In 1965, a visit to Times Square in Manhattan offered old school sordidness at its best. With a giant Camel cigarette
billboard actually puffing real smoke rings from the mouth of a giddy looking man looming over the roiling crowds, a boy could
walk the sticky sidewalks and see a carnal world in action everywhere. Nasty little stores sold switchblades, gibbering vagrants
wobbled along in feculent pants tucked with ass pocket whiskey, and, of course, there were the nudie-cutie movie joints for
addicted voyeurs. If you didnt mind stepping over a buzzed out sot in a canary yellow suit, laying prone, eyes rolled back,
arms flung out, to get into a smut joint, Times Square offered the fix. Still, until the release of I, A Woman, a Swedish
subtitled film directed by Mac Ahlberg, erotica had really not gone main stream, or hit the respectable theaters.
I was sixteen at the time, a product of Norwegian culture in Brooklyn, based along Eighth Avenue with over 100,000
children of immigrants living amidst stores, churches and solemn homes where the native tongue still survived. There was even
a Norwegian newspaper called Nordisk Tydende. And even though a shocking number of the girls who attended my church
reminded me of Inger Stevens, sex was flat out repressed. So much so, that I covertly learned about Jane Mansfields nudie
shots in Promises, Promises from the mandatory hidden Playboy and therefore, instantly acquired a preposterous
double life.
Before I, a Woman reached the media, the public and theaters like the Rialto, I had already taken one shameful
excursion to Times Square, at around age 14. Anne Coreo, an aging striptease legend, was starring in This Was Burlesque,
a pretty legitimate production but, complete with its bump and grind band and vaudeville comedians, it also promised real,
live, big, tall, buxom dancers with pasties. And it delivered. Even though I somehow was admitted into the theater, it wasnt
lost on the ticket guy that I had created a humiliating, fake moustache with Times Square kit that included spirit gum.
Boys have always liked to look at girls, but you have to understand that in the first half of the sixties, actresss fantasy
bodies featuring pointy cantilevered brassieres, were actually worshipped by we children of Hefner. But these fantasy
figures were mostly covered up, however scantily, in feature films.
THE MOVIE THAT CHANGED THE WORLD!
Then came
I, A Woman (or
Jeg en Kvinde, in Swedish) starring the luscious Essy Persson. The ads were everywhere,
in all the newspapers, and on posters festooning Times Square. There she was, an evil babe to be sure, with black bangs and
a head tossed back in suggested ecstasy. Essy Persson, who would take it all off and even touch, or be touched by, the loathsome
men in the cast. The plot was simple: A young nurse from a rigid, stifling home leaves her epicene fiancée for a series of
sexual adventures, starting smack dab in the hospital where she works. In one of the most disturbing and memorable scenes
to ever slam into my young mind, I saw the aging, bed ridden patient, leering like a Devil in
Haxan: Witchcraft Through
The Ages softly grasp the thigh of Essy as his fierce pagan eyes hold her in a Dracula stare. He was abominable in the
sense that to me, a Sunday Schooled Norwegian, he represented the brazen, atheist Danes and Swedes. More troubling still,
he was getting what
I wanted.
I watched this filthy old man, played by Bengt Brunskog, his floppy, liver spotted hand inching its way up her thigh, and
felt myself grow sick from outrage and passionate fascination simultaneously. She stands there, in the furtive hospital room,
allowing this eerily silent lecher to finger and probe upward inch by inch. Damn! Ida Lupino would never allow that, I thought.
Nor would Ann Margret, or Natalie Wood, or even Angie Dickenson! The nurses blouse falls away and we see the first big money
shot (for that era, anyway) as the camera probes and leers from the firm breast to the pulsating neck to the orgasmic, beautiful
face. I was lost forever.
Today, this is daytime soap opera material, but back then the Catholic Legion of Decency condemned
I, A Woman in the
strongest possible terms, more franticly even than
Gods Little Acre (below) roughly a decade before (because of Tina
Louise's heaving under stomach-tied shirt). But what
I, A Woman accomplished was momentous. Danes and Swedes had marketed
a worming intrusion of their sullen sexual freedom right into American theaters.
Yeah, there had been other European films that we knew were a little daring, but they always had genuine narratives and were
made by respected directors.
I, A Woman was dark and dirty, with scene after brazen scene in which Essy Perrson exhibited
what voyeurs really longed for, lingering pans of the female form. Seem quaint in our present world? Yeah, daddy. Thanks to
Essy.
Still, the voyeurism of the Danes and Swedes in their sex films was a one-sided affair, like every titillating movie of the
day. The idea was to expose women pouty pin-up types, who posed like Betty Page, confident in their brazenness to eager audiences
of men. That was it. The rain coat slobs saw a parade of sex scenes in the black and white
I, A Woman, inflicted by
flaccidly pale, out-of-shape, morbidly depressed Scandinavians. The male cast members were not memorable (except for the
lecherous monstrosity in the hospital bed) because they were incidental to Essy Persson taking her clothes off.
The movie was a hit. Guys took the train from Queens, the Bronx, and Brooklyn to see Essy Persson over and over. I know. I
was one of them, a teen aged kid who just wanted to look at Essy Perssons perfect body as long and often as possible. I began
to suspect that the Norwegian church girls were closet Essy Perssons themselves. In a way, that fantasy proved to have some
validity, later. But being an insecure little movie nut with zero self confidence, that didn't help me much. To boost my
self image, I decided to copy old movie stars like Errol Flynn, or the currently popular Roger Moore, from the British TV
show,
The Saint. I paraded a fake Hollywood chivalry and it got me nowhere. All I could do was wish that the smiling
Inger Stevens types at church would change, like werewolves, into Essy Persson.
The less inhibited European Nordic view of sex opened doors to taking shame out movies.
I, A Woman knocked it out of
the park, but from Karl Dreyer to Ingmar Bergman, I never felt that the Scandinavians got steamy romance to the screen. Instead,
the chronology of many Nordic films seemed littered with pretty girls chased by creeps who looked like Julian Assange. And
so I found the Norse movies disturbing. That's maybe because I knew the Viking face all too well. I'd seen it throughout childhood,
like watching the close ups of old men in Karl Dreyer's
Joan of Arc (below). See, I loved the old sailors who showed
up in church when they were ashore. In the innocent atmosphere of Lutheranism, they seemed noble and even saintly. They looked
like Richard Widmark or Curt Jergens and had kindly wrinkles around their eyes.
But at sea, or in foreign ports, they were possibly very different. At sea, in a world of chaos, the Lutheran sailors may
have morphed into lurid
I, A Woman, prototypes. Their kindly faces may have gone Swede, or Dane, heaven forbid! Their
eyes may have emitted the glare of Dostoyevsky's terrible suggestion that everything is permitted. Yes, their gaze may have
taken on godless Swedish lechery at its nastiest, who knows? I saw them sailing out, out to the black beyond, where the grandfatherly
countenances contorted into something blasphemous and indecent. My teenaged mind couldnt accept them licking their lips, like
the white haired reptilian thing in the hospital bed, and furtively probing Essy Persson.
