It's been a while since I've launched a
full-on April Showers post. I've covered SO many in the last 13 years, that it's challenging to turn up new ones and, over the last couple of years, I've often just done a mini-post for whatever new ones I've come across. But I do have a small collection for today to mark the occasion of April. It's a typically random and off-beat offering.
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Chris Atkins, doing it nature's way.
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Just as information, I am a completest and rarely leave gents out of posts like this, whether or not they happen to be my own "type." I feel like there's an audience out there one way or the other for anything from the skinniest scrawn to the curvaciously corpulent. But if I happen to suggest that a subject is not exactly cover boy material, it somehow warrants hate mail from some of our flakier readers out there, so I will not be making much personal commentary about anyone's physique. That's up to the viewer to determine. (But anyone can view this site's long history and see that from showers to tubs to bulges to whatever, I've always been inclusive of guys regardless of their specific physicality.) So, let's turn on the tap and go with the flow!
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This MGM leading man Robert Montgomery (the father of Elizabeth, who won hearts on Bewitched!) In 1934, he and Clark Gable tussled over the affections of Joan Crawford in the film Forsaking All Others.
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Here we find him getting ready for a big night with a spirited shower (and one seriously unbecoming cap!)
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As his character in the film is weall-to-do, such drudgery as reaching for his own towel are beneath him!
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His valet is on hand to make certain he doesn't have to wait a moment to begin drying off.
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This much he can pretty much do on his own.
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Same film, we come upon this man entering the "SHOWERS" of a health club.
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The brawny attendant has come to inform a showering Clark Gable of a phone call.
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Gable requests a towel from the man...
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...and even gets a reacharound assistance with putting it on as he races down the corridor!
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I included the phone call because the sequence affords us a glimpse of The King in his towel.
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And there's a nice closeup of him with mussed hair.
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Our next flick is the 1952 musical About Face. Taking place in a military school, it kicks off with a song as the guys get ready. Though Gordon MacRae, shown here, isn't seen in the shower...
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...it seemed criminal to neglect to put him in the post as he awakens shirtless and starts in to sing.
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Can you think of a better way to wake up each morning?!
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Do take note that there are five guys showering under three shower heads...! I like those odds. Ha ha!
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MacRae's costar is Dick Wesson, who sings his part of the number in the shower.
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But he's not even what caught my eye in the scene... It's the two dudes behind him. That's one guy's hand on the other's shoulder! Teamwork!
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I don't know where his hands are now...
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But they are having some FUN that morning. I'd sing, too. Probably, "Ah... sweet mystery of life at last I've found thee."
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Now it's 1961 and we find another group shower, this one in the armed forces.
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A closer look.
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The movie is The Outsider, based upon a true story. Tony Curtis portrays Ira Hayes, a Native American who enlists in the marine corp, helps raise the flag at Iwo Jima, then is swept up into a maelstrom of personal issues afterwards.
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Gregory Walcott, as the sergeant, is sure to check each recruit for thorough cleanliness after his shower!
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Curtis regards the shower head with trepidation and awe, having never seen such a contraption before.
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He may also have been wondering how it would affect his makeup!
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No such worries, though. Bud Westmore made sure it stayed on.
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Showering alone is just WAY overrated....!
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Notable character actor Clifton James is an unlikely subject to appear in a post about showers, but here he is in 1975's Rancho Deluxe.
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He wouldn't be alone in the shower because this is, after all, a movie! As he's scrubbing down, wife Elizabeth Ashley is carrying on a conversation with him.
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She had several amusing expressions during their exchange.
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These two, Bernie Casey and Ron O'Neal, figured into a prior post on underwear bulges, but they're making a return appearance because of a brief shower they took in Brothers (1977.)
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This shot shows them placed in a confined stall together.
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It's a brief scene, but as I said at the outset, I'm a completest!
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1987 brought us Prick Up Your Ears, a dark tale based on the life of playwright Joe Orton. But one bright spot includes Gary Oldman and his partner Alfred Molina's sunny trip to Morocco.
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A beach-side shower seems to really be satisfying the boy at left...
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The whole setup catches the eyes of Oldman.
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So he poses for a photo (or ten) to mark the occasion.
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In a heartbeat, he's drawn in to the activities.
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Like I say, showering alone is way overrated.
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Next up is highly-prolific character actor Bruce McGill from the semi-obscure dark comedy Out Cold (1989.) In it, he's a real schmuck who treats his business partner John Lithgow and his wife Teri Garr like hell.
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One day he comes barrelling home unexpectedly in order to take a quick shower (before going out to meet another woman.)
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It seems like no one wants to get his own towel...! He orders Garr to hand him one.
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An irritated Garr watches as her hubby dries off and quickly dresses for another occasion.
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One of the most notable facts about this shower is that in the current (HDTV/DVD) rendition of this film, what you see above is all you see.
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But in the old, more square, format for VHS, viewers saw everything. The picture was cropped far lower, affording a far more explicit view of McGill. (You can easily see this online. Unfortunately, I don't post full-frontal here in order to keep the site less restrictive.) But Garr wasn't exactly idle herself...
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Present (under the bed) during the entire sequence shown above is her cute realtor/side piece! He scampers about when McGill comes home too soon and is seen in the altogether.
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So even though her pal isn't in the shower, I had to show him nonetheless in the interest of equal time.
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Our final shower comes from the quirky 2002 romantic comedy Pumpkin. Christina Ricci is a sorority sister with a cute tennis star boyfriend played by Sam Ball.
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As his shower isn't quite as revealing as this sequence, I'm doing some prep work by sharing this shot.
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When Ricci takes part in a charity program and winds up falling in love with one of her developmentally challenged participants, Bell has a meltdown and winds up losing an important tennis match. His teammates are far from understanding about it.
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When Ball enters the gang shower room, he is not greeted particularly warmly.
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His aggravated teammates have nothing good to say about his performance on the court.
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Before long, the subject of Ricci's new boyfriend comes to light.
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One of the guys even looks Ball over and intimates that maybe Ricci left him because the other guy had more to offer her...!
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Ball is understandably raging by now. But the off-beat movie heads into a few unexpected directions.
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And with that, this post has circled the drain and come to its sudsy conclusion.
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I'm not underdressed for once!
ReplyDeleteGroup singing in group showers always strikes me as odd except for rugby songs, of course.
I expect you're familiar with that WW2 military training film about hygiene where they force their colleague under the shower and sing songs about soap and water? Utterly bizarre....
Thank you so much for yet another great post. I follow you religiously. I went to my sources for "Pumpkin" and "Out Cold". Cold was indeed heavily edited. And what a ODD film "Pumpkin" is. So very, very odd, but Ball has an amazing jaw. Btw, "Bonanza" is readily available on various Youtube channels and one of my favorite activities is scanning the episodes for Little Joe sightings. Believe me there are plenty. Thank you again.
ReplyDeleteYou're still finding great stuff for these annual posts!
ReplyDeleteThe group dynamics in the shower in ABOUT FACE demonstrates how at one point, there was nothing suspect about men being in close proximity while naked, even to the extent of a little "non-sexual" contact here and there as long as it wasn't below the waist.
These days, locker rooms have partitions in the changing area and separate enclosed shower stalls, and urinals have partitions between them-- all designed to eliminate any viewing by another man, which is now considered a "violation" of someone's "safe space."
"Tony Curtis portrays Ira Hayes, a Native American..." apparently as a cigar store "wooden Indian," based on those frame grabs. Gregory Walcott had been the male lead in PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE several years earlier; I bet Curtis'"stoic" demeanor gave him flashbacks to working with Tor Johnson as a blank-eyed zombie!
That framing issue you mention-- where VHS and cable prints were sometimes more revealing than a widescreen DVD version-- was fairly common at one point, because films were being shot with an open "square" (4:3) aperture later hard-matted to achieve a "wider" (but cropped) image for theatrical showings.
(I once saw a theatrical showing where the theater goofed and forgot to put the hard mattes on the projectors, and you could see boom mikes at the top of the screen!)
This approach to filming was used to eliminate the need for "pan and scan" transfers to get the full width of the theatrical release into a TV print-- all you had to do was leave off the hard mattes and do a full-frame transfer. Even so, occasionally TV/VHS prints would have to be cropped in a little on all sides to eliminate things like boom mikes that weren't intended to be seen.
And depending on the level of overscan your TV had, some of the top and bottom image simply dropped off on its own. Two films that actually lost bottom-of-the-frame frontal nudity this way were Robby Benson in RUNNING BRAVE and Jason Priestly in CALENDAR GIRL.
Both films were shot and transferred to TV prints and VHS with an open frame that revealed more than widescreen prints did during the nude scenes-- and a framegrab of Benson from a print of the film was printed in IN TOUCH years ago. However, in order to be able to see the "full Monty" on TV, due to overscan you had to fiddle with the vertical hold to roll the very bottom of the frame up for a second. (These days, adjusting the display setting on a modern TV would do it.)
Anyway, a great fun post, as always! Be safe and well, everyone!
Reading about that Bruce McGill film, it reminded me of two other versions of things being cropped out of the original. First was the Art Hindle movie, "The Surrogate" 1984, when it was shown on cable tv back then, you could see everything Art Hindle had to show, as he had a full frontal nude scene, and was not shy to hide anything. The second thing I can think of is Elton John's music video called "The One" 1992. Originally, there was a scene where the good looking guy and girl were entwinned in the nude and you could the guy's genitals as the couple spun around in a sitting position. Now, when you see the video, they zoomed in close to where you cannot see anything.
ReplyDeleteI was once told I “gave good shower”. Well, cleanliness is next to - well, you know.
ReplyDeleteHilarious, these images. The Bruce McGill scene is very hot though. I do love a chubby guy. It's funny to think that before internet porn, we had a sparse collection in our heads of full frontal memories from films. Now you can just Google it all. And I did Google McGill, of course. :)
ReplyDeleteApril showers and April fools here. I saw Pumpkin but only remember Ricci and not the jerky but hot dudes from the movie, she's really had an offbeat career. I love these themed posts! Ugh Prick Up Your Ears, what a shocker and a really depressing movie. He was always game for sex but it left his poor hubby humiliated and doing a slow burn that doesn't turn out well, that being said this scene looks super fun to watch and film.
ReplyDeleteBTW, I didn't mention this before, but the "now you see it, now you don't" full-frontal exposure of Robby Benson in RUNNING BRAVE (1983) occurs during a locker room scene with a group of guys totally nude, including frontals.
ReplyDeleteSince there were showers involved as well, this might've been fully (un)covered in an earlier edition of "April Showers," but I can't remember.
The other guys-- including an extended full-frontal on second lead Jeff McCracken-- are clearly on display and not subject to being masked by cropping, like Benson. The amazing thing about this is not only that this film only got a PG in 1983, but that it was a Canadian film distributed in the U.S. by Disney!
The scene was "squeaky clean, non-sexual" straight male locker room horseplay in an "uplifting" sports film about a Native American runner (Robby Benson with brown contacts) fighting prejudice in the early '60s-- and additionally it sets up a plot-necessary brief tension between McCracken and Benson.
Therefore, it not only got a pass from the MPAA in theatrical release, but even survived intact in the initial cable showings and VHS release. (I can't recall for sure if I saw it on cable or VHS later in the '80s, after reading about the nudity.)
According to the IMDb-- which has tags for "full frontal male nudity" and "showering together" among other helpful content alerts-- the film was shot spherical 1.85:1, which means actually filmed full-frame 1.37:1 and matted to 1.85:1 for theatrical showings, as opposed to using an anamorphic lens to get the widescreen presentation.
I haven't seen the film since I viewed it in the late '80s to check out the nudity and found the "peekaboo nudity" hiding in the overscan.
However, I have a hunch that if you can find it anywhere these days, there will be re-cropping and digital fogging obscuring the nudity in the scene-- plus some editing of any nanosecond not related to the actual setting-up of the conflict between the characters.
Thanks again, Poseidon, for a steamy post.
ReplyDeleteI'll be in my bunk.
John, did you ever watch "The White Shadow?" The guys on the team sang doo wop in the shower on a few of the eps. Not sure how much that happens IRL, but it was fun on the show. I don't clearly recall the film you mention. Will have to look it up!
ReplyDeletePtolemy1, thanks so much! This site is riddled with shots of Little Joe and "little joe." LOL I love watching "Bonanza" on DVD just for the even better quality shots of Michael Landon's taupe trousers.
hsc, I could go on and on and on... I can take it even further, though. In the beginning, the YMCA didn't ALLOW swim trunks! Nudity was fully expected if you wished to swim. Later, they did permit trunks (and by the mid-'60s when girls were there with regularity, they required them.) But several of the Ys near me have the remnants of urinals right near the pool so that a feller could hop out, do his thing, then hop back in. Good clean fun and surely less peeing in the water than what happens now. LOL We're regressing when it comes to body comfort amongst our own sex. Media images contribute to that, along with many other issues (like photographic technology, for one.) Bruce Willis in "Color of Night" and Charlton Heston in "Number One" are some other movies where the cropping did us in. But it's kind of fun to know that the performers were truly naked during filming and not just pretending, with their briefs pulled partway down. Glad you liked this! P.S. - it's highly coincidental that you mentioned "Running Brave" because not long after doing this post, I saw part of the movie and began looking into it!!! A Quickie will be forthcoming. Thanks for the info.
Skippy, I had no idea about ol' Art! I'll have to look into that. I also don't recall "The One" video. Amazing what we WON'T FORGET when it's seared into our psyche, no matter what the editors do later.
Dan, some of my greatest achievements have taken place in and under the water! LOL They don't call me Poseidon just because of the movie...!
Shawny, I like a little man with my man, too. Like I said, we HAD to recall the things (literally, the things! Ha!) we saw because there was little to nothing to refer to afterwards.
Gingerguy, yes, "Prick Up Your Ears" seemed so desolate the first time i saw it. I hadn't even remembered the sequence seen here! Surprisingly, it's not what stuck in my mind.
A, glad you liked this!!
Thanks again. Whenever I see a shirtless Clark Gable I'm reminded of Sir Donald Sinden's reminiscences of making "Mogambo" in which he was forced to shave his considerable chest hair because Gable had it in his contract that no co-star could show more than he. Also, Teri Garr's toy boy in "Out Cold" was delicious fur ball TV fave of the 80's and 90's Tom Byrd who, sadly, retired in 2000. He's apparently never married.
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