The life of the famous gangster – Roger Corman style! Promotional catchphrase: “The man who made the Twenties roar”
Though the film purports to be biographical, it is not. For example:
— Susan Blakely’s Iris Crawford is a fictional character.
— Frank Nitti (played by a pre-Rocky Sylvester Stallone) speaks at Capone’s funeral, a pretty neat trick, since he had been dead for four years.
Legendary nudity! Susan Blakely didn’t do many nude performances in her career, but she absolutely committed to this one.
Gotta rate this one two vas and a voom. It is good to be Capone. Or Ben Gazzara. Actually, Gazarra would be better – you get to be in Big Lebowski and not die in prison of the syph.
Video –
This one didn’t cum out on VHS for a longgg time. Remember capping it from Cinemax iirc. Had seen the pics in Celebrity Sleuth back in the day …
She also had a nude scene on HBO’s Hitchhiker.
If any film deserved to get a thorough 4K open-matte Criterion restoration/remastering, it’s this one.
They wouldn’t even have to do the whole movie, just these scenes.
I wonder if they’d planned on doing a slow zoom out so Susan Blakely wouldn’t have to worry about the southern exposure… But then perhaps some over-excited AC zoomed out too fast and caught the pot of gold. And you’ve got it, you’re going to use it.
I don’t think they were trying to limit anything. It was 1975, an interesting time. Nudity was only getting more explicit and by this time Hollywood was going to and talking about X rated films. As a young kid I remember seeing actual naked women on the cover of Playboy and other mags on full display at the counter when we’d stop in to buy stuff. Satellite tv was starting to show uncensored content if you were subscribing to it. Carson was even airing unedited shows on satellite with swearing. I think many were expecting the sex and nudity to only go farther.
But then something changed and I’m not sure the cause. Certainly conservatives were up in arms so maybe they were threatening changes in the laws or regulations. The late 70s were more conservative and the 80s only got worse and worse. It took until the 90s for things to start to pick up again in the mainstream. Mainstream media has always been a pain in the ass and that’s why I’m glad they are shrinking and being replaced by everything that’s available on the internet and streaming. The new things are too wide and varied so they can never be as easily controlled as Hollywood has been.
Actually there is one other change in the late 70s I’m aware of. Smaller, independent filmmakers would being pushed out. They used to be able to get their movies in local theaters by just showing up and showing it to the owner. DJs used to be able to play the records they brought in. Every director says that 1967-1975 was the age of the director where they had tremendous power.
Something changed after ’75. Many smaller studios went out of business even though they could still sell tickets. Hammer Studios says they could no longer get funding even though the films in 1975 sold more tickets than they had sold before. Smaller players were being forced out. You see many successful small studios disappear around ’75. Radio stations started to be controlled by bigger corporations and DJs were told to follow the playlist. Basically there was a period from ’67 to ’75 were the talent had a lot of power to do what they wanted and whatever made money set the direction. After ’75, corporations took control and they dictated what the talent would do and by the time cable started in the 80s, the corporations only cared about the best way to squeeze money out of people. No longer was everything the same price. If something could sell better then they would often put it on a more expensive channel. The only thing they care about is the quarterly report showing growth in revenues and profits. Nothing else matters to them.
The 1980s was the Reagan/Bush decade, rife with social scolds like Ed Meese and Anita Bryant and Phyllis Schlafly et al.
With the “Conservative Christians” in charge, Hollywood toned down the sex and turned up the violence.
Stick bot talking out of his ass as usual: no nudity in THE 80s?!? There was a tit shot in John Hughes’ first movie fer chrissakes
If they can find the un-retouched footage of Phoebe wading into the surf in Paradise, anything’s possible – Film preservation!