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Full-frontal nudity, steamy threesomes, one-for-the-money shots — these movies pushed the envelope and still played multiplexes
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‘Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom’ (1975)
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‘In the Realm of the Senses’ (1976)
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In this article:

Nicole Kidman,

Pornography,

Tom Cruise

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Arriving on a wave of high anticipation, hype and bag-headed public appearances , the first “volume” of Lars Von Trier’s two-part, five-hour magnum opus Nymphomaniac will start rolling into theaters on March 21st. ( Vol. 2 doesn’t arrive until April 4th, though you’ll be able to catch both chapters on video-on-demand starting on March 20th.) Never one to shy from provocation — he’s more likely to sprint towards it — the Danish director’s chronicle of one woman’s sexual awakening is littered with spankings, fellatio, a ménage à trois or two, sodomy, masturbation and good old-fashioned humping. Though some stunt, er, parts were employed, you are basically watching actors like Charlotte Gainsbourg and Shia LeBeouf engage in the sort of unsimulated activities you associate with porn stars. (LeBeouf even sent in a homemade pornographic videotape for his audition.)
Despite the abundance of explicit sex on display, however, Von Trier’s film is not pornography. Rather, it’s the latest in a long line of films that have pushed the envelope in terms of what can be shown in “mainstream” films and not be considered the sort of movie that requires you to give your credit card to a Web site in order to watch. These films are cast with A-list movie stars and directed by world-class filmmakers. They are designed to play in multiplexes and art houses. Some have been imported in as prestige foreign films, and others have been produced and distributed by Hollywood studios. But the 3o films here all share one thing in common: They all come as close to being pornographic as mainstream films will allow. Read this NSFW list with someone you love.
It wasn't just the pubic hair on display that got Vilgot Sjoman's political screed-cum-melodrama seized at customs when it was brought here in 1969, put at the center of an obscenity case tried by the Supreme Court and considered one of the more notorious films of its day. (Although the few scenes in which actors Lena Nyman and Borje Ahlstedt show off some hairy nether regions certainly helped distinguished this Swedish import from the usual foreign-film fare.) No, what put this story of a radical student having an affair with a married man in boiling hot water was the sequence in which Nyman plants a kiss on her costar's penis in full view; that was enough to brew up a shitstorm that woud end up breaking down censorship barriers and ultimately help usher in an age of cinematic permissiveness. No one talked about the interview footage of Martin Luther King Jr., or footage of actual Vietnam War protesting, or the cheeky subversiveness of the movie's antiauthoritarian humor. They focused on the genital smooch. The curiosity and the contrversy helped garner it a broader audience. And the rest is history. DAVID FEAR
Cinematographer-turned-director Haskell Wexler's mix of narrative and nonfiction (including actual riot footage shot during the '68 Democratic Convention in Chicago) is fueled by the tension of watching performers interact with real situations. One scene in particular, however, struck the MPAA board as a little too real for their tastes: A naked-as-jaybirds romp between future Tarantino favorite Robert Forster and Marianna Hill, with the two of them ending up literally between the sheets. The almost documentary-like feel of their tryst earned Wexler's movie an X, though he'd claim that the rating was more reflective of the political rage he portrayed onscreen. We still think the you-are-there canoodling in the buff may have had something do with it, Haskell. DAVID FEAR
Ken Russell's majestic adaptation of D.H. Lawrence's novel was one of the outré director's more somber, "respectable" films – save for the naked wrestling match between Alan Bates and Oliver Reed, considered by many to be mainstream cinema's first instance of full-frontal male nudity. It's also the stuff of acting lore: Both actors kept trying to back out of doing the scene, until one night they got drunk together and went for a joint pee, during which they were able to check each other out and realize there was nothing to feel self-conscious about. (Or maybe there was: Reed spent his time in between takes off to the side, as he put it, "trying to get a semi on so that it would look more purposeful and stop all my girlfriends saying ‘why bother' and deserting me.") Seen today, the homoeroticism is undeniable regardless of the scene's supposedly plantonic male-bonding intentions. It's a man-on-man sex scene in everything but name. BILGE EBIRI
It may not have been as momentous as Stravinsky's The Rites of Spring (as Pauline Kael notoriously claimed at the time), but Bernardo Bertolucci's seminal film was a watershed how sex was depicted on film. The Italian director originally wanted French stars Dominique Sanda and Jean-Louis Trintignant to play the leads; Sanda had just gotten pregnant, however, and Trintignant wouldn't do nudity. So the director enlisted newcomer Maria Schneider and, in a casting coup, Marlon Brando — with the latter quickly turning this tale into a riveting, expansive meditation on his own screen image. His character is a widower who's been beaten down by life, and who uses his anonymous, athletic and often creative sexual encounters in an empty Parisian apartment as his way of escaping from the world. Audiences weren't used to seeing a major movie star having fingers shoved into his rectum, and though its sex scenes seem somewhat tame today, the film's exploration of how carnality can destroy boundaries is still something to behold. And you'll never hear the phrase "go get the butter" the same way again. BILGE EBIRI
Nestled inside Nicolas Roeg's blood-chilling paranormal thriller is one of the best sex scenes ever committed to film. Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie play a couple relocated to Venice after the accidental death of their daughter. Before becoming unraveled by an English psychic claiming spectral visions of their child, the two stars disrobe for a night of marital bliss. The details are one thing (a pocket of saliva gleaming on Christie's neck, an exchange of grins accompanying a change of positions), but it's Roeg's intercutting between the act and its after-moments that makes the sequence so sublime. What makes the film near-pornographic, you ask? Sutherland later claimed that he and Christie actually made love on camera during the sequence — a statement that's been refuted and resubstantiated many times over the years, but which still lends the scenes an odd voyeuristic thrill. ERIC HYNES
In the early 1970s, Italian poet-novelist-critic-filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini had conjured up a box office phenomenon with his "Trilogy of Life" – earthy, sex-filled adaptations of The Decameron , The Canterbury Tales , and The Arabian Nights . But for his follow-up to the lively, colorful trilogy, Pasolini made one of the most shocking, degenerate films of all time. Set during Mussolini's short-lived reign in the titular Northern Italian republic, Salò depicts four officials who imprison groups of young men and women and then proceed to sexually humiliate, torture, and murder them in grotesque ways. It's an incredibly hard film to watch, by design: Pasolini wanted to rub the viewer's face in this horrifying allegory of what he felt capitalism was doing to human beings. Given the horrific, no-holds-barred sadomasochism on display, we'd say "Mission Accomplished." BILGE EBIRI
Porn, as we all know, played in seedy theaters full of dudes in dirty raincoats (prior to the video revolution, at least). Porn did not play at the New York Film Festival — so the fact that the presitigious event would program Nagisa Oshima's look at a real-life murder case involving a maid, her employer and their all-consuming sexual frenzy meant it was not porn, right? Despite the NYFF's seal of approval and the fact that one of Japan's greatest filmmakers had made this very explicit docudrama, the film's sequences of actors very much engaging in coitus noninterruptus were still too "hot" for customs officials, and the festival's later screenings were stopped. Legal battles would eventually see the courts ruling on the side of Senses being art and not smut, and the movie is now rightfully recognized as a true-crime classic. But if there was ever a film that challenged the notion of art versus porn, it was this one. DAVID FEAR
The only feature from Bob Guccione's Penthouse Films International watches as the eponymous emperor (played by Malcolm McDowell) leads Rome with both an indiscriminate sword and promiscuous cock. It's an attempt to combine the "best" of both tony ancient-historical epics (Gore Vidal wrote the script) and skinflick set pieces, but guess which side wins out? Caligula carousels through incest, rape and necrophilia, pausing only to let its heavyweight cast — McDowell, Helen Mirren, Sir John Gielgud, Peter O'Toole — chat with Penthouse Pets novel or find novel uses for piss and spunk. Hedging his bets, Guccione grafted six minutes of hardcore sex onto the film, mostly via an orally fixated orgy sequence; the result feels like the sort of unholy union that might even give the degenerate Roman figurehead pause. ERIC HYNES
Trying to track down a serial killer who is picking up men in S&M clubs, detective Al Pacino goes undercover into the gay subculture of New York and, as one does when they submerge themselves in their part, gets in way too deep. Director William Friedkin reportedly went in a little too deep as well, and was forced to cut about 40 minutes of footage (!) before the MPAA would change its original X rating to an R —which still didn't stop him from including lots of man-on-man action and intimations of someone being fisted. The film provoked protests from the gay community for its questionable depiction of homosexuality and the city's leather-daddy scene; the notoriety contributed to Cruising flopping spectacularly upon release. Since then, however, its reputation has been somewhat redeemed, and it has become something of a time capsule for a certain late '70s New York downtown subculture. BILGE EBIRI
Rainer Werner Fassbinder's final film is at once one of his most personal, and one of his most reviled, with even his biggest admirers bristling at its garish artificiality and Tom-of-Finland-inspired set design. (Bring on the giant-penis architecture!) But this stagebound, stylized take on Jean Genet's novel is also profoundly intimate and sad, its intense scenes of homosexual sex jutting up against its arch performances and otherworldly atmosphere. It's less an adaptation of a book than a fever dream Fassbinder had after reading it, complete with nocturnal emissions. BILGE EBIRI
Now notable more for the context surrounding its release than for its content, Philip Kaufman's adaptation of Anaïs Nin's memoir was the first mainstream movie to earn an NC-17 rating. Though meant to salvage artful erotica from the pornographic ghetto of the X rating, the designation quickly became the kiss of death — numerous newspapers refused to even carry ads for this relatively tasteful (if unashamedly sexual) literary love story starring Fred Ward as the libidinally adventurous novelist Henry Miller and Maria de Medeiros as the gradually unbound Nin. All of the film's ecstatic grunting, moaning and thrusting had moral watchdogs crying indecency, though scenes involving a very young, very naked Uma Thurman as Miller's wife (and Nin's lover) didn't stop her from becoming a bona fide movie star later on. ERIC HYNES
Filthy in the best possible sense, David Cronenberg's adaptation of J.G Ballard's near-future novel of vehicular desire surveys the wreckage of modernity and digs up taboos — car-accident fetishes? inter-wound penetration? — that most of us didn't even know existed. From high-speed, high-impact orgasms to exploring the erotic potential of leg braces, the sex scenes here manage to be both icky and disconcertingly arousing. Consummately seedy leading man James Spader is a bourgeois professional permanently perverted by a near-death experience, while character actor Elias Koteas turns in one of the randiest performances in film history as a slithering scarfaced greasemonkey. It won a prize for "audacity" at Cannes; Ted Turner found the movie so degenerate that he tried to have it banned from ever being released. ERIC HYNES
Lars von Trier has been thumbing his nose at society and good taste for long before Antichrist and Nymphomaniac , and his only Dogme 95 film helped garner him his first true taste of controversy. It's a bleak black comedy about a group of adults who act like developmentally disabled people in order to both liberate themselves from, and get up in the face of, bourgeois complacency. One of their provocations involves having group sex – which, naturally, the director shows in characteristically unflinching fashion. (There's also a shot of an erect penis, which was digitally blurred upon the film's release in the U.S.) The film got into ratings trouble in some countries as a result – but by later Von Trier standards, it practically feels like a Disney film. BILGE EBIRI
Stanley Kubrick's swansong averted an NC-17 rating thanks to director-approved digital inserts that obscured pornographic acts during the much-discussed Venetian-masked orgy sequence. The scene still feels remarkably smutty, though the film's steamiest moment would barely qualify as PG-13. After each indulging in extramarital flirtations at a lavish holiday party, Tom Cruse and Nicole Kidman get high in their bedroom and talk about desire. Provoked by her husband's disbelief that she could ever be sexually tempted, Kidman parks on the carpet in white skivvies and delivers a jealousy-stoking monologue for the ages involving a summer getaway, a studly naval officer, and a purred vocal delivery. In terms of potency, Cruise's subsequent sexual odyssey pales in comparison. ERIC HYNES
Leos Carax's achingly personal adaptation of Herman Melville's "Pierre, or the Ambiguities" tells the story of a moody young man (G
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