Martin Scorsese has directed 25 narrative feature films over the course of his career, yet sex and nudity have never been a particular obsession of his, on-screen anyway. Though the director's many peccadilloes in the wild days of the 70s really never bled over into his films in that era, he isn't afraid to work bluewhen the film calls for it. With The Irishman finally coming to Netflix this week, what better time to look back at New York's favorite filmmaking son?
The films in which Scorsese uses nudity almost all call for it... Barbara Hershey'sBoxcar Berthauses her body to seduce potential victims, Linda Fiorentino's Kiki in After Hours is an eccentric artist, in The Last Temptation of Christ, Barbara Hershey's sexualized Mary Magdalene shows Willem Dafoe's Jesus what he could have if he settled for a normal life, etc. There's plenty of sex and nudity to be found in his films, it just seems like something he doesn'tusemuch.
Like an expert chef, however, Scorsese seems to view nudity as a spice used carefully and infrequently when crafting a meal. When the recipe calls for sex and nudity, you're going to notice it's an integral part of the stew. Typically, however, Scorsese prefers to cast beautiful women—Cybill Shepherd, Liza Minnelli, Cathy Moriarty, Jessica Lange, Michelle Pfeiffer, Winona Ryder, Vera Farmiga, Michelle Williams—and photograph them in such a way that seeing them nude would almost be less sexy.
Final note before we begin, I'm leaving Goodfellasand Gangs of New York off of this list since their nudity is more of the accidental rather than intentional variety. Let's start near the very beginning...
Boxcar Bertha
Like so many of his contemporaries—Coppola, Bogdanovich, and Demme, to name just three—Scorsese began his big time feature filmmaking career with mega-producer Roger Corman. Following his self-financed feature debut, 1967's Who's That Knocking At My Door, Scorsese was granted quite a bit of freedom for his second feature, Boxcar Bertha. Gifted a budget of $600,000—nearly ten times that of his debut film—Scorsese bent to the will of Corman by shooting lots of nude scenes with the film's star Barbara Hershey.
As the titular lady of the railway, Hershey begins the film a sympathetic character, driven to help railroad employees fight for better working conditions during the Great Depression. After teaming with lover and union thug David Carridine's Big Bill Shelly, it isn't long before their fight against the railroad becomes criminal in nature. Like Arthur Penn'sBonnie Clyde before it and Terrence Malick'sBadlands after it, Scorsese's Boxcar Bertha gave a pair of outcasts the spotlight for a spell before dooming them to their fate.
Their first love scene, just nine minutes into the film, is shot very tenderly, suffused with a tinge of first love...
Mostly the scene is shot in close-up, with Hershey's breasts only periodically appearing in frame. Contrast this with their sex scene 43 minutes later, where Hershey is fully immersed in her mission of seduce and destroy. Here she is fully nude in a position of power, while the physically imposing Carradine in hunched on the floor...
Like Bob Fosse a few weeks back, Scorsese loves women and almost always shoots them very tenderly and lovingly, placing them in positions of power over the men thanks to the inherent vulnerability of sex. Scorsese himself even pops up in a cameo as one of Bertha's johns. Just get a load of this chubby cheeked little boy that would become the wily old man we all know and love...
This tender use of sex and nudity continued into his next film...
Mean Streets
After a screening of Boxcar Bertha, John Cassavettes allegedly told Scorsese that he was a better filmmaker than exploitation films deserved, so he changed gears and gave us his first great film about the Italian-American experience in New York City, Mean Streets. A subject Scorsese has returned to in his work time and again, this was the birth of so many of the things we come to associate Scorsese with: Real New York locations, a brilliantly curated selection of pop tunes woven into the fabric of the film, and of course, Robert De Niro.
Though star Harvey Keitel had worked with Scorsese on Who's That Knocking..., in 1972 De Niro was mostly known for his work with one of Scorsese's close friends—and past subject of this column—Brian De Palma, as well as his audition for every male role in The Godfather, which landed him the role of young Vito Corleone in Godfather II. In other words, he had been in Scorsese's circle, but the two hadn't worked together before. It was, obviously, the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
Keitel's Charlie is attempting to live a clean life with no interference from the underworld, while his best friend—De Niro's Johnny Boy—is constantly in debt to increasingly more dangerous people. To boot, Charlie is shacking up with Johnny Boy's epileptic cousin Teresa (Amy Robinson) behind his back. 52 minutes in, we get another tenderly staged nude scene with Amy first glimpsed nude peeping tom style, through a window...
Then she and Keitel go from arguing to making up, after he admires her nude body as she gets dressed...
It's very much keeping in tone and style with the nudity in Boxcar Bertha, explicit but not dirty. That's sort of the best way to describe the sex and nudity in most of his films, actually.
After Hours
Except this one, maybe. Perhaps the most gratuitous nude scene of Scorsese's career comes in this 1985 Griffin Dunne vehicle. Legendarily this was going to be Tim Burton's directorial debut until funding fell through on Last Temptation once again and Scorsese suddenly had an opening in his calendar. This film is often confused with its L.A.-set counterpart, John Landis' Into the Night with Jeff Goldblum and Michelle Pfeiffer, released the same year.
Both films are also united by their gratuitous nude scene, here courtesy of Linda Fiorentino. Dunne plays straight-laced Paul who has a chance encounter with the free-spirited Marcy (Rosanna Arquette). When turning up at her apartment to meet her, he is instead greeted by her sculptor roommate Kiki, played by Fiorentino, who casually strips off her bra in front of Dunne just 20 minutes into the film...
One could look at this scene as a way of preparing Paul—and by proxy, the audience—for an unexpected night where anything can happen, which is likely how Scorsese intended it. You could also cynically view it as a producer attempting to get more juice around the film by including a nude scene.
The Color of Money
Scorsese was another gun for hire while raising funds to make Last Temptation on this belated sequel to 1961's The Hustler. Best remembered now as the film that finally won Paul Newmanhis Oscar, the film has some Scorsese hallmarks—the intense color contrast in the pool hall scenes, the Robbie Robertson score—but isn't as good as the sum of its parts.
The gorgeous Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio shines in her two nude scenes in the film, first seducing Newman's Fast Eddie Felson via a well placed hotel room mirror...
Then again just eight minutes later after Newman roughs her up a bit, we get a flash of breast courtesy of her open shirt...
It's very reminiscent of her nude scene just a few years earlier in Scarface. Like the film itself, the nude scenes are pretty good, just overshadowed by everything around them in Scorsese's filmography. Like the time he finally got to make the movie he always wanted to make...
The Last Temptation of Christ
Scorsese tried for over a decade to bring to the screen Nikos Kazantzakis' controversial novel "The Last Temptation of Christ" to the screen. Various incarnations would have featured everyone from Aiden Quinn to Ed Harris as Jesus, but ultimately the role went to the transcendentally perfect Willem Dafoe.The Catholic Scorsese re-teamed with Calvinist screenwriter Paul Schrader, with whom he'd worked on bothTaxi Driver and Raging Bull, and together with the Greek Orthodox Kazantzakis' original tome, gave the world a version of the Passion Play the likes of which they'd never seen.
16 years after they first worked together on Boxcar Bertha,—where she allegedlyintroducedScorsese to the book—Barbara Hershey returns to play the second most influential female in the New Testament, Mary Magdalene. The parallels between the two characters and their proximity to powerful men is no small coincidence, I'm sure. She earned an Oscar nomination for her work here, sadly the film's only nomination at that year's ceremony. InKazantzakis' book and Scorsese's film, Magdalene is a prostitute known to a pre-Gospels Jesus. Early in the film, he goes to see her and must wait for her to finish work for the day...
She thenattempts to seduce him with the promise of a normal life and the loving embrace of a woman. Though this will come back into play in the third act, this particular seduction endswith Mary kickingJesus out after he rejects her advances...
Dafoe's Jesus thengoes through most of the beats of the Gospels: 40 days of temptation in the desert; Being baptized by Andre Gregory's John the Baptist; Leading hisapostles to Jerusalem, meeting with David Bowie's Pontius Pilate. It's all by the numbers until, while on the cross, Jesus is visited by a young girl proclaiming to be an angel. She tells Jesus that he passed God's test and may come off the cross and lead a normal life.
First step in a normal life for Jesus is finally getting married to and having sex with Hershey's Mary Magdalene. Their sex scene, two hours and thirteen minutes into this film was ground zero for all the controversy spawned by this film. The notion that anyone would want to depict their savior as a sexual being upset many Christians, driving them to boycott the film. In retrospect, it's as tame and vanilla a sex scene as you could ever want to see Jesus H. Christ participate in...
Hindsight being 20/20, it seems awfully ridiculous that anyone would get upset by this scene, though outrage is a key part of every zealous Christian's tool box. The angel is later revealed—by Harvey Keitel's Judas Iscariot, of all people—to actually be the devil tempting him. Jesus repents and is instantly taken back to the cross he never left. The film's entire third act has been the titular "Last Temptation of Christ," something that in this critic's estimation, makes Jesus seem like a much more tangible and real person.
As a former Christian myself, I can tell you that this film played a crucial role in understanding the story of Jesus. He's portrayed in the Bible as a figure above reproach, yet we're reminded often of his humanity. This is never demonstrated in the Bible however, and keeps Jesus at arm's length. Scorsese's film makes Jesus feel achingly real and all-too-human. If you're interested in trying your faith by fire, I cannot recommend this film any higher.
Casino
Scorsese's second longest film—and his final with De Niro and Pesci until next year's The Irishman—has its fair share of critics, and while it may have played like Goodfellas-lite upon its release in 1995, looking back I feel it's major Scorsese, not minor at all. This is a much more grown up, inside baseball film about thevarious criminal organizations vying for control of Las Vegas. Despite its setting, it's not all glitz and glamour. This is a much more restrained Scorsese, embracing middle age—he turned 53 mere days before the film was released.
The three leads here are playing variations on characters they've played dozens of times before: De Niroplays Ace Rothstein, a man who may be in charge, but who is constantly undermined by the more connected mafia men around him. Pesci plays Nicky Santoro, a violent psychopath and a riff on his most famous role as Tommy DeVito in Goodfellas. Finally there's Sharon Stone playing Ginger, a woman who may be through with her life as a prostitute, but whose life as a prostitute isn't through with her.
Stone gives her all here, and while she is perhaps not quite as good as she was in Basic Instinct, this remains her only Oscar nominated role. Though Stone was never shy about nudity, her only nudity here is in nip-slip form, first as she chats with—and eventually goes down on—Pesci at the hour and seventeen minute mark...
Then again with Pesci as they have sex at the two hour and twenty minute mark...
It's telling that both of her "nude scenes" in this film are with Pesci rather than her character's husband De Niro or her longtime pimp James Woods. I'm not sure if there's a hidden meaning there, but like Kubrick before him, nothing is in a Scorsese movie by accident.
Casino is full of memorable moments, not least of which is Pesci's death at the hands of Scorsese regular Frank Vincent, whose Billy Batts was on the receiving end of a legendary beat-down by Pesci's Tommy in Goodfellas. There's also a great bit of nudity 18 minutes in as the gorgeous Millicent Sheridan strips down for some hanky panky with the always brilliant Dick Smothers as a crooked Senator...
Casino was Scorsese's longest movie for nearly twenty years, until he finally cracked the three hour mark—not counting his docs—with his Oscar nominated 2013 film...
The Wolf of Wall Street
Now this is where everything explodes into an orgiastic bacchanalia. Where Scorsese had shown Herculean restraint with sexuality in his previous efforts, this one opens with this scene of Leo blowing coke into Natalie Bensel's butthole...
...and only gets wilder from there. To paraphrase the late, great Rick James, much like cocaine, The Wolf of Wall Street's a hell of a movie. It's a bit like a three hour coke binge in and of itself with peaks, valleys, and a feeling of great exhaustion and anger afterwards. It's no pleasure cruise, despite the many pleasurable things on display, which makes me question how anyone could come out the other side of this movie thinking that Scorsese in any way condones this character's behavior.
Leonardo DiCaprio brings all his worst impulses to the forefront in a tour de force performance as Jordan Belfort, potentially the biggest scumbag protagonist in movie history. DiCaprio sheds his vanity and gives it his all in this film, delivering the best performance of his career in the process. You may not like Belfort—and you definitely should not—but there's no denying that DiCaprio is in top form here.
The "A Star is Born" moment in this film, however, belongs to Margot Robbie's Naomi LaPaglia. Just shy of the one hour mark, she makes an easy mark of Belfort with her fully nude reveal that easily landed on everyone's list of the greatest nude debuts of all time...
The film parades out an endless array of naked women after this including Katarina Čas' naked romp with Oscar winner Jean Dujardin—a scene designed in very much the same vein as Robbie's nude reveal...
And Krista Ashworth topless getting banged by Henry Zebrowski's Sea Otter while everyone else waits for their turn with her...
But absolutely no one can hold a candle to Margot in this movie, and her character ends up being the most recent in a long line of Scorsese female leads who do what they have to do to survive...
Even Jonah Hill pays Margot the highest compliment ofmasturbating to her, but he makes the crucial mistake of doing it in front of her. And his wife. And basically everyone he knows...
That clip comes to us courtesy of our sister site MrMan.com. One hates to end any column on Martin Scorsese with that particular moment, so let's close things out with Quentin Tarantino recounting a legendary tale about Scorsese and the making of Taxi Driver. Enjoy...
For the record, I buy the story, I don't buy the involvement of a gun, however.
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—Catherine Breillat: Part One
