I guess, so great and famous and yet nasty that its hard to "get into it" on paper.

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I think you are right that around 1960 there is a sense of barely restrained eroticism 'in the air' across the world of cinema and maybe across the western world generally: 'sexuality's busting loose' is a background message of a lot of movies around this time

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Everything would seem to indicate it. What's clear in my readings(and your presentations below) is that the European film makers had the freedom to express early and directly on sexual matters, and Hollywood filmmakers were going berserk(well, some of them were) on the lingering church-based constraints of the Hays Code.

I suppose we cannot take too lightly the power of "the church" (in all its types) on movies in those days. In addition to the Hayes code and MPAA hurdles, Hollywood filmmakers had a Catholic Code that would "condemn" movies(thus forbidding church goers to see them.) "Psycho" somehow missed the "condemned" category , as I recall, but ended up with "some parts morally objectionable for all."

No matter. Sex was in the air, the European films were already there, repression was ending. People wanted to have FUN.

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(on pain of driving people literally insane if you try to contain/deny it any longer, see, e.g., Splendor in the Grass (1961)).

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THAT aspect of the sex drive is very interesting(particularly as expressed in this film as being with the young woman), and a few films covered it. I recall how directly frank the opening kissing sequence in Splendor in the Grass was, with the waterfalls in the background.

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which no one ever forgets, and the other, Les Cousins, has its main female character spend half the film sunbathing just in panties like so:
https://vaguevisages.com/juliette-mayniel-les-cousins-2/
More famously, the main couple in Hiroshima Mon Amour spend about half the movie lounging around in bed, pre- and post-coital.

Then go to 1960. La Dolce Vita isn't explicit but leaves you in no doubt that Marcello Mastroianni's character is enjoying a life of sex parties and multiple partners.

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Your "Cook's Tour" of European erotic filmmaking, narrative and imagery, certainly makes the case for why Hollywood directors of a certain stripe were going nuts wanting to join in. Why, they were like Natalie Wood in Splendor in the Grass.

There was little Hollywood could do in response, but they tried. We've got Otto Preminger's Anatomy of a Murder with a trial using "clinical" approaches to sex -- discussions of rape and penetration and "spermatazgenation" or some such term, and of course, a snickering crowd laughing at the word "panties." Its all very frank and yet too clinical and heavy-handed to be very erotic.

Hitchcock had Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint exchange extremely frank banter on that train -- the fantasy lies in how quickly Saint offers herself up for sex in her train compartment. There's no skin, but it was the best Hitchcock could do at the time, and I guess it worked pretty well.

One year later, there's more skin and intimacy in the Psycho opening scene, but even there, Hitchcock chose to push the nibbling/kissing business that was his trademark.

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Peeping Tom has images like the following:
http://tinyurl.com/y7mcdx45
which is an ominous counterpart to Sam standing over Marion - the alternative Psycho-noir where the out-of-town person who meets you in a hotel for sex (or sex-photographs) kills you.

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I've never seen Peeping Tom all the way through. Is that shot in the movie? If so...isn't that a little historic, too?

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Its funny to me how Hitchcock never really got the eroticism of the scene in Psycho going again. Tippi and Rod get one brief kiss in The Birds. Tippi is too frigid for much fun in Marnie -- though an extreme close-up of Sean's lips locking down on Tippi's is pretty sexy in a dominating, sad way. Hitchcock came closest to the Psycho tryst scene with Paul and Julie, but Julie didn't show any skin and the couple seemed mismatched. A planned topless love scene in Topaz was scrapped so we get some good kissing scenes and that's it.

Came the seventies, Frenzy famously has rape as its "love scene" but we get that later bit of business in which while Blaney and Babs consensually go to bed, Hitchcock decides to skip the whole session(perhaps "eschewing the cliché") and instead gives us Babs after-the-fact nude walk to the bathroom. Very British kitchen sink cinema, you ask me. (And its not Anna Massey.)

And then we have Family Plot, where each couple speaks often of the sex they're going to have, but we never see a bit of it. We don't even see their beds. Perhaps Bruce Dern wasn't made for sex scenes. I do like how the film informs us that Barbara Harris is sex-crazed and Dern tells her he is "too pooped to pop," and how William Devane and Karen Black intimate to us in the audience that their sex life includes some S/M, maybe. Which tracks with their villainy.

But its funny about Family Plot: its like Hitchcock threw in the towel on sexuality altogether. Barely any kissing, no love scenes, some direct talk about sex, that's it.