In 2024 we know what it means when a young and pretty actress has to take off her clothes for a movie director, producer or the like, and that hard-earned knowledge protects her – up to a point. The movieman Harvey Weinstein was stopped in his tracks when he was convicted of assaults and sexual harassments, but before that he raped and took advantage of several young and ambitious actresses who filed against him.
However, we are not blind to the fact that many other powerful men have been doing what he did, and that they or someone like them may still be
doing it. To them it may, even be some kind of “male sport” which they don’t
see as a crime.
How would these "fun loving" men have felt about the beautiful, young Austrian actress who in 1933 took off her clothes and ran through a forest, totally naked, before she took a swim in a lake, stark naked. Was she exploited by the director, Gustav Machatý? Naaahhh, I don't think so, and the movie, “Ecstacy”, was about a young and beautiful, but frustrated woman who marries a wealthy but much older and impotent man whom she replaces with a young, handsome and virile engineer. Thus the daring nude bathing scene was in accordance with the movie, which made her famous.
I think that what made her able to make her name in a movie like “Ecstacy”, at a time period that wasn’t used to and therefore got shocked at seeing nakedness and female orgasms on the big screen, was a certain ruthlessness. She didn’t feel exploited by having to undress and show her nakedness in front of either the director or the besotted public all over the world. To me it seems that she sort of took the full ownership of her body and used it as she chose. For instance, she was married six times after fleeing her first and very wealthy husband who more or less kept her prisoner as a “symbol of male status”, a signal to his specific world of wealth and power, which she turned down in order to make her own. It seems that all of her husbands and lovers were powerful men, and she may have exploited some of them in a conventional manner, but she herself, wasn’t subdued by them. Or put in another manner: She didn’t become an obvious Harvey Weinstein-like VICTIM, on the contrary.
Bad boy Harvey doesn’t exactly look like a guy anybody would lust for, but he did hold a power, that would open certain doors in the movie industry that were of use for a lot of young actors and actresses. Did he go too far in his sex-ploitation and demands or was he sent into prison by all these young women because they found other ways to make an impression on the right people? Or, has the times really changed that much that the world of the ugly, non-attractive, but powerful men has been invaded by women who simply don’t accept more of that? People who dream of a career without being victimizing? I, for one, hope so ....
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