MOVIES : FILM COMMENT : Nothing Left but Smoke : Unlike the trailblazing movies of the ‘60s and ‘70s, today’s hottest films intertwine sex and violence as its own aesthetic

In one movie, a group of nuns shuck their habits and dance around in nude abandon while one of their sisters undergoes an exorcism. In another, a woman struggles frantically against a rapist, but is eventually overcome by passion and begins to respond. In a third, a man murders his wife, then props her nude corpse on top of a homemade sexual apparatus and has sex with it.

If those were among the images that caused the Motion Picture Assn. of America’s ratings board to slap adults-only labels on recent films, you could appreciate board president Richard Heffner’s defensive assertion that “it’s the material in the movies that is getting tougher, not the board.”

But the images described above are neither recent nor culled from exploitation films. They’re from R-rated versions of movies by serious filmmakers and released in the United States by major studios between 1971 and 1983, and which are available now at any reasonably well-stocked video store.

You can see the naked nuns, and much, much more, in Ken Russell’s 1971 “The Devils.” The rape scene is from Sam Peckinpah’s “Straw Dogs,” also 1971. And the act of necrophilia, sandwiched between a shotgun killing and a suicide, is in Bob Fosse’s “Star 80.”

To many people whose coming of age paralleled or preceded the revolutions in sex, politics and culture in the ‘60s and ‘70s, and whose memories of those events remain vivid, the current alarm being rung over the candor of film content has an old and tinny ring. Chicken Little has been bellowing “the sky is falling” over movie theaters for so long, he’s become confused with the Boy Who Cried Wolf.

The truth is that short of committing felonies, filmmakers are limited by the laws of nature and economics as to how far they can go, and in the first 15 years after the ratings system was introduced in 1968, they got there.

In those years, filmmakers gave us every view of human anatomy and sexuality that a camera could conceivably capture and for which an audience could conceivably be found. We saw violence enacted in detail that would shock a slaughterhouse foreman. And we heard obscenities uttered so often and in so many colorful combinations they became white noise.

Members of the movie ratings board saw real people die in Vietnam (“Hearts and Minds”) and at rock concerts (“Gimme Shelter”). They saw sex simulated by major stars (in too many movies to count), performed by professionals (in art-house porn movies), and imagined by animators (in “Fritz the Cat”). They saw intestines spill out of a soldier’s belly (“Catch-22”), a head explode like a ripe melon (“Scanners”) and a gang stomp an elderly man and rape his wife while crooning “Singin’ in the Rain” (“A Clockwork Orange”).

What could today’s rating board members be going through that’s so awful? Doesn’t anybody remember “Last Tango in Paris”? Marlon Brando’s butter request? Maria Schneider’s bath?

The immediate answer is that context is everything and where there were political, social or psychological underpinnings to many of the trailblazing movies of the ‘60s and ‘70s, today’s hottest films are often just smoke and mirrors, sex and violence intertwined as its own aesthetic. Even Heffner agrees that “where violence once seemed to come out of the film, today’s films often come out of the violence.”

Movies like “Basic Instinct” and “Body of Evidence,” to cite two major studio movies that had recent skirmishes with the ratings board, exist for no other reason than to titillate and shock. Betrayal is the theme of the moment and nothing conveys betrayal with more marketable potency than showing people being murdered by their sex partners.

Pretty soon, nobody will be able to make love until everyone’s tied up.

We see nothing in these movies that we haven’t seen before on film, but without being part of some broader context, the images become starkly mechanical, and we sit there like voyeurs flipping through the pages of Hustler.

“Say, did I see what I think I saw?”

“Hold on, Bubba, we’ll check it out when it gets to video.”

For the 10 parents on the ratings board to justify a peek up Sharon Stone’s skirt on any level other than pure commercial titillation is no small task.

Yet, they managed.

The ratings system, created by MPAA President Jack Valenti 25 years ago this November, was designed to neutralize would-be community censors, and its function, then as now, is to maximize Hollywood’s profits by keeping its customers happy and its pictures out of court.

The system did not start a revolution in film content, as many critics on the right believe. The rigid Hays Code was already a musty antique when Valenti became MPAA president in 1966. By ‘68, American moviegoers had seen full frontal female nudity in “Blow-Up,” graphic violence in a story about anti-Establishment heroes in “Bonnie and Clyde,” and had heard the barriers against screen profanity get knocked down by a rush of verbal abuse in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”

Valenti, taking over as chief lobbyist and PR man for an industry that had nearly self-destructed by misreading the relevance of television, was smart enough to know that the testing of values in movies was merely reflecting what was going on in America.

The Free Speech Movement had been launched in Berkeley several years earlier, the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements had become political whirlwinds, and the white middle-class baby boomers were coming-of-age and rejecting the values of their elders as no generation had ever done before.

Hollywood had gotten through the ‘50s and early ‘60s largely on the strength of wide-screen epics. Its immediate future depended on its ability to develop a new audience, and the one thing it could do, what European filmmakers had been doing all along, was take on stronger social themes than Americans were getting from TV, and in a more candid fashion.

That first ratings board had barely learned its alphabet when it was prompted to put an X on Robert Aldrich’s “The Killing of Sister George,” a story about lesbian love that arrived in late 1968, complete with a nude scene.

Soon, the board members were viewing public nudity in the documentaries “Woodstock” and “Gimme Shelter,” staged public nudity in “Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice,” public copulation in “Zabriskie Point,” and something you don’t often see in a major studio movie, a male lead (Jon Voight) being fellated by another man in “Midnight Cowboy.”

All of those films took moviegoers into uncharted territory on the American movie map, but it was the huge success of Dennis Hopper’s low-budget hippie Western “Easy Rider” that identified the counter-culture as a viable target audience.

“ ‘Easy Rider’ had everything the Establishment feared,” said the film’s producer and co-star, Peter Fonda. “Sex, violence, rock ‘n’ roll, drugs. Nothing was the same after that.”

With “Easy Rider,” and Hollywood’s recognition that it needed the help of filmmakers more in touch with the counter-culture than it was, the genie was let out of the bottle. For the next 10 years, roughly through the ‘70s, film’s brightest political minds--Francis Coppola (the “Godfather” movies, “Apocalypse Now,” “The Conversation”), Hal Ashby (“The Last Detail”), Sidney Lumet (“Dog Day Afternoon”), Arthur Penn (“Little Big Man”), Robert Altman (“MASH,” “Nashville”), Ken Russell (“Women in Love”), John Cassavetes (“A Woman Under the Influence”) and Bernardo Bertolucci (“Last Tango”)--made their best movies.

For that brief period, it was as if filmmakers and filmgoers were exploding conventions and exploring issues together. If things got irreverent, sexually explicit, or verbally assaultive, they seemed essential. People weren’t exactly holding back in real life; filmmakers did so at the risk of appearing foolish.

These elements weren’t always used in the service of socially relevant, or even humanistic, content. The vigilante and slasher movies, which used violence as visceral entertainment, came out of the new freedom, too. So did egregious sexual curios like “Caligula” and “Candy.”

But for the first time in our history, Americans were deciding for themselves how much was too much, and market-sensitive Hollywood was finding little resistance out there. Only a handful of films--”Last Tango,” Mike Nichols’ “Carnal Knowledge,” Peter Bogdanovich’s “The Last Picture Show” and William Friedkin’s “The Exorcist”-- were taken to court by local officials, and they all won their cases.

Hollywood had a strange ally in fending off censors in the early ‘70s. How could anyone be too upset by a brief look at frontal nudity in “The Last Picture Show” when couples were lining up at a theater down the street to see Linda Lovelace exercise her First Amendment rights on Harry Reems in “Deep Throat”?

Not everything about the ‘70s was intelligent, or dignified. It was a time of questioning and experimentation, all fodder for the filmmaker. Group sex, wife-swapping, love-ins and other forms of behavioral kitsch were dramatized or parodied in movies almost as soon as Newsweek reported them.

Paul Mazursky’s “Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice” covered both the wife-swapping and encounter group fads with a lusty impertinence, and the sexual Olympics in Barry Feinstein’s “You Are What You Eat” was a hilarious send-up of Masters and Johnson’s research.

By the late 1970s, there wasn’t a whole lot Hollywood hadn’t included in movies, and the political content had all but been removed. There were post-mortems being made about the Vietnam War (“The Deer Hunter,” “Coming Home,” “Apocalypse Now”), but the street war at home was over. As the baby boomers turned their attention to careers and family, the drug culture that arose with them, and that made drug use almost a fixture of ‘70s movies, lost its middle-class cache.

Meanwhile, with Steven Spielberg and George Lucas showing the way, Hollywood discovered a new audience, teen-agers, for a different kind of movie, the epic matinee adventure, and gave itself a different mandate for the ‘80s. Out went the political thumb-suckers, in came the technical wizards.

If Hollywood had become an unlikely think tank in the ‘70s (surveys showed that movies had their most educated audience then), it was a video arcade in the ‘80s. With few noteworthy exceptions, the only movies with complex social themes in the last decade were independently made, and often independently distributed.

Lucas and Spielberg didn’t change American culture, but they certainly caught the same reactionary wave that carried Ronald Reagan into the White House, and which brought the weight of the right wing to bear against the arts.

The two also set in motion a spending spree from which the studios are just now beginning to retreat. Between 1981 and 1991, the average cost of a major studio movie more than doubled, from $11.3 million to more than $25 million, a fact that made it nearly impossible for risky subject matter to get major studio financing.

The science-fiction craze ran its course by the mid-’80s, and the big-budget action film is about out of steam now. Hollywood is scaling back and looking for less-expensive projects, but more often that has meant exploitation thrillers.

“Day after day, we are seeing unbelievably tough stuff,” says Heffner. “There is no limit to how far (filmmakers) are willing to go, or how frequently.”

Heffner acknowledges that the board has a different set of priorities today than in the ‘70s.

“It’s our perception that parents are more concerned with violence now than they were in the ‘70s,” he says. “We wouldn’t be doing our job if we didn’t look carefully at those elements.”

The problem with movies like “Basic Instinct” and “Body of Evidence” is that violence and sex are the same thing, and there is nothing else to consider.