Dead Sex Kittens: Farewell to Three Icons of Movie Eroticism

A trio of movie actresses died within a day of one another last week: Maria Schneider, 58, in Paris on Thursday; Lena Nyman, 66, in Stockholm and Tura Satana, 72 (or maybe 75), in Reno on Friday. Each was known mainly for a single film, and the three could be written off as one-hit wonders, except that the films they starred in — Satana in Russ Meyer’s 1965 Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, Nyman in Vilgot Sjöman’s 1967 I Am Curious (Yellow) and Schneider in Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1972 Last Tango in Paris — stand today as monuments to cinema’s wildest and most adventurous decade.

In the Vietnam era, which saw the toppling of so many social standards, these actresses gave face and especially form to a seismic, worldwide change in movies, when suddenly everything could be said and shown. They provided a view of the bold, confrontational, sexually liberated woman — from the perspective, that is, of the avid, controlling men behind the camera and in the audience.

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In the mid- to late 1960s, as young America exploded in opposition to the Vietnam engagement and French youth shut down their country in the manifestations of May ’68, a cultural revolution was brewing in movies. Just a few years before, U.S. jurisdictions had banned films showing an unseemly amount of skin; in 1964, Lenny Bruce was convicted of obscenity. The Hollywood factory was still grinding out family films starring Doris Day, Jerry Lewis and Elvis Presley and handing out Oscars to the likes of The Sound of Music and Oliver! But in corners of the cinema world some directors threw out the playbook that had held since the coming of talking pictures in the 1920s.

The new rule was that there were no rules; movies could spout obscenities, show nudity and copulation, operate under the same freedoms that applied to artists in any other medium. Within a decade, every movie outrage that had been a crime became the Hollywood norm, and hard-core pornography was both public and chic.

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Tura Satana
The filmmakers who shattered the old icons came from two different directions: up from the grind house and over from the art house. Meyer, a combat cameraman in World War II and then a cheesecake photographer (his portrait of his wife Eve was used as an early Playboy centerfold), graduated to feature films with the 1959 nudie-cutie The Immoral Mr. Teas, which was made for $24,000 and grossed more than $1 million. Within a few years Meyer had ditched the color comedy genre for mad melodrama in monochrome: epics like Common Law Cabin, Mudhoney and Motor Psycho, all featuring convoluted plots, ripe dialogue and riper starlets. Deemed disposable drive-in fodder on their first release, they quickly found adherents among film critics and proto-fanboys, and in 1969 Meyer was hired by a major studio, 20th Century Fox, to direct Beyond the Valley of the Dolls from a script by one of his young critical admirers, Roger Ebert.

Tura Satana in Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill!

Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! — the title encapsulates Meyer’s tripartite vision of movies: speed, babes and violence — has plenty of those commodities, but, surprise, no nudity. Its narrative tone, though, is lurid to the max. The movie follows three strippers, led by Satana as Varna, who love racing their cars on the California salt flats. They race one guy who’s brought his girlfriend along; über-tough Varna gets into a fight with the guy, snaps his spine and kills him and takes the girl as a hostage. Hearing of a rich coot (Stuart Lancaster) with a hidden fortune, Varna and the three women pay him a visit, only to discover that he’s as crazy and ruthless as they are. But the old man is accurate enough in his appraisal of Varna. “She’s a cold one, all right,” the coot says. “More stallion than mare. There’s too much for one man to handle.”

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Meyer’s films are filled with bosomy, dominating women, and Satana might be the prototype ad apotheosis. Dressed in black, with gloves to match, and sporting a tight top with a V or W neckline, she scowls at the world and spits emasculating aphorisms in its face. When a randy gas-station attendant stares at her cleavage and chirps, “Now that’s what I believe in, seeing America first,” she snaps, “You won’t find it down there, Columbus.” And when one of the other strippers is worried about whether she can fool the old man, Varna gives her Lesson No. 1 in the Russ Meyer Performance Manual: “You don’t have to believe it, honey. Just act it.”

Satana had the biography to back up her grit. Born Tura Luna Pascual Yamaguchi in Hokkaido, Japan, in 1938 (or 1935), from a Japanese-Filipino father and a Cheyenne-Scots-Irish mother, she was interned with other Japanese-Americans in a California camp during World War II. She played bits as strippers and whores in such Hollywood films as Irma La Douce and Who’s Been Sleeping in My Bed? before getting her big chance in Pussycat and making the most of it. Her face is a rigid Kabuki mask of predatory sensuality, her deep voice clipped and authoritative, her figure a series of dangerous curves, her long stride that of a wartime general masquerading as a runway model. She wasn’t a sex object called upon to act; she was the total package of commanding movie presence and acting chops. Seeing Satana here, you’ll wonder why she didn’t find a deep Hollywood niche, at least as a character actress. But neither Meyer nor any director of his stature used her again. Pussycat was her one shot at immortality, and her aim was true.

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Lena Nyman
She enjoyed a 50-year career in Swedish movies and theater, including a good role as Liv Ullmann’s damaged sister (and Ingrid Bergman’s daughter) in Ingmar Bergman’s 1978 Autumn Sonata; but Nyman’s notoriety sprang from, and pretty much ended with, the two I Am Curious films — the first called Yellow, the second Blue, for the colors of the Swedish flag. In both she plays, more or less, herself. Released at home in 1967 and 1968, the films were acquired by Barnet Rosset’s Grove Press in the U.S. The reels were immediately seized as obscene by U.S. Customs, until a Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that they could be shown. The ruckus created a must-see aura for Curious (Yellow), with enthusiasts paying up to $4.50 for a ticket when the average price was $1.50. Made for less than $100,000, Curious (Yellow) grossed $20 million in the States — the equivalent of at least $100 million today. And all for a movie with some vivid simulated sex encased in a screed about the Swedish welfare state.

Lena Nyman in I Am Curious (Yellow)

Sjöman’s idea was to create, on the fly, a docu-portrait of his homeland and interlace it with the sexual and political adventures of Nyman, then 22, who had acted in his previous film, 491, and here would appear as the director’s mistress, muse and plaything. His producing studio, Sandrews, gave him 100,000 meters of black-and-white film stock and the intoxicating license to do as he wished. “I had been taught to let every whim and idea pop up,” Sjöman recalled in 1992. “So I began to look for actors who thought it would be fun not to have a written manuscript, but liked developing an idea I had invented that same morning.” Trailed by Sjöman’s small crew, Nyman interviews passers-by about government policies and sexual equality. She also quizzes Martin Luther King Jr. and Olof Palme, the Education Minister who became Sweden’s Prime Minister (and like King, was later assassinated), as well as Soviet poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko.

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A movie on the subject of whether Sweden is socialist enough does not attract the raincoat brigade; scenes of coitus and fellatio do. Nyman, who goes by her own name in the films, strays from her lover Sjöman for a tryst with a young actor, Börje Ahlstedt, and it is they who make love everywhere: up a tree, on a balustrade of the Royal Palace and in bedrooms hither and yon. Since Ahlstedt remains flaccid through the ardor, the sex scenes that raised the ire of the Customs Department stirred little tumescence among U.S. viewers and critics. Ebert, reviewing for the Chicago Sun-Times, wrote that the film “is not merely not erotic. It is anti-erotic. Two hours of this movie will drive thoughts of sex out of your mind for weeks. See the picture and buy twin beds.” TIME’s Jay Cocks, who gave the film a more measured notice, nonetheless titled his review “Dubious Yellow.” Generally, the film was seen as a swindle.

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Well, a movie can be not erotic, or anti-erotic, and still worth watching. What’s of interest today is the relationship of director to actress and the elfin, exhibitionist vitality of Nyman. Between sex talk with a girl chum (they discuss using shower nozzles, vibrators and vacuum cleaners) and asking each of her 23 lovers to answer a questionnaire on their sexual experiences and political affiliations, the pudgy star eventually tires of Börje, dreaming of castrating him with a knife. Her beau too grows alienated: he glances at a bedroom ornamented with Che and Marx photos and snarls, “Put dieting posters up on your wall instead,” and drives away with a dismissive “I don’t want those tits in my MG.”

Behind these sexual skirmishes is a standard movie-set romance, which may begin in erotic attraction and end in a who’s-using-whom catfight. “You want a girl in your film and a girl in your bed,” Lena tells Sjöman. “And if you can combine the two, all the better, right?” She feels manipulated by her master — and he by her: “She’s using me, that damned girl,” Sjöman complains. “This movie is her chance, and she knows it. And, boy, does she take advantage of it!” All this may be fiction, but it reflects the familiar synergy and abrasion of a director and his leading lady. And if we take the movie at its word that Sjöman and Nyman were bedmates when Curious was made, we’re left with the odd spectacle of a director filming his girlfriend having sex with another man.

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Maria Schneider
In their big films, Satana and Nyman were acting with unknowns. Schneider’s onscreen partner in her first prominent role was Marlon Brando, fresh from The Godfather. She played Jeanne, a young bride-to-be who goes scouting for an apartment, meets a middle-aged man there (Brando’s Paul) and enters into an intense, claustrophobic affair in which, at the man’s insistence, no names or biographical details will be exchanged. At heart a movie about two people in a room, having sex and talking about sex, Last Tango was a ’70s sensation not for what it showed, exactly — though a scene in which Paul sodomizes Jeanne, using butter as a lubricant, might have been a movie first — but because Brando was doing it. Schneider was the woman he did it to.

In the storm of agitation, the rhetoric of both the movie’s defenders and its detractors ascended to operatic heights. Writing in The New Yorker, Pauline Kael proclaimed: “The movie breakthrough has finally come … This must be the most powerfully erotic movie ever made, and it may turn out to be the most liberating movie ever made.” (The review would become nearly as famous as the picture; in subsequent years, when other critics referred to Last Tango, they’d say, “That was Pauline’s film.”) The movie’s event status was certified by a TIME cover story; so incendiary was the article’s judicious description of the sex scenes that an unprecedented number of outraged readers canceled their subscriptions.

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Last Tango doesn’t deserve either extreme response. The movie is long and lumpy, with such empty grand gestures as door punching and floor rolling and a few acting arias that show more bravado than behavioral truth. There’s an ill-fitting subplot involving Jean-Pierre Léaud as Jeanne’s filmmaker fiancé, who wants to make a documentary about her life (the exact same notion that informed I Am Curious.) But Tango exerts an enduring fascination: for its ruthless intimacy, for the elegance of its spare, swank visual style, for the master class Brando gives in character improvisation — particularly in one four-minute closeup in which Paul recalls the indignities of his youth — and for the beguiling mixture of kewpie doll and sex toy that was Maria Schneider.

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The daughter of actor Daniel Gélin and model Marie Christine Schneider, Maria spent her teens vagabonding through Montparnasse and Marrakech, living in communes, taking men and women as lovers. With curly hair ringing a puffy, pouty face, and large breasts on an otherwise boyish frame, Schneider telegraphed the try-anything spirit of a sexually swashbuckling age. That wasn’t the image that Bertolucci had hoped to set against the rutting desperation of Paul, Brando’s character. The director originally cast the blond, seraphic Dominique Sanda, who had illuminated his previous film, The Conformist, and who in Last Tango could represent a kind of modern virgin goddess, defiled and then deified by her goat lover. The idea was for Paul to drag Jeanne down sexually to his level — not for him to dive into the lower depths and find her waiting for him.

But Sanda got pregnant (by Brando’s old pal Christian Marquand), and Schneider, 20 at the time, won the job by the ease with which she disrobed at Bertolucci’s request. Undressed, he said, “she became much more natural.” Since Jeanne would be naked in much of the movie — Brando too, but only metaphorically — the director needed an actress who didn’t feel violated every time she had to take her clothes off. A blasé exhibitionist, Schneider fit the bill. Now she had to convince the star she was worthy of spending a film with him. Taking Schneider to a bar, Brando said he wanted her not to talk, just stare at him as hard as she could. She managed the trick, and Schneider recalled, “From then on he was like a daddy.” She said they never had sex, onscreen or off. Quoting Schneider from the TIME story: ” ‘He’s almost 50, you know, and’ — she runs her hand down her torso to her midriff— ‘he’s only beautiful to here.’ ”

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The Paul-Jeanne affair begins in animal passion (they have sex within moments of meeting), blossoms in moments of erotic caprice (“That’s your happiness,” he says in their postcoital bliss, “and my hap-penis“), sours as they swap insults (she telling him he’s old, he responding, “In 10 years you’re gonna be playin’ soccer with your tits”) and reaches its brutal nadir in the sodomy scene. When Jeanne accepts her fiancé’s proposal of marriage, Paul realizes that she means more to him than a vessel of anonymous sex. Suddenly he’s all charm, gushing with details of his life (“I’ve got a prostate like an Idaho potato, but I’m still a good stickman … Anyway, you dummy, I love you”) and taking her on the last tango that will lead to his death. Her final words: “I don’t know him …”

An instant celebrity, Schneider got another big role in a 1975 film (The Passenger) by a major director (Michelangelo Antonioni) and with an American superstar (Jack Nicholson). But her wild, drug-addled life throttled her career. She walked off one film to enter a mental institution to be with her girlfriend of the moment, and in 1977 she was fired from Luis Buñuel’s That Obscure Object of Desire; Buñuel puckishly replaced her with two actresses alternating in the same part. Bob Guccione offered Schneider the female lead in his 1979 porno-epic Caligula; she rejected it, saying she wanted to be known as an actress, not a sex performer.

“I’m much more free sexually than Bernardo or Brando,” Schneider boasted during the Last Tango furor. Later, though, she bore both men grudges, saying that they “manipulated me, using me without thinking about me. I took years to forgive them.” Nearly 40 years later, upon Schneider’s death, Bertolucci made his mea culpa. “Maria accused me of robbing her of her youth, and only today I ask myself if she wasn’t perhaps right,” he told the Ansa news agency. “Her death arrived too soon, before I could re-embrace her tenderly and tell her that I still felt close to her, and ask her at least once for her forgiveness.”

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We do well to remember that, in the great movie revolution of the mid-’60s to mid-’70s, intimacy was in large part simple voyeurism, and an actress’s first casualty was her modesty. Stripped naked, literally and often emotionally, she lived out the fantasies and compulsions of the man directing her. All actors are in a sense exhibitionists, parading themselves, costumed only by the characters they play; but the more private the parts they reveal, the more of their secret, vulnerable selves they expose. Some women, like Tura Satana, enjoy the attention; others, like Lena Nyman, take it in stride; still others, like Schneider, feel they’re the victims of cinematic rape. All, though, whether eager volunteers or reluctant draftees, were soldiers in the battle for a free and mature movie culture. Schneider, Satana and Nyman deserve our respect for fighting in the vanguard, on the front lines, of a war over the movies that was won in the ’60s and is largely forgotten today.

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