It's fitting that Francis Ford Coppola and The Godfather are forever linked because Coppola himself turned out to be quite the Godfather of Hollywood. His success paved the way for all of his film school pals to get their shots at the big time, and he turned his family name into a brand, with Coppolas (and Coppola cousins) permanently dotting the film industry landscape. Born in Detroit but raised in New York, Coppola spent the 60s practicinghis patented brand of self-sabotaging behavior, but his talent was undeniable and he picked up his first Oscar for his screenplay for Patton.
He would win four more over the course of his career, making him one of the most lauded writer/directors in history, but he always seems to run from success. After Godfather II, he would shun the saga for nearly twenty years before returning with the underwhelming (by comparison) Godfather Part III in 1990. He abhorred the notion of repeating himself, and eventually stopped making films altogether early in the new millennium.Like his former protegé George Lucas, Coppola wanted to get back to the world of experimental film, and his four most recent features are appropriately—if not always successfully—artsy.
Coppola's relationship with sex in the movies is very complicated. Anyone who has read Peter Biskind's essential account of Hollywood in the 70s, "Easy Riders, Raging Bulls," knows that while Coppola projected an image of the every-dad, married to the same woman for over fifty years now, he couldn't help himself when he was on the set of his films. His wife Eleanor apparently forgave him for many transgressions, but it's ultimately something in both of their pasts now.
He didn't necessarily bring much of that on to the screen until the back half of his career, as we'll discuss momentarily. There's a very chaste and distanced view of sex and nudity in his early work that has gone right out the window since he adapted Dracula in the early 90s. Let's take a look back at how he evolved as a filmmaker when it comes to his depiction of sex...
The Rain People
Coppola's seventh feature directorial effort is the first film for which he is the sole credited writer and director. Shirley Knight stars as Natalie, a woman on the run from her husband after finding out she's pregnant. He's not some abusive animal, though, she's just suffering the same sort of crisis typically associated with men. She's happily married, but realizes she never sowed her wild oats, so to speak, and takes off on a journey to sleep with a bunch of men, basically.
Two of the men she shacks up with along the way are played by Coppola regulars James Caan and Robert Duvall, both of whom would be back for Coppola's next film. There are two brief flashes of her breasts in the film, represented here by a still...
Shirley Knight was pregnant in real life at the time of filming, adding the sort of verisimilitude Coppola sought to differentiate himself from the pack. Coppola likely could have contented himself making films like The Rain People for the rest of his career, but the biggest film of his career was right around the corner.
The Godfather
How much can any one person hope say about The Godfather that hasn't already been said better elsewhere? Let's jump to Sicily, where Michael is in hiding after killingSollozzo and McCluskey. In a very sweet series of scenes that would have been cut from a lesser film, we watch as Michael falls in love with a young local woman named Appollonia (Simonetta Stefanelli). They go on their first date accompanied by her entire family, a moment of old world charm in a film about—among many, many other things—the reluctance of Don Corleone to bring his family into the new world of drug trafficking. There's a romanticized notion about the old world in this film, and these scenes truly reinforce that.
On their wedding night, Coppola gives us a very intimate peek into their first sexual encounter, with Stefanelli slowly removing her neglige to reveal her breasts...
It's shot in a very chaste way, one of the most simultaneously wholesome and sexy nude scenes in cinema history.
The Conversation
Before diving back into the Corleone saga with Godfather Part II, Coppola made this riff on Antonioni's Blow-Up involving an audio surveillance expert (Gene Hackman) who gets in over his head on his latest job. The film is teeming with autobiographical subtext surrounding Hackman's character Harry Caul. Despite being a devout Catholic, Caul still receives sexual visits from a woman named Meredith (Elizabeth MacRae), who eventually betrays him by stealing his tapes of the titular conversation and giving them over to the man who hired Caul.
An hour and fourteen minutes into the flick, MacRae strips down while Hackman lays on the bed, her boobs, bush, and buns all visible, not bad for a PG film...
Apocalypse Now
The film where Coppola notoriously went "off the reservation," Apocalypse Now tests the limits of the phrase "pain is temporary, film is forever." One of the most notoriously problem plagued productions of all time, the film tarnished Coppola's reputation, even after it became a box office success. The original cut of the film has only one nude scene, courtesy of Cynthia Wood, who plays one of the Playboy Bunnies brought in for a USO show...
Forhis 2001 Redux version of the film, Coppola re-inserted a number of deleted scenes including an extended trip by Willard (Martin Sheen) and his men to a rubber plantation, owned and inhabited by a wealthy French family. Aurore Clément appears fully nude in this sequence, prepping the bed that Willard is in, the audience never sure if they're witnessing reality or another hallucination...
One From the Heart
Coppola's first out-and-out financial fiasco was this 1981 musical where Coppola employed cutting-edge (for the time) video effects to create the ultimate 80s musical experience. The film is an utter disaster from beginning to end, with Coppola reaching for something, anything to hold on to thematically. The film's only saving grace is the always luminous Teri Garr. Anyone raised on Young Frankenstein, Tootsie, or Mr. Mom eventually made their way to this movie because it has her only nude scenes...
They're both pretty fleeting, but again, it's the only place to see Teri nude...
The Cotton Club
Former Paramount Pictures President Robert Evans was also looking to get his mojo back around this same time, and Coppola was coming hot off The Outsiders, making a reunion of the old frenemies inevitable. The Cotton Club is much more famous for all of the lawsuits it spawned rather than any of the content of the film, but overall it's a pretty weak effort from Coppola—especially considering his much better films like Tucker and Peggy Sue Got Married surround it.
Diane Lane, who had worked with Coppola on his previous effort Rumble Fish, has the film's only credited nude scene, a quick look at her ass as she gets up off Richard Gere's lap while light streams in through some lattice-work...
The Godfather Part III
Coppola returned one final time to the Corleone family with this weakest effort in the series. It's certainly not for lack of trying, and Coppola does his best to reconcile all of that Italian Catholic and Organized Crime guilt coursing through his veins. As I always say, if you want closure for Michael, this is the only way to get it. The film's only nude scene is a super fleeting one, a brief glimpse of Bridget Fonda's buns as she gets out of Andy Garcia's bed...
Bram Stoker's Dracula
Coppola's sexuality explosion has its roots in this gothic romance from 1992 that amped up the blood and the sex from Bram Stoker's novel to appropriately R-rated levels. Everyone remembers the early scene where Dracula's brides have a foursome with Keanu Reeves, but not everyone knows that a young Monica Bellucci is the first wife seen on screen...
And it isn't long before Florina Kendrickand Michaela Bercu both get in on the act as well...
Already we see a Coppola who is more comfortable with sex than he's ever seemed. There's an almost unrestrained glee he takes in including so much nudity in the flick. Winona Ryder, much to the chagrin of many audience members, is the one major female actress in the film who doesn't get nude. We do get a nice look at her braless bouncing breasts as she runs out of the house looking for her friend Lucy (Sadie Frost)...
When she finds Lucy, she's being ravaged in the garden by Gary Oldman's Dracula in beast form...
This is some pretty wild sexual stuff, seemingly coming from another filmmaker altogether. Sex and nudity have been present throughout his filmography, but he's treating the material the same way a teen in the midst of puberty would approach it. None of this is a bad thing, just a touch out of character with the rest of his sex scenes.
Youth Without Youth
Coppola's final two films we're going to talk about come from his later period when he got back to down and dirty indie productions where he wielded total control. This surreal love story—one which beat Benjamin Button to the punch by a full year—stars Tim Roth as an aged professor who, on the verge of committing suicide, is struck by lightning and imbued once again with youth. And possibly super powers. There's also a Matt Damon cameo. I'm not kidding. It's a strange one.
Before re-encountering the love of his life (Alexandra Maria Lara), he has a very sexy tryst with a woman known only as The Woman in Room 6 (Alexandra Pirici), shot in a way that's substantially sexier than any of the other sex scenes in Coppola's work...
Spoiler alert, the whole thing turns out to be a dream sequence littered with all manner of Nazi imagery. Like I said, this is a weird movie.
Tetro
Not as strange, perhaps, as Tetro, though. For this noirish tale of two Italian brothers (Vincent Gallo, Alden Ehrenreich) who meet in Argentina and renew their rivalry. This is as close to a feature length perfume ad as any filmmaker this side of Luca Guadagnino has made, full of incredibly, achingly beautiful compositions in aid of a film with close to no actual content.
Young Han Solo frolics in a hotel room with Leticia Brédice and Sofía Castiglione, with the latter flaunting her breasts for Ehrenreich...
The three also share a bath several minutes later...
Vincent Gallo, meanwhile, is romancing the gorgeous Maribel Verdú, her nude body bathed in beautiful shadow as Gallo kisses her up and down...
Again, very overtly sexy stuff from a guy who seemed rather averse to "sexy" nudity in the first part of his career. Did he finally come to terms with his own guilt instilled in him by marriage or religion or both? Or did he just throw his hands up and say the hell with it and start shooting sexy nude scenes? What are your theories? Sound off in the comments section below!
Check out the Other Directors in Our Ongoing "SKIN-depth Look" Series
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All non-nude imagesvia IMDb
