One of the most underrated and under-appreciated American filmmakers of the 20th century, Chicago native Philip Kaufman is one of that rare breed of filmmakers who makes movies that are almost exclusively for grown-ups. Even his films without nudity have a distinctly adult bent, and while people who aren't legally allowed to purchase alcohol can watch them and even enjoy them, they really can't be appreciated until one comes of age, so to speak. Far from prolific, he helmed only a dozen feature filmsbetween 1964 and 2012, creating an air of excitement in film nerd circles whenever a new film of his was announced.
His penchant for multiple takes and a luxuriously paced production schedule has earned him a reputation as a perfectionist, and even got him fired from directing The Outlaw Josey Wales when he and star Clint Eastwood came to blows over the number of takes Kaufman demanded. It's this attention to detail, however, that separates Kaufman from his contemporaries—Eastwood included. His films can be challenging to watch, thanks in no small part to the fact that nearly all of his films run well over two hours, but it is his meticulous nature and punctilious craftsmanship that makes his films a treat to revisit again and again.
Kaufman's skills as a writer—often in service of adapting another artist's work—are as renowned as his directorial work. He received a story credit on Raiders of the Lost Ark, having come up with the idea of Indiana Jones pursuing the Ark of the Covenant, and despite his dismissal as the film's director, is heavily credited with creating many of the deeper nuances of character and story on display in the aforementioned Outlaw Josey Wales.
Sex and nudity are part and parcel with his thematically adult subject matter, with sex—or a lack thereof—driving many of his protagonists through their various journeys. Sex, to Kaufman, is humanity, and its pursuit can be both the endgame and the downfall of his characters. It often represents liberation from societal norms, with his characters expressing their innermost desires externally through sexual encounters. From The Unbearable Lightness of Beingand Henry Juneto Quills and Hemingway Gellhorn, sex is often thegateway to his character's journeys toward self discovery and self expression.
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978)
The second film adaptation of Jack Finney's classic sci-fi novel "The Body Snatchers" is considered by many to be the best adaptation of the material ever committed to film. Following a run of independent features—as well as his dismissal from The Outlaw Josey Wales—Kaufman was badly in need of a commercially successful film in order to maintain any sort of longevity in the industry. Thankfully he achieved both critical and commercial success with this film, setting him up for a career exploring age old concepts in a uniquely modern context.
Unlike Don Siegel's 1956 film version—which moved the action of the story to the fictionalized town of Santa Mira, California—Kaufman decided to set his take on the material in San Francisco. This grounded the underlying horror in a real location, with the fantastical scenarios of the story unfolding amongst landmarks recognizable to any audience member. In a 2018 interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Kaufman explains his decision to set the story in San Francisco...
“Could it happen in the city I love the most? The city with the most advanced, progressive therapies, politics and so forth? What would happen in a place like that if the pods landed there and that element of ‘poddiness’ was spread?”
The particulars of the story remain intact from the both the novel and original film, with a race of aliens who escape their dying home planetand begin taking over the bodies of humans in an attempt to repopulate their own species.The film centers around a group of humans—including Donald Sutherland, Jeff Goldblum, Leonard Nimoy, Veronica Cartwright, and Brooke Adams—who catch wise to the alien invasion and attempt to survive. Late in the film, Brooke Adams' character Elizabeth is hiding out with Sutherland's Matthew at a pier where the aliens are preparing to ship their body snatched comrades overseas to begin invading more populous areas.
Desperate to avoid detection, Elizabeth eventually falls asleep and is assimilated, with Matthew finding her nude in the woods several minutes later...
Matthew then sets off an explosion, killing many of the pods in the process, but not all of them as a nude Elizabeth makes her way through the wreckage to find her former friend...
Eerily, the film was released just a month after the notorious Jonestown murder-suicide in Guyana, giving the film a prescience which Kaufman addressed in the aforementioned Hollywood Reporter interview...
“Part of the pod thing is becoming single-minded, and becoming part of a group of people who are single-minded and bent on survival of that group. Just before the film was released, Jonestown took place, and that was a case of a lot of people from San Francisco were looking for a better world and suddenly found themselves in pod-dom, and it was fatal. It could not have been a more pointed reason for watching the movie.”
The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1988)
Kaufman followed Body Snatchers up with the 1960s Bronx-set dramedy The Wanderers in 1979, before going on to make the Oscar-winning classic The Right Stuff in 1983. He would earn his first—and sadly, only—Oscar nomination for his next film, an adaptation of Milan Kundera's recently released novel "The Unbearable Lightness of Being." Set during the ill-fated Prague Spring in late 60s Czechoslovakia, during whichtime the country was briefly liberated from the Communist rule that had been in place since the end of WWII, the film centers around atrioof characters celebrating their newfound freedom while tumbling unknowingly toward a tragic end.
Daniel Day Lewis plays Tomas, a well-regarded brain surgeon with an insatiable sexual appetite. When we meet him, he has interrupted a surgery by convincing one of his nurses (Pascale Kalensky) to show him her breasts for three seconds, all while two other doctors andthe patient watch from the next room...
Tomas is engaged in an affair with an artist living in Prague named Sabina (Lena Olin), but his wandering eye can't help but catch sight of a waitress named Tereza (Juliette Binoche) on a trip to a resort town. Tereza soon tracks down Tomas in Prague and moves in with him, which would seem to complicate things with Sabina, at first, but the two become fast friends, forming a throuple before such things even had names. Both of these brunette beauties bare all in a series of skintillating scenes, hopping in and out of bed with Day Lewis throughout the film's luxuriously paced first two hours...
Later in the film, the Warsaw Pact begins to take full effect, with military opposition crushing the forces that ushered in the Prague Spring, and Tomas has his passport confiscated and is no longer allowed to practice medicine due to his politically minded writings. He takes a job as a window washer and one afternoon, seduces the daughter (Consuelo De Haviland) of a high ranking Czech official, with the woman slowly undressing for him, putting her lithe and lovely body on display...
Easily the most sexually explicit film of Kaufman's career to this point, the film was a critical smash, earning Kaufman and co-screenwriterJean-Claude Carrière an Oscar nomination for their work. One person who was not a fan of the film, however, was Milan Kundera himself, who felt the film didn't properly honor the source material, causing him to refuse any subsequent offers to adapt his work. The themes of personal and artistic liberation through sex, however, came to be Kaufman's calling card, a trend that only exploded with his next film...
Henry June (1990)
Rising Sun (1993)
While not as high-minded as his previous literary adaptations, Kaufman's next film adapted the work of the hottest author at the time, Michael Crichton. Crichton adapted his own 1992 novel with Kaufman and co-screenwriter Michael Backes into a film that, to put it mildly, hasn't aged well. More than 25 years removed from this film, it is one of the more xenophobic films of the 90s, presenting Japan and Japanese culture in the same way a science fiction film might explain an alien culture—for example, there are more than a couple Western digs at both sushi and karaoke. Nevertheless, Rising Sun fits comfortably into one of the 1990s' most popular subgenres, the erotic thriller.
Wesley Snipes stars as anLA detective attempting to solve the murder of a call girl (Tatjana Patitz) at the recently opened American headquarters of the powerful Japanese conglomerate Nakamoto—a little too close for comfort to Die Hard's Nakatomi Plaza, if you ask me. He is partnered with John Connor (Sean Connery), a retired police captain and expert on all things Japanese, as they attempt to get to the heart of an elaborate cover-up involving a US Senator (Ray Wise), a sleazy American lawyer (Kevin Anderson), and the call girl's boyfriend, a Japaneseyakuza named Eddie Sakamura (Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa).
It doesn't take long for things to get kinky in this flick, as there is surveillance footage found in the room where Tatjana Patitz's call girl was murdered, which shows her having violent sex with a man whose face is obscured—more for plot reasons than anything else...
This footage is revisited several times throughout the film from several different angles, but it's fairly explicit stuff for the time period thanks to Kaufman showing a woman's pubic hair and a man going down on her. The prime suspect, Eddie Sakamura, is tracked down by the police who conduct a raid on his home while he is having a sexy sushi session with some ladies. Shelley Michelle is serving as the human sushi tray, and you may recognize her as Julia Roberts' body double both in the film and on the poster for 1990's Pretty Woman...
The other woman in Sakamura's company is March 1992 Playmate of the Month Tylyn John, who offers up her nipple for Eddie to lick sake off of, andduring the raid, beats up Snipes while still fully nude...
The film managed to turn a profit, but obviously nowhere near the profit turned by Crichton's other 1993 film adaptation, Jurassic Park. The film has mostly fallen by the wayside now that it's no longer in its late 90s HBO heavy rotation days, and it's probably for the best. Although the film is competently made and acted, it's a mess of garish Japanese stereotypes that have aged about as well as Mickey Rooney's landlord character in Breakfast at Tiffany's.
Quills (2000)
It would take 7 years to get another film from Kaufman, but his heavily dramatized take on the final months in the life of the notorious Marquis de Sade (Geoffrey Rush) would mark his first film of the new millennium. Very loosely based on de Sade's time imprisoned in the insane asylum Charenton, the film is right in line withso many of Kaufman's best films, featuring a rebellious protagonist railing against the system, this time to often repulsive effect. Scripted by Pulitzer Prize winner Doug Wright, the film presents de Sade through the eyes of Charenton's overseer, the idealistic young Abbé du Coulmier (Joaquin Phoenix).
A battle of the wills ensues, as de Sade continually flaunts the ideals that would one day come to bear his name, and the eager young Abbé holds fast to the belief that the Marquis will eventually see the error of his ways and repent. de Sade holds the upper hand in their relationship at all times, however, due to the fact that he knows that the Abbé is obsessed with a laundress named Madeleine (Kate Winslet), who has been aiding the Marquis in smuggling his manuscripts out of the asylum.
de Sade's writings continue to stir controversy among the aristocracy, although the most corruption they seem to inspire is allowing people to become more sexually adventurous. One such encounter we are privy to involves Rebecca Palmer getting double teamed by two dudes in bed...
Through a series of rather strangely violent circumstances, poor Madeleine ends up being murdered by an inmate who is relaying de Sade's final tale to her before she is sent away due to her part in helping the Marquis. de Sade relays the death to the Abbé, adding insult to injury by informing him that Madeleine died a virgin. That night, the Abbé has a dream in which he sees Madeleine's nude body on a slab,discovering thatshe isn't dead and the two begin to have sex...
Ever the equal opportunity filmmaker, Kaufman devotes more screen time to male nudity than these brief glimpses of breasts we get from these two ladies.Geoffrey Rush spends a fair amount of time completely nude when the Abbé punishes him for continuing to write and smuggle out manuscripts, forcing him to be nude at all times so he cannot write any more. Of course, de Sade finds a way to continue raging against the machine.
The film's ultimate undoing is that it flies in the face of historical accuracy, sending de Sade out of this world by having him—rather absurdly—choke himself on the Abbé's crucifix as he attempts to give de Sade absolution in the final moments of his life. While it makes for a more dramatic end to the story, it's also so hopelessly ludicrous that anyone looking to get the real story can only scoff at the choice in retrospect. Nevertheless the film earned three Oscar nominations and is fairly well regarded some 20 years after its release, if not exactly the talk of the town anymore.
Hemingway Gellhorn (2012)
Kaufman's last theatrically released feature was the 2004 decidedly un-erotic thriller Twisted, but he did return to the director's chair one more time for the HBO Original Hemingway Gellhorn in 2012. Kaufman's hiatus was not exactly planned, however, as he spent much of his time in the ensuing years tending to his wife of 51 years, Rose, who died of cancer in 2009.Co-written by Permanent Midnight scribe Jerry Stahl, Hemingway Gellhorn dramatizes the tumultuous decade long love affair between Ernest Hemingway (Clive Owen) and journalist cum author Martha Gellhorn (Nicole Kidman).
Meeting by chance in Hemingway's favorite Key West bar in 1936, the two tough-as-nails writers have instant chemistry, though Gellhorn is well aware of Hemingway's womanizing and rampant infidelity, allowing her to maintain an aesthetic distance which drives him mad. While covering the Spanish Civil War the following year, the two meet again while taking refuge during a bombing raid, and their passions flare up, driving them into one another's arms, making love as the building seemingly crumbles around them...
Hemingway leaves his wife and writes "For Whom the Bell Tolls," dedicating it to Martha. Jealousy strikes, however, when Martha begins to gain more success and notoriety as a writer due to her coverage of various wars, and after refusing to marry him, Hemingway marries—and later divorces—his third wife. Meeting again in Havana years later, Gellhorn finallyacquiesces and agrees to marry Hemingway. Their marriage is a relatively unhappy one, however, as both are now clearly dissatisfied despite having what they seemingly always wanted...
The film's big romantic triumph, however, is in the fact that Gellhorn becomes Hemingway's first wife to ask him for a divorce, rather than the other way around. The literary-mindedness of the project, coupled with some spectacular sequences make it of a piece with the rest of Kaufman's work, but it's much more restrained sexually than most of his prior work. The older, wiser Kaufman is more interested in the seduction than the act at this point in time, but his command of the craft is as strong as it has ever been.
It's a shame that he hasn't done anything in the ensuing years, but I hold out hope he may yet return to deliver us another masterpiece in the making. The world is a slightly less sexy place without a new film from Philip Kaufman.
Philip Kaufman Films Without Nudity Not Covered in This Column
Check out the Other Directors in Our Ongoing "SKIN-depth Look”Series
—Catherine Breillat: Part One
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All non-nude images courtesy of IMDb
