I am wondering which movie ...
Question: I am wondering which movie you think has the sexiest/most erotic strip scene. Not some XXX-rated porn movie, but a mainstream movie.
Answer: In addition to leaving out hard-core porn, I'm eliminating direct-to-video soft-core pictures because I don't think they're what you have in mind, either. Two candidates spring immediately to mind, one old and one relatively recent.
The old movie is Gilda (1946), starring Rita Hayworth as a slinky man-eater. Her celebrated strip number, which she performs while singing the suggestive "Put the Blame on Mame" (Mame's sex appeal is blamed for everything from the 1906 San Francisco earthquake to the fire that ripped through Chicago in 1871) barely involves any stripping. She starts out in an evening gown and a pair of elbow-length gloves and is interrupted after she's removed only a single glove. But Hayworth, a cabaret dancer before she broke into movies, really knew how to work a room: The scene is all tease and no sleaze, and it sizzles with erotic promise.
Jamie Lee Curtis' comic-yet-steamy strip in True Lies (1994) turns up regularly in print and video roundups of sexiest movie moments. Part of the scene's appeal is that Curtis looks great: She's leggy, curvy but lean, and lacks the exaggerated, man-made sex-toy anatomy of, say, a Pamela Anderson (which is why women like the scene as much as men). Partly because the strip scene comes out of a clever context: Curtis' Helen Tasker is a restless wife who thinks her husband, Harry (Arnold Schwarzenegger), is a boring computer salesman, but he's actually an undercover superspy; he suspects — with some justification — that she's having or considering having an affair. He disguises himself as someone else and blackmails her into taking a "mission" that involves pretending to be a hooker, seducing a double agent and planting a miniature transmitter in their hotel room. The payoff is that the "agent" (who stays in the shadows while she does her act) is actually her husband. The other factor is Curtis' perversely enticing mix of sultriness and gawkiness (including an apparently accidental pratfall that director James Cameron liked so much he kept it in). After all, an excess of perfection can feel very cold and mechanical — that's what's wrong with Demi Moore in Striptease (1996). She looks sleek and polished, but there isn't an ounce of life in her or in her routines.