PASSION KILLER
Oh what a turn-off if Covid proves a movie
THE AGE OF INNOCENCE (1993)
IT’S no accident that many of cinema’s most sensual moments happen in period films, when buttoned-up social morality and actual buttons seem designed to discourage intimacy.
This could hardly apply more to high-society New York in the 1870s, which makes it all the sexier as Daniel DayLewis’s lawyer Newland Archer, though engaged to May Welland (Winona ryder), falls for her hot cousin Countess Olenska (Michelle Pfeiffer). Her orgasmic tremors when he finally nuzzles her neck make the earth move for the audience, too.
TO HAVE AND HAVE NOT (1944)
FOR at least ten years I’ve been telling my children that smoking isn’t clever, cool or sexy . . . but I would never cite 19-year-old Lauren Bacall’s entrance in Howard Hawks’ To Have And Have Not as supporting evidence.
It isn’t what most of us know as a sex scene, and yet, as she stands in the open doorway asking ‘Anybody gotta match?’, then lights up with as much sultry elegance as anyone has ever done anything on screen, she turns even Humphrey Bogart’s legs to jelly.
So really it was a sex scene, and by the time Bogey lit a cigarette for her two years later in The Big Sleep, he had left his third wife and made her his fourth.
CASABLANCA (1942)
MICHAeL Curtiz’s wonderful picture is already prominent on the list of films Directors UK is urging its members to look at, and with good reason.
It is unquestionably one of the most romantic movies ever made, as rick (Humphrey Bogart) and Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman) grapple with their powerful feelings for one another, complicated by war, the German occupation of Casablanca and her marriage to another man.
But their fully-clothed kiss, its passion somehow intensified in black and white, adds an irresistible hint of real sex, whatever you believe is meant by Curtiz’s cut to a revolving lighthouse!
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 sexiest of-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.