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of this erotic dream dizzy with desire, convinced that, at last, I’d experienced the
real thing. This
was what it was all about—men and women together, the great guarded secret of what they did and howthey did it when it didn’t have to be done in the backseat of a car or in the uncertain privacy of somebody’s parents’ living room.
    What did I see that was so arousing? It wasn’t the few quick glimpses of nudity, nor the occasional caress that freely strayed across the woman’s body. Rather it was the natural ease with which this man and this woman carried it off. So cool, so casual. When we see the lovers in the tub, we can tell they’re really bare; there are no strategically positioned bubbles or reflections. But the camera, so cleverly handled, doesn’t strain to reveal or conceal. When the woman rises from the water to reach for a towel, once again the camera is totally relaxed. It doesn’t stare salaciously—the way I would’ve stared salaciously. Rather, like the true eye of an experienced lover, it scans the passage of her breasts, her navel, moving across this charged terrain with matter-of-fact nonchalance. Intimacies like these, the film seemed to say, are the unspectacular facts of adult life. One takes them in easy stride. For didn’t we, the audience, know all about these things?
    Like hell we did!
Not me. Not my friends. Nevertheless, the film invited a blasé acceptance. And it was getting what it asked for. Because (my God!) in a theater filled to capacity, no horse laughs, no wolf whistles, never a giggle or gasp. This was some classy audience. Of course, all of us, adolescent and adult, were being artfully cued. Perhaps I even knew it. But I also enjoyed it, especially as the cueing was being done by this stunning actress who played the woman, Jeanne Moreau—or, as I remembered her name then, “jeany More-oh.” No great beauty by Hollywood standards. A plain face with bad skin. An unremarkable body. Rather limp and smallish breasts. But precisely for that reason, she took on a pungent reality. There could actually
be
such a woman. This is how she’d act in her bedroom, in her bathroom. And the way she moved, with such compliant carnality, I could imagine she was indeed naked under her clothes. Who could believe such a thing of Doris Day?
    My buddies, I recall, were unimpressed. The film held no magic for them. They thought it compared poorly with Tempest Storm’s more ritualized gyrations. (Also, they were outraged by the absence of popcorn.) But I left the theater intoxicated with Jeanne Moreau, by her suave, slightly bored permissiveness. I wanted more of these films. I wanted more of these women. Which was too much to expect of drowsy Modesto. But when, soon after, I moved to Los Angeles to start college, I was on the lookout for all the foreign movies I couldfind and so finally made my way to The Classic, where I quickly caught up on the whole postwar repertory of French and Italian films. I took in the heavy as well as the light—
Shoeshine
and
Open City,
along with
Beauties of the Night
and
House of Pleasure
—because you could never tell. In the middle of a grindingly morose neorealist drama, some deliciously unashamed sexual byplay (all I was really watching for) might suddenly light the screen.
    By then, there were opportunists by the score cashing in on the belated American sexual revolution, filling slick magazines and slicker movies with topless vixens, buxom playmates. A few years farther down the line we would be treated to a surfeit of X-rated skin flicks that loaded the screen with genital gymnastics and full-frontal gynecology. But I’m recalling an illusion of another order, one that worked by understatement and elegant insouciance. Sometimes, in the Italian films of that period, the passions of men and women were lent a more bracing physicality by being blended into the rough grain of everyday life.