I’m surprised the suggestively homoerotic “White Boys/Black Boys” numbers didn’t trigger an R back in 1979.
And before that M was charged to GP because Mature gave the impression it had more adult content than Restricted.
This is where I think the committee was biased and their judgement based on their own nostalgic experience instead of their usual prudishness.
Also, 1979 standards were generally looser than those that followed in the 1980s when both Democrats and Republicans cooperated in a crackdown on sex. The Right had their traditional religious excuses and as usual were taking advantage of any opportunity to take people’s rights away. The Left because we have to protect the children from the filth in TV, movies, music, and video games and because a lot of them were just as conservative as the Republicans. Plus neither side had any idea of what the internet was (even though Tipper Gore’s husband invented it), and no notion that any plan for the government to keep people from looking at porn was flat out laughable.
This Film Not Yet Rated is a 2006 documentary that exposed how capricious the MPAA’s ratings are. Click on the Wiki link and scroll down a bit for the 10-point bullet list of the documentary’s ‘interesting’ findings.
The 1969 Swedish film Adalen 31 was rated X. Read the blurb on IMDb on its contents. There are a teenage boy and girl who “explore” things but it’s very tame. Yeah, that’s a porno alright.
(Which reminds me of a quote I saw about the movie Woodstock, rated R: “They won’t let the kids in to see the movie of them running around naked.”)