10 OF THE BEST
We’ll keep this brief…
NOTTING HILL
Dressed only in Y-fronts, Rhys Ifans’ slobby flatmate Spike opens the door to a thong – sorry, throng – of paparazzi. He pulls some poses, then shuts the door and examines himself in the mirror. ‘Not bad… Well-chosen briefs, I’d say. Chicks love grey. Nice firm buttocks.’
A CLOCKWORK ORANGE
Superman’s not the only one who sports his pants on the outside, with Malcolm McDowell’s Alex DeLarge wearing his jockstrap loud and proud. It’s actually a cricket codpiece – amockingly applied sign of gentlemanly privilege, like the droogs’ bowler hats.
BRIDGET JONES’S DIARY
Men’s undergarments are often played for laughs, while women are sexualised. Hail this scene, then: ‘Now these are very silly little boots, Jones,’ purrs Hugh Grant as Daniel Cleaver. ‘And this is a very silly little dress. And these are… fuck me, absolutely enormous panties.’
CAPE FEAR
And you thought Max Cady’s Hawaiian shirts were loud... When Robert De Niro’s pyrotechnic psycho is arrested and stripsearched, he’s wearing the tightest, tiniest briefs of the fiercest red you ever will see. It’s almost enough to distract from the tats.
ALIEN
Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley making her last stand in teeny knickers divides opinion. Aliens director James Cameron said it ‘stepped over the line’. Weaver herself said, ‘After five days of blood, guts, fear, sweat and urine, do you think Ripley wouldn’t take off her clothes?’
DUNE
Who can forget the space pants worn by Sting’s Feyd Rautha in 1984’s Dune? Not the musician-actor’s wife. ‘[David Lynch] said, “You’re wearing these flying underpants,”’ recal
