Cry Uncle!'s explicit sex and on-screen rape ignites international censorship — banned in Finland and kept out of Norway until 2003

Scandals & Feuds4/5 wildness

Cry Uncle!'s explicit sex and on-screen rape ignites international censorship — banned in Finland and kept out of Norway until 2003

Cry Uncle! / 1970s

When John G. Avildsen's 1971 black comedy Cry Uncle! arrived in theaters it brought more than sleazy private-eye antics — it carried a level of explicit nudity, drug use and sexual violence that triggered official censorship in Scandinavia. The film's plot includes an on-screen sequence in which the protagonist, Jake Masters (played by Allen Garfield), follows a prostitute to an apartment and rapes her after she has been killed; that depiction of sexual violence, combined with orgy footage and unabashed nudity, proved incendiary for 1970s classification boards. Finland responded quickly by banning the film for a year after its release, and Norway went further: Cry Uncle! was effectively prohibited there for decades and was not legally available until 2003. The long Norwegian embargo — stretching across the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s as cultural standards and classification regimes evolved — turned the picture into the sort of forbidden cult artifact that later generations would seek out.