They’d emerged soaking wet into a frozen arctic zone. Wet clothes = dangerous when frozen. Swapping them temporarily for dry furs is perfectly reasonable and they were from a society where nudity was pretty casual. The gratuitous thing was maneuvering them plot-wise into emerging soaking wet into a frozen landscape so that they could be put in the position of changing clothes. I don’t recall that being in the book( though someone can correct me there ).
But more was actually filmed. In the book as a condition of aiding them Box actually has them strip nude so that he can pose and sculpt them. This was apparently filmed with full-frontal nudity but cut from the movie to avoid a greater chance at an R rating. You could get away with some nudity in a PG film back then, but only so much. Apparently cumulative weight of scenes counted with the notoriously capricious film raters.
So oddly the scene included is possibly more gratuitous than the one cut, which at least more closely adhered to the literary plot. Of the course the book itself was soaked in sex and violence, rather more than was shown in the film.
I don’t have the book to hand, but my recollection is that a short circuit redirected the car they were riding in to Hell (a prison probably somewhere in the vicinity of the South Pole). Following protocol, they were knocked out by injection, wrapped in cocoons and shuttled through a force field maze to the prison proper. There Logan’s first job was to kill an existing inmate so he and Jessica could take over his cave. The reason they sought out Box was that since he was somehow linked to the Thinker, he knew the way back through the force field. They got very cold, but never wet.
What I could never figure out in the book is how Logan was able to stash the Gun, as he’s being knocked out and shuffled off with Jessica.
Logan was wet because, after finding out Logan was a Sandman, Whale stuffed him into a flooding compartment in ‘Molly’/M.O.L.L.U., an undersea settlement near the Mariana Trench.
A lot of the book doesn’t make sense with a critical reading. Still quite a ride though.
What I could never figure out in the book is how Logan was able to stash the Gun, as he’s being knocked out and shuffled off with Jessica.
Logan was wet because, after finding out Logan was a Sandman, Whale stuffed him into a flooding compartment in ‘Molly’/M.O.L.L.U., an undersea settlement near the Mariana Trench.
A lot of the book doesn’t make sense with a critical reading. Still quite a ride though.
I vote against it being gratuitous, more a slip. Creepier without any nudity is the 1931 version where Kong peels off Fay Wray’s clothes and sniffs them!
The Hawaiians – the much-neglected sequel to Hawaii, using other material from James Michener’s book. There’s a completely gratuitous scene where Charlton Heston gets into a Japanese basth with the women.
The film came out in 1970, two years after Heston showed us his butt in Planet of the Apes.