Other than
Burt Reynolds posing on a bear skin rug for
Cosmo, this is probably the most famous nude photo ever: a frontal of
Johnny Crawford, a Boomer icon for his teen idol songs and his role as the squeaky-clean, innocent kid on
The Rifleman, no longer squeaky-clean or innocent, letting it all hang out for the swinging 1970s. It was used to advertise
The Naked Ape (1973).
But no one has actually seen the movie, unless you went to the theater on the three days in August 1973 when it was playing.
The book
The Naked Ape (1967), by Desmond Morris, attributes our behavior today to the evolutionary advantages of our caveman ancestors. Women are attracted to big muscles, for instance, because they were better for fighting off saber-toothed tigers, thereby enhancing survival. Men are attracted to big breasts because they can nourish infants better, thereby enhancing offspring survival.
Wait...not every woman likes big muscles, and not every man likes big breasts. Sometimes it's the other way around. Physical attractiveness is primarily a matter of cultural norms.
Anthropologists thought it was ridiculous, but the back-to-nature set grabbed copies as fast as they could be printed, creating the first anthropological bestseller since Margaret Mead's
Coming of Age in Samoa.
But how do you make a movie out of an anthropological text?
Not very easily, apparently.
It seems to be about two college student (Johnny Crawford, Victoria Principal), who get all horny with each other and hang out naked, while a psychiatrist (John Hillerman) explains their behavior as cave-people grunting. There are trippy animated sequences. Robert Ito of
Quincey plays a samurai. Davis Olivieri of
The New People is in there somewhere. Since it was produced by Hugh Heffner of
Playboy, I doubt that there is any gay content.
In spite of the word "naked" in the title,
The Naked Ape came and went instantly. Writer/director Donald Driver never wrote or directed any movie ever again. It received no play on tv, hardly any on cable tv, it's not on youtube or Netflix, and there's no DVD available. It's hard to even find a plot synopsis.
Maybe it's for the best. After seeing the nude frontal of Johnny Crawford so often for so many years, what movie could live up to the expectation?
You can see the uncensored photo on
Tales of West Hollywood.
johnny crawford is exquisitely beautiful ! ! !
ReplyDeleteJohnny Crawford looks
ReplyDeleteGood wish or without clothes. Goggles bless you.
I don't know whether this contributes to your article, but the composer of the film's score [Jimmy Webb], who was specifically called to do the score by Hugh Hefner, also composed the score for another film called Voices which had a gay dance instructor who appeared near the end.
ReplyDeleteThis needs to be part of the Criterion Collection
ReplyDeleteYeah, nothing like a nude scene that wasn't censored in the movie but is blacked out on the page describing it. Because the human body is ugly and horrible and shocking and nobody of any age should ever be confronted with one.
ReplyDeleteBefore you start judging me, check the Blogger rules. Nudity is not permitted, unless there is a "snesitive conteent" firewall, and this is a blog about children's media. No nudity, no profanity, no explicit descriptions of sex. You can get nudity oin 1,000.,000 web pages. Why dd you want to see it on a blog about children?.
DeleteNudity of and in itself, is not inappropriate for children, but the white man sure does like to demonize mere nudity.
ReplyDeleteThe original (Johnny Crawford) movie is now available on DVD and Blu-Ray, but of course the new PG-13 release has censored the famous photo of Crawford. How I yearn for the day when those who want their media content bleeped and blurred will have to pay extra for it, and let the rest of us watch things as they were filmed!
ReplyDeleteToo bad Johnny Crawford couldn't have been a cast member in the 1972 film The Genesis Children. No censoring there.
ReplyDelete