It’s sequel, Dawn of theDead wasn’t rated X since by 1978 x ratings were associated with pornography. Instead it was released unrated, but with the same audience restrictions (no one under 17 admitted). The marketing made it vlear this was because of violence and that the film no explicit sex scenes.
The Devils (1971) might fit the bill. One of those early Ken Russell films, it initially got an X rating for very good reasons…you can get a sense of how extreme it was by looking at what the Wiki article shows as censored.
A cut version was originally released, but the uncut version was eventually made available in the UK, and then I think was on Criterion until recently.
You didn’t have to submit to the MPAA to get an X rating. They didn’t even trademark it. The symbol for it was in a circle; all other MPAA ratings were in a box.
The MPAA didn’t want to get involved in rating porn, so any purveyors of X-rated films were free to use the rating without submitting it. They would rate it if asked, but few films that were aiming for an X didn’t bother.
So it is quite possible for Night of the Living Dead to claim an X-rating. If they didn’t submit it, they couldn’t claim any rating but X.
Yes, I was aware of this. Movies were not given an X rating. They could give themselves an X rating after the MPAA denied them another rating or, by default, by not asking the MPAA for a rating. So Night of the Living Dead was legitimately an X-rated movie.
However, as far as I know, Image Ten and Continental Distributing never claimed an X rating. It was a rating that was placed on them by some third parties like newspapers and theaters.
Didn’t pornos have to start using XXX to distinguish them from films that might have an X rating for something other than sex?
XXX was just marketing.
Like “New and Improved!"
I don’t think so; I think that they used multiple Xs as a marketing gimmick, to imply that they were even more explicit than a “simple” single X rating.
As noted in the Wikipedia entry on the rating:
The Harrad Experiment was one of the first to come to my mind. I first saw that around 1976 on HBO. I know it was the rated X version as it was being shown in the same month as Harrad Summer which was “only” rated R.
I think that the most erotic film I remember from the 60s is The Girl on a Motorcycle also called 'Naked Under Leather’ starring Marianne Faithfull, and Alain Delon.
Britain had been using a rating system since at least the early 1950s, and an “X” certificate meant “adults only”. But it’s surprising what fell into that category. I’ve seen a picture from 1953 of the first run of The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms – a Ray Harryhausen film that I grew up watching on TV – with an “X” rating on it. Clearly an “X” rating in Britain in the 1950s didn’t connote only porn.
They must have had something like that in mind when they instituted the “GMRX” rating system in the US in the late 1960s, and putting Midnight Cowboy in the X-category, and later Last Tango in Paris. But I don’t recall Klute getting an X-rating, and a quick internet search doesn’t list it as having one. In fact, I don’t think any of the other films listed above got higher than an “R” rating.
It sometimes happened that a formerly X-rated film would be cut and receive an R-rating. That happened with Last Tango, which was released in an R-rated version. It also happened with the spoof Flesh Gordon. The version I saw in Salt Lake City in the 1980s had clearly been cut (they took out the hardcore sex scenes in Chief Nellie’s dungeon). I’m pretty sure that the lame sequel, Flesh Gordon 2, never had an X-rating.
Caligula, by the way, was never submitted to the MPAA, because Guccione didn’t want to release a film with an “X” rating. So it was released as “unrated”
Doesn’t look like Myra Breckenridge (1970) has been mentioned yet but it looks to fit the bill.
Women in Love was made in 1969, and was definitely shocking for its time…or even for now (not sure how people would react to seeing two fairly well known actors wrestling fully nude in 2022).
I saw it when it first came out in late 1974 or 1975 in a legit theater, and I saw the VHS version. It’s the rare example of where the good parts are really the good parts. The R version didn’t just not work as eroticism it didn’t work as a story.
I was thinking of proposing it for this list, since it had a wide release outside of porn theaters. (Remember them?)
Did the actual stage production of Hair get filmed and released? It was way before my time. I’ve heard it was very well done.
Not some Hollywood adaption of the play.
Nope, just “some Hollywood adaptation.” Which was rated PG, and IIRC, didn’t need anything more restrictive.
It was also a very different beast from the stage play. Completely rewritten script. they tried to duplicate the “feel” of the period, not reproduce the play. So no nude scene.
Re: Hair. I thought the PG rating mentioned was a mistake. After all Beverly D’Angelo has a good length topless scene. But it was indeed PG. That wouldn’t fly today.
The Hawaiians (1970), a sort of sequel to Hawaii (1966), using material from Michener’s book that didn’t show up in the earlier movie, had a surprising amount of toplessness in it. When released, it was rated “GP”, which is what was later changed to “PG”.
Reportedly too many people thought “GP” stood for “General Patronage”; “PG” was held to be “Parental Guidance”. One comedienne joked that it stood for “Get Popcorn”, which is what she told her son when the topless scenes came on.
After X had been used on some movies that turned out to rather lame some movies were advertised as XX to indicate they were even dirtier movies. Then before long some movies advertised with an XXX rating, and then XXXX movies. But apparently XXXX didn’t work any better than the more manageable XXX rating which became known as a Triple-X rating. Of course all these ratings were made up. Triple-X seemed to stick.
It might. It was a skinny dipping scene, no sex. The selected group of people who decide on the arbitrary ratings who let it go with a PG rating if they don’t think it would corrupt teenagers to see it. The particular movie and the history of the stage play could be seen more favorably than other movies with comparable content also.