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Hollywood's gone off sex, but thanks for the memories! Film critic Barry Norman questions the cynical motives behind cutting the 'rumpy-pumpy' in favour of action epics
We didnt see the act itself, merely the strongest possible suggestion of it, but that was astonishing enough.
For this was back in 1965 when the censorship rules were just beginning to be relaxed, and daring sexual stuff was still uncommon in the cinemas.
Raunchy: Dirk Bogarde and Julie Christie in Darling which was made just as censorship rules were beginning to be relaxed
From there, of course, the movies went on to ever greater licence, culminating in what is probably the most famous (or perhaps that should be notorious) sex scene the sequence in 1992s Basic Instinct when Sharon Stone uncrosses her legs to reveal that she isnt wearing any underwear.
That one brief flash, which defined Stones career and boosted her to A-list stardom, caused a great kerfuffle. She agreed to do it, she told me, because the director Paul Verhoeven had persuaded her that this simple, startling act proved that she had total control over all the goggle-eyed men in the room with her.
Flash: Sharon Stone became an A-list superstar after that scene in Basic Instinct
This, however,dolce and gabbana glasses, was nonsense. Verhoeven asked her to do it because he knew it would arouse controversy, this being the first time cinema audiences had ever seen a movie stars private parts in quite such intimate detail.
But that occurred 20 years ago a more innocent age before the internet and now it seems we will not be seeing its like again. Not in the immediate future anyway.
According to recent reports, Hollywood has decided that sex, far from being here to stay, is now dead as far as audience interest is concerned, and that there is more money to be made from special effects-dominated blockbusters.
No more raunchy sex on the big screen,versace bright? I can live happily with that because Ive never regarded sex as a spectator sport.
The energetic, simulated rumpy-pumpy of two complete strangers, however attractive, when viewed from the detached comfort of a cinema seat cool drink in one hand, popcorn in the other is, lets face it, faintly ludicrous.
It is, in my experience, more likely to raise a grin than anything else.
This is not to say that sex scenes cannot be effective and memorable.
Some have entered cultural folklore, such as one sexual encounter between Marlon Brando and Maria Schneider in Last Tango In Paris, which is said to have increased the sales of butter though not necessarily for use on toast.
Or the moment in a coffee shop in When Harry Met Sally, when Meg Ryan simulates an orgasm in front of BillyCrystal, causing another customer to tell the waitress: Ill have what sheshaving.
Those sequences are memorable for different reasons the first one because its genuinely shocking, the second because its very funny.
Then there are other controversial sex scenes, like those in Dont Look Now in 1973 when the carnal encounters of Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie were so lustily convincing as to cause a rumour to spread that, golly, they really did it.
Unfortunately, bad sex movies also tend to stick in the mind. If you ever had the misfortune to see that great turkey Gigli, you will probably recall a lengthy bedroom encounter between Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez.
Memorable: The scene in When Harry Met Sally went down in movie history when Meg Ryan simulates an orgasm in front of Billy Crystal
Im afraid that left me (and, I suspect, the audience) cold because even though Lopez was Afflecks squeeze at the time, there seemed to be no empathy between them at all.
And then there was 9 ? Weeks the supposedly ground-breaking 1986 erotic drama in which Mickey Rourke and Kim Basinger were at it so often that I grew positively bored.
And the scenes of mental violence when he makes her crawl about like a dog and watch while he sleeps with a prostitute were hard to take.
For the great disadvantage of graphic sex scenes, whether done well or not, is that for better or worse you tend to remember them rather than the rest of the film.
Besides, in the past 30 years or so, with the advent of looser censorship allowing filmmakers to show pretty much what they want, the cardinal rule that less is often more seems to have been forgotten in other words that what is implied can be far more arousing than what is explicit.
Reel love: Madeleine Carroll and Robert Donat in The 39 Steps
I still maintain that one of the most erotic scenes in cinema history is to be found in Alfred Hitchcocks The 39 Steps, released in 1935.
Robert Donat and Madeleine Carroll, handcuffed together for reasons too complicated to go into here and on the run from the bad guys, seek refuge, rain-drenched, in a small hotel. There she takes off her stockings and as she unrolls them his hand follows down the line of her leg without ever touching her.
That was far more effective than any number of shots of heaving bodies,cheap versace glasses, because everything was left to the audiences imagination.
For that reason, I wont lament the decline of sex scenes in modern films, though the reasons for that decline money being the dominant one do worry me.
Films with raunchy sex scenes are likely to be given stringent certificates, which bar under-15s from the cinema. And in an age when the target audience for the Hollywood studios in particular is those aged from 12 up to 18, that means a serious loss of revenue.
These days, the film-makers argue and this is another reason why sex is now less common on screen that even pre-teens have seen much more graphic acts on the internet, and arent remotely interested in watching tamer stuff in the cinema.
The time when teenagers got much of their sex education from the movies because an adult would never have dreamt of discussing it with them has long gone, and they have nothing to learn from anything on offer in the local picture palace.
Then theres a third reason why film producers, far from demanding sex scenes as they once did, are now ruthlessly cutting them from screenplays.
And that is because women, who increasingly decide which films they and their partners will watch, are fed up with seeing themselves depicted not only as sex objects but often as the victims of sexual assault, as in Lars von Triers Breaking The Waves, in which Emily Watson is gang-raped.
Instead, Hollywood executives seem to have decided we should be force-fed ever more CGI-dominated action epics which they believe will appeal to that core young audience, even if those special effects only serve to swamp the story and the characters.
Frankly, I could do without most of them as well. In fact, Id take The 39 Steps any day.