Earliest (Good) Taboo Movies?

Mondo Cane? (I've never seen it)

 

Probably the concept of a woman finding out her husband is dead then sleeping with a younger man the same night raised some eyebrows.

But for me, watching the TV version as a child and judging by my older sisters’ reactions, the discussion about condoms and phases sounded pretty taboo, even though I didn’t really understand it all.

 

The Nanny with Bette Davis.

I seem to recall that the actor who played the young boy wasn’t even allowed to see the movie when it was released.

 

Hatful Of Rain, about a morphine-addicted Korean War veteran. From 1957.

 

This would qualify:

Brief Encounter
Brief Encounter (1945) - IMDb

 

The Misfits, with Marilyn Monroe (who can act), Clark Gable, and Montgomery Clift. (They can act, too.) 1961. Tackles some very contemporary themes.

I've only seen Streetcar Named Desire, but there are several other adaptations of Tennessee Williams plays that may be worth checking out- The Glass Menagerie, Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, Sweet Bird Of Youth, Night Of The Iguana.

 

I'm a fan of The Anderson Tapes, too. Lighter fare than the others I've recommended. But, once again- tackles some very topical themes with wit and intelligence.
The cast is great- including, among others, Sean Connery, Dyan Cannon, the film debut of Christopher Walken, Garrett Morris!

 

Baby Face
Three on a Match
Peyton Place

 

The 1933 Hedy Lamar 'shocker', Ecstasy?
Or is it 'exploitation?
(I've never seen it, but heard about it for decades, now)

 

Written by Frankie "Five Angels" Pantangeli!

 

D.W. Griffith, 1912

A man invents a soft drink laced with cocaine, Dopokoke. He becomes wealthy, but his son gets hooked and ODs.

 

Blow up. The first film to have legitimate actresses going topless for no good reason.

 

Victim (1962)

 

We saw it in our 50's, during the 'Aught's...and even as seasoned indie-cinemaphiles that was still hard to take!

 

I just saw the 1974 Lenny Bruce biopic Lenny the other night, with Dustin Hoffman and Valerie Perrine. One of the original "docudrama" pics, I think, featuring "on-camera interviews" of "Honey Bruce, his wife" (Perrine) and "Lenny Bruce's mother" (Jan Miner.) Bob Fosse is no Robert Altman- it isn't a great movie, or even a particularly good one. But there are some powerful scenes. Some of them are pretty edgy and disturbing- one particular drug binge by Honey and Lenny toward the end of the story in particular, that leaves them both scrambled and shattered. High film noir quotient.

Speaking of Lenny Bruce: Culture Hero St. Lenny The Chivalrous, Archetype Of All That Is Hip, from the TV series The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, is a much more sympathetic portrayal than the guy in the 1974 movie. The character flaws of the Lenny Bruce in Maisel are rarely in evidence, and when they show up, they're treated lightly and played for laughs. Not a realistic take on the actual Lenny. But intimations of who he was at his best, or who he possibly could be, or was aspiring to be, at his best. I love that character, who turns up in different episodes of the show more or less on a whim.

I also love the retro-Brigadoon fantasia of Kennedy era America that's been conjured as the setting for the Marvelous Midge Maisel and company, that La La Land version of New York City and Vegas and Miami. Not noir at all- closer to a foul-mouthed mock-protofeminist send-up of I Love Lucy. Although that isn't the half of it, really. Whatever you want to compare it to, it's great entertainment.

 

And here I thought this was a Kay Parker thread.

Is this thing on?

I don't need to be *escorted* I can find the door by myself.

 

Bowmp-chik-a-bow-wowww...

 

There were a lot of people from the late 60s Tokyo avant garde scene, so I'd say it's closer to art film. The lead (Pi-tah, aka Peter) is still famous in Japan to this day.

Triumph of the Will? Nazi propaganda made by someone who is clearly a huge cinematic talent. I saw it once years ago, literally got queasy about halfway through. I still get squirmy thinking about it.

 

Kitten With A Whip

 

In light of the fact that Blow Up touches upon the classic poles of Sex & Death, it could be argued that the nudity in the film was not gratuitous, even if it was received in a voyeuristic way by those members of the audience who weren't as mature as the film itself was.

 

Yeah, that movie showed Lenny like he was some sort of priest.

Speaking of "Maisel", all my friends say I should see it because "Mort Sahl is in it".. I only watched the first episode, and they just played one of his records from the 1950s.

 

Mrs. Maisel is worth watching for the cinematography alone. As for the rest of the achievement, I bet Woody Allen is envious. It's taken much of the thematic material and stylistic innovation he broke new cinematic ground with in the 1970s- New York City; Jewishness; urban bohemian subcultures; the tectonic shifts in sexual and cultural mores of the 1960s era; fast and witty repartee; high-concept esthetics in camera work- to a more subtle and refined level, only from a gynocentric perspective. I came to the series late- the premise sounded contrived and easy to exhaust, with overtones of stultifying PC. Boy, was I wrong. Mrs. Maisel is a terrific, multilayered show with terrific acting by everyone involved. I'm not an HBO subscriber or an inveterate observer of the cutting edge in television shows, so my opinion isn't authoritative. But it may be the best TV show I've ever seen.

fwiw, I think the conceptualizers of Mrs. Maisel found the perfect era for the setting of the series. I don't even want to watch a TV show that attempts a deep dive into 1960s or 1970s youth culture. That scene is too fractured, too fraught, too reliant on interior perspectives, naively wholesome at its idealistic center but also vulnerable to sordid extremes...the lurid gaze of the the camera eye would not serve the depiction fairly, and it would be practically impossible to script a narrative that isn't dishonest- whether in the direction of exploitation or hagiography. At best, a season of TV episodes would resemble a series of variations on Easy Rider-a film that said everything that it needed to say in one "episode" of around 100 minutes, without any need to belabor the point. And as with Easy Rider, a TV series on 1960s youth counterculture would not end well. The era has already been well and thoroughly mined by musicians, songwriters, lyricists, fiction writers, and filmmakers. There's no need to sift through the tailings pile for the leavings, especially not for the purpose of a TV show.

What makes the early 1960s so much better as grist for a television series with pretensions of social commentary and historical review? Liminality. The first rays of dawn; the initial cracks in the ice jam, before the flood. The point when cultural rebellion- and, yes, actual cultural revolution, American style- was still the endeavor of a fearless vanguard of iconoclastic artists and visionaries who were for the most part young- but adults, not adolescents. Before the Generation Gap yawned wide open as a mass phenomenon, sometimes wider than the Grand Canyon. Before Life During Wartime- whether the kids were the 19-year olds drafted and sent to Vietnam, or the massive children's crusade of teenyboppers signing up (or conscripted) for the War on Drugs on the side of the illegal drug markets (thereby incurring an array of risks, notably criminalization at the hands of a parental generation in denial about their own inclinations toward drug use.) Or both, as it happened.

 

Red Dust (1932) and Bombshell (1933), both starring Jean Harlow, are incredibly entertaining and still outrageous many decades later