Since Roger Moore passed I’ve been rewatching all the Bond films, and listening to a podcast called “James Bonding” where the hosts talk about each individual movie. Something they’ve brought up (and I’ve heard in numerous other places) was that during the opening title sequence (with the Bond theme song and opening credits) especially during the Roger Moore years there was a lot of outright nudity that you supposedly weren’t meant to see. This is especially obvious in “The Spy Who Loved Me” and “For Your Eyes Only” where you can outright see fully topless women that aren’t covered in shadows at all.
The claim is, that on VHS and even on DVD this nudity wasn’t noticed since the screen was either too fuzzy or too low resolution to make out the details, but now with high resolution HDTV’s and crystal clear transfers you can make out completely topless women when it was intended to be simply suggestive and would bump the PG ratings of those films to an R rated for home release due to all the nudity.
However, since these films were originally in theatrical resolutions, wouldn’t the nudity have been obvious even then and thus it was completely intended?
I think you’re right. Apart from anything else, when those two films were made, the home video market was tiny-to-nonexistent — it simply wouldn’t have been considered. I’m not even sure home videos had ratings at the time.
Plus, of course, it was the 70s: topless women were everywhere. A quick glimpse of nipple barely registered — it certainly wouldn’t be enough to change the rating on anything other than a children’s film, which the Bond films weren’t.
I’m reminded of an anecdote of Roger Moore’s: when he was being courted by EON to take the role of Bond, he was taken for a tour of Pinewood studios, where they’d just finished shooting the previous film. They came into the studio where Maurice Binder was filming the title sequence, to find him on his knees in front of a nude dancer, smoothing down her pubic hair with vaseline so it didn’t show in silhouette. Moore apparently said: “Never mind Bond — how do I get that job?”
No, people like Cubby Broccoli and Harry Saltzman were amongst the most upright of filmic producers and would have been painfully horrified to find out any part of their work contributed to the exploitation of women’s forms and inadvertent titillation.
America changed through the 80s, from progressive and permissive, devolving to prudish and overly sensitive. This manifests in multiple arenas, but nudity on film is a big one.
Well, that’s certainly true, but I think 1981 (in the case of For Your Eyes Only) is early enough to have benefitted from the more permissive attitudes of the 70s.
An example of just how pervasive nudity was (for those who don’t remember the 70s) is in this still from The Wild Geese (1978). That’s Roger Moore (coincidentally) with the gun, but in the background you can see wallpaper entirely made up of images of topless women. That was a widely-available mass-market wall covering sold through the normal retail chains by Mayfair wallcoverings, and prominently advertised in all their sample catalogues at the time. Nobody turned a hair. It came in a range of colours, too, but I think the silver foil seen there was the most popular. Because it was the 70s.
My brother and I could never quite persuade our parents to let us have that paper on our bedroom walls, despite the fact that Dad worked for the company that made it, and could get it for practically nothing. Nope: orange and brown geometric patterns for us.
Yeah, the early 80s had movies like Porky’s and the first Police Academy and the first Revenge of the Nerds each had nudity in them, but their sequels did not and most other movies that would have been a bit more pruirient got oriented more towards children after that time, around '84 or so.
It was pretty obvious to me when I first saw Thunderball (circa 1970) that I was getting glimpses of nudity in the opening title sequence. No VHS pause necessary. But it was still fuzzed out and printed in odd color. Fleeting glimpses of partial nudity were gotten away with even before the MPAA ratings were used in 1968 *
Standards for nudity had relaxed by 1960 – see here, for instance
*One of my favorite examples – Disney’s Fantasia. You get glimpses of the nipples on the clearly female harpies in the Night on Bald Mountain sequence. You also see topless centaurettes in the Pastorale sequence, but they have no nipples. You can only get nipples in a Disney film, apparently, if you’re Evil. And they can’t be normally colored.
There were brief glimpses of nudity in Our Man Flint, the Bond parody.
These days Cable TV shows seem to have the lock on nudity and sex. Much more than you would see in any but the most NC-17 film. Like Game of Thrones. Or pretty much every Starz production.
And nudity in a non-sexual context was permissible in a PG movie before the introduction of the PG-13 rating. Logan’s Run and Clash of the Titans were both PG on release.
Oh, long before. The Hawaiians (1970) had pretty gratuitous (but arguably non-sexual*) nudity, and it was rated “GP”, a short-lived category that took over from “M” but was soon changed to “PG” when too many people mistook it for “General Patronage”
“Non-sexual”, my foot. It was as gratuitously titillating as any sex scene, but didn’t involve anyone touching anyone else.
I saw John Wick 2 yesterday, and it really struck me in a scene where a woman gets into a bathtub, naked, and cuts her wrists, then gets shot. But not one boob is shown.
In a movie with, I dunno, 200 kills, people shot in the head, blood splatter everywhere, but no boobs.
Minor inside joke: Porky’s was a ‘normal’ 1.85 ‘flat’ movie, no optical compression to Cinemascope. However, the movie was filmed full frame, 1.33 to 1, and each projector’s aperture plate masked out the rest of the image. If one was bored late at night, and ran the movie with no one around, and, shall we say, miss framed the image a little low, the shower scene became much more interesting.
…most have already seen it: but the Alan Partridge commentary of the opening credits of “The Spy Who Loved Me” is hilarious. (Mildly NSFW: mainly because of the language, everything else is in silhouette. )
Weren’t meant to see? Mate, I could see it when I was 12! The first Bond movie I ever saw was You Only Live Twice, and the first thing I noticed was all the nekkid wimmin in silhouette. And I can say for certain that the studio they filmed them in was cold.
Then please explain why, exactly, there are so many more children born out of wedlock than there used to be. Please explain why 75% of teenage girls think that it’s ok to dress like sluts. Please explain why traditional morality is under attack like never before.
Sex scenes also seem to have disappeared from mainstream movies. The sex scenes in *Top Gun *and *Die Another Day * were pretty graphic. In Wonder Woman, to cite one recent example, there is a scene which is romantic and entirely innocent.
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