9 Sexedelic Nude Scenes from 1969

1969 stands as the year that pop culture evolved from the mass grooviness of Woodstock and the far-out giant leap of the moon landing to the horror of the Manson Family murders and the Hells Angels stomping out flower power at Altamont.

It was also the year that Hollywood erupted with new creative freedom, emboldened by expanding societal mores and the new MPAA rating system.

Filmmakers could now dip into the palette of patently adult material, including coarse language, unflinching violence, and, most importantly, sex and nudity.

Let’s trip on back to 1969 and dig nine classic nude scenes from that headiest of daze gone by.

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1. EASY RIDER
Toni Basil
(1:26)
Toni strips full-frontally nude in a New Orleans cemetery while tripping on LSD.

Easy Rider is indisputably one of the hippie era’s ultimate artistic statements. Toni Basil’s “Hey Mickey!” video is one of the most indelible media images of the 1980s. How interesting that one cultural touchstone unwittingly begat another. On acid. Naked.

In Easy Rider, actress, choreographer, and future songbird Toni Basil portrays the bluntly named character New Orleans Prostitute.

She drops LSD and emerges from her clothes alongside anti-heroes Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper in a Crescent City graveyard, and we enjoy her bare dancer's physique amidst an onslaught of psychedelic freakout footage.

Toni may be ballerina thin, but Easy Rider is some heavy stuff, man.

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2. CHERRY, HARRY & RAQUEL
Uschi Digard
(0:25)
Uschi worships the sun by wearing only a Native American headdress and sexing up Charles Napier in the heat of the high desert.

Two-fisted filmmaker Russ Meyer will forever rule as cinema’s ultimate Visionary of Voluptuousness, the Duke of Knockers, the Maven of All Things Massive Mammary, and larger-than-lust double-barreled dairy queen Uschi Digard will always be his ultimate all-natural, super-humanly endowed signature starlet.

Cherry, Harry & Raquel is Meyer’s follow-up to his international breakthrough blockbuster Vixen! (1968) and chronicles square-jawed Charles Napier as a corrupt Texas sheriff whose marijuana-smuggling business is dwarfed by the intoxicating power of the abundant ultra-boobs belonging to the titular heroines (Linda Ashton and Larissa Ely, respectively), along with Uschi as Soul, a Native American vision in every sense of the term.

Meyer himself described the untamed action of Cherry, Harry & Raquel as “hotter than a Mexican’s lunch.” And to that all we can add is “¡Sí, senõr!”

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3. BOB & CAROL & TED & ALICE
Natalie Wood
(1:14)
Natalie walks up a flight of stairs wearing just a shirt, exposing her butt with each step.

Director Paul Mazursky’s Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice explores the highly late-’60s subjects of wife swapping, group sex, and letting it all hang out.

While co-star Dyan Cannon keeps covered, Natalie Wood one-ups the sex-kitten image she cultivated in Rebel Without a Cause (1955) and Splendor in the Grass (1961) by sneaking some cheek into view as she ascends a staircase sans panties.

Not only is Natalie the first A-list child star to grow up and expose flesh on screen (you’ll be seeing her again this holiday season in 1947’s Miracle on 34th Street), she also set a beautiful example for her daughter Natasha Gregson Wagner, who follows in mom’s bare steps in films such as Lost Highway (1997), Quiet Days in Hollywood (1997), and Modern Vampires (1999).

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4. MACKENNA’S GOLD
Julie Newmar
(1:09)
Amazonian eyeful Julie bares butt and a bit of breastage while skinny-dipping in a river.

Five-foot-eleven, daughter of a showgirl, and the all-time most fur-rocious Catwoman on the 1960s Batman TV series, Julie Newmar co-stars as an Apache guaranteed to raise your totem pole in the hard-edged western Mackenna’s Gold.

During an intense moment on the banks of a river with Gregory Peck and some paleface blonde, Julie strips nude and dives into the cool banks for a sizzling skinny-dip.

Unable to resist, Peck jumps in behind her and, eventually, so does the white woman, but it’s only Julie who shares her athletic, sun-kissed physique with us. What you do with your peace pipe as you drink her in nude is nobody else’s business.

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5. MISSISSIPPI MERMAID
Catherine Deneuve
(1:04)
Catherine changes shirts outside in a convertible, baring her breasts in broad daylight to the delight of driver Jean-Paul Belmondo—and us too.

French dish Catherine Deneuve first stunned the world in Roman Polanski’s freaky thriller Repulsion (1965).

By the time she played a bored housewife who turns tricks for kicks in the international arthouse sensation Belle de Jour (1967), Catherine’s erotic conquest of humanity was complete. From there, each role further solidified her as one of cinema’s all-time most luminous sex goddesses.

Francois Truffaut’s Mississippi Mermaid casts Catherine opposite Jean-Paul Belmondo, and that French tough-guy who got famous in Breathless (1960) finds himself gasping for air anew when his traveling companion doffs her top in his open convertible.

Catherine will have a similar effect on you—even if we don’t get to see her mermaid tail.

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6. MIDNIGHT COWBOY
Sylvia Miles
(0:20)
During a series of eye-popping flash cuts, Sylvia slips in some butt as she jumps into bed with Jon Voight.

In 1969 there had never been a mainstream movie even remotely like Midnight Cowboy, and, in many ways, no piece of cinema quite so avant garde has ever so thoroughly rocked the masses ever since.

It remains the only X-rated film to win the Best Picture Academy Award, back when that designation actually indicated material meant for thinking adults and not just hardcore pornography.

The cowboy of the title is Joe Buck (Jon Voight), a Southern stud who tries, and fails, to make it as a New York City gigolo, only to end up taking care of tubercular gutter dweller Ratso Rizzo (Dustin Hoffman).

Along the way, Joe beds a succession of customers played by Broadway stars Brenda Vaccaro, who almost subliminally flashes breasts, and Sylvia Miles, who does, as noted, register clearly on screen with her bare rump.

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7. MEDIUM COOL
Mariana Hill
(0:36)
Mariana exposes every inch of her nude body while running around an apartment with Robert Forster. Their energetic foreplay eventually collapses into heaving sex.

Like Midnight Cowboy, writer-director Haskell Wexler’s Medium Cool also stormed theaters with an X rating (both have since been re-rated R).

Unlike almost any other film, however, Medium Cool mixes documentary footage with actors playing out a dramatic story to create a one-of-a-kind, only-in-1969 experience.

That X rating likely had much to do with the heavy themes of societal overthrow bubbling to fruition at Chicago’s 1968 Democratic National Convention, although Star Trek vixen Mariana Hill’s breasts, butt, and fluffy muff—even though they’re shot through a hyperactive zoom lens—likely pushed the final verdict past M (the rating for Mature, which later evolved into PG) and R (good old Restricted) headlong into X country (No One Under 17 Admitted; replaced in 1990 by NC-17 upon the arrival of Henry & June).

It’s a wild moment, very much in keeping with the frenzied tone of the film and its time. Ironically, Mariana in Medium Cool is full-blown scorching.

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8. THE PRIME OF MISS JEAN BRODIE
Pamela Franklin
(1:23)
Pam is resplendent while posing nude for a painting.

Maggie Smith plays the progressive educator of the title in the 1932-set The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie but it's Pamela Franklin, as one of her libidinally liberated boarding-school students, who busts out boobs and butt on camera here.

Mighty-mammaried Maggie does bare her mature bombers in California Suite (1978) and My House in Umbria (2003), but Prime is all about, well, youthful prime, so it’s 19-year-old Pamela who poses nude for a painting here and nakedly steals the lustful thunder.

That same year, Pamela slipped some nip in bed with Marlon Brando in The Night of the Following Day (1969), which she followed with bare exposure in the occult Orson Welles oddity The Witching (1972) and the well-remembered British spooker The Legend of Hell House (1973).

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9. MARQUIS DE SADE: JUSTINE
Romina Power and Rosalba Neri
(1:36)
Romina and Rosalba commiserate while shackled topless in a sexily foreboding dungeon.

Marquis de Sade: Justine is remarkable for any number of typically 1969 coolnesses.

Its star, Romina Power, is the real-life daughter of legendary Hollywood swashbuckler Tyrone Power.

Its director, Jesus Franco, was ramping up toward the most dizzying heights of his garish, grotesque, and ridiculously prolific exploitation career.

Its inspiration, the Marquis De Sade, also figured as the launching point for the same year’s De Sade with Christiane Krüger and Uta Levka nude, while two classic versions of Venus in Furs were adapted from a book by his partner-in-extreme-kink literature, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (it is from the surnames of these two whackjobs that we get the term sadomasochism).

Its co-star, Rosalba Neri, went on to a brilliant nude career in European shock cinema, with standout nakedness in 99 Women (1969), Lady Frankenstein (1971), The Devil’s Wedding Night (1973), and more.

And the movie’s source material, the novel Justine by the Marquis De Sade, has been made into numerous exceptional explorations of the outer limits of eroticism, including Justine de Sade (1972), Justine & Juliette (1975), and Justine (1977), featuring randy British scandal babe Koo Stark.

And it all started here, as so many of life’s best happenings do, back in ’69.