Getting Naked With Bo Derek in ’10’ and Phoebe Cates in ‘Fast Times’

In recent years, social media has revealed a new prudery among younger movie watchers, too tiresome to describe in much detail, but kind of boiling down to a directive that sex scenes are only permissible in movies if they “advance the story.” Now, of course, in the genre of sex comedy, sex IS the story — whether there are scenes overtly depicting the sex act or not. Over the next several weeks in his new series The Summer Of Sex Comedies, Decider contributor Glenn Kenny will provide a guided tour of the permutations of the sex comedy (from innuendo to full frontal nudity) as well as its various luminaries (from Marilyn Monroe to Jennifer Lawrence). So even if no noteworthy new sex comedies come up in the next few months, you can still have a pretty hot cinematic summer.

When we last spoke, the 1970s had begun, and nudity had reared its delightful head in the sex comedy. How could it not. We recollect that director Otto Preminger — a filmmaker we don’t reflexively associate with comedy, despite the fact that he worshipped his elder cinematic maestro Ernst Lubitsch, he of the fabled “touch” that rendered innuendo in a most refined fashion — broke what now seems a weird barrier by including the word “virgin” in the dialogue of his mild 1953 romp The Moon Is Blue. 

This act of defiance was the one of several chips in the wall of the Motion Picture Production Code that served as a self-censoring apparatus for Hollywood. Howard Hughes had taken a swing against it with Jane Russell’s cleavage in his 1948 The Outlaw. Filmmakers in the late ‘60s found they could go even further if they were willing to risk an “R” or “X” rating. The ratings system was a kind of last gasp for regulation, one that remains with us today. New freedoms didn’t exactly compel old-school filmmakers to run amok, but they did use them — hence, as we mentioned last time, old-school maestro Billy Wilder, now thirty years into his Hollywood directing career, having Juliet Mills go topless in Avanti!

Writer-director Blake Edwards was 16 years Wilder’s junior but started his Hollywood career around the same time as Wilder, albeit as an actor. From 1948 to 1960, he wrote and sometimes directed slight, enjoyable light comedies (he helped script My Sister Eileen in 1955, whose director Richard Quine would go on to helm Sex and the Single Girl in 1964) before making a very big splash with Breakfast at Tiffany’s in 1961. The Pink Panther in 1963 made an even bigger splash and spawned a blockbuster franchise. But Edwards was a restless talent and a combative guy (as well as a chronic depressive) whose observations of the sexual revolution compelled cinematic investigation. And that permissiveness of the ‘70s allowed him to shape 10, which made a U.S. star out of the British comedian Dudley Moore and an instant sex symbol out of the lithe, cornrowed Bo Derek. (Derek’s husband, former actor John Derek, had a type when it came to mates, and with Bo he found a woman he could really Pygmalion it up with.)

Moore plays George Webber, a Hollywood songwriter of great repute and much wealth. His girlfriend, played by Edwards’ real-life wife Julie Andrews, is ideal — a talented singer, sweet, smart, sexy. (How sexy? She’s often seen in a very sheer robe that goes up against Andrews’ squeaky-clean Sound of Music/Mary Poppins image. In SOB, Edwards’ next film, an inspired indictment of Hollywood, Edwards would go all out and have her appear topless.) But he’s just turned 40, and so is beset by a midlife crisis, or male menopause, or what have you. He thinks everyone else has it made — using a telescope, he spies on his neighbor across the canyon and envies the guy’s playmates, one of whom is portrayed by then real-life porn star Constance Money. 

One afternoon he encounters a wedding party and is hypnotized by the bride, who represents female perfection — the “10” rating of the title. Edwards indulges his love of Laurel and Hardy style slapstick by having George endure various painful pratfalls in pursuit of another glance of this girl. So obsessed is he that when he learns that Jenny, for that is the woman’s name, is the daughter of a local dentist, he makes an appointment with the guy so as to drill him (see what I did there) about where she’s honeymooning. The appointment is more than he bargained for, as Dr. Miles finds a bunch of cavities that he then determines to tackle marathon style, if not Marathon Man style. 

George does find Jenny, and through a series of plot twists, finds himself alone with her, naked and everything. It’s a dream come true but also, in the quasi-moralistic mode of the era, a bit of a letdown. She introduces him to Ravel’s “Bolero” as Ultimate Sex Music (that must have done wonders for classical LP sales at the time) but says it’s music she likes to “fuck” to; George is clearly thrown off by her ostensible vulgarity. He’s even more confounded to learn that her husband, who phones her mid-seduction, isn’t bothered by her activity; they have an “open marriage.” One can’t tell if George is more confounded by her nonchalance or ostensible amorality. He seems to be of the old-school mindset that sex is only good if it’s “dirty,” and one thing to make it “dirty” is to make it furtive. George goes through with it — one is reminded of the Woody Allen observation “They say sex without love is a meaningless experience, but as meaningless experiences go it’s pretty good.” But he leaves the liaison with a new determination to make it work with Julie Andrews, and why not. Monogamy is reaffirmed.

10 was a sex comedy about adults, made by adults, and aimed at adults — although Bo Derek’s appeal gave it a more expansive reach, particularly with respect to teenage boys. Said teenage boy were more explicitly catered to a year back, with the 1978 release of National Lampoon’s Animal House. The comedy about the world’s most unruly frat, set during the Kennedy-and-Bond era that set the stage for the sexual revolution, featured a grouping of the world’s horniest college underclassmen and depicted the various lengths they went to in pursuit of relief. On the one hand, Tim Matheson’s slick operator “Otter” (does his manner explain the nickname?) seduces the oppressive Dean’s alcoholic wife (Verna Bloom), while feckless pledge “Pinto” (Tom Hulce) pursues a sweet supermarket checkout girl named Clorette (Sarah Holcomb). This Very Socially Irresponsible Movie plays Clorette’s Extremely Statutory Status as a punchline. Because that’s the kind of movie it is. If you saw this in 1978, while a teenager, you likely found this at least mildly amusing, and you were also moved to throw your own toga party. (Reader, I did.) 

Oh yes, and the movie also sanctioned voyeurism, in its depictions of John Belushi’s party animal Bluto Blutarsky mounting a ladder to spy on a couple of undressing coeds (including 1973 Playboy Playmate of the Month Martha Ann Smith) and turning to the camera and giving a Groucho Marx-style eyebrow-raise, to render the viewer complicit. The picture did know its audience. 

Several years later, 1982’s Fast Times at Ridgemont High, directed by Amy Heckerling from a memoir by Cameron Crowe, delighted teen audiences while depicting several varieties of parental nightmare. Dope-smoking, teen sex (claimed if not actually achieved, as it turned out in one crucial case), unwanted pregnancy, abortion, etc. But the erotic action, for the most part, was imaginary — and also, for some fellows in the audience, epic. Judge Reinhold’s beleaguered Brad — a high-school good-guy who finds himself increasingly humiliated throughout what’s supposed to be a triumphant senior year — has a thing for his sister’s ravishing best friend, Linda, played by a ravishing Phoebe Cates. Locking himself in his domicile’s bathroom, he looks out from his window as she emerges from the pool and then fantasy takes over. Cates’ unhooking her bikini top from the front is one of those moments that, in the days when movies were on VHS tape, would come back from certain rentals with the oxide beginning to flake off from the backing. Thank heaven, then, for digital discs and streaming. This kind of frankness reset the boundaries yet again.

In citing this aspect of Fast Times, however, one obscures the larger ambit of the picture, which gave a great deal of agency to its female characters and ultimately deplored the sexism to which they were subjected. A year after its release, another star-making vehicle would add fascinating complexity to the coming-of-age sex comedy. Stay tuned. 

IN THE NEXT INSTALLMENT OF “THE SUMMER OF SEX COMEDIES”: Just take those old records off the shelf because Tom Cruise is about to drop trou in Risky Business.

Veteran critic Glenn Kenny reviews‎ new releases at RogerEbert.com, the New York Times, and, as befits someone of his advanced age, the AARP magazine. He blogs, very occasionally, at Some Came Running and tweets, mostly in jest, at @glenn__kenny. He is the author of the The World Is Yours: The Story of Scarface, published by Hanover Square Press, and now available for at a bookstore near you.