Brash, outspoken, and most assuredly not for everyone, Oliver Stone is one of the most talented American directors of the 20th century. He's also one of a breed of director whose films have become more risky than rewarding, and a series of big budget misfires hasmore or less ended his career as we know it. Ego is a difficult thing to manage, and Stone has never been great at keeping his in check. His outspoken nature has gotten him in trouble on more than one occasion and he is among the more divisive filmmakers of all time.
Most, if not all, of Stone's films are a macho male fantasies, and the way he depicts sex and nudity is informed by that standard. The male gaze is upon nearly every woman who appears nude in one of Stone's films, and though many of his nude scenes are fleeting, they are almost all defined by their brazen gratuitousness. Even in Stone's Oscar winning screenplay for Midnight Express—directed by Alan Parker—a film with an almost exclusively male cast, has Irene Miracle show up at the prison and reveal her breasts so her incarcerated boyfriend can jerk off...
I don't know if it was in Stone's screenplay or if the idea came from Parker, butthe pan up to her face crying instantly kills whatever sexiness might have been present in the moment. Something tells me it was Parker's idea and not Stone's.
Overall, the way Stone presents nudity in his films is with the leering eye of an older brother telling you, "If you were as cool as this film's protagonist, you'd have beautiful naked women like this all over you." Compared to other directors we've covered, there's some of the sleaziness of Adrian Lyne in Stone, a dash of Tobe Hooper-esque exploitation, andBrian De Palma's gift for courting controversy. Let's start further back than Stone would like, with an early exploitation effort...
The Hand (1981)
Although Stone himself frequently omits 1981's The Hand and 1974's Seizure when talking about his career, there's lots of Stone's hallmarks in this one despite it also featuring some rank amateur filmmaking. The theme of unintentional laughter will come back later in Stone's career, but it has its roots in this low-budget horror film about a comics illustrator (Michael Caine) who hilariously loses his hand in a car accident, only to have it replaced by a hand with its own murderous agenda. And when I say he loses his hand in hilarious fashion, I mean it...
Ultimately, Stone doesn't raise the material above exploitation trash—films in which you find Michael Caine with surprising frequency—and you'd never know it was one of his films without knowing as much in advance. The nude scene, however, is one of the clearest indications you're watching an Oliver Stone movie. Later in the film, Caine's character takes a job teaching at a university and makes the acquaintance of comely coed Annie McEnroe. She takes her top off for the lascivious Caine in a shot that almost exactly mirrors the one from Midnight Express...
While not quite the embarrassing blight on Caine's resume that Blame it on Rio would be three years later, anytime the actor was made to be in a sexual situation with a woman half his age, the result is revolting. If you're a fan of terrible movies, I would highly recommend The Hand, it's packed to the brim with unintentional hilarity and all the Michael Caine granny hair you could shake a stick at...
Salvador (1986)
The first of Stone's two films released in 1986 is often the also-ran in discussions about Stone's career, considering it was released the same year as Platoon. However, Salvador is an unflinching look at the downside of American intervention in Central American dictatorships, a film every bit as relevant now as it was over thirty years ago. James Woods earned an Oscar nomination for his performance as Richard Boyle, an arrogant, self-destructive photojournalist looking for a quick payday in El Salvador along with his friend Doctor Rock (Jim Belushi).
While there, Boyle hooks up with an old flame, played by Elpidia Carrillo, and shares a hammock with him while nude, showing off her right breast and buns...
Unfortunately, the film does not end on a happy note with her accompanying Boyle back to America. She instead gets herself deported so she can be with her children, and Boyle ends up arrested for causing a scene when she does so. While the film certainly doesn't glamorize Boyle or his behavior, there isan unmistakable sense that Stone views him as another of his aspirational protagonists.
Wall Street (1987)
One of the quintessential films of the 80s, Wall Street finds Stone making another war movie, just one seton the battlefield of high finance. Michael Douglas won an Oscar for his portrayal of Gordon Gekko, despite allegedly suffering major trauma at the hands of Stone who belittled his performance during the early days of production. According to the feature "Money Never Sleeps: The Making of Wall Street" released on the 2007 20th anniversary DVD, Douglas recounted tales of Stone telling him he seemed as if he had "never acted before," and other such insults to stoke Douglas' own sense of not being taken seriously as an actor.
Pain is temporary, as they say, and Douglas admits that it drove him to a better performance, and Gekko really is the sort of symbol of everything that's wrong with the world of venture capitalists. His young protege in the film, Bud Fox (Charlie Sheen), is set up to be Gekko's fall guy, but Fox turns the tables on him, ultimately sending his former idol off to prison. Before all of that, though, there's more of Stone's patented aspirational nudity. See, if you were as cool as Bud Fox, you too might have a fully nude beauty like Suzen Murakoshiwaking up in your bed and showing off her boobs and bush while she saunters off to the bathroom...
Born on the Fourth of July (1989)
Stone picked up his second Best Director Oscar in three years for the second film in his Vietnam Trilogy—along with Platoon and Heaven Earth—1989's Born on the Fourth of July. Although the film lost Best Picture to Driving Miss Daisy, it was a substantial hit, earning back almost ten times its reported budget of $17 million. Tom Cruise, taken seriously as an actor for the first time following good notices in the previous year's Best Picture winnerRain Man, stars as real-life Vietnam vet Ron Kovic, who was one of the leading voices in the movement by Vietnam veterans to get the respect they deserved from the American government.
In one of her first performances, Vivica A. Fox appears as a prostitute who, ahem, entertains the men in the VA Hospital where Kovac is recovering from an injury that has left him paralyzed. Fox briefly bares her breasts as the camera pans over to Kovac in the next bed, looking distraught...
Close to an hour later, Kovac finally loses his virginity while staying in the Mexican village of Villa Duce, thanks to the tender love and care of a prostitute played by Cordelia González...
Poor Ron thinks he's in love with her following their transaction, but he gets over it pretty quickly when he sees her later with another man! Their love scene isshot in that typical Stone style, close-up on the breasts before panning up to her face, and if she is indeed faking it, at least she's giving the guy a thrill...
The Doors (1991)
Stone's next biopic would take him into the world of sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll with The Doors, a film that has, for better or worse, come to be the definitive version of the psychedelic band's story. Val Kilmer turns in one of the best performances of his career, inhabiting Jim Morrison so wholly that many people think of him rather than the real Morrison when the name is said. It's a transformative performance and arguably the best thing about the film.
While The Doors does follow the standard biopic formula wherein the band is formed, achieves success, and then disintegrates, but it's not precious about the formula in the way a film like Bohemian Rhapsody or Walk the Line is.The film attemptsto match the spirit of the band's lead singer and more or less does just that. This perhaps makes the title something of a misnomer as we get no sense of the lives of other band members Ray Manzarek, Robbie Krieger, or John Densmore off stage, but it has sort of remained the final word on the band as a whole.
Morrison's affinity for the rock star lifestyle was notorious, and an early scene of him doing poppers in an elevator with the busty Christina Fulton keeps right in line with Stone's love of showing breasts being unveiled. And they honestly don't come much nicer than Fulton's fun bags...
Kathleen Quinlan would earn herself an Oscar nomination four years later for her role in Apollo 13, but in The Doors, she plays a blood drinking nyphomaniac reporter who has wild animal sex with Morrison all over her ornately decorated apartment...
Meg Ryan also co-stars in the film as Morrison's long suffering girlfriendPamela Courson, briefly baring her breasts in bed with Morrison at the 65 minute mark...
If you're a fan of the band, I could see you being disappointed in this film, but I can't imagine they'd find a better Jim Morrison should they ever attempt to redo the band's story on film.
Natural Born Killers (1994)
One of my personal favorite films of all time, Natural Born Killers is Stone mixing up genres at his finest.Stone became the first major director to successfully exploit the MTV-style of frantic editing and near-constant narrative tangents. The result is a hypnotic film about the violent nature of humanity and the media's culpability inelevating violent criminals to rock star status. The violent criminals in this case as Mickey (Woody Harrelson) and Mallory (Juliette Lewis), serial killers who become celebrities thanks to a culture willing to embrace anyone charismatic, no matter their crimes.
Interestingly, this is one film where the nudity doesn't feel quite so gratuitous, likely because there's very little. Already balancing a heavy load of violence and profanity, Stone likely didn't need more content for the chopping block. Early in the film when Mickey and Mallory are holed up in a motel with a hostage, Juliette Lewis gives us a quick peekdown at her left breast as she chats with Harrelson on the bed...
Almost as if to say that it takes evil to capture evil, Stone makes Detective Jack Scagnetti (a never better Tom Sizemore) every bit as reprehensible a character as the couple he's tailing. Scagnetti's backstory involves him acquiring a thirst for justice when his mother was murdered in front of him when he was eight years old. However, he also has a healthy appetite forperpetrating violence againstwomen like a doomed prostitute played by Lorraine Farris, who ends up strangled to death by Scagnetti...
Natural Born Killers, like most of Stone's movies, is not a film for everyone, but it is one that has its ardent defenders. I think it's his most fully realized vision on screen, even more so than JFK, the movie you hold for the end of a Stone retrospective because it's the one where everything comes together. Too bad it all falls apart not long after.
U-Turn (1997)
U-Turn is one of the weakest films in Stone's oeuvre, a mess of a thriller starring Sean Penn at his navel-gazing worst. Picture Sean Penn in a disheveled suit, wearing aviators, smoking a cigarette, and looking around as if to say, "How did I end up in this movie?" and you've got some semblance of what to expect from this stinker. Penn plays a drifter on the run from the mob who runs across a couple played by Nick Nolte and Jennifer Lopez, each of whom tries to enlist Penn's help in killing the other.
Double crosses, triple crosses, hidden identities, and more revelations begin to pile up, beating pure apathy into the audience by the time the film's final "twist" rolls around. Literally the only reason to see U-Turn is for Jennifer Lopez's topless sex scene with Powers Boothe (of all people)...
Her left breast has roughly48 frames worthof screen time, at the beginning and end of the sex scene, but it is one of only two times she actually went topless on film, so it can't help but remain essential...
Any Given Sunday (1999)
While far from a bad film, Any Given Sunday is where the wheels start to really come off the Oliver Stone wagon.What should have been a two hour, down and dirty look at the power dynamics in the NFL becomes bogged down by a 157 minute running time and a vast supporting cast, many of whose effect on the story amounts to nothing.
The film has a ton of male locker room nudity, but the female nudity in the film is vintage Stone. We get a peek inside the social life of head coach Tony D'Amato (Al Pacino), who has a classic trophy girlfriend, played here by Elizabeth Berkley, who has a lengthy chat with Pacino while topless...
See guys, if only you were as cool as Al Pacino, you too could land Elizabeth Berkley!
Alexander (2004)
The final film we'll be covering of Stone's is perhaps his most tinkered with. When Alexander, Stone's epic retelling of the legend of Alexander the Great (Colin Farrell), hit theaters in November 2004, it was thought to be a serious awards contender. What audiences got instead was Stone trying, and failing, to recapture the magic of his earlier epics. He has since recut the film no fewer than three times, releasing an 8-minutes shorter "Director's Cut" simultaneously with the theatrical cut on DVD in 2005.
Robust DVD sales led Warner Brothers to approach Stone to recut the film again, this time titling it "Alexander Revisited: The Final Cut," which Stone dubbed his "roadshow cut" featuring nearly everything he shot and ballooning the film's already hearty 175 minute running time up to a bladder-bursting 214 minutes. Three years later, Stone would release his "Ultimate Cut" of the film, again 8 minutes shorter than the previously available version.
The crime here is that he wasted years on a film that just doesn't work, no matter its running time. Again, the film is rife with male nudity, but the only female nudity comes courtesy of Rosario Dawson, playing Alexander's wife Roxana. Their wedding night is spent with the two actors, fully nude on a bed, roaring and fighting with one another like primal beasts...
Like the assault on his mother (Angelina Jolie) earlier in the film at the hands of his father (Val Kilmer), the scene generates more unintentional laughter than it does elicit genuine sympathy for two victimized women...
Still, you can't argue that it's fun to watch Rosario Dawson's big breasts and beautiful body bounce about as she fights with Farrell. She's totally game, which is a relief considering the film cuts her and her character no slack...
Still though, bro, if you were as cool as Alexander, you could get a chick as hot as Rosario Dawson, too.
Other Films byOliver Stone with Nudity Not Covered in This Column:
Check out the Other Directors in Our Ongoing "SKIN-depth Look”Series
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