As a number of chapters in this volume show, erotic cinema was fundamental to filmmaking in the period of the transition to democracy in Spain (1973–86), with examples ranging from the ‘destape’ tendency, which crossed between genres like comedy and melodrama, to the urban youth crime thriller, or ‘quinqui’ film (see Faulkner 2016). This chapter stakes a claim for the discussion of this area in middlebrow cinema also. The ‘middlebrow’, a mobile adjective that may attach to text, institution and audience alike, has been frequently understood – and dismissed – as an unadventurous area of mainstream filmmaking. When describing a film text, middlebrow may refer to serious or educational – but not too challenging – content, and to accessible – but not simplistic – form. When describing an institution it may refer to the ways a certain exhibition space, like an art cinema, may confer value. A middlebrow audience, on the other hand, is one that is culturally aspirant and often – but not always – middle class.

At first sight this may not appear propitious terrain for the appearance of the erotic, commonly associated with highbrow art film, like Pedro Almodóvar's stylised erotic thrillers, or lowbrow genre film, including, but not limited to, hard- and soft-core pornography. The purpose of this essay is not to insist that critics working on these attractive extremes of high and low have overlooked the erotic pleasures of the middle, though this may emerge as a corollary. In making a claim for a distinctive ‘middlebrow erotic’, it argues, rather, that in the especially overwrought social and political contexts of the Transition, this area of Spanish cinema performed a particular cultural labour: that of educating audiences in new democratic values and freedoms. In the early to mid- 1970s, when censorship was still in place and Franco still alive, a timid – and often rancidly misogynist and homophobic – erotic cinema may be located in the sleazy content of ‘destape’ films. For example, in subgenres such as ‘cine con curas’ (films with a priest), new freedoms were tentatively tested by exploring taboo subjects like the (hetero-)sexual affairs of members of the clergy. However, by the late 1970s, the dictator was dead, and censorship breathing its last.