These images do not appear in the movie. It was a staged for a photoshoot. Kris’s wife, Rita Coolidge, was not thrilled that he was willing to do this as an extracurricular activity, and was even less impressed that he came home from that shoot drunk and beat her. Kris has said in interviews that he’d like to take this chapter out of his life.
Kristofferson and Miles reported engaged in a torrid affair when the film was shot. Too bad we can’t enjoy the sex scenes as much as Kris and Sarah seemed to. Unlike other similar examples of when people fell in love on camera, like Wild Orchid, none of that passion appeared on camera in “Sailor.”
Some naughty stuff did happen in the film:
Scoop’s notes (SOME SPOILERS):
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The movie is an adaptation of a Japanese story by the respected author Yukio Mishima. A sexually frustrated widow takes up with a sailor. Her son becomes resentful. The son and his friends plot against the sailor.
The story must be about a uniquely Japanese mind-set because the characters are engaged in motivations and behaviors that don’t seem at all credible or recognizable to viewers in the English-speaking nations. For example, a group of adolescent boys is obsessed with the “pure and perfect” order of things. That forms the sole basis of their conversations, and is a backdrop for some scientific experimentation. Yeah, it sounds just like the things I discussed with my friends while we hung out at the mall and ogled the girls in short skirts. While the photography in this film can be gorgeous, the story simply doesn’t make the transition into a realistic, or even a possible, story about Brits and Americans in the 1970’s.
The unrealistic characterizations are matched by slow pacing. In fact, the whole film seems longer than Lawrence of Arabia, and it moves so languidly that I even fast-forwarded through the sex and masturbation scenes which, although fairly long in duration, are not lit well, and are neither very passionate nor very erotic.
The director also employs some clichéd film devices that had fallen out of fashion thirty years before this film was made. At one point the American sailor and his British lover are separated. The director fills the screen with shots of a ship’s prow cutting through the waves, then we see the little route line filling in on nautical maps, while the lovers’ letters are heard in voice-over. Like every other scene, this seems to go on forever.
As we watch it with today’s eyes, Sarah Miles appears to be the only professional actor in the movie. Kris Kristofferson is amiable enough, basically playing the challenging part of “Kris Kristofferson in an ill-fitting sailor hat,” but he just didn’t have any acting skills at that stage of his career. His technique basically consisted of mumbling in a gravelly voice while staring into the middle distance.
If slow development, bad acting and unrealistic situations aren’t enough to turn you off, you’ll also find that every single character in the film is despicable except the sailor. The sexually frustrated widow is completely unlikable, and the kids … well, to avoid a complete spoiler, let me just say that they are unimaginably morbid monsters.
Elliot Gould has nothing on Kris Kristofferson when it comes to nude publicity shoots.