Surprising Nude Scene
Have you ever been watching a film or television series where a nude scene shows up and kind of takes you by surprise? Or have you been watching something and an actor you never expected to see nude shows up in a scene? I am just trying to think of some and a couple come to mind. Sir John Gielgud is briefly nude as a British Jew sent to a death camp in The Winds of War. Mel Gibson has that brief skinnydipping scene in Gallipoli. I love that the men are nude in that scene as the bullets rain down on them under water. Their human vulnerability and the horror of war is given more power by them being naked. It's so interesting that we don't see Janet Leigh completely nude in the Psycho shower scene, yet we know she's nude and the shower and suggestion of nudity is highly effective even without total exposure.
Glad someone else had the same reaction in Backdraft. That gang shower scene comes up in mind every once in a while. Unexpected and pretty great. Another one is the dorky but awesome movie Starship Troopers. Every time I'm doing squats at gym the goal...never attainable...is to get Casper Van Dien's butt hehe
Glad someone else had the same reaction in Backdraft. That gang shower scene comes up in mind every once in a while. Unexpected and pretty great. Another one is the dorky but awesome movie Starship Troopers. Every time I'm doing squats at gym the goal...never attainable...is to get Casper Van Dien's butt hehe
I was surprised by the nudity in the shower scene in Backdraft. It wasn't designed around sex, it seemed like just a natural depiction of daily life of firefighters.
Yeah, I agree. Do you think it's also to show vulnerability? We think of firefighters sometimes as almost this special breed of human and maybe seeing them briefly naked it reminds us they are ordinary people under those uniforms.
I never understood the skinny dipping scene at the opening of polyanna.https://youtu.be/DwkBbnDVIck.Why would a movie about a girl start off with a picture or a naked boy's butt and all of the boys skinny dipping together?If this was made today, ...
Yeah, thanks for bringing up that skinnydipping scene! I've thought about that one alot and have referenced it in other discussions on nude swimming. Your open-ended comment can be easily answered in that I'm sure it just wouldn't be made today. Just those two seconds of nudity would cause an uproar. It is interesting, as you express, that a movie about a girl would open with naked boys. I've read that it's to show the wholesome innocence of a time gone by. When that movie came out in 1960, I expect that the children's audience, boys or girls, would not have been very accustomed to skinnydipping.
I guess the exception would be rural areas and nude swimming at the YMCA and Boy's Clubs. At the same time, there would have been many parents and grandparents in those audiences who would see that boy's naked butt as an instant reminder of earlier more innocent times. Nostalgia. Polyanna is a wide eyed innocent, who transforms her small world with her own goodness. I guess a secondary question could be, are the naked boys supposed to represent a world we want to harken back to, and a place we want to linger? I think that's the intention, and it has always appealed to me that way. That's the simple explanation and I know from various discussions, others share it. I also wonder if it's supposed to show an innocent and unsupervised masculine "boys will be boys" world, unshamed but also untamed? So it can contrast with Polyanna's femininity. I don't know. I do think it's an interesting choice. I expect that at the time it was accepted and seen as cute and not at all out of the ordinary. It's only now, through the lens of a less nude friendly culture that some see it as almost gratuitous nudity. I wonder if there is some dimension I'm not exploring here about male nudity in a very female centered film? This isn't the place but we could also have a whole discussion on Walt Disney and his choices in imagery.
There is the skinny dipping scene in https://youtu.be/2yXz1r5kn_king scene in Tom Sawyer.Both boys make a point of getting their naked butts out of the water so they are seen on screen.Somehow even if they were boys being boys, it was seen as innocent fun.Naked boy butts were wholesome.
I just watched this and you're right! I've always thought naked boy butts are wholesome and this shows it. I loved reading Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn when I was a boy and I remembered them skinnydipping, it's written in I think Tom Sawyer.
The Victory at Sea series from early 50s: https://archive.org/details/VAS_06_Guadalcanal.At 20:58, the recruits undress and then a lot of adult naked male butts going up stairs.
I just watched this too! It's so interesting how nudity was used and shown so openly. Victory at Sea was on television in the 50s and rebroadcast frequently in the 70s and 80s. It's kind of amazing and unexpected to see it like that. This quick scene, that shows all those recruits walking naked, reminds me of how ordinary and routine male nudity was. Men were so accustomed to seeing each other as boys and men that they are apparently not thrown by it at all. I wonder, if there was a sudden need for a military draft and today's young men had to get naked like that, how they'd handle it. I can only imagine the discomfort they'd probably experience.
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