Monday

I think this is the single largest issue we have ever had. In addition to 283 image files, we have 650 meg worth of movie clips! In fact, I had several more contributions and my own collages, but I decided to save them until tomorrow because there is only so much people can look at, and I was running out of time.

Sons & Lovers

The most interesting thing about the novel Sons and Lovers, an early work by D.H. Lawrence, is that it is nearly an autobiography. Lawrence's own parents were severely mismatched. His father was a barely literate miner and his mother was a schoolteacher who resented the hand life dealt her, which was to raise children in a grim, impoverished, uncultured mining community while her husband spent every day in the pits and every night in the pubs. Lacking any meaningful communication with her husband, she poured all of her dreams into her children, and seemed to form a quasi-sexual relationship with her sons.

David (D.H.) turned out as he did because of his mother's solicitous if overprotective attentions. The good  news is that he eventually escaped the humble mining town of Eastwood and became one of the most famous authors of the 20th century. That was certainly no small achievement. The bad news is that he was a mama's boy, which got him ridiculed by men and caused him to fail in his early attempts to relate to women, since he could never escape the domineering influence of his mother.  Fortunately, he possessed the intellect and objectivity necessary to realize the problematic nature of his relationship with his mother, and he was able to turn it into literature, capturing the best and worst elements of her influence with remarkable candor in Sons and Lovers.

The second most interesting thing about the book is that you've never actually read it unless you are truly a dedicated scholar. Even if you think you have read it, you probably have not. I was completely surprised this morning to find myself in this group. As I was researching this article today, I discovered for the first time that the uncensored work was never really seen until 1994, which meant I had not read it since I had not revisited the novel since my college days in the 1960s. Oh, there was a version of it out there for me to read, but not the version Lawrence wrote. E-notes reports: "Edward Garnett, a reader for Duckworth, Lawrence’s publisher, cut about 10 percent of the material from Lawrence’s draft. Garnett tightened the focus on Paul by deleting passages about his brother, William, and toning down the sexual content. In 1994, Cambridge University Press published a new edition with all of the cuts restored, including Lawrence’s idiosyncratic punctuation." Oh, well. I have read it now, since it is available online in its entirety, or available in summarized form.

I don't think I was really missing much all these years.

You can pick up a complete, concise plot summary from Wikipedia. The short version is this: Paul (the surrogate for Lawrence himself) is torn between the chaste, religious, and simple country woman who loves him and a modern, freethinking married suffragette who wants him for extramarital hanky-panky. Ultimately he is unable to relate very well to either woman because of his Oedipal relationship with his own mother, and mum's constant meddling in his romantic affairs.

There had previously been a relatively chaste film version of the novel made in 1960 with an American (Dean Stockwell) in the lead. It was directed by the famous cinematographer Jack Cardiff, who had a brief directing career in the 1960s and 70s before returning to cinematography full time. Cardiff did a good enough job in the director's chair that his version of Sons and Lovers won him an Oscar nomination as the best director that year. He has also been nominated three times in his life for the cinematography Oscar, winning for Black Narcissus way back in 1947, which was near the beginning of an astounding 70-year film career that continues to this day. Cardiff's version of Sons and Lovers was nominated for seven Oscars in all, including best picture, and won for its impressive cinematography.

The BBC turned Sons and Lovers into a mini-series in the 1980s, and that version was seen in the United States on Masterpiece Theater. (Although not by me. I don't even remember that there was such a thing.)

ITV1 conceived of their 2003 version as an opportunity to interpret the work for the first time without censorship, presenting the sexual scenes as explicitly as Lawrence might have imagined them, and working for the first time with the full text from the uncensored 1994 release of the novel. The network threw a great deal of money into this production ($8 million), since they believed in the project's appeal for at least two reasons. First there was the element of name recognition. "Sons and Lovers" is one of the most widely recognized book titles in history. It was the most popular of Lawrence's works during his own lifetime, and The Modern Library list rated it among the ten best novels of the century. Second there was the story's suitability for British television, combining as it does period costumes, solemn dialogue, an established literary reputation, and explicit sex - the perfect combination to provide housewives with guilt-free titillation.

The author did a good job of working around Lawrence's stiff, windy dialogue. He either made it more terse and natural or eliminated it altogether, substituting pauses and glances whenever he could. Until the last fifteen minutes, I thought the film had done a great job of interpreting and pictorializing Lawrence's work, except that the setting seemed too sanitary. Given that the story took place in a mining and farming community, I was astounded to see that it was never grim or grimy. These manual laborers managed to keep themselves, their clothing, and their abodes quite clean and salutary except for an occasional smudge of dirt on their cheeks. Perhaps that was because this version was filmed on the Isle of Man (except for the old-fashioned railway station, which is actually in Yorkshire), while the 1960 film was shot on location in Nottinghamshire, where the narrative actually took place.

In adapting the novel to the screen, the scriptwriter eliminated one character and made another one-dimensional, both to good overall effect. The character of Paul's younger brother, Arthur, has been written completely out of this version. This was, in my opinion, an inspired piece of condensation on the scriptwriter's part, because the Arthur subplots really add nothing to the story and serve only to distract us from the four central characters. (Paul, his two lovers, and his mother.) The character of Paul's miner father is still present throughout the story, but has been reduced to an abstraction. While Trevor Howard had breathed life into the character in the 1960 movie, and received an Oscar nomination for his role, the actor's only job in this version is to stare ominously and uncommunicatively. Although he is always somewhere on the periphery of the story, he has virtually no dialogue in the second half, thus focusing the story completely on Paul (D.H. Lawrence's alter ego). This was a good move in terms of economy and focus, although it lost some opportunities to provide dimension to the father by showing that he was not as shallow as his family seemed to believe. The elimination of the younger brother and the reduction of the father's role did not eliminate anything important while giving the other characters the screen time necessary to explore their relationships in depth.

Everything was going along well until that last fifteen minutes I mentioned earlier. I don't know what happened there. The scriptwriter just sort of went off the track at the very end. Each of Paul's relationships with his two lovers ends with a slightly different spin than Lawrence had imparted. Since the film had been quite faithful to the novel up to that point, I assume that the author had to have had some specific point in mind when he made the changes, but I can't pick up on it. I honestly can't give you any reasons why the changes were made, although the revised farewell scenes seem to be neither better nor worse than Lawrence's, but merely different, and I have no objection to what he did to end Paul's two affairs.

The very last scene was another matter entirely. Paul sits in a pastoral setting and reminisces to himself, seeing a rosy-tinted version of the past, as played out by a repeat of earlier footage. This trite narrative technique seemed strangely out of synch with the rest of the story, and totally outside the realm of Lawrence's inspiration, and feels like it was tacked on to add some warmth and a more hopeful tone. I wasn't comfortable with it. The word "corny" comes to mind.

There is a lot of nudity, and of the full-frontal variety at that, but it's all in the second half. In my opinion the story takes too long to get to the sex and nudity - more than two hours elapse before the "modern woman" character seduces Paul by coming naked into his room. If you are interested in the flesh, you can literally skip Part 1 entirely! Once it starts, however, the nudity is virtually non-stop, taking only an occasional break for the requisite scenes of squalor, death and misery which persuade us that the project is weighty enough to justify our ogling some attractive flesh.

In addition to the female nudity shown below, Rupert Evans shows full frontal and rear nudity.

If you're scoring at home, part 1 of the series is a C-. It would be of no interest to anyone not already predisposed to be interested in the source material or in this type of stodgy period piece. It has no nudity, and does a lot of stage-setting involving minor characters. Part 2 is much better. At least a C. Maybe a C+. It is livelier, has more plot development, concentrates on the central relationships, and has many, many minutes of very sexy nudity.

Call it a C for the whole deal: good acting, good production values, a solid offering for the Masterpiece Theater crowd, but too windy and soapy to interest mainstream viewers.

I'll have the collages ready for tomorrow. In the meantime, here are the film clips

Esther Hall (zipped .wmv - almost ten minutes of nudity!)

 

Lyndsey Marshal (zipped .wmv)

 

 


 

* Yellow asterisk: funny (maybe).

* White asterisk: expanded format.

* Blue asterisk: not mine.

No asterisk: it probably sucks.

OTHER CRAP:

Catch the deluxe version of Other Crap in real time, with all the bells and whistles, here.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Gladiator Eroticus

Gladiator Eroticus (2001) is a Seduction Cinema effort that I somehow missed before now.

In this one, Darian Caine is the lead as Erotica, the bravest general in the Roman army, and the choice of emperor Gluteus Maximus to succeed him over his worthless son, Dickus Minimus. Meanwhile, Minimus is devoting all his waking efforts into seducing his sister, Clitoris (Misty Mundae). After a battle, Dickus flashes dad, and dad laughs so hard he dies of a heart attack. Erotica is still out "licking" the barbarians. When she returns, Dickus is already emperor, and she heads off to her native Lesbianis, only to find it being torn down for a shopping mall or something.

Erotica is captured by barbarian lesbians, and made to fight as a gladiator. The goals of the battle are somewhat different, however, as you use your sword to gain an advantage, grab a tit, then have a girl/girl scene. So much for the preliminaries. Later, we have girl/girl/girl/girl/girl scenes. I probably shouldn't forget Dickus' cultural contribution to Rome, the Vomitorium.

IMDb readers say 2.7 and I can't disagree, but this was of some historical importance for Seduction in that it defined their genre of lesbian spoofs  and led of course to Playmate of the Apes and Lord of the G-String. I suppose some will even find a chuckle or two, and it was interesting to see a point in history when Misty Mundae was not lead material. I have seen far too many Seduction Cinema DVDs, and from several special features have the impression that I would very much enjoy Darian Caine, so it was nice to see her given a chance.

I will call this a C- as a skin-flick. The story is not brilliant, and the transfer quality could be better, but there's lots of skin, and it doesn't try for even a moment to take itself seriously.

 

Darian Caine shows everything.

 

 

 

 

Misty Mundae shows breasts in several scenes, including a long shower sex scene with Ruby Larocca.

 

 

Ruby Larocca shows breasts and hints of bush.

 

 

 

Numerous other women show body parts in various unidentified roles, and in group sex shots, including A.J. Khan, Victoria Vega and Katie Jordan.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Byron

 

Byron (2003) is a BBC two-part TV series. There is some breast exposure by Camilla Power ...
... and some unknown women ...
... Natasha Little shows a little, maybe.

 

Rough Magic

 

No nudity in Rough Magic (1995) but Bridget Fonda shows a bit of leg and cleavage.

 

Temptation of a Monk

Some nudity by a bald Joan Chen (zipped .avi) in Temptation of a Monk (1993) ...

... and some pendulous breast exposure by an unknown woman.


 

Hotel Erotica

The last episode in the first season of the Hotel Erotica series is Love Potion #10 (2002).

Plenty of nudity by three ladies:

"Scarlet Johansing" (aka Monique Parent)  ...

 

... Elena Ayala ...

... and Juliet Beres.


 

Female

 

Female (2005) is a Japanese movie with four separate stories. I was able to get a translation of the title of three of the stories but the fourth escaped me, and the IMDB was no help.

The ladies showing (mainly) topless nudity were Saki Takaoka ...

... Eri Ishida ...
... Kyoko Hasegawa (zipped .avi) ...
... and Mitsuko Ishii.

 

The Vampire Lovers

 

Plenty of nudity in Hammer Horror movie The Vampire Lovers.

There's a brief sighting of Ingrid Pitt's (zipped .avi) bush ...

... Madeline Smith (zipped .avi)...
and Pippa Steel (zipped .avi) show their breasts ...

... and there's a bit of cleavage by Kirsten Betts ...

... and Kate O'Mara.

 


 

Wallander - Brothers

From the above-average Swedish police series Wallander (2005), we have some brief breast exposure by Johanna Sällström in an episode called Brothers.

 

The Young Lieutenant

From the French film The Young Lieutenant (2005) aka Le Petit Lieutenant we see Bérangère Allaux baring her breasts.

 

Duplicity

Duplicity (2005) (aka Trouble in the IMDB) is another French film, but this time a weird one. Breast exposure by Natacha Regnier (zipped .avi) ...
... and Hanna Novak.

 

For a Few Dollars More

 

For a Few Dollars More (1965) is an excellent spaghetti western and Rosemary Dexter flashes her breasts.

 

 

 

 

 


Head of the Family

We wrap up Head of the Family today.

First we have Alexandria Quinn, a porn star who uses many aliases and was, like Traci Lords, caught for being underage while making porn films. As soon as she turned 18 she went right back to work.

Caps and a clip of her impressive hooters.

Then one last look at Jacqueline Lovell and her sexy body with caps and 2 more clips.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Hunger

episode: "Bridal Suite"

A young and newly married couple (Karen Elkin and Colin Ferguson) arrive at an isolated guest house owned by Mrs. Garington (Sally Kirkland) for their honeymoon. But during the night, the groom disappears and whilst his wife frantically searches, she learns the true and terrible secret of the bridal suite.

 

 Karen Elkin was already in one of the Hunger episodes, but her nudity was much better in this one

Sally Kirkland also exposed her breasts in this episode.

 

 

 

 

 

Notes and collages

The Ladies of Sci-fi/Fantasy

The Outer Limits

... unlike the resurrection of "The Twilight Zone" series which had none of the quality of Rod Serling's production, the new "The Outer Limits" series was far superior to the original ... and the occasional nudity by beautiful women as well ...

Natasha Henstridge

 

 

 

 

 

Beer League

Prepare to laugh your ass off if you watch 2006's Beer League. It is crude, rude, socially unacceptable, and most of all, extremely funny. It's even realistic; most of us have known clowns like the ones in this flick.

Artie Lange plays an unemployed slacker who, after causing so many problems his softball team is about to get kicked out of the league, becomes inspired to urge them to improve their game so they won't be ousted. He convinces them that, since it's a beer league, all they have to do is practice, something most of the teams don't do.

The thing that makes this movie so great is not the predictable plot, but rather an extremely funny script and a great job by the actors. There are very few lines in this movie that aren't funny. Long-time porn star Keisha plays the Pitching Machine, a hooker who can shoot ping-pong balls out of her vagina.

Keisha and others

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images

Anna-Grete Nissen in Mazurka
Andie MacDowell in one of the more remarkable pokie shots of all time
Tina Aumont in The Nude Princess

Misty Mundae in The Screaming Dead

Uschi Digard self-help demonstration

Daniella Poggie in Gestapo: Last Orgy
Ajita Wilson in The Nude Princess
Singer Lilly Allen shows how to deal with the paparazzi!

Collien Fernandes in Taff

Natalia Avelon in Das wilde Leben

 

Videos

Brandy Ledford in Demolition Man, a movie I love far beyond its actual merits. It's my favorite Stallone film outside of the Rocky series (possibly excepting First Blood), and my favorite of his comedies. Then again, how much competition does it have in the Stallone comedy oeuvre? Rhinestone? Stop, or My Mom Will Shoot?

This one is only for hard core Misty Mundae supporters, and I mean "hard core" in more ways than one, because before Misty made her way into soft-core lesbian vampire films, she got her training in HARD-core lesbian vampire films. Here's Vampire Strangler. Warning: this is a very large download (224 meg) and the movie is utter shit. It is only noteworthy for the early XXX action from Misty.

Today's collection-builder is Kim Basinger.