Tarzan and His Mate (1934)

Back in 1934, with the United States in the midst of the Great Depression, only the sight of a woman jiggling her jugs in a bikini and loincloth could raise the spirits and slacks of the downtrodden men and women selling apples on the street. Thankfully, the Hays Code wasn't around yet when those filmgoers flocked to Tarzan and His Mate (1934). In this second film in the Tarzan series starring Olympic swimmer Johnny Weissmuller as the famed King of the Apes, Harry Holt (Neil Hamilton) hears that there's a secret elephant graveyard that just might hold hundreds of tusks he can sell for the ivory. He wants Tarzan and Jane (Maureen O'Sullivan) to lead him there, but Tarzan's not cool with the idea since he thinks those graves are sacred. After Holt kills an elephant to see where it stumbles off to die, Tarzan gets pissed off about what the businessmen are doing to the jungle and its creatures, and soon a war between ivory seekers and the Tarzan, Jane, and Cheetah team erupts. This is a pretty classic Tarzan movie, but the reason it has had such a long lasting legacy, and why it was selected for preservation by the National Film Registry, is because it has nudity! Yes, back when FDR was president, moviegoers got to watch Maureen O'Sullivan prance around in a very revealing loincloth, that let viewers see all sorts of black and white hotness! But the real risqué scene was a fully nude one. Jane goes swimming, and we see all three B's of a lovely lady who isn't actually Miss O'Sullivan, but a body double. Censors had a fit about seeing that fit body totally nude, in part because she was white and most movie makers who wanted to slip some nip into their talkie used a "native girl" or some other form of nonwhite woman. Uncle Sam cracked down on showing even a bit of buttcrack after this flick, which was still censored in various states due to the state of undress we saw Jane in. It's been nearly one hundred years, and that ass in Tarzan and His Mate is still something to scream about! Mmmmm-annn-gannn-nniii!