Most of you already know this, I suppose, for I have recounted the anecdote many times, but I have a special connection to this scene. It represents the first time I ever saw a naked woman on screen. The year was late 1962 or early 1963, and nobody was naked on screen in American movies then. Later that year, Elizabeth Taylor showed a part of her bum in Cleopatra, but I didn't see that movie then. I don't think I saw any loose flesh in an American movie until about a year later when The Pawnbroker truly broke the nudity barrier and received for its efforts the dreaded "condemned" rating from the Catholic Legion of Decency. I think that meant you would go straight to hell if you died between seeing that film and your next confession.

Boccaccio '70 somehow managed to sneak in under the radar of controversy, perhaps because the nudity was minimal and the audiences small in number, or perhaps because it was an acclaimed foreign film in three unrelated segments, each directed by a screen legend: Luchino Visconti (Obsession), Federico Fellini (La Dolce Vita), and Vittorio De Sica (The Bicycle Thief).

My friend The Duck heard through the official teenage guy grapevine that this film had some nudity in it, so he resolved to see that nudity, and he persuaded me to join him in his wanton pursuit of screen flesh. I was happy to oblige. (It's difficult for me to comprehend that I'm talking about an incident that happened 50 years ago.) We soon found, however, that it wasn't all that easy to pull it off. It was winter, and the theater was located beyond our walking or biking distance. We were fourteen at the time and could therefore not drive ourselves there. The situation required us to conceive a fairly elaborate plan to dupe my mother into chauffeur duty. Here's how it worked. There were two theaters about a block apart. One was showing an innocuous film. My memory tells me it was Darby O'Gill and the Little People, and that's how I've always told the story, but a double check of the release dates at IMDb doesn't seem to confirm that. Darby would have been out for four years at the time Boccaccio '70 came to Rochester. Oh, well, let me use Darby in my anecdote, although it was probably something else. Whatever the "beard" movie was, I remember that I had already seen it and could describe it to my mom if she interrogated us, but her suspicion was never aroused and she showed no curiosity about the film.

Around the corner from the Darby theater was the one showing Boccacio '70. The drop-off was easy. We waved good-bye to my mom and walked around the corner as soon as her car disappeared. The pick-up was trickier because our film got out later than Darby, so we told mom we'd get an ice cream or a hot dog or something after the film, and arranged for her to pick us up a full hour after Darby ended. That way there was no reason for her to question why nobody else was coming out of the theater at the pick-up time. Why so long? An hour, standing outside on a cold Rochester night? Yeah, that was a price we were willing to pay, but we also had adjusted for the fact that my mom was always early for everything, so we had to consider exactly where we would be when she would first spot us - which would occur a half an hour before she was supposed to be there.

Was it difficult for two snot-nosed kids to get into the only film in town with bare flesh and naughty stories? Not at all. In our paranoia and guilt, we had imagined that there might be problems with some officious moral guardians, and we were prepared to go back and watch Darby if necessary, but there were no hurdles of any kind. The MPAA system (version 1.0) wasn't enacted until 1966, so there were no specific rules or guidelines about who could see which movies. Sure, if we had tried to sneak into a porn film we probably would have been turned away because the establishment would not risk a charge for corrupting the morals of minors, but this film was an award winner at Cannes and some of it was directed by the guy who did The Bicycle Thief. Nor were there public protests or outraged editorials to draw attention to the film. The film was under the radar, and so were we. Frankly, neither the cops nor the theater owner were concerned about screening out minors. We simply paid for our tickets and strolled in uneventfully.

Thus it happened that I saw Romy Schneider offer a very brief flash of her breasts in the Visconti segment, the first succulent forbidden flesh I had ever seen on screen. As it turned out, we also liked the movie, although the only thing we liked about the Visconti portion was Romy's flesh. That segment was meticulously crafted, artistic, bittersweet and insightful about the nature of human relationships and the death of love - in other words a whole bunch of crap to 14-year-old boys.