It has never been trickier to bring sizzle to the set... But here

THere may yet be a baby boom as a result of lockdown and couples quarantining together, but in cinematic terms, sex and the pandemic are not happy bedfellows. Film production has started again, but under new guidelines, directors are being urged to promote safe on-set working practices and that includes scenes involving actors jumping into bed together — or not.

even before any of us had heard of Covid19, some movie directors were feeling compromised by the #MeToo movement.

A pass in a bar, a hand on a knee, a sizzle of sexual chemistry . . . heightened sensibilities already meant that such things could no longer be depicted willy-nilly, if you’ll pardon the term. In this era of social distancing, though, showing sex on screen has become trickier still. The professional association Directors UK this week updated its guidelines for ‘directing nudity and simulated sex’, suggesting ways of presenting romantic liaisons other than with the kind of graphic sexual activity recently seen in the steamy TV drama Normal People.

Let characters be shown fixing their own clothes ‘after the event’, they say. Or how about ‘the closing of a bedroom door’ as a way of leaving the action to ‘a viewer’s imagination’? In some respects, all this represents a dramatic leap back in time to the notorious Hays Code, which subjected 1930s Hollywood to strict rules about screen sex.

Will Hays, who led the censorship committee, was a Presbyterian elder from Indiana and a former U.S. Postmaster-General, so it’s perhaps as well that he didn’t live to see the 1981 version of The Postman Always rings Twice, an erotically charged remake of the 1946 film with Lana Turner.

That one was sexy enough, but by the time Jack Nicholson and Jessica Lange got down to business 35 years later on a kitchen table, very little was left to the imagination.

Perhaps, though, the new pandemic-influenced guidelines actually represent a leap forward, not backward, in that they force actors and directors to think more creatively about sex. In our anything-goes culture, the depiction of sex on screen has been becoming less and less erotic, by getting more and more explicit. even the Nicholson/Lange coupling looks tame by modern standards.

The directors of the 1940s might have preferred not to work within the constraints of the Hays Code, but it did lead to some of the sexiest images in the history of cinema, such as Humphrey Bogart lighting a cigarette for a similarly smouldering Lauren Bacall in The Big Sleep (1946).

That scene was utterly sensual and sexual, no less — in fact, rather more — than any number of heaving and thrusting scenes we are confronted with in modern-day films.

So, in that respect alone, three cheers for the effects of Covid on the movie industry.

Directors are being encouraged to look at films such as It Happened One Night, the classic 1934 romcom starring Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert, to learn how sex was depicted in a more innocent yet more censorious age — with ingenuity and panache.

Here are my top picks of films they might consider revisiting, containing what, in my view, are nine of the most erotic sex scenes ever devised — and one of the least . . .