You may not know his name, but you know John Boorman's work. While we won't be diving into most of his best known films like Deliverance, Exorcist II: The Heretic,or Hope and Glory,this crafty Brit dabbled in genre worlds as well. He provided us with a gritty Lee Marvin action flick, the insane science fiction/fantasy Zardoz, and what I feel to be the best attempt to put King Arthur on film with 1981's Excalibur—no offense meant to Monty Python and the Holy Grail fans.
Born just a few years prior to England's involvement in World War II, Boorman started—as did many of his generation—in television,making documentary films. He caught the attention of a producer looking to produce a Hard Days Night-esque flick for the Dave Clark Five titled Catch Us If You Can, notable only for not being outright awful. It was good enough to land him a gig directing the aforementioned Lee Marvin vehicle Point Blankin Hollywood, which set his career off and running in a big way.
After scoring his first Best Director Oscar nom for 1972's Deliverance, Boorman was offered the job of directing The Exorcist, along with Stanley Kubrick and Mike Nichols, but turned it down finding the premise to be absurd. DirectorWilliam Friedkin declined the opportunity to return for the sequel, leaving the door open for Boorman to get his crack at the material. The disastrous Exorcist II: The Heretic was the result, denounced by Friedkin, author William Peter Blatty, and virtually everyone else. It's arguably the worst sequel in a franchise rife with rotten sequels.
Boorman channeled his own experiences growing up during The Blitz in 1987's Hope and Glory, coming away with another Best Director nomination. Sadly his career has been a series of peaks and valleys since then, though he has managed to crank out two solid genre flicks in the last 25 years. However, turning back the clock to the start of his Hollywood career finds that he's always been a fan of nudity, a crucial element of any good genre movie...
Point Blank (1967)
Based on the book “Hunter” by Donald E. Westlake (as Richard Stark), 1967's Point Blank was a hugely influential action-thriller that, along with the following year's Bullitt, would set the gold standard for a major city action flick.Lee Marvin stars as Walker, a criminal double-crossed after a successful heist by his wife and his partner, who have been having an affair on the side. Thinking that they've killed him, they flee with all the cash, but they didn't succeed in their mission to kill him, and as he is nursed back to health, he's got only one thing on his mind, revenge. If you haven't seen the film but the plot sounds familiar, the 1999 flick Payback with Mel Gibson was based on the same source material.
Lee Marvin wasn't just one of the most grizzled and hardened veteran actors around, he was also a class act. Marvin himself had casting approval and final cut on the film and deferred both of them to Boorman. This gave the eager 34 year old director, working on his first Hollywood project, the perfect opportunity to show what he could do, and he didn't squander it. The stylish thriller became the template for a lot of similar films and Boorman's first nude sceneset a lot of standards for on-screen nudity as well.
Hollywood was just starting to come out from under the thumb of the Hays Code and, with it effectively ceasing to be enforced by 1967, directors and writers now had the opportunity to add elements that were previously unavailable to them. Sex, nudity, violence, and most importantly, doing away with the mandate that the villain had to pay for their crimes in the end, gave them a lot more freedom to explore new territory, and nude territory. Enter Angie Dickinson, playing the sister of Walker's ex-wife, whom our hero eventually beds, because that's the sweetest revenge of them all. Plus, this character being played by Angie Dickinson makes that something of a no-brainer.
At the 50-minute mark, Walker formulates a plan for Dickinson to seduce Reese, Walker's partner who cuckolded and betrayed him, played by John "Dean Wormer" Vernon. We get a hint of her butt crack in bed with him, but once Marvin makes his presence known, she flees the room and begins to get dressed in the background, giving us plenty of nice looks at her nude body as she hurriedly dresses...
Steven Soderbergh, an ardent admirer of the film, conducted an interview with Boorman released as a commentary track on the film's DVD and Blu-ray release. In it, Boorman recounts a story about Angie Dickinson in which she was asked by a reporter whether she dressed for men or for women, "She said 'I dress for women, I undress for men.'" God bless Angie Dickinson.
Zardoz (1974)
After the monstrous success of Deliverance, critically and commercially, Boorman had carte blanche to do whatever he liked next and he chose tocreate one of the absolute most bizarre science fiction/fantasy films in history, 1974's Zardoz. The idea allegedly came to him while he was preparing to make a live action adaptation of Lord of the Rings, which United Artists abandoned when the script became too costly. Boorman imagined a future world near the end of the 23rd century, strictly divided in two: Haves and Have Nots. The haves, in this case, are the immortal Eternals who live in luxury while the mortal Brutals must eke out an existence in a wasteland.
If you've never seen Zardoz, one can safely assume that you've at least seen what star Sean Connery, playing a Brutal named Zed, looks like when we first meet him in the story...
Boorman's Deliverance star Burt Reynolds was originally cast in the role, but Connery took over when Reynolds dropped out just three weeks before production was scheduled to start. Zed is a violent Brutal known as an Exterminator, and one day decides to hitch a ride on the giant stone head known as Zardoz that is sent by The Eternals to The Brutals to deliver weapons and collect any food the Brutals have harvested for the Eternals. Upon arriving on the grounds of a palatial estate known as The Vortex, he is discovered by Consuella (Charlotte Rampling) and May (Sara Kestelman), who hypnotize him and turn him into a menial laborer.
Zed turns out to be a much more intelligent Brutal than they've ever dealt with before and it isn't long before he attempts to discover the secrets of the Eternals.The film is bonkers, bug nuts, unhinged insanity from beginning to end and simply must be seen to be believed. Charlotte Rampling, in the same year she made the brutal The Night Porter, does some much less disturbing nudity here...
Sara Kestelman also gets in on the action, getting into a full-on catfight with Rampling as soon every woman in town wants to jump on Connery's bandwagon, so to speak...
As perhaps the only woman not interested in riding the Connery express is Sally Anne Newton as an Eternal named Avalow, who rides a horse topless, tempting the hapless Brutal...
Excalibur (1981)
The legend of King Arthur has a rather dubious on-screen history, with many attempts being made to bring the tales of the knights of the round table to life and none of them really connecting with audiences in any meaningful way. The one exception in the realm of serious adaptations is Boorman's 1981 film adaptation Excalibur, adapted from the 15th century textLe Morte d'ArthurbyThomas Malory by Boorman and frequent collaboratorRospo Pallenberg. Stage actor Nigel Terry, appearing in his first credited role since The Lion in Winter 13 years earlier, plays Arthur from teen all the way to old man.
The infamous love triangle between Arthur, Guinevere (Cherie Lunghi), and Sir Lancelot (Nicholas Clay) reaches its apex an hour and 27 minutes in when Lancelot steals Guinevere away to a wooded glen for a little hanky panky...
Just five minutes later, Morgana, played by Dame Helen Mirren, seduces Arthur by casting a spell to make him think she's Guinevere, and showing her phenomenal fun bags beneath a mesh dress...
Finally, in a move straight out of Dario Argento's playbook, Boorman cast his own daughter Katrine Boorman asIgrayne, Duchess of Cornwall and mother of Arthur. Just 16 minutes into the flick, we're treated to Arthur's conception as his father Uther (played by a young Gabriel Byrne) lays some magisterial pipe as Igrayne's kingdom burns to the ground...
The would go to gross $35 million at the box, more than tripling its budget. It's also notable for also being a part of the DC film universe canon as it was the film that Bruce Wayne's parents took him to see before being gunned down at the beginning of Batman v Superman.
The Emerald Forest (1985)
There are precisely two reasons to talk about Boorman's, pardon the pun, booring 1985 film The Emerald Forest. Obviously, the nudity, and we'll get there in a moment, but it's most important contribution to the history of cinema is that John Boorman created the first ever Oscar screeners for this film. Distributor Embassy Pictures didn't have the money to mount an awards campaign for the film, so Boorman created VHS copies of the film and made them available to rent for any Academy member at several Los Angeles video stores. It didn't get nominated for anything, but it's still significant to know that this fourth quarter tradition was born because of this film.
This is one of those movies with a substantial amount of nudity,most of it about as sexy as an issue of National Geographic. That's not to denigrate the bare breasted women in the film, it's just de-sexualized to such a point that it's, well, not sexy. One exception to that rule is Filipina beauty Tetchie Agbayani, a former Playboy model who has a little fun with a fellow tribesman in the water...
Where the Heart Is (1990)
Easily the strangest film on Boorman's cv is thisdramedy that plays a lot like James Ivory's Slaves of New York from a few weeks back. A simultaneous satire of the upper class and celebration of artistic freedom, Where the Heart Is didn't play to audiences in 1990 and it sadly doesn't stand the test of time either. 80s excess had only just peaked and like a lot of other films that took aim at the rich in this same time period like Brian De Palma's Bonfire of the Vanities, it just wasn't the right time. In fairness, it'll never be the right time for Bonfire.
Uma Thurman and Suzy Amis play sisters freeloading off their wealthy father Dabney Coleman, creating bizarre postmodern art in his palatial estate. When he has a professional meltdown on television, he decides to kick them and their brother out ofthe house, giving them each $700 and telling them they're on their own. Hijinks ensue, crazy roommates come into the picture, and it all culminates in a role reversal that feels, well, straight out of a movie and not any sort of reality.
Thurman and Amis both flaunt their nude bodies under body paint, however, as they recreate famous works of art on their bodies...
The Tailor of Panama (2001)
Along with 1998's quietly hysterical film The General, 2001's The Tailor of Panama represents the peak of Boorman's late career work. Based on the John LeCarre novel of the same name, the film's script is credited to LeCarre, Boorman, and Welsh writer Andrew Davies, and gave us a bit of a non-Bond outing for Pierce Brosnan in between Bond movies. Brosnan plays MI6 operative Andy, who is sent to Panama after he was exposed for having an affair with the foreign minster's mistress in Spain. Here he makes the acquaintance of Harry Pendel (Geoffrey Rush) a world class tailor who is also an ex-con and scam artist.
Pendel is happily married to Louisa (Jamie Lee Curtis), blissfully unaware of her husband's criminal past, making poor schmo Harry into the perfect target for Andy's criminal dealings.26 minutes into the flick, we get our first of two nude scenes from Curtis, as she bares her breasts in bed with Rush, and then we get a nice look at her left breast forty minutes later when Brosnan takes her by surprise...
There's also bonus boobage from Braveheart's Catherine McCormack as a woman Andy hooks up with...
It's great to see Brosnan play what is essentially a villainous take on Bond, Rush is fantastically charismatic as a man desperate to keep his past a secret, and Curtis is amazing in what could have amounted to a helpless damsel role. Definitely worth your time if you've never seen it before now.
Queen Country (2014)
Boorman's most recent directorial effort—though his script for The Professor and the Madman was turned into a film last year—is this romantic Korean War-set drama. Though the film starts out as a sort-of brothers-in-arms type of war film, it soon becomes a romance when solider buddies Bill (Callum Turner) and Percy (Caleb Landry-Jones)get some leave from their military jobsin honor of Queen Elizabeth II's coronation and Percy meets Bill's free-spirited sister Dawn (Vanessa Kirby).The two fall hard for one another, but a stupid decision on Percy's part threatens to tear their newfound love apart.
Odds are good that if you've heard of this film at all, it's because you were trying to find Vanessa Kirby nude. You probably saw her in M:I-Fallout or Hobbs Shaw and wondered if she had gone nude and indeed she has, in this very film! An hour and four minutes in, she strips nude to go skinny dipping while Percy and her brother watch from the porch!
There's also a nice look at Aimee-Ffion Edwards' left breast when she pulls down her dress and presses it against a window for Bill earlier in the film...
It is my sincere hope that we haven't seen the last of John Boorman behind the camera, but even if we have, he's left behind a solid legacy of taking big risks that often paid off. Granted, sometimes they didn't, but such are the perils of taking big risks.
John Boorman Films with NudityNot Currently on Our Site
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**Non-nude images via IMDb
