The Screen's 20 Most Seductive Scenes

11 Chinatown (1974)

Jane Fonda and Tuesday Weld are among the stars who were considered to play a wealthy, imperious, enigmatic neurotic who becomes romantically involved with an LA. detective in the late 1930s. Instead, Faye Dunaway made a fiercely indelible, heartrending impression in the role opposite Jack Nicholson, who played the private dick investigating what at first appears to be a simple homicide. The pair meet as adversaries but, as the serpentine plot of Robert Towne's Oscar-winning screenplay uncoils, Dunaway's glamorous, haunted heroine finds herself hovering close to Nicholson in her bathroom, applying antiseptic and bandages to his nose, torn open by thugs. "There's something black in the green part of your eye," he says, almost exulting in finding a chink in her elegant armor. "Oh, that," she replies. "It's a...it's a flaw in the iris." "Flaw?" he asks. "Yes," she replies, "it's a sort of birthmark." As a prelude to the bedroom scene to come, it's sublime stuff. Mutual imperfections lead, inevitably, to the boudoir.

12 Body Heat (1981)

Kathleen Turner, in her film debut, radiates such blazing sexuality in this atmospherically sultry film noir that the threat of being typecast in the genre seemed all but inevitable. Body Heat was only a critical hit, though, and Turner's film career took other interesting turns. Yet on the basis of this movie alone she ranks as the screen's most memorable sexual manipulator since the '40s glory days of smoky-voiced, heavy-lidded mantraps like Lauren Bacall, Lizabeth Scott and Jane Greer. As in most classic films noir, traditional sexual roles are upended. Turner acts the predator while William Hurt, as a masochistic, hapless dupe of a lawyer, is the prey she ensnares in a plot to murder her millionaire husband. "You're not too smart, are you?" she observes, precisely sizing up indolently hunky Hurt, then adding the kicker: "I like that in a man." Against the heady, hallucinatory atmosphere of a Florida heat wave, sexual tension electrifies every frame of film. And the dreamy jangle of wind chimes at dusk outside the windows of her mansion is a refreshingly unexpected sound effect and effective prelude to the upcoming sex scene that crackles like a summer thunderstorm. Great stuff.

13 The Year of Living Dangerously (1983)

Who wouldn't want to live dangerously with the young, ridiculously gorgeous Mel Gibson and Sigourney Weaver? The backdrop of the film is a volatile time of revolution in 1965 Indonesia. Gibson plays a rookie foreign correspondent struggling to understand a strange, exotic culture; Weaver is the British diplomat he falls for. The erotic high point arrives after a formal, stiff-upper-lip dress party when he rushes her out to a shadowy terrace and kisses her while urging her to leave with him, then storms off when she refuses. Next comes one of cinemas great sex-in-the-car scenes. As he is about to drive away, she impulsively climbs into the car with him and they can't stop kissing while he tries to keep control of the steering wheel. As the heat between them rises, the car reaches a curfew checkpoint manned by armed guards. He floors the gas pedal, shooting past burning barrels, the flames of which lick the car as bullets fly all around them. Once they know they're safe, they laugh in hysterical, ecstatic release at the glorious folly of their falling in love while their world blows to bits.

14 Risky Business (1983)

The young, nascent Tom Cruise and Rebecca De Mornay radiate palpable erotic heat on-screen which, reportedly, was transferred offscreen as well. He convincingly plays a callow, amped-down suburban teen nerd blazing his way to studliness (an apt parable for Cruise's career trajectory) and she is just right as the quirky, worldly hooker he becomes involved with when his parents leave him in charge of their expensive house and sports car. Easily the hottest and most daring of the pair's love tangles plays out on a speeding Chicago commuter train at night. The jerky rush of the train and the titillation of potential exposure only add to the thrill. Why, it's enough to turn even a car fanatic into a fan of public transportation.

15 Thelma & Louise (1991)

Brad Pitt has never been more persuasively sexy or charismatic than when, as an amoral, white-trashy drifter picked up by the titular Arkansas suburbanites played by Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis, he proved why lying, scheming bad boys with flawless abs are such an American addiction. He's on fire here, an erotic amalgam of James Dean, Clyde Barrow and early Robert Redford. One of the frankest, funniest, most liberating seduction scenes in American movie history comes when Davis, as an abused wife, shares with roving Romeo Pitt a raging bout of clawing, thrashing, bed-smashing sex. It makes you want to cheer for Davis's character's big emotional breakthrough--even when Pitt purloins her money while doing the same with her heart.

16 Basic Instinct (1992)

Sharon Stone deserved the instant pop-icon status she achieved as the calculating, dangerous, alluring modern femme fatale with a penchant for ice picks in this murderously sexy film noir. She moves, talks and dresses like a latter-day Hitchcock heroine--Grace Kelly hotwired with Kim Novak--gone irretrievably over the edge. Although Stone looked a natural to take up where lethal glamour girls of the past had left off, she went for the higher ground of status and critical respectability. Here, though, she glows malevolently. No wonder Michael Douglas's burnt-out, on-edge homicide detective loses his head to her the way worldwide audiences did. By now it's a cliché to cite Stone's thigh-parting as the film's lusty highpoint. But for audacious seduction, we vote for the disco rave sequence during which Douglas finds Stone in the men's restroom, where, in a stall, her female lover straddles her while they both snort coke. When he approaches as if to join in, she slams the stall door in his face. You want it? Suffer. It's a sexed-up counterpoint to ice-queen Grace Kelly shutting her hotel-room door in baffled Cary Grant's face in To Catch a Thief.

17 The English Patient (1996)

This Best Picture Oscar winner sealed the fate of Ralph Fiennes as a world-class heartthrob and turned Kristin Scott Thomas into a burnished, red-blooded tragic romantic heroine. Set largely in the memory of a dying World War II pilot/cartographer horribly burned in a plane crash, the entire film vibrates with sophisticated sensuality, piercing intelligence and the thrill of forbidden romance between the pilot and the wife of a fellow cartographer. But the moment that truly sets hearts racing occurs after a sequence in which Fiennes's sardonic, rampantly attractive count overcomes prison guards and leaps off a moving train to fulfill a promise to his lover, who awaits his return in a desert cave after being badly injured during a suicidal plane crash with her husband. Fiennes finds her, too late as it turns out, and, weeping, swoops her into his arms before flying her in his plane over what is arguably the most heartbreakingly beautiful and erotic desert landscape ever filmed.

18 Jerry Maguire (1996)

Everyone seems to have a different favorite seductive moment in director Cameron Crowe's intelligent romantic comedy in which Tom Cruise beautifully plays a slick, hotshot sports agent stricken with a crisis of conscience, and Renee Zellweger, the heartbeat of the movie with an offbeat charm reminiscent of the young Shirley MacLaine's, plays a lovelorn single mom devoted to him. For our money, the film's smoothest seduction scene comes in the elevator setup just after Cruise has lost his job and decided to strike out on his own, and finds that Zellweger is the only employee willing to leave with him. As Cruise keeps trying to reassure himself and her by saying, "We're gonna be OK. We're gonna be great," a handsome romantic duo board the elevator, begin conversing in sign language and smooch. Zellweger watches wistfully as they debark and explains to Cruise, "My favorite aunt is hearing-impaired. He just said, 'You complete me.'" Heart-on-the-sleeve honesty withers slick sarcasm. At that moment, we know what he doesn't know yet: He's a goner. So is the audience.

19 Out of Sight (1998)

Jennifer Lopez at her most earthy and polished and George Clooney at his most irresistible deliver the most memorably romantic foreplay scene in recent screen history. Riffing on the "opposites attract" theory--she's a federal marshal, he's her ex-con bank-robber quarry--the stars play adversaries ineluctably drawn to one another. They spark one night in a rooftop Detroit hotel bar with a snowstorm raging beyond the wraparound windows; their fireworks are set off by tart, multilayered, slightly rueful dialogue delivered by both actors with the kind of insouciant self-assurance that makes audiences fall in love with them as the characters fall in love with each other. It helps, of course, that Lopez and Clooney are costumed, lit and shot to perfection throughout the movie, but what makes this particular scene zing is the buildup of erotic tension between them that mounts by intercutting their badinage (rife with double meanings) with shots of them undressing in a hotel suite--an homage, we understand, to the classic lovemaking montage in Don't Look Now.

20 The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999)

Years from now, people will still be talking and writing about the precise moment Jude Law seduced movie fans worldwide. It's how Law looks, dresses and acts in this movie--he's shot like a movie star from the '40s or '50s--that people miss in his subsequent films. Playing a carefree, sun-kissed, fatally glamorous American ex-pat justifiably confident that people will fall in love with him on sight, Law's metallic, cavalier charm is never more evident than in a nightclub sequence in which he sweeps his devious, calculating pursuer, played by Matt Damon, onstage to accompany him to perform a raucous song. Law, sweaty, footloose, at ease, performs for the audience in the scene, as well as in the movie theater. We watch along with Damon's character and, before we know it, we've got it bad for him. Almost as bad, in fact, as the title character does.

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