Great thread.
I think my answer is The French Connection. I was about 11.
But the ratings thing was jumbled in the 60’s and early 70’s. M became GP and then PG. Not sure where R fit in. So I may have seen a more adult movie than the French Connection but at a different rating. Or maybe not.
I’ve looked it up elsewhere, and apparently you’re correct, but for the life of me I don’t recall the toplessness in the first Hawaii. It was present, and downright gratuitous, in The Hawaiians.
But it still doesn’t qualify as an “R”-rated film. They wouldn’t have put R-rated material in a General Release movie in 1966, and, even with the nudity, the Hawaiians only got a “GP” (=PG = M) a couple of years later.
The Enforcer; my Mommy took me.
Carrie; first one I saw on my own.
MAS*H
I remember it very well because I took a date from high school and I was quite concerned that we would not get in. (She was 17 and I was 16.) No problem.
Irma la Douce in 1963. This was before the current movie rating structure, but kids weren’t allowed in. While it was a comedy, it concerned prostitution, which was considered too risque for children.
When I went to see The Blue Lagoon I was well over the minimum age, but there were lot of underage kids hanging around the theater begging me to escort them in so they could see some naked Brooke Shields. I didn’t help them out.
Hey, I was helping save them from the sight of almost-naked and drunk Leo McKern.
How could I forget Carrie? I answered Animal House upthread, but it looks like Carrie came out before Animal House, so I have to change my answer.
Damn, that’s impossible. I know I saw one at around 12 (~1983) at a friend’s house, but can’t remember for the life of me what it was. I remember the thrill of watching something “illicit” (I grew up in a very religious household), but it was just a very forgettable movie. It doesn’t help that I saw a “backlog” slew of older R movies (“Revenge of the Nerds”, “Blues Brothers”, etc.) on home video shortly after that, so I can’t just look at a list of Rated R movies from the 80s and know which one I saw first.
The first one I saw in a theater, I must have been about 15, was Fantastic Planet. It didn’t register on me that it was R-rated (I think there was an R- and a PG-rated version floating around; IMDB says it was PG, but it’s on their list of R-rated 70s movies). It was animated, foreign, and art-house.
A friend of mine had cable in the 70s, so I probably saw Blazing Saddles earlier.
Phantasm, followed very closely by Dawn of the Dead. It was a drive-in double feature.
Easy Rider, in 1969 at a drive-in when I was 15. I was with some older guys, so they let us all in.
The first horror movie I remember asking my parents for permission to see on HBO and getting it was My Bloody Valentine.
The first rated R movie I saw in a theater was Psycho 2. For some reason my friends and I really wanted to see it so one of our parents convinced the ticket person to let us in (the parent was not staying for the movie). They finally relented and it turned out we found the movie boring as shit (I was like 10 or 11).
I honestly don’t remember. However, after looking at the movies named by people, I’d have to say that, were many of those movies released today, they would be PG-13, not R.
It was at the drive-in when I was 6. It was the second half of a double feature and I think I was supposed to be sleeping. Lipstick: featuring the Hemingway sisters Lipstick (1976) - IMDb
Raped kid and revenge killing is not what a 6 year old should be seeing.
National Lampoon’s Vacation. I was pre-puberty, but when the topless scene hit, my brain went “file this away, it’s going to be important later”.
Hmm. Thought it was going to be Damnation Alley, a post-apocalyptic sci-fi/horror film starring George Peppard, Jan-Michael Vincent, and some flesh-eating mutant cockroaches. But IMDb tells me that was only PG-13. Still, one scene of a character being forced into a car full of said carnivorous roaches revisited me for several nights.
Interesting bit of trivia that I discovered many years later: Damnation Alley was supposed to be Twentieth Century Fox’s big summer sci-fi blockbuster for 1977. They had much lower expectations for their other summer sci-fi flick, a space opera about a band of rebels taking on a galactic empire. Called, somewhat unimaginatively, Star Wars.
My folks were pretty strict about movies but in my early teens they started to let me watch some R-rated rentals with them that they thought would be OK. I think the first might have been Rain Man maybe around age 11 or 12 and then JFK around age 13.
There’s a lot of complaints from film makers that it’s actually gone the other way at that boundary. Mild nudity and adult situations that used to be allowed in PG/PG-13 movies is now grounds for an R.
That has to be a later re-rating. PG-13 did not exist when Damnation Alley came out.
I don’t know where you got the 13 from but its IMDb page states “United States:PG (MPAA rating)”. This appears to be an original ad for the movie and also has “PG”.
