About last night

The one-night stand is a wonderful thing -- it can be, anyway.

In the movies, however, there tend to be consequences the morning after: babies, stalking, and worse. Judd Apatow's new comedy "Knocked Up," which opens Friday, is about a one-night stand that results in a pregnancy, but the stigma is turned upside down: The trystees try to have a relationship for the sake of the child.

This qualifies as progressive by the standards of Hollywood, which has rarely gotten sex without love right. The joys are fleeting. Not even such a pro-woman treatise as 1991's "Thelma & Louise" could permit one of its fugitives a night with a flattering stranger without dire complications -- he was also a bandit who stole their money, forcing them to become bandits themselves. But for every "Indecent Proposal" ($1 million for a night with your wife!), there's a "Before Sunrise," a film that dares to bask in the glow of a fleeting attraction without shaming the lovers for feeling it.

Following are some memorable films from the one-night-stand wing of the movie hall of fame.

WESLEY MORRIS

THE MIRACLE OF MORGAN'S CREEK (1944)

From the '30s to the mid-'60s, the Hays code dictated what Hollywood studios would and would not allow onscreen. In 1944, the very clever writer-director Preston Sturges found a way around the rules. "The Miracle of Morgan's Creek" is about a girl who goes to a drunken party with soldiers and wakes up pregnant -- forbidden fare on nearly all counts. Sturges's (ab)solution: The girl, Trudy Kockenlocker (feisty Betty Hutton), who barely remembers what happened, didn't get drunk, she merely banged her head. The soldier who knocked her up, the vaguely recalled Ignatz Ratzkywatzky, managed to marry her before being shipped overseas. Screwball bliss ensues.

HOWARD KARREN

THE WAY WE WERE (1973)

Misty water-colored memories? That's all we take away from the greatest love affair of our life? It hardly seems worth all the fuss and yet . . . somehow this odd pairing of Robert Redford and Barbra Streisand endures. Or maybe it's just the memory of Redford in military uniform and tiny track shorts that endures, I'm not sure. All I know is there's always been something very appealing about a romance where the frizzy-haired, loudmouth liberal Jew snags the conviction-free, golden-boy WASP named Hubbell. And Arthur Laurents's poignant, intelligent screenplay makes that not such a guilty pleasure.

JANICE PAGE

THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW (1975)

It's the usual dark and stormy night when a just-engaged couple -- doe-eyed Janet (Susan Sarandon) and square-jawed Brad (Barry Bostwick) -- seek assistance after a flat tire, only to be serially deflowered by a transvestite extraterrestrial, Dr. Frank-N-Furter (Tim Curry, improbably alluring in a corset-and-garters getup). He slips into bed with each in turn, while pretending to be the other. Hilarious despite the occasional parodic excess (Frank-N-Furter makes Hannibal Lecter look like a fussy eater), the movie has spoken to successive generations with its plea for unbridled hedonism and sexual self-expression: "Don't dream it, be it."

SANDY MacDONALD

THE TERMINATOR (1984)

Linda Hamilton's Sarah Connor has just learned that mankind is destined to be steamrollered by Austrian-accented machines -- so who can blame her for reaffirming her humanity in a seedy motel with militant protector Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn)? You know how it goes: You're up late, helping a guy cook up some plastic explosive . . . he tells you, "I came across time for you" . . . and then wham, you're knocked up with your terminated date's kid, the future savior of the world. "In the few hours that we had together, we loved a lifetime's worth," says Sarah, clearly still verklempt that her Mr. Right Now won't be bach.

TOM RUSSO

SIXTEEN CANDLES (1984)

Moments after waking up in the Rolls Royce of the school stud's dad . . . next to the prom queen . . . with his orthodontic headgear on . . . Anthony Michael Hall's character, Farmer Ted, makes the universal hand symbol for intercourse and asks, "Did we . . . uh?" You can't blame him for not remembering -- it had been a wild night for the high school freshman and undisputed king of the geeks. In the final third of John Hughes's delightfully pre-P.C. comedy, Farmer Ted pops a birth-control pill, nearly suffocated under a table at a blowout house party, glimpses the prom queen's panties, and peels around his Chicago suburb in the Rolls with the drunken queen hanging all over him. So, did they do the deed? We'll never know for sure. And it's probably not worth thinking about too hard.

MARK BAZER

BEFORE SUNRISE (1995)

In Richard Linklater's Gen-X indie film, two attractive 20-somethings, Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Celine (Julie Delpy), meet cute on a European train and begin a zesty conversation. Sparks fly, and Jesse convinces Celine to hop off with him in Vienna -- before they've even learned each other's names. For the next 14 hours, they stroll through the capital, revealing their fears and desires, untold secrets, and ideas about love and life. Then they spend the night together in a city park. The talk veers into the cringe-worthy at times, but the film is irresistibly sublime: an attempt by two people who've made a connection to slow down time and bottle their fleeting moment together.

CHRISTOPHER WALLENBERG

ONE NIGHT STAND (1997)

Coming off the success of "Leaving Las Vegas," director Mike Figgis offered this interesting take on human interconnectedness. Wesley Snipes plays a married LA commercial director who, during a business trip to New York, meets and has sex with an alluring woman (Nastassja Kinski) at the hotel. Later, he discovers she's the sister-in-law of his AIDS-stricken best friend (Robert Downey Jr). The transition out of the actual "one night stand" scene is brilliantly visual -- the screen goes from black to blue and a jet streaks across the sky. Inside, a still-high Snipes flies home still hearing his illicit lover's sighs.

STEVE ROSEN

OUT OF SIGHT (1998)

Think what you will of George Clooney's acting and J.Lo's Hollywood career, "Out of Sight" packs real heat. Director Steven Soderbergh translates the Elmore Leonard thriller that fuses antitheses, the bank robber Jack Foley (Clooney) and Federal marshal Karen Sisco (Lopez). And what a short fuse that proves to be. In one of moviemaking's most erotic and accidental clothes-still-on first dates ever, Clooney and Lopez find themselves locked in a car trunk. Bathed in the interior red glow of the tail lights, the super-charged flirtation nearly blows off the lid. The top-notch crime plot players include Don Cheadle, Ving Rhames, and Luis Guzman, but it's Clooney and Lopez who prove the allure of opposites is real, if short-lived.

ETHAN GILSDORF

EYES WIDE SHUT (1999)

Did she, or didn't she? The couple at the heart of Stanley Kubrick's final film is energized and tormented by threats from without. Alice Harford (Nicole Kidman) stuns her husband (Tom Cruise) with detailed fantasies (or are they?) of a torrid affair with a naval officer on a family vacation, sending him reeling through a nighttime Manhattan crammed full of sexually voracious women desperate for a moment of pleasure. In the light of day, though, the promise of passion outside the bounds of commitment is lined with dirt, and the only truly alluring affair Kubrick's couple wants to continue imagining (and thereby making real) is one that involves only the two of them.

SAUL AUSTERLITZ

"SAVED!" (2004)

In this religious satire, 17-year-old Mary (Jena Malone) does what any self-respecting evangelical with a gay boyfriend and pool-side visions of Jesus would do: She tries to cure him by having sex with him. Her plan is less than successful, however, as her one-time lover ends up at a "degayification" camp and she winds up with child. But her troubles are not for naught. Ostracized by her religious friends, Mary learns -- with the help of fellow misfits Macaulay Culkin and Eva Amurri -- the true meaning of devotion as she struggles to find the faith within.

MICHELLE KUNG

Walk of shame

When Hollywood decides to turn a jaundiced eye on casual sex and its consequences, the results are often anything but subtle. Here are just a few of the highlights of the low life.

LETTER FROM AN UNKNOWN WOMAN (1948)

For his opulent Hollywood masterpiece, master-of-doomed-love Max Ophuls put a tragic, fertile twist on fornication in the pre-sexual-revolution era: Smitten as a teen by philandering concert pianist Stefan Brand (Louis Jourdan), who lives (and loves) next door, Lisa Berndl (Joan Fontaine) has a long-awaited rendezvous with the ivory tinkler and winds up preggers. Nine years later, at a Vienna opera house, the deadbeat dad's as randy as ever, and clueless that they've met before. She writes him a soul-baring missive explaining everything, and by film's end he learns three things: Lisa's dead, his son has perished of typhus, and he, Stefan, is a cad who missed an opportunity for true happiness.

DAMON SMITH

LOOKING FOR MR. GOODBAR (1977)

All she wanted was some decent sex with a decent guy. Instead, Theresa gets murdered. This Diane Keaton vehicle doubled as a judgmental caveat. Theresa drinks too much and she has no standards. "See," the movie says, "this is your libido on feminism." The movie, directed by Richard Brooks, certainly did a number on Hollywood movies dealing fairly with a woman's sexuality (I'm still not sure we've recovered). "Goodbar" came out months after "Annie Hall" made Keaton a star, playing the neurotic opposite of Theresa's basket case. Where Annie was free to experiment sexually, this movie needed women to know that your next no-strings liaison could be your last.

WESLEY MORRIS

The Fourth Man (1983)

It sounds like your typical author's fantasy: Arrive in a small town for a book reading and have an impulsive fling with the comely widow putting you up for the night. How disastrous for writer Gerard Reve (Jeroen Krabbe), then, that he's in a Paul Verhoeven movie and that the lady in question (Renee Soutendijk) is more of the black widow variety. In the Dutch arthouse hit that gave the director his Hollywood green-card, the mystery is as nastily compelling as the mind games Soutendijk plays with Krabbe and Verhoeven plays with us.

TY BURR

FATAL ATTRACTION (1987)

It's been two decades since editor Glenn Close had a bun in the oven and a bunny boiling on the stove -- both the result of a raunchy weekend spent with attorney Michael Douglas while his wife and young daughter were away. Close just couldn't let go, famously claiming "I'm not going to be ignored" and putting the fear of crazy, curly haired women in to married men everywhere. The movie also got everyone talking about the responsibility cheaters have to the women they discard. In the end Close got what many felt she deserved, at the hands of the wife (Anne Archer), no less. Affair over.

LYNDA GOROV