Hot nights and naked flesh in Jamaica, circa 1840. A white sugar heiress (gorgeous newcomer Karina Lombard) gets married off to an Englishman (Nathaniel Parker), who is cad enough — for starters — to leave her bed for a quickie on the veranda with the black maid (Rowena King). The film flaunts its NC-17 rating, perhaps to remove the stigma of its literary origins for the Basic Instinct set.

Author Jean Rhys capped her career in 1966 with Wide Sargasso Sea, a brilliant novel of a woman's disintegration inspired by Charlotte Brontd's Jane Eyre. Rhys was conjecturing about how Edward Rochester came to lock up the "mad wife" he brought home. But the film, directed by John Duigan (Flirting), is more lush than literate. Though the actors strip, their characters stay frustratingly unrevealed.

“All Along the Watchtower”

Jimi Hendrix got hold of Bob Dylan's early John Wesley Harding tapes and in late 1967 recorded a version of "All Along the Watchtower" with the Experience in London. Dissatisfied with that first development, Hendrix brought those tapes with him to New York in early 1968 when he began work on Electric Ladyland. Eddie Kramer, Hendrix's engineer at the time, told Rolling Stone that Hendrix "was still looked upon by his basically white audience as the mammoth black guitar hero. There was a constant fight within him to expand himself." Hendrix's successful take on Dylan's work has long been recognized by the songwriter. "I liked Jimi Hendrix's record of this and ever since he died I've been doing it that way," Dylan wrote in the liner notes to his Biograph box set. "Strange how when I sing it, I always feel it's a tribute to him in some kind of way."