A pair of mostly forgotten indies with great skin, an Oscar winning classic, a British flick chock full of nudity, and one of the great cult classics of the 20th century were all released on December 9 in Movie Nudity History!
2016: Frank Lola
Any sex scene involving Michael Shannon is gonna be awkward, but when it opens a film and involves an actress' long-awaited topless debut, it's worth pushing through the awkwardness. Imogen Poots decided that the time was right to make her topless debut, after baring her buns two years earlier in A Long Way Down, so Frank Lola opens with Shannon going down on her with the Vegas skyline glowing outside their window...
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This strange and twisted little flick eventually takes a trip to a sex club, where Emily D'Angelo goes topless to get tied up, and there's even a blackmail video involving Poots and a topless Sarah Molasky... Sweet sassy Molasky!
Shannon himself would go on to land his second Oscar nomination in early 2017, not for this film but for Nocturnal Animals, which was also released on this same day four years ago!
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2011: W.E.
9 years ago today, Madonna stepped back out of her then-husband Guy Ritchie's directorial shadow to make her sophomore feature film with this tale of Wallis Simpson, the woman who caused King Edward VIII to abdicate the throne. The story intertwines her story, Wallis played by the always amazing Andrea Riseborough, with that of an abused housewife in the 1990s named Wally Winthrop (Abbie Cornish), after the controversial Ms. Simpson.
The story wastes no time drawing parallels between the women, opening with a scene that intercuts Wally getting into the tub with an abusive incident Wallis faced at the hands of her first husband— he drags her out of the tub to demand his dinner. While Cornish used a body double for her flash of breast, Riseborough bares all in this heart-wrenching scene...
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2005: Brokeback Mountain
**Bold portions of the following text are excerpted from Anatomy of a Scene's Manatomy: Brokeback Mountain on MrMan.com**
Back in 1998, the second season of South Park aired an episode titled "Chef's Chocolate Salty Balls" wherein the Sundance Film Festival relocated to the sleepy Colorado hamlet. While many of the townsfolk are excited about the influx of independent cinema, Cartman derides independent films as being about "gay cowboys eating pudding." 7 years later, that statement would prove oddly prophetic with the release of Brokeback Mountain, an independent film about gay cowboys who, in all fairness, are never actually seen eating pudding.
This sort of jokey comparison seemed to haunt the film prior to its release. Would anyone be able to take a movie about gay cowboys seriously? Would this unintentional association with a raunchy comedy series hurt the film's prospects? Could a straight-identifying director and cast accurately portray the gay experience? 15 years on, it's easy to see that outside of the realm of pop culture, the two are barely associated with one another anymore, as Brokeback Mountain turned out to be such a masterpiece that it transcended any sort of jokes made about it at the time. In fact, to this day, it remains the most recent film selected for preservation in the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress.
Although Brokeback Mountain was hardly the first "mainstream" film to deal with a gay relationship, it broke ground in so many ways simply by taking its premise as seriously as it would were it a heterosexual love story. Gay characters in film had, for the most part, been supporting players or marginalized background characters, with their relationships not given the same weight and context as their straight counterparts. And while cinema had produced gay love stories in the past, they were never greeted with the almost universal critical and commercial acclaim that Brokeback received.
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The female nudity in Brokeback Mountain is substantially more copious than the male nudity, though the male intimacy obviously tips that balance. Nevertheless, it does come off as a bit of an olive branch to the straight alpha men in the audience dragged there by their significant others. Either way, we ended up with female nudity in a movie that didn't really need or call for it, so I'd put it in the win column for pretty much anyone attracted to women sitting in the audience.
Anne Hathaway, playing Jake Gyllenhaal's future wife Lureen, and Michelle Williams, playing Ledger's wife Alma, both bare their breasts in bed with their male co-stars whose characters were obviously fantasizing about one another. While Williams had been going nude on film for five years at this point, this was just Hathaway's second nude role following her nude debut earlier this same year in Havoc...
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2005: Mrs. Henderson Presents
Another Oscar-nominated flick released on this day 15 years ago is this British flick that may sound like a stuffy prestige play, considering it starred Judi Dench and Bob Hoskins, but it turned out this was one of those cheeky Brit flicks with lots of skin! Director Stephen Frears began the long, slow descent into "true story" phase of his career with this story of a widowed woman (Dench) who buys a defunct theatre in late 30s London to turn it into a nude variety house like the Moulin Rouge in Paris. While obviously a cultural dividing line at first, the theatre morphs into a symbol of hope when it stays open during the London bombing raids in the early days of WWII.
A host of Brit beauties made their nude debuts here, with Yellowstone's Kelly Reilly making a particularly big impression, along with future Harry Potter/Game of Thrones star Natalia Tena, and future The Tudors/Versailles star Anna Brewster...
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1983: Scarface
**Portions of the following text are excerpted from our SKIN-depth Look at Brian De Palma's Films**
There's not much in the way of nudity in the three hours of this coke-fueled extravaganza that starts at about a nine and only goes up from there. For all that extravagance, however, there's just not much in the way of nudity in this one. There's a nice topless shot of Sue Bowser as she sits in bed with Tony Montana's brother Steven Bauer...
And of course there's more of De Palma's signature conflation of violence and nudity—this time with a heaping helping of a twisted family sexual dynamic—when Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, as Tony's sister, gets gunned down while topless and wearing an open robe...
I'm not going to bad mouth Scarface, it's a classic and it certainly has its moments, but its every bit as complicated, messy, and coked-up as its title character.
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