I'm sort of watching this as I'm working on the computer (it's not a very good movie!), but was rather surprised when Perry King walked toward the camera in his scene in the slave quarters early on, FULLY NUDE.
I don't think I've seen this happen in any other 70's Hollywood film.
Was there any comment about this when the film was released? Male movie stars just didn't do that! (And they usually still don't!)
I'm not sure that was true for most stars. Certainly there's no full frontal photography of Robert Redford, Paul Newman...or any of the really big stars of the day. Did you even see this of Jon Voight in Midnight Cowboy, although it received an X rating? I don't remember seeing Marlon Brando this way in Last Tango in Paris. When Burt Reynolds posed nude for Cosmopolitan, he covered himself with his hand.
I was just surprised, because while you would sometimes glimps an actor nude from the rear, major motion pictures did not, as I recall it, customarily show their male actors in full frontal nudity.
It's possible I wasn't paying attention, but I'd think I would recall that.
'Don Johnson showed his front in The Harrad Experiment around the same time (1973).' ----------------- oh,from what I've heard about Don,that would be ..too MUCH of a display of power.
Let's not forget Sly Stallone 1972' soft core X-film when he needed @200.00 bucks to stop sleeping in the train station. I have that film. He is completely nude and performing simulated sex with a black lady who also does a jive-ass dance. However, Sly's 'shortcomings' were not the film's draw.
Alan Bates and Oliver Reed both showed it all off in a fascinating scene in Women in Love, which if memory serves is a very good movie and I might recommend your finding and watching it.
Well, you started this thread in 2010. Since then, you must have realized that male nudity has come to the fore, lol, again. Apparently Ben Affleck went frontol in Gone Girl. Much as I had a crush on him, I'm glad I missed that.
I did see Kevin Bacon show why Kyra Sedgwick loves him so much in Wild Things, 1998. That's kind of old but he does go commando all the time, I think.
Jason Segal was full frontal in Forgetting Sarah Marshall. I know there are other big people I have seen take it all off recently, I just forget who they are. Harry Potter aka Daniel Ratcliffe probably did in his Broadway remake of Equus as the main character very famously does that in the play.
But, yeah, when I saw Perry King do that in this 40-year-old movie, I was like, Wow, that movie was ahead of its time. Not to mention that King was a doll both in dress and out. I'm not sure the scene actually added anything and I wonder who wanted it, whether the director, producer or King himself. But I'm glad it is still in.
Harvey must really have liked showing off because he was also frontally and fully nude in The Piano. He looked darned good, too, for a man who was then unrecognizably 50.
And of course there was that movie Full Frontal. Did they do the title thing in that one, too?