In 1968, the Motion Picture Association of America (known as the MPAA then, just the MPA now) introduced a movie ratings system. It was done in response to a situation that wasn’t good for filmmakers. The Hays Code had been in use for decades, delineating what was and was not acceptable to show onscreen, with no genuine regard for its context in the story being told. There was also the matter of local censorship boards that would freely edit out content they felt was unacceptable. The new system was designed to self-police, and to provide information to parents so they would have an idea of a film’s potentially objectional content.
Those ratings were G (acceptable for all ages), PG (parental guidance suggested), R (no one under 17 admitted without a parent or adult guardian), and X (adults only, no one under 17 admitted). In what has to rank as one of the biggest blunders in the history of movie-related things, the MPAA got a copyright for all those ratings except the X. That allowed the makers of adult entertainment to self-apply it, and even distort it into the meaningless “XXX” that was often prominently featured on p*rnographic films.
What was meant to help movies intended for adult audiences turned into a burden for those same movies, as the public came to associate the X with truly explicit sexual material. In 1990, the MPAA finally replaced the X with a new NC-17 rating that unfortunately never took off as intended. The following films all received an X rating, some during its optimistic early days, others after it had been tarnished. Several wanted so desperately to avoid the association with adult fare that they opted to hit theaters unrated instead.
The Devils
Photo: Warner Bros.
Ken Russell’s The Devils was not only rated X, it has also largely been kept away from audiences for years. This 1971 religious drama is not available to stream or purchase because of accusations that it’s blasphemous. Vanessa Redgrave plays Sister Jeanne, a lusty, hunchbacked nun who has sexual feelings toward a Catholic priest named Urbain Grandier (Oliver Reed). He’s later accused of witchcraft, which leads to his eventual execution.
Nudity is constant in the film, and it’s often nuns who are shedding their clothing or behaving in an erotic manner. Violence is abundant, as well, with everything from whippings to self-mutilation to outright torture. There’s even a shocking scene where a nun is forcibly given a boiling hot enema. Because all this sex, nudity, and violence is inextricably intertwined with religion, the movie has an edge that even most of the other X-rated releases lack.
The Devils first got Britain’s X rating. It became scandalous immediately, with the Catholic Church condemning it. For the American release, Warner Bros. – to Russell’s great displeasure – chopped a couple of the most extreme moments, most notably one involving a group of naked nuns who become sexual with a statue of Christ. Yet the film got an X rating anyway. That version did hit cinemas domestically, but so did a later R-rated version that had even more material excised. Because of its controversial nature, there were multiple cuts of The Devils. As director Joe Dante put it, “It was the incredible shrinking movie. Every time you saw it, something else was missing!”
Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer
Photo: Greycat Films
Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer was so shocking that it took four whole years before anyone would distribute it. The film was a festival hit starting in 1986, yet unnerved people so deeply with its realistic violence that distributors were afraid to touch it, especially once the MPAA branded it with the X rating. It wasn’t until 1990 that, bolstered by rave reviews, the thriller finally hit theaters in limited release. Michael Rooker gives a chilling performance as Henry Lucas, a serial killer who forms a connection with a dealer named Otis (Tom Towles). Together, they go on a murder spree.
Those killings are presented in a stark manner that almost feels like documentary. One of the most harrowing sequences finds the men breaking into a house and videotaping themselves as they brutally execute the family living there. Because of the violence and the manner in which director John McNaughton filmed it, Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer was denied an R rating. Critic Roger Ebert reported that the ratings board said there was actually no way it could ever be cut where they’d give it an R. That’s how gut-wrenching it was. In lieu of going out with the X, the filmmakers opted to release unrated, with a self-administered warning on ads saying, “This is not a film for children. No one under 17 will be admitted.”
Last Tango in Paris
Photo: United Artists
The X rating was perfect for the late 1960s and early 1970s. The sexual revolution was in full swing, and filmmakers increasingly wanted to deal with sexuality. Bernardo Bertolucci was one of them. His 1972 Last Tango in Paris was a landmark work in erotic cinema. Marlon Brando stars – and allegedly did Method work – as Paul, an American expatriate living and working in France. He begins a torrid affair with a young local woman, Jeanne (Maria Schneider). The two don’t even exchange names because it’s supposed to be a no-strings-attached deal. Nevertheless, emotions get in the way, leading to a painful breakup and Paul’s eventual slaying at Jeanne’s hand.
Bertolucci didn’t waste the chance to take advantage of the cinematic liberation of the time. Last Tango‘s sex scenes are explicit, with the most well-known involving the couple utilizing butter in the act. Material along those lines made the X rating appropriate, as did a scene where Paul sexually assaults Jeanne. The movie’s tone, which mixes eroticism and anti-eroticism in a manner designed to make viewers uncomfortable, solidified the need for a more restrictive rating. It earned many rave reviews, but also condemnations that accused it of being p*rnographic. Such controversy created lines around the block at theaters showing the picture.
A Clockwork Orange
A Clockwork Orange is also ranked #36 of 160 on The 150+ Best Futuristic Dystopian Movies
Photo: Warner Bros.
Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange is the rare film that still has the power to provoke and outrage audiences decades after its initial release. This 1971 drama stars Malcolm McDowell as Alex, the leader of a gang called the Droogs. They’re hooligans who like to get drunk and then engage in, as the character famously puts it, “a little of the old ultraviolence.” Alex is eventually recruited for a scientific experiment designed to rid him of his aggressive tendencies.
The movie hit theaters just three years after the establishment of the rating system, and was precisely the kind of thing the X was designed for. A Clockwork Orange is a serious work that happens to contain horrific acts of violence, not the least of which is the vicious beating of a rich lady with a heavy sculpture. There’s also some graphic sexuality onscreen. The media was not quick to embrace the idea of an adults-only rating, and many outlets refused to accept ads for the film during its original run. This led Kubrick to substitute 30 seconds of less explicit sexual material about eight months later, so the rating could be dropped to an R. It was an early case of the ongoing struggle that would eventually lead to the demise of the X.
Performance
Photo: Warner Bros.
Performance is the story of Chas (James Fox), a gangster who hides out in the home of rock star Turner (Mick Jagger). All kinds of debauchery takes place, much of it also involving Pherber (Anita Pallenberg), a woman who lives with Turner. There were plenty of signs that the graphic sex and equally graphic violence were going to cause a problem when a large portion of the audience walked out during a preview screening and the wife of a studio executive allegedly vomited in horror. Warner Bros. subsequently shelved the film for two years before releasing it.
It has long been rumored that the wild sex scenes in Performance were real. Co-director Nicholas Roeg once claimed that when he went to pick up the developed film from the lab, he found nervous employees destroying the reels with hammers because they feared that they would be arrested for possession of p*rnographic material. When asked about the sequences, Jagger has always cheekily refused to confirm or deny their authenticity. Whatever the case, viewers get an eyeful during a lovemaking scene with three participants, as well as copious amounts of nudity. Although subsequent home video versions of Performance were rated R, the original release – once it finally made its way into cinemas – more than earned its X.
Fritz the Cat
Photo: Cinemation Industries
Fritz the Cat holds the distinction of being the first animated movie to receive the X rating. Ralph Bakshi’s boundary-pushing 1972 feature was so proud of this fact that it used the tagline “We’re not rated X for nothin’, baby!” on its poster. Based on a character created by cartoonist R. Crumb, the film follows the titular feline as he romances a string of lady cats, drops out of college, and goes through a series of adventures that turn him into a revolutionary. The intent was to spoof the counterculture movement that sprang up in the 1960s.
You couldn’t get further away from a Disney picture than Fritz the Cat. It has copious nudity and explicit animated sex, including a bathtub romp between Fritz, two female cats, and a kangaroo. Characters’ genitalia is seen throughout this and similar sequences. Violence, substance use, and profanity are also pervasive. The movie’s satire of racial issues includes politically incorrect images and exaggerated stereotypes, among them a woman in blackface. The idea of an X-rated cartoon caught the public’s curiosity, leading to a worldwide box office gross of $90 million. Fritz the Cat became the most successful independently produced animated movie ever.
One person who wasn’t enamored with the film was R. Crumb. Displeased over how his work was distorted into something hyper-sexualized – and angry about Bakshi cutting a deal for rights to the character behind his back – he sued to have his name taken off the credits.
Female Trouble
Photo: New Line Cinema
John Waters has long had the nickname “the Pope of Trash,” so it’s entirely appropriate that he once made an X-rated film. 1974’s Female Trouble stars longtime collaborator Divine as Dawn Davenport, a teenage delinquent who runs away from home, gets pregnant, and falls under the spell of Donald and Donna Dasher (David Lochary and Mary Vivian Pearce), two photographers who lure her into a life of crime and take pictures of her misdeeds. The fame-hungry Dawn eats it up.
Like all John Waters movies, Female Trouble is crude, tasteless, and hysterically funny. Who else could conceive of a sex scene that takes place on a filthy mattress in the middle of a garbage dump? Or a woman who lives in a giant birdcage and has her hand chopped off in retaliation for throwing acid in Dawn’s face? Or a scene where Dawn throws an epic tantrum because her parents didn’t get her “cha cha heels” for Christmas? Female Trouble has sex and violence, yet all of it is intentionally over-the-top and unrealistic, especially compared to most other X-rated features. Waters’s cheerfully vulgar tone, however, made the ratings board believe it should not be accessible to children or teenagers in any way.
I Am Curious (Yellow)
Photo: Grove Press
For a time in the late ‘60s and early ’70s, sexually explicit foreign films became chic. People went to see them for lusty reasons, but also to feel sophisticated. I Am Curious (Yellow) benefitted from that, becoming an unlikely hit in 1967. The movie intentionally blurs fiction and reality, focusing on an actress named Lena (Lena Nyman) who has an affair with her director, Vilgot Sjöman (played by Vilgot Sjöman, who also directed), then moves on to a fellow actor, Börje (Börje Ahlstedt). During this time, she also becomes actively involved in political causes.
That film-with-a-film conceit took care of the “artsy” side of I Am Curious (Yellow). The sexual side, which easily got it an X rating, features frequent shots of Lena nude, various forms of non-traditional intercourse, and an act of lovemaking in a tree. One particular scene in which Lena kisses Börje on his flaccid private parts, was so notoriously graphic that a judge labeled it “obscene,” and police showed up at a Boston theater to seize prints of the movie. What followed was a protracted legal battle that went all the way up to the United States Supreme Court. They ruled that showing I Am Curious (Yellow) was not obscene and therefore legal, meaning theaters could continue to program it.
The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover
Photo: Miramax Films
The case of The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover helped usher in the NC-17 rating. This 1989 Peter Greenaway film is a serious work that earned rave reviews from critics, yet hit a snag when the MPAA branded it with the X. Outrage over the perceived injustice helped convince them that a new rating was needed. Michael Gambon stars as Albert Spica, a gluttonous and mean-spirited gangster who eats at a restaurant he owns every night, with food prepared specifically for him by his cook, Richard Boarst (Richard Bohringer). His wife Georgina (Helen Mirren) takes a lover, Michael (Alan Howard), because she’s so put off by his ways.
Aside from the abundant sex and nudity, the film contains two highly disturbing scenes that raised the hackles of the ratings board. In one, Michael is killed by Albert’s men, who forcibly shove pages of a book down his throat, causing him to choke. That leads to the second scene, wherein Georgina asks Richard to cook Michael’s body and feed it to her husband in retaliation. In the final moments, she forces Albert at gunpoint to take a bite, then shoots him because he’s a “cannibal.”
The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover is done with a pitch-black satiric tone and a Grand Guignol style. When it earned the X, Miramax Films had to decide whether to cut it to an R or release it unrated, as many mainstream theaters refused to play X-rated fare given the now-pervasive association with adult films. To preserve Greenaway’s vision, they chose the latter. Critics like Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel used the occasion to push for a new “adults only” rating, and the NC-17 was introduced the following year, in part from pushback along those lines.
Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song
Photo: Cinemation Industries
Melvin Van Peebles’s Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song was a landmark in Black cinema. Although certainly tame by today’s standards, the combination of violence and a “stick it to the white cops” message was nothing short of incendiary in 1971. Van Peebles stars as Sweet Sweetback, a well-endowed performer in a brothel sex show. He’s set up to take the rap for a murder he didn’t commit by two white police officers. Sweetback ends up savagely beating both of them with the same handcuffs they’ve shackled him with. This sends him on the run, with more cops in hot pursuit.
Scenes of the lead character engaging in sexual activity and killing cops prompted the MPAA to slap Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song with an X. An opening scene of a 13-year-old boy (played by Van Peebles’s son Mario) having sex with a hooker was a particular sticking point, for obvious reasons. The filmmaker wasn’t discouraged by the rating, though. In fact, he saw an opportunity to reinforce the movie’s message. Van Peebles came up with the idea to advertise the film with the tagline “Rated X by an All-White Jury” – the implication being that the ratings board itself was racist and determined to make it hard to see a picture with a message of Black power. It worked, and the movie became both a smash hit and an important piece of cinema history.
if….
Photo: Paramount Pictures
if… takes place at an English boarding school. The older students, known as the Whips, like to torment the first-year students, referred to as the Scum. Malcolm McDowell plays Mick Travis, a rebellious teen who gets sick of this dynamic and the administration that allows it to continue. He therefore leads a few of his friends in a revolt against the school. It turns bloody after they discover a stockpile of weapons.
The issue with if… was that Mick is the protagonist of the movie, so the idea of rooting for him, even after he and the others open fire on a crowd of people that includes children, is difficult to swallow. The story is meant to be a satire of the traditions and abuses of power inside British schools. Not everyone gets satire, though. That quality guaranteed an X rating. The violence shown onscreen is meant to be disturbing, in order to get the themes across, and it did indeed disturb enough to warrant the most restrictive rating both in America and England.
Beyond the Valley of the Dolls
Photo: 20th Century Fox
Beyond the Valley of the Dolls has the distinction of having been written by legendary film critic Roger Ebert. He was a pal of Russ Meyer, the exploitation director known for making wild movies that often centered around his affection for large-breasted women. This 1970 comedy is an in-name-only sequel to the screen adaptation of Jacqueline Susann’s book Valley of the Dolls. It follows the exploits of three young women who bring their rock band to Hollywood in search of fame and fortune. Instead, they end up lost in a sea of sex, drugs, and general perversion.
The film has enough of those things, along with nudity from the aforementioned buxom women, to easily nab the X rating. Beyond the Valley of the Dolls is not necessarily as graphic as other films, but the pervasive air of sexuality makes it feel like it is. As with all of Meyer’s pictures, it oozes sex. The director had an interesting, and typically Meyer-esque, reaction to the restrictive rating. According to Ebert, Meyer and the studio were shooting for an R, and when they didn’t get it, he wanted to re-edit the movie to include more sex and nudity, so it would at least maximize the X rating. The studio, in a hurry to get the movie into theaters, declined his request.
Midnight Cowboy
Photo: United Artists
Midnight Cowboy remains the first and only X-rated movie to win best picture at the Academy Awards. Among the first group of films to receive the new rating, it’s a fine example of what the X was intended to represent – a serious, artistic-minded work designed to be viewed solely by adults. Jon Voight plays Joe Buck, a New York City hustler who ends up living in an abandoned building with con man Ratzo Rizzo (Dustin Hoffman). The story tracks what happens to them as Joe experiences ups and downs on the job and Ratzo sees his health decline.
A movie that provided an unflinching look at sex work was uncommon in 1969, when Midnight Cowboy came out. It earned rave reviews for its frankness and authenticity, as well as for the superb performances by Voight and Hoffman. Nothing could have been better for the X during its infancy than having a movie with that rating take home the top prize at the Oscars. Everyone could see that it afforded filmmakers an opportunity to tackle heavier, more challenging issues in a mature way. That, of course, didn’t last, so this John Schlesinger-directed classic is a fascinating example of what could, and should, have been.
The Girl on a Motorcycle
Photo: Warner Bros.
The very first movie of any sort to receive the new X rating was The Girl on a Motorcycle. It didn’t keep that rating – or the title, for that matter – very long. Directed by Jack Cardiff, it stars singer Marianne Faithfull as Rebecca, an unhappily married woman in France who puts on her leather, hops on her motorcycle, and rides off to see her lover Daniel in Germany. Drug use and love-making follow; flashbacks reveal how she and Daniel met and how she got her beloved bike.
The Girl on a Motorcycle earned an X rating for full frontal female nudity, which was highly uncommon onscreen at the time, as well as for other sexual content. It hit theaters that way initially. Then, apparently wanting to make it available to a wider audience, Warner Bros. edited the film slightly to get an R rating. They released that version under a completely different title, Naked Under Leather. Ironically, the title of the R-rated cut sounded more appropriate for the X-rated cut, and vice versa.
The Evil Dead
Photo: New Line Cinema
One of the long-time complaints about the X rating was that the MPAA was quicker to slap it on independent productions than on studio films. Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead may have partially fallen victim to that. The movie was made outside the studio system, with Raimi and his team raising the money from investors. Bruce Campbell plays Ash, a guy who takes his girlfriend and some pals to a cabin in the woods. There, they find a cursed book known as the Necronomicon. After opening and reading it, a malevolent force is unleashed, leading to gruesome violence.
The Evil Dead was gory, but not necessarily any worse than many of the slasher flicks that were popular at the time. Raimi’s visual style certainly rendered it more intense, though. The primary reason for the X rating was a scene in which a woman is violently sexually assaulted by a possessed tree. It was a disturbing sight that kicked the story out of traditional horror and into the realm of something genuinely upsetting. Receiving an X may have limited The Evil Dead‘s box office, but it proved a big aid on home video, which was quickly becoming a hot thing. The movie was a rental smash, with horror buffs eager to check out this “extreme” work. It has now, of course, become a genre classic.
Dawn of the Dead
Dawn of the Dead is also ranked #4 of 125 on The Top 100+ Zombie Movies Of All Time
Photo: United Film Distribution Company
George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead practically invented the zombie subgenre, establishing a lot of the rules and conventions that are still used to this day. The 1968 release was eerie and tense, but not really gory. Romero went the opposite way for 1978’s Dawn of the Dead. This installment is part horror movie, part social satire. It revolves around a bunch of people who get trapped in a shopping mall with encroaching zombies. They have to fight for their lives inside this bastion of consumerism.
Even though it has moments of levity, Dawn of the Dead‘s graphic violence went beyond the bounds of its R-rated counterparts. It contained images like a man’s head being literally blown apart by a shotgun and a zombie having the top of his head lopped off by a helicopter rotor. Moments like these led the MPAA to brand it with an X. That didn’t sit well with Romero and his producers. They told the board to pound sand, releasing their movie unrated, so as not to face the stigma the rating had generated by that point.
Greetings
Photo: Sigma III
It might shock you to learn that the first American film to receive the X rating was from director Brian De Palma and starred Robert De Niro. That film was 1968’s Greetings, in which three friends attempt to avoid being drafted into the Vietnam war. There’s not really a formal plot here; it’s more episodic in nature. Co-starring with De Niro are Gerrit Graham and Jonathan Warden. Their characters talk not only about Vietnam, but also about the Kennedy assassination, politics, sex, and just about everything else that was a hot topic in the late 1960s.
Rather than any one particular scene, it was the overall tone of Greetings that scored it the X. There’s a subplot involving a “smut peddler” played by Allen Garfield, plus a scene where Graham’s character draws on the body of a nude woman in his attempt to disprove the Warren Commission’s “single bullet theory” in the JFK killing. There’s additionally a great deal of frank sexuality. Perhaps fittingly, Greetings was the first of several times De Palma would confront the MPAA and their harshest rating. Dressed to Kill, Body Double, and Scarface would all earn the X during their initial passes in front of the board.
Medium Cool
Photo: Paramount Pictures
Medium Cool casts Robert Forster as John Cassellis, a cameraman for a Chicago television station. He can be a little too obsessed with his job, focusing so intently on getting good shots that he does things that skirt on the unethical. After a row with his employer, he gets a freelance assignment to cover the 1968 Democratic National Convention, the explosive event in which thousands of Vietnam War protestors clashed with police, turning the city’s streets into a virtual battleground.
The X rating given to the film by the MPAA was controversial. Ostensibly it was due to adult language and some full-frontal nudity during a sex scene between John and a nurse named Ruth (Marianna Hill). Wexler wasn’t buying that, though. Years later, after Medium Cool had been re-rated R, he claimed that “what no one had the nerve to say was that it was a political X.” In other words, he believed that the ratings board was conservative and therefore gave it an X because they disliked or were made uncomfortable by the hard-edged, liberal exploration of war, racial issues, and poverty.
