It’s the world’s oldest profession, but it’s also the world’s most stigmatized profession. Sex work, be it prostitution or erotic dancing or pornographic acting, is a reality of the world, an umbrella of occupations that have never gone away or been snuffed out no matter what laws or restrictions society has tried to impose against it. Far from it: as the world has lurched forward into the online era, sex work has fully gone online, with subscription platforms and websites allowing for new ways for those in the field to make their bucks.While people who do sex work come in all shapes and sizes, on film, sex workers tend to be painted with a reductive, dehumanizing lens. Often, they’re not really characters at all, but window-dressing in crime movies or — most appallingly — dead bodies in films about killers that don’t particularly provide them with much backstory. Or, they’re punished for their profession in ways that feel leering and cruel, like the trauma Elisabeth Shue’s prostitute suffers in “Leaving Las Vegas.” Films that don’t treat sex workers as disposable often overly glamorize their labor: just take a look at “Pretty Woman,” a love story that’s more fairy tale than genuine look at the realities of prostitution.
Still, look past the more cliché “hooker with a heart of gold” stories, and you’ll find a rich history of movies that have found a way to portray the humanity of sex workers, and look at the occupation’s realities with nuance and empathy. Movies starring sex workers as main characters dates back to Pre-Code Hollywood, including movies like “Shanghai Express.” While prostitution became taboo in the days of the Hays Code in American cinema (you could still find plenty of portrayals abroad), movies like “Midnight Cowboy” and “Klute” helped to center the perspective of sex workers on film. At their most interesting, movies about sex work double as a look at the realities of life within capitalism, where desire and base human instincts are commodified and sold like any other product.
In recent years, one of the prime surveyors of sex work in film has become Sean Baker, the filmmaker behind movies like “Tangerine,” “The Florida Project,” and “Red Rocket,” all of which focus in some way on people within the field. Baker’s movies have been acclaimed for their unsentimental but humanizing look at sex work in America. His latest, “Anora,” is one of his best, a “Pretty Woman” riff about an exotic dancer who marries the son of a Russian oligarch that’s at turns hilarious and bitter, and features a terrific Mikey Madison in the lead role.
With “Anora” now in theaters, IndieWire is taking a look at the films across the history of cinema that have most sensitively handled sex work, portraying the occupation not with leering cruelty but by emphasizing that those within it are, above all else, human. This list includes films that center around prostitution, stripping, pornographic acting, and other professions that fall under the loose umbrella of sex work. Read on to find 20 great films about sex work.
‘Shanghai Express’ (1932)
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They’re called ‘fallen women’ by a Christian missionary they travel with, but Marlene Dietrich and Anna May Wong’s high-class escorts in ‘Shanghai Express’ are among the most glamorous sex workers in film history. Josef von Sternberg’s 1932 pre-Code film dresses both stars in simmering dresses, eye-popping hats, and fluffy coats so exquisite one can just practically feel them from beyond the screen. Dietrich cuts a particularly commanding figure as Shanghai Lily, a woman who turned to prostitution after her lover (Clive Brook) left her, but reconnects with him on a journey from Peiping to Shanghai. Sternberg’s film luxuriates in her steely screen presence, and never judges Lily or Wong’s Hui Fei for their profession, even allowing the two to be the heroes of their own fate when their train is seized by Chinese rebels.
‘The Goddess’ (1934)
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An early classic of Chinese cinema, ‘The Goddess’ features actress Ruan Lingyu in one of her final roles before her suicide at age 24. She plays an unnamed young woman who, to care for her young son and get him the education he needs, spends her nights walking the streets as a prostitute. Her double life turns into a tragedy when a criminal manipulates and blackmails her into being with him, while her son faces bullying for his mother’s profession. ‘The Goddess’ lays the tragedy on thick and ends on a downbeat note, but it’s always sympathetic to Ruan’s mother and her selfless quest to support her son, and the actress’ performance is simply exquisite.
‘Street of Shame’ (1956)
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Acclaimed Japanese auteur Kenji Mizoguchi made a few movies dealing with prostitution and sex work, including ‘The Life of Oharu,’ a tragic story of a young woman forced into a life of sex work. His final feature ‘Street of Shame’ is a similarly devastating look at the profession, albeit expanded into an ensemble story. Four women of varying ages and backgrounds work for the Dreamland brothel in Tokyo’s Red Light District, as they attempt to find money and/or a husband to get out of the profession, only for the realities of the stigma surrounding prostitution and the manipulative tactics of the brothel’s owners to constantly push them back into the doors. In the background of their very personal struggles is a parliament bill that threatens to give them even fewer options by permanently banning prostitution; ‘Street of Shame’ itself is sometimes credited with pushing the first antiprostitution laws of Japan, which passed a few months after the movie’s release.
‘Nights of Cabiria’ (1957)
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One of Federico Fellini’s most acclaimed films, ‘Nights of Cabiria’ also features one of the greatest performances in any of his films. The titular Cabiria is an optimistic sex worker played by a magnificent Giuletta Masina (Fellini’s wife), who conveys the woman’s internal conflict and desire to change her ways and settle down with compassion and nuance. The film inverts what you might expect of Cabiria; she’s a kindhearted and compassionate figure, while the people around her are the cynical and selfish ones. ‘Nights of Cabiria’ doesn’t necessarily give its lead a happy ending, quite the opposite, but it’s moving finale doubles as a celebration for the young woman’s inner steel.
‘Accattone’ (1961)
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Pimps are generally speaking supporting characters or outright villains in films. A rare exception is ‘Accattone,’ the directorial debut of Italian auteur Pier Paolo Pasolini. The lead character, played memorably by non-professional actor Franco Citti, is a shiftless pimp whose forced to scramble when his prostitute is put in prison, and attempts to drive another young girl into the line of work in order to make ends meet. The film, a curious meld of Catholic imagery with Italian neo-realist sensibility, doesn’t exactly portray the selfish and lost Accattone as sympathetic, but it undergirds his efforts to take advantage of the women he recruits to sex work with the knowledge that he’s just as much under the heel of capitalism as they are.
‘Vivre Sa Vie’ (1962)
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A landmark French New Wave film, Jean-Luc Goodard’s ‘Vivre Sa Vie’ is a story that portrays sex work as the first step of a downward spiral, but makes up for it with visual style and real empathy for its lead. Divided into 12 episodes, it tells the story of how wife and mother Nana (Anna Karina) leaves her husband and son to achieve her dreams as an actress and escape her bleak life of poverty. When her efforts fail, she falls into a life of prostitution instead. Karina is memorably cool as the disillusioned Nana, whose final fate makes for a heartrending tragedy.
‘Belle De Jour’ (1967)
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A common theme for many of the films about sex work before ‘Belle De Jour’ is that the prostitutes at their center take to the profession for practical reasons, needing the money to support themselves and maybe even their families. Luis Buñuel’s provocative hit throws that away entirely in its portrait of Catherine Deneuve’s Séverine Serizy, a young wealthy bourgeoise woman who finds herself a job moonlighting as a ‘beauty of the day,’ a high-class prostitute who entertains clients in the afternoons while her husband works. For Serizy, the money is beside the point: it’s a way to find herself as an erotic, sensual being, submitting to the masochistic desires her dutiful husband cannot fulfill. It’s a probing look at lust and sexual neuroses that doubles as a wry look at upper-class discontent, a sex work film where the money driving the sex is almost besides the point.
‘Midnight Cowboy’ (1969)
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One of the first notable films to dig into the topic of male prostitution, ‘Midnight Cowboy’ from director John Schlesinger is a picaresque portrait of two men on the margins of a bleak and dirty New York City. The X-rated film — controversial but acclaimed enough to win Best Picture despite that — sees Jon Voight and Dustin Hoffman give two of their best respective performances as a Texas dishwasher turned failed New York hustler and the small-time con man that takes him in. Whether you read their relationship as a straightforward friendship or a barely-suppressed romance, ‘Midnight Cowboy’ is a touching look at attempting to scrape your way through a cruel world and earn a living, even if you end up being the worst, least-successful hustler known to man.
‘McCabe and Mrs. Miller’ (1971)
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Classic Westerns are littered with hookers and prostitutes (sometimes veiled examples to get around the Hays Code), but most are just window-dressing or one-dimensional fallen women archetypes. Leave it to Robert Altman’s famously unconventional take on the genre ‘McCabe and Mrs. Miller’ to give a far more fleshed-out and human look at the profession. Set in a small Washington town, it follows the two main characters (Warren Beatty and Julie Christie) as they join together to operate a brothel in the conservative town. The portrayal of their business doesn’t particularly lean toward glamour: one worker at the brothel is a mail-order bride forced into the business after her husband’s murder, while another is a troubled young woman who attacks her client with a knife. Christie’s Mrs. Miller is a particularly unscrupulous madam, treating her charges not as a family but as employees to help her make money. In the unsentimental and grimy world that Altman transplants us into, there’s simply no room for sentimentality and romance: it’s not a surprise that, as McCabe and Miller fall into bed together, she still charges the man for sex every time.
‘Klute’ (1971)
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Jane Fonda won the Oscar for Best Actress for her sizzling performance in ‘Klute,’ playing a New York City call girl who teams up with a private detective (Donald Sutherland) to help him crack the disappearance case of his best friend. It’s a pulpy premise, but ‘Klute’ was acclaimed upon release for pairing its thriller plot with a rather down-to-earth slice-of-life tone, and Fonda’s empathetic portrayal of Bree is the main reason why. She plays Bree as cynical and unsentimental, someone who enjoys her job because it lets her manipulate and take control at times when she feels powerless. Alan J. Pakula’s film, however, lets her dethaw and turn into a hero of sorts, falling for Sutherland’s titular Klute and cracking the case through her own deductions.
‘Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai Du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles’ (1975)
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One of the most acclaimed films ever made, Chantal Akerman’s intimate epic ‘Jeanne Dielman’ sucks all of the danger and lurid scandal associated with sex work out of the equation to portray it as simply another step in a monotonous daily routine. Delphine Seyrig’s titular widowed mother goes through the same steps of her highly regimented schedule across three days, and earning money by bringing men to her home for sex before her son comes back from school is just one other passionless step on her to-do list. It’s an utterly unconventional portrayal of sex work that nonetheless rings true, emphasizing that it is, at the end of the day, just another job — one that can make you go a little crazy, but a job nonetheless.
‘American Gigolo’ (1980)
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Richard Gere is at his most stunningly handsome in ‘American Gigolo,’ Paul Schrader’s controversial but iconic neo-noir that casts him as a vain high-class male escort. Living a materialistic life, Gere’s Julian wields his body and sex appeal as a key, using it to gain access into the upper-class and respectable worlds of the women he services, even rejecting kinky or queer assignments. He takes pride in his ability to please and satisfy his clients, but holds them at an emotional remove, one that proves his undoing when he becomes a prime suspect in a murder and has no one willing to testify on his behalf. Gere’s performance is cooly removed but subtly touching, portraying Julian as both a striver and a lonely soul, one whose desperate attempts to whore himself into elite society leave him disarmed when he finally experiences true passion.
‘My Own Private Idaho’ (1991)
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A bizarre borderline mess of a film that mixes a devastating look at a ruined friendship with an unhinged loose modernization of William Shakespeare’s Henriad, ‘My Own Private Idaho’ works entirely thanks to the incredible performance of River Phoenix as young street hustler Mike. Narcoleptic and perpetually unhappy, Mike is hopelessly in love with his best friend Scott (Keanu Reeves), the son of their city’s mayor who rebels by taking to prostitution. On their journey to find Mike’s estranged mother, they encounter danger and romance alike, all while Mike’s feelings and perpetual fear of abandonment threaten to grow and burn him whole. Gus Van Sant’s acclaimed film is a prime platform for Phoenix, and his performance as the adrift Mike is filled with such yearning and desire that it’s almost unbearable to witness.
‘Showgirls’ (1995)
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Paul Verhoeven’s misunderstood masterpiece of excess ‘Showgirls’ loosely files the titular girls into two categories. On one hand, you have strippers and pole dancers at seedy, grimy clubs, where Elizabeth Berkely’s Nomi Malone begins her quest to reach the spotlight. On the other, you have the more respectable showgirls who perform on extravagant stages at resorts and casinos dance revues, represented by Gina Gershon’s vampish starlet Cristal Connors. What Verhoeven leaves unspoken in a film that otherwise bares all on the table is that, despite the two’s animosity and Nomi’s ‘All About Eve’ style journey to Cristal’s place at the top, the two are fundamentally doing the same thing, showing and selling their bodies to men for a buck or two or two million. It makes for a film that, despite its camp and lurid sheen, proves as much a shrewd look at the American Dream as it is a shocking T&A spectacle.
‘Boogie Nights’ (1997)
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Paul Thomas Anderson’s breakout film, ‘Boogie Nights’ is a hilarious, touching look at the golden age of porn, from the perspective of a young dishwasher turned adult film star (Mark Wahlberg, in what is undoubtedly the best role of his career). From his central role the film expands to encompass a wide variety of directors, actors, and crew who make pornos during the ’70s and ’80s, all of whom have their demons and issues they work through. What makes ‘Boogie Nights’ great is how they emphasize that, as the industry changes with the rise of home video, it’s all just a job in the end, one that requires blood, sweat, tears (and generous heapings of cocaine) to pull off.
‘The Girlfriend Experience’ (2009)
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For ‘The Girlfriend Experience,’ Steven Soderbergh cast Sasha Grey, then known mostly for her work in pornographic film, to star in his intimate and coldly rendered look at the work of an escort. Grey is down-to-earth and convincing as Christine, for whom sleeping with her clients is often just as small part of her job requirements. More frequently, she offers them girlfriend experiences, pretending to be their partner in various settings and offering them emotional support for a price. It’s a service that Soderbergh emphasizes isn’t all that different from other forms of emotional labor that working-class people need to take on, often cutting from Christine’s escapades to her personal trainer boyfriend Chris (Chris Santos) as he plays friend with his own clients. Sneakily, ‘The Girlfriend Experience’ is a defining film about The Great Recession; set in the lead-up to the 2008 election, Christine’s unexpected emotional attachment to one of her clients is backgrounded by the reality that she doesn’t have many options for money with many of her usuals needing to cut back on their spending. It’s one of the most explicit looks at sex work as a barometer for the sliding, bumpy mess of Capitalism, and one of the most successful.
‘Tangerine’ (2015)
