Rhett carrying Scarlett up the stairs in 1939’s Gone With the Wind and her reaction the next day lets you know they had a night of wild and (at least for her) enjoyable sex. Would that have been the most graphic “sex scene” for the day (nothing was shown, but she’s clearly basking afterwards and you know exactly why he’s taking her upstairs)?
What about a sex scene to involve nudity? French kissing? Thrusting? Gay sex? Oral? (Again, I’m talking about mainstream, not porn or novelty films [like nudist colony reels].) Or even sexual issues such as abortion, unwed pregnancy, birth control, etc…
I might be wrong, but I think that Women in Love had the first scene featuring extensive male frontal nudity in a mainstream film. Oliver Reed and Alan Bates wrestling nude in front of a blazing fireplace. Wow.
Capone (1975) first female spread legged shot in a mainstream film.
Not sexual, but genital- Ebert IIRC once wrote that Point Break (the good one) (1967) was the first film to show a guy getting punched in the crotch- and probably the only film that showed a punch (as opposed to kick).
You most certainly mean on television, and even then that’s only notable because it was the first and last show where a couple shared a bed on TV for a long time, since TV programming isn’t much older than 1947. But if you think that’s the first time a couple was shown sharing a bed ever in the mainstream media, you sound stooooooopiiiiiiid!
That’s not really French kissing, but I’d like to mention Edison’s May-Irwin Kiss (1896) as being the first on-screen kiss. Looking at it 110 years later, I get a strange porno vibe from the way she looks at the camera.
Nagisa Oshima’s The Realm of the Senses probably has a number of firsts (and onlys) for a mainstream release. I’m thinking of eggs and shiitake mushrooms for instance.
Peter Jackson’s Meet the Feebles (1989) had puppet sex (and much more) way before Team America. As a matter of fact I think it was the first time a walrus and a kitten were shown having sex in a mainstream movie.
No, that would be the Charlie McCarthy & Mortimer Snerd in BROKEWOOD MOUNTIN’ short of 1938. Charlie claimed it was his evil twin, Mortimer swore he was drugged, and Edgar Bergen had to return to Sweden for several years until he agreed to produce Candice in the OSS Breeding Service.
The first of the firsts would be Eadweard Mubridge’s stop-action animal locomotion plates that he started making in 1884, and which were instrumental in his developing the zoopraxiscope. (He’s the fellow who made the stop-action photos of a galloping horse in 1877.)
Many of those Victorian animals were very human and very naked.
Several years ago TCM showed a silent movie about abortion. IIRC, one of the main characters was a married woman who used abortions as a form of birth control. I think the movie was Hypocrites by Lois Weber. According to the Wiki article, it was made in 1915.
He was a beautiful man in his prime. Unfortunately, like Sharon Tate, I can’t enjoy a picture of him without thinking of that gruesome murder (and the SOBs both eventually walked free).
