Reeling Backward: "Barbarella" (1968)

So it turns out the most lasting cultural impact of "Barbarella" is boobs.

The movie came out in late 1968 at almost the exact same time the new MPAA rating system went into effect, becoming one of the first mainstream films to feature a copious amount of nudity and sex. The opening credit sequence where star Jane Fonda strips down from her space suit to her birthday suit, her lithe body somewhat obscured by some cheekishly flickering titles, remains an iconic moment in cinema.

Admittedly, the sexual encounters are largely implied or spoofed. But there's nakedness aplenty apart from Fonda's occasional dropping frock, and at one point her character is placed inside a machine that's supposed to kill her with sexual pleasure, only the power of Barbarella's orgasms overwhelm the gizmo.

Not too bad for a PG rating. (F'reals.)

A little boob and butt may not seem like such a big deal a half-century hence. But the fact that American movies were again willing -- after a fleeting acceptance of nudity in silent films -- to show the human body in its entirety finally put cinema on an equal footing with other visual arts like sculpture, photography and painting.

Since then Hollywood has gone back and forth on how much flesh it is willing to show, including our current atmosphere where it seems like it's more common to see a penis than a vagina. (Don't squawk, fellas: we held an overwhelming advantage in that regard for well past a century.)

"Barbarella" helped usher in a new era of moviemaking that wasn't strictly aimed at families with kiddies, and we're all better for it.

The fact remains, however, that even the most generous contemporary reading of the film and its legacy comes to the conclusion that "Barbarella" is am embarrassingly awful POS.

It has achieved "cult" status almost from the moment it came out, because the movie is so ridiculously silly that it's hard to take the humor at face value. We never quite feel like the film is in on its own joke. Camp can go quickly from self-ridicule to pathetic pandering. Maybe people laughed with "Barbarella" in 1968, but in 2017 we can't help but laugh at it.

Producer/master of schlock Dino De Laurentiis put the project together based on the French comic book about a space traveler/sex adventuress. Screenwriter Terry Southern punched out a cheeky script, only to see director Roger Vadim and six Italians receive billing alongside him.

According to legend Southern didn't know about the story changes until he saw the other men's credits onscreen. And there were at least a half-dozen more writers who contributed without credit, dashing off revisions even as the cameras rolled. Fonda herself has claimed that they shut down production several times, ostensibly due to her own illness, but really so the next scenes could be written.

After her nude appearance in the opening, Barbarella gets naked again after her spaceship crashes on a planet near the city of Sogo, and she hooks up with a hirsute "Catchman" (Ugo Tognazzi). She offers him any reward for saving her life and he requests sex the old-fashioned way, not the 41st century method of taking a pill and having a vibrating commune through the touching of hands. Barbarella finds the experience... invigorating.

From there, Barbarella's displays come mostly through costume changes, including outfits where one or two breasts are seen through transparent cups, or partial destruction of her clothes. Background characters take up the slack, however, with a multitude of bare-chested/bottomed residents of Sogo or the surrounding labyrinth of exiles. It's enough to make a voyeur's fingers work overtime over the pause/rewind buttons.

It's difficult for me to conceive that in the 1960s Jane Fonda was largely regarded as an inconsequential sex kitten. We're so used to modern conceptions of her as a serious actress, Hanoi Jane, exercise matriarch and now aged icon. But Henry's little girl was still evolving back then.

Vadim was married to Fonda at the time, and he reportedly pursued several other screen vixens, including Bridget Bardot and Sophia Loren, before settling on the missus. She attacks the part with a mix of confident verve and shrinking neuroticism. Her Barbarella is erotic but reactive, a feminist icon who lets the men (and one potential female mate) make all the first moves.

Barbarella has been sent to Sogo by the Earth president to find the wayward scientist Durand Durand, who has developed the first weapon in centuries. (This did give the idea for a name to the '80s pop band, ironically by dropping a pair of double D's.) She eventually finds him, played by Milo O'Shea, having taken on the role of the concierge to the city's Great Tyrant, the Black Queen (Anita Pallenberg, her voice dubbed by Joan Greenwood).

Durand has been ravaged by age while experimenting with the Mathmos, an ocean of volatile liquid energy underneath Sogo that is fed by negative emotions and thoughts. His goal is to overthrow the queen and then take over Earth, except that she is always protected by the robot-like sentinels, the Black Guard.

We actually see the queen a little earlier, dressed up with an eye patch and an outfit with a transparent crotch, doing the emperor's old act of pretending to be a commoner -- in her case, to cavort with the idle and willing. She comes onto Barbarella, calling her "Pretty Pretty," but things don't culminate that way.

David Hemmings turns up as Dildano, the leader of a bumpkin rebel movement that seems to consist entirely of his unkempt bachelor pad of a headquarters, also located underneath Sogo. (Why not awash in Mathmos goo, we know not.) He makes a deal with Barbarella to get her into the queen's Chamber of Dreams, and they share a hair-raising sexcapade using the contemporary Earth method.

Master of mime Marcel Marceau has a small part as Professor Ping, one of the outcasts in the labyrinth.

The other notable character is Pygar, an angel (or "ornithanthrope," as he calls himself) who has been blinded and left unable to fly. He's fixed up after a romp with Barbarella, and becomes her ally and main mode of transport after that.

Tall, tan, muscular and blond, I thought at first that Pygar must be played by a young Terence Stamp after some peroxide and time at the beach. But it's actually John Phillip Law, who had a brief heyday as a sex symbol in the late 1960s and early '70s. This was a throwback to a time when Hollywood freely accepted fair-haired fellows as virile examples of masculinity, unlike today.

The look of "Barbarella" was considered quite astonishing for its time, what with the lasers and robots and spaceships. And this was not a low-budget film (somewhere between $4 million and $9 million, depending on who you ask.) But when you consider that this movie came out the same year as "2001: A Space Odyssey," it looks like positively primordial science fiction.

Part of this was intentional, as "Barbarella" is meant as fun, not cerebral rumination. The floating or flying scenes are quite obviously accomplished with wires or tilted cameras, giving the movie a funhouse aspect. The whole thing feels grubby and cheap, but not without titillation.

Today it operates mostly as an exercise in voyeurism. The inheritors of "Barbarella" came not in the sci-fi realm but in soft-core movies like the Emmanuel series, with our heroine a somewhat naive lass wandering through an alien landscape of bacchanalia and carnal revelry, in which she is invited to partake.

Part sex tourism, part futurist plaything and whole lot inept craftsmanship, "Barbarella" is one of those films that became important without ever actually being any good.

Reeling Backward: "Blow-Up" (1966)

It's always funny to watch a film from back when that was considered racy in its day. "Blow-Up" was the first English-language film by the Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni, and was picked up by MGM for release in the U.S.

But with its generous helping of nude(ish) flesh, the film couldn't get past the censors, still functioning in 1966 but wavering as more films with provocative material were becoming mainstream. MGM created a special distribution wing for "Blow-Up."

Seen today, the movie would be unlikely to get anything harsher than a PG-13 rating. The nudity is mostly oblique -- Vanessa Redgrave famously played an entire extended scene topless, but her breasts are never fully seen.

Based on a short story about a hip British photographer, "Blow-Up" is framed as a whodunit, but mostly is an exploration of swinging London of the 1960s. At the time of its release, it was viewed as a celebration of everything "mod." But I think the film, and Antonioni, paint a more critical of this movement than first glance would suggest.

Start with the fact that the protagonist, Thomas, is completely unlikeable. As played forcefully by David Hemmings, Thomas is vain, selfish, egotistical and utterly unconcerned with anyone's feelings than his own. A famous fashion photographer who yearns to be taken more seriously as an artist, Thomas treats his models as beautiful playthings to be manipulated and disposed of.

Perhaps the most famous image from the film is from Thomas' photo shoot with a supermodel (Veruschka von Lehndorff, playing herself) in a skimpy dress. At one point he straddles her on the ground while she writhes. Then he gets up and leaves abruptly: He's finished with her, and therefore she holds no more allure for him once her image has been satisfactorily captured.

At one point he complains about having to photograph women, referring to them as "these bitches." In another famous scene, he cavorts with two young girls who have come to his home studio hoping to become models, chasing them around and tearing off their clothes in a fascinating sequence that blends eroticism, subjugation and misogyny. They're all laughing, but Thomas wears a sadistic expression throughout.

Thomas doesn't seem to stand for anything, or possess any underlying principles. He's pure id, completely caught up in whatever grabs his interest in the moment, then moving on to the next thing once he quickly grows bored. He buys a huge airplane propeller from an antique store, then forgets all about it until the delivery man shows up with it.

He wanders into a park and takes some pictures of a man and woman canoodling. The well-dressed man is suspiciously older than the girl, whose name turns out to be Jane. She catches sight of Thomas taking their photograph, and confronts him to demand the pictures -- even trying to snatch away his camera and biting his wrist when he resists.

Later she shows up at his studio, again insisting upon obtaining the negatives. Thomas plays with her cruelly, thinking she's just cheating with a married man and doesn't want to get caught. She even undresses in hopes of seducing him in exchange for the photos. Thomas again resists temptation, and gives her a different roll of film.

When he blows up the pictures, he sees what appears to be a figure standing in the bushes with a gun. He returns to the park and finds the older man stone dead. Was the couple's foray into the park a set-up to kill him? Is Jane a terrified dupe or part of the plot?

Antonioni deliberately keeps the potboiler aspects of the plot at arm's length in order to explore the London scene -- the fashion, the music, the freewheeling spirit. Near the end there's an extended chase sequence where Thomas thinks he spots Jane on the street, and pursues her. This is where things really get interesting.

Antonioni depicts the twentysomethings of mid-60s England not as vibrant, brash rebels, but zombie-like figures dulling their senses with booze, drugs and emotional detachment.

While chasing Jane, Thomas stumbles into a club where a rock 'n' roll band is playing. Hundreds of young people decked out in fashionable clothes stand or sit, listening intently to the music but barely moving. They have no expression on their faces. A few heads nod almost imperceptibly in time, but otherwise everyone seems more mesmerized by the concert than enjoying it. A lone couple dance nonchalantly, their rhythmic activity serving only to underline the torpor of the rest of the crowd.

The band was played by The Yardbirds, performing their song "Stroll On." The guitarist is annoyed by static from a faulty amplifier, and starts hammering it with his guitar. Eventually he smashes the instrument and throws the battered remains of the neck into the crowd, which suddenly erupts into frenzy. The once-comatose audience scrambles for the trashed relic, which Thomas manages to grab hold of and flee the club, pursued by others who want the souvenir.

Once he gets away, Thomas looks at the half-guitar and sullenly tosses it onto the street. Another young man picks it up, inspects it, and throws it back down. It's Antonioni's comment on how the things the mod crowd value are so shallow and ultimately worthless.

Thomas wanders into a party looking for his friend and business partner, Ron, and finds everyone stoned out of their minds. He tries to explain to Ron about having witnessed a murder, but can't pierce his friend's drug-induced haze.

Returning to his studio, he discovers all the photographs but one stolen. He returns to the park to find the body gone. His chances of exposing the crime -- and gaining fame and fortune for doing so -- are gone.

Wandering around the park, he comes across a troupe of mimes riding around in a jalopy. (The same group opened the film, accosting Thomas for money, which he bemusedly gave.) He watches them conduct a mime game of tennis, even returning an errant "ball" that goes over the fence near him, and hearing the sound of nonexistent racquets.

I tend not to like rambling storylines like this, but I think "Blow-Up" is the rare film where the subtext is more interesting than the surface.

3.5 stars