The scandalous nature of Last Tango in Paris made Bernardo Bertolucci’s name and his fortune. The highly erotic tale of a recently widowed American man (Marlon Brando) who begins a purely sexual relationship with a young Parisian woman (Maria Schneider) was vilified, censored and banned. The film premiered in New York in October 1972, generating immediate controversy. In smalltown America groups hurled insults at those waiting for the cinema doors to open; in France audiences waited two hours for a screening; in Spain, where it was banned by Franco’s dictatorship, thousands crossed the French border to see it in Perpignan and Biarritz; in Britain, where the infamous butter-lubricated sodomy sequence was at first edited, the moral campaigner Mary Whitehouse was outraged that the film was…

Source: The Times November 26, 2018 17:03 UTC