nudity

Liberality doesn't run in a straight line. There are lots of old movies with nudity, although primarily above the woman's waist, although with the production code in tv it took a long for us to see them. I believe Lucille Ball was a chorus girl in one of those. Some people today consider many of those sexploitation films. Among the most risque were musicals where the burlesque theater was brought to the movies. There actually was a reason for churches to not want their congregations to see those just as they didn't want people attending girlie shows at the "burly Q." Busby Berkeley's routines were incredible. Sex, drugs, and jazz (not rock and roll) were the name of the game.

Silent movies even used "bad words" although they usually stuck to strong curses and put spaces in the middle of others, a practice that has always puzzled me when everyone was supposed to know what the word was from the first and last letters but I imagine it was thought little kids wouldn't. That's why they called them the Roaring Twenties. And it didn't stop the second the stock market crashed, as people of that generation might tell you if you could pry it out of them. :) They weren't as naive and unsophisticated and saintlike as they liked to portray to their children and grandchildren.

Early silent flickers and talkies were a mix, I think, of films that were supposed to have real dramatic content, films that were just for fun, and films that were an update on the old peepshows--sometimes in the same movie. Even Edison's company filmed versions of the French postcard! One Edison silent short subject online has a woman undressing before two ogling middle aged men while she is on a trapeze at the level of their box in a theater and although she didn't take off her corset and underwear the men were slathering all over the performance. I don't know what redeeming social value that had. I suspect not much. :) You can picture some of these movies being shown in seedy theaters to men in raincoats.

We didn't get back to that for another generation when once again young people were demanding more. But we can just see the tip of the iceberg because so many movies have been destroyed by neglect or perhaps even chucking out the old to make room for new films. I suspect we will never see the juciest stuff because the reformers got to it before we were born. Just because you haven't seen it, doesn't mean it never existed. That generation swung pretty good. :)