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"Psycho" in the New Documentary SKIN The Story of Nudity in the Movies

posted 4 years ago by ecarle (14979)
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So Netflix is running a documentary entitled "SKIN: The Story of Nudity in the Movies."

Well...you can imagine how much fun THAT one is to watch.

Its as hybrid as the topic itself. The film has various "talking heads" and some of them are prestigious indeed. Like Malcolm McDowall. Or Peter Bogdonovich(so ubiquitous to movie docs now.) Or a matronly woman who does the rating for the MPAA.

But some of the talking heads are perhaps less prestigious, if more interesting: the beautiful women who appeared nude in various movies. They are older now and you get a sense of how age leavens everything. Still, some of them still look great(maybe a little plastic surgery here and there.) One of them -- looking older and with plastic surgery -- says something direct about her topless scenes in an 80's teen sex comedy : "I knew then that I was never going to look that good again - so why not preserve it on film forever and ever?"

And THAT's why some people get into the movies.

I ran the three minute trailer for SKIN(as I shall call it) before watching it and there -- right up front -- was the shower scene from Psycho and I thought "well, now I HAVE to look at this, its in accord with my ongoing studies." Hah.

The truth of the matter is that SKIN is very knowledgeable about its topic(nudity in the movies) and quite fascinating in how it plays out. All these "talking heads" and then cuts to -- NOTHING but nudity. The scenes and moments that are usually cut out of documentaries that CAN'T show this R and X rated material are practically ALL you see in SKIN. And it creates an interesting "dulling effect." EVERYBODY's naked in these clips. And it is "equal opportunity." Female nudity(so treasured by boys and men). Male nudity(less treasured by girls and women.) ALL body parts and -- let's face it, "that part" on men remains the most taboo of screen nudity images, the "greatest prize." And SKIN shows us a lot of those. So..equal opportunity.

Yet the movie goes in different directions at times. For instance, Eric Roberts is a talking head. Poor guy - he's Julia Roberts less successful brother but he does have a career. You're wondering why he is IN this and then they reach "Star 80" the movie by Bob Fosse about how Playboy Playmate Dorothy Stratten was horribly killed by her rejected "pimp like" boyfriend Paul Snider(played by...Eric Roberts.)

Roberts discusses how director Bob Fosse made Roberts sleep in the same house where the real Snider killed the real Dorothy Stratten. Fosse and Roberts took separate rooms and slept the night there -- because Fosse DEMANDED it. Then when they filmed the movie, they filmed the murder-suicide in that same house where it happened.

Creepy...and it has NOTHING to do with nudity in the movies. What DOES have to do with nudity in the movies from Star 80 is how the rather boyish and flat-chested Mariel Hemingway(also a talking head in this film) voluntarily got breast implants to play Stratten. No coercion -- Hemingway wanted that role.

And Mariel Hemingway is also interviewed about the nudity in Robert Towne's "sports movie" about female track athletes and their lesbian affairs in "Personal Best." More nudity footage with the interesting angle that when some of these young women go topless...they have the chests of young men. Must mean something.

This documentary is "bookended" -- at the beginning and at the end -- with the proposition that MeToo means that nude scenes (and sex scenes, which the film is less interested in) will never be the same again. Once the idea of sexual harassment is (rightfully) removed from the workplace on nude scenes, you are left by this documentary with a pretty clear idea: the Hays Code right-wing religious zealots who banned nudity from the 30s to the 60's have been replaced with left wing zealots who are banning nudity today if in impacts "the dignity of women." (Men evidently -- not so much?)

Which is OK. In the real world, all the sex and nudity has pretty much defaulted to porn anyway. Maybe someday we will get a nude scene in a Marvel movie but..rating?

Indeed, to me the strongest point made in SKIN is that it was in Hollywood in the 70's (with European films ahead of them and alongside of them)-- with the coming of the 1968 R and X ratings -- that the most important filmmakers and actors and made the most important films in which nudity was a factor. Blow Up(a little ahead of the R rating.) Midnight Cowboy. A Clockwork Orange. The Last Picture Show. Carnal Knowledge.

Came the 80's, this doc seems to say, the nudity moved to teen comedies and coming of age movies. We get Phoebe Cates emerging from the pool in "Fast Times at Ridgemont High"(with commentary by its female director, Amy Heckerling.) We get the immortal Porky's. And we get all manner of teen sex comedies. (In their favor to me: its all sweet, loving, first time and consensual. The rapes of the 70's are gone.)

[–] ecarle (14979) 4 years ago

Like most "history" documentaries, SKIN starts way back when and then moves on , decade by decade.

Thus we get some interesting fuzzy silent footage of nude women in the main, "artists models." This is turn of the century stuff. Next comes the pre-code 20s and 30s in which Hedy Lamarr showed all ("Ecstasy") and a lot of other women inaugurated the famed "hands over the breasts" pose. Add in some footage of Claudette Colbert taking a bath and a key plot point emerges: though a whole lotta breast could be shown up to the Hays Code, and the same in the early 60's...those two inches or so known as "the nipple' are/were the verboten area and are from the R-rating on, the key line of demarcation for women in movies to cross.

Which brings SKIN to ...Psycho. There it is! The truth of the matter is that, given how airtight the Hays Code was about nudity, SKIN pretty much has to leap from the pre-code era TO Psycho to FINALLY get to Hollywood even flirting with nudity again(though Brigitte Bardot and Peeping Tom were already among the movies showing skin in Europe in the 50's and 1960, and we see THOSE clips.)

What's interesting when SKIN reaches Psycho is that the focus isn't on Norman Bates or the house or the twist or the story..its ONLY on that shower scene. And its on the nudity(or lack thereof) in the shower scene. A talking head offers this variant on the usual remark: "The movie that proved the Hays Code was now the walking wounded was..Psycho." For a lot of reasons(we know) but certainly the mix of sex(nudity) AND violence in the shower scene.

[–] ecarle (14979) 4 years ago

SKIN elects to show the shower scene from Mother's approach to the end, while a narrator tells us that "Janet Leigh had a no nudity clause in her contract, so nude model Marli Renfro was used." And for once, that told me something I hadn't really thought about before: though it may be "exploitational" to require an ACTRESS to go nude on the screen..what about the "professional nude model," like Marli Renfro? Hitchcock himself knew the difference, way back in 1959. There were women who did not DO nudity(Janet Leigh), but there were women who DID(nude models like Marli Renfro.) Where are the "MeToo" connotations THERE?

In showing us the shower scene ONLY from Mother's approach to the end, SKIN rather skips over the truly erotic part of the scene: Janet Leigh showering and at once "washing her sins away" while also suggesting all sorts of pleasure and orgasmic release under that shower nozzle. Leigh did that "nude from the shoulders up" -- with her face. Which is a reminder that you don't need nudity to be sexy on the screen. (Interesting though: no mention is made of the nipples on view near the end of the scene -- Marli's. Again with the nipples. Historic.)

Once SKIN leaves Psycho, and before it gets to 1968 and the R rating and beyond, it makes an amusing detour to the "nudie" movies of the early 1960's. Like Russ Meyer's "The Immortal Mr. Teas." And Jayne Mansfield cavorting quite naked in the bath in "Promises, Promises." And Mamie Van Doren(interviewed "today" quite old) remarking on a movie she made called "Three Nuts in Search of a Bolt" in which she took a naked "beer bath." (Hmm..the shower bath scene in Psycho, the beer bath scene in Three Nuts in Search of a Bolt.)

[–] ecarle (14979) 4 years ago

The funny part about that early sixties stuff is: I remember it. I remember "The Immortal Mr. Teas" on the marquee near a US Naval base that served a community where family of mine lived. You'd see sailors on leave in their white uniforms line up down the block for THAT one. And I remember both "Promises, Promises" and "Three Nuts in Search of a Bolt" in terms of their newspaper ads (in the LA Times, probably right next to ads for The Birds and Cleopatra) AND I remember MY parents talking to OTHER parents about those films, often in the "would you please leave the room, we want to talk about adult stuff" way that parents did at that time.

Honestly I didn't even remember "Three Nuts in Search of a Bolt" until this documentary brought it up. Where did it play? Drive-ins? Second run houses? (SKIN also notes that Francis Coppola directed a nudie early in his career, and that the Supreme Court cleared the way for movies about nudist colonies or exercise to allow nudity in.)

Eventually, SKIN leaves that weird 60's netherworld of Jayne Mansfield and Mamie Van Doren nudies and gets to the "important films" that the R rating brought in. There is no time for Frenzy, but we see The Last Picture Show and I'm reminded how even though it was an important Oscar-bait movie, me and my friends went to see it at the drive-in to getta load of all that nudity and sex in the thing(which was presented very much as the desperate activity of bored, lonely people in a nowhere town -- from the adults on down to the teens.) Bodanovich comes on to note that the producers told him Cybill Shepard could only be in the movie if she would do a nude scene and Bodgo told them, "No I'm going to cast her anyway, and we will SEE if she does the nude scene." (She did.)

[–] ecarle (14979) 4 years ago

Irony: Ann-Margret was finally seen as a "serious" actress in Carnal Knowledge(she got a Oscar nom), but that's where she did her first nude scenes. We see them -- and this documentary is knowledgable enough to show her nude scene in "Magic"( a garden variety Psycho knockoff about a ventriloquist played by Anthony Hopkins and his murderous dummy.) Point made: once Oscar convinces you to drop your clothes...you're willing to do it again.

Joe Dante -- who went A-list for Spielberg with Gremlins and Innerspace - - shows up to help guide us through the "Women in Prison" movies of which he directed at least one in the 70's. THERE's some shower scenes for you. Pam Grier talks about those, too -- it was a long way to Jackie Brown.

You can feel SKIN losing steam as it powers on through the 80's to today because sex and nudity rather retreated from the American studio film. The "highlights" are there: Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct; the laughable crumminess of Showgirls; where things ended up with 50 Shades of Gray. But for the most part, nudity just ain't happening much on screen today and when it does in the future, it will be highly regulated.

One more thing: back in its 70's segment, SKIN gives us the (famous?) non-sexual nude wrestling match between Oliver Reed and Alan Bates in Women in Love(1970.) Zooming forward to 2007, we get the non-sexual nude wrestling match between Sacha Baron Cohen(as Borat) and his 360 pound hairy sidekick in "Borat." Both scenes are a bit much for the heterosexual male viewer -- but the Borat scene is just about the biggest and most sustained "adult" laugh of the last 20 years.

It will surprise you...when nudity REALLY matters at the movies.

[–] swanstep (2715) 4 years ago

but we see The Last Picture Show and I'm reminded how even though it was an important Oscar-bait movie, me and my friends went to see it at the drive-in to getta load of all that nudity and sex in the thing (which was presented very much as the desperate activity of bored, lonely people in a nowhere town -- from the adults on down to the teens.)

That's one movie where later 'directors cuts' have really altered the film by adding nudity - since the '90s Shepard's Jacy has a big pool-table sex scene with Clu Gallagher's Abilene. It doesn't work for me: it's too "hot" and even feels MTV-ish. It breaks the film's rule that "all sex & nudity shall be miserable & awkward & self-conscious & completely dominated by wider social setting"!

Anyhow, it was a big change to a film that I'd always thought of as pretty nailed down to its original form by its success and status as a classic and was quite shocked by its '90s add-ons.

[–] ecarle (14979) 4 years ago

but we see The Last Picture Show and I'm reminded how even though it was an important Oscar-bait movie, me and my friends went to see it at the drive-in to getta load of all that nudity and sex in the thing (which was presented very much as the desperate activity of bored, lonely people in a nowhere town -- from the adults on down to the teens.)
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That's one movie where later 'directors cuts' have really altered the film by adding nudity - since the '90s Shepard's Jacy has a big pool-table sex scene with Clu Gallagher's Abilene. It doesn't work for me: it's too "hot" and even feels MTV-ish. It breaks the film's rule that "all sex & nudity shall be miserable & awkward & self-conscious & completely dominated by wider social setting"!

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That's interesting. I haven't seen The Last Picture Show many times since its 1971 debut, but when I saw it in recent years I watched that scene with Shepard and Clu and I recall thinking "Hmmm..I don't remember this, well I was young and saw it at the drive-in." Turns out I didn't see it.

I take your point here, swanstep, because that pool table action IS out of line with the rather sad and desperate sex that the rest of the movie is about.

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Anyhow, it was a big change to a film that I'd always thought of as pretty nailed down to its original form by its success and status as a classic and was quite shocked by its '90s add-ons

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These "director's cut" things are sometimes good, and sometimes not. George Lucas addition of a garish sundown sky to the opening shot of "American Graffiti" kind of ruined my memories of that shot when I saw that (life changing) movie to me in 1973. The sky in the original was more realistic, a bit more "sad and moody." But i guess George always saw that garish sunset, and added it. Along with putting back in some scenes that should have been left OUT.

[–] swanstep (2715) 4 years ago

Maybe someday we will get a nude scene in a Marvel movie but..rating?

Deadpool had a pretty out-there sex-scene I thought, and Watchmen in its various incarnations is a hard-R both sex- and violence-wise (and sexual violence), so it's just a matter of whether Marvel is prepared to take the box-office hit that an R-or-above rating represents. The superhero genre itself is very tolerant of adult content.

[–] ecarle (14979) 4 years ago

Maybe someday we will get a nude scene in a Marvel movie but..rating?

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Deadpool had a pretty out-there sex-scene I thought,

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Hmm...I've been watching the wrong comic book movies!

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and Watchmen in its various incarnations is a hard-R both sex- and violence-wise (and sexual violence),

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Ah yes...I'm not watching the current series but I did see -- and liked -- the 2009 film

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so it's just a matter of whether Marvel is prepared to take the box-office hit that an R-or-above rating represents. The superhero genre itself is very tolerant of adult content.

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Well, I just sort of threw Marvel out there because it is so dominant of our "movie scene" these years but truly -- these muscular men and shapely women in their form-fitting tights often involved in hand to hand combat: its a sexy genre, to be sure. Just not REALISTICALLY sexy.

And Watchmen and Deadpool remind us that sex and nudity have not been TOTALLY removed from the movie scene in recent years(though Watchmen is over 10 years old.)

Indeed, I think that HBO practically requires nudity in a lot of their films and series. Recently, "Deuce" about Times Square porn and prostitution in the 70's.

So perhaps even in the age of MeToo(which seems to be fading fast), there will be room for...skin. And sensuality.

[–] ecarle (14979) 4 years ago

Indeed, I buried one lede from this SKIN documentary-- the women interviewed who did all these nude scenes are pretty much uniformly OK with it. One notes that she did so many nude shower scenes "I considered myself the cleanest actress in Hollywood."

On the other hand, a now 50-something Sean Young describes a "fun" nude scene she did in the 1987 thriller "No Way Out." They show it. She's taking Kevin Costner into her apartment for a fling; her roommate comes out and says she's staying somewhere else that night. Young removes her fur coat and is nude; she smiles and gives the coat to her roommate who says to Costner "nice meeting you, Tom." And Young enters the apartment with Costner -- her nude, him not -- and the roommate leaves, and everybody's smiling.

Young notes: "It was good acting on my part. Because I had to sell that I was comfortable and amused in my nudity...and I wasn't."

So...we can never REALLY know how willing these actresses are. But many are.

I used to joke that Helen Mirren must have had a "MUST DO NUDITY" in her contracts, rather than no nudity.

And this movie SKIN applies that same standard to Julianne Moore, who worked nude a lot and -- the movie shows us -- did a memorable scene in Altman's Short Cuts with "husband" Matthew Modine in which she argues at length with him while...bottomless with her blouse ...and never notices it or tries to cover up. He's her husband, after all.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 4 years ago

One returns to Hitchcock, though. I've always found it interesting that having "opened the door" on nudity and sensuality in Psycho with Janet Leigh, one film later in The Birds we have a very overdressed and rather frigid Tippi Hedren(she wears a borrowed granny nightgown in one scene); then we have a REAL frigid Hedren in Marnie; then we have Julie Andrews "sexy under blankets" in Torn Curtain. Hitchcock wouldn't address nudity until Frenzy.

Speaking of which. Aside from the rape murder, there IS a consensual post-sex scene with nudity in Frenzy. Blaney and Babs are in bed sleeping, having had sex. Babs gets out of bed to go to the bathroom, she is nude and viewed from the side and behind as she closes the door to us. We never see Babs face. Anna Massey in an interview for the Frenzy DVD said "They used a body double. I told Hitchcock I was willing to do the nudity on my own, but he preferred a double."

So there -- an actress WILLING to do nudity and NOT ALLOWED.

Its a big world out there.

Though ANOTHER key to Hitchcock, of course, is that he filmed very sexy love scenes and described very sexual relationships without any nudity at all. He "slipped things past the Hays Code" all the time. The erotic relationship between Tallulah Bankhead and John Hodiak(almost always shirtless) in Lifeboat -- ON a lifeboat. Cary Grant pushing Ingrid Bergman into Claude Rains' bed -- and hating her for it -- in Notorious(plus: those kisses.) Miriam Haines the tramp/nymphomaniac in Strangers on a Train(married to Guy, pregnant with another man's baby; on a date with TWO guys and allowing herself to be picked up by a third.)

CONT

[–] ecarle (14979) 4 years ago

Grace Kelly cheating on Ray Milland(who had been cheating on her) with Bob Cummings in Dial M. Grace and Jimmy in Rear Window; Grace and Cary in To Catch a Thief("Leg or breast?").

Stewart undressing Novak in Vertigo -- he saw her nude after he fished her out of San Francisco Bay and put her in his bed. Grant and Eva Marine Saint practically inviting each other to have sex right NOW in North by Northwest. And neither of them ever takes their clothes off on screen even as things get intimate in her sleeping car on the train.

I suppose Hitchcock -- who worked mainly in the Hays Code -- is Exhibit Number One of how one could make very sexual movies without any nudity or sexual simulation at all.

Still, the documentary SKIN says "sometimes nudity works pretty good too."

PS. Malcolm McDowall as an interviewee is fun in SKIN. He notes that he was considered "the most naked man in movies" and pleads: "But I came in just as the floodgates on nudity opened in the 70's." It is shown that not only was he in A Clockwork Orange -- rough enough(I don't like that film; Alex should have stayed in prison) -- but also in the infamously perverse "Caligula," of which we see some clips. I recall reading reviews of that film which put me off not because of the sex and nudity, but because of gore and scatology. Still...it had a lot of skin, and its in SKIN.

[–] swanstep (2715) 4 years ago

Hmm...I've been watching the wrong comic book movies!

OK... youtube has the Deadpool scene I mentioned:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P3kpBXQI0Rs
Looking at it now for the first time since first watching the film.... it's not as explicit as I remembered it. Most of its naughtiness is really a matter of implication and pace and cutting. Deadpool was R-rated and trying to be self-consciously irreverent and transgressive throughout (not a million miles from things like Kickass and Kingsmen) but it still came as a bit of a shock to me when this kind of R-rated screwball comedy bit (as if Cary Grant and Ros Russell were suddenly ripping their clothes off) broke out in the middle of the movie.

[–] ecarle (14979) 4 years ago

OK... youtube has the Deadpool scene I mentioned:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P3kpBXQI0Rs
Looking at it now for the first time since first watching the film.... it's not as explicit as I remembered it.

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That's the mark of a good commercial studio sex scene. I've revisted from time to time what I remembered as "graphic movie sex scenes" from the 70's and 80s and found that they weren't really that graphic at all. Just well staged and shot enough to create the "bigger picture in my mind." I suppose its like all that discussion of how we didn't see what we thought we saw in the Psycho showere murder, including, ahem...penetration. In THAT movie, of a knife.

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Most of its naughtiness is really a matter of implication and pace and cutting. Deadpool was R-rated and trying to be self-consciously irreverent and transgressive throughout (not a million miles from things like Kickass and Kingsmen)

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Yes, they are "of a type," aren't they? Violent, sexual..meta. I recall the credit sequence of Deadpool going out of its way to make FUN of credits and the people they really represent ("Screenplay by ...two douchebags who got lucky" or something like that.)

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[–] ecarle (14979) 4 years ago

but it still came as a bit of a shock to me when this kind of R-rated screwball comedy bit (as if Cary Grant and Ros Russell were suddenly ripping their clothes off) broke out in the middle of the movie.

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Sex scenes (which are a dying breed) can be staged all sorts of ways, but if they are FUNNY and real, they are certainly different. Too many sex scenes portray the act with an almost religious solemnity(the couple looking forcefully into each others eyes.) Better: fun, raucous...screwball.

There's one early in North Dallas Forty (1979) between NFL player Nick Nolte and his on-the-side mistress that captures narrative and character while being quite sexy...and funny. One scene earlier, this woman was on the arm of the mean rich-kid team owner(Dabney Coleman, always a jerk) as Coleman belittled Nolte and suggested he could be fired and traded at any time. One scene LATER...here is Nolte cavorting with Coleman's girl. Moreover, Nolte has been established as having a body broken and battered by his sport, and the voracious woman is hurting him bad even in the midst of "fun." One takes in the narrative(Nolte getting Coleman's woman) and the character(Nolte is in too much pain to really enjoy sex)...and the scene goes from there. Post-coital there is more pain. The woman is going to MARRY Coleman. She claims she can protect Nolte's job, but it hurts to think of how.