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However, that didn’t mean that sex was not bubbling up beneath the surface.
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Kissing during this time period was something shared between a husband and wife, both implicitly and explicitly. The kisses of this era were fairly formulaic: the man (often tall, masculine and strong) mashed his lips to a woman’s (often shorter and being held down or wrapped up in some way).Īfter the subtle sexiness of the 1940s film noir came the domesticity of the 1950s. “Those kisses were passionate and dangerous - and someone usually ended up dead because of it.” “In 1940s and 1950s film noir, the kiss symbolized the sex that the characters were definitely having but that the filmmakers weren’t allowed to show,” writes Scott McKinnon, a professor of Film Ftudies and Psychology at Western Sydney University in an email.
#Old gay men kissing in cars code
Hitchcock and other film noir era directors had to get creative (see another famously sneaky kiss in The More the Merrier in 1943), keeping with the code but also giving us impassioned scenes most 1940s audience members were not used to during the code era. Hitchcock's film got away with outright intimacy even under the strict regulations of the time by breaking up the kiss so that the actor's lips touched no longer than three seconds at a time while the whole romantic exchange actually lasted three minutes. The Motion Picture Production Code, that was in effect from 1930 to 1967, had strict rules about showing “excessive and lustful kissing.” The unofficial rule of the time was three seconds of prolonged kissing maximum - anything longer was indecent. It’s a deeply tender exchange and it also completely disrupted the norms of the time. Two lovers, played by Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant, talk gently into each other’s mouths, kissing and nuzzling on and off. The famous kiss in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1943 film Notorious is intimate. The history of the onscreen kiss is filled with hidden meaning, so here's a breakdown of the way kissing has evolved on the big screen - and the events that influenced the meeting of mouths along the way - from the 1940s to now. With every decade, the art of kissing experienced major shifts depending on was happening in our culture at the time, as well as the restrictions imposed on filmmakers. Lip locking moves in tandem with the politics of the time, going from little closed-mouthed collisions to spit-fueled smooches. While a kiss may have equated suburban happily-ever-after in the 1950s, it changed with the sexual revolution of the 1960s and changed again with the return to moral conservatism of the Reagan era of the 1980s. They taught generations the spontaneous wonder of being dipped and kissed, the perils of making out in cars, and the way to will a kiss into existence using nothing but a lingering glance on a stranger's lips. For many, these kisses came long before actual first kisses. But whether it's a tender peck or an impassioned embrace, the gravity of a cinematic kiss is not to be underestimated. “There was a day when to succumb to a kiss was to agree to marriage” says Linda Williams, a professor in Film and Media Rhetoric at University of California, Berkeley in an email. Audiences have been mesmerized and scandalized by this intimate act for over a century. In movies especially, there are the classics, the rebels and the anomalies that happened ahead of their time. Kissing is an art, and like all art forms, the dominant style changes across eras.