I don’t know if this really counts, but the first movie I can remember seeing that even came close to “nudity” was Corvette Summer, when I was 12 or 13. There’s a scene where you see the hooker’s bare tit silhouetted in profile.
If that doesn’t count, then the next earliest one I can remember would be Airplane! - the rather chaotic scene where an inexplicably bare-breasted woman crosses the screen. It’s been a long time since I saw it, so I can’t describe it any better than that.
I think it was the Shining. I remember watching it with my parents when I was 11 or 12, and the part where the naked woman emerges from the bathtub (and then decomposes) was extremely awkward to watch with my parents.
I’ve never gone from boner to 0 so fast then when watching that scene.
Damn she started off hot.
I think it was In the Heat of the Night, in 1967.
I was 11, and saw it at a drive in with my parents and sister.
There is a scene where for a few seconds you see a naked woman through a window. The window frame mostly masks the naughty bits, but as she moves slightly, you get a bit of nippleage, and possibly a flash of pubic hair, but I don’t remember for sure.
Next was probably the first Billy Jack movie, which wasn’t Billy Jack, but was The Born Losers. This was released the same year as In the Heat of the Night (1967), but I saw it in a small third run theater a year or so later with some friends. We went during the day and I suspect our folks didn’t know exactly what was in the movie. Actually, as I think about, I didn’t know. My friend picked the movie and I had not heard of it previously.
There’s a boobies-shot earlier in the movie than that. Folks going through the security X-ray in the airport are shown on the security agent’s viewscreen sans clothing. Most notably, there was a nun with some yummy girlie bits.
If the rape scene in **Midnight Cowboy ** counts, then that would have been the first movie nudity I saw. I was in college and had read a review of the movie in Playboy and got the idea that it’d be a great date movie. Not so much. To this day, I think it’s one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen.
Are you sure it was Hawaii? My memory is faulty on this, but I don’t recall any nudity in Hawaii.
The semisequel (also based on Michener’s book), The Hawaiians, did feature nudity. Charleton Heston (again!!) gets into a Japanese bath with some bare-boobed women.
The movie was one of the first to be rated GP, and I remember a female comedian saying that it stood for “Get Popcorn”, because that’s what she told her son when scnes like that came on.*
*A lot of people apparently though “GP”, which replaced “M” for “Mature”, stood for “General Patronage”, which probably resulted in a lot of real-life Get Popcorn incidents. Shortly after , they reversed it to “PG”, and said it stood for “Parental Guidance”. It was the last change intil they started subdividing the ratings with “PG-13” in 1984. Why they couldn’t leave it at “M” has always puzzled me. Maybe they thought too many people would mistake it for “X”.
Re Romeo & Juliet- I saw that, but after The Vampire Lovers, ON A SCHOOL-SPONSORED OUTING! I think it was early Jr High School, about 1975. We were delighted. I heard no reports of parental outrage or anyone’s job being threatened. Yet there we were- seeing a quick shot of Romeo butt & Juliet boobage.
I, Claudius on PBS. I had no idea you could do that on TV.
Followed by Caligila (first think we rented when we got a VCR. Thanks, mom.)
And thank the gods for the Romans.
I too thought of Billy Jack as the first I could recall. Tho it has been years (decades) I thought the scene was a little more than Krockodil described. Maybe involving one of the main characters in bathing in a lake or something. Does she get raped thereafter? I dunno. Mammary memory could be faulty.
I clearly remember one time watching Masterpiece Theater with the family - probably in the early 70s. It was some Russian novel - maybe Dostoevsky (sp?). And at one point one actress was in the foreground facing the camera talking as she slowly removed several layers of clothing. I couldn’t believe it when she took off the final layer ad there - on TV - in my family room - were breasts!
I seem to recall a pretty hot dance of 7 veils from a production of Salome, also on TV.
Ah - PBS, National Geographic, and the odd Time “Newsmakers.”
Mine’s a little unusual; around 1969 (I would have been eight), my family was either moving (again) or on a long car trip. Driving in (I think) a station wagon, at night, through some little town in Texas. Passed a drive-in theater (you younger folks may not know what those are). There was a brief moment, a few seconds when the screen was visible from the highway, and during that moment, the scene on the screen was of a long-haired girl, seen from behind, slipping her panties down over her hips. No idea what the movie was, but it was a significant event in my young life.
Female nudity - I’m not sure, but I think it was Saturday Night Fever. The scene with Donna Pescow in the back seat of the car was certainly the first love/sex scene I ever saw.
Male nudity - It was artfully shadowed, but the scene in American Gigolo where Richard Gere gets out of bed and stands by the window with the shades slightly open.
There’s a very brief and very dark shot of a naked woman (JoBeth Williams, as it turns out) in Kramer vs. Kramer (1979) – I’m pretty sure that was my first glimpse.
For me it was the movie “Hot Dog”. It was a cheesy ski movie with boobs.
My dad had a tape of it and I would sneak it out when my parents weren’t home and fast forward to the good parts. I never did see the whole movie, but I just found out that the ski competition/timeshare episode of South Park was a parody of that movie. I might have to get ahold of it and actually watch it if it is that bad.
The first movie I ever saw that exposed me to nudity was Jaws. I was the ripe old age of five, and my uncle Alan took me, along with his girlfriend to see it at the Drive In. That was in 1975, by the way.
He warned me right before showed the severed head in the beginning of the movie, but I didn’t, so that was the one and only warning to avert my eyes. FWIW, despite modern parenting sensabilities, I was not scarred, made afraid of the water, or otherwise damaged in any way as a result of seeing that movie at the somewhat impressionable age of 5.
Back when I was about ten, one of our family friends got a VCR, which was still pretty novel at the time. One night, we went over to their house so that the adults could party and the kids could watch movies to stay out of the way. We went to a rental place (renting movies! What a concept!) and picked out a couple. The folks tried to steer us away from the very worst, but we somehow managed to convince them to get Conan the Barbarian and Up The Creek. So, boobies were viewed, and it was good.
Yes it did. That was the first female nude scene my tender young eyes were exposed to. My older sister was watching it when it first came on TV in '85 or '86, and she chased me out of the room. The television was situated near the door to the dining room, so I sat at the kitchen table and pretended to color.
The first male movie nudity I can remember was in Wild Things when Kevin Bacon stepped out of the shower.
Frosted Glass, when you said Interview with the Vampire were you talking about the scene where Lestat finds the woman in Claudia’s doll closet?
I was sure I’d seen the film in question earlier than 1970 (which was when The Hawaiians came out), but I had to do a lot of googling to find a refence to the nudity in Hawaii to convince myself that I was talking about the right movie. IIRC, it was a scene early in the film of topless native women swimming in the ocean, something that Max Von Sydow as the missionary insists must stop. One native woman, picking up on the missionary’s constant references to damnation, asks if it’s because “Water too damn cold?” This is the only thing I remember from the whole 3-hour movie.
No, as he was decidedly unimpressive. But you see why i will never forget. First naked man? Burned into the brain.
The first case of seing nudity in a movie that I can recall (and given the poor nature of my memory I can probably assume that it wasn’t really the first time) would be when I was about 10 or 11 years old. My brother and I rented the movie The Day of the Jackal, about an attempt to assassinate Charles de Gaulle. I remember very little of the movie but there was on scene where both the assassin and a female character (the wife of some government official I think) get out of bed and there was nudity involved. Breasts and butt where definetly shown, there was no full frontal male, but I can’t recall if there was full frontal female.
I think that the main reason that I recall this scene at all is that the nudity was so… mundane I suppose. It was presented in a completely non-sexual way and the scene was shot just like any other scene only sans clothing.