Dear Terry,
Your temperature-reading of sex in the movies the other day seems to me right on the money: “I’m not prudish about on-screen sex: I just don’t think it tends to be especially memorable or persuasive.” This is just what I was trying to say when I wrote here about my problems with the film adaptation of The Wings of the Dove. Here’s part of what I wrote about that movie’s sex scene (a scene not depicted in the novel, only suggested):
But if the sex scene comes off as just another ho-hum sex scene…you risk making Densher seem like just some pathetic bounder, altogether unworthy of Milly, and tipping the delicate balance of imperatives that gives James’s moral drama its life. And this is what happens. Densher sacrifices Milly for the promise of a night with Kate, that night turns out to consist of bland movie sex, and the whole story becomes hard to take seriously, the d