Movie Time: Skin: A History of Nudity in the Movies

It's still too damn cold here at the Fortress of Ineptitude.

Since the post on Sunday, wintry precipitation did unto us strike with a mix of snow and ice that is still with us.

We had a few days with clear blue skies lit by a bright golden sun which afforded us a little melting. 

But that glowing sun was working against temperatures that never got much beyond freezing. 

And dang if we don't have more snow and ice on the way this weekend.

One does not venture out with being completely bundled up in many, many layers of clothing.

Which ironically leads us to....

It's MOVIE TIME!

I say ironically because today's post is about a documentary on the subject of nudity in film.

"Once you've seen one woman naked.... 

you wanna see all of 'em naked!" 

comedian Ron White

"Why, there's boobies on my TV!"  

George Cooper in Young Sheldon

From 2020, it's Skin: A History of Nudity in the Movies.

It's about all things in movies that are naked, nude and have no clothes on. 

Yes, we mostly explore the cinematic nakedness of the female woman of the opposite sex but in the interest of fair play....

Malcolm McDowell is interviewed about his bare ass appearance in Caligula.

But yeah, it's mostly women as they discuss dropping dresses to be naked in the movies.

Skin: A History of Nudity in the Movies has a matter of fact vibe with it's comprehensive look at the subject of being naked in film.  

This movie came out in 2020 in the immediate aftermath of the #MeToo movement, rightly asking questions about  what it’s actually like for the performers, the choices they felt they did or didn’t have.

What effect does being nude in front of film cameras and up on the movie screen have on the actors who bare all?  Actresses like Sylvia Miles,  Mariel Hemingway and Mamie Van Doren confess to some disquiet about doing nude scenes.  

Skin shows us some pre-code skin. 

• Babylonian partying gave us a lot of skin in D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance (1916)
• Clara Bow bared her breasts in the first Oscar-winning best picture, Wings (1927)
• Hedy Lamarr scampering through the wilderness in  Ecstasy (1933) 
• We learn about the first use of a body double in Tarzan and His Mate (1934), when a model stood in for Maureen O’Sullivan during a nude underwater swimming scene. 

After all that, codes enacted by Will Hays and enforced by religious scold Joseph Breen kept nudity out of the movies for the next 30 years.

The 1960's was a time of cultural revolution and skin was in starting with the beauty of Brigitte Bardot in And God Created Woman (1956) and horror of Janet Leigh in the shower scene of Psycho (1963).   

Once the walls of the Hays morality fortress were breached, other films begin to engage in on screen nudity.

 Blow-Up give us aflash of Jane Birkin’s pubic hair which was a first. And we're off to the races for more nudity in the movies.

A reminder that it's not just women baring all in the movies:  

Skin shares the humorous tale of an extended nude wrestling scene between Alan Bates and Oliver Reed in Women in Love. (1969).

The sequence was edited down to accommodate American audiences.  The edits made the scene play less like the wrestling match it was supposed to be but now looks like a sex scene. The movie gets an X rating.  

We also get a way too long look at extend fight scene in Borat with a naked Sasha Baron Cohen against a very large, very fat guy. Any prurient interest in watching naked people? Succcessfully squashed. 

While a lot of the actors interviewed for Skin are sanguine about their experiences in nudity in front of the movie cameras, not everyone emerged from the experience unscathed.  

Erica Gavin, the star of the 1960s' exploitation film Vixen recalls her dark descent when she saw herself naked on screen and her subsequent struggles with anorexia where she starved herself down to 76 pounds. 

Sean Young recounts the absurdity of shooting the limo-sex scene in the 1980's drama No Way Out where she had to take all her clothes off but Kevin Costner kept his own. (According to Sean, Kevin was more nervous than she was about the scene.)

Malcolm McDowell talks about the insanity of shooting Caligula, the most high-end porn film ever made.

Cerina Vincent recounts her experience in Not Another Teen Movie playing a foreign exchange student who is more accustomed to life au naturel in her native country. So she wanders about school just gettng through her day completely naked. No quick fertive scenes of nudity. Cerina is just standing there or walking like a normal person... who happens to be naked. 

We also get directors like Peter Bogdanovich, Joe Dante, Kevin Smith, Amy Heckerling, Martha Coolidge, and Kristanna Loken  about the rewards and challenges of being behind the camera with nudity in front of it. 

Skin: A History of Nudity in the Movies shows us a variety of nude scenes in movies that cover a wide range of intent, from the puriently sexual to evoking innocence, vulnerability. 

Or just plain weirding us out. Geez! That scene from Borat...Damn! 

Let's wrap up this post with a musical performance by Seth McFarlane about the beautiful tradition of women baring themselves quite literally in film.