[nitpick]Just about everyone in Hollywood except De Mille directed the 1925 Ben Hur: Fred Niblo, Charles Brabin, Christy Cabanne, J.J. Cohn and Rex Ingram.[/nitpick]
He didn’t go frontal in that one. Maybe you’re thinking of American Gigolo.
Oh, that is an EXCELLENT resource. I’ll definitely check it out at length.
Robert Forster and Verna Bloom had frontal nudity in Medium Cool (1969).
Sweden’s I Am Curious (Yellow) (1967), released in the U.S. in 1969, also had male and female frontal nudity.
No, not at all.
Eve, is that all you have? A nitpick?
Nope, I distinctly remember very early in the movie, Mayo getting his dad out of some whore den or something. His dad’s pubes and dongle a clearly visible for a beat or two.
I have read that Georges Milie (sp unsure, the guy who made that pic of the “From the Earth to the Moon” with all the early special effects) made hundreds of films before 1920. I’ll bet there were a lot more filmmakers out there doing the same. I’ll also bet, especially in European cinema, that the distinction between porn and mainstream stuff was a lot murkier when the medium was just starting out – for one thing, it started out as a hobbyist kinda thing, there wasn’t any “mainstream” element to it. That’s where those “educational” white slavery films came from, I bet. Anybody know anything about that?
You forgot Purity (1916), Two Arabian Knights (1928), and quite a few others (I’ve seen it claimed as over 100) from the silent/early sound era.
*Evil Captor: It’s Melies.
As far as real early porn, there were Kinetoscope fims such as Airy Fairy Lillian Tries On Her New Corsets, How Bridget Served the Salad Undressed and The Athletic Girl and the Burglar, which did involve a certain amount of polite semi-nudity.
I was 16. They played it in the drive-in beside our house (in the middle of a residential district :eek: ) one weekend. All my friends came over to spend the evening in my back yard 
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Interesting. I read the IMDB listings and they seemed to imply that they were the kind of “tweener” fare I’m thinking of … stuff that wasn’t exactly something for the headlines, but also not smoker material.
As for “How Bridget Served the Salad Undressed” – I recently saw a Laurel & Hardy clip where Stan is working as a waiter at a wealthy home and he’s asked to serve the salad undressed, so he strips down to his boxers and T-shirt. Not nearly as funny or effective as the original.
“Yeah, we would’ve seen his dick if not for that damned boarding boat!”
I am surprised no one has mentioned 1966’s Blow Up by Antononi.
It was the first mainstream film to show the nether regions of a female and the first to show a star at her peak (sorry about the pun [no - nevermind, I’m not]) topless - Venessa Redgrave.
It was also a very intelligent movie - so much better than the remake with Travolta 20 or so years later.
For television - The first full nudity I ever saw on the tube (not counting the adventure travel shows like Seven League Boots and the Lowell Thomas thing - “We were cutting our way through the jungle when suddenly a tribe…”) was on PBS. It was a British import called Candida.
I seem to remember that I-TV was the one who did it in Britian and it was banned (an injunction or something) from being shown. Then the BBC showed all the “naughty bits” on a program explaining why the show was being banned. Obviously, then since everyone who wanted to see the naughty bits had already seen them on the Beeb, the ban was lifted.
When I saw it in the states on PBS, I don’t remember the big to-do about it.
Speaking of remembering - I just remembered seeing the nude opening scene of the German 1936 Olympic film made by the German Woman buddy of Hitler’s - Full frontal nudity of attractive women standing there throwing a large ball around. Got my attention! And I saw it on television on regular channel. This was before everything belonged to the networks so I think some local programer thought it was just a foreign language documentary. The whole film showed - no sudden break in. I saw the film in the early 60s or late 50s.
TV
You can never see enough titties.
Or to put it more poetically, “We would’ve seen his thingie if it weren’t for that damn dinghy!”
Paging Little Nemo! 
I am something of an expert on early cinema (about 80% of the data in the IMDb for 1890-1903 was put there by me), and I don’t know what you mean by a “hobbyist kinda thing.” Almost all American films before 1902 were made by two companies, Edison and Biograph. There were no amateur gauges of film (16mm, 8mm etc.) back then, and Edison zealously enforced his patents on 35mm.
Méliès did make many “stag” films, but they weren’t hard core. For example, a woman undressing as she tries to find a pesky flea.
And there was male “backside” nudity in that one too. In the galley slaves sequence some poor shmuck is chained up standing face to the wall. Totally bareassed naked.
How about Fay Wray in King Kong and Maureen O’Sullivan in Tarzan and His Mate (yes, another woman doubled her underwater shots, but those are her own breasts when she surfaces).
P.S. The title is Blowup folks, one word, no hyphen.