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If that proposal were adopted, the stamp should, by rights, appear on an astonishing variety of products. Already, under a new, voluntary rating system, certain films are branded "M" and "suggested for mature audiences." American moviegoers have been peeking at bodies ever since Theda Bara bared her royal nipples in 1917 in Cleopatra. Still, inhibited by production codes and the restriction imposed by such influential bodies as the National Legion of Decency, American moviemakers generally avoided total nudity and explicitly erotic situations until the late 1950s, when successful films like Room at the Top and Never on Sunday showed that seals of approval had become an anachronism. Today, assured of virtual immunity against seizure and prosecution, movie exhibitors and importers have no qualms about films that would have been cut or confiscated a few years ago. Far-out films now on show include The Libertine, in which a widow acts out a manual on errant sex; I, A Woman, II, which portrays fetishism, voyeurism and varied adultery; and Therese and Isabelle, a "love story" that treats of lesbianism and autoeroticism.
The most explicit and protracted depiction of fellatio ever filmed for commercial distribution occurs in an as yet unreleased movie called Coming Apart, starring Rip Torn as a troubled psychiatrist. For all its howling commercial success, I Am Curious (Yellow) by comparison is about as erotic as Das Kapitol. Andy Warhol's latest film, a 90-minute sexorama appropriately titled Blue Movie, contains 45 minutes of realistically simulated copulation (heterosexual for a change).
Warhol's movies used to be "underground," but most of them are now shown in theaters and seriously reviewed. The distinction between "underground" cinema, straight commercial films and "sexploitation" movies is no longer easily made. The screen's crassest byproduct, variations of the old stag film or skin flick, draw more customers in some cities than the hard-ticket Hollywood product. Ranging from 20 minutes of nudie shorts to the sophisticated voyeurism of Directors Russ Meyer (Vixen) and Radley Metzger (The Dirty Girls), sex films are now a multimillion-dollar-a-year industry. Exhibited in well-appointed cinemas that charge $3 and up for admission, they have moved from the tenderloin to midtown.
For a long time, the theater lagged far behind the cinema in the realistic presentation of sex. Until recently, actors came on as fully clothed as if they were lunching at the Plaza. Then, all of a sudden, playwrights and directors decided that nudity was significant, artistic and serious. In 1965, Jean-Paul Marat briefly flashed his gluteus maximus in Marat/Sade. As the marquis warned in the same play, "The revolution of the flesh will make all your other revolutions seem like prison mutinies." And so it almost has.