Plenty of people know about this film-- probably many more than have actually seen it --so it is rather surprising that no discussions about it have yet been started on TMDB to date (unless some folks wrote some, and then for whatever reason deleted them). So I suppose I'll get it started. I've only just purchased this on DVD a few months back, and finally watched it for the first time last night, purely to satiate a long-standing curiosity about the film. I'll begin with the technical aspects, before we get into what it's most notorious for.

On the Merits:

Ecstasy (or Extase, in Czech) was first released in 1933, although the filming was done in the summer of 1932, with the most controversial scenes apparently-- from my online research --shot in August of 1932. Cinematography is better than many films from this time period. My DVD copy-- from some outfit named GFFA --is grainy for the first few minutes, but otherwise the film stock has been decently restored. This movie has been frequently billed as a Silent film, but it is not. It has its own soundtrack as part of the film, and there is spoken dialogue between the characters, though this is very infrequent. There are no intertitles. When originally released, there were several different language versions, one of them naturally being in Czech, since this is a Czech film. However, my copy, both in the spoken language and in the letters that the characters write to each other in the film, is in German. I do wonder if the German version was the most common version shown outside of Czechoslovakia (a nation which, since 1993, has not existed, having peacefully split into Czechia and Slovakia).

Hedy Lamarr plays Eva, a young bride who discovers that her much older husband Emile (Zvonimir Rogoz) has no interest in sex; she thus begins an affair with Adam (Aribert Mog), a railroad design engineer. The story itself is rather dull, the film extremely slow-moving and really quite directionless. For me, this film will not be graduating to my permanent collection, and will soon make its way to the dustbin.

On the Notoriety:

This was the first feature-length, "serious" film to feature female nudity. Hedy Lamarr appears completely nude in a few brief scenes, but we only see her in close-up topless; as for the rest of her, she is shown only very fleetingly, and from far away. All of her nude scenes take place outside, in pastoral settings. During her sex scene with Adam, it is shot inside, and both she and Adam are fully-clothed. Her orgasm scene is shown only in her facial expression-- Adam has moved lower on her body and is nowhere in view. By today's standards, this is all extremely tame.

As a side-note, there was nudity in film before this movie, but they were short, soft-core porn flicks, which have been around almost since film was invented (pretty sure I've seen some even from the 1890s, in documentaries about early film).

As I've said, in my opinion at least, Ecstasy is not a good film overall, interesting as a first foray into mainstream cinematic nudity, but nothing more.