The Pier

Salò, or The 120 Days of Sodom (Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma)




The film's certainly not for the squeamish or the easily offended. In Salo, rape and sodomy are fairly pedestrian peccadilloes. Viewers are treated to a multitude of perversions, including feces eating, bloodletting, scalpings, and finally brutal murder. This film is guaranteed to gross out even the most hardcore of viewers at some point.

Helen Gurley Brown's self-help best-seller was the nominal source for this Hollywood sex romp, directed by Richard Quine, co-scripted by Joseph Heller and David R. Schwartz, and starring Tony Curtis and Natalie Wood. Tony Curtis plays Bob Weston, a writer for a scandal magazine who is working on an article on research psychologist Helen Gurley Brown (Natalie Wood) and her best-selling book Sex and the Single Girl. Bob needs to interview Helen, but she refuses to see him. Bob impersonates one of her neighbors, Frank Broderick (Henry Fonda), as a ruse in order to see her on the pretext of marital counseling. After several meetings, Bob attempts to seduce her, but she resists; then he phones her and claims he's about to commit suicide by jumping off a local pier…..