Through no fault of his own, Nicolas Roeg's death last November was overshadowed by the death of Bernardo Bertolucci three days later,leaving many people—myself included—lamenting the fact that Roeg wasn't better appreciated in his lifetime. Roeg started his career in the camera department, learning every job on the chain and eventually working as a second unit cameraman on David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia.He then moved up to full-fledged cinematographer, lensing films for such directors as John Schlesinger (Far From the Madding Crowd), François Truffaut (Fahrenheit 451), and Richard Lester (Petulia and A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum). Should this series continue, in time, we'll get to all of those guys.
Roeg served as his own cinematographer for his first three features, his 1972 documentary Glastonbury Fayre being the last time he was the credited cinematographer on any film. His next three films—Don't Look Now, The Man Who Fell to Earth, and Bad Timing—were all shot by Anthony Richmond, who won a BAFTA for his work on Don't Look Now. He would remain fiercely loyal to many of his crew members, working mostly with two editors—Graeme Clifford and Tony Lawson—as well as many of the same designers and craftspeople.
Sex and nudity are prevalent throughout Roeg's work, popping up in virtually everything from his very first film until his final narrative feature. Even his forays into television later in his career yielded us some fairly risqué stuff like Full Body Massage. The opening minutes of his very first film contain nudity, and it would pop up early and often throughout his filmography—with the notable exception of his one foray into fantasy filmmaking, 1990's The Witches. Unlike so many directors we've covered lately, this one takes us all the way back to the very beginning...
Performance (1970)
Co-directed with screenwriter Donald Cammell, Performance was filmed in 1968 with the studio hot to capitalize on Mick Jagger's desire to move into the world of acting. The studio got cold feet when they saw the finished product, however, and shelved the film until 1970. Interestingly, I think the film had a more seismic impact by waiting until after the 60s ended, serving as the first post-mortem of the peace and love generation's failure to take hold in any meaningful way.
Though billed as a starring vehicle for Jagger, he doesn't show up until a third of the way through the movie, with James Fox doing most of the heavy lifting in the early goings as a violent Cockney gangster named Chas. I'm sad to report that my introduction to Fox was through Sexy Beast—the same way I discovered Ian McShane—and seeing him young, virile, and in his prime has given me a new appreciation for one of England's most celebrated character actors. We open the film with Fox carrying on a rather explicit fling with the lovely Ann Sidney...
Fox's Chasis in need of asylum after a double cross run on a local gangster, and takes refuge in a flat in Notting Hill run like a commune. It's here that he meets Pherber (Anita Pallenberg) and Lucy (Michèle Breton), two women involved with a performer by the name of Turner (Jagger). Turner confesses he's "lost his demon" and seeks a new muse to create music once again. Both women spend a lot of time nude with Jagger in this portion of the film, whether they're having a threesome or just chilling in the tub...
I don't know if there's something about water with Nicolas Roeg, but it features heavily in a number of his films. Sometimes its connected to sex like this film and Walkabout, or to death like in Don't Look Now, or even amuch needed resource for aliensin The Man Who Fell to Earth. Michèle Breton's other nude scee in the film is also in the tub...
Of course, the big story at the time was Pallenberg, who was Keith Richards' girlfriend at the time—having dumped Brian Jones for Richards–yet she gets busy with his bandmate on film. Richards famously offered to pay Pallenberg whatever money she was going to make for starring in the film as an incentive to keep her out of the film. By the time the flick came out in 1970, she had already gone nude in Christian Marquand's Candy and MarcoFerreri's Dillinger is Dead, so the novelty had mostly worn off, but she goes nude a bunch of times in this flick, including during a threesome with Jagger and Breton...
Walkabout(1971)
For Roeg's first solo outing as director, he went to the Australian Outback for this tale of two children abandoned by their father in the wilderness, who must rely on an Aboriginal boy on walkabout to guide them back to civilization. The book of the same name on which Roeg based his film finds a young woman and her younger brother stranded in the desert following a plane crash. Roeg changes the circumstances of their abandonment, choosing to have their father go insane, drive them into the wilderness and shoots at them, before exploding their car and shooting himself in the head.
Jenny Agutter, just 18 at time of filming, stars alongside Roeg's own son Luc as the orphaned children, and David Gulpilil as the Aboriginal boy. Both Agutter and Gulpilil went on to have long careers, the latter most famously playing Neville in the Crocodile Dundee films. Agutter was most famous at the time for appearing in two successful adaptations of The Railway Children, so having an established child star make her nude debut in this film was a big deal at the time.
Agutterspends a substantial portion of the film nude, this scene in particular a good crossroad to the water symbolism mentioned earlier.As a nude Agutter swims in a nearby pond, the boy hunts and kills several animals including an iguana and a kangaroo, the contrasting scenes intertwined...
Later in the film, the boy startles Agutter as she is getting dressed. Little does she know that he's attempting to perform a mating ritual, but she frightens him enough to convince her brother to run away with her the next morning...
The young Aboriginal boy meets a gruesome end while Agutter and her brother make it out okay, a strong statementat the time, but one that resonates nearly fifty years after the film's release. Agutter and her brother don't necessarily get a happy ending, however, as the final shot of the film is her as an older woman reminiscing about the carefree time spent in the company of the Aboriginal boy, swimming naked...
Don't Look Now (1973)
I said just about all I have to say about Roeg's adaptation of Daphne Du Maurier's story of two grieving parents attempting to move on following the death of their daughter in this Anatomy of a Scene's Anatomy. I know that's a cheat, but click over and read that, then come back.
The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976)
And welcome back. For his fourth feature film, Roeg went rogue in the science fiction genre. The Man Who Fell to Earth doesn't play by any established storytelling rules and is often a tough first watch for people. Revisiting the film is essential, however, becauseit as absolutely singular film, unlike any ever made before or since, and it takes a while to get into the film's rhythms.
One of the film's three maincharacters is Dr. Nathan Bryce (Rip Torn),a man running from an alcoholic past as a college professor addicted to sleeping with his students. Through several cleverly edited montages, Roeg shows Torn bed-hopping between Adrienne Larussaand Hilary Holland...
There's also a flashback to a rendezvous with the sensationally stacked Linda Hutton...
You also see Rip Torn's dick a bunch of times, you know, if you ever wondered what his dick looked like. He eventually comes to work for the film's main character, Thomas Jerome Newton (David Bowie), an alien sent to acquire water for his dying home planet, yet who has become consumed by capitalism. He uses alien technology to create a company that makes him fantastically rich, but it has drained his desire to complete his mission and return to his home planet.
Newton soon crosses paths with the third lead character, Mary Lou (Candy Clark), a New Mexico woman whom he eventually invites to live with him in his nearby home. She introduces Newton to sex and alcohol, both of which contribute to his malaise toward his mission. The government also uses alcohol tokeep him docile and sedatedlater in the film when Bryce spills the secret that Newton is an alien. Mostly his home life with Mary Lou is normal, full of lots of sex and what seems like happiness...
Things go south midway through the film's second act when Newtondecides one evening to reveal his true form to Mary Lou, horrifying her and causing him to kick her out of his life...
Working again with a music superstar attempting to make the crossover into film, Bowie fares better here than Jagger did in Performance. Roeg asked too much of Jagger as an actor and he didn't have the skills to execute that vision. Bowie, on the other hand, is much more pliable in Roeg's hands, relying on his natural otherworldliness to convey the fact that this man is not from this planet.Bowie was alsousing a lot of cocaine during filming, as he admitted in a 1992 interview with Movieline...
It was a pretty natural performance. ... a goodexhibitionof somebody literally falling apart in front of you. I was totally insecure with about 10 grams [of cocaine] a day in me. I was stoned out of my mind from beginning to end.
Bad Timing (1980)
Roeg completed his musician trilogy when he hiredArt Garfunkel to play a sexual deviant in Bad Timing: A Sensual Obsession. Not exactly the first guy you think of when you think of sexual deviancy, Roeg exploits Garfunkel's natural goofiness by making him seem harmless, despite the fact that he has some wild sexual tendencies revealed in the film's climax. Bad Timingis notable for a few reasons, the most substantial of which is that it's the first time Roeg would work with his eventual wife and filmmaking partner for many years to come, Theresa Russell.
Russell plays Milena, a woman suffering through a loveless marriage in Cold War Vienna with a much older man (Denholm Elliott), who begins an affair with American psychiatrist and teacher Alex (Garfunkel). Their story's framing device involves Alex bringing Milena to the hospital after she suffered what he describes as an overdose. A detective (Harvey Keitel) pieces together the real story, which is that Alex drugged Milena in order to sexually assault her, the incident then seen in flashback...
Don't ever let anyone tell you that seeing Art Garfunkel having sex with the lifeless body of Theresa Russell won't ruin sex for you forever...
The film would make one hell of a sexual deviancy double feature withBrian De Palma's Dressed to Kill, released in the same year. Well, technically.The Criterion Collection, who is responsible for bringing a lot of Roeg's work to a wider audience, released this film on home video for the first time in the United States in 2005. They've released this film, Walkabout, Insignificance, Don't Look Now, and The Man Who Fell to Earth, though the latter is now out of print.
Eureka (1983)
Roeg's firstfilm in an unofficial trilogy ofdramatized takes on true stories (along with 1985's Insignificance and1986's Castaway) this film was based on the true story of Sir Harry Oakes, an industrialist who made a fortune in the gold rush, only to be murdered on an island he owned in the Bahamas some 20 years later. Gene Hackman plays Jack McCann, a thinly veiled version of Oakes, who realizes too late that money can't solve all of his problems. His main problem these days is his rambunctious daughter Tracy (Theresa Russell), who has married the ambitious but rather doltish Claude Van Horn (Rutger Hauer)...
McCann soon has bigger fish to fry as New York gangsterMayakofsky (Joe Pesci, basically playing Meyer Lansky) wants to open a casino on McCann's island. This eventually leads to McCann's murder, which drives his family to madness. Theresa Russell, never shy about showing some skin, lets it all hang out two hours in when she getsspooked in the night shortlyafter her father has been killed...
Like so many of Roeg's films, it was shelved for two years, finally dumped into a handful of theaters in the U.S. before being forgotten about. Thankfully, it found its audience on home video, and the film is now seen as one of Roeg'slesser efforts of the era, but that likely has more to do with the strength of everything around it.
Castaway (1986)
The final film in what we'll call Roeg's "loosely based on a true story" trilogy, Castaway took its inspiration from writer Gerald Kingsland, who placed an advertisement in the newspaper seeking a female companion to live with him on an uninhabited island for a year. Lucy Irvine, whom Kingsland eventually approved to accompany him on his mission, turned the story into a book, on which Roeg then basedhis film.
Oliver Reed was cast in the lead, being the only man large enough in real life to play such a boisterous soul as Kingsland. Amanda Donohoe was cast as Irvine, comfortable in the fact that the role would have her naked a lot of the time...
I mean, most of the time...
Besides Reed and Donohoe, another Ken Russell regular, Georgina Hale, also appears in a small role as a nun, but this is mostly a two-hander between Reed and Donohoe. Since she spent a substantial portion of the film in the altogether and Oliver Reed has a certain reputation for, shall we say, romancing his co-stars, many people assumed that there were some shenanigans on set, but Donohoe set the record straight in a 2011 interview...
"Well, naked on a desert island with Oliver Reed – it was a tabloid fantasy, wasn't it? He was an alcoholic and his behaviour was erratic, but he was always a courteous and good actor. His personal life wasn't working but he never crossed any lines professionally."
That's good to hear, but you can't blame us for thinking it...
Full Body Massage (1995)
Like fellow SKIN-depth Look directorsKen RussellandRobert Altman, Roeg directed a segment for the 1987 anthology film Aria, however his segment was skinless. At least one flick he did in the 90s was very much not skinless, though, and that's the Showtime Original Film Full Body Massage. If you've only seen the clips here on Mr. Skin, you might assume that this movie is just ninety minutes of the guy from F/Xrubbing his greasy hands all over Mimi Rogers' big breasts, I'd say you're about half right, it's closer to 45 minutes.
The film has drawn comparisons to Jacques Rivette'sLa Belle Noiseuse, though where that film's conversations were all about the meaning and process of creating art, this is just Bryan Brown talking about ancient massage techniques while he slides his hands around Rogers' body. In other words, it's not as deep and meaningful as Rivette's film.
It is like Roeg's films in one major way, however, which is that it is sexy as hell. Roeg directed what is widely regarded as the sexiest sex scene ever made in Don't Look Now, so it's not totally surprising that this film definitely achieves its intended goal of arousal. It just sadly doesn't have much going on beyond that. Rogers plays a wealthy socialite whose entire world is turned upside down when he regular masseuse can't make their appointment, so he sends Fitch (Brown) in his stead.
Of course, this leads to more than just massaging, and it's also more than just Mimi Rogers getting nude in this film. We get some perfect posterior from Elizabeth Barondes...
As well as some fantastic fullnudity from Gabriella Hall...
But this is Rogers' show and no one can outshine her absolutely incredible body...
An hour and five minutes in, we get a nearly four minute massage scene that ranks among the most popular scenes here on Mr. Skin, and it's not hard to see why. Well, it is hard, it's just not difficult...
Puffball: The Devil's Eyeball (2007)
Roeg's final narrative feature—he would contribute a short segment to the documentary The Film That Buys the Cinema in 2014—finds the director returning to the world of supernatural horror one last time. In a nice bit of symmetry, Donald Sutherland appears in a small role, but the film never really comes together, finding the director more interested in the more aggressive side of sex.
Kelly Reilly plays a young architect who moves to asmall town in Ireland where she plans to design a very modern building on an old plot of land. The women—including Miranda Richardson—who have a right to the plot, but no male heir to step up and claim it, place a black magic curse on Reilly, though it backfires when she gets pregnant the old fashioned way...
What starts as a sexy encounter turns violent, however, as Reilly finds herself writhing around after sex like a possessed woman—spoiler alert, it's because she's possessed. Well, sort of...
Reilly's character gets around, too, shacking up with another local guy to further dampen Richardson's plans...
It's an ignominious way for Roeg's career to end, considering he helped birth the supernatural horror genre and ended up making a pale imitator before it was all said and done. However, if you like your plots to be non-linear, your editing to feature constant contrast, and your sex scenes to be raw and real, there are few better than Nicolas Roeg. He will be missed...
Other Films by Nicolas Roeg with Nudity Not Covered in This Column:
Check out the Other Directors in Our Ongoing "SKIN-depth Look”Series
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Non-nude images via IMDb
