The Summer of Sex Comedies: Natalie Wood Graduates From ‘Single Girl’ Sex To Fearsome Foursomes

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.

It was the charisma of Marilyn Monroe that made the sex comedy pop in the late ’50s. But in terms of loosening sexual mores up further, it was a British secret agent, not solely the blonde American bombshell, who did a good deal of the heavy lifting.

James Bond, a favorite character of New Frontier pitchman and Presidential sex symbol John F. Kennedy personified on-screen by sultry Scotsman Sean Connery, was terrifically promiscuous in his personal life. And not just because the baddies in his movies kept killing his bedmates. (In the inaugural Bond picture, Dr. No, Bond had an actual steady girl, Sylvia Trench, played by Eunice Gayson, who actually made it into From Russia With Love.) The Bond ethos was arguably as crucial a component in the international sexual revolution as was the Kinsey Report and, of course, the birth control pill. 

The Bond movies had their humorous moments — I always chortle sadistically at “you’ve had your six”; IYKYK — but were not comedies as such. To demonstrate the Mach 1 speed at which things were loosening up, we turn to the ever-adorable Natalie Wood, in two films that came out a mere five years apart: 1964’s Sex and The Single Girl and 1969’s Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice. 

You know Natalie Wood. She was the little girl who didn’t believe in Santa in 1947’s Miracle on 34^th Street. She was the kidnap victim in 1957’s The Searchers. (And the younger version of her character was played by her little sister Lana Wood, who’d grow up to play a Bond girl named Plenty O’Toole in Diamonds are Forever. Mind-blowing!) Always pretty and winning, Wood had grown into a real fox by the time she was tapped to play real-life journalist Helen Gurley Brown (a self-described “mouseburger” who nevertheless founded Cosmopolitan magazine) in the 1964 Sex and the Single Girl.

Co-written by Joseph Heller — one year AFTER the publication of his groundbreaking novel Catch-22 — and directed by underrated American auteur Richard Quine, Sex was a bouncy concoction about as substantial as meringue. Tony Curtis plays a fictional character named Bob Weston, editor of a gossip rag, who contrives to write an expose on Brown. Wood’s character takes exception to the rag’s description of her as “a 23-year-old virgin.” You can guess the rest, as Bryan Ferry once sang. Like many films of its time, the picture plays coy with respect to how experienced its heroine actually is. Two years after Sex, ginger bombshell Ann-Margret played the title role in The Swinger, as an aspiring writer who just makes up dirty stories in order to get published. 

The winsome Wood went on to comprise one quarter of the title quartet Bob and Carol and Ted And Alice, the 1969 movie that purported to bring down the walls of Jericho as far at the post-counterculture notion of “free love” was concerned. Its director and co-writer, Paul Mazursky, constructed himself a nice corner in counterculture explaining; his next movie, I Love You, Alice B. Toklas, was an advertisement for weed, with Peter Sellers as the test case on making American less uptight, man. 

Here Wood plays Carol, the wife of the relatively long-haired, bead-wearing, groovy doc filmmaker Bob (Robert Culp), and the movie begins with them at some kind of sensitivity-training weekend replete with dialogue like “I’m Myrna. I’m here because I want a better orgasm.” In the interest of “honesty” Bob admits that he recently cheated on Carol. Who cheats on Natalie Wood? Ted and Alice, played by Elliot Gould and Dyan Cannon, are the couple’s uptight friends who think it’s weird that Bob goes around telling everybody “I love you.” 

As scandalous as the movie seemed in fall of 1969, it plays way less so today. Its racy content is mostly talk. And more talk. But Mazursky proves that if you pack a movie with enough racy content, even if it’s just verbal, you can get away with having pretty much no structure at all. While it doesn’t show any signs of having a strong improvisatory component, as an Altman film would, it’s replete with scenes that drag on long after what would have been considered a punch line has landed (usually with a thud). 

Good thing, then, that the people talking have substantial appeal. Robert Culp, prior to this picture a television star, did not catapult to film superstar but delighted fans by toggling between big and small screens, hitting a high point with the hard-boiled Hickey and Boggs, a crime picture re-teaming him with his I Spy co-star Bill Cosby. (Remember him?)  Elliot Gould’s very square Ted earned him a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination, but that wasn’t the turning point for his career. That would come less than half a year after Bob and Carol’s release. Gould’s work in the groundbreaking M*A*S*H catapulted him from Amiable Schlub to Devastatingly Hip Schlub; he and costar Donald Sutherland were at the vanguard of ‘70s leading men whose looks and attitude didn’t hew to Movie Star convention. Dyan Cannon also scored an Oscar nomination, for Best Supporting Actress, and continued to impress as a comedic character actress, particularly in 1973’s The Last of Sheila. Only Natalie Wood declined to capitalize on the film’s success, going into semi-retirement after becoming pregnant with her first child, Natasha Gregson Wagner (herself an actress). You couldn’t blame her — she’d been working since she was four years old. 

Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice ends — and this is hardly a spoiler alert, since the image of the gang was used on the poster for the theatrical release — with the foursome climbing into bed together. The punchline to the punchline is that they then have no real idea what to do next. Thus began a trend of even “daring” mainstream Hollywood pictures introducing a notion of “free love” for the express purpose of insisting it doesn’t work. 

For all that, the movie pushed Hollywood standards to the left. In 1972, director Billy Wilder, who pushed innuendo as far as it would go in the 1950s with the likes of The Seven Year Itch and Some Like It Hot, made Avanti! In which he depicted his regular amiable funny guy Jack Lemmon romping in the Tyrrhenian Sea with a topless Juliet Mills, heretofore known to American audiences as the squeakily wholesome Nanny in the sitcom Nanny and the Professor. Young fellas who snickered at her on that show snickered no more upon seeing this sight, and by “fellas,” I mean mainly me. And of course permissible nudity became a game-changer for the American sex comedy. How could it not?

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.