The September 1965 issue of Movies International magazine published these promotional photos of a scene from a sexploitation flick called A Night With Salome, calling it the only memorable thing about the film:
Specifically, the reviewer wrote:
This is a bad film being shown in many theaters under many aliases. Still, this sex bash has one great scene to recommend it, a dance performed by a marvelously gifted and beautiful young woman. We don’t know her name, but it and her performance are the only things worth remembering. This flick has been disguised as Five Nights Of Love, Five Nights Of Sin and Many Ways To Sin. Whatever the title, it’s a dog. The only worthwhile five minutes deal with Salome seducing lecherous old King Herod, her stepfather, portrayed as a lump of disease ridden flesh, by a lump of nonentity actor.
I have long had an item on my Internet searching to-do list, perhaps too long delayed by the fact that I’ve spent as much of my leisure hours as I have thinking about sexbots and gill men and so on. That item was to track down a famous performance by the soprano Maria Ewing done at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden sometime in the early 1990s. Oh, don’t groan. She very much deserves a place of honor here, because of her performances in Richard Strauss’sSalome.
Now, it’s well known that the burning erotic core of this overheated-to-begin-with opera (based on a play by Oscar Wilde is a performance by Salome of the famous Dance of the Seven Veils, performed for her stepfather (and great-uncle) Herodes, the Tetrach of Judea (busy man). Herodes is clearly trembling with lust for Salome, and Salome is in turn nursing a less-that-healthy obsession with the prophet Jochanaan, who is imprisoned in a pit in Herodes’s court.
Performance convention for this high-art striptease since its first performance in 1905 has been for the singer-actress depicting Salome to end in a body stocking.
Maria Ewing’s performance starts conventionally enough:
And there’s a conventional amount of taunting of Jochanaan in his pit:
But in the end Ewing, shall we say, defies the traditional performance convention:
And it is just glorious. Pictures I can present here do it little justice. You can readily find video of this on YouTube: one example is here:
In the end, Salome insists on being brought the head of Jochanaan on a silver platter. Herodes, having given his word, has no choice but to comply. Salome’s triumph was the subject of a famous illustration by Aubrey Beardsley.
Bonus! Searching for Maria Ewing turned up an arguably even steamier performance by Francesca Patanè in a Rome production of Salome.
