Hollywood’s Steamiest Sex Swaps

Earl Fowler

Dunno about you, but I sort of miss the fusty Motion Picture Production Code implemented by Hollywood studios in 1934 in response to the sanctimonious outrage provoked mainly by salacious Mae (“A Hard Man Is Good to Find”) West films.

The purpose of the code (popularly known as the Hays Code), enforced by a group called the Production Code Administration less and less effectively until 1968, was to minimize explicit treatment of sexual themes in motion pictures released by major U.S. studios.

I’m not advocating its reinstatement, at least not on religious or moral grounds, but do admit to a sense of fond nostalgia insofar as the code required a certain amount of mischievous waggishness or canny subterfuge to subvert. In effect, it became the inadvertent fons et origo of a brilliant stream of bamboozle-the-censor creativity.

As writer Andrew Katzenstein observed last month in a New York Review of Books article titled “Fools in Love”:

In many cases, all that’s needed to get across sexual meaning is a raised eyebrow or a sidelong glance. It isn’t especially difficult to discern that, for example, in Theodora Goes Wild (1936) Melvyn Douglas’s rakish illustrator steps up his efforts to sleep with (Irene) Dunne’s best-selling romance novelist when he realizes that she’s a virgin; or that in Mr. and Mrs. Smith (1941) Robert Montgomery’s character is aroused by the possibility of having what would technically be premarital sex with his wife of many years (Carole Lombard) after they discover that their marriage license is invalid; or that in My Favorite Wife Dunne’s character wants to punish her estranged husband (Cary Grant) before their reconciliation by making him unbearably horny. As the film scholar Leger Grindon wrote, “Censorship fostered the artful implication that allowed the innocent to suspect nothing but provoked the imagination of the experienced.”

Whenever things start to drag in current movies, the fallback missionary position of way too many directors is to throw together a passel of beautiful bodies, à la pelle. Doesn’t usually advance the plot and I’m almost sure there must be a point at which tedium kicks in. I’ll keep filling the caramel corn bowl and let you know.

But first, here’s a titillating peek at what I consider the 10 sexiest non-sex scenes ever to emerge from behind the negligee curtain during the Golden Age of Hollywood when, as Katzenstein put it, “wit and physical confrontation became the chaste manifestations of desire.”

To be familiar with most of these flicks, of course, one would have to be stalled on the great gravel tarmac of the Drive-in Theatre of Life, awaiting one’s eternal instalment in the underground parking section below. The aluminum projected-sound speaker wedged onto the driver’s side front window crackles for us all.

Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.

For it’s time to visit our Refreshment Centre. Show starts in eight minutes. Yum, yum. It’s time for a tasty and refreshing snack. We promise to satisfy your hunger. Your thirst. Your sweet tooth. So visit our Refreshment Centre now. Let’s go! Show starts in seven minutes …

Think of what follows as an exercise in Bachman Turner Classic Movies Overdrive:

10) A young Shirley MacLaine (as Fran Kubelik) telling a young Jack Lemmon (CC “Bud” Baxter) to “shut up and deal” at the end of 1960’s romantic comedy-drama holiday classic The Apartment.

9) Poor but honest lawyer Dr. Max Sporum (played by Herbert Marshall) excitedly sharpening pencils (sometimes a nib can be more graphic than graphite) upon meeting lovely usherette Luisa Ginglebusher (played by Margaret Sullavan, and no, I am not making up any of these names) in 1935’s The Good Fairy.

8) Emasculated palaeontologist David Huxley (played by Cary Grant) and scatterbrained heiress Susan Vance (Katharine Hepburn) looking for David’s missing intercostal Brontosaurus clavicle (sometimes a bone is … you know the drill) in 1938’s Bringing Up Baby, a box-office bomb now considered an echt screwball comedy masterpiece.

7) Twenty-year-old Lauren Bacall as Slim, purring seductively to 45-year-old Humphrey Bogart’s Harry (Steve) Morgan in 1944’s romantic war adventure film To Have and Have Not: “You know you don’t have to act with me, Steve. You don’t have to say anything, and you don’t have to do anything. Not a thing. Oh, maybe just whistle. You know how to whistle, don’t you, Steve? You just put your lips together and ... blow.” And just like that, Bogie’s tempestuous marriage to his third wife, Mayo Methot, was a puff in the wind.

6) The flirtatious banter of anything William Powell and Myrna Loy were in together, particularly when starring as well-heeled, copiously drinking, sensationally sleuthing Nick and Nora Charles in 1934’s The Thin Man and its five sequels. In his book Becoming Nick and Nora, Rob Kozlowski describes their relationship as “the friendliest, most fun marriage ever captured on screen.”

Typical Thin Man repartee:

NICK: I was shot twice in the Tribune.

NORA: I read you were shot five times in the tabloids.

NICK: It’s not true. He didn’t come anywhere near my tabloids.

5) That steamy ocean liner scene at the end of 1941’s The Lady Eve in which Henry Fonda’s woman-shy, snake-fancying heir to the Pike’s Pale (“The Ale That Won for Yale”) fortune tells Barbara Stanwyck’s heart-of-gold cardsharp that he has no right to be in her cabin because he’s married. Stanwyck as the door closes: “But so am I, darling, so am I.”

4) Fred MacMurray as insurance salesman Walter Neff in 1944 film noir Double Indemnity, describing his first glimpse of Stanwyck and her honey of an anklet: “The living room was still stuffy from last night’s cigars. The windows were closed and the sunshine coming in through the Venetian blinds showed up the dust in the air. On the piano in a couple of fancy frames were Mr. Dietrichson and Lola, his daughter by his first wife. They had a bowl of those little red goldfish on the table behind the big Davenport. But to tell you the truth, Keyes, I wasn’t a whole lot interested in goldfish right then, not in auto renewals, nor in Mr. Dietrichson and his daughter Lola. I was thinking about that dame upstairs and the way she had looked at me, and I wanted to see her again, close, without that silly staircase between us.” (Yeah, he killed Dietrichson for money and for a woman. He didn’t get the money and he didn’t get the woman. Pretty, isn’t it?)

3) The misty-eyed ending to 1942 drama Now, Voyager, when Paul Henreid’s Jerry asks Bette Davis’s Charlotte whether she’s happy and she replies: “Oh, Jerry, don’t let’s ask for the moon. We have the stars.” Shall we just have a cigarette on it?

2) The butter stick bit in Last Tango in Paris. No, wait. I meant the famous Bella Notte spaghetti scene in Lady and the Tramp. I always mix those two up.

1) Jimmy Stewart’s tabloid magazine journalist Macaulay (Mike) Connor doesn’t ultimately wind up with Katharine Hepburn’s Philadelphia Main Line socialite, Tracy Lord, in 1940’s The Philadelphia Story. She remarries Cary Grant’s C.K. Dexter Haven, a patrician yacht designer. But boy, the muy caliente scene of the night before the wedding as Tracy gets tipsy, takes an innocent midnight swim with Mike and is carried into the mansion by him is the sultriest, slinkiest, seductive-est sequence in the whole comedy-of-remarriage genre that was so popular in the Thirties and Forties. (Keep in mind as you read this that it wasn’t until the mid-Forties that the systematic extermination of six million Jews during the Second World War became commonly known as The Holocaust) :

MIKE: Tracy.

TRACY: What do you want?

MIKE: You’re wonderful. There’s a magnificence in you, Tracy.

TRACY: Now I’m getting self-conscious. It’s funny. I … Mike? Let’s ..

MIKE: Yeah?

TRACY: I don't know — go up, I guess, it’s late.

MIKE: A magnificence that comes out of your eyes, in your voice, in the way you stand there, in the way you walk. You’re lit from within, Tracy. You’ve got fires banked down in you, hearth-fires and holocausts.

TRACY: I don’t seem to you made of bronze?

MIKE: No, you’re made out of flesh and blood. That’s the blank, unholy surprise of it. You’re the golden girl, Tracy. Full of life and warmth and delight. What goes on? You’ve got tears in your eyes.

TRACY: Shut up, shut up. Oh, Mike. Keep talking, keep talking. Talk, will you?

Mamma Mia, attsa some spicy meatball!