Oh what a turn-off if Covid proves a movie PASSION KILLER

our critic picks his most erotic sex scenes for inspiration

DON’T LOOK NOW (1973)

SomE of the sexiest scenes in the movies are erotic because of what they suggest, some because of how startlingly real they seem.

When the grieving characters played so unforgettably by Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland in Nicolas Roeg’s magnificent psychological thriller Don’t Look Now have sex, it’s very much the latter (though Roeg denied the rumours that his leads weren’t actually faking it). Brilliantly, he made the post-coital scenes of them getting dressed just as erotic as the sex itself by intertwining them, creating an extraordinary, electrifying sense of intimacy.

DOUBLE INDEMNITY (1944)

THE genius of Billy Wilder’s brilliant film noir is the way it oozes sex — even at the time of the Hays Code. The sequence where Fred MacMurray watches Barbara Stanwyck’s long-legged femme fatale slowly descending the stairs is not a conventional sex scene, yet vibrates with sensuality and lust, paving the way for his fall from grace as she uses her womanly wiles to persuade him to murder her husband.

THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE (1981)

THIS sex scene seemed so convincing that rumours persisted for years that Jack Nicholson and Jessica Lange were doing it for real on the kitchen table, especially once it emerged that director Bob Rafelson filmed it on a closed set — just him, his cinematographer, and the two stars.

It’s still one of the most erotically charged of all movie moments.

BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID (1969)

AT FIRST we are encouraged to think Robert Redford’s Sundance Kid is forcing lover Etta (Katharine Ross) to undress at gunpoint. That’s what makes it a great sex scene, because there’s a real frisson of tension. It doesn’t matter that we don’t see them go much further.

WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT (1988)

‘YOU don’t know how hard it is being a woman, looking the way ah do.’

‘You don’t know how hard it is being a man, looking at a woman looking the way you do.’

The exchange between Bob Hoskins’ private eye Eddie and toon temptress Jessica Rabbit (Kathleen Turner) is nothing if not a sex scene. He’s thinking about it, she’s thinking about it and so are we . . . even though she’s pen and ink.

CASINO ROYALE (2006)

ThERE has to be a Bond scene in any sexiestof-all-time list, and tempted as I am to include an encounter between Sean Connery and honor Blackman’s Pussy Galore from Goldfinger, there’s nothing more erotic than Daniel Craig’s 007 and Vesper Lynd (Eva Green) in the shower in Casino Royale. It’s not like most of Bond’s conquests. It’s sad, sexy, tender and, as he sucks her fingers, actually rather beautiful.