I found that Guinness book I mentioned earlier. It’s called The Guinness Book of Movie Facts and Feats. According to it, a woman was seen topless in Sydney Lumet’s The Pawnbroker (1964), “the first time nudity had been allowed on screen since the setting up of the Production Code Administration Office 30 years earlier.”
The book also has this to say:
This would pre-date What’s His Name by a year.
Nudity was fairly common in American films before the Hays Code. Most reference books I’ve seen say that Carroll Baker was the first actress to appear nude in a mainstream Hollywood film AFTER the Hays Code (the film was “Baby Doll,” adapted from a Tennessee Williams play).
Just to clarify something from above: The Hays Code was created in 1930, but wasn’t seriously enforced until 1934. My source: this book, which I highly recommend.
So you’re both right, kinda. 
In the silent film version of Ben-Hur there is male nudity(full-backal, not frontal) In one of the galley slave scenes there is a guy chained against face against the wall of the vessel. He’s never named or referreed to, I guess it is presumed he is being punished for something. And in one scene where Judah is criving his chariot in a victory procession in Rome there are topless girls throwing flower petals.
Some people believe Bosko (a small, stereotypical black boy, and Warner Bros.'s first cartoon star) says “The dirty fuck!” when a villain appears on the movie screen in “Bosko’s Picture Show” (1933). However, another version of the cartoon has shown up with Bosko calling the villain “cur,” and some believe that the “cur” version was the one shown to movie-goers in 1933.
I heard (maybe an UL) that the centaur scene from “Fantasia” (1940) originally featured topless centaurettes. The MPAA got wind of this and made em draw clam shells over the centaur boobies.
IMDB mentions nothing of this (although it has an interesting tidbit about black versus white centaurs from that scene : http://us.imdb.com/Trivia?0032455)
Anybody heard similar?
Guinness says the same thing about Fantasia.
They also say that the first full-frontal male nudes (in the post-Hays era) were Alan Bates and Oliver Reed in Ken Russel’s Women in Love. (I believe every Ken Russel film has nudity. Not that I’m complaining.)
edwino, your link to http://www.imdb.com doesn’t quite work because of the “)” at the end of it. You do get into the site, but you get a “search failure” page.
As for “fuck”, Guinness says on another page that it was first heard (post-Hays) in I’ll Never Forget What’s 'is Name. I guess it was never spoken in Virginia Woolf after all. However, imdb says Ulysses was released on March 14, 1967, but What’s 'is Name wasn’t released until December, 1967. Looks like Ulysses wins.
I wonder when nudity was first seen on American TV…? (excluding documentaries). Was it Roots?
There are definitely some semi-nude women in Fantasia. Check out “The Night on Bald Mountain” sequence. Supposedly the breif scene showing two black Zebra centauresses serving Baccus was cut out sometime back due to PC concerns. The video release restores this scene.
I don’t recall any topless centaurs in Fantasia, but there were certainly several fully-nude nymphs and female færies. This was in the most recent theatrical relase, which would have been about 1990, I think. Was the nudity restored sometime along the way?
Along the the line of Disney færies, there were a few frames in Peter Pan where Tinkerbell’s legs meet at a point below the bottom of her skirt, but there wasn’t anything there.
Interestingly, full-rear male nudity doesn’t even seem to warrant a PG-13 anymore. The Mask of Zorro had such a scene (bandits tying up the townsfolk they robbed, all tied together naked around a large cactus facing inwards), and I think that that was a PG.
After the opening sequence involving the winged horses, they cut to several centaurettes bathing in a pool fed by a waterfall. They are topless, and we don’t see that they are centaurettes until they walk out of the water and reveal their horsey halves. After that, the cherubs start dressing the centaurettes’ hair and making hats with flowers and tree bark and bird’s nests and draping flowers over their bosoms. After that, the centaurettes are never topless again. (Actually, they are nude in the beginning and remain bottomless thereafter. Their horse halves are never dressed!)
And unless I’m mistaken, while the centaurettes’ breasts are shown, they lack nipples. Nipples are seen on some of the demons in the “Bald Mountain” sequence. They flash by so briefly, most people didn’t notice them in 1940. Today, though, we have the miracle of freeze-frame VCRs and DVDs.
BTW: A 'centaurette" is a Disney invention. In Greek mythology, all centaurs were males. They mated with human women. (Insert bestiality fantasy here.)
There was a movie on Bravo! a while ago called, 'Hollywood Babylon", which consisted of nothing but clips of nude scenes from Early hollywood movies, dating from the silent era all the way through the 1970’s. There was a surprising number of nude scenes in movies in every decade of the last century.
And it’s “Hedy Lamarr”. There was no Hedly. Her real name was Hedwig Eva Kiesler.
dropzone was referencing Blazing Saddles in which Harvey Korman played a character named Hedley Lamarr. Almost every time another character addressed him, they called him “Hedy.” To which he replied, “It’s Hedley!” Not a very funny joke, but repeat it a couple of hundred times and it grows on you.
Incidentally, I read somewhere that Hedy Lamarr sued Mel Brooks for unauthorized use of her name.
FWIW, The Mask of Zorro was and is PG-13. I have the video on my shelf. There’s also a male bareass shot in the current A Knight’s Tale (cough cough sucks cough cough), and that’s PG-13 as well.