Uncle Scoopy's world-weary musings about naked celebrities, sports, humor and other important, manly things.
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It’s three straight minutes of sex while Autumn delivers a lengthy, non-stop monologue about physics. I didn’t make that up.
It’s a real oddball film, which I will describe in detail below.
Autumn finished #5 that year in our poll for the Best Nude Scene of 2011, and I think I voted for her.
My notes on the film follow.
Considering a career in ‘rasslin’?
Eddie Guerrero died of natural causes at age 38. That might be a sign you’ve chosen the wrong profession.
And whatever you do, don’t agree to do a 70-foot fall, no matter how much they’ve padded your landing. Owen Hart died of unnatural causes at 34.
In this fantasy, Baron Münchhausen is an immortal whose travels through time and space are recounted in a series of flashbacks.
This 1943 film is exceptional in several ways:
First, it is a technical masterpiece. The sets and the color photography are as good as or better than any films from the same era being produced in Britain or the USA, including even The Wizard of Oz and The Thief of Baghdad. The recently remastered 4K version is spectacular.
Second, it was begun at the height of Nazi Germany’s military successes, ordered by Joseph Goebbels himself. It was written by a Jewish man, Erich Kästner, but his name was banned from the credits.
Third, the Arabian portion of the film contains nudity, in an era when naked flesh was verboten across the Atlantic. Here is the relevant portion of the film. Sample capture below.
The film’s premiere in March 1943 ran 134 minutes. A re-censored version was released just three months later with a runtime of 118 minutes, with changes presumably ordered by the Nazi Ministry of Propaganda to expunge controversial aspects of the film. The restored 4K “export version” (available for free here) is shorter still, running 116 minutes. The German Blu-Ray has all three versions (134 premiere, 118 later theatrical, 116 export version). I have not seen the longer versions and don’t know what is in the other 18 minutes.
If anyone has seen the premiere version, please tell the rest of us what the differences are.
Netflix. German erotic thriller with a great deal of topless nudity.
No reviews. No votes at IMDb, but one IMDb commenter called it Fifty Shades of Rubbish
Lilli visits her sister Valeria, surprised to learn she’s engaged to a Frenchman, Manu. She spontaneously meets nightclub manager Tom, sparking an instant connection. A dark secret lurks behind the island’s events.
French romantic drama in English and French.
In the beautiful South of France, Guillaume is a suicidal Frenchman. Vedrana is slowly dying in a loveless relationship. She is determined to make him love again, but his former fiancée shows up at his doorstep, pregnant with his child.
Low-budget historical fiction. USA.
An adaptation of Alain Didier-Weill’s play Vienne 1913. Set in Vienna on the eve of the First World War, the film draws together a trio of unlikely bedfellows: Sigmund Freud (Alan Cumming), a young and embittered Adolf Hitler (Samuel H. Levine), and Hugo (Liam Aiken), a privileged yet tormented pianist caught between the poles of reason and revulsion. That Freud and Hitler were contemporaries in the city is historical fact; that they might be drawn into this triangular, symbolic dance of ideas and influence is the film’s bold hypothesis.
Cara Corrigan is the one with the pearl necklace.
This came up in another thread yesterday because it included a nude scene in an era when little nudity was to be found. American films were just about nudity-free for nearly 30 years starting in the summer of 1934, but other parts of the world were less inhibited.
This is a French drama created by two of the giants of cinema in the 30s and 40s – Marcel Carné (director) and Jacques Prévert (writer). Although acclaimed as one of the greatest films of the 1930s, and considered the prototypical example of French poetic realism, there was a time when it was nearly lost to us forever.
Le jour se lève was released in France in June 1939 and shown in the US the following year. In France, however, the film was banned in 1940 by the Vichy government on the grounds it was demoralizing. After the war’s end, the film was shown again to wide acclaim.
In 1947, it was again suppressed when RKO Radio Pictures wanted to remake the film in Hollywood (as The Long Night). The company acquired the distribution rights of the French film and sought to buy up and destroy every copy of the film that they could obtain. For a time it was feared that they had been successful and that the film was lost, but it re-appeared in the 1950s and has subsequently stood alongside Les Enfants du paradis as one of the finest achievements of the partnership of Carné and Prévert.
The plot:
Francois, a sympathetic factory worker, kills Valentin with a gun. He locks himself in his furnished room, awaits his fate, and starts to remember how he was led to murder. He met once Francoise, a young fleurist, and they fell in love, but Francoise was apparently seduced by Valentin a cold, machiavellian guy. Alone in his room and out of cigarettes, François realizes he has no hope of escape. The police decide to throw tear gas into François’s room in an attempt to subdue him, but just before they do, François commits suicide by shooting himself in the heart.
So … a comedy?
The nudity:
Arletty (Léonie Marie Julie Bathiat) is often cited for her famous response to accusations of collaboration with the German occupation by having an affair with a Luftwaffe officer: “My heart is French, but my ass is international.” Her wit didn’t help her avoid a conviction and jail sentence. She was found guilty of treason, but served only two months in the calaboose, after which she managed to work in French films for another decade or so, until failing eyesight forced her into retirement. Her eyes may have given out, but the rest of her body seemed to be pretty healthy, since she was still alive in the 1990s.
