It might be that all I got was that glimpse, as my official records don't show me as having seen the whole movie. I'm pretty sure I caught Blue Lagoon, parts of it anyway, on cable at a friend's house, so it may be time to add it to my lists. But Brooke in skimpy clothing -- it's one of those movies where their nudity is covered by coconuts and well-placed hair, if I remember correctly -- was enough to send me down a Brooke Shields rabbit hole, resulting in a viewing of the considerably more adult-oriented Endless Love around the same time. (Didn't think you could go down rabbit holes in the early 1980s? Apparently you could.)
I still wanted to see more, and I sure did see more of Brooke Shields in the earliest of those three films, 1978's Pretty Baby. I don't remember much about Franco Zefferelli's film, but I remember one scene with absolute clarity: Brooke Shields, who would have been about 12 at the time of filming, jumping up and down on a bed, fully naked.
You might think this is what I wanted, what had been teased in the comparatively chaste Blue Lagoon two years later. But even as a ten-year-old I remember feeling skeeved out by it. Here is this girl, who would have been only two years older than I was at the time she filmed it, jumping up and down in her birthday suit, without any breasts or pubic hair to speak of it. It wasn't right.
I was reminded of my Pretty Baby experience last night while watching my latest 1970s horror this October, The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane (1977).
Before we get into genre quibbling, I'll say that Nicolas Gessner's film might be more comfortable in the thriller or mystery genres than horror, but I went by the poster art above to decide it made a good viewing for the month leading up to Halloween. The movie's opening scene also takes place on Halloween, which doubles as the birthday for the main character, played by Jodie Foster.
Whether it's a horror or a thriller or a costume drama has no relevance for what I want to talk about today, which is another instance of teenage nudity, and a very matter-of-fact inclusion of themes related to child sexuality on the whole.
In that opening scene, when the movie is barely five minutes old, we see Martin Sheen's character perving on the 13-year-old Foster. He's come to visit her house under the guise of trick-or-treating, but his children aren't with him -- he's run on ahead of them, perhaps for the very opportunity to perv on Foster's Rynn Jacobs.
After he invites himself in, first we can't tell if he's calling her pretty and touching her hair just as some kind of overly forward attempt to be charming, something that would have been more common back then and would have fallen away in the decades since. Pretty quickly, though, his advances become unmistakeably sexual, and are confirmed when he gets called out on it and quickly scampers out of the house before his own children have a chance to arrive. (They're stepchildren, we later find out, which makes more sense.)
The fact that Martin Sheen is casually a pedophile in this movie is interesting for a couple reasons. For one it reminded me that before he began playing almost exclusively good guys later in his career, Sheen could be a real weirdo on screen. He played sort of a psycho in Terrence Malick's Badlands in 1973, a few years before this, and a few years after this, he's the sinister presidential candidate in David Cronenberg's The Dead Zone. Playing a pedophile would not have made anybody blink at that time.
But the thing that's really strange about it is how it forefronts the sexuality of a 13-year-old girl. Foster was born in 1962, so when filming took place, presumably in 1975, she would have actually been 13 -- maybe only 12, as her birthday is late in the year. Wikipedia doesn't say exactly when filming occurred, but the movie was ready for Cannes in 1976, its general release delayed until 1977 due to the sorts of controversies I'm writing about here.
Not only does Sheen treat her as a sexual object in his every interaction with her, but the film itself does as well. She's also got a relationship that becomes actually sexual with a teenager a few years older than her, played by Scott Jacoby, who reminded me so much of Matthew Modine that I had to check to make sure it was not actually him. The existence of that relationship alone would not be enough to posit a perviness on the part of the filmmakers, but the following is.
There's randomly a scene that shows Foster stripping down naked to get in bed with Jacoby's character. We see her from behind and from the side, but her rear is fully visible and there's a very clear side view of her 13-year-old breasts, which have enough hang to them to qualify as adult breasts. There's absolutely no reason this needed to be in there, except that, according to Wikipedia, a producer wanted there to be "sex and violence" in the film. Yikes.
At the time I was watching the film I did not know this, but it's not actually Foster we see in that shot. Her older sister Connie did a nude double for her, and Connie seems to have been 21 at the time. I'd like to go back and watch that shot to see what trickery they did to create the illusion that it was Jodie rather than Connie, because I certainly didn't suspect I was looking at anything other than Jodie Foster in that shot. However, whether the actress was of legal age or not is besides the point. The film wants us to believe we are seeing a naked 13-year-old girl. Apparently, this was not something we minded at the time -- and perhaps even something we were supposed to like?
It must have been weird to be Jodie Foster at that time, as she also made Taxi Driver, where she plays a child prostitute. That film, released in February of 1976, would have been released concurrently with the production on The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane, but you'd think principal photography would have already been finished if the film were set to appear at Cannes in May. So it appears that multiple filmmakers imagined something sexual about her even when she was just a 12-year-old. And that apparently, this was not universally scorned. (Thank goodness Freaky Friday was released between these two films to give her public image some additional dimension.)
We are so nervous about these issues today that not only would you never come close to child nudity in a film today, but you'd barely even suggest anything related to child sexuality. We don't want to make films in which pedophiles appear even if it is absolutely 100% clear that that character is the scum of the earth.
In reading up a little more, it seems that these choices were controversial even at the time, not just in hindsight. Regarding Pretty Baby, Wikipedia states:
Pretty Baby received an R rating in the United States, an X rating in the United Kingdom, and an R18+ rating in Australia, for nudity and sexual content. Continuing controversy over Shields' nude scenes resulted in the film being banned in the Canadian provinces of Ontario and Saskatchewan until it was repealed in 1995. Gossip columnist Rona Barrett called the film "child pornography", and director Louis Malle allegedly was portrayed as a "combination of Lolita's Humbert Humbert and (by that point) controversial director Roman Polanski".[1]
Okay that seems pretty clear. Although the delay in the release of The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane was due to a court case over distribution rights, the controversy over the nude scene is listed in Wikipedia's opening two paragraphs about it, as word got out that Foster had a conflict with producers about it and actually walked off the set. I guess her older sister eventually had no such qualms. (The nude scene was removed for the VHS release but restored for the DVD release.)
So in the subject of this post I made it sound like this sort of thing happened all the time, but maybe I've just stumbled across two of the more egregious examples. The fact that I cannot immediately recall any other examples, despite seeing my fair share of films from that era, seems to support the relative scarcity.
The funny thing is, apparently even The Blue Lagoon, which I thought was comparatively chaste, has a number of scenes that might qualify as nude scenes, some involving body doubles for Shields, who was still underage at that time. Reading up on the parental guide on IMDB, I found that you can clearly see Christopher Atkins' penis at a couple points, and there's even a masturbation scene, which must have been really confusing to me at that time. Atkins would have been 18 or 19 at the time of filming, at least. The other scenes where they appear without clothes are obscured underwater, so maybe not as graphic -- which is also maybe why the more in-your-face scenes in Pretty Baby shocked me so much.
Nowadays we won't even do infant nudity on screen. Back then, on the other hand, I don't believe that a young naked Clark Kent in the original Superman (1978) even raised any eyebrows, because everybody knows that a naked child under the age of three is not sexual -- we would hope. (Apparently there is also a naked baby in the later portions of The Blue Lagoon.)
Today? The naked underwater baby who is portrayed as reaching for a dollar bill on the cover of Nirvana's Nevermind has filed a lawsuit alleging "child sexual exploitation." I suppose neither extreme is particularly useful for society.
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