SEX IN CINEMA - 1987

Published in the November 1987 issue of Playboy, “Sex in Cinema 1987” was part of the magazine’s broader tradition of looking back at the year in film through the lens of culture, controversy and changing screen boundaries. The feature surveys major Hollywood releases, European art-house imports, British cinema and genre films, showing how eroticism, glamour and adult themes returned to movie screens in very different forms throughout 1987.

Movie screens are steaming up, and mother England, surprisingly, is lighting the fire.

Just the facts of life, ma’am: Dan Aykroyd, as Dragnet’s straight-arrow Joe Friday — nephew of the immortal Jack Webb — bemusedly checks out the action in a strip joint.

Highbrow diatribes get wise, sex sells, declared a Variety headline earlier this year. This is news? Sex is being used to flog everything from soap to running shoes — sales of one brand of footwear shot up 700 percent following a particularly steamy ad campaign — but Hollywood has been slow in getting the word. The erotic temperature of major-studio releases had been plunging steadily downward since 1972’s Last Tango in Paris. Finally, in 1987, the mercury is inching back up, with a nudge from an unexpected source. Mother England, of all places, has been invading her former colony with films that overflow with brazen bedroom antics, kinky sexual practices and what the Monty Python gang loves to refer to as “naughty bits.” This text continued on page 146.

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Witching may make it so: From occult rites to deviltry, strange things are happening.

Jack Nicholson has a hell of a time playing Satan to the comely coven of Cher, Susan Sarandon and Michelle Pfeiffer in The Witches of Eastwick. Dennis Hopper is a far scarier personification of evil as torch singer Isabella Rossellini’s nemesis in Blue Velvet, already a hit on the video-cassette charts.

Freddy never looked like this before! In his latest outing, A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors, the monster metamorphoses into female form. In Necropolis, Leeanne Baker goes four up on Freddy as a sort of ghoul-dugger wet nurse, amazingly well preserved for her purported 300 years. Sylvia Kristel is the count’s bloodthirsty ex in Dracula’s Widow.

She’s a sweet young thing on TV’s Cosby Show and A Different World, but Lisa Bonet projects raw passion as a mambo priestess in Angel Heart; her love scene with Mickey Rourke almost earned the movie — which is based on a William Hjortsberg novel serialized in Playboy back in 1978 — an X. More kinks are due in Aria; weird antics from Rigoletto, one of its ten segments set to opera music.

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Star power lends a little something extra to the steamier movie scenes of 1987.

Surely, she’s seen one of those before. Whoopi Goldberg goes into the closet for Burglar. In Half Moon Street, Sigourney Weaver — turning to prostitution to make ends meet — sheds her clothes in reel after reel; with diplomat Michael Caine, she does it for love. This being the Eighties, both budding-romance and monkey-business contacts become entangled in terrorist plots. Summer Schoolteacher Mark Harmon discovers one of his students, Ken Olandt, moonlighting as a male stripper in a Chippendales-style nightery.

Superhunk Rob Lowe and sexy Kim Cattrall do a Calvin Klein-ad imitation in Masquerade; Kathleen Turner’s a time traveler again in Julia and Julia, dreaming her way back to her past — and into an affair with Sting.

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Movies for the young at heart: more class, more sass and nary another Porky’s in view.

In the more innocent age depicted by Neil Simon’s autobiographical Brighton Beach Memoirs, Jonathan Silverman gets his jollies by dropping stuff so he can sneak a peek up cousin Lisa Waltz’s skirt. Lou Jacobi essays the May-December routine with Monique Gabrielle in an episode of Amazon Women on the Moon. Andrew McCarthy gets to cop a feel in Mannequin, but the lady, played by Kim Cattrall again, is a mere dummy. It’s the reel thing, however, for horny teen moviegoers Emily Lloyd and Lee Whitlock in Wish You Were Here.

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Béatrice Dalle, the manic-depressive titular character in the highly charged French film Betty Blue, appears in one of her deepest indigo moments. Its mood contrasts sharply with the animal energies displayed in Dirty Dancing, an American coming-of-age picture set in the summer of ’63 at a Borscht Belt resort. Cutting a mean rug are Cynthia Rhodes and Patrick Swayze, who portrays the hotel’s resident stud and dance instructor.

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Do foreigners do it better? Well, they definitely do it with greater frequency — on film, anyway.

The flames in the fireplace aren’t the only ones ignited in Italy’s L’Attrazione (Top Model), featuring Stefania Sandrelli and Florence Guerin. But the most controversial Italian import of 1987 is Devil in the Flesh, released with an X in the U.S.; the scene with Maruschka Detmers going into action on 19-year-old neighbor Federico Pitzalis earned it.

In Spain’s Padre Nuestro, Fernando Rey plays a dying cardinal who’s trying to make things up to his illegitimate daughter, Victoria Abril. His Eminence’s rebellious bastard doesn’t make things easy for her dad; she’s a flamboyant prostitute who flaunts her unorthodox parentage by styling herself La Cardenala. The French drama Rendez-vous introduces Juliette Binoche as an aspiring actress in heat and hoping to be discovered in Paris, where her sexual partners include Wadeck Stanczak and Lambert Wilson, a talented fellow who even manages to rise from the grave for love.

Topless fun in the sun is the principal attraction of the frothy French release L’Année des Méduses, starring Valérie Kaprisky. She dallies with a pair of German tourists, Barbara Nielsen and Antoine Nikola. Meanwhile, the seemingly indestructible Emmanuelle marches on, with a pair of amorous ladies among the visual aids of Emmanuelle 5.

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The colorful poets Byron and Shelley are irresistible fodder for director Ken Russell, Britain’s wild man of the cinema. In Gothic, Shelley, Julian Sands, his wife-to-be, Mary, Natasha Richardson, Byron, Gabriel Byrne, and his mistress, Myriam Cyr, get down and dirty. Rita, Sue and Bob Too features a randy threesome — Michelle Holmes, Siobhan Finneran and George Costigan — the last about to “joomp” the Union Jack and the birds. Prick Up Your Ears, the grim life-and-death story of homosexual playwright Joe Orton, stars Gary Oldman, chatting up a pair of pretty boys. Truly far out is Personal Services, based on the misadventures of a madam who catered to a well-connected — and kinky — clientele.

For the ultimate blind date, take a trip to a desert island: That’s what Brits Gerald Kingsland and Lucy Irvine did, and the movie Castaway is based on their conflicting accounts. The strangers in paradise are portrayed by Oliver Reed and Amanda Donohoe; reels unspool before they finally get horizontal, but audiences are treated to many delightful views of Amanda unclad.