A movie about Beethoven, a Best Picture winner, a comedy classic by a late director, and a pair of solid gold dad classics were all released on December 16 in Movie Nudity History!
1994: Immortal Beloved
It's rare that you know exactly where you were more than two decades earlier, but I know for a fact that on December 16, 1994, my ass was in the seat at the old tenplex in Paramus, NJ to see Immortal Beloved. While the film was clearly marketed as Amadeus for Beethoven, it's more of a sumptuously speculative piece of work about a likely fictitious woman. Following the death of Beethoven (Gary Oldman), several women come forward all claiming to be his great "Immortal Beloved" to whom he bequeathed his entire estate. Various women tell their stories via flashback about their romantic dalliances with the deceased composer, like Geno Lechner, who takes down her dress in the woods to seduce him...
There's also some bonus boobage from the lovely Valeria Golino, along with a flash of frontal from Johanna ter Steege who, spoiler alert, turns out to be his immortal beloved...
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1988: Rain Man
When people talk about movies not "aging well," I often think of this Best Picture winner released on this day 32 years ago. Before autism and the entire spectrum of related mental illnesses were fully understood, this film basically equated autism with an intellectual disability. Hindsight, and all that, but the film often plays poor Raymond (Best Actor winner Dustin Hoffman) and his various behaviors as "quirky" or "amusing." It's not a good look three decades on, but Tom Cruise really and truly nails his performance as an opportunistic and manipulative parasite looking for a new host.
It's interesting that the film's only nudity comes in the midst of one of those problematic scenes that's clearly played for laughs, but isn't all that funny in or out of context. It's the return of Valeria Golino, y'all, six years to the day before Immortal Beloved and just three years before Hot Shots!, bares her breasts while Tom Cruise belittles his disabled brother...
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1983: The Man Who Loved Women
**Portions of the following text are excerpted from our SKIN-depth Look at Blake Edwards' Films
Since Curse of the Pink Panther was more or less finished by the time 1983 rolled around, Edwards was free to work on another film, ultimately releasing two films in the same year for the second consecutive year—1982's other release being the skinless Victor/Victoria. For his fourth film in two years, Edwards chose to do an English language remake of François Truffaut's 1977 film The Man Who Loved Women. Edwards had been planning the film for some time, initially offering the lead role to Dustin Hoffman, who turned it down, and then Warren Beatty, who was attached all the way through development before dropping out just prior to shooting.
Edwards ultimately went with Burt Reynolds, who was on the downside ofhaving been biggest box office draw for an entire decade, offering him his meatiest role in years.Edwards did away with Truffaut's framing device of the funeral for the protagonist—Reynolds' sculptor David Fowler here—instead giving wife Julie Andrews amuch expanded role as his psychoanalyst, to whom he spends the film confessing to all of the many affairs he's had over the years. We're privy to quite a bit of his philandering, including a dalliance with Jennifer Ashley that finds her topless in the tub...
The film's legacy, however, lies in the fact that this is the only place you can see Marilu Henner nude, and we mean really nude, completely nude, in bed with Reynolds—her future husband on the 90s TV series Evening Shade. Though she's nude in bed with Reynolds for well over a minute, we don't get our best look at Marilu's best bits until she gets out of bed...
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1983: D.C. Cab
Also released on this day 37 years ago was the late, great Joel Schumacher's sophomore directorial effort co-starring Mr. T and Gary Busey! Although Schumacher attempted to distance himself from the film as he began to be taken more seriously as a director, he wrote the screenplay, shared a story credit with his producer, and not for nothing, the flick's got a killer Giorgio Moroder score. The film was just released on Blu-ray for the first time earlier this month, giving Moriah Shannon's amazing nude scenes the high def upgrade it's long deserved...
Honestly, Schumacher was a great director and if you enjoyed his sensibility and can appreciate the inherent joy in seeing Mr. T, Busey, Bill Maher, Paul Rodriguez, and Bob Zmuda all together in the same movie, you should check it out.
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1973: Papillon
On this day 47 years ago came one of my father's all-time favorite movies, yet another Dustin Hoffman vehicle released on this day, Papillon. Steve McQueen stars in the title role alongside Hoffman in this true tale of a lifelong friendship between two prisoners. McQueen's safe cracker is wrongly accused of murder in early 1930's French Guyana and gets sentenced to life imprisonment, where he meets Hoffman's Louis Dega. Over a number of years, Papillon—so-named for the butterfly tattoo on his chest—makes several escape attempts, eventually ending up living among a secluded tribe deep in the rainforest of Honduras.
Here we get a bunch of nudity from the native women, including Ratna Assan as Zoarima, the woman he falls in love with...
The film was remade in 2017 with Charlie Hunnam and Rami Malek in the lead roles and is about 15 minutes shorter than the original, if you're looking to shave some time off of things. Just putting that out there, I have yet to see either, but my father says they're both good.
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