14 Schindler’s List (1993)
Actors who stripped down: Hundreds of extras playing concentration camp prisoners
Why they’re fully nude: Authenticity.
Steven Spielberg won his first Oscar (we’re not counting that Thalberg Award) for what is inarguably much, much more than a mere “movie.” Already meticulous, the filmmaker scrutinized every last production decision to create maximum impact in telling the story of Oskar Schindler (Liam Neeson), the German businessman who became a Holocaust hero when he put more than 1,000 Jewish refugees to work in his factories, saving their lives in the process.
Of all the instances of full frontal nudity on this list, its inclusion in Schindler’s List is one of the most hotly debated. But it exists—authentically so—for the sole purpose of depicting the absolute powerlessness of the more than six million European Jews who were brutally executed during World War II. Still, Spielberg’s decision created a bit of unnecessary controversy when the film aired—uncensored, at the director’s insistence—on television for the first time in 1997.
Senator Tom Coburn claimed that NBC’s airing of the film had brought television “to an all-time low, with full-frontal nudity, violence, and profanity.” The hullabaloo didn’t end there either; Coburn then had to defend his own comments when politicians on both sides of the aisle attacked him. He backtracked a bit to say that he simply felt the movie should have been aired later at night, when fewer children would be able to watch it unsupervised. All subsequent television broadcasts have played unedited.
