My constant complaint during tedious matinees spent at the Forum or Odeon was: “Mum, you promised it wouldn’t be love!”, as two Hollywood heart-throbs would slobber over each other on a bed – both with one foot planted firmly on the floor (censorship rules of the 1930s) – and caressed by the swooning strings of Erich Wolfgang Korngold, the only sexy thing in the film.

This constant kissing and cuddling, even in westerns and gangster movies, went on right through my childhood and well into my teens. Sure, Jane looked healthy in her Tarzan rags, and Fay Wray endured an inspection by King Kong that was “disturbing”, but the tame billing and cooing was, for a young boy, not much more than tiresome interruption.

There was one notable exception. During the Southampton Blitz, when I was still a schoolboy, I used to give film shows on a hand-cranked projector to the local auxiliary fire service. On one memorable occasion I was screening Faust, a German silent movie made in the Twenties. It was all a bit expressionistic for our doughty firefighters, except for one scene, in which Faust ravishes the virginal Marguerite in a four-poster bed. Tilt up to the evil Mephistopheles on top of the canopy, laughing gleefully and hanging on for grim life, as the bed begins violently to rock and roll. To my amazement this inexplicable (to me) spectacle nearly brought the house down. I was mystified, but I was paying attention.

This was something of a breakthrough, the like of which I didn’t see again, until I was well into my twenties and catching up with the vagaries of the Nouvelle Vague. By then the bouncing bed was here to stay.

Background

• Last Tango in Paris

• Last Tango in Paris - Sunday Times review

• Haunted by that last tango

We're no longer shocked by Brando’s passion

Are the endlessly repetitive bedroom bouts of Brangelina, Jude Law and Scarlett Johansson sexy?

Related Internet Links

• 2007 London Film Festival coverage

• Times Online Film Trailers

By the time I came to film D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love the “sexual revolution” had peaked. In 1969, when the film was made, simulated sexual intercourse on the screen was becoming old hat. Nevertheless, D. H. was insistent, and it became my privilege to translate his passionate intensity into images – again and again, in the three films I made of his works. As it happened, Women in Love became one of the first mainstream movies to feature male nudity, and Glenda Jackson the first actress to win the Oscar for a role that included sharing a bouncing bed with Oliver Reed.

Even in what were sexually precocious times, the sight of two handsome men locked in naked embrace in Women in Love was undeniably a breakthrough and triumph for artistic freedom. And, dare I say it, the sequence was as beautiful as it was passionate. Sublimated physical desire and urgent emotional yearning: a heady brew. When Gerald uses his little finger to make an imaginary incision in Rupert’s bare bicep, as they lie panting and sweating, the sexual frisson is so palpable that it’s painful.

Cheers for the late lamented John Trevelyan, censor extraordinaire, who put his job on the line to make screen history, by declining to demand one single cut in the entire five-minute scene.

Not many eyebrows are still being raised in today’s overstimulated culture. Not long ago a friend reports joining the matinee crowd for Women in Love in a shabby flea-pit in Dorset. Sitting behind two elderly ladies, he waited for their reaction to the nude wrestling scene. Breaking the postclimactic silence, one woman turned to the other and remarked breathlessly: “Nice carpet.”

It takes more than desperate love and lust to make audiences sit up and take notice these days. One can only imagine how puzzled filmgoers will be when the scandale célèbre of its day, Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris, reappears in selected cinemas this week. It’s hard to remember the visceral, rowdy, emotionally charged impact it had in 1972. At its premiere there were howls of outrage and ovations of hushed awe, critics’ ecstasies (“the most powerful erotic film ever made”) and calumny (“makes you want to vomit”); lawsuits; censorship debates; banning in certain countries; and ticket sales that went through the roof.

When Last Tango was unleashed, it was the most radical exploration of raw taboos and Brando’s unique talent to expose man’s naked griefs, fears, impulses and tendernesses. It wasn’t particularly sexy, although the plot entailed the fantasy of making love with a stranger over and over again in an isolated room, with the woman’s agreement to neither ask nor reveal anything personal: “No names, no nothing – I don’t want to know anything about your past.”

It was less about sex and more about obsession taking over from passion. In Last Tango, compulsive merging seems the best route to healing a wound so primal that no words can do it justice: the existential agony of incarnation. Brando’s sheer physicality, his willingness to strip layer upon layer of self (no matter how humiliatingly) and to incorporate his own painful autobiography in ad lib monologues, made the film utterly shocking and riveting when I saw it.

The taboos that were shattered in Last Tango were less to do with the excitement of violation and desperate desires of the body than they were about the ultimate taboo of telling truth without disguises. As such, the film was beautiful, not pretty – exactly like the Francis Bacon portraits that ran under the credits and informed the characters.

One can only predict that today’s audiences will be underwhelmed. Bring on the special effects, bring on the acrobatics. I can confidently say my latest offering, The Girl with the Golden Breasts, sails pretty close to the wind of change. My plot concerns a Hollywood wannabe who hopes that enhanced breasts will bring her fame. She goes ahead, little knowing that the skin tissue used in the operation is taken from a vampire cadaver. The result is that every time she has sex, her nipples open to reveal lethal vampire fangs, hungry to feed on her unsuspecting lover.

Is it sexy? You bet. Are the endlessly repetitive bedroom bouts of Brangelina, Ben Affleck, Jude Law, Scarlett Johansson and Sienna Miller sexy? No, not very.

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