The most shameful film ever made?
Liberals said Last Tango was a work of genius. But as the truth about its infamous rape scene emerges, is it . . .
When it premiered in Paris in 1972, it caused a sensation that echoed around the world. Across France, cinema goers queued for hours to see it, joined by Spanish film lovers who travelled hundreds of miles to get around General Franco’s ban on the shocking movie.
Film fans had never seen such cold, brutal sexual explicitness as in Last Tango In Paris — and certainly not from the two leviathans of the cinema, Marlon Brando and the Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci.
Brando, at the height of his success after The Godfather was released a few months earlier, played a widowed American who starts an anonymous sexual relationship with a much younger woman — played by the French newcomer Maria Schneider.
The most notorious scene contains a protracted rape in which Brando’s character — who Bertolucci based on himself — forces himself on the sobbing, struggling girl.
Schneider was 19 and Brando 48, and the film clearly represented a sexual fantasy of Bertolucci’s. It was, he explained, about ‘seeing a beautiful, nameless woman in the street and having sex with her without ever knowing who she was’. Both of his stars said the director pressed them to actually have sex although they say they refused.
Brando and Schneider promoted the film in the U.S. by cavorting naked for a photospread in Playboy magazine. Bertolucci ramped up the excitement by describing Schneider as ‘a Lolita but more perverse’, who had developed an ‘Oedipal fixation with Brando’.
Schneider, making her starring debut and anxious to please the powerful filmmaker, claimed she had slept with 70 women and 50 men, and used heroin, cocaine and marijuana. She later admitted she had made up the stories simply to interest the Press.
The film industry’s liberal establishment fell over itself to heap praise on Last Tango.
‘I walked out of the screening and said to myself: “how dare I make another film?” My personal and artistic life will never be the same again,’ gushed Gosford Park director Robert Altman.
Pauline Kael, influential film critic of The new Yorker magazine, compared the film’s arrival to the first performance in Paris of Stravinsky’s dissonant ballet The Rite Of Spring in 1913, which was regarded as a revolutionary moment in classical music.
‘This must be the most powerful erotic movie ever made, and it may turn out to be the most liberating movie ever made,’ she intoned. ‘Bertolucci and Brando have altered the face of an art form.’
BOTh of them won Oscars and Last Tango raked it in at the box office, becoming so popular that cinemas in London were able to screen it for years on end. even though the rape scene was one of the most disturbing two-and-ahalf minutes of cinema ever made, the film was not only art but a seminal moment in the sexual revolution, claimed its fans.
however, there were reports from new York of ‘well-dressed wives’ vomiting in disgust at an inaugural film festival screening, as well as a few brave voices of protest from those who dared to contradict the wave of critical acclaim.
Mary Whitehouse, tireless champion of morality and decency, was outraged when British censors cut just ten seconds (part of the rape scene) but still allowed it to be released with an X certificate.
Labour MP Maurice edelman, himself a former screen writer, also spoke up, complaining: ‘ Art? no, it’s a licence to degrade.’
But what did these moralistic Philistines know, or the repressive regimes such as Spain and Chile that banned the film? Well, it turns out rather more than the highhanded liberal establishment that dismissed them at the time.
Because this weekend it emerged, to howls of outrage, that Brando and Bertolucci played a vile trick on the young actress Maria Schneider — for whom the film turned out to be nothing short of a calamity.
In a newly unearthed video interview from 2013, 76-year- old Bertolucci admits the infamous rape scene — in which Brando’s character used butter — was not consensual and that he hadn’t warned Schneider what was going to happen.
he and Brando had decided on the butter on the day of filming but felt it would be more effective cinematically not to tell Schneider. ‘I didn’t tell her what was going on because I wanted her reaction as a girl, not as an actress,’ said Bertolucci matter of factly.
‘I wanted her to react humiliated,’ he added. ‘I think she hated me and also Marlon because we didn’t tell her.’ Although he claimed to ‘still feel very guilty about that’, he didn’t regret the incident.
even if he didn’t physically rape her, the panic and distress on her face, and the tears running down it, were real as Brando ripped off Schneider’s underwear.
Pinning her arms out in front of her, he thrust himself against her while demanding that she repeat a twisted philosophical creed he was reciting to her.
news of Bertolucci’s remarks has prompted an outcry from hollywood stars on Twitter, including calls for all copies of the film to be destroyed. ‘This is beyond disgusting. I feel rage,’ said Chris evans, star of the Captain America superhero films.
‘To all the people that love this film — you’re watching a 19-yearold get raped by a 48-year- old man. The director planned the attack. I feel sick,’ said Zero Dark Thirty actress Jessica Chastain.
‘heartbreaking and outrageous’, chorused Westworld star, evan Rachel Wood. Brando and Bertolucci were ‘sick individuals to think that was OK’.
AnnA KenDRICK was one of the few stars who was unsurprised, saying she had known about it for years. ‘I used to get eye-rolls when I brought it up to people,’ she said. In fact, Schneider’s ordeal was first revealed by this newspaper, in a 2007 interview in which she described Bertolucci as ‘fat and sweaty and very manipulative’ on set. This bullying culminated in his surprising her with the butter.
‘I should have called my agent or had my lawyer come to the set because you can’t force someone to do something that isn’t in the script, but at the time, I didn’t know that,’ she said.
‘ Marlon said to me: “Maria, don’t worry, it’s just a movie,” but during the scene . . . I was crying real tears.
‘I felt humiliated and to be honest, I felt a little raped, both by Marlon and by Bertolucci,’ she said. ‘After the scene, Marlon didn’t console me or [apologise]. Thankfully, there was just one take.’
One doesn’t have to look very far beyond hollywood’s horrible reputation for misogyny, not to mention its pathetic sycophancy to its biggest stars, to understand why Schneider’s shocking claims went largely unnoticed until they were confirmed by the ‘great’ Bertolucci.
While the film may have further gilded his reputation and that of Brando (whose only naked scene was — in contrast — cut by Bertolucci to save the actor’s modesty), Last Tango pretty much destroyed Schneider.
She had only ever wanted to be an actress not a sex symbol, and the fall out from the film ‘ turned me a little crazy’, she said, resulting in a nervous breakdown.
As a result of her experience making it, she refused to ever appear naked on film again.
As her career sank, she battled with drug addiction, overdoses and an attempted suicide during the Seventies. In 1974, she came out as bisexual and spent the later years of her life campaigning for women’s rights in film-making. She died of cancer, aged 58, in relative obscurity in 2011.
every few months brings fresh embarrassment for hollywood as new details of its sleazy venality — long hidden by actors terrified of being frozen out for their honesty — finally emerge.
British actress Thandie newton recently revealed her disgust at discovering that a lewd audition tape a director made her do when she was a struggling hopeful was passed around male executives in Tinseltown.
Stars including Gwyneth Paltrow, Charlize Theron and Mariel hemingway have made similar confessions about the loathsome demands directors have tried to make of them.
hollywood continues to worship a string of directors — including Roman Polanski and Alfred hitchcock — accused of abusing underage girls or women.
Perish the thought that an industry which prides itself on its impeccable liberal values should ever admit Mary Whitehouse might have had a point about Last Tango.
But when the film’s highlight is a sobbing teenager being raped by a grunting, middle- aged Marlon Brando, it was surely woefully foolish to hail the film as ‘liberating’. It certainly wasn’t liberating for Maria Schneider.