One of the most popular sex scenes of all time is the kitchen scene from the 1981 version of The Postman Always Rings Twice. But many people find the more implicit parts of the 1946 version to be sexier. These people include the earlier film’s female lead, Lana Turner, who wrote in her autobiography, “[The makers of the 1981 film] didn’t have to worry about the censors. I’d had to project a rather intense sexual presence, but always with my clothes on. I was amused to read that [NY Times film critic] Vincent Canby considered the remake a pale, rather sexless imitation of my version.”
Yes, a film with neither nudity nor simulated lovemaking can be quite sexy, likely sexier than an explicit remake, for innuendo and other teasing maneuvers around either the Hays Code or the MPAA ratings board’s restrictions are far more tantalizing than any bare and balls-out displays of graphic sex common in movies today. Though many classic implications of sex on the big screen were rather obvious and quick, giving the audience a nudge but hardly a rise (think the Eisensteinian metaphors of a train entering a tunnel in North by Northwest or fireworks exploding in To Catch a Thief), loads of films turned up the heat through the use of careful camerawork, daring dialogue and more subtly suggestive actions. Sometimes such sexy moments of tension and/or playfulness are definite forms of foreplay and serve as lead-ins to actual sex acts, on or off screen. But not always.
Everyone has his or her own ideas of what’s sexy, so feel free to disagree with our choices and/or suggest your own (I can guess what the first suggestion will be). Consider our list simply a starting point for discussion. …Read more
Publisher Quirk Books and author Seth Grahame-Smith have come up with the best way to make a literary work more accessible since the creation of Classics Illustrated comic books: they’ve added “all-new scenes of bone crunching zombie action” to Jane Austen’s 19th century novel Pride and Prejudice. This new version, out in stores this May, is titled Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: The Classic Regency Romance – Now With Ultraviolent Mayhem! And if you didn’t think it was a masterpiece before, chances are you will now.
Avoiding the majority of public domain movies already consisting of horror and science fiction elements, we’ve come up with ten great classic films that would be even greater with the addition of zombies. …Read more
That’s not actually Marilyn Monroe in the McDonalds commercial above. It’s Susan Griffiths, a Marilyn impersonator who you may have seen on the cover of this month’s GQ magazine. I’m not sure how old the ad is, but I wanted to use it as the Clip of the Day in order to share some other McDonalds print ads that I discovered while on vacation in Buenos Aires last week (no, I wasn’t dumb enough to bother eating at McDonalds with all the great Argentine beef elsewhere; I was using the restroom). I don’t know how old these ads are either, but they seem pretty despicable regardless. Check out some pics of Bogie, James Dean, Marlon Brando and Nat King Cole hawking cheeseburgers after the jump.
The 25 titles to be inducted in the National Film Registry for 2007 include some of my favorite films: George Cukor’s The Women; Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven; Nicholas Ray’s pitch-black In a Lonely Place; and, of course, my favorite franchise film of all time, Back to the Future. The full list, as well as thoughts from NFR advisory board member Dave Kehr, can be found here; see an extended clip from the Ray film above.
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
filmcouch-114
