Arthouse sex film topped US box office in 1969, a first for foreign-language cinema

Evidence

A hundred blocks uptown, Swedish director Vilgot Sjöman’s I Am Curious (Yellow) was packing the same Cinema Rendezvous where, to the New York Times’s displeasure, The Chelsea Girls surfaced two years earlier. An instant sensation (and a triumph for Grove Press publisher and neophyte film distributor Barney Rosset), I Am Curious (Yellow) would be the #1 US box office attraction for the week of November 26, 1969—the first foreign-language film to top Variety’s weekly chart. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 1412

Categorization

• CANDY: Fun, tweetable fact: the first foreign-language film ever to top Variety’s weekly US chart was a sexually explicit Swedish movie.