Thankfully, this is the nearest thing to nudity he has. The sex is mostly fully clothed, although Maria gets entirely naked for a bathing scene, displaying some old-school luxuriant pubic hair and Brando gets his great, flabby 40-something bum out for the final scene in the tango bar when he 'moons' an outraged proprietress who is attempting to throw him out. Later he morphs into Cagney, a premonition of his final top-of-the-world moment in Maria's apartment, and he unleashes a hilarious hammy English accent, whose cadences give him Olivier's camp self-possession. Like Don Corleone receiving petitioners in his inner sanctum or Colonel Kurtz in his cave, this is one of Brando's crepuscular roles, a brooding creature of the shadows, from which the first recognisable thing is the nasal-strangulation of the voice. That face is hyperreal in its leonine handsomeness. Brando confronts the audience like a bull behind the china shop counter, and his extraordinary, old-fashioned charisma is what keeps you watching. What a bizarre film it is, capable of delivering some shocks, certainly, but possessing not power exactly, but a fascinating, unevolved clumsiness. These sessions skiff out to the wilder shores of despair and degradation, and include the legendary butter-assisted sodomy Brando later returns the compliment by allowing Schneider to do the same thing to him with two fingers, sans Kerrygold, an act rendered even more piquant by his later revelation that he has 'a prostate like an Idaho potato'. The fantastically earnest story is about Paul (Marlon Brando), a damaged, grieving widower who meets up with freewheeling hippie-chick Jeanne (a heartbreakingly vulnerable-looking Maria Schneider) to cauterise his spiritual agony with regular anonymous sex in a Paris apartment.

Nobody makes sex films like this any more, with the exception of France's Catherine Breillat, who actually has a minor acting role here. So it's bracing to revisit that great shocker of yesteryear, Bernardo Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris from 1972. A s far as erotic-obsession dramas go, we live in a dull margarine age, an era of low-cal olive spread.

Last tango in paris