My wife and I would go to a movie every week, and sometimes two, but as it became evident they were no longer making movies for me (or my generation) we slowly stopped. I have not been inside a movie theater in close to ten years.
Television followed the movies. As someone who could once tell you when and where every program was on, I am reduced to watching the history channel.
It is not all bad, it give me more time to spend reading on the FreeRepublic.
You are so right. Some of the great Hollywood film stars in the old days burn up the screen, yet you never see as much as a French kiss. Consider Marlene Dietrich in "The Blue Angel," which introduced her to Hollywood from Germany.
The same is true of books. Who wants to read a cold, detailed analysis of sex when you can achieve more by powerful indirection? When the bars were let down to writers, most of them became trivial. Thomas Hardy had to work under extremely restrictive rules, yet most of his novels are far sexier than anything more explicit that was written later. Consider "Tess of the Durbervilles."
"Lady Chatterly's Lover," one of the great test cases in the American courts, is just plain silly. It's an unintentional hoot. Since then, most "sexy" novels have been sillier. Lawrence's "Sons and Lovers" is a grea novel, in part because it is much less explicit but far deeper and more suggestive.