For our final Skin-depth look of 2018—just under the wire, I might add—let's have some sleazy fun. We covered a lot of sleaze early in this column from such masters as Verhoeven, Schrader, and De Palma, but it's gotten pretty artsy since then. Let's regress, then, with the work of one of the absoluteexperts in highbrow sleaze: Adrian Lyne.
Nearly 40 by the time he made his feature directorial debut, Lyne is perhaps more comfortable working in "adult fare" because he was one when his career began. He has always tended to make movies for grown-ups, a genre that's all but disappeared in this day and age (this year's Widows being a notable exception that proves the rule).
Lyne's eye for composition and ability to coax fantastic performances from his lead females has earned himrespect in equal measurefrom both critics and his peers. Like Verhoeven, he's also directed some absolute box office juggernauts: Flashdance and Fatal Attraction were among the Top 3 highest grossing films the year they were released, and Indecent Proposal was the sixth highest grossing movie of 1993.
So why doesn't anyone really talk about him? Why is he sort of an also-ran to some of his British peers like Alan Parker, Stephen Frears, and Mike Leigh? And why hasn't he directed a film in nearly twenty years? Let's at least attempt to answer some of these questions while talking about the way he uses sex and nudity in his films...
Flashdance
Following his skinless debut feature Foxes, Lyne caught the eye of mega-producers-in-the-making Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer, who hired him to direct theirdebut film under their new producing label. The film would also be the second for superstar screenwriter-to-be Joe Eszterhas, doing a page one rewrite of a script by Tom Hedley (Circle of Two).
18 year old Jennifer Beals won the lead role of Alex Owens, a steelworker by day and exotic dancer by night who is indeed a "Maniac" on the dance floor. Those dance moves were left to several professionals, including Marine Jahan who would finally get her face seen in her next film, Walter Hill's Streets of Fire. In retrospect, it's a tad ridiculous that they thought nobody would notice at the time...
While the film is very sexually charged, the actual nudity in the film is confined toa handful of scenes featuringuncredited actresses. A few that did get credit, however, include softcore icon Monique Gabrielle—who would explode thanks to the following year's Bachelor Party...
As well as the late Sunny Johnson, who would tragically die just a year after the film's release due to a cerebral hemorrhage at the age of 30...
Flashdance would become the third highest grossing film of 1983—behind only Return of the Jedi and that year's Best Picture winner Terms of Endearment—and its success sent Beals, Eszterhas, and Lyne's careers soaring...
9 1/2 Weeks
Though her career was nearly a decade old by the time she signed on to play Elizabeth in this 9 1/2 Weeks, Kim Basinger wasn't much more than a glorified day player and supporting actress in most of her work. Shebecame a world class sex symbol and the go-to seductress for years to come thanks to her work in this film. Loosely based on a true story, the film chronicles a torrid love affair between Elizabeth and John (Mickey Rourke) that lasts the length of the title, during which time she is at his beck and call in all manner of sexual experimentation.
In real life, the woman on whom Basinger's character is based was kept handcuffed and basically held prisoner during this time, ending up in the hospital at the end of the affair. While Lyneskirts these rather problematic issues in the film itself, he was apparently something of a tyrant with Basinger on set, treating her in a similar manner to the way her character is treated. Whether or not this elicited a better performance from Basinger is up for debate, but she maintains that this isher favoritefilm in which she stars.
Selling a rather dark premise as a piece of erotica means that the sexual content has to cure a multitude of sins. Thankfully the film has some amazingly sexy moments, three of which have transcended the film itself and become iconic in their own right. First is the ice cube scene at the 27 minute mark, brilliantly parodied several years later in Hot Shots!...
Then, of course, there's Basinger's naked dance to Joe Cocker's cover of "You Can Leave Your Hat On," a song popularized again a decade later in The Full Monty...
But the coup de grâce comes an hour and twelve minutes in, when the two fuck like animals in a rainy stairwell. This is one of the hottest scenes ever put on film and seeing cunnilingus in a mainstream film is always welcome, particularly in an age when that sort of thing wasn't depicted on film as much as it is now...
Completed and originally scheduled for release in the late summer of 1985, the film would need many cuts and several different versions were prepared and rejected by the MPAA, pushing the film's release into the winter of 1986. This led to its rather paltry take of a little more than six million dollars at the box office against a budget of $17 million.
The film's box office failure didn't dampen Lyne's prospects, however, as the biggest movie of his career was right around the corner...
Fatal Attraction
How does a director go from successful to respected, though? How does one make that leap? For Lyne, it was by directing a film that was still steeped in the sleaziness with which he made a name for himself, yet respectable enough to crossover into both critical and mass appeal: Fatal Attraction. According to IMDb, more than 20 directors—including Brian De Palma and John Carpenter—passed on the film before Lyne stepped behind the camera.
Thanks to an uncredited rewrite by Wrath of Khan's Nicholas Meyer, this thriller got a dose of respectability with somevery well observed dialogue in place of the typical erotica schmaltz one would find in great supply at the time. Michael Douglas—who would earn an Oscar for his other 1987 film, Wall Street—plays Dan Gallagher, a relatable family man who gets drunk one night while his family is out of town and ends up banging his colleague Alex (Glenn Close).
Their first sex scene together finds them back at Dan's place for a frantic fuck in his kitchen sink, among other places in the house...
Their torrid affair continues over the next several days until Dan's wife Beth (an Oscar nominatedAnne Archer) returns home and Dan tries to break things off with Alex. The cracks in her façade begin to show...
Fatal Attraction originally ended with Alex committing suicide but framing Dan for the crime. Beth then discovers a tape wherein Alexthreatened Danwith this exact scenario and presumably gets him exonerated. Test audiences apparently found this too bleak, despite the eventualconclusion we reachbeing more or less the same—without turning Beth into a murderer, I might add. So reshoots were called for, which Lyne participated in after being paid a reported $1.5 million, and we're forever stuck with this faux happy ending.
An absolute box office behemoth, Fatal Attraction was the second highest grossing film of 1987 behind only Three Men and a Baby. It also earned six Oscar nominations, including Lyne's one and only nomination for Best Director. Still a gold standard thriller to this day, it is perhaps most dated by its treatment of a mentally unstable woman as the villain. Nevertheless, it is so far above average within the genre, you can almost forgive its handful of issues.
Jacob's Ladder
The world now his oyster following two box office smashes, and only one bump in the road, Lyne put all his collateral behind the psychological thriller Jacob's Ladder from writer Bruce Joel Rubin (Ghost). Perhaps the least sleazy movie of Lyne's career, this 1990film is a waking nightmare that lingers with the audience long after it's over. Tim Robbins plays Vietnam vet Jacob Singer, whose post-war life is becoming increasingly haunted by horrifying visions.
The film wrestles with a lot of issues from the use of hallucinogenic drugs on soldiers duringVietnam to the Biblical allegory to which the title alludes. There's a lot of movie packed into this film, andthe film apparentlylost around twenty minutes of footage—mostly in the third act—just prior to its release due to studio demanded cuts.Unsurprisingly there's little sex or nudity to be found here, though the late, great Elizabeth Peña does have a handful of topless scenes in the first third of the film...
Bad timing and a series of false starts delayed the movie past the Vietnam craze of the late 80s and—as astutely pointed out by Robbins in a 2015 interview—in the rather patriotic run-up to the first Gulf War, audiences largely rejected this baldly anti-war film. It remains something of an anomaly on his directorial c.v. and though the lack of sexseems tosuggest he was running from certain perceptions of his work at the time, there's no denying that it is as visually arresting as any film he ever made.
Indecent Proposal
Leave it to another steamy "adult" film to save the day. Lyne's career is defined by its ups and downs, and sadly the ups in the latter part of his career never got bigger than this 1993 smash hit. The ultimate wish fulfillment fantasy film, Indecent Proposal was the famous "I'll pay you a million dollars to sleep with your wife" flick that launched a thousand pre-internet memes. Robert Redford's billionaire becomes infatuated with Demi Moore's modest real estate broker, and hepresents her husband, Woody Harrelson's equally modest architect, with the titular conundrum.
That the "poor people" in this movie are a real estate broker and an architect should tell you something about how dated this film feels twenty five years after it was made.There is surprisingly little nudity in the film, likely thanks to having a female screenwriter in Amy Holden Jones. It's mostly suggestive, never showing the act between anyone other than Demi and Woody, who have sex on the floor just five minutes into the film, and are shown having an awful lot of fun doing so...
Like Verhoeven, who feels (and looks) like a cousin to Lyne, he's unafraid to make the sex look pleasurable and fun in his films. This is what separates him from the pack when it comes to the way he depicts sex in his films—at least, for a while anyway. Things will take a turn eventually, but it's interesting to note how he's riding the line between respectability and sleazy, and managing to keep these scenes firmly in the former by demonstrating the pleasurability of sex. Very few American directors ride this line successfully, it's mostly non-Americans who keep things more respectable than sleazy.
Though mostly forgotten now, Indecent Proposal wasonly bested at the box office that year by such juggernauts as Jurassic Park and Mrs. Doubtfire. That is honestly just as well as the film isn't quite up to snuff with Lyne's films that came before. This was the beginning of the end for him creatively, and he'd really never regain his footing from an audience perspective either. The film is probably better remembered now for the countless references and spoofs it spawned over the next few years. One also cannot help but love that Woody Harrelson himself participated in a parody of this just three years later in Kingpin...
Lolita (1997)
The good times come to an abrupt end right around here. Lyne takes all of the goodwill he'd earned over the years and poured it into what he hoped would be the definitive adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov's most famous novel, "Lolita." Lyne forgot, however, that if Stanley Kubrick had already tried to adapt this novel and couldn't fully make it work, it was probably a lost cause.
Persuaded by his Reversal of Fortune co-star Glenn Close to work with Lyne, Jeremy Irons steps into the lead role of Humbert Humbert, the man whose sexual maturity never reached beyond his middle school years, thus dooming him to a life of criminality. In a cheeky bit of casting—considering her own real life role as Lolita to Don Johnson—Melanie Griffith takes the role of Charlotte Haze, the landlady who welcome Humbert into her home and eventually her bed, unaware that he's (not so) subtly pursuing her 14 year old daughter Dolores (Dominique Swain,only one year older than that at the time).
A body double was used for Swain's nude scene in the film and a pillow was placed in Irons' lap anytime Swain is seated in it or positioned romantically with the actor. It had to have been a challenge to shoot, begging the question of whether we ever needed another adaptation of Nabokov's novel. Curiously there's more male nudity than female nudity on display, with Irons flaunting his ass and Frank Langella letting it all hang out as Clare Quilty.
The less said about this film, the better, other than to say that it only had a limited theatrical release—laughably as an awards qualifying run—which netted it a grand total of(say it in Dr. Evil's voice)"one million dollars" against a budget reportedly well over $60 million. It was eventually shown in America on Showtime in 1997, but it was more of a curiosity at that point than something people actively wanted to see. Whether or not this ruined Lyne's career is up for debate, as he did make one more film after this, but it definitely tarnished his reputation.
Unfaithful
Lyne had always followed up a flop with a smash hit in the past, so why not do it again, he must have thought. This loose adaptation of Claude Chabrol's 1969 filmThe Unfaithful Wife, this flick rides that line between respectable and sleaze once again,staying on the right side of that equation most of the time. Lyne directed Diane Lane to her first—and shockingly, to date, only—Oscar nomination for this 2002 thriller for grown ups thatopened the week after Spider-Man broke every opening weekend record in history.
Lane and Richard Gere play Connie and Edward, a married couple with their fair share of problems.Connie leaves home one day to find something that will put a spark back in her life and she finds it in the form of Olivier Martinez's Paul. The two begin one of those patented Adrian Lyne torrid affairs, with the laughable conceit that Lane is substantially older than Martinez—despite her being only a year older in real life.
Lane was 36 when she played Connie, which is of course not even remotely cougar-ish, but in terms of the way Hollywood executives view actresses, youcould easily reverse those numbers.She is impossibly sexy in this film, and while there's not nearly as much nudity as you seem to think there is—Lyneat times treats her breasts like Spielberg shot the shark in Jaws—there are some unspeakably gorgeous shots of her body in this film...
40 minutes in, Laneshe rides home on the subway fantasizing about her first encounter with Paul, and the scene stands alongside the most erotic scenes Lyne has ever put on film, and there's no nudity in it...
Don't get me wrong, there's plenty of Diane Lane naked in this flick...
...it's just not top of mind for Lyne. He seemed to be moving into a phase where nudity wasn't needed for the eroticism to play, but he abruptly stopped making movies after this. I'm not sure why this was the end of the road. He was apparently prepping a film back in 2013 titled Deep Water, but nothing ever came of it. It's a shame too, because we've now been cheated out of some great movies for grown ups over the last sixteen-plus years. It's a genre that's sorely missed, and it could really use someone like Lyne to revive it.
