Unlike Bertolucci's previous films, which had been tightly scripted and executed, Last Tango was a largely spontaneous affair, and only made more so when Bertolucci cast the legendary method icon Brando as the embittered, angry and self-loathing middle-aged widower Paul.
Last tango in paris butter scene was actually stagged movie#
An international movie-world sensation largely because of his previous film The Conformist – featuring Jean-Louis Trintignant and Dominique Sanda, whom the director had imagined for Tango – Bertolucci was inspired to make the movie by an erotic fantasy he had of a sexual tryst with a complete stranger in an apartment. In case you don't know, and by now there are probably millions who don't, Last Tango was directed by the Italian enfant terrible Bernardo Bertolucci. As a glimpse of what transgression looked like in January, 1973 – not only to Pauline Kael but to so many people around the world – the movie is as valuable a time capsule as a garage-sale stack of Playboys. Last Tango doesn't date well at all, but that's why it remains so compelling. But that was enough: I've probably seen the movie a dozen times since, and each time with a stronger conviction of just how chained to its historical moment it is. Last Tango knocked me sideways on that first viewing, though I probably couldn't tell you why – as much, I suspect, to do with the nudity (hers), dirty talk (his), butter scene (both) and a searingly raw Brando performance as anything else. I was a 15-year-old die-hard Brando fanatic and movie nerd, and if it was good enough for Playboy, it was bad enough for me. Catharines, Ont., but nothing was going to stop me. I had to use fake ID to see it when it opened in St. By the time January rolled around, with the movie finally scheduled to meet the public (it would open a month later in the rest of the United States and Canada), you were more likely to find someone who admitted to supporting Richard Nixon than who hadn't heard of Last Tango. Everyone was talking about Last Tango in Paris: There was a photo spread of Brando and Schneider at carnal play – her naked, him not so much – in Playboy magazine, both Time and Newsweek ran cover stories on the film and, in an unprecedented marketing ploy, United Artists ran Kael's entire review in a two-page ad in The New York Times. The review, which ran for 3,500 words over several pages, had the desired effect. "Bernardo Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris was presented for the first time on the closing night of the New York Film Festival, October 14, 1972: That date should become a landmark in movie history comparable to – the night Le Sacre du Printemps was first performed – in music history." Shawn gave in and Kael went to work on what would become one of the most famous movie reviews ever published. According to Brian Kellow's recent biography of Kael, the properly cautious Shawn was initially reluctant, but Kael persuaded him this was more than just a movie. The New Yorker's faultlessly heat-seeking movie critic Pauline Kael was there, and after she saw the film she talked her boss and editor, William Shawn, into running a review months before the movie's actual opening. Nothing dampens a movie's legacy quite like controversy, and few movies crested a wave of controversy as tidal as Last Tango in Paris, which had its theatrical opening in New York 40 years ago this month.Īfter months of transatlantic static about the movie's allegedly explicit sexual content, featuring the 48-year-old Marlon Brando (freshly rejuvenated by The Godfather) and a 20-year-old unknown named Maria Schneider, Last Tango had its pantingly anticipated premiere on the closing night of the New York Film Festival in October, 1972. – Pauline Kael, reviewing Last Tango in Paris in The New Yorker "The movie breakthrough has finally come."