Interestingly however, as the decade moved forward, the Playboy articles started cooling on this notion, with the initial enthusiasm for XXX films waning and being ultimately replaced by a blissful ignorance of the existence of hard core movies.

Starting in 1969, Playboy magazine ran an annual article every December selecting the ‘Sex Stars’ of that year. The Rialto Report recently celebrated our fourth birthday, and so we thought it would be a good moment to take a brief step outside of the bubble of golden age XXX films, and look at what was happening to the depiction of sex in mainstream films over the same period.

Julie Clarke Performances

Julia Anne Clarke was selected as Playboy magazine's Playmate of the Month for March 1991, and she appeared on the cover of the April 1991 issue. Firstly, it chronicled the increased sexual permissiveness in mainstream films, with films like ‘Last Tango in Paris’ (1972) receiving more and more attention with the general public. Ironically this coincided with a time when some of the best adult films were being made, by filmmakers such as Radley Metzger, Alex de Renzy and Anthony Spinelli. With hindsight it seems as if the novelty of the concept of real sex on film was perhaps more interesting to the world than the actual quality of the films.

Who were the sex stars of the 1970s? How seriously was their work being taken? And how well do their films measure up today? As a bonus we’ve also included the October 1971 article from Playboy, ‘The Porno Girls’– one of the first detailed portrayals of the emerging sex film industry in a high-circulation magazine.)