Just finished this interminably long movie. Anyone seen it?
It has a WHOLE lotta nakedness for 1977, including some full frontal female. Susan Sarandon in a soaking wet tissue-thin nightgown was kind of an eye-opener. Was it thought to be particularly risque in its day?
Not a bad movie. Slow. Pretty rewarding- if hokey- ending if you can stick it out.
Dr. Johnny Fever makes an appearance early on.
I loved that book. At the time Sidney Sheldon was my favorite “popular” author – he could tell a damn good story. The sex scenes could have been easily omitted, IMO.
Unfortunately, memory tells me that any movie made from his books tanked at the box office. His TV shows were much more successful.
The opposite actually. Nudity was probably considered less of a big deal for actresses in 1977 than it is now.
A lot of barriers in films broke down in the seventies and nudity was one of these. So filmmakers could argue that nude scenes were as much about art as they were for commerical value.
And this was before HBO, VCR’s, and the internet. A nude scene would only be seen in a theatre when the movie was in release. It wasn’t expected it would follow an actress around for the rest of her life.
The Bestseller status of the book allowed the movie to include a healthy dose of nudity without being tagged as pornography (not that big of a deal them either, pornography was on the upswing through the 70s). That was the only Sidney Sheldon book I read. Nothing about it made me consider reading another. But in the book, there was more flesh to the predictable plot. With that removed, the movie took on that Lifetime made for TV quality, plotwise.
The movie may have been out a little to late. Through the 70s, after the ‘boundaries removed’ era of the 60s, influential directors like Coppola and Scorsese took over the dramatic pictures, with stories that conveyed deeper significance than a romance novel.
This was the first movie with a sex scene I ever saw. It was shown late at night on the local TV station and OMG. Considering I couldn’t get through Charlie’s Angels without well, you know, it was quite the experience!