In "A View from the Bridge," a violent Raf Vallone attacks handsome young Jean Sorel, growling, "I'll show you what you're gonna be -- what you are -- what you are!" And kisses him brutally on the mouth as Carol Lawrence screams in horror.
And in the quirky buddy movie "Thunderbolt and Lightfoot," Jeff Bridges taunts George Kennedy by clamping his hand over Kennedy's mouth and kissing it. "I'll kill you for that," screams Kennedy.
"I think Americans are perhaps more scared of their sexuality," suggests gay British director John Schlesinger. "They're prepared to show violence of all kinds, but when it comes to sexuality I think America is both self-righteous and tries to bury it as if it didn't exist."
Schlesinger's "Sunday, Bloody Sunday" is one of the first examples of a film in which homosexuality is presented simply as a part of the lives of the characters, without making a point about it.
Schlesinger describes his battle with the screenwriter, who wanted the gay kiss played "in long shot and silhouette, and I said 'no way.' It should just happen. And that's what we did.""There's a world of difference," says Susie Bright, "between how an audience looks at two men getting it on, and two women getting it on."
As in "Personal Best," when Mariel Hemingway makes love to Patrice Donnelly, "there's a comfort with female nudity and female girlishness and girlie bonding that can be sexy, and it can be completely palatable, even erotic."
On the other hand, says Whoopi Goldberg, "straight men are more uncomfortable with two men making love because somehow that means you're weak." In contrast, she describes her own love scene with Margaret Avery in "The Color Purple" as being less about sex than about intimacy, which is acceptable between women.
Similarly, when Susan Sarandon "put the kiss in at the end of 'Thelma and Louise'... my feeling was that they were beyond sexuality, that it was a kind of love... they were really there for each other in the tradition of 'Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,' except they didn't go down in a rain of bullets."
She speculates that had Butch and Sundance kissed at the end of that movie, "they would have had more reason to shoot them."
Reflecting on her love scene with Catherine Deneuve in the elegant vampire movie "The Hunger," Sarandon conjectures, "I don't think, for better or worse, that women are taken very seriously in this area... it's actually something that straight men can watch and not be threatened by, and straight men are the ones that are propelling the industry forward...
And I suppose when you go to the movies and you see men being affectionate... besides the sex, just the affection itself is just too much. Guys are supposed to be strong and unfeeling."