Gargoyles was a 1972 TV movie that got played a lot on weekends during the day in my youth. Despite the bad special effects and make up I remember being mildly creeped out by. Cornel Wilde played the professor and I just found out Bernie Casey was the head Gargoyle.
I love high concept movies like The Truman Show, so it’s weird that I just learned about, and watched Being There.
I remember that movie! It was actually pretty good, as TV movies went.
Forgotten? Ach! Melvyn Douglas won an Oscar for his role in it. Great movie.
He also wrote the screenplay for Age Of Consent, a very autobiographical movie that starred a young and absolutely gorgeous Helen Mirren. Old Norman had a talent for getting the ladies to peel down, I’ll say that for him.
Yes, not very well-known or remembered today. And it should be: a crazy premise that makes sense once you understand it, and a fish-out-of-water story, where the unaware fish makes some incredible connections, and ends up being influential in American economic and political policy. Without knowing it.
May have to dig that one out of my DVD library, and watch it again.
Peter Sellers. Shirley MacLaine. Definitely not forgotten. “I like to watch.”
Now for a chance for all y’all to make fun of me. How about an animated movie from my youth:
Helen Mirren was naked in the Penthouse movie Caligula. Now that she has been so identified with playing QEII it seems wrong somehow.
Helen Mirren was doing “artistic” scenes, from her earliest films, well into her 40s.
QEII was the exception, not the rule
There was an episode of MAS*H all about Hawkeye and BJ’s attempt to get a copy of the movie because they thought it was risqué as it had been banned in Boston.
‘I love Helen Mirren! She’s always so… naked! It’s like her breasts are afraid of the dark!’ and ‘When a Helen Mirren film comes on the telly, that’s like a guarantee. Her name says, "Okay, boys, you better watch this one with the curtains shut.’ - ‘Jeff’, from Coupling
I think ‘Jeff’ was the one who also came up with ‘The full Agutter’.
Watching Vanishing Point, Electra Glide in Blue, and Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry one might come to the conclusion that directors in the 70’s all resolved the question “How do I end this damn movie?” the same way.
Looking over my DVDs…
The Pirate Movie - Kristy McNichol and Cristopher Atkins dismantle Gilbert & Sullivan. But they seem to be having so much fun doing it, the movie is infectious (YMMV)
Quick Change - Bill Murray and Geena Davis pull off a heist. All they have to do is get out of town… Watch for Tony Shaloub is an absolutely hilarious role of a cab driver caught up in the chaos.
Swashbuckler - Another pirate movie (starring Robert Shaw and Genevieve Bujold) with some of the most over the top takes on Captain Blood type movies you’ll ever see, including Peter Boyle knawing every bit of scenery he’s in.
Hopscotch - Walter Matthau and Glenda Jackson flim, flam, and bamboozle the CIA (Ned Beatty at his most unlikable) across two continents.
Carny - The pairing of Gary Busey with the near-jailbait Jodie Foster probably explains why this isn’t shown much.
And, hey, I really like The Hot Rock. It’s not in any way faithful to the book, but the casting is superb, and the slow burn frustrations of the characters (particularly Moses Gunn as the African Ambassador bankrolling the retrieval of said hot rock) is great.
Pederast!
Errol Flynn and Basil Rathbone dueling? Nothing compared to Boyle and Bujold! 
I think you mean Boyle and Shaw.
I love that scene. It starts out as a genteel duel with smallswords, then gradually degenerates into a brawl with cutlasses.
And don’t forget The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, also with tasteful nudity and she was in her mid-forties at the time and still stunning. I think that lady made some sort of deal with the devil lol.
Which brings up another rather forgotten movie starring Ms Agutter, Walkabout. She was VERY young in that one and it would be a scandal if the movie were made today–I’d guess she was maybe eighteen when it filmed and possibly younger if production took a while. Amazing cinematography on that one too, it’s gorgeous.
She’d just turned 16 when that was filmed.
“Walkabout was meant to be innocent,” she says of the arty survival film. Roeg, she claims, went to great lengths to put her at ease and explain his vision of a Garden of Eden. But she admits, with a gulp: “it wasn’t easy”.
“I was a 16-year-old and I felt very uncomfortable about being naked. But they shot from a long way away and I didn’t have anyone around me. And actually, when I did the shot, I got dressed very quickly. It felt very free in the water because you know, I have to tell you, swimming in the water naked is lovely and I still swim in the water naked.”
Earlier in the article, she says that her only regret is the exploitation of her nude scene.
It’s not an issue with me,” says the star of BBC’s Call the Midwife, in her softly spoken cut-glass accent. “The exploitation of it is. You can end up naked in places you don’t want to.” We’ve met up in a London hotel to discuss her new film, the decidedly not X-rated The Railway Children Return, but conversation has veered towards the nude scenes she did as a young actor. Now, she explains, “[these scenes have] ended up out of context” on the internet. “That shocks me. Doing it doesn’t shock me.”
That tracks, she absolutely did NOT have an adult figure in that movie and definitely had baby fat in her face. But “o tempora o mores” I suppose. The past was a different country and they do things differently there.
I’ll have to watch it again, but I think the exclamation is by Bujold (Pederast!) and initial engagement is between her and Boyle, but quickly turns into the battle between Shaw and Boyle.