Actually, surprisingly little.
The New Age has a 10-odd-minute sequence that takes place at a bondage S/M Party. And I mean 10 odd minutes.
Actually, not that much bondage ensues. There’s a lot of dominant/submissive play, but most of the bondage comes at the beginning when we see her wearing the yoke. There’s another shot of Gyllenhaal wearing the same yoke later, on, and we see a short scene of her making love to Spader at the end with her wrists tied behind her back, around a pine tree (nasty!).
And in 1933 there was Roman Scandals of 1933, which featured a sort of giant layer cake set with Roman slavegirls all naked and chained to the top layer of the cake (they all wear long wigs that conceal their naughty bits). One of them is a young and lovely Lucille Ball.
One of my fave mainstream scenes. My only beef with it was, it was underlit.
Oooooh yeah. One of the fave old TV series for bondage fans was Sky King. Poor Penny just couldn’t go a week without some owlhoot tying her up.
And The Outlaw has Jane Russell bound and gagged twice. Yeah, that was a pretty good movie.
Yeah, that last scene just made me cringe thinking about all the places he was going to be pulling splinters out of for her later.
I realize people mock the movie mercilessly, but there’s a moment in The Avengers where he’s putting her boots on that was just…a moment. Not exactly bondage, not exactly D/s, but it, um, squooshes me in the same place that BDsm erotica does.
Cronenberg’s Dead Ringers
Miss Piggy ties up Josh Charles in Muppets in Space, and I for one find it extremely erotic.
Whaaaaaat?
Terror among Us, an obscure made for TV movie from 1981 has perhaps the best Women-in-Bondage scene of any mainstream movie. At least that’s what my cat, who’s really into that sort of thing, tells me.
Barb Wire.
And there’s a short scene in Mr and Mrs Smith.
Well, to answer your question directly: no, I don’t know of any great bondage scenes in mainstream movies. To be honest, by far the best bondage scenes I have scene are in Japanese adult anime (hentai) which are unlike American porn in that they feature plot and characterization. But I’ll deal with movies, of the sort you can rent or get through Netflix. (Note: Blockbuster censors its movies rather intensely. I know for a fact that the scene in Over the Wire was entirely cut from the Blockbuster version, and that some of the scenes in Romance were censored for Blockbuster).
Frankly, the very best mainstream movie scenes are easily outdone by even mediocre bondage video porn. This makes sense: the bondage filmmakers know what they are after, they go after it very directly, they make sure the sexy parts are well lit and they dwell on the sexy parts. The bondage tends to be imaginative and revealing in all the ways mainstream bondage tends to be unimaginative and not revealing, if you know what I mean.
It’s pretty much the same with straight sex scenes – nothing in a mainstream movie is gonna match a hardcore porn flick for sheer sexy raunchiness.
That said, what are the best mainstream bondage scenes? My faves tend to change from day to day, but right now the ones I come up with are:
Over the Wire. It’s a consensual scene (always a plus for me) between a sheriff and his wife. He cuffs her hands behind her back, there’s some foreplay, then there’s a scene where they have sex while her hands are still cuffed and she’s gagged with his tie. It’s all very nice and friendly (later, she cuffs him for more fun). But it’s also very brief, seriously underlit, and the wife’s gag looks like it’s going to fall off if she doesnt hold it in place with her teeth.
Cat People. Nastassia Kinski, tied in a nude spreadeagle and having sex. Pretty damned intense, for mainstream. Sadly, very underlit. You’d see more of her naughty bits if she’d been wearing a pair of short shorts with the lights on.
Fatal Conflict – former MTV VJ turned B movie starlet Kari Wuhrer stars in this SF flick. She’s not the one who gets tied up. Instead, there’s this great scene in a futuristic gangster’s hideout, where he has beautiful slavegirls processing emeralds wearing nothing but skimpy, almost see-through cutoff T-shirts, electronic chastity belts and metal gags. There are about a dozen slavegirls so attired, and they get a lot of attention, although all they are doing is polishing and peering carefully at emeralds while half-naked and gagged. Naturally, they are all gorgeous. Kari rescues them.
Spun – An indie flick in which actress/model Chloe Hunter plays a stripper who hooks up with a meth freak. They make love, but he gets a phone call from his connection that he can score some meth. So he pretends to Chloe that he wants to do something kinky. She’s all for it. So he ties her naked and in a wide spreadeagle to the bed, then gags her with duct tape and blindfolds her with more tape over her eyes (gotta hurt, but they have ways of making the tape not so sticky). But the meth freak isn’t interested in kinky sex, he just wants to keep her in place so he can make love to her after he scores his meth (a nice little example of how whacked-out one’s priorities can get when one takes drugs.) Unlike Cat People, this scene is very well lit, and unlike most mainstream flicks, Chloe is very naked and we see plenty of scenes of her tied up like this.
Romance – French art house flick has Carolyn Ducey naked and ballgagged and with crotch ropes on in one scene (not to worry, she is French, and her thatch of pubic hair does more than a mere thong could to keep her naughty bits hidden). There’s also a scene of her being molested while wearing a yoke. Both scenes nice and consensual, and for that reason, right up there with Over the Wire. Also features a pretty much hardcore scene with Rocco Siffredi.
Opposing Force – At an ultra-secret training camp in the Pacific designed to help captured flyers maintain their sanity while being tortured, things go terribly wrong. The commander spends a leetle too much time in the sun and goes way insane himself. Lisa Eichorn, the only woman recruit, winds up stripped naked, tied hand and foot, gagged and raped by the camp commander (the guys get rough treatment of a more traditional, non-sexual sort.) This is about the most graphic bondage scene you’ll find in a mainstream film – compares with Cat People in that respect, and like Cat People, it’s underlit.
The Abductors – Has all kinds of great scenes. Basically, it’s a 70s B movie with a detective theme that was deliberately made to have bondage as its central appeal. Ginger is a private eye on the trail of three kidnapped cheerleaders – cheerleaders who have been kidnapped by white slavers! She’s too late to save them from being force to take off their clothes and get bound and gagged, and later, to have sex. She’s too late to even prevent this from happening to herself. But eventually, very eventually, she catches the bad guys. (This is one of a series of three films with the same character and themes, the others are “Ginger” and “Girls Are for Loving.”
To tell you the truth, a week from now I might come up with a completely different set of scenes, and frankly this set of scenes is lacking strictly because they ARE scenes – there are other flicks, like Jupiter’s Darling or Son of Sinbad or Amazon Queen that are more interesting to watch because they have some interesting stuff going on in terms of relationships (or in Son of Sinbad’s case, dancing girls).
So the question I have for the OP is, what do you think makes a bondage scene great? Because there’s certainly no agreement on the subject among bondage fans. Some of them don’t consider a scene a bondage scene unless the bondagee is gagged, some are very interested in feet, others think the scene is ruined if there’s any nudity. So what constitutes a great bondage scene is a very subjective thing.
There are an awful lot of mainstream bondage fans who agree with you. And your cat. It has four different damsels being distressed, all of them gagged. One of them is Sarah Purcell, best known as a host of “Real People.”
Well, I’ve been interested in bondage scenes in which the character (usually a male) is tied up (consensually or non consensually; it doesn’t matter, although I lean towards non consensual capture and bondage scenes…)
I like peril/danger scenes, most like what would be in James Bond, (as CalMeacham said previously), and scenes dealing with interrogation.
I have a “fetish” (not in the medical sense, however) for neckties and suits, and would enjoy it far more if my captor were wearing these clothes.
If there is an element of nudity, however, it just ruins the whole experience for me.
Very true.
Wasn’t the sex scene cut of the The Quick and the Dead (Sharon Stone version) supposed to be her with Russell Crowe tied up?
As you can tell from my post, I don’t pay much attention to dude in distress scenes. There used to be a guy who ran a dude in distress Yahoo newsgroup, but a quick search revealed no such group. I’ll think about the topic. I do remember writing a review of an old movie about gladiators where I commented that the director was clearly into sweaty, burly guys in chains, but I imagine that might be a little too nekkid. I’ll look it up later nonetheless, and see if I can think of any clothed scenes. The only one that comes to mind is Humphrey Bogart in The Big Sleep, who’s dressed in a suit and captured by bad guys, but most of that time he spends talking to Lauren Bacall, who’s kinda in league with them.
Unfortunately (for you 
) There are a lot more Women-in-bondage scenes in popular culture than Men-in-bondage. This is probably because the “damsel in distress” is such a popular theme, while the “hero in distress” isn’t.
Since I’m interested in women, I don’t really look for scenes involving men. The only ones I can think of that come close to what you want are a couple of episodes of Buffy and Angel. At the end of season two of Buffy Giles is tied up and tormented by Angelus and Darla. At some point early in Angel (season two?) Wesley is tied up by Faith. You might check these out.
The burly guys in chains movie I referred to earlier is “Gold of the Caesers.” Here’s the relevant comment about it from the review I wrote:
Not my thing, but the hero in the comic book series Starman often gets captured, knocked out, and tied up, and has to escape or fight his way to freedom. There are several trade paperback collections available reprinting most of the series.
Hey, I’ll pimp Starman any way I can!
This thread reminded me of a scene in some otherwise-forgotten movie I’d seen on Skinemax or somesuch long ago. Some female who was probably a vampire or otherwise invested with supernatural strength was trying to convince some guy to have sex with her. Guy was reluctant because he didn’t want her to put the bite on him, or something like that. She had him handcuff her hands behind her back, then was on her knees on the bed, nude, waiting for Mr. Timid to take a ride. Something else then happened, they had to go somewhere in a hurry, and she snapped the cuffs like they were paper. Mr. Timid sputters that she could have done that at any time and how was he ever safe and blah blah blah onward to the rest of the movie.
Paul Mercurio’s spanking in Exit to Eden was pretty hot.