One Hundred Sex Scenes That Changed Cinema E-Book

Neil Fulwood

• Herausgeber: Batsford
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 283

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

100 Sex Scenes that Changed Cinema explores the representation of sexuality and sexual expression in cinema by tracing the key scenes that helped change, develop and influence one of the world's most powerful medium. The 100 films are arranged thematically in the following chapters: Implicit (Not-explicit) sex scenes - the lure of sex in film noir (Double Indemnity, The Postman Always Rings Twice and Gilda; suggestiveness through dialogue ('snails and oysters' scene in Spartacus; visual metaphors (food scene in Tom Jones); Explicit sex scenes - films that have shocked, challenged and disturbed, pushing back the boundaries of what can be shown on screen. From Hiroshima, Mon Amour through Ai No Corrida, Emmanuelle, 9 1/2 Weeks to Intimacy and The Piano Teacher. Also with details of homo-eroticism (from Caravaggio to Mulholland Drive) and Rites of passage/sexual awakening; The European Aesthetic - the five European directors whose work is marked by a frank, uncompromising approach to sexuality: Bertolucci (Last Tango in Paris, Stealing Beauty), Bunuel (Belle de Jour, That Obscure Object of Desire), Almodovar (Labyrinth of Passion, Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down), Chabrol (Les Biches), and Greenaway (The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, The Pillow Book). Pleasure and Payment - the darker side of on-screen sexuality: obsessive/self-destructive behaviour (Breaking the Waves, Henry and June, The Night Porter); Bondage and sado-masochism (The Servant, The Opposite of Sex); Voyeurism/pornography (Body Double, Boogie Nights); Prostitution (My Own Private Idaho, Midnight Cowboy and American Gigolo); the role of sex in horror film (Ginger Snaps, Angel Heart); Forbidden Flesh - taboo subjects: incest (Close my Eyes, The Cement Garden, Spanking the Monkey) and necrophilia (suggested in Vertigo but explicit in Kissed).

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

CHAPTER ONE: IMPLICIT

The Postman Always Rings Twice

Double Indemnity

Gilda

The Fabulous Baker Boys

From Dusk Till Dawn

Pandora’s Box

Spartacus

Black Narcissus

Some Like It Hot

The Servant

From Here to Eternity

Tom Jones

Ghost

Sex, Lies and Videotape

Out of Sight

Rear Window

North by Northwest

Un Homme et Une Femme

The Thomas Crown Affair (1968)

The Thomas Crown Affair (1999)

Lolita (1961)

Lolita (1997)

CHAPTER TWO: EXPLICIT

Hiroshima, Mon Amour

Blow-Up

Last Tango in Paris

Ai No Corrida

Betty Blue

Intimacy

Emmanuelle

The Lover

9 ½ Weeks

Fatal Attraction

Basic Instinct

Bound

Mulholland Drive

Wild Side

The Killing of Sister George

Desert Hearts

Women in Love

Cruising

My Beautiful Laundrette

Sebastiane

Caravaggio

The Crying Game

The Graduate

The Last Picture Show

Y Tu Mamá También

Stealing Beauty

À Ma Soeur

Kids

Walkabout

Performance

Don’t Look Now

The Man Who Fell To Earth

CHAPTER THREE: THE EUROPEAN AESTHETIC

Viridiana

Belle de Jour

That Obscure Object of Desire

Les Valseuses

Trop Belle Pour Toi

Merci la Vie

La Dolce Vita

Guilietta degli Spiriti

Fellini-Satyricon

Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!

Live Flesh

Talk to Her

Drowning by Numbers

The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover

The Pillow Book

CHAPTER FOUR: PLEASURE AND PAYMENT

A Short Film About Love

Body Double

Boogie Nights

Midnight Cowboy

The Escort

The Wings of the Dove

The Piano

The Story of O

The Piano Teacher

Romance

The Night Porter

The Beguiled

Eyes Wide Shut

Leaving Las Vegas

Tales of Ordinary Madness

Marnie

Under the Skin

Breaking the Waves

Ginger Snaps

The Wicker Man

Angel Heart

CHAPTER FIVE: FORBIDDEN FLESH

Salò, or The 120 Days of Sodom

La Grande Bouffe

Close My Eyes

The Silence

Spanking the Monkey

Vertigo

Quills

Kissed

The Devils

The Last Temptation of Christ

AFTERWORD

Notes

Selected bibliography

Acknowledgements

Index

implicit

CHAPTER ONE

Picture the setting, not that it’s particularly romantic or erotic: a run-down diner/gas station somewhere in the sticks, a sign out front reading ‘MAN WANTED’. The proprietor is a shambolic middle-aged drunkard; the business is starved of customers. Into this milieu comes Frank Chambers (John Garfield), a drifter and self-confessed ‘cheap nobody’; so begins The PostmanAlways Rings Twice (Tay Garnett, 1946). He enters into dialogue with the proprietor, Nick Smith (Cecil Kellaway), who offers him a job and a hamburger on the house. They go inside to discuss terms and conditions. Nick leaves Frank to tend to the stove while he goes to serve someone waiting for petrol on the forecourt.

Across the floor, bare of carpeting, rolls a tube of lipstick. It comes to rest at Frank’s feet. The camera tracks back, reaching an open door, which frames a tanned and shapely pair of legs. A quick pan up and we are presented with an archetypal film noir scenario: the introduction of the femme fatale; the promise of the erotic; the moment where the hero’s fate is sealed.

Not that Frank is much of a hero. Nor is film noir a genre in which heroes are prevalent. Indeed, the usual motivations of film noir characters are greed, lust or fear. The men, for all their tendencies towards violence, are often weak; they allow themselves to be manipulated by women. That the femmes fatales are the stronger characters owes in no small part to their use of sexual self-awareness as their weapon of choice.

The femme fatale here is Cora Smith (Lana Turner), wife of the hapless Nick, and sole beneficiary under the terms of his will. As the film progresses, she will inveigle Frank’s help in murdering him, the quicker to acquire his business and profit from his life insurance policy. And from the outset, it is evident that Frank is going to do her bidding. His first interaction with Cora – completely non-verbal – tells us all we need to know. She stands framed in the doorway, watching him coolly. Her outfit – a revealing top and shorts, almost as if she were dressed for the beach – is as white as her motives are dark. Frank picks up the tube of lipstick and hands it to her. She glosses her lips right in front of him, still eyeing him insouciantly, then turns away. The hamburger burns on the stove as he gawps after her.

Archetypal film noir: John Garfield ensnared by Lana Turner in The Postman Always Rings Twice.

Not only is the scene loaded with unspoken tension between the characters; it also acts as a metaphor for the film entire. The tube of lipstick equates to the favours Cora will bestow on Frank should he do her bidding; the area of floor it rolls across represents the property Cora schemes to get her hands on; and the conflagration on the stove symbolizes (albeit unsubtly) the heat of their passion and the violent act that will ultimately destroy them.

The promise of the erotic: suggestion and manipulation in film noir

Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1944) is very much the precursor of The Postman Always Rings Twice – unsurprisingly, since both were based on novels by James M Cain1. Again a culpable male, insurance salesman Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray), is beguiled by a predatory female, Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck), intent on reaping the rewards of her husband’s premature demise. In a plot twist more coldly cynical than anything Postman has to offer, Neff is made complicit even before the murder when Phyllis persuades him to take out the policy (the film’s title derives from the accidental death clause) without her husband’s knowledge.

Like Cora, she uses Neff’s attraction to her in order to manipulate him. But whereas Cora’s ploys are entirely physical (she is constantly applying lip gloss, smoking cigarettes in a manner that draws attention to her lips or flouncing around in beach wear), with Phyllis, notwithstanding that she is introduced wearing just a towel, there is a more intellectual edge. Whereas Cora leads her accomplice on, Phyllis sounds him out. Neff meets Phyllis when he arrives at her house to discuss car insurance with her husband. The husband is conveniently out. Phyllis appears at the top of the stairs, betowelled. During the course of the scene, they twice base their conversation around metaphors. The first plays on Neff’s line of work.

Neff: I’d hate to think of you getting a scratched fender when you’re not covered.

Phyllis: I know what you mean. I’ve been sunbathing.

Neff: Hope there weren’t any pigeons around.

The erotic connotations of ‘not covered’ (unclothed) are reinforced by Phyllis choosing this moment to withdraw to her room to change. She reappears, still buttoning up her dress, and slowly descends the stairs. The camera lingers on her ankle-bracelet (traditionally a piece of jewellery associated with prostitution). The implication of voyeurism in Neff’s comment about pigeons is here made manifest.

Their second bout of metaphor-laden verbal sparring comes when Neff makes it clear that he has less interest in returning later to speak with her husband, and more in actually seeing her again. Phyllis castigates him for going too fast (i.e. being too insistent).

Phyllis: There’s a speed limit in this state. 45 miles an hour.

Neff: How fast was I going, officer?

Phyllis: I’d say about 90.

Neff: Suppose you get down off that motorcycle and give me a ticket.

Phyllis: Suppose I give you a warning instead.

Neff: Suppose it doesn’t take.

Phyllis: Suppose I have to rap you over the knuckles.

Neff: Suppose I burst out crying and put my head on your shoulder.

Phyllis: Suppose you put it on my husband’s shoulder.

Suggestive stuff. The main implication is that Neff already sees himself as subservient to her. Also, the choice of a legal infraction (albeit a minor one) as metaphor tells us they will soon be partners in crime. But most of all, there is the sense of Phyllis working out an angle – how she can use Neff to her best advantage – even as she weaves her seductive web.

Charles Vidor’s Gilda (1946) serves up just as much erotic tension. Indeed, Rita Hayworth’s performance as the eponymous object of desire is so central to the film’s aesthetic – so defining – that the narrative (a tangled tale of loyalty, betrayal, casinos and cartels) is shunted so far into the background as to be superfluous.

The femme fatale as icon: Rita Hayworth in Gilda.

If The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity can be said to revolve around the eternal triangle – husband, wife, lover – Gilda ups the ante by setting its protagonists in a ménage a trois of sorts. The story begins with small-time gambler Johnny Farrell (Glen Ford) rescued by casino boss Ballin Mundson (George Macready) from a surefire beating after cheating at dice. Mundson, elegant but contemptuous, hires Farrell to keep his casino free of fellow cheats. A close relationship develops. The sense of latent homoeroticism is summarized by Mundson’s comment, ‘women and gambling don’t mix’.

It isn’t long, though, before Gilda comes between them. When Mundson returns from a business trip, newly married to her following a whirlwind romance, he does not realize that she and Farrell have a history. Gilda mocks Farrell from the outset, calling him a ‘boy’. Mundson, unaware of the reason behind her hostility, soon begins treating him in the same manner.

Tension is heightened when Mundson, treating his wife as no better than a kept woman, alters Farrell’s job description: henceforth, he becomes her personal chauffeur/minder. ‘Picking up the boss’s laundry,’ as Gilda puts it, a line steeped in self-loathing even though it is an accusation against Farrell.

Plot twists pile up: there is an assassination attempt on Mundson; he later fakes his own death. Against all this, the sexual power games between the three leads remain at the forefront, and it is Gilda who provides the most erotic moment – a scene in which two long black gloves are the only items of clothing removed – when she upstages both men at Mundson’s casino, performing a burlesque rendition of ‘Put the Blame on Mame’.

‘There never was a woman like Gilda’ screams the tagline on the poster – and this scene pretty much licences the hyperbole. Clad in a sleek black number that is low-cut to the point of defying gravity, peeling off the aforementioned gloves and tossing them into the crowd (choreographer Jack Cole allegedly modelled the dance numbers on those of a striptease artiste of his acquaintance), Hayworth performs the routine with a sense of wild abandon2. As the song ends, Gilda unclips her diamond necklace and throws that to the cheering horde of admirers, then makes the provocative comment, ‘I’m not very good with zippers.’

That the scene generates such frisson owes to the centrality of its smouldering femme fatale: it is at this point that everything in the film – its characters, its plot contrivances – are held in stasis, subjugated to Gilda’s display of sensual self-expression. It also demonstrates the use of music and dance in on-screen sexuality.

Torch numbers: sexual expression in music and dance

The music to which Gilda performs her routine is a big band number, allowing for smoky, torch-style vocals as well as large slabs of brass and percussion conducive to bump-and-grind dance moves. Forty years on, a torch song – this time with just a piano accompaniment – provides The Fabulous Baker Boys (Steve Kloves, 1989) with its most iconic moment. Again, the dynamic is the arrival of a woman, which upsets a close relationship between two men.

The men here are brothers: Jack and Frank Baker (Jeff and Beau Bridges respectively). They are professional pianists, though nowhere near the Alfred Brendel league. Gigging at upmarket bars and lounges, their programme of light jazz and nostalgic conversation between numbers is less than inspiring. To keep from losing bookings, they reluctantly take on a singer. Enter Susie Diamond (Michelle Pfeiffer), a former escort girl with a laconic attitude that mirrors Jack’s approach to life. Her presence exacerbates an already volatile sense of resentment between Frank, a dedicated family man and the business brains of the outfit, and Jack, who cares about nothing except his dog, and takes his only pleasure playing for nothing in low-lit jazz clubs the wrong side of midnight.

The film reaches its turning point at a rural hotel where the threesome is playing a New Year’s gig. The brothers’ noncommunication, played out in counterpoint to the increasing sexual tension between Jack and Susie, is made manifest when Frank is called away by an emergency on New Year’s Eve. Jack and Susie are left to perform the set themselves. They lose no time in dropping Frank’s preferred musical programme – hoary old standards like ‘Feelings’ – and go for something sexier. What better song than ‘Makin’ Whoopee’? Forget the raised-eyebrow sense of double entendre with which most male vocalists imbue it (one thinks of Frank Sinatra’s version on the Songs for Swingin’ Lovers album); Susie delivers it in low, sultry, come-hither tones. The sexual references abounding in the lyrics are emphasized by the sight of a semi-recumbent Susie, all red dress and high heels, draped across Jack’s grand piano.

Michelle Pfeiffer as lounge singer Susie Diamond in The Fabulous Baker Boys.

As with Gilda, the narrative halts in order to give the female protagonist (quite literally) centre stage. But whereas the musical interlude in Vidor’s film is solely about Gilda, what we are seeing here demonstrates the chemistry between Jack and Susie: at one point, she caresses his face while he plays; at the close of the song, she climbs down from the piano and leans against him, head thrown back, as he picks out the last few notes. The dynamic of this scene is based entirely on the tension and contact between pianist and singer – man and woman – and signposts the subsequent narrative development whereby one seduces the other. It is the fractious nature of this sexual relationship that leads to the disintegration of their act and the final rift between Jack and Frank, the dramatic mise en scènes that inform the latter half of the film.

A quite different turning point is reached when From Dusk Till Dawn (Robert Rodriguez, 1996) delivers its big musical number. There is a different flavour to the music – Tex-Mex and slightly seedy – and the scene serves as a prelude to something that is decidedly un-erotic. Rodriguez’s film, from a script by Quentin Tarantino (who co-stars), is very much a game of two halves. It starts out as a conventional crime thriller: two brothers, Seth (George Clooney) and Richie (Tarantino) flee to Mexico with a suitcase full of ill-gotten money, a trail of murdered policemen and innocent bystanders left in their wake. To facilitate an easier border crossing, they kidnap a family and hide in their recreational vehicle. Once out of the United States, they make their captives drive them to an out-of-the-way roadhouse, the Titty Twister, where they have arranged to meet their contact.

As its name suggests, the Titty Twister is a sleazy establishment, frequented by rough customers. Its main attractions are a live band and a group of topless dancers. When Seth and Richie arrive, their hostages in tow, they are just in time for the highlight of the evening’s entertainment, an appearance by the cryptically named Santanico Pandemonium (Salma Hayek). At the conclusion of her performance, the film changes direction in mid-stream (the scene comes at almost exactly the halfway mark) and bloodily embraces all the traditions and iconography of the vampire genre. The dance number bridges these differing aesthetics. As with Gilda, it is a moment of narrative stasis; and like The Fabulous Baker Boys, it generates its own internal dynamic.

Santanico appears on a stage that looks more like a pagan altar, flames shimmering to either side of her. The set design is redolent of old Hammer studios productions, a pointer to the ensuing shift in genre. She wears little more than a bikini and a cape. She removes the cape almost immediately, to reveal a snake wrapped around her. Not only does the snake provide another point of reference for horror movie enthusiasts, but also its phallic symbolism speaks for itself. The music begins, guitar-driven, the vocal barely a murmur, and Santanico dances. The snake is removed and she makes her way off the stage, onto the tables around which the Titty Twister’s lascivious clientele are grouped.

Gilda’s routine is evocative of striptease; Santanico’s quite literally becomes a table dance. The finale has her interacting with the audience, reaching down to pick up Richie’s bottle of beer, which she then pours down the smooth expanse of one leg. Richie licks the beer off her foot appreciatively. The music ends; applause rings out. ‘Now that,’ Seth comments, ‘is what I call a fucking show.’

It is at this point that From Dusk Till Dawn effects its transition: reacting to the blood seeping from a wound Richie has earlier sustained, Santanico is revealed as a vampire and – pardon the pun – pandemonium ensues.

At the risk of drawing a crass analogy, it can be said that Santanico’s sexuality unleashes a destructiveness that affects those around her (as do Gilda and Susie Diamond, only without going to the extreme of turning into vampires). Metaphorically, this is borne out by the presence of the snake, imbued as it is with connotations of the serpent in the Garden of Eden. It signals an end to Seth and Richie’s paradise (everything has gone their way so far: they’ve got away with the money, evaded the authorities and successfully crossed the border) and the beginning of their own personal hell (Seth is forced to kill his brother when he becomes one of the undead, the first victim of Santanico’s attack).

From Dusk Till Dawn is as different a movie to The Fabulous Baker Boys as it is to Gilda, but all three draw upon a synthesis of dance, music and sexual expression that stretches back (ironically, since music is an aural medium) to silent film. Pandora’s Box (G W Pabst, 1928), aptly described by Maitland McDonagh as ‘a morality tale with no moral’3, uses a dance sequence to make its strongest statement about its heroine’s need to demonstrate her sexual self-identity. So strong is this need, that Lulu (Louise Brooks) ultimately causes the downfall of everyone around her – as well as sealing her own fate.

The first half of the film highlights her less-than-auspicious background – her association with Schigolch (Carl Gotz), the pimp who exploited her in her youth, and whose company she still keeps (perversely, she passes him off at one point as her father) – as well as her talent for beguiling admirers into keeping her in the manner to which she is accustomed. Her meal ticket when the film opens is newspaper owner Peter Schon (Fritz Kortner), whose son Alwa (Franz Lederer) is himself carrying a torch for her. She disrupts his engagement to a socially more suitable woman, publicly seducing him. Compromised, left with no choice but to marry Lulu, Schon discovers that while he might have financed her lifestyle he certainly doesn’t own her. She chooses their wedding celebrations to make this point.

Dressed in inappropriately virginal white, she gives her new husband short shrift, instead flattering Schigolch with her attentions, behaving enticingly towards Alwa, and dancing an intimate tango with the openly lesbian aristocrat Countess Anna Geschwitz (Alice Roberts). The Countess’s silken black dress is in stark contrast to the white of Lulu’s; likewise her butch appearance – only the feminine outfit saves her from androgyny – is at odds with Lulu’s shimmering persona. Always feminine, always seductive, she vacillates between the coquette and the vamp, sometimes within the space of moments.

The scene is tense enough given the degree of humiliation Schon suffers (cold-shouldered while his bride comes on to first a pimp, and then his own son); but what really electrifies it is the sudden suggestion that Lulu’s promiscuity extends to other women, making her arguably the first heroine in cinema to consciously define her own sexuality rather than being defined or objectified by the male characters who surround her. It also presents one of cinema’s earliest instances of sapphic sexual chemistry, prefiguring same-sex dancefloor scenes in The Conformist (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1969) and Bitter Moon (Roman Polanski, 1992).

Stand-ins: metaphor in dialogue and imagery

As we have seen in Double Indemnity, dialogue based around a metaphor can communicate sexual tension between characters without recourse to the explicit. Through reasons of censorship or, as we shall see in the more contemporary examples cited later in this chapter, the acquisition of a less strident rating (generally conducive to better box office), many films use similar ploys.

In Spartacus (Stanley Kubrick, 1960), bisexuality is rendered in culinary terms. The scene is set in such a way that there can be no evasion of the homoeroticism on display. General Crassus (Laurence Olivier) calls for his servant Antoninus (Tony Curtis) to bathe him. He sits upright in a sunken bath, his entire torso above the waterline. Antoninus, stripped to the waist, is compelled to step into the bath; physical contact is necessitated. (The camera dwells on Curtis’s muscular physique throughout.) A curtain of fine material is drawn around Crassus’s bathing room, lending the proceedings a voyeuristic quality. The general asks Antoninus if he has ever stolen, lied or ‘dishonoured the gods’. Antoninus replies that he has not. Crassus steers the conversation in another direction:

Crassus: Do you refrain from these vices out of respect for moral virtues?

Antoninus: Yes, master.

Crassus: Do you eat oysters?

Antoninus: When I have them, master.

Crassus: Do you eat snails?

Antoninus: No, master.

Crassus: Do you consider the eating of oysters to be moral and the eating of snails to be immoral?

Antoninus: No, master.

Crassus: Of course not. It is all a matter of taste … and taste is not the same as appetite and therefore not a question of morals, is it?

Antoninus: It could be argued so, master.

Crassus: My taste includes both snails and oysters.

The repeated use of ‘master’ in Antoninus’s responses imbues him with a submissiveness that his physical strength belies. The way Crassus phrases his questions – the concept of ‘taste’ being ‘not a question of morals’ is a snippet of double-speak worthy of a lawyer – suggests that he is setting out to coerce Antoninus. The portrait of Crassus as a libertine, eager for any form of sexual delectation or experimentation, is completed when he declares his affinity for ‘both snails and oysters’.

This is a prime example of how an emotionally complex and sexually charged scene is rendered in terms conducive to censorial lenience. There is nothing explicit here: the physical contact occurs in an historically accurate context (those of high rank or social standing were bathed by servants); the dialogue is literate and eloquent, never profane. Yet there remains no doubt as to Crassus’s prurience, or his designs on Antoninus.

The irony, of course, is for all that Kubrick and scriptwriter Dalton Trumbo avoided the explicit, the scene was cut from the original theatrical release. It was not until the film was restored in 1991 that it was reinstated. The footage was retrieved, but the soundtrack was missing. Tony Curtis, then aged 66, re-recorded his dialogue. Olivier, however, had died two years earlier; Anthony Hopkins stepped in, seamlessly emulating Olivier’s vocal qualities.

No less provocative a subject for its time was the atmosphere of barely repressed sexual hysteria depicted in Powell and Pressburger’s Black Narcissus (1947). The first of their collaborations not to be rooted in wartime propaganda – and their first production since the ‘love conquers all’ romantic fantasy of A Matter of Life and Death (1946) – this adaptation of Rumer Godden’s novel couldn’t have been any more different from their filmography to date. There is no wartime backdrop; no ‘message’; no romanticism.

The story opens with Sister Clodagh (Deborah Kerr), a devout nun serving at a mission in the Himalayas, charged with establishing an order in a decaying old building precipitously founded on the edge of a sheer mountainside. From here on in, every frame of film is suffused with a dark sexuality: the property is revealed as a former brothel, suggestive frescos still adorning the walls; the gardens overflow with exotic flora (a more subtle Garden of Eden metaphor than that in From Dusk Till Dawn); the schoolroom is filled to bursting with local children (evidence that procreation is rife in the surrounding villages). The agent for the property, Mr Dean (David Farrar), evinces a darkly sexual persona: he is ruggedly handsome, and steeped in machismo – as well as being a hard drinker, he is direct to the point of abrupt; he is certainly no gentleman. His presence, more than any other factor, contributes to the growing tension between the nuns.

Sexuality and repression: Kathleen Byron and Deborah Kerr in Black Narcissus.

Elsewhere, the almost-developed sexuality of orphaned Indian girl Kanchi (Jean Simmons, cast against type but utterly compelling) is contrasted with the ludicrous adolescent pretence at sophistication attempted by Dilip Rai (Sabu), the son of the Himalayan general who has permitted the nuns residency in the former bordello. (The film takes its title from the imported cologne the boy wears.) Nonetheless, this unlikely couple lose no time in eloping.

Tensions run high between the nuns. The volatile Sister Ruth (Kathleen Byron), torn between her duty and her desires, refuses to renew her vows and determines to leave the mission. In the film’s most startling scene, Clodagh visits Ruth in her cell. Ruth has divested herself of her habit and is wearing a red dress. Biblically, there is an association of scarlet with wantonness. This is compounded when Clodagh, insisting on staying with Ruth till morning (when she is due to leave), reads piously from the Bible. Clodagh is convinced that she can persuade Ruth against her decision. Ruth responds by taunting Clodagh, distracting her from the pages of the Good Book as she applies a coating of lipstick as red as her dress. Ruth’s already undisguised attraction to Dean is one thing (his subsequent rejection of her paves the way for her attack on Clodagh in the film’s vertiginous finale), but her overtures to Clodagh take Black Narcissus into a quite different realm. If her red dress (cf. The Fabulous Baker Boys) denotes her free-spiritedness, and the lipstick (cf. The Postman Always Rings Twice) serves to accentuate her looks, the fact that she uses these visual prompts on another woman – and does so with a certain degree of success (Clodagh experiences flashbacks to her only romantic relationship) – suffuses the scene with similar implications to Crassus and Antoninus’s dialogue in Spartacus.

Visual metaphors in Black Narcissus, then, carry a psychological import. But they can also be used for humorous purposes. Billy Wilder’s Some Like it Hot (1959), a razor-sharp satire involving gangsters and transvestitism, is arguably one of the most elegant comedies of sexual mores ever to have emerged from Hollywood. Reluctant witnesses to the St Valentine’s Day massacre, jazz musicians Joe (Tony Curtis) and Jerry (Jack Lemmon) go on the run from mob boss Spats Columbo (George Raft). An opening for a sax and a bass player in an orchestra booked to appear at a swish Florida hotel gives them the ticket out of Chicago they need. One problem: it’s an allgirl outfit. Solution: dress in drag, speak falsetto and adopt the names Josephine and Daphne.

Complications, of course, ensue: Joe falls for dipsomaniac lead singer Sugar Kane (Marilyn Monroe), ageing playboy Osgood Fielding (Joe E Brown) falls for Jerry, and the Friends of Italian Opera (read: the Mob) show up in Florida for a convention of crooks. The Joe/Sugar, Jerry/Osgood flirtation – played out in parallel – provides the main comic set-pieces. Joe divests himself of the accoutrements of Josephine at the earliest opportunity and adopts another disguise, this time as a Cary Grant-style smoothie. He attracts Sugar by appealing to her sense of materialism, passing himself off as heir to the Shell Oil fortune. With Jerry forced to maintain his Daphne persona in order to lure Osgood from his yacht, Joe takes Sugar aboard the vessel. In a nifty reversal of the typical seduction scene, he claims an inability to make love to women. Consequently, Sugar takes matters in hand. Draping herself across him (he is reclining on a couch), she kisses him passionately.

Sugar:Anything?

Joe:I’m afraid not. Terribly sorry …

Sugar:You’re not giving yourself a chance … Relax.[She kisses him again.]

Joe:Like smoking without inhaling.

Sugar:Don’t inhale.

As witty as the interplay is between the leads (and Monroe’s comic timing is impeccable), what makes the scene hilarious is Joe’s leg rising behind Sugar the first time she kisses him. Not only does this serve the narrative purpose of revealing his true feelings (the film, after all, is built around masquerade and false identity), but also it’s a sly and debonair manner of suggesting an erection.

In Joseph Losey’s The Servant (1963), the suggestion is made of a homosexual relationship, notwithstanding that the main characters are ostensibly heterosexual. This subtext is smuggled in beneath the film’s primary narrative purpose: an investigation of class and power. The flunkey of the title, Hugo Barrett (Dirk Bogarde) is taken on by Tony (James Fox4), a young man whose aristocratic good looks belie the fact that he is nouveau riche, lazy and weak-willed. Barrett quickly begins to usurp his authority, a ploy suspected by Tony’s fiancée Susan (Wendy Craig). Barrett cajoles Tony into hiring Vera (Sarah Miles), a woman he announces as his sister, as a maid. An indiscretion while Barrett is ostensibly attending his sick mother leads to a one-night stand between Tony and Vera.

Concerned that Tony is being manipulated, Susan moves in with him and starts treating Barrett high-handedly. Matters come to a head when Tony and Susan return earlier than expected from a weekend away and discover Barrett and Vera having sexual relations. Barrett reveals that she is not his sister, but his fiancée, remarking that this turn of events ‘sort of puts us in the same boat, sir’. This revelation effectively terminates Tony and Susan’s engagement, and Tony dismisses Barrett.

Master and servant: distortion and role reversal in The Servant.

Drinking heavily following Susan’s departure, Tony later rehires Barrett (Barrett claims that Vera has left him, and that she used them both). This is the turning point. Roles become reversed. Barrett’s obsequious ‘sir’ (equivalent to Antoninus’s ‘yes master’) is replaced by ‘mate’ and ‘Tone’. They bicker like an old married couple. An oblique remark to shared experiences in the army hints at homosexual activities in their past.

At the denouement, Barrett throws a party. The guests comprise a few shabby-looking women who may or may not be prostitutes. Drunkenness and indifferent use of these women are the order of the day. Vera shows up, seemingly to beg money from Tony; however, she soon enters into the spirit of things. It is through her presence that the subtext of repressed homosexuality is consolidated. She is the woman both men have used (despite Barrett’s allegations that she is the predator). Through her they have had sex by proxy. Just as they intend to do with the less than salubrious female company Barrett has procured for the party.

Things are curtailed, though, by the arrival of Susan. Evidently still concerned about her ex, she is shocked at his state of inebriation, and how freely he is giving himself over to the favours on offer. In a lastditch attempt to recapture his attention/affections, she makes a move on Barrett. He rejects her. The slap she gives him as she leaves – and the shaky, effeminate way he reacts – identifies Barrett as a stand-in for ‘the other woman’, the third party who has driven a wedge into her relationship with Tony. The film ends with Barrett herding everyone out; the final image is of him and Tony alone, no women between them any longer.

Less sophisticated, but nonetheless effective, examples of metaphor are scattered throughout mainstream cinema. Take From Here to Eternity (1953), Fred Zinneman’s adaptation of James Jones’s novel about American soldiers (and their various romantic entanglements) stationed in Honolulu on the eve of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Although a very sanitized version (the novel is frank in its depiction of sex, brutality and racism), the film still gets across Jones’s criticism of the military system.

A synopsis presents a cross-section of corrupt hierarchy: a young enlisted man, Robert Prewitt (Montgomery Clift), refuses to box for the regiment, earning himself the disapprobation of Captain Holmes (Philip Ober), who instructs Sergeant Warden (Burt Lancaster) to make his life hell. Warden (an apt name given the prison-like disciplinary excesses that characterize life at the barracks) happily complies, while at the same time cuckolding Holmes by carrying on an affair with his wife, Karen (Deborah Kerr).

The Warden/Karen relationship mirrors that of Prewitt and the girl he falls for, Lorene (Donna Reed), a nightclub hostess (a polite Hollywood euphemism of the time for hooker) whose fantasies of being an officer’s wife tip over into self-delusion. But whereas Prewitt and Lorene’s tentative relationship is hardly the stuff of grand cinematic melodrama, the scenes between Warden and Karen practically beg the definition ‘tempestuous’. Their most memorable encounter provides the film’s key image. To a backdrop of thunderous waves, they scramble down a rocky escarpment to a secluded area of beach. Warden strips down to his shorts. Karen pulls off her skirt; she is wearing a one-piece bathing suit. They race into the sea. Zinneman renders this imagery all the more feral for intercutting it with Prewitt brooding jealously over Lorene’s attentions to other men at the club. When he cuts back to Warden and Karen, they are lying in close embrace, lips together, as the surf crashes around them.

Using a metaphor that is just as unsubtle, Tom Jones (Tony Richardson, 1963) also invokes Spartacus in its food-fixation, but in this case dialogue is abandoned in favour of the purely visual. Based on Henry Fielding’s rambunctious novel, Albert Finney stars as the inveterate ladies’ man of the title. The film starts with its hero abandoned as a baby at the estate of Squire Allworthy (George Devine). Allworthy assumes the child to be the offspring of two of his servants, Jenny Jones (Joyce Redman) and Partridge (Jack MacGowran). Outraged as much by their unmarried status as by the actual abandonment of the child, he dismisses them and undertakes to bring Tom up as if he were his own son. Allworthy, however, does have a son of his own, Blifil (David Warner). Blifil’s sense of Tom as a rival continues into adolescence as Tom proves popular with women and indulges to the fullest in the many sexual favours he is offered.