Sex Scenes In Modern Film

Owing to the modesty of human beings in the first half of the 1900s, early motion pictures rarely featured sex scenes. In fact, intimate moments of any kind were virtually impossible to find on screen. The mainstream media would not depict a man and a woman in bed together until the early 1960s and even then it was Fred and Wilma Flintstone, so no real flesh or human emotion was exposed. Sex scenes are far more common in modern movies than their older counterparts. The general moviegoing public has become more open to such scenes, largely due to films like Basic Human Instinct and, more recently, 50 Shades of Grey.

Movies, as we all know, are not real. They are works of fiction, even when a title card at the beginning tells us that the picture

With roles in movies like The Fast Lady, Fahrenheit 451, and the film adaption of Far from the Madding Crowd, Christie established herself as one of the foremost actresses of the swinging London era.

Because she did the bulk of her work in the 60s, when the motion picture industry was still in its artistic infancy, many of Christie’s early movies are pretty tame, if not all of them. But in 1973, the award-winning actress would shock her fans and the general moviegoing public when she appeared as the female lead in Don’t Look Now.

An independent British-Italian film, Don’t Look Now gave Julie Christie and her co-star Donald Sutherland a level of artistic freedom that neither had experienced before.

The movie features a steamy scene in which the pair strip naked and throw themselves onto a bed, panting heavily and writhing in each other’s arms. The scene was so realistic that many more conservative movie buffs demanded it be censored. Even Warren Beatty, Christie’s boyfriend at the time, fought to have it scrapped from the final cut.

Although Julie Christie has been careful not to admit to actually doing the deed with Sutherland on camera, she has said that she “loved the squirming bits and all those things you don’t see”.

Quiz 1