October 2009 Archives

At this unsure moment, sex doesn't seem to be on everyone's lips. A decade ago, the bodies politic were forever getting it on, at least in the then-pulsating media and groovy groves of academe.

But now the topic has cooled to family-room temperature. Of course, I'm not sure about actual coital statistics -- so this could be a New York Times trend story. It's like when, as a graduate student, I read that hetero anal sex was unusually popular in Europe during the reign of Napoleon. 

So were Empire silhouettes. Any statistical correlation?

Please, historians, where's the ... data?

The wonderful thing about erotic reality is that it rears its ruddy head wherever and whenever it has the chance. So I should have anticipated my initial shock and subsequent delight when, on a random Netflix billet-doux, I saw cinematic drool and lust run rampant in a 1934 pre-Code Paramount feature called Search for Beauty.

That's a nice title, no? It stars Buster Crabbe, well-known even now as a firm aquatic Tarzan, and an unrecognizably blonde Ida Lupino. The movie proposed a contest to choose the most athletic specimens from gymnastic Anglo places such as Scotland and South Africa, and it was in fact a "real" contest -- in which 19-year-old Ann Sheridan won a part, a contract, a life.

Here's the deal. The movie has a scene in which hunky guys show their bare butts. What?!? The gluteal exposure adds nothing to character or plot development, and neither George Cukor nor Mitchell Leisen directed. Towels snap; flesh quivers; it all takes eight or nine seconds. At the time, anyone with a quarter could buy a ticket.

 

There's another scene in which the sad drunken actress Gertrude Michael ogles Crabbe's swimsuit bulges through binoculars. (She has a line like: "Oh, Momma, that's for me," but I didn't write it down, I was too surprised.) But the next photo is better than pert dialogue:

 

The actors above, if alive, must now be in their nineties. Film, of course, simulaneously denies and nails mortality. But how can anyone reject the sweet vitality pictured here, all subject to official and personal erasure?

Let's see if our century's video capabilities have any impact on cross-generational joy:

 

A while back, when it was "leaked" that the 600th issue of Archie comics would be a wedding announcement, I myself made a modest proposal. Today, the New York Times published an Archie follow that pulls my facetious wishful thinking into the real -- albeit comic -- world. Sometimes, buried sentences such as these just cry out for attention:

"The polls that I've seen ran about 80/20, Betty over Veronica, with Jughead continually coming in a strong third," said Mr. [Michael E.] Uslan, a comic-book historian, a longtime "Archie" fan and a producer of the big-screen "Batman" films.

 

A strong third! Right after Veronica! My felt-capped head is reeling. Did other poll choices include Veronica's tycoon father, Mr. Lodge? (I always thought he was really Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr.) Mr. Lodge seems quite svelte, and rich: a catch.

"What is now proved was once only imagined." Yes, William Blake is almost always right.

For an automatic alert when there is a new Out There post, email jiweinste@aol.com.