Strange New World:

Sex Films of the 1970s

Jon Abbott

ISBN - 13 : 978 - 1505670172

ISBN - 10 : 1505670179

Text © Jon Abbott, 2015

All promotional materials, publicity stills, magazine covers and video and DVD sleeves reproduced in this book are from the author’s collection, and are copyright their respective commercial sources. They are used solely for their intended function, and there is no intention to infringe on that copyright. This book is an independent and impartial work compiled from published information and publicly available broadcast materials for historical and sociological purposes, and there is no intention to infringe on the rights of the owners.

“The day will come when cinema will have to repay the debt that it has incurred with the subject of love and sexuality, which it has always treated with hypocrisy, falseness, and reticence”

--Francois Truffaut

“People don't rent or buy films to see less... rather, to see more!”

--Tinto Brass

“Amazing thing, film. Show women a camera, and they show you their behinds”

--Jean-Luc Godard, through his doppelganger, Paul Javal, in Le Mepris

Cover: Maria Forsa hitch-hikes 1970s style on the cover of the superb Butterflies (aka Blafferen) DVD from Another World.

Back cover (print version only): Robin Asquith in the famous publicity still from Confessions of a Window Cleaner eyeballs Gloria Guida in Quella Eta Maliziosa (That Malicious Age).

Strange New World:

Sex Films of the 1970s

Jon Abbott

Also by Jon Abbott

Irwin Allen Television Productions, 1964—1970: A Critical History of

Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, Lost in Space, The Time Tunnel, and Land of the Giants

McFarland, 2006

Stephen J. Cannell Television Productions: A History of All Series and Pilots

McFarland, 2009

The Elvis Films

Createspace Independent Publ., 2014

Cool TV of the 1960s: Three Shows That Changed the World

The Man from UNCLE, Batman, and The Monkees

Createspace Independent Publ., 2015

for further details search Jon Abbott on Amazon and/or see the back pages

Preface

People who notice that the bricks in my living room wall are actually DVD cases can't resist reading the titles out aloud.

“Mega Shark vs. Crocosaurus!… Kung Fu Hustle?”

“I Married a Monster from Outer Space!?”

“Ter-ri-fying Girls’ High School…”

“The Hideous Sun Demon!”... “Satan’s Baby Doll…”... “Fulltime Killer!”...

“What’s The Girl from UNCLE?”

“What’s a Gidget Collection?”

The answer to all of the above is that I love trash. Not just any old trash, but Quality trash. It doesn't have to be sexy trash, or lurid trash, although I like that too, it could be anything from 1960s Hanna-Barbera cartoons to 1950s giant bug movies, from vintage Stan Lee Marvel Comics to sleazy pulp paperback covers, from gangster films to spy shows, from Mort Weisinger’s Superman comics to Harvey Eisenberg’s Tom and Jerry comics, from Godzilla the fire-breathing atomic dinosaur and Gamera the flying jet-propelled turtle from Japan to Lino Banfi and Alvaro Vitali comedies from Italy, from Republic serials to pre-Star Wars pulp sci-fi with rockets, robots, ray-guns, and rock men. Yes, I’m tough to live with.

My daughter likes to tease me about Attack of the Giant Leeches (they’re black bin bags in a cave). My son kind of likes G-Men Never Forget. My wife rolls her eyes at The Ghost in the Invisible Bikini (it's a ‘60s film, so it’s the girl who’s invisible, not the swimwear).

And sometimes people get it wrong. Dasepo Naughty Girls isn’t a porn film, and has no nudity in it at all; the magnificent Cutie Honey (actually a live-action sex-free Manga) doesn’t even belong in this book. And Tickle Me is an Elvis film (but Jocelyn Lane is gorgeous in it).

Based in Britain, I’ve had over 400 magazine articles published in the U.K. over the last thirty years, and several books in the U.S., with individual pieces having appeared frequently in titles such as Television Weekly, Starburst, Media Week, The Dark Side, Adult Movies on Video, Cult Times, Dreamwatch, What Satellite, and Comedy Review, and regular columns at one time or another in Video Today, Stills, What Video, TV Zone, Video World, Starlog U.K., and Home Entertainment. Most of those features concerned themselves with American television, some of them with film, and two conversations, as if read from a script, have repeated themselves like recurring dreams at dinner parties, soirees, barbecues, and press junkets with dispiriting regularity throughout my writing career.

The topic, ladies and gentlemen, is hypocrisy.

The first one goes like this:

“And what do you do?”

“I write for magazines about film and TV”

“Oh, really? Isn’t it awful about all this American rubbish on TV these days?”

(pause for effect--I let that hang in the air for just a split second)

“Actually, I love it. It’s the American TV series that I write about. I find most British shows slow and boring and badly made”

“Oh. Oh. Oh... Well, there are a couple of American shows we do watch…”

They would then start reeling off titles like MASH and Golden Girls or Bilko and Star Trek, or Frasier and Friends (and on one memorable occasion, Santa Barbara), and it gradually transpires that they watch as much American TV as anyone else.

And the other conversation veers off like this:

“Oh, isn’t it awful that there’s so much sex and violence on TV/in films these days. I can’t watch anything with sex and violence in it”.

“Oh, I’m the opposite” say I, provocatively. “I won’t watch anything unless it’s got sex and violence in it... Oh, yeah, I love it”.

Actually, I’m a bit of a wind-up artist. Sure, I love my Stallones and Schwarzeneggers, my Die Hards and Chinese gangster films, and almost anything with a couple of naked girls in it, but a lot of the time I’m watching The Flintstones, Top Cat, Thunderbirds, Batman, The Untouchables, The Beverly Hillbillies, The Lucy Show... all that sex-free goofy stuff from the ‘60s; I also like James Cagney, John Wayne, Corman, Scorsese, Altman, Tom and Jerry, Frasier, Seinfeld, and Laurel and Hardy.

But folks, the porn industry is worth billions.

Billions.

Bill-i-ons.

I don’t earn billions, and I don’t spend billions, so there must be a couple of other guys out there besides me enjoying the female form in all its glory, and watching hopefully attractive young couples go at it like sewing machines.

I admit it, I enjoy a good trashy sex film with a glass of wine and a bag of chips. And so do most of you. The sales figures say so. Our culture says so. The advertising industry says so. And everyone in the media knows that if you put a sex scene or a nude scene in a film, play, or TV show you treble the audience. Given that everyone knows this, it’s quite frankly amazing that there isn’t much more sex and nudity in the media than there is. We should be drowning in it.

But people can still be a bit weird about sex, even in the 21st century. We have the censors, the moralists, the religious zealots, the prudes, a certain kind of “feminist”, the official bodies, the nobodies, the regulators, the press that pander to the lot of them, and the plain old mixed-up to, uh, mix it up. A beautiful woman with her clothes off puts a smile on my face, lights up my life, makes my day. Apparently, judging from the way the rest of the world seems to carry on about it, that’s just me. And yet somehow, the human race keeps reproducing, sex films never fail to make money, and the porn industry flourishes. It seems there’s just as much hypocrisy about sex and sex films as there is about American television and violent movies (ahh, so that’s where he was going!).

Sex. We all like it, most of us want it, but when sober, none of us wants to talk about it. Fair enough, it’s private and personal, and we all have our own little idiosyncrasies, our flaws, worries, and hang-ups. We also don’t want anything we say coming back to bite us in the butt later (my sorry ass is going to have more teeth-marks in it than a box of hard centres after this little lot I suspect). After all, what we say at ten o’clock in the morning doesn’t always correspond with what we actually do at ten o’clock at night. But as the marketing people know all too well, everyone is interested. Sex sells, and preferably with lashings of nudity (and occasionally, lashings on nudity… yikes).

I’ve written books about Lost in Space and The Time Tunnel, about The Rockford Files and The A-Team, about Batman and The Man from UNCLE, and about the Elvis Presley films. This is my book about sex films. Not necessarily porn films, but films about sex.

Pornography comes in more diverse and varying forms and approaches than its detractors give it credit for. No-one would claim that Roy Rogers was the same as Clint Eastwood, or Mike Hammer no different to Agatha Christie. Yet porn is just discussed as “porn”. Nevertheless, presentation style aside, hardcore porn is ultimately just about the sex. But softcore porn and genre films with sexual content are far more intriguing to write about (and read about) because they have to wrap something around the sex and nudity, strike an attitude, find a format. And that's when it gets all pop-culturally and sociologically interesting.

When I started this project it was going to be a slim, jokey little volume mocking bad sex films, a surefire throwaway thing for the Christmas market to help financially justify some of my more obscure book projects. But then I got excited (no, not like that). As I realised just how many different types of film used sex to sell their subject, and the difference between those that delivered and those that couldn’t, wouldn’t, or didn’t, I found out just how interesting this subject was, and I started taking it seriously. Well... semi-seriously. And that would be the next obstacle.

And so, the project became a massive tome spanning two volumes and featuring over 400 A-Z reviews of sex films on DVD from the late ‘60s to the present day, and I hope still to publish that work in the future. But a trade publisher, when I offered it to them, wanted more--and less--than that. They wanted something more manageable, less glib and salacious, and more specific. And they weren't too keen on the A-Z format either. So I gave it some thought. Could I use my original project as a reference source for a new, different work?

I thought of writing about the films chronologically, but I didn’t want to do a history that went back to the silents, I wanted to do what I knew. And what I knew was that, because of the nature of the beast, the best and most interesting sex films came from the ‘70s. And I knew the ‘70s.

But did I? Having lived through the period, I knew what was honest and dishonest about the decade and the films, and I understood the audience and why they were made. But now they seemed to come from another planet. How to explain to anyone born after 1980 where these films came from, why they were the way they were, why they were so liked and so loathed, why they filled a need, why they caused a commotion, why they faded away, and what they’d been replaced by?

Then I realised how and why it could--and should--be done. Some things are eternal: love of life, fear of sex and the consequences of sex, lust, hypocrisy, morality, exploitation, commerce, desire, voyeurism, beauty, ugliness, prudishness, the desire to shock and be shocked, the need to laugh and love. Nothing has really changed, only our attitude. And yet, because of that, everything has changed, and in a very short space of time. Two films from France in this book took twenty-five years to get a release. And the 1970s could have no more accommodated College Rules and Dare Dorm any more than the present day could tolerate Some Like It Sexy, The Sex Thief, or The Cheerleaders.

That’s nothing new, of course. Back in the 1970s, films made in the 1940s and 1950s were frequently on television and seemed a hundred years old. Women with wide skirts and tight hair coyly simpered and preened, while men in baggy trousers and hats strutted around talking in what appeared to be a jaunty foreign language. And yet, these films were fun and entertaining.

The distance in time then was less than the distance between now and the 1970s. As I get older, the distant past seems nearer and clearer than the recent past. It just matters less. Too many people weren’t there, don’t care. And fortunately, I’m not nostalgic about the ‘70s, so I can be objective. Some things were better then, some things were worse.

Those who were there or are already informed about the period will notice some omissions in this trawl through the decade, for which I can only apologise and cop to now; the size of the book compared to the size of the project defeated me, and tough choices had to be made. I'm still in mourning for the massive amount of material I had to take out, the vast majority concerning product made outside the ‘70s, but rest assured it will turn up somewhere, some day, and in the meantime we have a very tight and concise book of astonishing range and variety that I’m very proud of. And although I felt we couldn’t really understand the 1970s without briefly looking at the surrounding decades, from Carry On to Tinto Brass to where we are now, the emphasis of this book, as the title clearly states, is obviously on those extraordinary ten years from 1970 to 1979.

My publisher and I eventually agreed to differ on this book as well, unfortunately (no animosity), the biggest stumbling block being my inability to write about the subject without a sense of humor prevailing, but by now I was madly in love with this theme, and in too deep to withdraw (oo-er!). They wanted a more serious, less flippant book, but as you can already tell, being British, I just can’t take sex, or sex films seriously. Sooner or later, no matter how intense or meaningful the discussion, no matter how profound the thoughts, I’m going to put on a Kenneth Williams voice and go “Ooooohh, Matron!!”. It’s what we British do (and I can’t stand the Carry On films…). And I refuse to pretend, for the sake of art, academia, or sexual politics, that we’re not all looking at the girls.

Nevertheless, behind the light tone are some serious observations, made sincerely. There is food for thought here. There are cold, hard facts. There is information, fascination, extrapolation. There is appreciation of the female form, and tough shit if you’re uptight about that. There is an understanding of sexism (defined here in its original specific interpretation as prejudice against gender, as opposed to puritanically condemning aspects of sexual pleasure), and tough shit if you’re uptight about that. There is history, written if not yet by the winners, by someone fighting our corner. But please note that this book is advertised as opinionated. If you don’t like or agree with my perspective, then that is your prerogative, no doubt based on your own cultural influences and personal experiences, but understand that I’m looking forward to the present from the 1970s as equally as I’m looking back from the present. You can take the boy out of the ‘70s, but you can't take the ‘70s out of the boy.

And finally, this is a book about sex, so there will be f-bombs going off occasionally, and quite frankly ladies and gentlemen, some appalling language. I’ll try to keep it to a minimum, because nobody likes being sworn at, and any word loses its meaning if it’s used too often, but they will be in there. It’s my intention to write about this subject frankly and respectfully, and most of all, intelligently, with the delicate amount of humor and forthright language required (any censorship in the illustrations was performed by the suppliers, although I did exercise a degree of self-censorship in the few discussions of hardcore to conform to legal and commercial requirements).

So if you think you’re likely to be offended, or you’ve picked up this book specifically to be offended, then I advise you--no, I implore you--to put it down now. Too often in this world, we treat adults like children and children too much like adults. This is a book for grown-ups, so enjoy it, and keep it on a high shelf. Let your kids have a childhood; adult pain and pleasure comes soon enough.

So--while I'm still around and able to do it, let’s go back to that strange new world that sprung from the ‘50s and ‘60s and look at some movies…

Spoilers: In order to properly discuss the content of the films Don’t Look Now, The Beguiled, Klute, and others, I will be revealing the endings and other relevant plot points. There’s no other way to seriously consider these films in the context of an informative reference work; I must assume comparable knowledge, or the desire for same. I can’t believe there’s anyone left in the world who doesn’t know how, say, Planet of the Apes or The Wicker Man turn out, but as I always work on the assumption that someone, somewhere, is going to be seeing these films for the first time, consider yourselves warned.

Introduction

“That’s the trouble with young people today” laughed an elderly lady ruefully but good-naturedly, who I worked with in a bustling kitchen in the 1970s. “They think they invented sex!”.

The conversation was about how little their generation knew about it when they were young.

“Well, we may not have invented it” my teenage self replied, “but we sure as hell discovered it!”. Cue roars of laughter from young and old alike… It was a strange new world for all of us in the 1970s. Most of the changes that came about in the ‘60s—long hair, the decriminalisation of homosexuality, the race relations legislation, the Oz trial, the abolition of censorship in the theatre—happened near the end of the decade, and only impacted on society in general during the ‘70s.

The 1970s truly was the golden age for exploitation cinema. The 1930s may have had the gangster films, and the 1950s may have had the drive-in sci-fi classics and j.d. movies, but for sheer sex and sleaze the ‘70s takes the gold prize. There had always been sex films in one form or another, but the ‘70s was the decade sex and nudity went mainstream. There were several cultural and sociological reasons for this, of course, some obvious, some obscure, and some exclusive to individual countries, and these will be discussed as we progress.

It was also the era of the softcore sex queen--Marie Liljedahl, Ingrid Steeger, Christina Lindberg, Pam Grier, Miki Sugimoto, Reiko Ike, Meiko Kaji, Birte Tove, Edwige Fenech, Lina Romay, Marie Forsa, Joelle Coeur, Gloria Guida, Sylvia Kristel, Felicity Devonshire, Fiona Richmond, Sirpa Lane, Annie Belle, Corinne Clery--women who have become, to followers of cult cinema and mostly with hindsight, the 1970s equivalents of Dietrich, Garbo, Lake, Grable, Hepburn, Monroe, Bardot, and Fonda. None of them had problems with nudity, but all of them retired rather than perform acts on film that a fair number of today’s college kids will routinely send to pornographers for party money. And it was an era when many film-makers, because of the new-found freedom of the times, would produce their best and most creative and extraordinary work.

Although Russ Meyer’s best of a bad lot was probably in the ‘60s, Paul Naschy would peak in the ‘80s, and Tinto Brass, at least as far as erotic content, in the ‘90s, the decade of the 1970s was the high point of the careers of enthusiastic amateurs and/or cult schlockmeisters such as Jess Franco, Jean Rollin, Joe Sarno, Mac Ahlberg, and Joe D’Amato, as well as mavericks Nicolas Roeg, Ken Russell, and Walerian Borowczyk. In Britain, entrepreneurs such as Stanley Long, Derek Ford, Greg Smith, and Pete Walker, to name just a few, were spewing out sex films of the sort that could and did only exist in the 1970s, and many people would have been quite happy to see them stay there. Eastern studios like Japan’s Toei and China’s Shaw Brothers were following Nikkatsu’s lead and turning to softcore sex and sadism to stay in business, France and Germany were churning out parochial, insular, culture-specific sex films as if croissants and wieners, Spain was sneaking as much as possible past the censors of General Franco, and American television’s interminable procession of cops and robbers series at the time looked like a slight drizzle in comparison to the tsunami of blood and guts and tits and bums showering down over Europe from Italy, where derivative directors were producing an endless stream of glorious sex and horror schlock. And while a general swing toward fascist behavior from the right and left, along with the arrival of AIDS and VCRs killed it all stone dead in the ‘80s, video, satellite and cable, and later, DVDs and the internet, have played a major part in bringing it all back for a second showing.

As for the brave new world of the 21st century, apart from a few pleasant surprises that have proven to be one-offs (Story of O--Untold Stories, Lila Says, Lower City, Gradiva, One Two Another, A L’Aventure, Don’t Look Down, Gainsbourg, and Q), all I ever seemed to find in the high street DVD stores in the 2000s were rapey art films or world cinema melodramas that ended with sexually independent women getting ill and dying. It seems that the punishing reactionary and misogynist morality of the serial killer horror movie isn’t too far removed from that of the art film. There was, in 2010, a false dawn promising a return to 1970s-style exploitation, offered by the likes of Lake Placid 3, Machete, and Piranha 3-D, but it seems to have gone quiet again. Maybe it’s me. Perhaps while bringing up two kids I spent too much time watching German satellite channels in the ‘90s and not enough time at the movies. But thank the gods of bacchanalia for the easy availability and vast improvement of hardcore, which is currently favoring fare featuring spectacularly uninhibited and pro-active take-charge young women (my favorite), for whom the presence of video cameras seems to be not a deterrent or even a pause for thought, but a positive provocation. And--of course--the few women still willing to mess around with an overweight compulsive writer and bad film buff on the wrong side of fifty. To those necessarily nameless treasures, I dedicate this book.

Jon Abbott, 2015

Sex in the ‘50s: I Married a Monster from Outer Space

Although often mocked for its magnificently lurid pulp title, I Married a Monster from Outer Space is one of the few adult sci-fi films of the 1950s, oozing sex and alcohol in every scene and concerning the themes of sex and marriage in the ‘50s. This was a subject usually seen from the perspective of a ten year old boy in the vast majority of bug-eyed monster films of the period, which are generally awash with sexless men and indifferent women, just as they should be. Of course, this is the 1950s, so it’s a very repressed, buttoned-up version of sex, entirely dependent on marriage (the film's token floozie, a wonderful portrayal by Valerie Allen, is blasted by an alien ray-gun that disintegrates her body as it drops into infinity), but thoughts of potency and fertility permeate every frame of the film.

In the opening scene, two teenagers are smooching in an open-top car, oblivious to everything around them, cocooned in the golden years that will be over all too soon. Inside the country club, things are a little more serious. A bunch of All-American guys--husbands--are mourning the fall of Bill Farrell (Tom Tryon) with a series of misogynist remarks and cracks about his impending marriage to the lovely--and lovestruck--Marge (Gloria Talbott). In this world--the film is achingly 1950s--marriage is the inevitable fate of all men and the inevitable goal of all women. Relieved at having finally landed Sam, the last of the town bachelors, the platinum blonde Helen (Jean Carson) laments “I'd just about given up. I was reading books about Florence Nightingale, Joan of Arc, Madame DuBarry... you know--career women”. As well as the film's 1950s aliens and saucer, with appropriate glorious time-sensitive music and sound-effects, this is a world of wide summer dresses, crew-cuts and pipes, checked jackets, finned cars, picnic hampers, suburban lawns, massive lamps, equally huge cigarette lighters, single beds, bars and country clubs.

The one failing of the film is technical, the insistence on filming day for night in broad sunlight, shadows falling everywhere. Just turning on the car headlights doesn't make it look dark, and this is particularly apparent in an early scene where alien Bill nearly crashes into another driver because his lights aren’t on. Marge asks him how he could possibly see where he was going in what is clearly the middle of the day. To add insult to injury, the studio sets show night time as we humans know it, and the film flits merrily between the two.

Despite the Hays Office’s single beds and the nights being lit by the blazing sun, Marge can’t figure out why she hasn’t fallen pregnant, and confides in the family doctor (Ken Lynch), who examines her and can see nothing wrong... but that’s because he’s looking at the wrong person, for on the way home from his last night of freedom, Bill was attacked and engulfed by an alien force that stole his body and strung it up in a flying saucer in the woods alongside several other townsfolk including buddy Sam, two cops (who in one amazing scene callously gun down a snoopy sleazeball, the film’s other severely punished deviant from wedlock), most of Bill’s buddies, the chief of police, and numerous others who are now ‘not quite themselves’. A wonderful thunder and lightning scene on the wedding night has the alien’s face super-imposed on Bill’s every time the lightning flashes.

It’s never baldly stated (today the film would be called “I Shagged a Monster from Outer Space”), but the town's womenfolk are going to bed with alien monsters. Bill is not himself, hasn’t been for months, and these days it seems that everyone’s acting weird. One night--or “night”--she follows him when he mysteriously leaves the house, and in a truly dreamlike scene, ends up in the nearby woods looking at a flying saucer. Now she witnesses a glowing alien form leaving his body, which becomes an empty shell, standing until she nightmarishly knocks it flat in panic.

Of course, it's not the most original of concepts. Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Invaders from Mars, to name but two, had done it before, and Village of the Damned and Children of the Damned, to name just two more, would do it later. The classic creature feature TV series The Outer Limits gave us “The Children of Spider County”, in which mandible-faced insect-men return for their progeny after Earth's done the tough years. And if only the film Mars Needs Women could have lived up to the promise of its title. But I Married a Monster from Outer Space does it just as well, and in my opinion, does it better, because the film is about sex, and that's what procreation and aliens impregnating women--usually “our” women--is all about, and this is what the other films all skate around (as do, of course, similarly themed episodes of ‘60s TV shows like The Invaders, Star Trek, and Lost in Space).

The aliens are taking human forms to pro-create (“What kind of babies?”/“Our kind”), but at the moment are battling impotence as they try to adjust to clumsy human forms. But how to tell who's who? The local doctor, finally swayed by Marge, has the inspired idea of gathering up all the town’s fathers-to-be to form an attack force on the saucer. In a sly comment on male virility (or am I reading too much into it?), the menfolk might as well be firing blanks. It's the ultimate nightmare for the gun-totin’ American male; their bullets have no effect.

However, it’s the massive hunting dogs of one hunter that save the day, by attacking the aliens with teeth. The two guards gone, alien blood spurting from their ripped and broken tendrils, the men storm the saucer. With the captives detached from their hosts, the aliens dissolve agonisingly into bubble-goo, and Marge is at last reunited with the real man she married (“Your people have won. That makes you happy, doesn’t it?” says the alien, finally understanding human feelings as he disappears in a blurp of foam). In a welcome touch, all the men--even the one whose duplicate drowned earlier--are alive, returned to their normal selves when the aliens disintegrate.

Of course, related on paper, the story is ridiculous. On the screen, it’s ridiculous, as are the wonderful aliens (magnificently designed vegetable plant men with foliage faces, leather pants, tendril hands, and a ping-pong ball in their mouth). But the trick to making these things work is the execution, and writer Louis Vittes and director and producer Gene Fowler have worked wonders to pull this off in the telling of the tale, where it counts.

For example: hysterical but methodical throughout, Marge returns to her house after several fruitless attempts to contact the world outside their small alien-infested town. When she finally confronts Bill about his alien-ness, she is calm and defeated. Bill enters to find her sitting in the dark. “How about some light?” he asks. “You don’t need it” she snaps bitterly, half-hearted, before he slowly admits his origins. There’s a beautiful moment at the end of their conversation, as, in a last bid to hurt him, her remarks satirise every sci-fi film that’s gone before, as she tries to scare him with stories of “the air force”, everyone mobilising, “they’re sending in the troops!”. She’s unaware that the doctor and his dozen-or-so men are, even as she finally confronts him, attacking the saucer successfully with little more than two dogs and some hunting rifles. The film’s final image of the alien force’s massive armada waiting for the go-ahead and now backing silently away from the Earth in defeat--almost shamefully, it seems--is superb.

Critics over the years have complained that behind the film’s silly title is great science-fiction, and a wonderful film. But they miss the point. What would you call it? Something pretentious that obscures the content? I Married a Monster from Outer Space, like the pulp magazine covers it imitates, tells you everything you need to know in the title of the film. It gets right to the point, the indisputable gist of the yarn. It’s creepy. She was married to an alien being for nearly two years. Married to him. Trying to have his kids. Married to a monster from outer space. It’s the title that makes the film wonderful. What else matters?

Sex in the ‘60s: Carry On Regardless

In French films, sophisticated men and women dine in evening wear before stripping naked and giving each other a bit of a spanking while philosophising on the nature of the universe. In American films, fat slobs and gyrating bimbos talk about “doing the nassty” and being “noddy, noddy”, before finding true love in a bland and banal marriage. In Germany, red-faced middle-aged men in shorts chase nubile maidens across the farmlands, while in Italy, some of the most undesirable men in the world pursue some of the world’s most beautiful women--who giggle and enjoy being sexually harassed.

Sex is a funny business. And it’s an even funnier business on TV and in the movies, where different cultures’ attitudes to the act are further clouded and confused by both the extraordinary behavior of the censors, bullies and weirdoes who set the cultural agenda and decide what’s right or wrong for us at any given moment in time, and the demands of the marketplace.

The British attitude to sex is surely fascinating. As a Britisher myself, where sex and nudity are concerned, I’ve often felt like a stranger in my own land. The Carry On films, a national institution in Britain, revered by millions, are to me and a puzzled minority like a sad, silent scream of sexual repression, a cry for help that went unanswered between 1958 and 1978 and then beyond. “This is very odd!” fumed frequent leading man Kenneth Williams during the 1980s in his diaries. “Why are they suddenly fashionable? They’re even trying to justify the bad scripts now, and talk about the classlessness of them! What hogwash!”.

If you were born and bred in Britain in the latter half of the 20th century, it was impossible not to be touched by the Carry On films. Unfortunately, their touch was rather like that of an aunt with a moustache, or a slightly suspect uncle. In the 1960s, for anyone not frolicking in the new-found freedoms of the counter culture, the Carry On films, alongside the James Bond movies, were pretty much the media representation of sex that all else took its lead from.

The French had Brigitte Bardot, the Italians had Sophia Loren, the Americans had Doris Day, and the British had Hattie Jacques and Joan Sims. And tragically, that was the way much of Britain liked it. If you were of the minority that didn’t, there were always the Avengers girls to give you a good seeing to, although that would involve being thrown around the room in a beating until you were fifty shades of black and blue, rather than any form of wild sexual abandon.

As Andy Medhurst, an objective aficionado and cautious admirer who has written extensively on the phenomenon in his book A National Joke, points out, “it would, of course, be spectacularly pointless to expect mid-20th century films rooted in music hall and seaside postcard vocabularies to speak a language of post-millennial, middle-class, feminist-influenced, ethnically sensitive liberalism, and there are many ways in which the carnival robustness of the series cuts refreshingly through the hypocrisies and stuffiness... At the same time, the films do not deserve a blank cheque…”. He goes on to refer to the “ceaseless sexism... appalling racism of Carry On Up the Jungle... and the callous homophobia of Carry On Abroad…” but, “with so many films over so many years... evidence can be found to support a wide and conflicting range of ideological implications”, and points out that the theme of the 2006 gay pride rally in Brighton was... Carry On films. Indeed, the Carry On films have a large gay following, primarily because two of the leads are blatantly gay.

He also goes on to list some of the character names in the 30-odd (very odd) films. To avoid charges of plagiarism I’m being selective, and adding a few of my own: Doctor Tinkle, W.C. Boggs, Miss Withering, Penny Panting, Citizen Bidet, Sergeant Major Bloomer, Senna Pod, Doctor Stoppidge, Linda Upmore, Nurse Ball, Ida Down, Hope Springs, Private Alice Easy, Stuart Farquhar, Miss Alcock, Gladstone Screwer, Lord Ffing, Cecil Gaybody, Sydney Fiddler, Captain S. Melly, Dr. Nooky, Mrs. Pullitt, and, says Andy, “a personal favorite, the woman who wants to prevent the beauty contest from taking place in Carry On, Girls, Augusta Prodworthy”.

If some of these quaint references pass over the heads of younger or overseas readers, be advised that they are all euphemisms for aspects of the two things that the British didn’t used to talk about--toilets and sex, the two hopelessly and tragically entwined in many British minds. Some of them don’t actually mean anything, they just sound as though they ought to; others are sledgehammer obvious. What is particularly revealing (insight turns up in the damnedest places) is that June Whitfield’s Ms. Prodworthy is also a seamless marriage of morals campaigner Mary Whitehouse’s censorious sex-loathing right-wing reactionary fascism and the Bizarro world left-wing militant feminism that the media consumed unquestioningly during the 1980s and which still lingers today (“all men are rapists”, “cars are phallic”, “pornography exploits women/encourages rape”, etc., all demonstrably quite the reverse with just a few seconds thought).

This doesn't mean that some of the 1970s Carry On films in particular aren’t heartbreakingly brainless in their attitude to women; 1973’s Carry On Girls is virtually unwatchable, as is the same period’s jaw-dropping On the Buses, a TV-to-film smut-fest from 1969, in which the men wage war through cruel intimidation on the introduction of female drivers. If anyone, male or female, thinks the world hasn't changed its antediluvian attitude towards women for the better, go take a look at the On the Buses film and meet us back here later!

Catch me in the right mood, on the right day, at the right time, and I might smile, or even laugh at a Carry On character or quip (a Kenneth Williams impression will always amuse), but on a general day-to-day basis, the Carry On films are profoundly depressing. Humor, is of course, subjective, and I won’t be pontificating on that, except to say that I assure you, I do have a sense of humor (Laurel and Hardy, Tom and Jerry, Fawlty Towers, Rik and Ade, Frasier, Seinfeld and many, many more all grace my DVD shelves). What little there is to laugh at in the Carry On films comes from the cast. In the ‘60s, everyone knew a facsimile of Sid, Charles, Kenneth, Hattie, or Joan. They were extreme cartoons of people we encountered every day. Much of Benny Hill’s humor, for example, is outdated and puerile, but I think as always, we laugh at recognition of the truth (contrary to media myth, more women found Benny Hill funny than men, in my experience). The rest, as with Hill, comes from the sheer likability of the characters and the people who play them so brilliantly. It’s difficult not to laugh at Sid James’ brazen lechery, Kenneth Williams’ prudish horror, Charles Hawtrey’s cheerful effeminacy, and Hattie Jacques’ bossy authority, just as it's tough to resist the impish, knowing grin of Benny Hill.

The Carry On films started in 1958 with the bog-standard military comedy Carry On, Sergeant (a 1957 film, Carry On, Admiral, was unrelated, other than by chance including Joan Sims in the cast). Four of the Carry On regulars appeared in ...Sergeant, Kenneth Williams, Kenneth Connor, Charles Hawtrey, and Hattie Jacques, although the leads were future premiere Doctor Who William Hartnell and future Bond girl Shirley Eaton, with veteran character actors Eric Barker, Bill Owen and Terence Longdon.

Longdon, Owen, and Eaton all returned the following year with future regulars Williams, Connor, Hawtrey, and Jacques, and Joan Sims making her debut, in Carry On, Nurse (1959), and as David McGillivray points out in his superb book Doing Rude Things, a daffodil joke changed everything (to elaborate for younger readers, an obnoxious patient is under the impression he’s having a thermometer inserted). Medical settings would prove to be a firm favorite in the years to come, but for now, producer Peter Rogers and director Gerald Thomas were working their way through the professions, and next up was Carry On, Teacher (1959), all the regulars intact. This film is so old that the child actors include future sex-com stars Richard O’Sullivan, Peter Cleall, Jeremy Bulloch, Sandra Bryant, and Diane Langton, as well as Francesca Annis, Carol White, Cleall’s Please Sir compatriot David Barry and a fair number of girls from the St. Trinians film series.

The following year saw Carry On, Constable arrive, which introduced Sid James to the series and stole its only funny joke--two characters trying to go through a door at the same time--from Laurel and Hardy. Carry On Cruising appeared in 1962, losing Hawtrey, Sims and Jacques. Williams is missing from Carry On, Cabby (1963), which adds young Jim Dale to the mix, but that year’s hurried Christmas release, Carry On, Jack (also 1963), starred Bernard Cribbins, Fawlty Towers’ fussiest customer and another Doctor Who name, and featured only Williams, Hawtrey, and Jim Dale of the regulars. Despite their popularity with audiences, Rogers was lucky enough to have a large enough ensemble cast to ensure that unwilling or unavailable participants would not be missed too much and the show would go on; none of the Carry On regulars appeared in every film.

Carry On, Jack was the first of the Carry Ons to be set in a historical time period (the Spanish Armada), and the next year’s Carry On, Cleo (1964), set in Ancient Rome, began a series of film spoofs, 20th Century Fox having just released their epic Cleopatra film. Carry On, Cleo includes my favorite Carry On joke of them all, when Kenneth Williams, betrayed as Caesar, cries “Infamy, Infamy! They’ve all got it in for me!” (apparently it was stolen from an earlier radio show). Although Hattie Jacques is still missing, and will be for a while (busy on TV), the regular Carry On line-up of Sid James, Kenneth Williams, Kenneth Connor, Charles Hawtrey, Joan Sims, and Jim Dale was pretty well carved in stone by now. That said, only Williams, Hawtrey, and Dale turn up for the inevitable Carry On Spying in 1964, which also features Cribbins again and introduces Barbara Windsor. Peter Butterworth and Bernard Bresslaw become semi-regulars with the painful Carry On, Cowboy (1966), and to lower the tone further comes the pitiful Hammer horror spoof Carry On Screaming (1966).

A brave but misjudged attempt to modernise was made at this point, when Rogers--who had switched to new distributors--tried to drop the Carry On prefix, thinking it outdated and now connected to his rival’s back catalog, and two of the Carry On films were initially released under different titles—Don’t Lose Your Head (1966) and Follow That Camel (1967). Despite the fact that the regular cast were all over the posters, and they were obviously Carry On films in all but name, the regular Carry On customers were a conservative bunch, and this did have an effect on the box office, with Rogers wasting no time in clumsily retitling them with the Carry On... restored.

He also made the mistake of trying to shoehorn an American name into the formula for the overseas audience, and included the brilliant Phil Silvers in the cast for Foreign Legion escapade (Carry On,) Follow That Camel, but again the reactionary old flag-wavers who made up the majority of the audience were having none of it. There was a strong sense of resentment in the ‘60s and ‘70s of the superiority of American entertainment, and while the British have always felt as though they secretly own Silvers’ Sgt. Bilko (in much the same way we “own” the Elgin Marbles, and various Egyptian and African artefacts), they didn't want him horning in on something so inherently British--and jingoism aside, their styles clashed anyway. When I watched this film as a young teen with my family back in the ‘70s, I was laughing at Silvers, and they were laughing at everything else. It was a most bizarre and disconcerting experience.

No fool, Rogers quickly realised which side his bread was buttered, and went back to the earlier films for a sure-fire back-to-basics return to what made the series popular in the first place. Seizing on Carry On, Nurse, he quickly commissioned Carry On, Doctor (1967), bringing back all the regulars including the long-absent Hattie Jacques, still busy on television, and even the recently ill and bed-confined Sid James (conveniently cast as a patient), and rather brilliantly adding camp stage act Frankie Howerd to the mix (possibly to take the role originally intended for Sid?). Howerd’s coy smut and closet homosexuality fit the format like a glove.

Unlike so many in the industry, Rogers took note of what his audience was telling him. He would also abandon the Hollywood spoofs in the years to come, well aware that despite modest overseas success, his core audience was the U.K., and deliberately started playing up the series’ Britishness, and exploiting to the max the sexual repression and love of infantile toilet humor that made the British unique across Europe.

He seized on race and class with the British Empire spoof Carry On Up the Khyber (1968), the closest the series ever came to satire, although done extremely carefully and pro-Brit, and hit the motherlode with the infamous Carry On Camping (1969), which not only cringed at sex, but squirmed at nudity as well, brilliantly exploiting British hypocrisy regarding both. Who doesn't weep at the sorry sight of the hideously ugly Sid James and Bernard Bresslaw sitting in the dark of the cinema plotting to trick their wives into taking a holiday at a goose-bumpy British nudist camp on the screen, while the indignant women sit in the next two seats with disgust on their faces and pursed lips? But who can't help laughing when Kenneth Williams, in the famous scene where Barbara Windsor's bra bursts off and confronts him with her protruding breasts, wails forlornly and appalled to Hattie Jacques to “take them away!!”!? Carry On Camping is the most well-remembered and referred to Carry On of them all, and the rest of Europe must surely love it too, just to laugh at the British.

The surefire Carry On Again, Doctor (1969) was followed by Carry On Up the Jungle (1970), with the returning Frankie Howerd and TV sit-com veteran Terry Scott (who had played a bit part in the very first Carry On, and returned to take co-starring roles in ...Up the Khyber and ...Camping) covering for the absent Kenneth Williams.

It might be argued with the advantage of hindsight that with Carry On Camping, the series peaked. Having defiantly survived the swingin’ ‘60s by entertaining all those many Brits to whom the term hadn’t applied, the ambience of the 1970s undoubtedly affected the series as it moved into the new decade. Whether the Carry On audience had deigned to participate or not, the world had moved forward, and quaint rapidly became pathetic, sauce became smut, and double-entendres became single-entendres. There was Carry On Loving (1970), set in a computerised dating agency, another period pain with Carry On, Henry (1971), the unflinchingly low-brow Carry On At Your Convenience (1971, which revolved entirely around a factory making toilets, thus handing the critics a spectacular own goal), the inevitable Carry On, Matron (1972), the dismal and cash-strapped Carry On Abroad (1972), the ghastly beauty contest farrago Carry On, Girls (1973), which is basically pigs vs. prudes (one struggles in vain to find a side, or even a character, to sympathise with), highwayman yarn Carry On, Dick (1974), which existed surely just to use the title, and the appropriately titled Carry On Behind (1975), a timely title as the series was by now being seriously left behind by the ‘70s sex-coms. Rogers, as astute as ever, sensed that the Carry On audience was more likely to be sitting at home watching the television rather than occupying cinema seats, and began sidling towards the notion of television specials and clip shows.

Hardly any of the regulars turned up for the dismal Carry On, England (1976), set on a military base, leaving Kenneth Connor and Joan Sims to carry the can (Sid James died that year), and the same applied to Carry On, Emmanuelle (1978), for which Kenneth Williams very reluctantly returned. There were by the ‘80s a fair number of made-for-TV specials and compilations, and many old British comedies had the pre-fix What a Carry On added to their titles by unscrupulous video distributors in the ‘80s, but these, while appealing to the same audience, were not authentic Carry Ons. Rogers never officially announced the end, and tried to put together further films, but the cast and the potential audience were dropping like flies, and the British film industry was on its knees.

By the 1970s, with the Carry On films still in production and the early ones a staple of, yes, family viewing on the television, the country had been divided between those still untouched by the Swinging Sixties and the growing number--particularly among the young--who considered them an outdated embarrassment. To announce that you found the Carry On films funny in the 1970s was to watch your street cred evaporate forever, doomed to walk the Earth a lonely, celibate, unloved laughing stock. They were your mother’s films. But by the ‘80s, with the series over and Nanny Thatcher in charge, the nostalgia factor kicked in, and the new young rediscovered the long-forgotten Sgt. Bilko, Norman Wisdom, Bewitched, Thunderbirds, Lost in Space, The Munsters, The Flintstones, and yes, the Carry On films, making them insanely fashionable again (although how many people buying the mugs, t-shirts and coasters actually watched the films is not known).

They also found favor with the sort of people who, in many cases quite understandably, rail against the excesses of political correctness, although one does occasionally worry about their ulterior motives (is it a return to common sense and freedom of speech they want, or just an opportunity to spout racist bile again?); one of the main causes political correctness manifested itself to begin with was unfunny bigoted comedy. I'll leave the topic alone for now, other than to say that the pendulum swings, and political correctness is probably the best example of that old adage “the road to hell is paved with good intentions”.

It almost goes without saying that the reality behind the facade was typically sad and sordid. In real life, Kenneth Williams was a bitter celibate and closet homosexual who hated himself, Sid James was allegedly cheating on his wife with a fellow cast member, Hattie Jacques had an open affair with a live-in younger man while her publicly humiliated husband looked ruefully on in his own house, and Charles Hawtrey, who had a massively overblown sense of his own importance, was picking up rough trade in dangerous locales at every location shoot the crew stopped for. Then they put their masks on and became loveable seaside postcard stereotypes for unsuspecting suburbia.

That the Carry Ons, frozen in time, did not carry on, we can be eternally grateful, but also vigilant. In 1992, a box-office disaster titled Carry On, Columbus made with a contemporary new cast of comedians crashed and burned, so we can never say never again.

Russ Meyer--He was glad to do it.

The Immoral Mr. Teas (1959), Eve and the Handyman (1961), Wild Gals of the Naked West (1962), Lorna (1964), Mudhoney (1965), Motor Psycho (1965), Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1965), Mondo Topless (1966), Common Law Cabin (1967), Good Morning and Goodbye (1967), Finders Keepers, Lovers Weepers (1968), Vixen (1968), Cherry, Harry, and Raquel (1970)

There’s only one Russ Meyer (and he passed away in 2004), but frankly it’s amazing that there was only one Russ Meyer. His films, personality, and attitudes embodied full on the attitudes and ambience of the countless sweat mags drooled over by thousands of American soldiers, dockers, and hardhats from the ‘20s to the ‘70s, but he was one of a kind. One guy--a former army photographer and cameraman--putting on film what dozens of hacks and commercial artists put in the pulps every single month for fifty years. And as with those lurid pulp magazines, his women looked as though they were striding straight out of the ‘40s and ‘50s, even in the ‘60s and ‘70s. Not for Meyer, skinny hippie chicks with spliffs and guitars, just lusty, busty, heavily made-up glamour girls with high heels, tight skirts, and a liking for booze, tobacco, and tough guys.

Although he enjoyed a healthy sex life with several wives and many of his performers, Meyer fantasised about women as being unattainable, take-charge, and fearsome. All his movies featured aggressive, dominant women with terrifying breasts, and storylines often featured intimidated, inadequate men, or arrogant buffoons who thought they were in charge but weren’t.

With wife and model Eve, businessman Peter De Renzie (in the early years), and best buddy Anthony Jack Ryan as his business partners, Meyer produced a string of similarly themed pictures throughout the ‘60s until his abortive experience at 20th Century Fox and Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. Then he fled back to what he knew best until the market started bellowing for stronger stuff, at which point he doffed his hat and retired. He then proceeded to release most of his movies (he’d shrewdly kept the rights to almost everything) on video in the ‘80s and DVD in the ‘90s, finding himself feted by softcore enthusiasts, fad-following trendies, and cult film buffs.

Filming from the age of fourteen, Russ Meyer was taking stills of strippers for a local burlesque house when he was commissioned by the owner to make a film of his girls to be shown in-house. He made his first feature in 1958, and inadvertently kickstarted the mainstream sex film market in America. When puritans and prudes scolded him that he'd “opened the floodgates of screen permissiveness”, he told them that his gravestone would say “I was glad to do it”, his stock response. To get round the censors and avoid charges of filming pornography in the fusty ‘50s, The Immoral Mr. Teas, made with an old army buddy in the lead and starring four local strippers, concentrated on sex-free, hands-off voyeurism and told the tale of a lonely voyeur in a straw boater who fantasises about clothed women in an undressed state.

Meyer was an ex-army guy and man’s man, and no fan of porn anyway, preferring simply to admire the female form. He had little time for a film-maker’s artistic pretensions, and in later years, as the market outmatched him, only included outright sex scenes when he had to. He was in it for the babes, and admitted it. It wuz a great way ta make a livin’. An old-fashioned guy, he liked sex but didn’t like swearwords, although he despised censorship, the bane of his life.

It’s almost impossible to comprehend today that The Immoral Mr. Teas was a daring, important and groundbreaking film. With their spartan surroundings, flat backgrounds, wry spot gags, and cornball all-American 1950s cliche narration, his early films resemble live-action versions of Hanna-Barbera’s early TV cartoons from the same period more than they do adult magazines (Mr. Teas even has a Huckleberry Hound job and a Huckleberry Hound hat!).

Narration, of course, has always been the first choice easy option for the low-budget or no-budget film-maker. No dialogue, foley or lip synching required, just a voiceover and cheap score. Despite a few lustful looks at some surprisingly bra-less receptionists and secretaries, Meyer pushes his luck for as long as possible, and it’s fifteen minutes in before any skin, and 25 minutes before any nudity. Just as long-suffering 1950s cinema patrons must have been losing their patience (even the narrator gives up and goes home after half an hour), the film’s final quarter delivers a lengthy skinny-dipping sequence that displays the three leading ladies (Michele Roberts, Dawn Denielle, and Marilyn Wesley) in all their glory, rather in the manner of the naturist films of the period, but without the nudist camp drivel or medical lecture that usually accompanied such rare treats in overground film.

It encourages genuine melancholia to imagine a time when sexually frustrated men gathered in public darkness to sit through these sad, shabby films in real-time, just for the opportunity to see an occasional pair of breasts and a naked body. The women in The Immoral Mr. Teas, when they eventually disrobe, are beautiful, astonishingly so given the standards of most nudie films of the era, and the stifling corsets, ghastly swimwear, and lumpen lingerie of the day. Beach girl Ann Leslie looks like she slid off the decal on the side of a WWII airplane, while the three women in the film’s main fantasy sequence (all seen clothed and equally appealing in the lengthy lead-in footage) are female perfection (some of Meyer’s later models, cast purely for the size of their breasts, were less so).

So, although it opens like a Yogi Bear cartoon describing Jellystone Park, and rambles on going nowhere for the first half-hour, before finally presenting us with four full-figured beauties in the most natural and inoffensive of surroundings in the last fifteen minutes, the sleaze factor of The Immoral Mr. Teas and Meyer’s other films is overpowering. Sexual desire, it is repeatedly indicated, is undesirable, troubling, and bad. It’s depressingly intriguing that the immorality Mr. Teas apparently suffers from, and goes to see a psychiatrist about, is nothing more than the manifestation of a man’s natural desires (which Freud could have told him some decades earlier, although puritan ‘50s America may not have been entirely receptive to the notion). Women are portrayed as mysterious, unavailable objects that exist only to tease, torment, and titillate men, and men shown as anxious, inadequate losers with empty, unfulfilled lives brightened only by their breast fixation and the anticipation of an often broken promise. The reviews of the period--which all gasp at what they consider to be a large amount of nudity--are particularly revealing. This was all there was... and no fast forward either.

It was this simple, straightforward approach to no-touch nudity that made the film, and Meyer, a pioneer. Meyer actually delivers, even if he takes his time getting there, and returning audiences surely took a book to read by torchlight rather than face re-watching Mr. Teas’ daily routine unfolding repeatedly, although the brief fantasy sequences are nicely done against sparse comic-strip-style backgrounds.

Meyer’s sequel, Eve and the Handyman (1961), follows the same format of padding and teasing, but stops before it starts, delivering nothing but gags and a few brief flashes. This time, Meyer’s wife Eve is the voyeur and narrator, spying on a handyman in an espionage-style spoof. Hypocritically but typically, Meyer was reluctant to share his wife’s undraped form with his audience, even though she had modelled.

Or perhaps the Meyers and their business partners had been burned by the censorship problems that dogged Mr. Teas, at one point causing the film to be impounded for almost a year. Educated by experience and eventually making their money (not soon enough for leading man Bill Teas, who bought himself out for a fraction of what he might have had), they swiftly found out that the right palms needed to be greased in each territory they opened in, the problem being less a matter of morality, and more a matter of remembering to pay off the right local officials and businessmen. Either way, this was much too cautious in comparison with his debut effort.

Meyer’s film career might otherwise have ended here, but next up was the ambitious western spoof, the irresistibly titled Wild Gals of the Naked West (1962), which is genuinely creative in the manner it overcomes its financial limitations, with a clever if overlong opening montage of sound effects and visual images that provide a potted history of the wild west without employing a single actor (although the second-rate narrator is extremely annoying). When the cast eventually turn up, we are firmly in Benny Hill territory again. I’m loathe to admit it, but the broad cartoonish spoofery and the cliche prospectors, shoot-outs, saloon girls, and cigar store indians etc. are genuinely funny, and Wild Gals of the Naked West featured enough fulsome female flesh for the time to satisfy an audience that could pretend it was there for the laffs. However, times were changing, and such short-changing sex films were falling out of favor. Although he split with business partner De Renzie at this point, Meyer always credited him with giving him his successful start through encouragement and education, and from these modest beginnings would spring a twenty year career that would later gift us Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, Vixen, and Beyond the Valley of the Dolls...

Following the Southern-Gothic sex melodramas Lorna and Mudhoney, two sadly monochrome hot and sweaty pulp paperbacks brought to life in 1964/‘65 with the aid of the sultry Lorna Maitland, and a bizarre attempt to film Fanny Hill with Italian actress Leticia Roman in the lead for schlockmeister Albert Zugsmith in Germany (also ’64), by the mid-‘60s Russ (and Eve) Meyer had returned swiftly to self-employment. In 1965, they produced two monochrome exploitation films without the troublesome nudity, the revenge road movie Motor Psycho and the camp curiosity Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! that was to become his most famous independent feature.

Temporarily tiring of taking on the censors, the Meyers sat back and studied the market, latching onto the comic-book consequence-free violence that had become prevalent in mid-‘60s pop culture through the joint influence of Bond and Batman. Their own films were becoming increasingly more fanciful and extreme, with the exaggerated amateur performances and big-breasted women already bordering on camp (Lorna and Mudhoney had not been taken as seriously by some reviewers as had perhaps been intended). Why not go all the way?

Featuring no nudity but some stunning women, and crying out for the comic-book colors and flesh tones it wasn't filmed in, the deliriously titled but unfortunately monochrome Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! eventually became a cult classic almost on the strength of its extraordinary title alone. However, it did have more than that going for it, in the imposing and intimidating form of the voluptuous and leather-clad stripper Tura Satana, a human cartoon cut-out accompanied by the sultry, cat-like Haji, and the stunningly beautiful Elvis film and beach movie regular Lori Williams. Continuing Meyer’s theme of dangerous and aggressive take-charge women, the girls played three go-go dancers from hell, the thuggish, cat-like bully in black leather Varla (Satana), and her two bimbo hangers-on, lesbian lover Rosie (Haji), and boozy, blonde man-hungry free spirit Billie (Williams), irresistible trouble-makers who walked all over men to get what they wanted.

In the first ten minutes alone, after a wonderfully corny spoken intro about the dangers of difficult women, we have seen go-go dancing, drag racing, clothed-skinnydipping (an oxymoron, I know, but the only way to describe it), and cat-fighting in and out of the water. They’re like an evil, anti-matter, mirror-world version of Charlie's Angels, and Jack Moran’s witty but improbable dialogue (pure undiluted comic-strip balloons), the jazzy music, the bad acting of the three girls (shamelessly cast for their figures), and Meyer’s surly misogyny and lowbrow tastes (for example, the klunky comedy music hammering home the garage mechanic’s purpose as comic relief) only add to the camp absurdity of it all. It's like watching a guys’ dorm room wall come to life, and is certainly Lori Williams’ finest hour, bringing her out of the background extras of bikini films for what would be sadly the only time. Satana, a fearsome brawler who also made appearances in camp classics Burke’s Law, The Man from UNCLE, The Girl from UNCLE, and the features Our Man Flint, The Astro Zombies, and The Doll Squad, was one of a kind, and Haji, who appeared in three more Meyer films, Motor Psycho, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, and Super Vixens (the latter as Super Haji!) is so bad she's hilarious. She spits out her lines in pieces as though she’s just hearing them as she says them. However, 1965 was a time for obedient wives and simpering daughters, not take-charge super-bitches, and the multiple joys of Faster, Pussycat! would not be appreciated until the ‘70s, when it slowly but surely built up a cult following to become the legend it is today. Keeping the company of the Meyer regulars and sex film bit players making up the male cast members was newcomer Paul Trinka, about to become a recurring familiar face on Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, whose first film role had been way down the cast list of a justly forgotten 1959 war fantasy starring Eve Meyer, titled Girls in Action and written by Meyer’s buddy and future prolific TV scriptwriter Ed Lakso.

Hurtling around the desert in individual cars (close-ups of the girls are clearly shot in vehicles that aren't moving), the three trouble-makers stumble onto a couple of hot-rodding teens. After initially appearing friendly, Varla’s taunts turns ugly and the boy ends up humiliated and beaten up by the titanic tart as her entourage watches. After she’s killed him in the heat of the moment, they take the terrified girl along with them, planning to eventually dispose of their only witness, who, they realise, will tell all as soon as she comes out of the hysterical shock she’s succumbed to. A gossipy garage mechanic inadvertently tips them off to their next rumble--a bitter old woman-hater in a wheelchair with a hidden fortune stashed away, who lives out in the middle of nowhere with his two sons, a musclebound doofus and a downtrodden wimp. Jobbing Z-movie actor and TV bit player Stuart Lancaster is excellent as the vindictive and nasty father, prejudiced against women after being crippled saving a girl from a train’s wheels, and horrible to his simple-minded son because his wife died in childbirth. The girls strut and pose magnificently throughout as the film works its way to a fraught and increasingly hysterical over-the-top resolution. It should be noted that the girls do not get their comeuppance from men.

In this and many other ways, Faster, Pussycat! was ahead of its time (it bombed at the box office, and was ruthlessly panned), and it might have been even better if made in the ‘70s, with color and nudity. It cries out for both, and the script, with unchanged references to Lady Godiva, nudism, and putting some clothes on, implies that it was initially intended, but Meyer had (temporarily) tired of fighting the censors. However, it works just fine as it is, and the fantastic compositions and crystal clear cinematography serve the girls well.

Meyer’s Motor Psycho is the lesser known twin of the legendary Faster, Pussycat! It’s a taut revenge thriller with hilarious hipster dialogue of the groovy baby making-the-scene variety, and the same stylised black and white photography and comic strip camera angles as Pussycat! With its menacing rock music for the bikers (who ditch their wheels early in the film), and sleazy jazz as soon as Meyer’s girls strut their stuff, it was also one of the first films to feature returnees from Vietnam as traumatised loose cannons, a popular and prevalent storyline in the 1970s before First Blood and Magnum p.i. turned it all around at the beginning of the ‘80s and made the vets equally inappropriate and unfair hero figures. Had it been made in color, it would be right up there with the classics of the genre, rather than just a footnote for film buffs. When early film references to Vietnam are being discussed, Motor Psycho is rarely referenced.

Veterinarian and no-nonsense nice guy Corey Maddox (TV tough guy Alex Rocco) gets on the wrong side of some callous, thrill-seeking bikers (it’s vets vs. a vet), but these are not straight-baiting anti-heroes for the teen crowd, but scum on wheels. After establishing Maddox’ relationship with his wife, the aptly named Angel (Hollie K. Winters), in lazy, languid love scenes that show nothing except lust, the bikers show up and rape her while he’s out on a job fending off the lusty neglected wife of a rancher client, and he gets back to find associate producer George Costello as a medic sympathetically loading her into an ambulance while Meyer, cameoing as a somewhat less sensitive cop, snaps “Nothin’ happened to her that a woman ain’t built fer!”. Maddox has a different, more heroic opinion, and sets off in hot pursuit, picking up a feisty Cajun girl (the indefatigable Haji of Faster, Pussycat!) on the way after her slobbish husband becomes the gang’s latest victim.

There’s not much sex in Motor Psycho, certainly not in the softcore sense, but every frame oozes with lust. If not for that, this might play more like a monochrome version of a Roger Corman or Maury Dexter biker exploiter than a typical tits-in-your-face Russ Meyer movie. It’s intriguing to think that had Faster, Pussycat! not been before its time, Meyer might have continued in this direction, at least for a while, turning out absurdist adventure for the drive-ins. Instead, he did what all directors do when their pet project bombs, and fled back to the safety of the sure thing, returning swiftly to his sweat mag origins, but in color for a laughable and cynical lowest common denominator rush job mock-umentary about topless dancers, followed by a trio of witless and over-wrought melodramas featuring tits, tits, and more tits...

Rallying together a handful of buxom bimbos to pout and pose and wiggle and wobble for the camera, Meyer made the ludicrous Mondo Topless (1966), a slapdash and cynical confection for the raincoat brigade to recoup some of the losses incurred on what would one day be regarded quite rightly as his masterpiece. There was no denying that it delivered what it said on the packet, and even Meyer not trying was better than most porn producers on their best day. One segment slips into black and white to integrate clips from his earlier Lorna, accompanied by the only color footage of leading lady Lorna Maitland. With the bank account replenished, Meyer proceeded with Common Law Cabin (1967), originally filmed under the appalling and completely irrelevant title How Much Loving Does a Normal Couple Need?

This is yet another outrageously stupid and sleazy movie that, like much of Meyer’s moronic, misogynist output, is surprisingly watchable. All Meyer’s stock characters are to hand--weak, stupid men sowing the seeds of their own destruction, bitchy, blowzy, big-boobed, sharp-tongued trouble-making women--along with his by now standard trademark failings--klunky comedy music telegraphing heavy-handed attempts at humor, sleazy saxophone for the arrival of the women, and hilariously stupid self-important narration going nowhere: “How does a river begin? With the season’s changing, the thaw of winter snow, or is it there all the time?”. It’s there all the time, Russ.

Meyer regular Frank Bolger is Cracker, a disreputable old drunk who drums up business for the crummy cabin resort run by Dewey Hoople (Meyer's buddy and this film's writer, Jack Moran) and his daughter Coral. Corrupt cop Barney Rickert (TV stalwart Ken Swofford) sees it as the perfect place to hide out with his stolen stash, while busty bitch Sheila Ross (knockout Alaina Capri) wants to go there just to annoy her uptight buttoned-up doctor husband (John Furlong), who doesn’t. Alone with only his bad choice of second wife (the absurd and frequently incomprehensible Babette Bardot from Mondo Topless) and developing daughter (nudie film starlet Adele Rein) for company, Hoople is fighting off an unpleasant and unnatural attraction to his uninhibited offspring, while Capri’s doctor’s wife is playing up to every male in sight except the one she’s married to. As always in a Meyer film, a seething hotbed of lust erupts into tragedy, and several cast members come to grief.

This was one of Swofford’s earliest jobs, and Furlong, a bit player rather than guest star material, started out with Meyer. Both Swofford and Furlong went on to extensive television careers, with both coincidentally making several appearances in The Rockford Files, although Swofford (who had his best roles in the aforementioned series) often appeared several times in other long-running shows. Moran was a former child actor best known for being the juvenile lead in Universal’s Buck Rogers serial. Finally filming in color, Meyer unfortunately chooses this moment to ditch the comic book panel direction of Teas, Lorna, and Faster, Pussycat! for more traditional camera angles, although his trademark ground level shots are occasionally seen.

“Sex in Meyer’s films is natural and unstoppable” wrote the wonderfully named Moose McGill in an early ‘90s film fanzine. “Problems arise between men and women when this energy is blocked, diminished, or diverted. The underlying thesis in all of Meyer’s movies is that misdirected sexual energy leads to all sorts of problems... a healthy society is a humping society! Common Law Cabin and Good Morning and Goodbye are prime examples of this philosophy in action…”.

“Meyer was an odd choice to be the one pushing any sexual boundaries” noted Jimmy McDonough in his Russ Meyer biography Big Bosoms and Square Jaws. “Here was a man with one foot in the commie-hating Norman Rockwell ‘50s, and the other in some garish live-action Looney Tunes universe where Li’l Abner and Daisy Mae got naked and got down”! As McDonough reveals, Meyer was as ignorant about sex as any other American male in the 1950s, but he took a subject that intimidated macho men and made a joke out of it--dragged it into the sunlight, as McDonough puts it. And while the glamour photographer turned exploitation film maker was quite happy to bed his actresses and models, he had no time for the casting couch, and--running his location shoots with dedicated precision like a military operation overseen by a demented football coach--tried to forbid his actors and actresses to have sex during a shoot, claiming that it drained their energy and enthusiasm.

Meyer’s attitude to sexual relationships was positively primeval. The middle-aged tough guys in Meyer’s films (all bearing a remarkable resemblance to himself and his army buddy entourage, even when inadequate and reprehensible) have no illusions that the girls they fight for are anything but high maintenance trash, and all the women in his films, whether wives or barroom pick-ups, are portrayed as flighty tramps who will only stick around as long as there’s action in the bedroom and money in the bank.

Russ Meyer continued

After yet another of Moran’s absolutely hilarious and agonisingly stupid marathon opening monologues that goes on for well over five lugubrious minutes (narrator Joe Perrin is the thinly disguised Vic Perrin, who narrated similarly verbose purple prose for the exquisite pulp sci-fi series The Outer Limits), the amusingly titled Good Morning and Goodbye (1967) turns into a similarly ridiculous sexual merry-go-round of lust as Common Law Cabin. This time, events are based around the reasonably well-off Boland family, impotent Burt (Meyer regular Stuart Lancaster), his trampy second wife Angel (the stunning Alaina Capri again), his borderline virgin daughter (blonde Karen Ciral), her narcissist boyfriend, and the local stud (Pat Wright), who is working his way through the entire female cast, including his workmate’s hillbilly bride. Now add to this mix a wild and wacky performance from Haji as some sort of airhead magical supernatural wood-nymph who frolics in the nearby woodlands semi-nude and revives Boland’s libido and self-confidence with mysticism and restores the status quo, and it’s The Last Picture Show meets A Mid-Summer Night’s Dream. If you've never seen a Meyer melodrama, start here and blow your mind.

Literally beyond parody, as no-one could possibly make any kind of spoof or send-up sillier than the real thing, this is jaw-droppingly bad, but enormous fun because of it. The girls are stunning (finally in color and photographed beautifully), and there is a smattering of nudity from Capri (who would rather slosh about nude in a muddy creek than in her beautiful back-of-house swimming pool), Haji (who runs around the woods starkers), and Carol Peters, the last apparently bouncing her boobs au naturel just for the hell of it (or perhaps to keep us seated during the aforementioned interminable narration).

The outrageously unreal dialogue that is venomously exchanged between unhappy man and woman includes such immortal lines as: opening robe—“What the hell more help can I give you than this?”/“Well I don’t enjoy a picnic the cockroaches have beaten me to”; “Hell, you’re not going to win any beauty contests ten years from now either, baby”; and “I’m tired of coming second... and you coming first”. The entire film carries on in this vein without once letting up on the vindictiveness and spite; not a single kind word is spoken by anyone, ever, and all the players are alone, unfaithful, and friendless. The only time anyone has any company is between the sheets.

Although the Meyers and their writers appear to have had some kind of mass mutual lobotomy, the amazing cars and clothes (it’s 1967) make this a retro delight; get a load of the props, decor, and background music as you lust after that Cadillac in-car radio and move to the groove... and don’t switch off before the end credits roll, or you’ll miss Haji running around the desert in the altogether. Complete and utter madness, the witty but uncommercial title was later changed to the staggeringly unimaginative Confessions of a Sexy Supervixen.

All Meyer’s films at this point were inter-changeable and forgettable plot-wise, and the next off the assembly line following Common Law Cabin and Good Morning and Goodbye, was no exception. Finders Keepers, Lovers Weepers (1968) offered more leering men (many of whom are, as usual, Meyer and his buddies), more shimmying and shaking stacked starlets, the inevitable completely irrelevant shots of fast cars and topless girls dancing in the desert, and a clever and pointlessly elaborate credits sequence (this time he’s had the credits printed out onto specially designed drinks bottle labels; previously, films have had them on road signs and domestic mail boxes). Is it a porn film with an overly elaborate plot, or a crime thriller with tits?

While bar owner Paul (Paul Lockwood) and his wife Kelly (Anne Chapman) cheat on each other, professional criminals played by Duncan McLeod and Bob Rudelson plan to raid the safe of his highly profitable business while brothel keeper Claire (Lavelle Roby) keeps the owner occupied. Kelly finally gets revenge on her rapey husband by dancing naked at the bar and screwing the lusty barman (Gordon Wescourt) for good measure, but unfortunately chooses the night of the robbery to do it, and all three end up in a hostage situation when our lamentable hero leaves the whorehouse earlier than planned. If you can find a character to care about, well done, but like most of Meyer’s color output, the film rarely bores. The girls look great, and McLeod, Rudelson, Wescourt, and Roby, all to be found in mainstream TV bit parts, are real actors.

Russ Meyer’s next was the groundbreaking Vixen!, which coined the five letter word his films would most be associated with in the years to follow. It also coined so much actual coin that the majors couldn't help but take notice, and Meyer was heading for the big break that would derail and misdirect him for the next few years.

Hollywood-raised hippy-dippy go-go dancer Erica Gavin made the title role her own, but followed it with a bout of anorexia after seeing her perfect form on screen convinced her she was fat (!). She recovered to return in semi-mainstream cult classics Beyond the Valley of the Dolls and Caged Heat before calling it a day. Although she and Meyer fell out with each other, far from bearing a grudge, she mourned Meyer’s passing in 2004, pointing out that he gave her “her fifteen minutes”.

“I think that some woman really fucked Russ up” said Gavin in an interview with Dennis Peary in 1975. “He doesn’t like women. He does but he doesn’t. I think that somewhere along the line someone hurt him drastically, because he portrays women as freaks. They’re plastic. It’s sort of sad how he sees women. That there’s no way they’ll ever be loyal to him”.

Ditching the classy over-complicated credits for cheap rolling titles, Vixen! (1968) features his most unpleasant character yet, and was clearly written (by Finders Keepers, Lovers Weepers supporting player Bob Rudelson) to shock. Vixen! revisits the premise of Common Law Cabin by setting events in an out-of-the-way holiday home, this time in Canadian fishing country, accessed not by boat but ‘plane, flown by Vixen’s easy going free lovin’ husband Tom (recurring Star Trek redshirt and TV bit player Garth Pillsbury). The only other girl in the cast is prolific porn actress Vincene Wallace sporting a 1960s bad hair day, but audiences certainly won’t feel short-changed.

Genuine scenes of eroticism are accompanied by a title character who, when she’s not mounting Mounties, committing incest with her biker brother in the shower, or seducing dissatisfied couples, is a spiteful, selfish, racist sex maniac, most of her bile directed toward draft-dodging black guy Niles (TV player Harrison Page in his first role). However, when the ‘plane is hired by a charming Irish rogue who turns out to be a Marx-addled terrorist whose genial facade slips when Niles shows that it takes courage to stand against war as well as go to it, Vixen suddenly sees her brother’s buddy in a new light. Despite Vixen becoming a reformed character at the end of the film, the constant stream of racist abuse seems unnecessary, dated, and hard going by contemporary standards, although the movie’s message might still speak to potential bigots in a constructive way. Mr “no messages” Meyer, surprisingly for an old-fashioned ex-army man, seems to place the grievances of the civil rights movement before any great belief in the military action in Vietnam, which makes the breast-fixated old bastard a bit of a secret right-on good guy on the quiet!

“So many things people write about my films... are so full of shit” he scoffed. “I had no message except big bosoms and greed. There was no intent to create something that would be profound. I wanted to... make a film that was funny and would make money. Appeal to the prurient interest. It turns me on. I get a semi. I have a good time. I love to make films. That’s it. I think it’s important to state that I was in this for the almighty buck... lust and greed. My films wouldn’t have survived without the tits, no matter what anyone says”. Most wouldn’t argue.

Cherry, Harry, and Raquel (1970) was the last, and very much the least, of Meyer’s late-‘60s efforts. After another three minute marathon narration from Vic Perrin, this time warning us of the dangers of marijuana (“Pity the poor potheads…”), plus a lengthy onscreen roll about censorship, Cherry, Harry, and Raquel finally gets underway... and makes no narrative sense at all. Random nude shots are cut into a rambling storyline that involves a corrupt cop (prolific TV tough guy Charles Napier) involved in drugs smuggling for a local big shot (Meyer regular Frank Bolger, acting as though he’s just had a stroke). After seeing this shambles, few would disagree about the dangers of drugs. Everyone who made this must have been as high as a kite.

There is an unconfirmed story going round that Meyer lost half the footage that had been filmed and had to reconstruct the film by padding out the running time, and another that lead actress Linda Ashton stormed off the picture mid-way, never to return, and there is certainly plenty of evidence on the screen to give these stories credence--time-filling devices such as repeated shots, inserts, and the never-ending narration. However these are all Meyer standards, and Meyer--never the most reliable source, and prone to shooting his mouth off--changed his story over the years, and there were a lot of incomprehensible films similar to this around in the late ‘60s (Casino Royale, Modesty Blaise, and Head come to mind without even picking up a book), so it’s tough to get to the truth with all participants missing or deceased. Either way, you can forget about a plot.

Dominating several good action scenes with strong violence are some beautifully posed and photographed big-breasted, full-figured women, including the titular Cherry (Ashton), a nurse, and Raquel (Larissa Ely), a hooker. Uschi Digard, who had no morals or compunction about appearing in any piece of garbage, and appearing here under the name Astrid Lillimor, one of her endless stream of pseudonyms, was certainly brought in to pad out the running time with a series of surreal shots in the desert that give this mess its distinctive love-it-or-leave-it charm. There’s plenty of quality eye candy here, but some may feel the price to pay in sleaze and lack of comprehension may just be too high a price to pay. But I doubt it. You pay for Meyer, you get Meyer, after all.

Or so thought 20th Century Fox, who at this point lured Meyer into the mainstream wilderness to the ultimate regret of both parties. When he produced Vixen!, his strongest film to date, it became a double-edged sword--successful in cinemas, but costing him a fortune in the courts. However, one side of the sword was considerably sharper than the other, and three million in court costs next to 26 million in box office ensured that Super Vixens and Beyond the Valley of the Ultra Vixens would follow, the latter title a play on his short-lived dalliance with the majors (Beyond the Valley of the Dolls was his unrelated sequel to Fox’s Valley of the Dolls). Beyond the Valley of the Dolls was followed by the anti-censorship tirade The Seven Minutes and the slave trade exploiter Blacksnake, and it wasn’t until 1975 that Meyer, independent again, came up with the inevitable Supervixens, pretty much picking up where he had left off before the Cherry, Harry, and Raquel debacle. It was during this period that he dabbled unsuccessfully with diversifying, with the brutal slave trader story Blacksnake, only to hear (says writer and Meyer biographer David Frasier in his DVD box-set notes) the plaintive cry from an audience member—“Where’s the tits?”.

Point taken, Meyer had returned to his vixens and ultra vixens, but the market had moved on from voyeurism to outright hard sex, and Meyer, seeing box office dwindle, chose to retire.

Joe and Inga

Inga (1968), Seduction of Inga (1971)

Europe had been in pretty much the same place when Meyer was shooting his pioneering premiere skin-flick in 1958, but by 1968 events were escalating to a point where he would soon be left standing in the dust, blinking like Wile E. Coyote after the Road Runner has passed through.

Joe Sarno and his wife Peggy were as alike to Russ and Eve Meyer as chalk and cheese. Whereas Meyer ideally would have preferred to stand still and look backwards, Sarno was excited by the prospect of moving forward. Producers of erotica who had aspirations to be taken seriously in an era dominated by phoney nudies and crass roughies, they were not slow to notice that, swingin’ ‘60s or not, all the advances in erotic film were being made in Denmark and Sweden. As these were two countries where sex and nudity were not considered a big deal, the major hurdle to producing anything other than stag films and hypocritical nudist camp reels had not only been removed, it had never been there in the first place. Although, like every country, both Sweden and Denmark had their occasional outbreaks of censorious moral outrage, it was usually about transgressions of family values, or religious matters, rather than anything directly related to what you could show in the way of sex or skin. Sex was the stuff of drama, rather than debate or low comedy. If anything, the Scandinavians took sex a little too seriously.

Sarno and his ever-supportive wife and assistant Peggy Steffans went to Stockholm with a finished script about a naive young girl who is plunged into a sexual maelstrom of manipulative, selfish adults, all of who want to use her either directly or indirectly in some way to satisfy their own desires. In Inga, (aka Jag--en Oskuld) everyone, it seems, is lusting after someone they couldn’t, or shouldn’t have…

Although it’s hard to believe, this dull, coy, but moderately interesting little sex-soap and its 1971 sequel were major events in sex cinema as the ‘60s closed and the ‘70s began. Daring at the time, but dull as dishwater today, Inga was the first film to star the beautiful Marie Liljedahl, and the one that cemented writer/director Joe Sarno’s reputation as a producer of slightly above average quality pornography. In the ‘60s and ‘70s, before fast forward, rewind, and the internet, audiences had to wait for their cheap thrills, and when you watched films directed by the likes of Joe Sarno or Russ Meyer, then wait was what you did. Fortunately, when those scenes came in a Meyer or Sarno film they were worth waiting for, and in the case of Inga, you had the perfect form of a dazzling young ballet dancer named Marie Liljedahl in the title role to look at while you were waiting. Crucially, she was as captivating to look at clothed as unclothed, and equally crucially, when she did get naked she was spellbindingly beautiful.

Sarno recreated the Swedish blueprint a little too well with Inga, which is slow and dreary, only just holding the interest as it proceeds. In the story, little orphan Inga (who only enters the story after 35 minutes, although she is seen briefly earlier) is packed off to live with her thirtysomething Aunt Greta (the attractive Monica Strommerstedt), who is involved with an arrogant and selfish young waster who entertains fantasies of being published. She has no illusions that she is living vicariously through his young friends, and that she is only retaining his attention with money, but funds are running low, and his desire for a boat has broken the bank. When Inga arrives, Greta schemes to pimp her out to a wealthy local guy who likes ‘em young, but the inevitable happens and the boat sails off with author and Inga, leaving a sadder and wiser Greta behind on the dock. The boy clearly fancies himself far more than he fancies any woman, as is made apparent in scenes in which he rejects the advances of assorted Danish pastries, so it’s somewhat debatable who the real winner is. There are two key erotic scenes, one in which Inga undresses near a window and is watched from below with her full knowledge, and another in which she brings herself to orgasm in a sequence which shows nothing below the waist at all, to its advantage. Liljedahl is also seen naked at a couple of other intervals, including the inevitable Swedish sauna.

However, the crisp black and white photography is no substitute for color where sex is concerned, and when Liljedahl (her services swiftly snapped up by other directors) finally became available for a sequel, enter Vernon Becker (of Dagmar’s Hot Pants fame, my favorite title for a sex film ever, and What the Swedish Butler Saw, probably the worst), who had just produced a sequel to Mac Ahlberg’s I, A Virgin. Consequently, 1971’s Seduction of Inga (aka Nagon att Alska) was filmed just two years later in color. Unfortunately, it then sat on the shelf for a couple of years, which pretty much ended any possibility of Inga becoming a franchise as Emmanuelle would.

Sure enough, as Seduction of Inga begins, we find Inga in a cheap bed and board, regretting the day she slipped off with Greta’s charmless lover boy, who needless to say has deserted her. It’s three years later, and she's now nineteen, but just as blissfully naive, and dumber than ever. This time she becomes involved with a smirking pimp, a wicked brothel madame, a middle-aged wealthy lothario, a high maintenance bunny-boiler, and a wimpy lovestruck young musician, and sees none of them for what they are. Although the sugar daddy has a dazzling orange car, the story takes place in dull and drab locations, and is again slow paced and clumsily edited (for reasons that will be gone into). Once again, it just about holds the attention, and once again it’s mostly due to Liljedahl and the equally attractive Inger Sundh stripping off periodically, although Sarno’s sex scenes are over before they start, and frequently, don’t even start. Fortunately, all Liljedahl has to do is stand there, clothed or unclothed, to keep things interesting, but for much of the film that's all she is doing.

Inga had been a success everywhere except Sweden, and was a prime candidate for a follow-up. Unfortunately, the finished film fell into the hands of the infamous Jerry Gross, the sleazeball who would give the world The Cheerleaders (to be discussed later), and who lived up to his name by editing in clumsy sex scenes that marred the finished feature. While one can sympathise with a distributor who's been presented with a sex film featuring no sex, Gross’ clumsy bump-and-grind inserts don't match either the film stock or the actors, and serve little purpose other than to remind us that while Sarno was no Tinto Brass, Gross was just gross. Playboy was inspired to call her the top sex star of 1971, but Liljedahl, who made only about half-a-dozen films in her brief career, was less impressed. Like many softcore sex film actresses of the early ‘70s, she saw which way the wind was blowing, and as sex cinema became more extreme, she slipped quietly and happily into retirement, leaving us just half-a-dozen opportunities to enjoy her extraordinary qualities.

Into the ‘70s: Strange New World

Rape of the Vampire (1968), Succubus (1968), Some Like It Sexy (1969), This, That, and the Other (1969), The Babysitter (1969), Weekend with the Babysitter (1970), The Young Graduates (1971)

For our purposes, the 1970s begin in 1968. This was the year Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush laid the groundwork for the British sex-com phenomenon, Nic Roeg made Performance (released in 1970), Jess Franco made his first significant film with Succubus, Jean Rollin made his first erotic vampire film, Rape of the Vampire, Paul Naschy first put on his werewolf make-up for Frankenstein's Bloody Terror, and Joe Sarno made Inga. Yet there was still very little to see, and certainly no indication of anything happening. All this was relevant only with hindsight.

Rape of the Vampire (aka Le viol du vampire, 1968), for example, an early experiment in vampire erotica by Jean Rollin filmed in glorious black and white, is a pretentious, confused, and fascinating self-indulgence concerning the fates of four alleged vampire girls haunting an abandoned gothic mansion, and the three ghost-hunters who come to debunk and rescue them. The debunkers come to grief, but are returned for further torments when Rollin extended the film and simply resurrected them. Not much else makes any sense either.

But in many ways, Rape of the Vampire was Rollin’s training ground for 1969’s The Nude Vampire, the superb Shiver of the Vampire (1970), the extraordinary Requiem for a Vampire (1971), and the atmospheric Demoniacs (1973). To be brutal, 1975’s Lips of Blood was probably the last good film he made, even though he carried on filming right up to the millennium. However, four and a half good films, with two bordering on masterpieces, is not bad going. One looks at tedium like Grapes of Death (1978), Night of the Hunted (1980), Sidewalks of Bangkok (1983), and Killing Car (1993), not to mention unhappy should-have-been-goods like Zombie Lake (1981), and wonders--what happened? But then most film directors only have about four and a half good films to their credit, no matter how many, or how few they make, even the greats. Rollin simply peaked early, although the thirty years of what followed must have been tiresome for those who didn’t find him after the 20th century, as I did, on DVD.

Equally inexplicable and obscure, Jess Franco’s Succubus (aka Necronomicon--Getraumte Sunden) also makes no sense at all, although again there are some wonderful visual treats. There was a trend during the late ‘60s and early ‘70s of stringing together random obscure images and hoping the audience would gasp with admiration. Anything was possible, and the counter culture turned anyone remotely creative into a kid let loose in the playpen.

Dreamlike and haunting, in many ways, the career of the Jess Franco we know starts here, although there's no sex or nudity to speak of. A mix of pulp magazines and typical Franco S-M, it's classic late-‘60s weirdness, a Spanish/German co-production partially filmed in Berlin, although the most scenic parts are filmed in Spain. One of Franco’s films made with real money, this was the first he made with model Janine Reynaud and later Franco regulars Jack Taylor and Howard Vernon. Beautifully photographed nonsense, with its 1960s ambience and decor, this looks better today than it probably did at the time. While I have sympathy with anyone who was trapped in a cinema seat with this stuff, it’s good to watch on TV in your own home at 3.00. a.m., drifting comfortably on the sofa.

In Britain, things were much more sedate. In fact, so much so that 1969’s two entries into the sex field, Donovan Winters’ Some Like It Sexy and Stanley Long’s This, That, and the Other were both not only fantasies, but actual dreams.

Ordinarily, when someone takes nearly ninety minutes to get to a punchline, they’ve lost the good will of the audience a long time ago. This is surely the case with the abysmal Some Like it Sexy, which has a twist ending that earns the punter’s belated respect. Had the film been watchable as anything other than a curiosity and historical artefact, then this would have been a genuine classic, but it's a hard slog for too little, too late. The clue is in the fact that our hero appears to have a different sort of personality during each one of his trysts. The problem is that, defying the law of averages, he's insufferable and obnoxious in every incarnation.

The uncharismatic Christopher Matthews, more often seen manning control panels in old episodes of Doctor Who and Space: 1999, plays a charmless lout who swans around late ‘60s London in an Austin Powers Shaguar lookalike with red lips round its grill (see above) and a briefcase full of previously wrapped trinkets to service a selection of stereotypical bimbo cliches from the period--foreign bird, flashy model, posh milf, black girl, hippie chick, nice girl, and--of course--twins. The most interesting thing about this deconstruction of the serial sexist shagger is the date. It was made before all the 1970s sex-coms about milkmen, window cleaners, and taxi drivers...

The big reveal--spoiler coming, look away now if you don't want to know the score--is that our smarmy seducer is in fact a mere butcher’s boy, a daydreaming fantasist being shouted at by the boss, thus explaining why each episodic encounter has been separated by the dull thunk of a joint of meat being sliced. And there we were thinking it was some sort of early suck-up-to-feminists statement about women being regarded as “just pieces of meat” (has even the most insensitive thug imaginable ever looked at the unclothed curves of a woman and seen a pork chop?).

With the exception of the infamous but under-used Collinson twins Madeleine and Mary, all the women are played by jobbing actresses rather than sex film stalwarts--Erika Bergmann, Penny Riley, Yolande Turner, Valerie St. Helene, Annabel Leventon, and Nicola Pagett. A very young Madeleine Smith, looking as though she’s been constructed out of pipecleaners, cameos as an awestruck but under-age--and untouched--nymphet. Only the Collinsons, Hammer’s Twins of Evil themselves, provide any kind of eye candy or sexual content, and it’s brief. As soon as the twins start making love to each other, Super-Brit pulls a face at the camera, shrugs, and leaves the room! In true British sex-com tradition, Matthews still spends most of his time running away or making his excuses to leave early... and these are his fantasies!

There’s far too much chat in Some Like it Sexy (the monologue by the rich woman goes on forever, as do all the scenes), and furthermore, the dialogue is terrible (particularly the inane banter between Matthews and Pagett; this guy could’ve written soap scripts). There’s also far too little fucking, and the distributors seemed to agree. Dissatisfied with the sexual activity (understandable, as there wasn’t any), they added some appallingly unerotic extra footage with spotty white body doubles which, frankly, make the film even less of a turn-on, as it’s been shot by an idiot who thinks we’d rather see a guy’s hairy ass humping away than the female form (perhaps it was the only position he knew). And to administer the death blow, even the twist ending is ruined by his boss having a cartoon style voiceover.

This, That, and the Other--a bit of this, not much of that, and none of the other--is another of Stanley Long’s clodhopping sex comedies, without the sex as usual, and in collaboration with the oddball Ford brothers, Derek and Donald, TV scriptwriters for early ‘60s U.K. TV shows such as Z-Cars and The Saint. We’ll be hearing more about this shower as the decade moves on.

This, That, and the Other stars a very young Dennis Waterman of Sweeney fame, and is divided into three short stories, which makes such material easier to film, but almost always gives audiences a program of unavoidably variable quality (some parts always better than others) and leaving the feeling that you’ve just watched an evening of television rather than the full-length feature film you originally anticipated.

The first story stars attractive singer turned actress Vanda Hudson as an aspiring actress trying to convince a film producer to hire her for a seductive role. When she accidentally overhears his reservations, she decides to seduce his photographer son to prove her suitability, but mistakenly puts the make on a disbelieving and anonymous photography shop assistant (a very young Dennis Waterman of The Sweeney and Minder, and a guy who’s been in British TV since he was a child). Naturally he can't believe his luck as she struts her stuff in front of him, pouting and posing for his (filmless) camera, and Waterman does disbelieving as one of his specialities. Once the truth comes out, it’s smiles all round for everyone.

To be fair, this segment has got a fair bit of sex and nudity in it, possibly because Long later admitted he fancied the actress, thus curing him temporarily of his usual weary apathy toward his half-hearted filming of the female form. In fact, it even goes on a bit! Waterman, even at this young age (barely twenty) is excellent as the stumbling, bumbling shop boy. As The Sweeney constantly allowed him to demonstrate, he’s one of those actors often underrated because he gives such a natural performance it's easy to forget he's working from a script.

The second story is a cloying feelgood yarn about a suicidal nobody who is interrupted from his final act by the arrival of a bunch of unpleasant, snobbish party-goers who mistakenly turn up at the wrong address and trash the place. It’s badly hurt by the censor’s scissors, but it wasn’t the suicide party theme that offended him, as various revellers pretend to slash their wrists and hang themselves. Apparently feeling a little depressed himself, he couldn't stand the idea of everybody having a good time at a party, and cut out all the nudity!

While this makes for a disappointing result for the director and his audience, the leading character (Victor Spinetti) gets a happy ending when the one nice person at the party realises the truth and takes a sympathetic shine to him. Vanessa Howard (of Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush) is excellent as the sweet young thing who borrows his toothbrush, and Alexandra Bastedo of The Champions puts in a nice cameo as a rude and selfish party-goer.

The third story is a little more interesting. In this, satirist John Bird (whom Long knew from having worked on his TV show) plays a cloth-capped everyman taxi driver who skives off work to see a sex film and then crashes his cab while taking pretty Yutte Stensgarde (Lust for a Vampire, Zeta One) to a party out in the sticks. She flees from the cab, and having just finished a particularly long journey, he is forced to pursue her on foot for the fare.

He stumbles onto a bizarre house carved into a cliff-side that is part Dr. No, part Flintstones, and part swimming pool, complete with viewing areas from assorted angles. With futility he thumps on the various windows as the bikini-clad girls obliviously flaunt themselves, and then, resigned to getting nowhere, takes a seat and watches them swimming around in a sort of porn film aquarium. After quite some time, the girls remove their tops but nothing else.

When the show’s over, various half-naked girls materialise behind him, coyly covering their breasts with their hands, alongside smarmy effeminate young men of the Jason King variety who were supposed to be found magnetically desirable to women in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s and are today soundly laughed at. They then start popping in and out of the picture like the supernatural beings or space aliens used to on TV shows like Bewitched, I Dream of Jeannie, and Lost in Space etc. This is followed by a seductive dance by a sexy girl (Cleo Goldstein) clad only in thoughtfully positioned plastic black handprints, which she slowly peels off.

While the window to the swimming pool ultimately disappoints (the censor would probably have got suspicious if the bikini bottoms had mysteriously come loose as well as the tops), the film does offer a fascinating window to the very late ‘60s. For a start, naked partygoers and nude swimming would not have been a problem just a few years later, as ample evidence indicates. What is amusing though is the contrast between the boiled-egg munching, sex film lusting cabbie and the futuristic sci-fi world he bumbles into, a world of threateningly dominant and seductive women whom he feels he must run from rather than jump into the midst of, and James Bond-ish, Star Trek-style trappings that are weird and freaky for the sake of it.

This is how middle-aged men, cloth-capped or not, saw the ‘60s; weird and inexplicable just for the purpose of annoying them. Bird represents the ordinary salt-of-the-earth blokes of the time who thought The Avengers and The Prisoner were rubbish but watched them every week anyway, baffled. Incredibly, the pool/house location actually existed, carved into a French cliffside by a wealthy millionaire, and is utilised in at least two other sex films of the period, I Am Frigid--Why? and The Lovers of Boulogne. Consequently, this cheesy film shot for well under ten thousand quid and filmed in a month has the production values of a major studio.

No doubt far more exciting activities than the censor would allow or Long could envisage took place there than this film dare show, but being British, our resilient little nobody is most interested in getting his “twenty-five bob”, which was just over two pounds then and would probably be the equivalent of about thirty to fifty today. Anyone of any other nationality would pay that much just to get into the house and be pounced on by the naked birds, but our hero flees into the woods, pursued by half-a-dozen dollies (or a “bevy of beauties” as the language of the sex film would have it), and then--you guessed it--wakes up in his cab, being nicked for dangerous driving. Yep, it wuz all a dream and the British male is once again safe from erotica.

But it wasn’t just middle-aged men in Britain who were having a hard time adjusting to all this European kinkiness.

Filmed in 1969, but looking more like 1964 due to the black and white photography, The Babysitter, surely the last film ever to be so short-sightedly made in monochrome for budgetary reasons, is the classic suburban husband fantasy of the sexy blonde teenager who, being driven home by the tired and irritable father figure, suddenly takes a fancy to him (a more honest tableaux would have slimy old dad putting the make on the horrified youth, and then begging for her silence, but this film favors desperate dads the world over, and dreams come true).

Deputy D.A. George Maxwell (George Carey) and his cold wife Eileen (Ann Bellamy, excellent as a credible and three-dimensional total bitch) are going out to another dreary dinner party with their dull friends. Their eight-month-old baby, an unseen accident he’s ambivalent toward and she’s bitter about, needs a sitter. Enter curvy Candy, a knockout with zero acting ability named Patricia Wymer, the living embodiment of a girl who gets by on her looks; this is the only sort of role she could ever play (she made three films and one magazine shoot in total), and she’s perfectly cast in it.

While a miserable time is had by all at the dinner party, Candy--cartoon show stereotype that she is--is straight on the ‘phone to get all her friends round for a rave in the Maxwell basement. As dancers Devon Blaine and Kari Longacre wiggle their dresses to the ground to reveal underwear-free perfect forms, George is listening to his neighbors carp and moan about everything in Time and Newsweek from the front page to the back. He’s not best pleased to get home and be wearily heading for the stairs when his wife announces that she’s not paying for a taxi--he has to drive the babysitter back to where she came from. Absurdly, Candy needlessly confesses to the impromptu party (“…but they didn't wake the baby”; hell, she couldn’t have heard the baby!!), but as her pretty little butt wiggles back up the stairs, the Wymer magic works its charm, and all grouchy old George can muster is a sappy smile. What a scamp…

Understandably reluctant to go back home too soon, he agrees to the Wymer magic’s request for tacos (“That’s a green light, Mr. Maxwell--it means you can go”), and an exciting world of fast food in the middle of the night is opened up to him. “What are you, anyway?” gulps George. “A... hippie!?”.

“I don’t know!” she blathers, because of course the script-writers are equally mystified. “I only know that I want to laugh! I want to know fun, I want to feel things! I want to be free!”. It turns out that she wants to be free to feel things like George’s dick, and our little lollipop turns up the next day at his house, where they end up frolicking in the pool and whoops, there goes the top of her swimsuit...

Bad girl Julie (Cathy Wilson) can't believe her luck. Initially trying to get dirty pictures of George’s daughter Joan in a rumored lesbian relationship (gasp), she’s hit pay dirt following George and his popsie around as the Wymer magic brings some metaphorical color back into his monochrome life. George is in charge of prosecuting Julie’s thuggish biker boyfriend for the brutal torture and accidental murder of a housewife, and she plans to blackmail him into getting the vicious lout off the hook. Meanwhile, that night, at a bridge game with more middle-aged zombies, all George can think about is sweet, sexy Candy... and when his wife starts on him about his inattentiveness, George just snaps and tells her to shaddup, goddammit!

This moment is enormously satisfying, because frankly, our inclinations are by now to side with poor, besotted Georgie. It's not exactly Breezy, but it's not Lolita either. Carey, a TV affable dad type, comes across as a very reasonable and sympathetic guy. He’s dignified, good-looking, and pleasant enough to not look like a slobbering predator, and he conducts himself with integrity, grimly typing out his resignation letter while unaware that Candy and her friends are retrieving the incriminating negatives with erm, appropriate force.

It is, of course, a middle-aged man’s fantasy--the 24 hour turnaround--written and filmed by three middle-aged men (one of them being co-writer and producer Carey, who bravely does a nude scene with the frequently on view Wymer), and it’s this skewed perspective that makes the film such fun to watch. This is how dear old desperate Dad saw the world he was born too late for in 1969, and he was missing it all...

There's a sensible ending, too, albeit part of the wish-dream. His boss has received the photos, but is more amused than offended, destroying them and telling George he’s still the best man for the job (he’s right; the thug has been convicted--George didn’t cave in). He suggests George intercept the postman, but it’s too late. His wife has received her share of the photos, but she has also seen herself in the mirror. There was a sweet scene much earlier, when George looked back on the days when his marriage was working in a montage replacing Candy with his wife, and clearly regretting its break-down. As the film closes, she’s prepared to try and make the marriage work again, and Candy is last shown getting groovy with guys her own age.

In the color follow-up Weekend with the Babysitter (1970), more of a re-make with Carey playing the same role with a different name, he’s no longer a deputy D.A., but a groovy movie maker, and his wife is no longer the right age for him (I love it that this new sharp-tongued wife expects him to back the car out of the garage for her; if ever a film was defined by its era...). Once again, it's a troubled marriage, and once again, it’s all her fault. At some time between the two movies (which he co-wrote and produced, an impressive feat), Carey seems to have had an unwarranted attack of self-confidence brought on by rolling around with Patricia Wymer; if his bio is to be believed, TV bit-player George Carey was in his mid-‘40s when he made these, but although he looks dapper, likeable, fit and healthy, he also looks more like he’s pushing hard on sixty. Conveniently left alone with a sitter he no longer needs, Carey (now named Jim Carlton) finds her reading the movie script he has to produce. A mad moment follows as the new young Candy (Susan Romen) pores over the dialogue, reciting it and rightly laughing at it, but then uses exactly the same phoney style of Hollywood teen-talk to tell him how bad his script is!

“There’s something big and new going on out there!” she trills. “And, oh, I don’t know--different! And if you want to understand it, you’ve got to really go out and look at it! Really look at it!”.

And she was laughing at his dialogue. But George doesn’t just go out and look at it, he gets down with the groove, does a dad dance, and cops a feel of it.

Preparation of a Martini is filmed in loving detail, as if it’s an erotic porno experience for 1960s middle-aged drinkers, but the film is less sure about drugs. The word junkie is bandied about scornfully to George’s wife Mona (Luanne Roberts), who has fallen in with James Almanzar’s sleazy (adult) dealer forcing her to use his boat for drug-runs to Mexico, although the unspecified drugs she and her fellow victims are desperate for appears to be heroin. Meanwhile, George is shown dreamily toking up harmlessly with a bunch of bikers. “It looks like an ordinary cigarette!” marvels the script, although a massive fat spliff the size of a croissant is being passed around. “We’re going to turn you on to what's happening!” they announce, but it turns out that what’s happening is motocross (“Look at me, I'm a biker and I took a bath today!” trumpets one of them proudly).

What actually happens is that while the wife is in the clutches of the drugs runners on board his boat, and not at mother's with junior at all, George is not so much sampling the wild debauched lifestyle of the motocross crowd as introducing Candy no. 2 to the world of affluent late-‘60s America. He takes her up in his private ‘plane, he takes her to his mountain cabin retreat, she showers and makes him breakfast after a night of passion in front of the log fire. There’s a whole new world out there all right, but who wants to be a scuzzy hippie when there's all this traditional good life up for grabs?

In an ending which is part middle-aged male fantasy and part 1970s cop show Hawaii Five-O, George/Jim and his pal Smitty (co-writer James McLarty) take to the skies to track down sleazy and wifey in the stolen boat, and then--having driven them to the shore--he leaps onto the back of one of the bikes and the entire pack of squeaky-clean bikers roar to the rescue, ripping apart little packets of white powder and scattering them to the four winds as George heroically swims out to rescue his wife. On the shore, Candy no. 2 watches them fall into each others’ arms with sad resignation—“Ciao, baby” she sighs.

Ironically, if The Babysitter proved successful enough to warrant a color re-hash the following year, it was probably down to the one element that doesn’t make it into the reboot--the beautiful body and sexy smile of Patricia Wymer, the frequently naked Candy no. 1 of the original who looked like Doris Day might have if she’d lost her virginity and found her sex drive. Not only does color Candy get less naked less often, she’s also not quite so cute, more formal and with less personality. Despite a bedroom scene and shower scene, the second version is much less raunchy, and more like a typical TV detective show of the era, with added modest sex content. There's a brief horrified attempt at lesbianism between Luana Roberts and the Werewolf Woman herself, Annik Borel (“because what Doris wants, Doris gets!!”), but with less than ten minutes cut out, Weekend with the Babysitter could have been shown on primetime TV of the day, it’s that far removed from reality.

Not to miss a trick, the following year the same company made The Young Graduates, in which a young schoolteacher (with a horrid wife, of course) is seduced by one of the kids--played by Patricia Wymer. Now long-haired and much more childish in her manner, and looking two years younger than she did two years earlier, she is behaving like petulant jailbait and not nearly so desirable in this one; she displayed a knowing maturity and coquettish allure in The Babysitter which is completely absent here, and yet the actress must at this point have been in her early twenties. An otherwise plot-less romp typical of production company Crown, who as usual just filmed a succession of incidents for the kids to glance at occasionally while they wrestled in their cars, it’s completely inoffensive pap. For whatever reason, Wymer left films after this 1971 effort, and has never been heard from again.

The question begs to be asked--who are the Babysitter films for? They were made for and sold to the drive-ins, but that market was composed of teens, not sad old men fantasising about lesbians and naked dancers and running off with the babysitter and hanging out with drugs-hating bikers. Both these films, written and directed by the same three guys, are Lolita-like fantasies for foolish middle-aged men, told by and from a middle-aged man’s perspective. But what do I know? The first one must have been successful somehow, because the reboot followed it immediately. There were no real hippies on film or TV during the 1960s, although there were a few comedy beatniks, a handful of angry adolescents, and a lot of gyrating mini-skirts. That all changed with Easy Rider, and oddly, Bonnie and Clyde, which revitalised the young lovers against the world genre.

But it wasn’t all farce. The next two chapters look at two of the most significant films of the 1970s involving sex and sexual identity, one from Britain, the other from America.

Performance

Watching Nic Roeg’s four masterpieces from the 1970s--Performance, Walkabout, Don’t Look Now, and The Man Who Fell to Earth--were among the most thrilling and exhilarating cinema experiences of my life. I had to see all four, over and over again, every chance I could. I didn’t believe them the first time. I had to soak them up, absorb them, work them out, wallow in them, pull them apart like flies to see how they worked. The cliche is true--every time you watch them, you see something different. You can know them inside out and back to front and they're still fresh.

Roeg learned the right way, beginning as a tea boy and clapper boy, becoming a cinematographer, and working with some of the best. When Performance was offered to him, he was ready. A half-century later, his tricks and techniques have slowly, very gradually, been assimilated into everyone else’s movie-making, advertisements, pop videos, and even TV shows. In the 1970s they were decades ahead of their time, but the only way to get across to a contemporary audience the notion of how devastatingly fresh and unusual Roeg’s films were is to put Roeg’s four greatest achievements next to the other media of the day.

1976, the year of The Man Who Fell to Earth, was the year of Logan’s Run, and the year before Star Wars, the film that took science fiction cinema back to square one. Don’t Look Now was produced at the same time Hammer, Amicus and Tigon were doing their thing. Walkabout by anybody else would have been a hysterical helicopter-laden search thriller with fraught performances and orchestral crescendoes. Performance isn’t a send-up of The Sweeney and its ilk, it precedes them--by years (when it was reissued in 1977, the strap-line was “Ten years ahead of its time... Are you now ready for Performance?”). Other film-makers were doing good stuff at this time; Peckinpah, Coppola, Altman, Scorsese, De Palma, Pakula, Michael Ritchie, Walter Hill, Woody Allen, even George Lucas, were at the top of their game, never again to better themselves. But Nic Roeg’s movies were in a league of their own.

Sex and violence, as those who oppose censorship have always been at pains to point out, should not be lumped together by the pro-censorship brigade who insist on us seeing neither. Outside the James Bond franchise (family viewing, apparently), Performance (filmed 1968, released 1970), co-created and co-directed by Nicolas Roeg and Donald Cammell, is one of the few films that wickedly combines the two. It opens with flash arrogant gangster Chas Devlin (James Fox) having angry, kinky, meaningless violent sex, and later features an extended scene of bloody, brutal violence that is deliberately filmed to excite, when Chas gets viciously done over by the thugs of sleazy wideboy Joey Maddocks (realised superbly by Anthony Valentine), all of them clearly enjoying every second of their animalistic fervor. When the tables are suddenly turned, and the bleeding pulped Chas gets his hands on his hidden shooter, Maddocks begs for his life. Denied, Chas’ brutal payback is almost orgasmic. Ironically, finally given their fusion of sex and violence, the censors both at the British Board of Film Classification and Warner Brothers insisted on the cross-cutting between Chas being flogged and his girlfriend clawing his back being removed. When Cammell pointed out that with this comparison gone, the scene became gratuitously violent, head censor John Trevelyan shrugged and snapped “So be it!”.

A squalid Soho crime lord with the wonderful name of Harry Flowers (Johnny Shannon in his break-out role) is less excited by all the violence. His criminal empire depends on his keeping his head down. Nobody likes a fuss, especially when he’s got officials in his pockets and rent boys in his bathroom (Performance, alongside Point Blank, was one of the first gangster films to point out that real mobsters observe rules and regulations, and have agreed and accepted limits; they don’t like to attract attention--upsetting the applecart is bad for business). Now Flowers must enforce the law of the jungle on his own enforcer. Chas knows what’s coming, and attempts to flee, but is forced to go into hiding. Skulking in a greasy cafe, he overhears a conversation about an available room.

Living in the cavernous spaces of a dilapidated Notting Hill residence cluttered with dusty 1960s paraphernalia already frozen in time, is faded rock star Turner (Mick Jagger in his first film role), and his drugs casualty lovers Pherber (Anita Pallenberg) and Lucy (Michele Breton). Comically attempting to ingratiate himself into a residence he previously would have simply barged into with physical aggression, the desperate Devlin visibly reins himself in and--the best he can come up with--tells Pherber he’s “a juggler”, savvy enough at least to sense the artistic aura emanating from the place, but able only to come up with something trivial and silly.

Even these dense creatures can see through this pathetic lie, but they let him through the door out of a fatal combination of apathy and fascination, whereby he becomes sucked into an alien world that can only be termed sex, drugs, and rock and roll.

Both their worlds are self-destructing; Chas can never return to South London, Turner can never return to the ‘60s. Turner's lost his muse, Chas has lost everything. Ultimately, their worlds--Chas Devlin’s of “rough sex and casual violence” as Martin Jones puts it in his book Psychedelic Decadence, and Turner's trippy drugs-addled bohemian stasis clash and then combine with each other. At the risk of sounding pretentious, this is a film about identity, and the masks we wear both in public and to deceive ourselves. Chas and Turner are both putting on a performance. However, this is not a psychological, analytical film, but a mystical one (that means it doesn’t have to explain itself).

It doesn’t hurt that mystical approach that Performance, both on camera and on set, was awash with drugs. During the film, the identities of the players, particularly but not exclusively those of Chas and Turner, mix and merge with each other. As Anthony Valentine, who played Maddocks related, some of the more cognisant and competent craftsmen were heard to complain that you could get a spliff on the set of Performance with no hassle, but nobody could get a cup of tea!

The sex in Performance was real in every sense of the word (offcuts from Jagger and Pallenberg’s tryst turned up at an Amsterdam porn festival!). Roeg’s sex scenes have always been both voyeuristic and realistic, and the central lovemaking scene between Jagger and Pallenberg is erotic and sensual, cleverly lit with a light through the thin sheets. Thus the action is visible, but taking place under the covers. As for the menage-a-trois in the bathtub, “even the bathwater was dirty!” seethed a Warners exec as he left an early screening.

The 1960s saw, through pop music, art, and the decriminalisation of homosexuality, the sexual boundaries blur, and Performance illustrates perfectly the confusion of male sexuality that prevailed between the aggressively macho and reactionary hard men and the long-haired, supposedly effeminate hippies (who were probably having more, and healthier, relationships--and more heterosexual sex--than the old-fashioned toughies). Representing the two worlds in reality, albeit through the filter of the media, were the London gangsters the Kray twins (whose reign of terror had only just ended with life sentences for murder) and the rock world personified by Jagger and the Rolling Stones (still on the ascendant, although Jagger never quite escaped the false image he presented here).

It was this canyon-wide gap between the two worlds that writer/directors Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg were exploring in Performance. Everything Chas isn’t, Turner is, and vice versa... and yet eventually, they merge, each of them at first secretly, and then later openly, fascinated by the other (Neil Sinyard in his book The Films of Nicolas Roeg, suggests that Devlin’s constant reference to his mirrored image may be not narcissism, but the insecurity of self-doubt, just as Jagger looks in his mirror and sees through himself).

One struggles to disagree with Devlin’s assessment of the hippie hovel from today’s perspective, but the sanctimonious posturing of the reactionary never dates. The gangsters are presented as terrifying but comical hypocrites, first seen on their way to terrorise the helpless employees of a cab company for not paying protection money while idly expressing disgust at the “filth” that was on TV the previous night when “the kiddies” could've been watching. It's difficult to decide which of Devlin’s two apes is the most frightening--the thick amateur television critic and morals campaigner about to traumatise and menace an office full of innocent wage-earners and destroy the furnishings, or the jokey bonhomie of Stanley Meadows’ tut-tutting gentleman thug, a role he found himself recast in for a decade afterwards (Meadows joked that before Performance, he’d always been cast as police officers; interestingly, although the legal profession puts in a brief appearance to show how pompous and corrupt it is, this is one of the few gangster/drugs films to feature almost no police activity at all).

Both the cocksure Devlin and the troubled Turner are putting on a performance for the outside world that unravels when challenged—Devlin’s mirror-gazing hard man, all fists, suits, and clean white underpants, and Turner's pathetically decadent rock star, all beads and bangles and effeminate second-hand cast-offs, wallowing in directionless drugs-supported mysticism and boredom. Chas has a gun, so he has the power, and indulges the stoned idiocies of his hosts... but they have a weapon that trumps his--magic mushrooms. Unfortunately for Turner, this one-upmanship is only temporary, an illusion in itself. When the game’s up and Harry's men turn up at Turner’s Powis Square hovel to take Chas away (his escape window of opportunity closed because he was stoned), Devlin calmly takes care of the unfinished business he’s wanted to from the outset, and shoots Turner in the head. If he hadn’t been head-tripping to sexual and mental freedom, he might have been day-tripping down to Devon or across the sea to New York and real, physical freedom. Now nothing matters anymore, but he’s nothing if not tidy.

Several performances were going on during the filming as well. Apart from Jagger and Pallenberg’s infamous verite sex session, producer Sandy Lieberson paid out of his own pocket to have famed fashion photographer and pop culture groupie Cecil Beaton take stills photographs on the set, and Roeg found the funds to hire a genuine Magritte painting worth 40,000 quid to hang on the wall, insisting that a print wouldn’t do. One of the thugs was played by real life thug, thief, and celebrity shagger John Bindon, who had a minor acting career playing himself in Kray-like crime roles in between scandals, court appearances, and balancing beer mugs on his erect penis. The film is littered with references to fashionable frauds and phonies such as Aleister Crowley, Jean Genet, William Burroughs, and Jorge Luis Borges whose works mesmerised fad-followers of the era. The film’s superb surreal ending, hinted at throughout the film, is inspired solely by Borges’ writings about doubles and dual identities.

Roeg has always claimed that Performance was a 50/50 collaboration between himself and Cammell, and even allowing for Cammell’s foolishness in trying to continue his career in L.A. rather than Europe, the fact is that Roeg went on to make the equally dazzling Walkabout, Don’t Look Now, and The Man Who Fell to Earth, and Cammell... well, Cammell didn’t. With the benefit of hindsight, Performance has Roeg’s fingerprints all over it. If Cammell was anything other than a muse (he was certainly the writer, and undeniably on set throughout), there is little doubt that he at least played a part in the editing process. What has been reproduced of the earlier very heavy-handed scripts, however, was deservedly absent from the screen, and his main contribution from the accounts of those who were there seems to have been to antagonise the actors, ignore protocol, and rewrite on the set, while Roeg did the hard graft of supervising the lighting, photography, and filming (in a giveaway remark, Pallenberg complained about constantly having to “wait around” for Roeg to set things up).

Performance scandalised everyone who saw it in 1968, from the photographic developers who not only refused to print the film, but also tried to destroy it, to the fellow Rolling Stone who rightfully feared for his girlfriend’s loyalty while doing her bedroom scenes with Mick, to James Fox, who retreated from acting for a decade, to the Hollywood film executives who sat slack-jawed and appalled in the screening room. Wrote Sinyard, Performance “...invites you not so much to follow a linear plot as a cluster of themes... life/death, male/female, sanity/insanity, reality/performance, wholeness of personality/disintegration of identity”. It finally secured a release in 1970, when it made ripples rather than waves, but slowly built up a reputation over the years until by the mid-‘70s a similar level of violence and realism could be seen on The Sweeney, a TV gangsters/cops show that was (way) above-average but nevertheless mainstream evening television. As Paul Tickell noted in a 1981 article for Time Out, until the premiere of The Long Good Friday, Performance had a greater influence on television than film, clearly accommodating the production of such 1970s series as Gangsters, Euston’s Out, and BBC2’s Law and Order (not the U.S. franchise).

But in the late 1960s, with Lieberson, Cammell, Fox, Pallenberg, and the Stones all running around together in the same circles long before filming started, Performance was, perhaps justly, cynically termed “the most expensive home movie of all time” by one bean-counting Warners executive. He had a point. Cammell knew the Stones through his then-girlfriend’s friendship with Pallenberg, and was fascinated with the new aristocracy of 1960s London, still basking in the afterglow of Time magazine’s “Swinging London” report in 1965--the criminals, painters, photographers, rock stars, scoundrels, and upper class fortunates and unfortunates who held court in the fashionable, but wealthy, parts of the city, reverse-slumming Bohemians who could play at being hippies all over the world. The allure of some of this circle’s detritus--the druggies, social misfits, hangers-on, fixers, and self-destructing losers posing as artists--would in the real world prove fatal to Cammell and injurious to Pallenberg and Breton. Pallenberg began a lengthy battle against heroin addiction after this film, and Breton was a drug-addled waif and impressionable juvenile delinquent that Cammell had picked up on the beach for threesomes with his fashion model girlfriend Deborah Dixon (who secured a credit as a costumes advisor, despite there already being a credit for wardrobe). While 25, Powis Square represented 81, Powis Square in the movie, interiors were filmed entirely within 15, Lowndes Square, in the unused residence of an eccentric Tory politician. Set designer Christopher Gibbs, who gave the building what Cammell called its “archaeological patina” of Eastern artefacts, Oriental rugs and cloths, and assorted Bohemian clutter, had furnished Brian Jones’ London flat for him, and been at the forefront of importing such tat for hippies’ fixtures and fittings throughout the ‘60s. It was exactly the look Cammell wanted for Turner’s Borgesian tomb. Fox, highly feted after a string of high-profile film roles, knew the Stones and their shared agent, Sandy Lieberson, and was dating the actress who played his girlfriend in the opening sex scenes. Lieberson wanted to break into producing, Cammell wanted to ditch painting for film-making, and bringing in Roeg, who up until then had only worked as a cinematographer, but jumped at the chance to come on board, meant that all three were first-timers with a multi-linked cross-stitched entourage.

“Looked at from today’s perspective, it seems like a miracle it ever got made at all” said Lieberson, interviewed by researcher Mick Brown for his exemplary Bloomsbury book on Performance. “But you’ve got to remember the times... It was the peak of Swinging London. Performance was just one of a whole bevy of movies that was approved through a spirit of euphoric optimism about what was going to come out of England. It was a very special moment in history. I’ve never seen it anywhere else, and it never happened again. And you certainly couldn’t make a movie like that now. Absolutely not”.

Following Performance, an experience she despises, Breton--discarded by Cammell, who was the sort who traded his women in for newer models--travelled the world getting into trouble and sampling the drugs culture, before cleaning herself up in the ‘80s. Pallenberg, like another Stones girlfriend, Marianne Faithfull, had her long fight with heroin addiction ahead of her. Most bizarrely (if you don't count Cammell’s 1990s suicide deliberately in the manner of Turner’s death, which he knew would take him forty minutes to die), James Fox threw himself into the role of Chas, literally living it 24/7 uber-Method-style, and when it was over, completed the breakdown he’d been heading for since earlier questioning his hedonistic but empty lifestyle. The actor son of a theatrical agent, he was in fact as upper-middle class as you could get, and it had been market trader and boxing trainer Johnny Shannon’s job to educate him in the milieu of the South London gangster (often accompanied by the borderline crazy Bindon). While Shannon deservedly segued into an acting career that included Fawlty Towers, The Sweeney, and Scandal (as Rachman, the North London slumlord), Fox, for all his wealth and success a lonely man, and already on the way to meltdown before taking the role for which he surrendered his identity, was easy prey for Christian recruiters, and became a bible-thumper for ten years.

Performance, filmed in ’68, released in 1970/’71, didn’t just document the death throes of the ‘60s, it portrayed the death-throes of the ‘70s before the decade had even occurred. As Jon Savage noted in Sight and Sound in the early ‘90s, “Shot in summer 1968 but not released until 1970, we could be in any time until the late ‘70s”. While one or two critics raged (notably John Simon in the New York Times after its N.Y. premiere), and a few others raved, Performance, a truly ground-breaking film whatever one thought of it, was mostly greeted with apathy and sneering disinterest at the time, rather than outrage. The London Daily Mail’s review, surprisingly calm and impartial, was presumptuous when it noted that “Even in the first week of January, I doubt whether 1971 will see a more hated, adulated, or hotly debated film than this”. Even today, it remains rightly revered by some film historians, and blithely dismissed, even simply ignored, by others. You may not like it (I love it), but you won’t forget it.

Klute

To relate the premise of Klute is to administer a cinematic sleeping pill: a prostitute is stalked by a killer because she knows too much and a detective investigating a missing person case endeavors to protect her. In the end, she’s cornered by the mystery stalker and the detective races to her rescue. It could be any Quinn Martin cop show of the 1970s from Barnaby Jones or Cannon to Streets of San Francisco, but instead it’s one of the most unusual and original films of that decade. There had been nothing like it before, and there’s been nothing like it since, even though the storyline is filled with every cliche stereotype in the book. The closest identifiable description would be an American giallo. Where the hell did Klute come from?

The scriptwriters were not renowned, and the work was revised several times. The cast were unproven or unknown. The director had made only one other film as a director and had toiled in cinema and theatre as a producer for a decade, unable to follow his one and only success from 1961, the worthy and impressive, but slow and dated adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird.

Despite being respected and universally liked and admired, and despite his enthusiasm, intellect, and intelligence, one flawed failure or unrealised, unfinished project had followed another. And yet, in 1971, came this masterpiece from Alan Pakula starring Donald Sutherland as the odd, dour, and laconic John Klute, and Jane Fonda--Barbarella!--as the pragmatic, cynical, emotionally barren prostitute Bree Daniels.

Donald Sutherland, father of Keifer (and boy, can you tell), was in 1971 a young character actor. He had so far played villainous oddballs rather than heroic investigators, while Jane Fonda--Cat Ballou, Barbarella, Hanoi Jane, daughter of Henry, sister of Peter, the future exercise guru of the ‘80s, wife of media mogul Ted Turner, future cosmetics saleswoman who, like us, couldn’t believe she was sixty-nine, Jane Fonda--gave the most extraordinary, non-stereotypical portrayal of a prostitute ever presented in the cinema. And in a film from Hollywood, not Europe. Hollywood, where all prostitutes have to be ten years older than every other woman in the cast and look like a drag queen--unless they’re Julia Roberts.

The film’s weakest scene comes unfortunately and dangerously at the very beginning, a muddled, mumbled dinner party at which quiet country boy detective John Klute is present, and later hired to find one of the guests, a business partner of the diners, who has gone missing. It’s not the clearest exposition in the history of cinema, but setting up the whole movie, quite important. Many viewers, in an environment where they can fast forward or switch off, may at this point give up on Klute. But from hereon, having admittedly botched its chance to set up the audience with clarity, Klute doesn’t put a foot wrong, and more importantly, produces several extraordinary scenes that are just so right.

Every scene in the film is a total original, every moment a fresh experience. This was in no small part down to both Pakula’s vision and certainty of what he wanted, and the skill of the craftsmen he selected to achieve it with their expertise. Cinematographer Gordon Willis worked with him again, but also filmed the Godfather trilogy and several Woody Allen films.

Said composer Michael Small, who would work with Pakula on nine more films, “He wanted the score to not only be a suspense score, but to underscore the psychology of the main character. I wrote a very minimalist score... with motifs that were repeated a lot. He was very specific about what he didn’t want. (Nowadays) I try to come up with a concept that relates to the whole idea of the picture rather than trying to underscore dramatically each little moment. My teacher in this regard is Alan Pakula, because when I did Klute, his expectation for the score was far beyond anything I had attempted”.

It was Pakula’s intention to marry the mystery of the suspense thriller with a study of the psychology of the three main characters--detective, prostitute, and murderer. Consequently, the film is not so much about who the killer is--this barely matters--but about the sexual baggage, the dirty little secrets, the half-hidden hang-ups each of them carry through day to day life.

All three characters are sexually uptight in an era of growing sexual frankness. Klute is a middle-American puritan, not exactly a prude, but a cold fish with an apparently low sex drive. Cable, the businessman revealed as the killer (it doesn’t matter, honest), is a control-freak, sadist, and voyeur who can only get off by terrorising the women he hates to desire. Even Bree Daniels, the supposedly uninhibited prostitute, feels nothing and gets nothing but cold cash from her numerous sexual encounters, which are completely meaningless to her other than as a business transaction (one wonderful scene has her going through the motions in a bland hotel room, seductively complimenting the customer in a sexy porno voice while brusquely looking at her watch behind his neck).

Extraordinarily, for a film about sex, prostitution and voyeurism, there is no nudity. Even more extraordinarily, I didn’t mind. It is absurdly not missed, even though the (male) viewer is somewhat teased by its coy absence. There are, however, several moments that carry an enormous erotic charge, primarily and specifically, a wonderful scene when Bree goes to visit Mr. Goldfarb, an elderly gent who entertains her after dark, where she slinks into his office in an exotic evening gown (faux Greek music playing as Fonda strides seductively through the deserted shop floor’s furniture) and, while she slowly undresses for him, relates a fantasy scenario about her encounters with another elderly man, who, she purrs, “was so wise... taught me so many things…” and “looked rather like you!”. Later, Klute confronts her. “You were there?” she fumes, violated. “You bastard”.

Bree Daniels is often described by reviewers as a prostitute trying to become a stage actress. However, there is no suggestion she seeks to give up her main source of income. It might be more accurate to say that Bree is a struggling actress working as a prostitute. She would refer to herself as a call-girl, or an escort, which is fair. She’s also--Daniels, not Fonda--a pretty bad actress. Interestingly, this was not Pakula’s intention, but when you compare her mediocre reading with the brilliant performance she puts on when making her clients feel important and sexually successful, there’s no comparison. Bree Daniels’ best acting is in hotels and motels, or in Goldfarb’s dressmakers, fascinatingly different in the daylight scene when it bustles with energy and activity of the most mundane variety.

Daniels is cold and classy, yet scared and vulnerable, more so since she’s been receiving creepy letters from a stalker who, unknown to her, is also spying on her and exciting himself by playing a tape recording of a previous encounter (Fonda has always had one of the sexiest voices in Hollywood, and this film shows it off as another film would show an actresses’ legs or breasts). We then see Bree seeking work at a model agency for a commercial, a far more dispiriting and humiliating experience than giving herself to grateful businessmen in drab hotel rooms (art imitating life, one of them is the then-unknown Victoria Hamel, later to turn down Charlie’s Angels and accept Hill Street Blues). The film makes the dull but relevant point that the cattle-calls for acting jobs and modelling assignments are just as coldly humiliating and demeaning as her hotel room fucks.

At home, she is tormented by obscene ‘phone calls. Significantly, she is scared, not just annoyed. But when Klute arrives, knocking at her door and asking detective-like questions, her knight in shining armor gets the door sarcastically slammed in his unimpressed, stiff and emotionless face. He persists. He makes a fruitless search of the corridors and roof when they hear the noise of an intruder above them. She finally lets him into her life as potential protector when she arrives home to find her apartment trashed and semen stains on her clothes.

There are no actual sex scenes in the movie, which is discreet and subtle, even when Bree finally seduces Klute, announcing afterwards--not entirely convincingly, although we are left to guess--that the seduction was all a sham, and she was just trying to break down his stoic demeanor and prove he’s as interested in her, and sex, as any other man. Fonda is the living embodiment of how to be sexy while keeping your clothes on (not a condition of which I normally approve). Pakula was rightly concerned about not glamorising the seedy activities of both Bree and Cable, although films and TV shows in later decades would continue to do so, and the result is a unique film about the creepier side of sex without being moralistic or puritanical itself.

One of the film’s key scenes has Daniels and Klute apparently going their separate ways. “Tell me, Klute. Did we get you a little? Huh? Just a little bit? Us city folk? The sin, the glitter, the wickedness?” taunts Fonda. “All that is so pathetic” replies Klute flatly, and Daniels stalks off, beaten.

Klute is not a prudish film, one of those many condemning sexuality and punishing the women for wanting, or even exploiting it, nor does it intend to make men look dirty or foolish. It also avoids the trap which even some of the most revered film-makers have fallen into, of making the creepy sex acts of Cable look freakishly exciting to the viewer. We never once enjoy Cable’s behavior from his perspective, even when we’re behind him, looking across to Bree’s apartment. On the contrary, the viewer is continually creeped out by Cable’s actions, while all acts of violence become even more horrific by taking place offscreen.

Cable’s playing of a tape recording of Bree’s colleague meeting her end months earlier during the film’s chilling denouement is both disgustingly ghastly and heartbreakingly sad, a shocking, powerful, haunting scene. Fonda plays it beautifully, her face a mess of tears, fear, and mucus, as we see both her overwhelming sadness and horror at hearing her friend’s death occurring on tape from many months previously, but also her realisation, and almost resignation, that she is next. Bizarrely, Cable seems to be hurting almost as much as she is; they are both crying like children.

Klute is a good man, Cable is a bad man. Both must succumb to their sex drives, which others in the film, including a couple of pimps and procurers, exploit. Klute controls his sex urges too much, to the point where he is almost a robot. Cable cannot control his at all, and they have corrupted him. Bree uses every trick in her repertoire to break down Klute’s barriers and force him to succumb to her charms, just to prove a point to her own satisfaction, but her success in doing the same for Cable may have doomed her.

As is often the case with great films, it very nearly didn’t happen. Pakula had been given the script by Warners (interestingly, all Pakula’s unrealised projects and failures had been carefully and specifically selected and pursued by him), and approached Sutherland and Fonda, who were at the time, living together. Sutherland jumped at the role (even though it was far more underdeveloped than Bree’s part), while Fonda was uncertain, seeing only the surface of the well-worn storyline. Shortly after Fonda had accepted, Warners took it back and tried to set it up with other people, but fortunately, their efforts failed and the project was half-heartedly thrown back at Pakula. The end result baffled the academics and analysts, but was embraced by the general public.

Some people have seen Klute as a feminist film, but this doesn't really ring true, as the film neither hates or blames men. Certainly Bree Daniels is a strong, independent woman, but she’s also needy and doesn’t accept that, and most significantly, she’s the architect of her own miseries and needs to be rescued at the end. Women willing to label themselves feminists could allow none of those characteristics past their prejudices.

It also couldn’t be classed as a male fantasy, because the call-girl who is supposed to be the male fantasy is shown to be calculating and cynical, exploiting the men as much as they exploit her. Despite Fonda’s storming eroticism, she is hardly a male sex fantasy as the cold, damaged, controlling Bree. Daniels is horribly spiteful and emasculating, and even more unpleasant when she realises how little effect her knife-twisting is having on the robotic Klute. It is not a film to make men feel good about themselves, other than by not identifying with either of the repressed male leads. A male fantasy would require Klute to be portrayed by a tough, or handsome actor--imagine it as a John Wayne film like Brannigan or McQ, or one of Clint Eastwood’s many cop roles--or for the viewer to be invited to identify with the voyeur, like so many unsavory and questionable horror films. When Gene Hackman, for example, displayed his stable of naked girls to the stone-faced tough guy enforcer Lee Marvin in the superb sleeper Prime Cut the following year, male viewers felt both revulsion and envy, disgust at his actions but excitement at the flesh on display. Who isn’t looking at the girls when Hackman dangles them before Lee Marvin like the pieces of meat he exports from his farm? When, in 1974, Borowczyk is about to show us the horrendous behavior of Countess Bathory in his magnificently erotic Immoral Tales, we are simply enjoying the sight of thirty or forty naked girls running around. And isn’t Pasolini’s Salo just a little erotic?

When a villain spies on any undressed woman in a thriller, or a slob or a nerd peers into the sorority house or shower room in a high school comedy, the male viewer is seeing only the body, not the impertinence of the action, in the comfort of the knowledge that the women are of course actresses, willingly displaying themselves. If we don’t acknowledge that fantasy, and our complicit acceptance of it as fantasy, we can’t even begin to turn the pages of this book. Here was a film about the dark side of sexuality, a man’s need to indulge his passions against his better judgement, knowing that when he succumbs to these pleasures, it weakens him in every way, proving him vulnerable and dependent on the woman and a woman’s need to control, at which point she is then disgusted, dismayed and disappointed by a man who can be controlled. Pakula has made a film about voyeurism and sexual exploitation of and by both sexes, and yet there is no nudity, and no traditional sex scenes. Klute defies categorisation, and this no doubt accounted for the initial poor reviews from the critics.

When the moment came for these jaded experts to recognise a new approach to an old subject, they failed to see it, lacking the ability to identify either the dazzling sequence of original scenes or the film’s success as a standard thriller (the public turned up in droves). Everything that was fresh about Klute, they dismissed. Everything that was traditional, such as the storyline and denouement, they mocked. They overlooked the film’s subtleties and nuances, and also the skilled and successful deployment of good old-fashioned shocks--the seat-jumping drumroll as the killer jumps out of the shadows and assaults Bree in the warehouse climax, for example, which catches every audience unaware. It must have been particularly galling for Pakula after he had brilliantly dismissed the original climax to be too conventional--Cable confronting Daniels in her apartment, and then blowing his brains out. It was inspirational to have the climax at Goldfarb’s warehouse instead and send Cable to his doom through the glass he had been peering through.

It is to the critics’ credit that many openly admitted they had been wrong in their first assessments; soon the awards flowed. Klute is certainly one of those films that is admired more with each viewing, and one does have to get past that clumsy opening exposition. Stick with it and wait to be hooked and you will see a film that has remained unique and extraordinary decades later, and lost none of its power and originality.

Clint Eastwood

The Beguiled (1971), Breezy (1974)

From the moment Clint Eastwood had clout in the Hollywood movie industry he made sure that everyone knew he wasn’t just a one trick pony, a TV cowboy who got lucky. He made cop films Coogan’s Bluff and Dirty Harry to avoid being stereotyped as a western gunslinger, and by the time the Dirty Harry franchise was up and running, he was using the sure-fire populist scripts to get personal projects made alternately, first at Universal, and then at Warners. He would give the studio their box-office dead certs on condition they kept him happy with his more unusual material. The studios happily went along with this; they were guaranteed their smash hits, and even the personal projects would break even with the Eastwood name attached.

This was the thinking that got the two Eastwood films in this book produced, The Beguiled, a dark gothic sexually-oppressive Civil War-set melodrama filmed in 1971, and the light but seriously under-valued hippy-dippy fantasy Breezy in 1974.

The Beguiled was based on a book by Thomas Cullinan, but his was the only authentic name in the film’s writing credits; the script had a torturous route to becoming the dark, disturbing, unsettling, unremittingly brutal study of sexual frustration that Eastwood and director Don Siegel, a regular Eastwood co-conspirator, envisaged. Consequently, one of the finest and most unusual American films of the already quality-abundant early 1970s is credited to two silly pen-names.

Once filming began, however, it was smooth sailing. Eastwood was playing John McBurney, a Yankee soldier found seriously wounded in the woods outside an ill-placed Southern school for young ladies, where two single women are incongruously teaching poetry, languages, and etiquette to the last six pupils with nowhere else to go, in the middle of a dangerous and murderous war zone. Overly polite, as his sort always are, McBurney is a wily, self-interested deserter and manipulative liar, who swiftly ingratiates himself with most of the lonely and frightened women, quickly assessing and attempting to exploit their weaknesses--innocence, slavery, loneliness, virginity, secrecy, or lust.

As was to be the case with Breezy, and most of Eastwood’s 1970s features, the cast was rounded up from television more than film, the usual practice being for Eastwood to secure a couple of big names from film or theatre for the marquee, and then offer opportunities to TV talents with smaller egos who wouldn’t overshadow him, but who in turn could deliver more than they usually had the opportunity to do on the small screen (Eastwood himself came up through TV, via the western Rawhide). It was a sly and sensible ploy that was genuinely both self-serving and generous (Eastwood would also build up a reliable posse of dependable regulars he could return to as the decade progressed). All the women in the cast had extensive TV credits, and would continue to do so, other than Geraldine Page, who spent more time in the theatre than in film.

Among the women are Martha, the lonely headmistress with a dark, possibly incestuous, secret, played superbly by Page; Doris, a prissy little bigot who believes that Yankee soldiers are all rapists with devil tails, played by Darleen Carr (more usually typecast on TV in devoted daughter roles); lusty sexpot Carol, played by Jo Anne Harris, a seductive bad girl type; virginal Edwina, Martha’s deputy, a once burned, twice shy sexually repressed virgin, played skilfully by Elizabeth Hartman; slave maid Hallie, with Mae Mercer giving a brilliant, cliche-avoiding performance of fire, resilience, and wisdom; and little girl Amy, portrayed by Pamela Ferdyn, a familiar face on mostly ‘70s sit-coms, usually cast as mouthy little madames full of wisecracks, but showing a real acting talent here going far beyond her sulky posturing on TV (she was the perfect choice for the voice of Lucy on the early Charlie Brown cartoons, and played a malevolent child on Star Trek).

Had McBurney kept his head down and quietly recuperated, he would have survived to tell the tale. But McBurney is a self-serving shit (flashback visuals contradict the lies he tells about his war), and tries it on with all of them, figuring out and playing on their individual weaknesses. Suddenly, all the women are adorning themselves and preening before mirrors, guiltily aware that there is a handsome, helpless and virile male presence in the mansion. Edwina, Martha, Carol, Hallie, and Amy each steal their own private and personal moments with him (interestingly, the prejudices of dreadful Doris make her immune to McBurney’s wiles), and it isn’t long before they’re all creeping around the house after dark with candles... but when McBurney is inevitably caught in Carol’s room with no credible get-out available, the game’s up, and events play out to a horrific but somehow inevitable conclusion.

With everyone now feeling venomous toward McBurney, who has shown his true colors (he had declared undying love to Edwina, but was on his way to Martha’s room, before being waylaid by Carol!), he has, in a drunken rage, reached the point of no return (he even accidentally kills Amy’s pet turtle in anger). The bitter and betrayed headmistress--pragmatically aware that he has discovered her apparently incestuous affair with her long-absent brother--is aware that everyone feels suitably distraught to be vengeful. Pretending to bow down to his whim (now it’s his turn to be seduced), they announce that they’re going to prepare a very special evening meal for him (Siegel films it superbly).

Don’t fall into the easy open trap of presuming The Beguiled to be either a man-hating feminist film, or a woman-hating misogynist film. As the first writer to quit observed, this film portrays everybody in a bad light; all the participants are wicked and deceitful in some way, and all of them are murderous, Eastwood before he enters the school, the women colluding in murder later. This is a film which positively sweats sex, and presents it honestly, in all its naked selfish greed. There is no nudity, other than a few brief glimpses of Carol en flagrante, which allows Siegel a superbly cheeky and comedic shot at the film’s most powerfully hurtful moment. When the virginal and besotted Elizabeth enters Carol’s room, she is greeted by the sight of the school sexpot’s bare ass on top of the naked form of the man who has declared his love for her. First, we see her p.o.v., and then the cameras shifts to Eastwood’s, Harris’ peachy naked bum sliding to one side to reveal Hartman’s comically cruel horrified visage.

The film ends as it began, with little Amy gathering mushrooms for dinner.

A further indication that Clint Eastwood wasn’t really a psycho silent gun freak or a braindead TV cowboy or cop type came with Breezy, a 1973 curiosity about a middle-aged man’s fling with a free-spirited open-minded hippie chick. He’s not in it, he directs.

In anyone else’s hands, this borderline dodgy yarn could have been utterly tasteless and discomfiting, a hideously embarrassing Lolita fantasy, but Eastwood makes it a blameless, happy ending character study of a May-December (March-October?) love story with a clever twist just before the finish.

Veteran actor William Holden (The Wild Bunch) is a world-weary real estate businessman, and he’s old school. He’s middle-aged, and he accepts it. He’s ditched his drunken bitch of a wife, who’s bleeding him for alimony, but he’s comfortably single and alone; we first meet him guiltily screwing up the ‘phone number of the previous night’s one night stand (Lynn Borden) as he waves her off from his expensive and secluded home. It’s Autumn in his life, and you get the impression he had a pretty respectable Spring and Summer.

Into his comfortable and secure world stumbles a wide-eyed innocent named Breezy (prolific TV cop show starlet Kay Lenz), one of those teen-age hippie chicks he’s seen on the TV and in the papers. One thing Breezy reiterates with a resounding thud is a reminder of just how real and wide the generation gap was between 1949 and 1979, well-dressed martini-swilling comfort-seekers planning their futures on one side of the fence, pot-smoking jeans and t-shirt-wearing drop-outs living for the day on the other, each group viewing the other with undisguised bafflement and hostility.

To say these two people have nothing in common is an understatement, but like a puppy taken in from the cold, she imposes on him for a few necessities and comforts alike. At first, she certainly is an imposition, with her incessant chatter and innocently prying, personal questions. His sarcasm and cynicism washes over her, but crucially, she’s perfectly aware of it (“I don’t give lifts to hitch-hikers” he says/“You have no idea how glad I am to hear that” she retorts, making herself comfortable in his car). She’s doing a number on him; she knows it, he knows it, and she knows he knows it because he's making sure she knows he knows it. A ‘lift’ leads to coffee, to breakfast, to “a few bucks”, he snarls.

It’s this important plot point that keeps their relationship honest; if she’d been genuinely naive, or he’d been a lustful dupe thinking with his dick, the film would have been neither comedy or romance, as an early encounter with a cliche creep makes abundantly clear. Significantly, it’s the needy Breezy who’s taking advantage; Frank Harmon never does, even when she’s unashamedly stripping off for a shower in front of him.

The facade crumbles when they find an injured dog in the street that he intends to write off, assuming it dead. She storms off in a rage at his supposed indifference and callousness, leaving him with the dog--which whimpers signs of life, and is consequently rescued and deposited at the vets at his considerable expense and inconvenience--and, inadvertently, with her guitar in the back seat, which brings about their second meeting. The third comes when she’s picked up by the police for vagrancy and tells the police she's Frank’s niece (“Do you know an Edith Alice Breezerman?”); this results in him supporting her lie to the cops at his door, being lectured for bad parenting skills, and having her deposited in his home for yet another evening of flakey banter.

Once again, every sarcastic remark he makes is responded to literally as she takes up residence further in his house and life... and thoughts. “What happened, you didn’t score today?” he snaps/“Don’t get nasty or I might leave” she smirks at the man who is still hoping she might leave.

While all this is going on, Frank’s also dealing with the impending marriage of the more suitable woman he’s been having a “no strings, no ties” affair with for the last six months, an intelligently written gift of a role for the otherwise television-trapped Marj Dusay; “Any time a girl agrees to a relationship like that, she’s already in love with you” she scolds him. “It’s a question of appetite... Crumbs or no cake at all”. This adult acceptance of the pragmatic limitations of what’s realistically on offer in middle age contrasts well with the hippy-dippy platitudes of Breezy.

There’s little doubt that there's an element of wish-it-was-me middle-aged fantasy-mongering going on here, even though the script was written by a woman and Eastwood himself was still fairly young himself when he made this, an attitude best represented by the leering comic performer Roger C. Carmel, who provides the sleaze magnificently as Holden’s envious friend (the scene where Frank’s adult acquaintances first become aware of Breezy’s place in his life when they bump into him at the movies is wonderfully played by all). However, Breezy belongs to the don’t-judge-me school of thought, and avoids all the traps and cliches that would have turned it into a leering lech-fest. Most importantly, it is Breezy who initiates every sexual advance, not Frank, who finds himself reluctantly but knowingly succumbing. William Holden was fifty-five when the film was made, but looked ten years older; Lenz was twenty, but looked seventeen. Somehow, it worked, although the discreetly shot but absolutely necessary bedroom scenes were pushing it. We accept this incongruous relationship, because, like Holden’s Frank Harmon, we recognise the inevitability of it and go with the flow.

Written by Jo Heims, the writer of Eastwood’s Play Misty For Me, initially as a script for Eastwood himself, it’s a wittier, sharper script than it’s often given credit for, its greatest attribute being the effortless avoidance of all the mistakes that would have sunk it. Richard Schickel, Eastwood’s biographer and the film critic for Time magazine, complained that Eastwood had shied away from the film’s erotic potential, which is surely why the film worked. “It has its comic and melodramatic passages” he wrote in Eastwood’s bio, “but overall its tone is bemusedly realistic, as if it is just relating a curious, mildly interesting story... in an unforced, even artless way”.

Unforced, yes, artless, no; the film is as carefully contrived as any professional commercial concoction to cover all the bases. Yes, it observes his alleged self-pity without indulging in it (but I don’t see Holden’s Frank Harmon indulging in self-pity, he seems incredibly pragmatic, realistic, aware and comfortable to me). Yes, the film stops short of satire, but importantly, it has fun with Frank, who goes through all the inevitable embarrassments, including having salespeople refer to Breezy as his daughter and having waiters ask for i.d. Yes, “aware that it is flirting with absurdity... it settles for good nature, good taste, and... sentiment”. Absolutely.

This non-judgemental understatement that pervades the film, its willingness to present all the characters fairly, rather than sending them up (other than the sleazy motorist, a major 1970s cliche, and Roger Carmel’s welcome comic relief, whose jealousy and careless child molester remarks--someone had to say it--break what little tension there is), is why the film still works in today’s more sensitive climate, despite the overwhelming sense of the ‘70s and the dated references to the notorious “generation gap” represented in the film by the very sort of lesser men than Frank who would have gratefully attempted to exploit Lenz’s “little hippie chick”.

The casting also had a significant part to play in making the film work. Had Eastwood, or another actor working with his good looks, taken the role, Breezy would have become a film about sex rather than love. Holden’s manly self-assurance and wit ensured that Breezy’s attraction to him was based on genuine qualities buried within his grumpy, world-weary exterior, not the “eroticism” some complained of being absent. Eastwood’s own real-life young squeezes, the waif-like Sondra Locke and bad girl Jo Anne Harris, were rightly dismissed as contenders for the role of Edith Alice Breezerman; neither could have offered the magic mix of youth and wisdom, naivete and practicality, that Kay Lenz brought to the part. Lenz’s demeanor of trusting innocence and Pollyanna vision of the world’s inherent goodness would have made her an exploited victim even by the reluctant Holden, but married with her character’s natural intelligence and the school-of-hard-knocks wisdom she had been acquiring fending for herself, it is clear that she is perfectly aware of what she’s doing and where she’s going. For this, we are given the early scene with the creepy motorist, the reverse of Frank, where we see Breezy’s instant realisation she’s in trouble, and to compare her with, the pot-addled and boyfriend-abused Marcy (“She takes drugs. I wish she wouldn’t”), a spaced-out dimwit. Breezy is the only 1970s teenager in America not doing either drugs or alcohol.

On a surface level, she’s perfectly aware that she’s initially playing Frank along for food, money, favors, and shelter, at least until he actually starts offering these things, at which point the finagler falls in love. In her youthful innocence, she’s less aware of the way she’s inadvertently having an impact on his life, feelings, and emotions, the latter two in her young eyes being absent for not being worn on his sleeve. She doesn’t know he’s saved the dog, is unaware he looks at the throng of teens outside his office expectantly and worriedly, knows nothing about the heartbreaking sense of lost opportunity between Frank and former flame Betty (Dusay) he’s dealing with, or that he feels guilty when he returns to his home later than promised and believes she’s left in disappointment (she’s actually waiting for him in his bed).

Far from artless, Breezy deftly dances around the issues it must confront, ducking and diving with every trick in the script-writer’s book while dealing with them; for example, the integrity and honesty of both lead characters is casually established early in the introductions, even as the script simultaneously shows us their worst attributes (Breezy imposing on people for life’s essentials, Frank cynically and dishonestly ditching his date). Breezy niftily avoids the dirty hippie cliche by complaining that her last crash had no toothpaste and asking for a shower; Frank avoids the dirty old man cliche by trying to ditch Breezy at every opportunity when he first meets her, and contrasting admiringly as the exact opposite of the cartoon sleazeball who previously picked her up and his nasty shit-for-brains work-colleagues.

Politely snubbed by studio, critics, and audience alike at the time, Breezy has its admirers. Like myself, most of them were Breezy’s age when they first saw it, and Frank’s age when they finally caught up with it again (the DVD release was 1998). It’s a nice film about a touchy subject.

The Moral High Ground

The Wife Swappers (1970), Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice (1969), Permissive (1972), Groupie Girl (1970), I, a Groupie, (1970), Schoolgirl Reports (1970—1979), Cool It, Carol! (1970), Monique (1970), Walkabout (1971), Love in the Afternoon (1972)

There were only two ways to get sex past the censor in the 1970s--be very, very serious, or very, very, silly; if you could dress it up as a disapproved social problem or worldly grim-faced debate, or snigger at it with the help of much-loved acceptable TV faces, you could, to use clean-up moral campaigner Mary Whitehouse’s schoolmarmish expression of the period, “get away with it”.

The Wife Swappers (1970) was unintended vintage hilarity from two of the most prolific sleazemeisters of the ‘60s and ‘70s. Derek Ford, the busier half of the Ford Brothers, and director/producer Stanley Long, take the prurient social concern option, complete with pipe-sucking condemnation from a solemn professor-type behind a desk, and giggly vox-pop shock and awe from phoney street interviews. Cheap and horrible, it made Stanley Long a millionaire.

After some magnificently two-faced opening narration to get past the moralists, we get a nice scenic drive around 1970s London with a kidnap victim who is made to strip naked and swim across a muddy river to a moored boat... at which point we hear a terrified scream and the titles come up. Our attention piqued (it turns out to be a role-playing game), we move on to more mundane segments involving, mostly, hopeful husbands and reluctant wives. And this is the film’s stumbling block; sexual experimentation only works if everybody involved is a willing participant. Most of this film is about coercing the women--and in every case depicted here it is the women--into joining in the rather fun-free fun. Otherwise, as this film is obliged by the censors to demonstrate, it’s no fun. Women are not supposed to be enjoying themselves, of course; in 1970s sex films, sex was just for men, and willing wife-swapping female participants are portrayed as positively satanic.

Far from being a male fantasy, The Wife Swappers is a prurient prude’s delight. The doom-laden narration (from authoritative, scolding men and weak, worried, reticent women) is enough to put the fear of God into the most fun-loving couple. “It is a feature of the so-called swinging set that they will constantly seek to involve others!” notes the narrator both excitingly and alarmingly, “…a feature they share with drug addicts and alcoholics!!”

This is an absolute hoot if you’re watching with the right people, but of course back in the spartan ‘70s, Ford and Long knew perfectly well that their entire paying audience consisted of sad old men sitting in a dark and dismal cinema who couldn’t even get their own wives and girlfriends into bed, let alone work out a group exchange plan, so events take on a distinctly grim and disapproving tone as the female narrators shiver and tremble at the thought of what they might have to do. This inevitably involves taking their clothes off, and in most cases they reluctantly oblige, which is the true purpose of the film. Unfortunately, everyone present at these suburban soirees is so tense and uncomfortable and consumed with guilt that no-one is actually enjoying themselves. If it’s all going to be as buttock-clenchingly repressed and embarrassing as this, then why bother?

A colossal embarrassment for participants and punters alike, The Wife Swappers is magnificently squirmy at every turn; “The film has aged disgracefully, and all to its credit” notes Simon Sheridan in his book Keeping the British End Up, “What was once viewed as titillating is now very, very funny indeed”. True, but it must be watched with mates, beer, and munchies if it must be watched at all, and on an evening when all present are resigned to the fact that they won’t be getting any tonight either. There is one single, solitary, clever shot in this poorly presented farrago that must be complemented for succeeding on several levels--a scene of reluctant sex distorted and reflected in the sunglasses of a grim voyeur watching impassively and stone-faced, his motionless visage filling the entire frame. A moment’s respite for your unlucky reviewer, but hardly a reason to waste 90 minutes of your life, especially when, in the 21st century, hardcore sex orgy DVDs with willing and eager physically attractive males and females are a click away from your postbox.

A year earlier, Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice (1969), a stylish and witty 1960s sex comedy with no nudity and disastrous sex covered the subject of wife-swapping swingers much more amusingly and effectively than the seedy British offerings.

Bob Sanders and his pretty wife Carol (the late, great Robert Culp and gorgeous Natalie Wood) attend a New Age retreat populated by the usual bunch of misfits and losers, with the intention of satirising it in a documentary film. Instead, they return from the weekend fully converted to a new world of total sexual freedom, brutal honesty, and straight-talking hedonism. This greatly amuses, and then begins to annoy, their somewhat straighter best friends Ted and Alice (Elliott Gould and Dyan Cannon), who have a very low tolerance level for Californian BS. One of the film’s funniest scenes has all four getting fashionably stoned, but reverting back to their normal, usual selves as the pot steals their inhibitions. Far from getting mellow and becoming enthused with love, peace, and happiness, they start mocking and griping about the dinner companions who have just left.

Bob and Carol both experiment with the concept of an open marriage, and in a wry and knowing sequence of events, it soon becomes obvious to Bob that this is a classic case of be careful what you wish for or you might get it. Nevertheless, pride forces him to persist in the face of all his natural emotions of possessiveness and jealousy. What’s most difficult for him to accept is that Carol seems to be not just okay with it, but enthusiastic. The scene where Culp’s Bob tries to convince himself he’s had a game-changing epiphany, and offers drinks and hospitality to his wife’s embarrassed toyboy is played beautifully. They take a reconciliatory trip with their troubled friends to Vegas, where all four of them end up in bed together... and do nothing. The ending, as all four gradually lighten up for the first time since the whole sorry experiment began, slowly but surely exchanging grins and loving looks as they leave their hotel room for dinner and a show is a delight. The film then goes totally ‘60s as multiple loving couples gather in the street outside for a rousing chorus of Jackie Shannon’s “What the World Needs Now (is love, sweet love)” by Austin Powers’ favorite songsmith Burt Bacharach.

Although heavy-handed by today’s standards, the superb performances from the four leads (particularly smug phoney Culp and smirking, frustrated Gould, but also bright-eyed Wood and stony-faced, uptight Cannon) make the film as funny and true today as it was when it was made. A period piece about two couples who feel they ought to be more a part of the ‘60s than they are, in many ways Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice reflects the confusion Hollywood itself felt, faced with a changing world that was rejecting all American cinema’s absolutes (the writers, Paul Mazursky and Larry Tucker, had previously written the uncomfortably cautious pilot for The Monkees).

Like Bob and Carol and that fabricated TV pop group, Hollywood wanted to be a part of the new world, but didn't quite know how. It was a world that not only didn’t fit in with the established wisdom and stereotypes embraced unquestioningly by Hollywood, but positively rejected them, and the big studios’ films in the late ‘60s were a mess because of it. The end result of this intelligent and funny film is a timeless time-capsule. Whatever pleasures free love brings (and they are plentiful), they don’t sit well with true love. When we figure out how to have both, we’ll be one up on Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice…

One of the favored suburban male fantasy roles for women in the 1970s, alongside au pairs, models, stewardesses, nurses, and cheerleaders etc. was that of the groupie, although when it came to cinema, the subject was almost always portrayed as sordid and unhappy, rather than adventurous, fun and liberating, like the other fantasies. Perhaps this was because whereas all the others might conceivably be encountered by hopeful male fantasists, in order to get their hands on a groupie, there is that awkward obstacle of actually having to be in a band, and so the girls concerned had to be reassuringly cheap and nasty and undesirable. Sadly, this was probably quite close to the truth, and most of the revolting specimens in the rock bands of the period were cheap and nasty and undesirable too. Lindsay Shonteff’s Permissive (1972), portraying a young teenager’s wretched descent into sleaze confirms most objective peoples’ suspicions about the sad lives these silly girls endured. As the DVD notes for the BFI's release of Permissive astutely point out, “for the groupies, it’s not about the music”. It’s about the prestige of being able to say “I’m with the band”, although these girls have a very odd definition of the word prestigious.

Permissive was the favored buzzword for reactionaries and indignant miseries in the 1970s, as the people left behind and alienated by the ‘60s frequently referred to a mythical media construct known as “the permissive society”. For the moralists, this was a negative, a scary, adventurous, experimental world in which now, everything was permitted. This was true, ironically, everywhere but in the media, where pop culture was still rigorously controlled and censored by dusty old men (and they were all men). As publishing, theatre, and finally cinema gradually wriggled free from the steely cold grip of their wizened claws, television and music only partially successful, these doomladen old bores preached and prated about the moral decline around them, even as they wielded prohibitive powers over it.

Behind this frown-worthy title is a catalogue of misery that pretty much confirms all the predators’ and parents’ suppositions about promiscuous girls in the 1970s. What is never mentioned in Permissive, because it doesn’t want to, and would rather shock, scold, and distress, is that most sexually uninhibited girls of the time were not groupies and had a pretty good time enjoying the genuine freedom offered by the post-Pill and pre-AIDS 1970s, but sad to say, the ones that were “with the band” probably did lead the doormat existences of the groupie girls of 1970s cinema. Selfish inconsiderate boyfriends, however, were not confined either to pop groups, or the 1970s.

One of the ironies of the British sex films of the 1970s is that many of the directors didn’t want to be there; their lips were as pursed as those of the critics. The late Lindsay Shonteff belonged to the lengthy list of British film directors in the 1970s who resented the racy subject matter he was offered, and probably held the severe views he was raised with. He clearly needed the work, which was an unfortunate situation to be in during that decade if you didn’t much care for sex films, as the likes of Val Guest and Norman J. Warren would also make abundantly clear. A slightly ludicrous figure who railed against the corporate suits to protect his artistic vision while never actually displaying any, he famously threatened to sue journalist David McGillivray (the writer claims in his book Doing Rude Things) for including The Yes Girls and Permissive in a piece on sex films in trade journal Screen International, on the plainly fallacious grounds that they weren’t sex films, which would have resulted in a fascinating and funny day in court to rival Chatterley and Oz if he had ever followed through.

Either way, it’s fairly clear where he stood on the subject of the “permissive society”, a term which faded away when comedy writers started referring to it and reduced it to the non-issue joke it was. With both of his sex films (which is certainly what they were) he took a disapproving stance, delivering the goods in satirical form in The Yes Girls and in schoolmarmish manner in the fraught and punishing Permissive.

Like many of his contemporaries across the sea in Hollywood in the latter half of the ‘60s, Shonteff and his writer Jeremy Dryden frequently use the teenage slang of the time out of context, which doesn't much help credibility. Visually, however, in early ‘70s Britain, he couldn’t do much wrong. All he had to do was point a camera at almost anything to capture the grey desolation, rainy weather, worn bricks and tatty formica of the decade. Nothing is new, everything is falling to bits... and the recently-produced looks even more worn-out than the obviously old. We had a great time back in the 1970s, but we certainly weren’t living in style.

Shy Jill (Maggie Stride), who arrives in the film from out of nowhere like a visiting Terminator, quickly finds herself out of her depth when she turns up on the doorstep of tired-looking hippie doormat Fiona (Gay Singleton). Fiona’s living with a gruesome hairy troll named Lee, who fronts a gruesome hairy rock band of no discernible talent. Before long, she’s hanging out with the brain-dead band members, their leering, predatory manager (he’s the only guy who smiles during the entire film, just the once, and even that’s unpleasantly), and an assortment of weirdoes and hangers-on. As she becomes more confident (if that’s the right word), and certainly more hardened, she works her way through the band members, eventually ousting her only friend from prime position in an astonishingly callous closing scene that made the film’s meagre reputation.

Where Permissive fails dismally is in offering any kind of explanation or answer to the social malaise it so forlornly documents. This is because, as accurate and convincing as the film is, the makers have absolutely no idea why any of it is happening. Tiresome cliche that it would have been, this is one film that could have used cutaways to interviews with actual groupies and band members putting across their opinions and anecdotes, in between the fictionalised scenes. No back story or motivation is offered for any one of the characters, and there is no attempt to discern why the girls do what they do. There's no money or glamour involved, no career or future, no luxury or jewellery, and no-one is living the high life, or even having anything closely resembling a good time. Even the guys don’t seem to be enjoying themselves much. Few of the girls are pretty, and they are all simpletons. The sex and nude scenes are defiantly unerotic, even though there are fleeting appearances by the Collinson sisters and Suze Randall, all clothed, and briefly Nicola Austine. While successfully avoiding charges of exploitation, the writer and director clearly haven’t talked to anyone, male or female.

The irony of it is, Shonteff probably had a point. He just couldn’t find it to make it. Even while wincing and cringing, one can at least understand the poor priorities, values, and choices of the hangers-on and celebrity-seekers of the X-Factor/Big Brother generation; a depressing and shallow spectacle indeed, but there’s money and attention involved. These sad little girls in the ‘70s gave everything and got nothing. Where’s the logic, even by an idiot’s reasoning?

Groupie Girl, which comes across very much as a cash-in and response to Permissive, dates to 1970, and so actually preceded it by two years. A companion piece to the tutting Permissive, Groupie Girl was written by former groupie Suzanne Mercer, so one must assume she knew her subject. If she did, and was honest, then she at least understood that there was fun to be had. It was maybe not adult fun, or anything that would impress or interest normal kids, or even anything modern teenagers would be thrilled by, but it wasn’t just bleakness and despondency.

A Stanley Long production, instantly recognisable as one of his by the expressions on the faces of the baffled onlookers caught on camera, is a far more upbeat effort, a cash-in fantasy even though its bleak motorways, rainy streets, grubby bars, and dingy hotels are equally depressing visually. It’s like a shabby, seedy version of The Monkees, but with sex.

Instantly, Mercer, Long, and director Derek Ford provide the motivation missing from Permissive. Instead of the dour, expressionless shop-girl face of Permissive's groupie, we get the lit-up eyes and lust of pretty Esme Johns (above), who made this one film, and disappeared. We know why this girl climbs into the back of the transit van. Unfortunately, she soons learns the same hard lessons as the dim professional victim in Shonteff’s yarn.

Mercer’s knowing script has the little bits of business in it Shonteff could never have known about; for example, we see her preparing to leave home without a word to her parents, amid the wonderfully 1970s ritual of the girls changing back from their actual evening clothes into what their parents think they wore out (a girl I knew put her make-up on in the ‘phone box at the top of the road). In those days of uptight, old-fashioned parents, still bitter about the austerity and tragedy of their war-blighted youth, these were the little details that make Groupie Girl ring true... even when brazenly ripping off the 1967 Redlands Rolling Stones drugs raid at the film’s end, or filming the melodramatic but memorable car crash caused when the poor groupie girl is hauled back and forth through the open windows of two mini-vans while on the road.

Even though Groupie Girl ticks the boxes, with cat-fights, sex orgies, multiple partners, police raids, and so on, it is still no better at providing a desirable finished product. Both films are dreary and depressing, although if you must sample one, Groupie Girl, while being more fanciful, is more honest, and has a pretty leading lady and marginally less repugnant men (although this is like comparing pigs to donkeys). Each has a memorable moment that has maintained its reputation over the years and prevented them from fading into oblivion; Permissive’s callous ending, and Groupie Girl’s stunt with the vans.

The last of the legendary 1970s groupie fictions was the Ingrid Steeger starrer from Erwin Dietrich in 1970, I, a Groupie, aka Ich, ein Groupie, a far more colorful and uncritical light-hearted affair, but with equally stupid and immoral girls. Initially beginning life as a co-production with Roger Corman, it was partially directed by Jack-of-all-genres Hill.

In London, Steeger’s Vicky stumbles onto an impromptu outdoor rock concert (fat chance!), and joins the unbelievably ugly group as an official hanger-on for the inevitable drug-fuelled orgy, where she attaches herself to one of the band. It's tame stuff, as Ingrid and new-found friend Vivian (Vivian Weiss) pursue the fleeing and disinterested inadequate around Europe, pausing in Zurich to go skinnydipping during a picnic and be assaulted by bikers, and in Amsterdam to give a blow job to one of the group onstage during a performance. After an encounter in Berlin with a black magic cult, Vicky ends up running down the street naked while on a trip, hallucinating that she's in a snowy mountaintop paradise (a famous image of Steeger used on her DVD box-set from whence this comes), and ending up bloodily squashed by a hapless motorist. There’s never a dull moment, but what the point of it all was is anybody’s guess, as the sex and nudity is all extremely perfunctory, the highlight being a lengthy naked back-of-the-bike motorcycle ride for two sweet young things (Ingrid and another) filmed in real traffic! Those were the days.

Moral High Ground continued: Schoolgirl Report

Back in the early 1970s, barriers weren't so much being broken down as trampled underfoot in the stampede to put realistic sex and violence on cinema screens and hold back the advance of television--by showing what the TV bosses wouldn’t, couldn’t, or shouldn’t broadcast. In Britain, Germany, France, Italy, and the Scandinavian territories, ugly, grateful men were being filmed getting it on with attractive but often badly lit and unflatteringly photographed young girls. Where all the handsome young men of the ‘70s were is a mystery, but very few of them were in the movies. Maybe they were having real sex.

Ironically, most of this fare has since turned up on TV twenty years later, and the German-made Schoolgirl Reports (or Schulmadchen Reports)--which in comparison with much of this stuff, weren’t too bad to look at--first made their appearance in Britain via the German channels on the Astra satellite in the early 1990s (in America, many of them have been dubbed and released with deeply inappropriate and deceptive titles and sleeve art). This dreadful concept ran throughout the entire 1970s, symbolically starting in 1970 and ending in 1979. For those who were teenagers in the 1970s--and I was--the females, fashions, and fretful fuddy-duddies of these ludicrous light sex adventures all brought back weirdly nostalgic memories.

Although posing as serious documentary studies on the mores of the “youth of today”, the thirteen films in this series were, of course, pure fantasy and exploitation through and through. While teens were indeed more laid-back and easy going about sex than ever before in the 1970s (and perhaps since, being post-pill and pre-AIDS) their parents still needed a thin excuse to enjoy themselves, and thus were born the Schoolgirl Reports, collections of short revelatory vignettes fooling no-one.

This, it seemed, was a devastating expose of scandalous new social conventions among the young and helpless that had to be told! It was purely coincidental, audiences told themselves, that everyone was running around naked. Some of these short pieces were played as Benny Hill-style light comedy, but the really funny ones were the melodramas that took themselves seriously... Reefer Madness meets Beach Party in the nude.

When the first Schoolgirl Report appeared in 1970, the series was initially based on (but soon drifted away from) a book by Gunther Hunold in which he interviewed about a dozen schoolgirls on their sex lives. All the adults are seen to be very buttoned-up, very worried and concerned, and frankly, a bit sinister. All the kids are at it with wild abandon. Interspersed with all this are verite street interviews, which may or may not be genuine (it’s difficult to tell when you can't speak the language; fortunately, the stories are self-explanatory). The overwhelming theme appears to be to both titillate and distress conservatives in equal measure.

The baker’s dozen of Schoolgirl Reports can be purchased in a reasonably priced box set (less than a fiver a film) or individually and a bit more pricey (of course the offers change on Amazon daily). They’re in the German language, although there are the dubbed and retitled ones out there with sleazy titles for the American market. However, as harsh as the German language is to alien ears, the last thing you ever want to subject yourself to is a nice uninhibited European sex film after the descendants of the Mayflower have got their mitts on it. It really isn’t too difficult to figure out what’s going on in these epics, and when it is, it doesn’t really matter.

Before we dive in, a word about the credits. The Schulmadchen Reports notoriously didn’t credit any of the performers, particularly in the first one when they were pretending to be authentic, and because, as the series went on, they rather absurdly insisted on persisting with the pretence that this was some sort of reality. Various reference sources have attempted to identify the players, but rather than indulge in guesswork, I’ve only listed names where I’ve been absolutely certain of who a player is. This is a shame, as I’d love to give credit where it’s due.

What I can do is reel off a list of the girls, and these are Puppa Armbruster (who appeared six times), Sandra Atia (three times), Alexandra Beau, Rena Bergen, Eva Berthold (twice), Marina Blumel (twice), Alexandra Bogojevic (three times), Astrid Boner (three times), Evelyne Bugram, Ulrike Butz (twice), Shirley Corrigan, Britt Corvin, Elke Deuringer (twice), Marianne Dupont (six times), Yvonne Dwyer, Marie Ekorre, Sonja Embriz, Sylvia Engelmann (twice), Marisa Feldy (three times), Claudia Fielers, Lisa Fitz, Monica Fleischer, Judith Fritsch, Karine Gambier, Marguerite Gerber, Roswitha Geuther (twice), Karin Gotz (four times), Anne Graf, Gudrun Grau, Marion Haberl, Monica Hagen, Heidi Hansen, Angelika Hefner, Elfi Helfrich, Christina Hoeltel, Margitta Hofer, Claudia Holl (twice), Jane Iwanoff (twice), Carmen Jackel, Gina Janssen (twice), Sonja Jeannine (twice), Uschi Karnat, Karin Kernke, Yvonne Kerstin, Astrid Kilian, Karin Konig, Claudia Korber, Carina Kreisch (four times), Cleo Kretschmer, Roswitha Krey, Andrea L'Arronge, Renate Langer, Eleonore Leipert, Eva Leuze, Christina Lindberg, Karin Lorson, Margot Mahler, Barbel Marcus, Ginny Noack, Elfriede Payer, Felicitas Peters, Mascha Rabben, Deborah Ralls, Roswitha Randl, Ursula Maria Schaefer, Gisela Schwartz (twice), Gundi Schwobel, Karin Simsel, Christine Snyder, Jutta Speidel, Sonja Spitzweg, Ingrid Steeger (twice), Ingeborg Steinbach, Christine Szenetra (twice), Carmine Van Der Poel, Christine von Stratowa (twice), Manuela Widman, Karin Wieland, and Helga Wild. Michael Schreiner was the frequently seen twitching blond nerd in the early ones, Rosi Mayr the little old lady who appeared frequently.

The emphasis in the first one seems to be on promiscuous girls getting dumb males into trouble (the moral tale of the promiscuous beauty waiting to ruin your life was a popular one in male fantasies of the ‘70s). A girl on a school trip seduces the bus driver; an alleged fifteen year old (she looks early twenties) is messing about with an older man; a sixteen year old attempts to seduce a priest in the confessional; and best of all, two naughty nymphs decide to tempt an uptight pool attendant with a midnight skinnydipping session.

Why those crazy kids and their wacky ways... driving around in open-top cars, playing musical instruments in the open air, walking, talking, barbecuing... it shouldn’t be allowed! And on it goes... two guys on a building site, a gym teacher... all fall before the lustful, predatory schoolgirls to the backdrop of jaunty, happy-go-lucky music... Yeah, in your dreams, guys. There’s more, and none of these stories appear to have a resolution (although I may be missing something in translation).

Schoolgirl Report no. 2 the following year reverses the premise; now the theme appears to be silly little girls getting themselves into trouble. It’s introduced by a very sincere young man in a suit addressing a bunch of worthies in their Sunday best, earnestly puffing on cigarettes and looking concerned. We are introduced to Elfie and Christa, aged 19, and Sybille, a mere 17 (yeah, right), and once again, they’re teasing teacher. He’s foolish enough to go round to Sybille’s house, where our little piranha fish plies him with drink that gets “accidentally” spilled. Suddenly she’s naked, and he’s all over her, ruining his life and career. He’s taken the bait, and they’ve taken the photos. The final shot has the now repentant schoolgirl silently weeping in class when she hears he’s suicided.

After a bit more po-faced pipe-sucking, we get a short vignette about a violent dad who doesn’t like his kid spying on randy teens. Then two shoplifting schoolgirls get a taste of their own medicine when their luggage is stolen while on a trip. This doesn’t seem to hinder their sex life, as they then promptly sleep around in threesomes and doubles.

Schoolgirl Report continued

Next is a comedy virgin (blond stammering Michael Schreiner, one of the lads from the building site in episode one) who drives his girl out to the countryside so that they can get back to nature. Their clothes are stolen, and the girl turns out to be in on it with the thief. Next, and in complete contrast, a nasty cautionary tale about drugs, frolics in a photographer’s studio where the school caretaker recognises the girls in his porn mag, and another under-age seduction. Mother and father wilt in court.

Schoolgirl Report no. 3 (1972) is more of the same, the mix of freewheeling sexual abandon, comedy mishaps, and attempted rape even more incongruous. It starts off light and merry, with a mass skinnydipping session followed by fun and games between the male and female dormitories. These scenes are great fun, particularly when the girls wrap their sheets around them and leap about as mock ghosties. Then the clouds gather, and the stories--being related by the group of youngsters in what looks like a pub garden--turn dark, with a tale of rape and attempted cover-up and suicide with a female victim who somehow gets blackmailed into catering for corrupt old men.

Next up is another creepy inappropriate schoolteacher, who not only lusts after the attractive girls in class, but insults the less desirable ones! After a couple of other sordid interludes with silly girls and nasty men, the film segues into an entertaining piece involving a Lolita-ish schoolgirl who sucks on an ice lolly while a middle-aged sleaze clumsily ravishes her. This guy’s scattershot lunge-and-squeeze technique, demonstrated in a variety of locations signifying a wild few days, must qualify for the worst sex in the entire series! The girl’s spurned and jealous boyfriend informs her raging parents, and the slobbering and mauling is put to a stop...

Runner-up for lousiest sexual experience is the next girl, who picks up a handsome hunk at the pool and park location frequently used, only to find out that the relationship is more wreck than recreation. He’s heartless, selfish, and ultimately violent.

In the most blatantly comedic story in this edition, the nervous nerd from the building site in no. 1 who got his clothes stolen in no. 2 finally gets lucky, and he and his squeeze sneak into the deserted school at night, only to find an older couple--presumably teacher and secretary--already hiding naked in the wardrobe when they’re overheard and try to hide. It all ends with the two oldsters chased out of the room by--apparently--the wife, and the wardrobe falling over, two young moons breaking through the back as it hits the ground. Why was there an empty wardrobe in the guy’s office anyway? Perhaps he made a habit of hiding in there...

This is the last scene worth watching in this edition, which is very variable. When they’re light and funny, the Reports can be quite amusing, but when they get dark, it’s depressing and pointless. There are no obvious lessons to be learned from the grim segments, they just relate unfortunate and improbable incidents.

Schoolgirl Report no. 4 (also 1972) concerns itself with more criminally careless teachers and doctors, and then segues into two anecdotes about discrimination against overweight girls and black girls. Things look up when ‘70s Swedish sex starlet Christina Lindberg shows up lurking in the foliage at a garden party while her brother makes out. There then follows what appears to be a very bizarre incest storyline, the weirdest thing aside of the actual sexual attraction being that two siblings in their late teens are still sharing a bedroom. No wonder they didn’t turn out quite right.

No. 5 (1973) opens with three bad girls luring their unsuspecting teacher into a threesome in a barn while on a school trip. One of them feigns illness to get him on top of her, but it's the stuffy middle-aged mistress who is carried out on the stretcher after walking in on them in the act. In the second segment, a sexy teen drives (it seems) her poor father or stepfather into court after provoking him beyond endurance. It’s difficult to know how much the poor schlub is the architect of his own destruction without knowing what’s being said in the dialogue, but ultimately it’s the adult who’s at fault because, let’s face it, you just Don’t. She’s obviously trying to get him going, so it’s all a bit distasteful, but the wife and best friend set a honey trap, and her culpability in her situation, along with the rest of her, is exposed.

The next story appears to be about a boy and girl who have sex before they’re ready (although it doesn’t look too traumatic), but are then seduced by self-serving adults when they confide. It’s difficult to figure out what the meaning is on this one, because they both end up in bed together afterwards, unharmed and improved by their experiences. Again, without the dialogue, it’s difficult to judge the intent, and even more difficult to care. Today there’s more likely to be a fuss about the post-coital cigarette they share…

Next, a little light relief, as a class of sexy schoolgirls attempt to torment a not very randy reverend. One particular young lady, played by German sex film legend Ingrid Steeger in a mini-skirt higher than her knickers, is more smitten than the rest, and won’t admit defeat (Steeger’s also in no. 4). The lucky actor portraying a man of the cloth then gets to participate in the girl’s extraordinary dream sequence in which she launches herself down a table towards him naked and, as the table morphs into a bed, is joined by four of her naked classmates who attempt to physically keep them apart. Oh it’s groovy, baby.

Next up, more laffs, as two jolly jokers (one of them the genuinely funny Rinaldo Talamonti) mending the school showers end up groping two compliant young girls, only to be interrupted by their foreman, and then an elderly schoolmistress (Rosi Mayr). With all four youngsters naked, more hilarity ensues, and the elderly Mayr gamely takes a pot of red paint over her head.

In the next yarn, a moralistic warning, as two young louts are encouraged by a girl’s promiscuity to assume she’s easy pickings. She ends up lured to a gang-bang. No consequences appear to be forthcoming for these thugs (unless the narration says different), the concept that she ought to be able to have as many partners as she likes, along with the privilege of selecting them, without being assaulted by men she hasn’t selected, apparently an alien notion.

Finally, a couple of nervous virgins get it on. Or don’t. Maybe. A mix of drama and slapstick, the theme appears to be irresponsible adults and even more irresponsible kids. Where will it all end? With no. 13.

Back at episode no. 6, however, a young couple are caught carrying on in a deserted classroom and are hauled before a school committee. The pair put up a defiant front and angrily proceed to relate a series of stories involving sexual relations in the school; it’s not only the lights that go down when the sex education films are rolling. Guilt-ridden we-are-all-to-blame faces listen with consternation to assorted yarns which involve skinnydipping, voyeurism, alfresco sexo, a revenge fuck, prostitution, a lot of pawing and mauling passing for sex, a brief shower scene, and a lusty schoolgirl’s adventures with a married gym teacher.

There are two main stories. The first involves Ingrid (Marie Ekorr), who fancies a sexy female teacher (Shirley Corrigan) and imagines her naked in the classroom. Things get fraught, and once rebuffed, our girl becomes a stalker. She tries straight sex with her clumsy boyfriend, but she just ain’t made that way. The second story concerns a comedy window cleaner, who sneaks into the short-sighted teacher’s class and has it away with three of the girls before he pushes his luck and the teacher faints away. This tragic fantasy is absolutely ridiculous and actually quite funny, with a sterling performance from the reliable Rinaldo Talamonti as the window cleaner, an Italian actor who was a combination of Benny Hill and Robin Askwith.

No. 7 is a doozy. It opens with a schoolgirl stumbling onto a busy prostitution ring run by her brother, who then punches out a client who insists on having her rather than the eager girls actually on offer (!). This is followed by sex in a shower, sex in a bedroom, sex in a stairwell, and sex in a study session... all with the same girl, a Christina Lindberg lookalike. Next, and best, our cheeky chappie Rinaldo Talamonti is back, this time playing an Italian dining room waiter called Carlo, in what can only be a tribute to 1970s Italian sex comedies of the time. Caught under the table of three girls looking at their legs (probably because he can’t resist kissing and licking them too), he proceeds to chat them up. Getting lucky beyond his wildest hopes, he finds himself naked in a hotel room with all three of them, exhausting himself on the first girl while the other two wait their turn in the bathroom.

Unfortunately, much to the great amusement of the naked girls, as he lies on the bed trying to recover for two more, he is jolted back to reality by the arrival of his comedy wife (twitchy Margot Mahler), who barges in, finds his trousers, and demands to know where he is. As he cowers behind the door, she is stabbing the bed covers viciously with an umbrella to see if he’s under them!

Fleeing into the hotel corridors naked, he dashes into an elevator with a bemused elderly woman, as the three naked girls, the wife, and the hotel porter fly down the stairs. Everyone sprints round the hotel in various directions. Scuttling around under the tables in the dining room, still naked, while his wife storms around lifting tablecloths, the three girls sit down at one--also still buck naked--and order dinner from the waiter; it’s that kind of comedy. Soon, the chase resumes until Carlo gets the public beating he deserves from his twitching spouse. All of this high spirited romp is brilliantly choreographed visual comedy, utilising the dining room and hotel lobby superbly, as he, the wife, the three naked girls, the hotel doorman, and the horrible wife fly around the place like a superannuated Benny Hill Show.

This is followed by two nasty old man vignettes, one involving a biker gang, and then the standard scenario so beloved of Italian comedies, whereby a bunch of overgrown schoolkids torment a naive young teacher. The final yarn has a girl lusting after teacher so badly she masquerades as her own mum to seduce him! Guess who turns up?

The highlight of no. 8, which mostly concerns predatory young girls after hapless men, is an eye-popping group shower scene about half-way through, although it begins poorly. We open with some shenanigans in first a greenhouse, and then a very 1970s bathroom with some magnificently headache-inducing ‘70s decor. The plot, to use the term loosely, involves a blonde pursuing a simple-minded gardener who, although obviously desperate for some female attention, is ignoring this willing real-life girl. Some rather unattractive sex follows. After this, things look up...

The next story concerns a sweet young thing who goes back to a young lad’s apartment and climbs into his bed. She’s lying there with the sheets up to her chin, nervously waiting for him to return, and he pulls them off as nervously as a bomb disposal expert. Then they have sex while airport lounge music plays in the background. In the third story, two schoolgirls arrange the seduction of their stuffy, uptight biology teacher in order to embarrass and humiliate her, but in a development everyone can see coming a mile off, the glasses come off, the bun cascades into lush auburn hair, and she turns up in class a new woman.

Next up is a peeping tom poacher who can't believe his luck when two nubile young beauties turn up at the lake he’s illegally fishing in to do a bit of skinnydipping. No breast is left ungroped before the girls dive in, but not content with this eyeful, he decides to steal their clothes. After much running through the woods in slo-mo, the girls find two guys’ clothes and cover up. When the guys show up, they see off the poacher after making him strip down to his shorts, and the sequence ends with all four enjoying a wild sex session, while the poacher is forced to stay in the river up to his eyeballs, each taking turns to snap “don’t watch!” or somesuch in German while they bang away. We’ve come a long way since The Immoral Mr. Teas twenty years earlier. The comedy scenes are actually funny (at one point the poacher successfully pole-vaults over a large pool of water, then loses his balance and falls backwards into it anyway), and as usual, the girls are delightful.

After yet another beautiful blonde tells her story of how she exhausts a manipulative sugar-daddy (events are being related on a school bus trip), the coach finally arrives at its destination, and the owner of the hotel, an extremely large man in a dirty vest, spies on the cast in the shower... and gets a bucket of water over him for his trouble. Frankly, I’d say it was worth it. Then our blonde lead tries to seduce the teacher and gets rebuffed and everybody models 1970s fashions in a field. Missing, for once, are the concerned old pipe-suckers and schoolmarms, with all attempts at erzatz documentary now abandoned.

The same applies to no. 9, in which the stories are related by a couple of country coppers who have just arrested the entire cast for dangerous driving. In the first story, a couple of (very) young marrieds encounter various problems ranging from shyness to lack of privacy to jealousy. Next comes the best of this selection, concerning an uptight little madame who goes to a wild party, drinks the spiked punch, and wakes up with a very considerate and fully-clothed young man whose mother is serving her a nice cup of tea. The party scenes are particularly amusing, with one of the young minxes from no. 8 (the wonderful Puppa Armbruster) getting the party going with an impromptu strip tease. Everybody immediately takes all their clothes off in admirable solidarity. When the parents come home the next morning, the house is strewn with comatose naked bodies.

Next we have a girl who can’t make her mind up between the girls and the boys; when her friend’s dad/step-dad gets an eyeful of hot lesbian action, things get ugly.

As usual, straight after the worst scenes come the silliest, as a middle-aged couple decide to get down with the kids; it looks like one of those Lucy Show episodes where the oldsters dress up as hippies. Later, a pretty blonde is traumatised by a flasher and can’t enjoy herself with her boyfriend. The film finally goes full-circle and the entire cast miraculously survive a double car crash that shouldn’t have seen anyone crawling out unharmed.

Schoolgirl Report no. 10 is quite possibly the worst of the series. It opens with a dreary tale of alcohol and regrets, before moving on to the familiar ground of the nymphomaniac maneater. Then it’s on to a swim party, where a pouty, petulant girl is giving her artist boyfriend a hard time. Strangely, everyone’s in swimsuits--a bizarre choice for this series, which usually takes any and every opportunity to show a bit of skinnydipping. He promptly makes out with her roommate, and a wild sex scene follows. And not before time. All this tedious banality ends with a hopelessly lame spoof of The Exorcist, which has to be the most abysmal and embarrassing parody I’ve ever seen in my life, making this easily the weakest entry in the run.

The entire series of Schoolgirl Reports had been written by one guy, Gunther Heller, and directed by just two guys, Ernest Hofbauer, with an assist and occasional solo outing by Walter Boos. I would be repeating myself as pointlessly as they were if I bothered to relate the contents of Reports 11 and 12, both of which cover very familiar ground from previous entries (and have a predilection for haylofts, for some reason). The series was now becoming repetitive and threadbare, and had clearly run its course. The same thought must have occurred to producer Wolf Hartwig as well, as he pulled the plug in 1978 and called it a day.

However, successful formats don’t lie dormant for long, and just two years later he was back with the same team for one final throw of the dice with The New Schoolgirl Reports, part 13. As is so often the case with desperate reboots of dying franchises, and despite the presence of new opening titles (with credits for the first and last time) and Jess Franco regular Katja Bienert opening the festivities, this revamp (with many familiar faces of the German sex-coms returning as if they’d never been away--which they barely had), simply confirmed the end of the whole enterprise. It was probably for the best; dated 1980, a few ghastly ‘80s fashions were noticeably mingling with the otherwise 1970s ambience, and who wanted to see a 1980s Schoolgirl Report? If anything screamed 1970s, it was these.

Moral High Ground continued

Britain's own schoolgirl report came in the form of a true story. The absurdly titled Cool It, Carol! (1970) is a shabby and depressing film about two bored kids living out in the sticks who head for the bright lights of London--and it’s tough to blame them.

Robin Askwith, still a few years away from his signature role in the Confessions films, plays Joe the butcher’s boy, who boasts of having connections and the promise of a job in London, and then has to back up his bravado when girlfriend Carol (Janet Lynn) calls his bluff. In fact, although she’s no more experienced in the ways of the world than he is, it’s the up-for-it girl who leads the naive virginal boy astray in this one; she’s sympathetically giving him a seeing-to on the train before they’ve even reached the bright lights of the city.

Having coped with their first encounters with blacks and gays, still something slightly exotic and suspicious to the middle England audience for such fare as this in 1970, the country bumpkins soon fall in with opportunists and sharks. Despite getting several breaks, Joe consistently blows all their money, and they swiftly work their way down the ladder; it’s almost heartbreaking watching Joe stumbling, fumbling, and bumbling from one scene to the next.

As the hapless naif, Askwith proves he can do more than drop his trousers, and gives perhaps his best performance in a limited line of work. As for Janet Lynn, director and producer Pete Walker, who made a series of exploitation films in the ‘70s that revelled in baiting and satirising the prudes and reactionaries, told blue movie buff Simon Sheridan, “I didn’t want to cast someone sexy, but needed an actress with an innocent face. In those days, it was very difficult to find a relative unknown who was prepared to bare all”. Only a couple of years later, actresses would be queuing up to strip off for the camera.

Having established that all Joe’s stories about having a job selling cars are a pack of lies, they clumsily and cautiously decide that she’ll fuck for money. Their first stumbling attempts are touchingly painfully inept, but before long a sleazeball takes the bait, and all three go back to his place. The scene where Carol first has sex for money, and the camera stays outside the bedroom with Joe, listening to the grunts and groans in the lounge, is powerful and moving. Having sunk as low as he can go, he makes the tea. Carol now has her first regular customer—“Same time tomorrow?” he smirks, “I’ll get some biscuits”.

When they return the next day, there’s a small army of dirty old men, patiently waiting their turn with her. “I’ll do it just this once” she murmurs, and when Joe goes into the bedroom afterwards to collect her, she mutters “I don’t ever want to do that again”. At first, Joe is repulsed by what they’re doing, while pragmatic Carol thinks little of it... but as Joe is gradually seduced by the money and glamour, Carol is tiring of doing all the work. An amateur porn shoot, grimly convincing, is almost Hogarthian, or even reminiscent of an Arthur Rackham fairytale illustration, a copulating Hansel and Gretel surrounded by trolls and gnomes. Everything she earns, Joe throws away, showing off. The more corrupt Joe becomes, the more she slowly backs off.

As one of her mother’s neighbors notes approvingly, Carol “has a lovely bum”, and a good figure, and this film would consequently be quite watchable if it wasn’t for the exhaustingly loud and strident music blaring forth at every opportunity. The portrait it paints of seedy ‘70s London is uncomfortably, depressingly, gruesomely convincing, and there’s no chance of any similar young couple being inspired to give it a go after seeing this catalogue of freaks, creeps, and weirdoes. Insanely, many of the pundits in the press felt otherwise, and were suitably outraged on behalf of their readers. Stage school graduate and cabaret dancer Janet Lynn certainly fooled the London Daily Mail; “What’s a nice girl like Janet Lynn doing in a nasty film like Cool It, Carol?” it wailed, apparently oblivious to the concept of acting, or indeed any other definition of nice outside their narrow views.

Despite its worth as a powerful and credible warning to naive teens everywhere however, Cool It, Carol, rather than being welcomed by the finger-wagging fraternity, scandalised the establishment and became a subject for appalled attack. Perhaps they saw themselves sitting in the sleazeball’s lounge, reading the sports pages until their turn came up. Perhaps they were astounded by the absolutely authentic attitude toward sex displayed by young people in the 1970s—“It’s just a fuck” shrugs Carol, demolishing two thousand years of oppression with four words.

Film and TV of all varieties, from documentary to sit-com, made a huge deal of every aspect of sexuality, the TV controls invariably resting in the hands of over-forties; for 1970s teens, the subject mostly elicited a puzzled frown. In the decade of the pill, and well before the arrival of AIDS, it was indeed just a fuck. This was not something many people over the age of forty wanted to hear, and certainly not acknowledge, in 1970. As always with Walker, the film is also highly dismissive of the police, who as potential protectors, are less than useless, deliberately ignoring the pair when not being aloof and intimidating or otherwise invisible. In a pre-Sweeney era of reassuring friendly bobbies and father figure authoritarian cops like Dixon and Barlow (Britain’s equivalent of Kojak or Streets of San Francisco), Walker was one of the first to show the tall-hatted foot soldiers of the 1970s in their true light.

An absurd and abrupt ending has the kids returning to their dismal former lives, sadder but wiser. The puritans in the press were outraged by what they perceived as a “happy ending”. Actually, it’s a heart-breakingly sad ending, but the moralists were peeved because Joe and Carol had, in their blinkered eyes, not been punished for their laissez-faire petty law-breaking (perhaps they were enjoying starving, being humiliated, sexually assaulted, ripped off, scammed, and leered at). In fact, even though the ending had them returning to dreary mediocrity, it was foolish and unnecessary for the pair to simply return to where they began, even if--in the real-life story Walker and writer Murray Smith had lifted from the U.K. scandal sheet News of the World—that’s exactly what had actually happened.

Having made all their mistakes in quick succession, the lesson the characters had surely learned was not to be readily exploited. By returning to their starting point, the lessons learned had been wasted, their experiences endured for nothing. Carol had enjoyed a successful modelling career, and was poised to go further; all she really had to do was throw in the prostitution, and perhaps send young, useless Joe packing. In the even harsher real world, the kids were dumb enough to reveal their experiences, and the real life Joe did time for living off immoral earnings. Where was the real immorality in that development?

Ironically, Janet Lynn’s career trajectory paralleled Carol’s retreat to normality; she left the glamour and excitement of the film business for the more sedate life of wife and mother. Lynn could have been up there with Jenny Agutter, Judy Geeson, and Susan George if she’d stuck with it, but she found ordinary everyday life more appealing.

However, not all the confessionals were coming from teens, and not all the bad behavior either. There was discontent among the thirtysomethings too...

In Monique (1970), a deeply miserable married couple (David Sumner and Joan Alcorn) hire a French au pair (writer/director John Bown’s real-life partner Sybilla Kay) and unlock a Pandora’s Box of repressed sexuality in the process. This is the flip-side of the same period’s Au Pair Girls--same fantasy, but approached from a different direction.

Bill and Jean are in the sort of wedlocked purgatory where their days consist of the snide comments and exchanged looks that couples use when they want to have a row but can’t in front of the children, and their nights consist of back to back deathly silence and never wanting the reading light on at the same time. Enter Monique, the live-in help who should make his wife’s daily grind a little more bearable. She’s bright, happy, and likeable, everything the working mum has forgotten how to be, and before long the husband starts noticing her and the wife starts getting chatty. “Don’t mess it up by trying anything, because I’d like her to stay” she snaps... but it’s husband Bill who comes home to find them getting a bit girly…

Monique does nothing to encourage the attentions of either Bill or Jean, but nothing to discourage them either. She allows Bill into her bed one night, and genuinely enjoys spending time with Jean during the day. She quite innocently and inadvertently finds herself getting increasingly involved with both husband and wife individually to such an extent that bringing everybody together in a threesome not only seems awkwardly logical but natural and inevitable. Writer/director Bown, who surprisingly never did anything other than continue acting again, carries off this unlikely absurdity with care, clarity, and credibility.

Ultimately, this wild card defrosts the atmosphere by seducing both of them at the dinner table, and they all end up in bed together. It’s impressive how this sequence with the simultaneous seductions is played, with Bown skilfully walking the tightrope between erotica for pleasure and storytelling necessity. Unfortunately, honestly portrayed sexual activity minus the cheeky chappies and the sink plungers was all a bit too much for the dour film censor, who attacked it with his scissors, although enough survives to make the point without inadvertently exciting anyone, which would of course be A Bad Thing.

Monique must have been quite a daring and scandalous film in 1970, and as daft and unlikely as it all is (although more credible than Stanley Long’s silly Sex and the Other Woman), what a pleasure to see a film about unconventional sexual activity that isn’t obliged to end in tragedy. Job done and marriage saved, Monique flits off like a sex therapist Mary Poppins, and leaves the marriage intact and revitalised--although where it goes from here is anybody’s guess.

Perhaps the most devastating indictment of life in the suburbs came from a film that took place entirely in the Australian outback.

Calmly and coldly, a businessman (no characters are named) drives his two children into the Australian outback for a picnic... and starts shooting at them. The kids survive, but their suicidal father and the car go up in a blaze. The young boy, an infant barely in school (the director’s son, Luc Roeg) and the girl (a sixth-former close to leaving it played by Jenny Agutter) must now find their way back to civilisation, and this is the basis of Walkabout (1971)--on the surface, at least.

As the children struggle to find their way back to their own recognisable world, the poor girl desperately tries to keep herself and her little brother alive without panicking and making him aware of their dire predicament. His playfulness and irritability contrasts heartbreakingly with her stress and resignation to their fate. A mixed blessing occurs when they encounter a young aborigine boy (David Gulpilil) on his walkabout--a tribal ritual whereby all young men of his age must survive on their own in the outback for a set period of time. He takes them under his wing, ultimately expecting something in return that Agutter’s character is unable to give. The story ends in appalling tragedy, with a very melancholy coda at the end, when the kids have returned to civilisation.

Walkabout is a film about sex, about the massive gulf between humankind and nature, and between civilised Australia and the aborigines. It sat on the shelf at the distributors for a while, a back-handed compliment. The trailer for it illustrates perfectly just how groundbreaking and different to the traditional approach the film was, by inadvertently demonstrating just what it would have been like in other hands--what Roeg relates visually and with subtlety, and with a minimum of dialogue, a cliche-strewn narration spells out in corny, overblown melodramatic detail.

Two superb scenes include an almost anthropological study of male-female attraction involving a party of researchers from civilisation somewhere else in the outback that comes across as a mix of social science and Benny Hill, and a scene of extraordinary irony in which the schoolchildren at one point unknowingly pass by possible salvation--a small town just over a ridge--which the aborigine sees, but thinks nothing of.

What Walkabout has--and what many sad posters on the IMDB are apparently unable to grasp--is a perfectly normal and natural attitude to sex and nudity... one which, if it prevailed in society, would make many of the films in this book ancient artefacts as inexplicable as the aborigine’s behavior was to Agutter’s suburban schoolgirl, last seen in a sterile kitchen wistfully daydreaming about her happy and uninhibited carefree experiences back to nature as her dull husband witters on about his hopes for promotion. It’s a throat-catching, heart-breaking scene.

I’m not going to get precious about Walkabout. I enjoy my home comforts and kitchen appliances, and don’t want to go back to nature in the Australian outback or anywhere similar, thank you very much. There’s nothing wonderful or noble about spearing lizards for supper. But the point the film is making, I think, is less about going back to primitivism and more about our repressed and narrow-minded attitudes to life itself--all ironically displayed in all their idiot glory by some of the amateur reviewers for this film on the internet at time of writing (and yes, of course there are some intelligent and sensible reviews of Walkabout there too… but it gets fucking depressing on the forums and the last few pages).

Moral High Ground concluded

Several continents away, in Paris, France, Frederic (Bernard Verley) is another dull little man in a dull little job. His secretaries spend much of the working day on the ‘phone to their boyfriends, and he is the invisible man, jealously glancing at long legs in the street, pretty faces in coffee bars, loving couples just starting out. He has a pretty wife (Francoise Verley), as dull men often do, an equally pretty childminder for his newborn baby who flits round the house naked (the young Suze Randall, later a professional pornographer!), and--intruding on his pain--a former girlfriend, a dazzling, doe-eyed free spirit with the hot-sweaty-nights name of Chloe (‘60s model and gossip-fodder Zouzou, aka Daniele Ciaret), who turns up out of the blue to offer him a no-strings place in her sex life. Heaven on earth, you might think, the best of both worlds, but our hero has a major monkey on his back. Guilt. Unfortunately for both him and the free spirit, Love in the Afternoon (aka L’amour l’apres-midi, aka Chloe in the afternoon, 1972) is a film about morality.

Most films finish with the happy ending that joins two individuals together for a life of blissful pleasure as a couple. There are very few films which contemplate how a man feels when he has sown his wild oats, made his choice, and committed to that one single woman, rightly or wrongly, supposedly for the rest of his days. How many of either sex are so deliriously happy with their life partner that their thoughts never stray? This is the subject of Love in the Afternoon.

“Now that I’m married, I find all women beautiful” muses our vaguely dissatisfied hero in the voiceover narration. His wife is expecting their second child, and he’s comfortable and happy, but going through the inevitable mid-life crisis. When Chloe, all long legs, provocative eyes, full lips, and floppy fringe re-enters his life (they knew each other years earlier through mutual friends, each involved with others), she gradually and deliberately insinuates her way into the poor sap’s life, playing with him like a cat plays with a mouse. Like Breezy, made around the same time and discussed elsewhere, each incident or appearance pulls her deeper into his day-to-day existence, but unlike Breezy, this is a series of deliberate and impulsive acts, meticulously executed.

First we get the casual drop-ins at the office, which then become planned and expected. She has a boyfriend, it’s just a casual platonic thing they’ve got going. Then of course we get the break-up with the current guy, Frederic drafted in to help her retrieve her belongings. Now she’s free, slightly more dangerous, slightly more available. Next, he’s asked to check out the new apartment she’ll be staying in. She even meets the wife and buys the baby a gift. Then, just as he’s enjoying having her around, she disappears for a while. When she returns, he’s hungry and confused. All the time, she’s pulling strings and pressing buttons.

She strings him along expertly, exquisitely. It’s fascinating to watch the body language between the two of them as they become closer. Her new job is a bust--she scampered off on holiday with the manager, who previously she couldn’t stand, pressed his buttons, and ran off with a young lad. Like Jane Fonda in Klute, another early ‘70s film, she entertains poor Frederic with stories of her sexual adventures. Then the punchline—“I’ve decided to seduce you”. When she gets a job in a dress shop through one of the office secretaries, she tries on dresses in front of him. He turns respectfully away, but can’t resist pointing out it's the first time he’s seen her legs--or indeed her figure, usually underneath stylish trouser suits or blue jeans. “I’ve decided to have a child by you” she teases—“I always get my way”.

This is not a film about a man bored with his life or disappointed with his choice of woman. It just deals with the truth that we are all still always stealing that sideways glance--that we can never stop wondering what might’ve been, what still could be... eyes wandering, window-shopping... There’s a wonderful scene, my favorite scene in the film in fact, because it is so beautifully played by Irene Skobline, in which a salesgirl flirtatiously talks Frederic into trying on and buying a shirt, after a snobbish male assistant elsewhere has achieved nothing.

Once Chloe has a nice apartment at last, she goes for the kill. They’ll have a heart-to-heart next time they get together, go out, have a drink, decide once and for all where they stand. Pick me up at my apartment, insists the cat to the mouse. When he turns up, she’s in the shower. Pass me a towel... pass me the mat... dry me... dry me properly. The towel falls down, and her bare butt fills the screen; Frederic is facing the other side. She lays on the bed, and Frederic goes to pull his jumper over his head... he finds himself peering through the neck, just as he did when he was playing earlier with his new-born son. He turns and flees. Back at the office, he ‘phones his wife. His meeting was cancelled, he's coming home... for some love in the afternoon.

The closing scene, with the inexplicably tearful wife vaguely aware almost subliminally that their marriage has just dodged a gorgeous naked bullet, the husband realising, almost forlornly but with some sense of relief, that he can be with no-one but her, is quietly, heart-wrenchingly touching. Has any film about infidelity ever ended so ambiguously and honestly as this? It’s a lonely, painful ending, and is it even an ending? The film is over, but the story goes on. Will he cut Chloe out of his life entirely, or will he carry on meeting her and eventually succumb?

Director Eric Rohmer was accused at times by New Wave acolytes of young leftists like Godard and Bertolucci of making middle class films about middle class people with no serious problems except their personal ones. Rohmer never denied this, admitting that, quite sensibly, he made films about the people and environs he knew. It’s revealing that most of his detractors’ arguments are built around the fact that he was not making the sort of films about the sort of subjects they thought he ought to be making. Then, if he’s fool enough to try, those same commentators will nail him for not knowing his subject. Which is the easiest and lowest--and most pointless and redundant--form of criticism.

As film critic Jonathan Romney remarked in 1990, “(unlike) Rohmer’s New Age contemporaries Godard and Rivette, all you need with Rohmer is a taste of the films themselves”. As he suggests, the straightforward simplicity of Rohmer’s films are what make them accessible to mainstream English and American audiences looking for an easy entrance to the supposedly sophisticated environs of French, or European “art” cinema. Rohmer himself suggested, with some justification, that his films are simplified, spoiled even, by the subtitling process. “Certain nuances disappear” he told Romney. “In French films, there are rather too many nuances--the way people talk, certain allusions--which disappear in subtitles”.

The Moral Low Ground

Quiet Days in Clichy (1970), Tropic of Cancer (1972), Turkish Delight (1973), Oasis of Fear (1971), Teenage Hitch-Hikers (1975), Blutjunge Verfuhrerinnen (part one—1971, part two—1972, part three—1973), Die Leibestollen Apothekertocher (1972), Terrifying Girls’ High School: Lynch Law Classroom (1973), Naughty (1971)

The American writer Henry Miller, a controversial novelist whose stream of consciousness semi-autobiographical outpourings were banned in England and the U.S. for over thirty years (until 1961), lived in financial and moral poverty for most of his life. He was a selfish, thieving, lustful, and unfaithful bastard, totally devoid of love, loyalty, or conscience. His writing, a literate, poetic, and potty-mouthed mix of pornographic anecdotes and philosophical musings, was beautiful, blunt, painfully honest and straight-forward, warm, and sensuous. A contradiction then, but hardly an enigma, for he bared his soul and inner-most feelings without a second thought.

As you can imagine, neither Miller nor his novels--the best being perhaps Tropic of Cancer, Tropic of Capricorn, Nexus, Plexus, and Sexus--lent themselves to filming during the 20th century, and although the content could be put on film today, the multiplex mentality has probably pretty much put paid to that, in America at least. Nevertheless, four attempts were made, in 1970 with Quiet Days in Clichy, in 1972 with Tropic of Cancer, in 1990 with a glossier, prettified, more conventional and highly criticised attempt at Quiet Days in Clichy by Claude Chabrol, and in 1994 with the glossy and insipid Henry and June. As you can also imagine, the early 1970s was probably the only time period in the entire 20th century when a film adaptation of Miller’s work and life could have been, or would have been, attempted. The results, however, were disastrous, each and every time, and the biggest disaster was Quiet Days in Clichy (aka Still dage i Clichy, 1970).

There is an old truism that those who talk about sex the loudest do it the least. While that could hardly have been said of Miller, you have to wonder about anyone amused by the puerile lyrics of Country Joe and the Fish, whose sad little songs help to make this shabby little film even more depressing than it already is. That’s quite a feat, bearing in mind we're discussing an independent film shot by an inventive but incompetent amateur with unattractive actors in black and white.

Deliberately carelessly edited, often using two takes of the same scene badly joined together, or if all else fails, still photographs, the culprit was wild card and professional waster Jens Jorgen Thorsen, whose main claim to fame was in sending the whole of Denmark into a frenzy by announcing he was going to make a film about the sex life of Jesus. As a film, it never developed; as a happening, it certainly happened. His one innovation here, again used as a short cut to cover his inability, but quite a nice touch, is comic book-style word balloons, thought balloons and/or narrative on the screen to convey information. Nothing in Miller’s life or work, however, was remotely connected to comics.

While 1994’s Henry and June (starring Fred Ward as Miller, and Uma Thurman as his wife June, who was Mona in the books) was too polite and pretty to accurately reflect Miller and his lifestyle, Quiet Days in Clichy is far too despondent and dirty. Whatever price Miller paid for living as he did, starving, lying, stealing, and hiding from debtors, the compensation was the sex. Miller had a good time, to put it mildly. This film shows his day to day existence as joyless and unerotic, which whatever you might think of him as a person, just wasn’t true. He was a true Bohemian who had the courage of his convictions to live his life exactly as he wanted to, and fuck everybody else, both literally or figuratively, and in the case of the women besotted with him, both. Most of us, including myself, have neither the courage nor the lack of conscience, to experience the extreme highs and lows of pain and pleasure that Miller endured and enjoyed.

Carl and Joe (the latter supposedly representing Miller) are two devious, dirty-minded deadbeats who live from hand-to-mouth in Clichy, a district of Paris, where their time is spent stealing, starving and fucking. First up is a deranged neighbor and prostitute who needs money to pay the rent—“whatever you want, I’ll do it”. They fuck her and steal the money back. Next, Joey picks up a curvy cutie from a coffee bar, but regrets giving her all his money in an impulsive moment of impetuous masculine benevolence. Now he resentfully imagines her eating sumptuously in the company of her boyfriend while he lingers hopefully outside shops and restaurants, drooling like a cartoon dog. The film’s most degrading and shocking scene belongs to him, rather than the women, as he forages in the waste bin for leftovers.

Meanwhile, Carl picks up an under-age simpleton who they exploit as both sex toy and housekeeper until the near-speechless parents turn up at the door. The monochrome parade of women continues, with little for we spectators to enjoy, including bath-tub frolics with two prostitutes who understandably turn nasty when Joey spoils the atmos by pissing in the water. They leap out and want paying... but are dumb enough to take cheques. The final foursome is the best of the sex scenes, but again, there is little in the way of visual stimulation, all the fun is had by the cast.

Thorsen’s film, perhaps predictably, suffered the same fate of panic-stricken and shocked total censorship that Miller’s novels did, but the work is in no way comparable. DVD distributors Arrow, never slow to pass on a film with nudity to help sell it, bless them, released it in 2002, to little fuss and bother. It was more likely to shock most people in 1970 than thirty years later, even though today the much smaller number of people it would offend would probably be more shocked!

To film Miller honestly, you just have to film Miller. The minute the writer, director, or distributor makes any kind of moral judgement, the project is lost, because the defining aspect of Miller was that he had no morals. The audience will see exactly what it chooses to see, regardless of however pro or con the dice are loaded, because the film is about sex, and the entire audience have already made their mind up about sex long ago, and are interpreting both Miller and the film from their own perspective. And it is very, very difficult indeed to film anything without a moral perspective, because someone has to decide how to cast the roles, how to direct the performances, what to put in and what to leave out, where to place the camera, and how to film the scenes. Every single one of these decisions, including the final edit of the material, defines the perspective of the film.

Jens Jorgen Thorsen’s decision to film in black and white and make the film dirty and grey, his decision to set it in the then-present day and cast the two leads as charmless creeps, and to film the women and the sex naturalistically, deprive the film of any hope it might have had to create the glowing sense of eroticism to be found in Miller’s books. And yet, when Miller wrote (which we barely see him doing here), the pages were so hot that there was sweat running between the binding. You could smell the semen, feel the tits in your face. It’s impossible to believe that either of these oafs appreciate the pleasure sex can give them, or the pleasure they might give to women, and certainly not that either of them are capable of putting it into words of more than one syllable. Whatever Miller was when he wasn’t finagling, drunk, or at the typewriter, he was able to satisfy the unfortunate women he snared in his web, and he was intelligent and literate. None of this is conveyed in this film, although I’m obliged to point out that Miller himself apparently approved of the result, and went out of his way to get a message to Thorsen to that effect. Go figure.

Books are meant to be read, and not spoken aloud, but Betty Botley and Joseph Strick (the latter also the director) make a better attempt at recreating the life of the arch sponger and seducer with Tropic of Cancer than Clichy, even with all the sex taken out, and all the sleaze left intact. A brave supporting cast have nothing to work with at all, and Tropic of Cancer could be one of the most pointless films ever made. A well-cast Rip Torn is at ease in the role, but was more Miller-ish in 1976’s Man Who Fell to Earth, to be discussed further on.

“We are all guilty of crime” said Miller. “The great crime of not living life to the full”. The old bastard died in 1980, after a life of drugs, drink, and debauchery, at the grand old age of 89, putting two fingers up to the moralists, censors and healthy living fanatics to the last.

Following the unwritten rule that all sex in art films must be bleak and depressing and/or end badly, writer Gerard Soeteman and director Paul Verhoeven, working with the source novel by Jan Wolkers, did their best to make Turkish Delight (aka Turks fruit, aka The Sensualist, 1973) as unpleasant as possible (The Sensualist is not the most original title in film distribution, and this one deserves it the least; if this guy’s a sensualist, I’d hate to meet an insensitive ass). We are first given dreary harmonica music over the titles, a gruesome opening scene, and the naked leading man sleeping in a disgusting hovel while having vile fantasies of brutalising and murdering his girlfriend and her new lover. Then he masturbates in front of her picture on the wall. Our hero is Eric Vonk, a psychotic loony and sculptor played by Rutger Hauer in his prime, and we are treated to jaunty music as he picks up girls (often awesomely inappropriately, which they forgive), gets them into bed, and treats them abysmally. A more profoundly vain, scary, and unpleasant man we couldn’t possibly encounter (at one point, he jumps uninvited into a woman’s open-top car), and what is particularly disturbing is there is the unnerving sense prevalent that we are supposed to like and admire this vile idiot and bully. Some sensualist.

We flashback two years, only to find him even more pointlessly hostile and hateful. He picks up the unbelievably beautiful Olga Staples (Monique van de Ven), a kindred free spirit but without the selfishness and venom, but their first day together isn’t exactly the stuff of dreams; he gets his dick caught in his zipper, gifts her a stolen fur, crashes her car, and carries her, bloodied and unconscious, along the motorway until a sympathetic driver finally dares stop for them.

Much to the dismay of her mother (a superbly deranged performance from Tonny Huurdeman), they find each other again, and to cut a long, sorry, and sordid story short, they fuck each other stupid until art film tradition determines that tragedy must strike (for the promiscuous woman, of course).

For all its grim reality (puke, shit, and maggots all put in a full color appearance), Erik is little more than a Hollywood hippie, cinema’s idea at that time of what a young person should be, inexplicably merry, wild, abandoned, thieving, screwing, and generally behaving in a wacky, prancing, dancing manner that the old fuddy-duddys couldn’t possibly understand. See that old granny over there? Spin her round in circles. See the stuffy bank manager? Ruffle his hair, you scamp! Spotted a hat that isn’t yours? Put it on your head, and then someone else’s! Oh, you crazy kid. This is all irritating enough when done in a feelgood film, but this is a feelbad film, and given to Verhoeven and Hauer, it becomes intimidating and terrifying.

Despite Verhoeven’s talent for black humor and observational comedy (Wim van den Brink has some excellent scenes as Olga’s daffy father), the only possible reason to watch this cavalcade of squalor is for the frequent and numerous sex scenes, which are some of the most erotic and energetic ever put on film, and despite being softcore, pretty strong even for 1973 Scandinavia. It’s difficult to conceive of any other time in cinema’s history when such lively, frank and honest fun in bed could have been presented. This is fucking for the sake of fucking, something rarely seen in cinema outside of porn.

All three leads later tried their luck in America. Van de Ven did some mainstream U.S. TV in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, briefly marrying Verhoeven’s cinematographer Jan de Bont, who later directed action films Speed and Twister. She returned to a prolific career in Dutch film and TV. Hauer’s credits, which include Blade Runner and a personal favorite, Blind Fury, are too numerous to list without digressing too far, while Verhoeven is best known for Robocop, Starship Troopers, and Showgirls. Given his history of honest nudity and eroticism for the sake of it, the opportunities missed in his ‘invisible man’ film The Hollow Man are disappointing, to say the least. As for his infamous Showgirls, it may have marked the first and probably last time American audiences have been more embarrassed by bad dialogue and weak acting than nudity.

In Oasis of Fear (aka An Ideal Place to Kill, aka Un posto ideale per uccidere, 1971), Richard (Ray Lovelock) and girlfriend Ingrid (Ornella Muti) are two young kids bumming round Europe. Free of morals, they sell pornographic pictures bought in Denmark to fund their bed and board, and when run out of Italy, they duck and dive from the authorities and take sex pics of Ingrid to move on. Although the film calls them hippies, real hippies were far more scruffy and odious in appearance, albeit as money-minded (they could afford to reject capitalism because they lived off everybody else!); Richard and Ingrid look smart and honest enough to be invited in for food and drink, and that’s exactly what well-off Barbara Slater (Irene Papas) does when our two travellers stop at her comfortable middle-class oasis (initially to fill their car with her siphoned-off fuel). As the film progresses, we realise that this self-indulgent and thoughtless pair aren’t quite as nice as we first thought, and Slater is their potential victim. But is she the victim we first presume, as the youngsters mock and antagonise her?

As ever, Shameless have done their usual careful restoration job on the DVD release, putting back several scenes near the end that greedy distributors cut for time, but which clearly improve the film. In creative terms it could have been trimmed a bit, but in the middle.

Rareflix are an American outfit who deal in, as they say themselves, films everyone else has forgotten. In many cases, there’s a reason they’ve been forgotten, and having been forgotten, the prints have not been cared for. This print isn’t too bad, and the following film is certainly worth preserving as a curiosity. It’s just not worth watching.

Teenage Hitch-Hikers (1975) relates the adventures of the two dumbest bimbo hitch-hikers in the history of the world, Mouse and Bird (Chris Jordan and Sandra Peabody). They wander around in a river waist-deep trying to catch fish, and when one gets caught in their pants, they throw it away in a panic. They do a strip in a diner to get food, and then leave without getting it. The unconvincing and phoney dialogue consists of trite platitudes (“We do unto people before they do unto us!!”) and the world-wise obvious (“I keep telling you--in this economy, boobs and butts are legal tender!”). Unfortunately, the director is a little too economical himself; clothes are frequently being removed, but often without much thought or appreciation of what’s underneath them. Ultimately, the law of averages takes over, and we do see most of what we want to--but at what a price…

If this film wasn’t so unbelievably dumb, it might be fun. In a perverse way, it almost is fun. The two leads are nothing special, but you wouldn’t kick them out of bed. All the supporting cast are present and correct--comedy cop, sleazeball drivers (a lingerie salesman, of course, as seen in Breezy and Butterflies, to name but two), peeping toms, nervous virginal dupes, leering rednecks, treacherous hippies, the pre-requisite predatory wealthy lesbian, and--going one better in the dumbass department--a comedy rapist. Yes, really, a comedy rapist (and for the first of several times in this book, I must point out that if it’s consensual, it’s by definition not rape).

The lazy term “so bad it has to be seen to be believed” is an over-used one in film criticism, but in the case of this bottom-of-the-barrel early ‘70s exploiter, it is entirely true. Despite plenty of the requisite nudity, this watered-down grindhouse disaster is quite painful and embarrassing to watch, a film written and made for idiots, by idiots.

The film is clearly financially embarrassed, a failing that shows itself the most when the girls take a ride with a well-to-do lip-licking lesbian in her chauffeur-driven car, only to pull up at a rather modest shack (the guest cottage perhaps?) and settle for a roll in the garden (with some quite amusing marks on the girls’ bodies as a result!). About a third of the way in they pick up another girl (pretty Nikki Lynn, who has the best body of the three, but exposes it the least) even more naive than they are (“Six tits are better than four!”). Unfortunately, six tits still leaves them several sandwiches short of a picnic, and instead of casing the joint while the girls distract the wicked lesbian, she sits in the house mooning over her absent boyfriend.

Every so often there’s a spark, as if a fractious pilot light is finally going to flame on; the comedy rapist is overpowered and tied up for some bondage and then left stranded; the final freeze-frame, with all three girls gaily giving the finger to the camera; and one good gag: trying to buy a car from the worst used car lot in the world (the owner sleeps in his own rust-bucket), the dealer says “2,000 will drive it away!”, to hear the retort “2,000 will drive us away!”. It all ends with an ineptly filmed hippie orgy sequence. Oh yeah... and the return of the comedy rapist. Ha ha.

Moral Low Ground continued

With credits that come up over huge close-ups of lips, breasts, and genitalia (quite terrifying in the cinema, surely), Blutjunge Verfuhrerinnen--part one (1971), Erwin Dietrich’s rip-off of the Schoolgirl Reports was never going to be subtle. In the classic two-faced style of the early ‘70s pseudo-documentaries, this one opens with a bunch of tabloid reporters plotting a series of scandalous stories supposedly condemning forward teenage seducers, each story linked by the notion that the female takes the initiative. In a series of unimaginatively executed vignettes, a shy artist (if there is such a thing) picks up an over-eager nude study at the beach, but barely has the chance to put brush on canvas before she’s all over him, a surly gas station hooker in need of a customer relations course takes on all comers with nothing but a used dish cloth to wipe herself clean, a bored schoolgirl feigns suicide to seduce her teacher, a lesbian piano teacher is blackmailed by her student, a lollipop-sucking Lolita picks up strangers on the bus for some fun in the woods, a “Frau mit der Vibrator problem” lusts after a grotesque muscleman, and Romeo finds his Juliet in the (un-)dressing room.

Very few of these little episodes have an on-screen resolution, but suddenly stop mid-way and are concluded by the tabloid guy providing the narration. The direction and editing gives the impression that everyone behind the camera was completely sloshed. When everyone’s told their tale, their suspicious editor points out that each activity of the male participants directly relates to the teller of the tale. In other words, either the story actually happened to them, or they were all making ‘em up...

Sleazy and stupid, it’s weird to think that anyone could ever have got off on images this lame. When you find yourself looking at the kitsch paraphernalia on the walls of the sets while the sex is going on, you know the final product leaves a lot to be desired. The girls involved are Rena Bergen, Melitta Tegeler, Yvonne Zoliker, Evelyn Traeger, Margrit Siegel, Kathrin Heberle, Margit Cizek, Dorit Henke, and of course Ingrid Steeger, of I, a Groupie fame, in whose Gold Collection of eight DVDs Blutjunge Verfuhrerinnen and its two sequels, subtitled Sex Und Noch Nicht 16 (aka Sex Interdit, aka The Young Seducers, 1972) and Die Blonde mit dem sussen Po (1973) can be found. Although Ingrid only has a brief scene in this one alongside all the other girls (she’s in the piano teacher skit), she’s undoubtedly the star attraction of the two sequels.

Looking a little more organised, most of the same cast return for no. 2, which is also a little less disjointed. They’re joined by Christa Free and Yvonne Schneider, with Cizek and Heberle absent. An improvement in most areas, this one ditches the tabloid hypocrisy and features an author dictating a story to a typist he’s just hired. Before long, she’s laughing and joking with him, and even critiquing and contributing to the text, so we don’t need to call in Columbo to figure out the final scene. In the meantime, we get vignettes set on the ski slopes, in a bowling alley, and on a school outing. There’s also two sequences built around the movies, and some inter-racial sex (no big deal today, but controversial back then), along with an early rehearsal for Dietrich’s truck driver fantasy with Lina Romay from Rolls Royce Baby a few years later.

Once again, the star turn is Ingrid’s, who--in a permed wig--is supposed to be Claire, an English maid (one of those rare occasions where dubbing actually helps). First she spontaneously jigs around the apartment in an impromptu strip tease and naked pogo dance (purely for her own satisfaction, out of boredom), swiftly dressing again when the lord and lady of the manor return, managing to plant her knickers behind the sofa at the same time. Then she seduces the old boy, brings the wife out of a faint when discovered with a bit of lesbianism, and is then pounced on by the young man of the house. It’s all in a day's work for Ingrid.

Dietrich was restricted by what he could show at this time, but he could still have done more than he did. Although his films deliver the goods (and he’s one of the few porn directors to understand the merits of showing the girls actually disrobe), they deliver the bare minimum, if you’ll pardon the pun. Dietrich was smart enough not to pointlessly cheat his audience, as so many British directors did at this time, but he put little effort into the end result. He was less interested in making good sex films as simply exploiting the market.

This he did, with dozens of movies during the ‘60s, ‘70s, and ‘80s. He produced over 70 films, the vast majority of which were 1970s sex films featuring the same stable of girls and often told in brief vignette style; one often feels the framing device was a pure afterthought, written post-production of the rest of it to string a bunch of disparate scenes together. Characters rarely appeared together outside their specific sequences, as the Schoolgirl Report girls did, and it’s quite likely he put them together from an inventory. He was hardly lazy, though. He wrote just over fifty of the films he produced, and directed just over forty himself, as well as taking on projects helmed by such well-known hacks as Antonio Margheriti and Jess Franco.

Dietrich used real everyday women in his films, with variable results, but this was preferable to a parade of Barbie doll clones, and it’s actually quite refreshing to see girls with, say, smaller breasts, or who were a bit on the full-figured side. Unlike so many, Dietrich always remembered to let the girls undress onscreen, even if many of their unwitting men frequently turned around, or walked back in the room, to be surprised to find them ready and willing in their birthday suits, a favored Dietrich cliche.

Ingrid Steeger was his most popular attraction, the archetypal girl-next-door, a sprightly nymph who starred in about two dozen soft porn films between 1970 and 1975 but, like many European actresses, managed to enjoy a prolific TV career as well. She was the German equivalent of the Sock-it-to-me girl in their version of America’s now-dated but then ground-breaking Laugh-In TV series, a revolutionary spot-gag/catch-phrase show much copied since, and had more trouble ditching that image than the soft-core one.

Steeger is the linking device and the focus of the third in the series, which opens with her fleeing the restraints of her convent education by belting down the road and hitching a lift from a jovial businessman, who she entertains with yarns based round the sexual exploits of other girls she’s known. There are also lots of name-dropping arts and literature references for some reason, a couple of which fox the subtitler. With Steeger going by the delightfully silly name of Babsi, she regales him with the antics of grape-picker Linda (Karin Hofmann), who for an inexplicable motive only she understands has been flashing a gormless virgin who’s clearly two sandwiches short of a picnic, music student Brunhilde (Claudia Fielers), who may not know her Wagner from her Schubert, but certainly knows her way around a lusty older man, the fulsome Viola (Chitta Coray), who pursues an initially reluctant woodcutter, two “twin” sisters who are clearly about fifteen years apart in age (Margrit Siegel and Jenny Jones), and Nadja (Nadine De Rangot), a motocross groupie, would you believe, but of course it’s Babsi who steals the show.

She has two tales to tell her eager audience on his way to a hotel bedroom for his own gratefully received ride. First, she’s an artist’s model posing for a nude life drawing class, and we see three fantasies of the all-male students. For one guy, she’s a sultry prostitute, for another she’s a teleporting ghostie who repeats her little disco jig from no. 2. Later, she’s the girlfriend of a flustered married man who panics when he sees a chubby forest ranger jotting down what he thinks is his car registration. Babsi obediently gives the bearded big boy the time of his life in return for the paper, only to find that he was simply counting trees in a sort of open-air stocktaking exercise. What is particularly amusing about this little frolic is that she has absolutely no qualms about giving this chump a seeing-to, and afterwards they both have a good laugh about it when she realises she’s been had in both senses of the word. Also interesting is that the portly middle-aged driver she's hitching a ride from isn’t the usual cliched soon-to-be-disappointed lech who has to get his comeuppance (see Breezy, Butterflies, Werewolf Woman, etc. etc. ad infinitum), but simply lucky. Dietrich obviously understood his audience

.

Very much a time capsule of the 1970s, Germany’s Naughty Nymphs (1972) does not actually exist, and behind this silly title is an unpronounceable German one that sounds like water going down a plug-hole (Die liebestollen Apothekerstöchter). The star of the show is a very young Sybil Danning, before she became the big-titted hard-faced dominatrix of American sleaze, and she’s accompanied by two other familiar faces from German soft-core, the beautiful Eva Garden and Alena Penz, two of the loveliest sex film starlets of the ‘70s.

This is a raunchy and frivolous fantasy that marries very healthy attitudes toward sex and life with some rather alarming behavior to make modern audiences gasp. Ironically, and pre-dating the similarly themed Confessions of a Driving Instructor and Come Play With Me, most of these scenes relate to the Viagra-style impotency cure sub-plot, which at the time was pure fantasy, but provokes the men into not just arousal but a maniacal frenzy that results in what can only be termed sexual assault--which, of course, the girls on the receiving end take in their stride, more with annoyance than distress. Somehow, our culture moved away quite rightly from such a cavalier attitude towards harassment, but unfortunately to a society where the slightest glance or remark is perceived as a gross affront to an individual’s personal space and all flirting must be performed on the internet for fear of being re-trained and lectured by the forces of repression. Happy days.

Local pharmacist Willibald (Paul Lowinger), who also finds time to take in lodgers and head up the local morals committee campaigning against indecency, is blissfully unaware that his two daughters Maria (Garden) and Christa (Penz) lead the most colorful sex lives in the village. While he dotes on his deceitful daughters and hosts pompous sparsely attended morals meetings in empty village halls, poor Elizabeth (Danning), a virginal hard worker with an obnoxious, bitter, and prudish attitude towards men, is considered to be the black sheep of the family because she keeps losing her jobs for refusing the attentions of the office creeps (it’s the ‘70s, remember--this could happen).

When Elizabeth comes home in disgrace, unemployed yet again, the girls realise that she’ll soon expose their merry bedroom antics to the father who favors them, and decide it’s time to rethink her priorities by unleashing the local nerd on her to somehow introduce her to the joys of sex. When this fails, they latch onto a local doctor who has taken a fancy to her surly demeanor. Obliged to work at his private health and rejuvenation clinic, where the nurses (by their own admission) are compelled to wear uniforms that make them look like strippers (never trust a doctor without glass in his spectacles), she and her colleagues find themselves perpetually sexually harassed as a matter of course. Danning’s hostility towards men and sex in general never precludes her displaying her body as provocatively and routinely as her promiscuous sisters. All three have a casual attitude to nudity that makes Eromaxx look Amish.

Added to the mix are Christiane Maybach as the extremely annoying Aunt Tante, who has a sub-plot of her own as her journey to stay with Willie is perpetually interrupted by her overpowering desire for al fresco sex en route, and Britt Corvin (of Baby Love) as mini-skirted maid Mirli, whose charms expose the hypocrisy of Willie’s anti-sex stance even more than his required detailed studying of porn mags to enflame his, uh, crusade. Also on hand for no reason whatsoever is Schoolgirl Report stalwart Rinaldo Talamonti as a lustful Italian unable to achieve erection until dosed with the magic pills that drive the second half of the film’s plot and cause comedy mayhem at the clinic when inadvertently substituted for sleeping pills (chuckle).

Over in Japan, where mainstream movies, art films, porn and Godzilla all emerged from the same few factories, the film industry was trying to cater for their audience in the face of a sudden boom in the emerging television industry dating back to the 1964 Olympics in Tokyo, which sold so many television sets it wiped out cinema attendance overnight.

While Meiko Kaji reigned at Japan’s Nikkatsu Studios, rival Toei studios (home of Gamera, the jet-propelled giant turtle) had two teenage sexploitation stars on their books who divided the spoils between them--Reiko Ike and Miki Sugimoto.

Inspired by Nikkatsu’s Stray Cat series with Meiko Kaji, Toei pitched in with the spectacular Girl Boss Blues: Queen Bee’s Counter Attack (aka Queen Bee Strikes Again) in 1971, directed by the prolific Norifumi Suzuki, and starring Reiko Ike. In the second, Queen Bee’s Challenge, she was joined by Miki Sugimoto, and while making individual appearances as well, the two were frequently cast together. 1972’s Girl Boss Delinquent and 1973’s Girl Boss Revenge featured both, as did Terrifying Girls’ High School: Lynch Law Classroom, a sequel to Terrifying Girls’ High School: Delinquent Convulsion Group (!) (both 1973). Literally making one film after another, they also teamed up for Criminal Woman: Killing Melody (also 1973).

From here, Miki Sugimoto would go on to Zero Woman: Red Handcuffs, and Reiko Ike to Sex and Fury, a third in the Terrifying Girls’ High School series, and Bohachi Bushido. Ike also appeared in the New Battles Without Honor or Humanity Yakuza series.

These films have been creeping out onto DVD since the early ‘90s, slowly but surely, mostly thanks to the sudden interest in all things Asian provoked by Jackie Chan, John Woo, Chow Yun-Fat, and Quentin Tarantino, but sadly the bubble appears to have burst, with the flood having diminished to a slow trickle, and several likely gems still unreleased. This is a huge shame, as some of the above sound great. Terrifying Girls’ High School: Lynch Law Classroom (aka Kyofu joshikoko: boko rinchi kyoshitsu, 1973), despite the absence of its predecessor, made it out of the superlative Panik House company before they closed, and is typical of the genre.

In this, with the full compliance of the local authorities, the school administration tolerates and encourages a brutal girl gang, lead by Sugimoto, to maintain discipline over the lesser delinquents at the sarcastically named School of Hope for Girls. “Let the girls neither live nor die!” is the unofficial school motto, but little does the disciplinary committee know what’s coming their way...! Reiko Ike is about to show up to investigate the gruesome demise of her deputy, whose horrible torture and murder opens the film.

It’s a total cartoon, of course, delivering tits and sadism alongside heavy-handed satire with a teens-eye view of the world, loading the dice against traditional values by showing everybody in authority to be comically corrupt. The school’s head is a twee, platitude-spouting simpleton who gets caught in a sex sting set up by the girls that ends with him admitting he’s got a thing for young girls in school uniform over the inevitable school loudspeaker system, while the vice-principal is a scheming usurper planning a coup, marrying a soppy teacher for her family’s money but secretly carrying on with the head girl! Into this mix is thrown a sly reporter, who allies himself with the girls to expose the corruption for purely monetary reward. It’s a simplistic, but fairly accurate view of the world!

As for the girls, imagine the American high school juvenile delinquent films of the 1950s thrown into a blender with Britain’s unfortunate St. Trinians series, all stirred in with the Asian gangster films of the ‘80s and ‘90s but set in the ‘70s, and you’re about there. It’s great fun and you won't be bored, but ultimately, like the girls, it’s all talk, promising more than it delivers.

One of the very few words that wouldn’t have found its way into one of Henry Miller’s novels is surely the admonishment “naughty”.

There’s something very sad and infantile about the word naughty when applied to the sexual behavior of adults, and indeed when applied to this sad and seedy little documentary from the early ‘70s titled—yes, you knew what was coming--Naughty (1971). Although the title suggests juvenile cheeky light-heartedness, it’s actually a very boring and earnest collection of staged Victoriana and then-contemporary news footage concerning prudishness, and the huge amount of effort puritanical types put into preventing the rest of us from having our fun. Today, of course, the 1970s film footage looks as dated and alien as the Victorian playacting, with lots of tense-looking men wearing sheepskin coats, ugly drab t-shirts, and droopy moustaches.

Naughty purports to be an impartial look at sex and censorship, but it is, of course, quite explicit about the hypocrisy of both the distant past and the now-distant 1970s. Extraordinary though, to realise it came after the sexual revolution of the 1960s, which--as ‘70s cinema so clearly demonstrated—didn’t happen for everyone, and on the strength of this film footage, didn’t look like much fun anyway. For all the changes wrought in the ‘60s, there was clearly still a way to go.

Film doesn’t do the 1970s any favors (the ‘60s always look sunny and happy, while the ‘70s always look funereal). It was actually quite a fun time to be young, enjoying the spoils of the battles having been fought in the ‘60s and the new puritanism of the 1980s still quite a way away. Put Britain of the 1970s on film, however, and it always looks dreadful--dark and violent, grim, grey, and oppressive. At times, it was, but the bright and colorful side of the era has never been caught, or even successfully replicated (for some reason, 1970s Italy, France, and Hong Kong always look great!).

Although the popular culture hasn’t, for the most part, stood the test of time (having been tightly controlled and defined by mainstream broadcasters and press), there was a genuine sense of the envelope being pushed. However, there’s some very depressing footage of the Wet Dream Festival in Amsterdam, with even the advocates of sexual freedom managing to make sex look drab and dirty and undesirable in ugly magazines with depressingly immature titles like Suck and Screw. Al Goldstein, editor of the latter, is quite amusing, but footage of the organiser of the festival raging that he won’t discuss sex if people keep calling it pornography, because for him, pornography is warfare and starving children, is just embarrassing. He means obscenity, of course; pornography is Latin for a visual depiction of sex workers on the job, which is indeed, exactly what porn is. Nobody watching this will feel much optimism for the forces of freedom and reason, or any sense of having missed out on something

Naughty, although a cynical slice of exploitation from Stanley Long and Suzanne Mercer, hardly the most progressive thinkers of the sexual revolution (they gave us Groupie Girl, On the Game, and Adventures of a Taxi Driver), has its heart in the right place, but viewed in the 21st century, where home entertainment and the internet has made its efforts largely redundant (even though little has changed in the minds of many), just seems like a plaintive cry for help from the bottom of a very dark, deep well. It’s like viewing the interiors of the Titanic on an underwater camera and trying to empathise with torments that took place so very long ago. We feel for them, as we feel for the witches on the ducking stools and the soldiers in the trenches of the first World War, but it’s all been over for such a long time.

It’s tough to acknowledge that the ordeals these tiresome and tedious bores promoting sexual liberation went through in the courts did in many ways clear the way for many of the films in this book, and enabled us to experience the freedoms we have right now. We owe these pompous self-righteous asses a massive debt of thanks for the world we live in today.

Christina Lindberg, professional victim

Exposed (1971), Maid in Sweden (1971), Anita--Swedish Nymphet (1973), Wide Open (1974)

With her parents away on holiday, teenager Lena Svensson is torn between two bad choice boyfriends--jealous, dorky Jan and exciting but violent Helge, for whom she has posed for some provocative pictures, and who is now using them as leverage.

Exposed (aka Exponerad, 1971) is the first and best-looking (at least on the Synapse DVD) of Swedish sex siren Christina Lindberg’s string of professional victim movies that appeared in the early 1970s and went on to include Maid in Sweden, Thriller, Journey to Japan, Anita, and Wide Open. Christina Lindberg was the queen of sordid sadness, a curvy doormat with a face like a mouse that’s just been sent to take luncheon orders from the cats. In all six of these she plays a downtrodden dopey dimwit who is mostly the architect of her own misery, a modern day Justine illustrated in this instance by frequent self-indulgent fantasies in which she imagines herself to be in far worse dilemmas than she actually is. Thus, a tiff with boyfriend Jan when she tells him about the pictures, and during which he impulsively and shamefully slaps her round the face is transformed into a thorough beating, and when she dangerously hitches a lift out of town with a perfectly friendly, if foolish, driver, she imagines he has assaulted her.

When she hitches a second lift from a couple of jovial swingers, they all end up at Jan's parents’ summer cottage, where again she fantasises, this time that the husband makes a pass at her and the wife pursues her in a murderous rage. When Jan inevitably turns up, they're all happy and naked and Jan, fuming, is neither. After trying to leave with the couple, and imagining that Jan’s pursuit of them ends in a tragic fireball, she less dramatically simply says her goodbyes and travels back to town with him. Things appear to have been patched up, until Helge and his photos make a reappearance.

Helge, if Lena's memories are to be believed, apparently holds the dullest sex orgies in the history of debauchery, although Lindberg’s usual comatose performance as Lena, coming to life only when sex is on the cards, is perfect casting; strangely dull and dowdy when dressed, Lindberg mysteriously transforms into a total beauty when naked, and her freeze-frame poses during the photography sessions are overpoweringly seductive. When this girl looks directly into the camera, the lens melts. Then she puts her clothes and her despondent woodland animal face on again and it all evaporates. No wonder she’s driving the guys to despair. “I feel too little and know too much” says Lindberg’s character at one point. She played that role to perfection in perpetuity throughout the 1970s.

Fortunately for Lindberg, Exposed came out before Maid in Sweden (also 1971), which was the first film she made, but not the first released. In Maid in Sweden, she’s country girl Inga, going through the usual teenage trials and tribulations with her generation gap parents, and desperate to escape to the big city for the summer. She goes to stay with big sister Greta (Monika Ekman), but her parents are unaware that Greta is shacked up with a scummy, selfish drugs-taking boyfriend (Krister Ekman--then married to Monika), who is seriously irritated that his partner’s baby daughter is going to be in the way for a while.

It’s a very dull film about very dull people in a very dull apartment in a very dull place. Lindberg’s body was never dull of course (she could bend her body into curvy masterpieces of living art), but it tended to be overwhelmed by the dreary and/or unpleasant nature of the films she made and her cue-card acting (she was by far the least talented actress of the ‘70s sex films). Most of the dialogue is repetitive, redundant, and very likely improvised, and the names Inga and Greta have been brazenly lifted from Joe Sarno’s Inga films. To add insult to injury, most of the prints of her major titles are of a very low standard of picture quality, making the content and storylines even more depressing. There’s very little plot to speak of, with Lindberg playing gooseberry and looking thoroughly miserable whatever she’s doing, even shopping or ice-skating; Ekman giggles a lot, but unfortunately, it’s with the creepy druggie. They set Inga up with a pop artist friend (Leif Naeslund), who promptly forces himself on her, in a violent act of undeniable rape which the film not only fails to censure him for, but has Lindberg end up enjoying, and staying with him awhile; the next day, perky pop music plays and Inga’s all smiles and cuddles, as if statutory rape was the most natural way in the world to start a romance, and exactly what she needed to bring her out of her shell.

Next up to sexually assault her is Greta’s boyfriend Castel, discovered in the bath with her by Greta... and after initially fighting him off, enjoying it again. Happily, Greta beats the crap out of him... although mostly for being unfaithful. And if you think this Lindberg film is questionable, wait ’til you see Thriller (discussed later). Even her first Schoolgirl Report concerned incest. Forever cast in strange or nasty films, Lindberg, for all her pristine physical beauty, really was the dirty girl of 1970s sex cinema. A huge waste.

From 1969 to 1977, Torgny Wickman was one of the kings of Swedish sleaze, making everything and anything from spurious sex education films to a 3-D production. Smack in the middle of this catalog of weirdness came the shabby, downbeat Anita--Swedish Nymphet (aka Anita--ur en tonarsflickas dagbok, 1973). Here, Lindberg plays Anna, aka Anita, who has a compulsion to sleep with the most inappropriate people she can find--lowlifes, old men, young boys, lesbians, anybody and everybody, until she eventually falls into the eager arms of Erik, a young social worker type with a passion for both her and psychology. Erik is played by a skinny and impossibly young Stellan Skarsgaard, today best known for his role as a middle-aged scientist in Thor and Avengers Assemble, but in those days a regular face in Swedish sex films.

The whole point of this film is plainly to show off Lindberg, but most of this footage is deadly dull and uninspired and there’s far more film of her wandering around Stockholm in flares and a fluffy jacket, which is also deadly dull, but marginally more interesting, if only as archive footage demonstrating why Sweden is famous for suicide. This is real slit-yer-wrists stuff, not helped by the poor quality of the print. The film is also hindered by the early ‘70s requirement for the makers to fake hand-wringing social concern, which overpowers the end result as Wickman lays it on with a trowel.

While Gloria Guida capered about in the Italian sunshine, Lina Romay scampered around Spain, and hordes of imitation Emmanuelles swanned around scenic Hong Kong, poor, pouty Christina was stuck with grim, grey Swedish landscapes of mud, lakes, and concrete, forever falling in with lowlifes and scumballs and having a pretty dispiriting time, and this was another typical example. Even when she took her Journey to Japan she ended up in the company of nasty old men; in Thriller, she’s a heroin addict forced into the white slave trade. Anita is a joyless and loveless film, seen through the eyes of the petty and small-minded people who persecute her. Far from erotic, there’s very little nudity, and the sex is sad and short. There’s also a very strange scene when a bunch of local worthies are sitting around in her parents’ house for no immediately discernible reason, and she starts to do a slow strip in front of them, with neither mother or father stepping in to stop her, but rather just standing there looking faintly irritated. Filmed in that slow, ponderous, Swedish way that made Lindberg’s infamous Thriller thrill-less, Anita is just a little too accurately evocative of its subject. No-one can accuse Wickman of sensationalism.

Wide Open (aka Sangkamrater, 1974), another typically Swedish snooze-fest, was the second and last film written, directed, and produced by Gustav Wiklund before he returned to his more prolific and successful career as an actor, and the final major movie of Lindberg, who was about to pursue further avenues with her husband and glamour photographer Bo Sehlberg. Wiklund had previously made Exposed in 1971, which had made a small fortune for the distributors to whom he sold it for a pittance. Three years later, and despite his stated distaste for “porn films”, his only shot at a second film was to seek out his now hugely successful protege for a follow-up. Fortunately for him, Lindberg had never bothered about whether she had a leading role or a bit part, but she was, by now, quite expensive, and Wiklund was lucky to get her for two days, most of which he was smart enough to get her to spend naked or at least semi-clad (she has a very sexy love scene in a stable and allows us one final filmed glamour shoot of the sort that melted the lens on Exposed). For someone who had expressed a dislike for nude scenes, Wiklund did them very well.

Lindberg (as Eva) turns up twenty minutes into this story which is mostly about two sisters and the rather shaky menage-a-trois that develops when sister Beryl (Gunilla Larsson in her debut role) turns up at the apartment of Marianne (Swedish Wildcat’s Solveig Andersson, a sex film regular also in Thriller) and her blatantly unfaithful boyfriend Paul (Kent-Arne Dahlgren), a hirsute multi-tattooed taxi-driver with not much interest in either of them. There is no story to speak of, just a backdrop of loosely connected random events which may (Beryl getting locked out of the apartment, Beryl taking a questionable event job) or may not (the parents of the girls drop in and meet Paul’s drunken dad, a neighbor who obsesses over the cats) lead to something later on. Plot development is not Wiklund’s strong point, but somewhere along the line, drugs and gangsters get involved. As ever, there are only the bodies to look at, as the clothes and locations are as drab and dull as in any Swedish film, unlike, for example, 1970s films from France, Italy, or Japan, where they don’t photograph dingy hovels and depressing dumps unless the script specifically calls for one. The film is also not helped by the poor casting choices for the dubbing, despite it being supervised by Wiklund himself; bizarrely, no print in the original language can be located--my god, it’s a 1974 film, not 1934.

In terms of characters, it’s the usual parade of mostly creepy, unpleasant people, but at least the four leads are interesting, and even if the scenes are as slow and ponderous as ever, they are frequently played in various states of undress. Clothes fall off the leading ladies repeatedly from the first scene to the last; if they didn’t, there would be nothing on the screen. Wiklund’s third and final directing credit, twelve years later, would be a television mini-series. Shame he didn’t like sex films, because it’s the only time his work came to life.

Women in Prison (1): Roger Corman and Pam Grier

The Big Doll House (1971), The Big Bird Cage (1972), Black Mama, White Mama (1973), The Arena (1974), Caged Heat (1974)

Innovator and king of the B-movies Roger Corman, as everyone into alternatives to mainstream tedium in film and TV knows, is a conundrum of contradictions in the twin arenas of art and commerce. Crucially, in a production career spanning six decades, he has always understood that commerce comes first, and art later; that way, art occasionally gets a look-in. Consequently, he’s a class act on a cautious budget who makes genuinely entertaining movies that shamelessly exploit the fads of the moment, whether juvenile delinquency, sci-fi, gangsters, vigilantes, t&a, or killer sharks. However, Corman always seems to be either seriously under-rated or seriously over-rated.

Cultural commentators never seem to get it right. They either put him down, and overlook the fact that for years he’s given numerous hopefuls their first step into the business, while providing a welcome alternative to mainstream pap which we’d all be worse off for not having, or they talk him up, and overlook the fact that he's a smooth-talking, corner-cutting profiteer and that much of his output is nowhere near as good as it should, and could have been. Corman contradicts neither camp. A Hollywood old-timer, he knows the old maxim that any publicity is good publicity.

As the 1970s began, Corman was the first to bring American cinema up to speed with the lurid content of the pulps and the paperbacks.

Tipped off by former teen star and now actor/producer of Z-movies John Ashley as to the cheapness and accessibility of the Philippines, a perfect all-purpose location, Corman assigned former second unit director Jack Hill to direct The Big Doll House, a Franco-esque jungle-based women-in-prison movie with the characterisation and humor that Franco’s rubbish always lacked.

It was also to be the break-out movie for feisty New World receptionist Pam Grier, who went on to make several further films with Hill and others, becoming the poster girl for 1970s “blaxploitation” movies.

With its chorus of 99 years in Grier's opening theme song, 1971’s The Big Doll House swiftly and probably deliberately provokes recollections of Jess Franco’s tedious 99 Women, generally recognised as the beginning of the WIP cycle that boomed in the 1970s and continued into the 1980s as self-referential parody. However, not only did Jack Hill and--perhaps inevitably--Roger Corman bring the jungle prison movie home to America, they also made a far better film (by B-movie standards) than the Euro-sleazemeisters.

After an iconic introductory glipse of Grier, we are introduced to Judith Brown (Women in Cages, Slaughter’s Big Rip-Off), a Playboy type, as Marnie Collier, new fish in the prison pond. She murdered her philandering (with the houseboy) wealthy husband, and doesn’t much care. She shares a crowded cell with pretty blonde Allcott (Roberta Collins of Caged Heat and Death Race 2000), dark-haired lovesick revolutionary Bodine (Pat Woodell of The Woman Hunt and The Roommates), and difficult and unapproachable black lesbian Grear (Pam Grier). Also crammed in are easy-going Ferina (Gina Stuart) and healthy-looking junkie Harrad (Brooke Mills of The Student Teachers). Collier gets the bunk of the previous occupant, whose slashed-up body was just carried past her.

In prison movies, we wait, sighing and smirking, for the cat fight, the food fight, the torture scene, the terrible punishment scene, the shower scene (filmed from the elbows up, in this case), and the hosing down. All dutifully turn up here. In prison movies, the head jailer is always a total bitch, and the warden either complicit or a well-meaning dupe. Step forward Christiane Schmidtmer, a German glamourpuss model, as the warden, and Kathryn Loder (who appears with Grier again in Hill’s Foxy Brown) as the comic-book villainess and all-round vicious sadist. The social barometer of what was acceptable in films climbed so slowly but surely in the first four years of the 1970s that if you watch enough of these films in chronological sequence you can actually see the mood of the times changing as rapidly and as mercilessly as a thermometer measuring the heating in a Florida retirement home; so many envelopes were being pushed that the landscape of cinema looked like a bunch of schoolboys had been opening packs of trading cards. By 1973, what looked daring in 1971 now looked tame. “Where will it all end?” bleated the hand-wringers in 1976. Well, as we now know, it ended with Star Wars taking cinema back to kindergarten and action heroes being turned into eunuchs by the need for a mall-friendly ratings certificate.

Comic relief in The Big Doll House is supplied by local sleazeball fixer Harry (genre veteran Sid Haig) and his newbie doofus assistant Fred (Jerry Franks). Haig, forever cast in TV bit parts as hoods and gunsels (so much so that he actually took a sabbattical in the 1990s out of pure boredom), relished any opportunity to stretch and particularly to do comedy, and these two creepy pigs revel in their freedom and proximity to the girls. Harry is introducing new boy Fred to the power and the perks of their routine, but what he’s really doing, in the time-honored tradition of comic relief, is filling up time. None of the girls, including Grier at this point, can act, and so it’s standard B-movie practice to drop in at least one real actor into the mix who can raise the game of the whole show (Collins shows traces of acting ability, but never gets a handle on her character). Harry exchanges treats for touch-ups, and this leads to some of the best scenes, as Grier offers hand-jobs through the bars and Fred peers through the conveniently frosted glass of the shower room at Collins (an early exploiter, Big Doll House is quite coy by later standards). The film drags a little during a lengthy and tedious torture and interrogation sequence, but the girls finally escape, and the final break-out and shoot-‘em-up is excellent.

The Big Doll House was second-unit director Jack Hill’s first film, and was also his introduction to Grier, whose career was launched with her full-on performance as the take-no-shit toughie. She took a larger role in Hill’s The Big Bird Cage the following year, having filmed Big Doll House virtually back-to-back with another director’s Corman WIP film Women in Cages, again with Brown and Collins, and played a minor role in blaxploitation thriller Cool Breeze. Grier was not careful or choosy with the roles she accepted, but got lucky when Hill left New World to make so-called blaxsploitation for Corman’s former partners and now rival studio American International; AIP teamed Hill and Grier for two of her most successful films, Coffy and the rehashed sequel, Foxy Brown. Grier had learned to act since The Big Doll House, or at least let her personality loose on the roles she was given. Uninhibited and unrestrained, she was now essentially the undisputed queen of the black movies; it wasn’t blaxsploitation, it seemed, if Pam Grier wasn’t in the cast.

Meanwhile, with a three million return on a 150,000 dollar investment, and an additional four million in overseas sales, Corman wasn’t slow in setting Hill to work on more of the same, going one better than all the other prison movies with the extraordinary The Big Bird Cage in 1972.

A follow-up, rather than a sequel, to the successful Big Doll House, this was another New World/Jack Hill sleaze-fest in the same vein, only bigger and better in scope. Pam Grier and Sid Haig are back, this time as sexually charged would-be revolutionaries Blossom and Django, involved in a rather tempestuous relationship in the hills of the usual unspecified South American trouble spot, and the sultry Anitra Ford (the ice queen of Invasion of the Bee Girls) is brash trash Terry Collier, who the authorities are only too pleased to see taken as a hostage, as her liason with the country’s top politicians has started to get a bit out of hand politically. When an assault by Grier and Haig’s banana republic Bonnie and Clyde on a wealthy night-club for funds goes awry, Terry finds herself branded an accomplice and locked up in an isolated penitentiary to do hard labor, and Django, initially left behind and abandoned with her, escapes to face the wrath of the suspicious and jealous Blossom a few days later. This gives Hill the chance to indulge in a little lethal horseplay, Blossom armed with a machete, Django defending himself with a dead plucked chicken. It all ends in a mud-bath, rather than a blood bath, after which their rickety shack starts a rockin’, and the other revolutionaries are a little jealous themselves. Deciding that the revolution needs a few more women--not feminists, but bed-fodder--an assault on the penitentiary seems in order.

Terry’s fellow convicts are cartoons--a sex-starved cutie (Candice Roman), a smart-mouth who thinks she's in charge (Teda Bracci), the fragile flower (Marissa Delgado), a towering dyke (Karen McKevic), and a mouthy black (Carol Speed). The vile Warden Zappa (Andy Centenera) hires only homosexual guards in order to ensure there's no monkey business with the girls; Victor Diaz (the pimp in Black Mama, White Mama) is hilarious as a camp guard in both senses of the word.

More eventful and less cliched than its predecessor, the film initially slips back and forth between two storylines--the activities of Blossom and Django, and events in the penitentiary, including Ford’s escape attempt--before converging in the second half when Blossom is incarcerated and Django goes gay to get a job as the inside man.

The Bird Cage itself is an enormous wooden construction that turns the cane the girls must gather into sugar, and is the warden’s prize and joy; naturally, it is the center of attention and dominates the poster and advertising. One of the highlights is the constant aggravation going on between McKevic’s giant comic-book lesbian and Speed’s taunting tease. At one point, chained to her bed, McKevic drags half the room’s fittings after her in an attempt to grab the panicking pixie. Later, McKevic smothers her own naked body in chicken fat so that neither the guards or her fellow prisoners can prevent her from finally catching her nemesis and giving her a kicking; after a wild chase sequence slippin’ and slidin’, she successfully gives her provocateur a pounding. When the Bird Cage malfunctions, Speed is sent to see what is jamming the mechanism. There is a terrible fatal accident, and it is, of course, McKevic who mourns the most ferociously, gunned down by the guards after trying to kill the callous, uncaring warden, more concerned for his Bird Cage than the numerous prisoners who die on it. Both films save the best for last, racking up the tension for exciting scenes of rebellion and escape, the unpleasant taunting Rocco tied down and sexually assaulted by the sex-starved prisoners in the most bizarre WIP revenge scene ever (and that’s saying something).

Looking at the ludicrous and fanciful posters for Corman’s films, it is impossible to deny that the sweat mags had finally been filmed in all their ghastly glory, missing only the hunky hero from the list of pulp mag ingredients. Ironically, Corman backed out of financing one of the most famous in the genre, Jonathan Demme’s enjoyable template Caged Heat, announcing that the prison movie fad was over, and choosing only to distribute it. In fact, it was only just beginning, one of the few times Corman’s timing was off. There were some more classics of the genre to come, both from America and overseas, but Corman had already made two of the best.

In the meantime, Grier moved on to the underrated Black Mama, White Mama (1973). This one starts like they all do, but then takes a sharp turn--left. Pam Grier, a black prostitute who’s ripped off her drug dealer pimp, and Margaret Markov, a spoiled little rich girl turned idealistic left wing revolutionary, are among the usual gaggle of girls being transported to a comic book WIP film jungle island penitentiary. So far, so typical, with all the usual stereotypes in attendance--including lesbian sadist jailer (Lynn Borden, the one-night stand in Breezy). But behind this dreadful title is a minor gem, an above-average B-movie that never takes a wrong turn, with even the most minor characters being thoughtfully realised, and the most trivial incidents being freshly drawn. Generally, WIP films fall to pieces when the director moves outside the confines of the grey walls; here, the prison is simply a springboard for a much more original and interesting girls-on-the-run yarn that never once drags.

Grier’s Lee Daniels is rescued from the attentions of the head jailer by the warden, but it turns out that she’s actually just protecting her own sapphic interests. Markov’s Karen Brent berates her for not exploiting her privileged situation--an interesting position for an idealistic leftist, but not too surprising. For the first twenty minutes it’s paint-by-numbers--the shower scene with the voyeuristic lesbian jailer, the attempted and rebuffed seduction, the hard labour scene, the food fight scene, the cruel punishment scene--but then comes the twist. Chained together as part of their punishment, the girls are being taken for questioning when Markov’s revolutionary buddies blow the supporting cast away, and the girls are on the run--still manacled together. And thereby hangs the plot; Brent needs to join her colleagues and seal a deal to overthrow the island’s authorities, while Daniels wants to get to her hidden stash of cash and follow her getaway plan. Daniels’ slobbish, spiteful pimp (the reliably slimy Victor Diaz) and his goons are pursuing her, and Brent’s terrorist buddies are trying to rescue her. A police chief, the pragmatic Captain Cruz, pressured by the usual two-faced politician, enlists the unofficial aid of sleazy local fixer Ruben Rojos (good ol’ Sid Haig), to bring them both in--dead or alive, he doesn’t care. A graduate of the school of very hard knocks, Daniels can’t afford Brent’s idealistic platitudes and unrealistic fantasies, while Brent can’t understand why, as a black woman, Daniels isn’t the fantasy cliche she expects her to be, fighting the revolution alongside her.

Grier has always been seriously underrated as an actress, and gives a fantastic performance here; catch the multitude of glances thrown at the jailer as she walks up the steps to incarceration, or the satisfied smirk when the jailer is prevented from brutalising her by the warden. Grier may only have half-a-dozen expressions, but many male performers (Robert Mitchum, Clint Eastwood, Bruce Willis) have found stardom with half that number, and Grier plays her usual role here to perfection. When she and tall blonde Markov, who holds up her half of the partnership equally well, are having their first of many confrontations on the run, she’s totally into it, completely believable in her role. Given the once-through-the-typewriter banality of the dialogue, this is fortunate.

Disguised as nuns, the girls disappear into the island foliage, and are quite vicious in their attempts to stay one step ahead of their multitude of pursuers, whether the unfortunate in the way deserves it or not. Everywhere they go, there is mayhem--bullets, explosions, death and disruption. The ending, which is not as nihilistic as some in the ‘70s, is nevertheless a surprise, subverting expectations of those who have seen a fair few of these sort of films.

Directing is Eddie Romero, with a production assist from John Ashley, former beach movie boy and future producer of The A-Team for Stephen Cannell. During the end of the ‘60s and most of the ‘70s, Ashley was active in the Philippines both as an actor and a producer of ultra-cheap action and horror schlock, and worked on this little gem for American International, which in comparison slightly raised the bar. This virtually returned him to where he had been in the 1950s, when he had been acting in AIP drive-in fare such as Dragstrip Girl, Motorcycle Gang, and Frankenstein’s Daughter. Both he and Romero, a prolific Philippines-based writer/director/producer, also assisted on the troubled jungle-based epic Apocalypse Now. It’s quite ridiculous that the Grier films of the competent but unexciting Jack Hill are acknowledged and revered, and this minor masterpiece, better than all of them put together, is almost unknown.

Grier’s 1974 film The Arena, a women-in-chains film with a difference, represented several firsts for Corman’s New World company and one last. It was the first European co-production, filmed at Rome’s Cinecetta studios (alongside Fellini’s Amarcord; he stopped filming to drool over Grier!), the first Corman film directed by the prolific Steve Carver (Big Bad Mama, Capone), the first produced by former actor Marc Damon, and the first editing job of the young Joe Dante. Filmed with a mostly Italian cast, many of them hiding behind Americanised pseudonyms so as not to disappoint the American market, and graced with a sub-Morricone score, it was also the last film Grier made for Corman, before signing with rivals AIP to make the legendary Coffy and Foxy Brown, among others.

The Arena reunited Grier with the towering blonde Markov, but now they were female slave warriors in Ancient Rome. Markov was the noble Bodicia, Grier the pragmatic Mamawi. Sold in the same slave auction to the effeminate Priscium (yes, really) are Lucretia Love as sweet drunk Deirdre and Marie Louise Sinclair as the self-serving and treacherous Livia. Cast as the Roman assigned to keep them in line was exploitation queen Rosalba Neri (in her Sara Bay identity) as Cornelia. After the good men they were forced to service the night before are callously cut down before the cheering crowds, a taunt leads to a food fight. As punishment, the girls are put into the gladiatorial arena to spice up the proceedings as an aperitif to the main feature, but quickly become the star attraction.

What you see is what you get, as this was long before the soulless short-cuts of CGI that make everything possible, but nothing plausible. Carver keeps the camera tight visually to hide any budgetary shortcomings, but provides crowd scenes where necessary. As a sex film, this doesn’t really satisfy, but as exploitation action, Corman and Carver deliver a satisfying salvo of 1970s schlock and sleaze.

The ground-breaking American WIP (women-in-prison) movie Caged Heat (also 1974) starred Erica Gavin (Vixen, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls), Juanita Brown (who also appeared in Foxy Brown), Roberta Collins (The Big Doll House, Death Race 2000), and Cheryl ‘Rainbeaux’ Smith (Revenge of the Cheerleaders, The Pom Pom Girls, The Swinging Cheerleaders). One of the seemingly few WIP films not to involve the participation of either Pam Grier or Linda Blair, it has become the blueprint for the standard jailbabes movie, despite appearing a full five years after Franco’s groundbreaking 99 Women.

Like 99 Women, it has been surpassed in content, although unlike the Franco film, it is a quality production worth seeing. Writer and director Jonathan Demme adheres to producer Roger Corman’s rule of pressing the audience’s buttons every seven minutes or so, and the final shootout, with the brainless guards shooting at escapees and prison staff hostages alike, is excellent, with the bad guys getting their comeuppance.

The great debate about Caged Heat conducted retrospectively has always been how much of its reputation is down to hindsight. Like many who apprenticed under Corman, Demme went on to greater things, some of them award-winning, and if he hadn’t, it wouldn’t be an issue. A certain kind of film fan insists on backtracking through successful directors’ work to locate genius in their early efforts that often isn’t there (Robert Altman’s TV work, for example, is no different to anybody else’s). Another kind of film fan overreacts to this enthusiasm by methodically refusing to acknowledge any kind of thematic consistency, influences, or auteur qualities at all. The truth is best discovered simply by watching the movie without any predetermined opinion or prejudice.

So is Caged Heat something special because Demme went on to win awards and make Big Films, or is it just another women-in-prison flick made by a hack who got the breaks others didn’t? The answer appears to be--after wading through dozens of reviews and sitting through the film twice--a wishy-washy yes and no. But don’t throw that chair, I will elaborate.

Caged Heat, while adhering to all the usual demands of the genre (which is what confuses the nay-sayers), is uniquely told from the women’s point of view, and it is this sympathetic perspective that makes Caged Heat unusual. This is not to say that it’s a chick flick. All the requisite guns, shoot-outs, lesbian shenanigans, shower scenes, hard labor, horrible accidents, unfair fates, and ritual humiliations that occur when one group of thugs has absolute power over another are present and incorrect, along with abundant nudity for anyone of either sex who gets off on natural women. The cliche warden (here, it’s horror film veteran Barbara Steele), collaborating either through naivete, misplaced reactionary politics, or self-interest, and the pervy prison doctor are both present, along with the usual array of blubbery or hatchet-faced guards. However, the women, while slotting effortlessly into the usual stereotypes (resilient innocent, perky blonde, sassy black, fragile flower), have depth, character, and personalities, which is not usually the case in such films, and their trials and tribulations are presented sympathetically rather than as set pieces for the detached male gaze, humanely rather than luridly. We even see their fantasies, some murderous, some harmless, in-between the traditionally male ones of stripping and showering. Sweat mag enthusiasts might find themselves feeling faintly dissatisfied without even realising why; in that sense, Caged Heat is subversive when compared with less thoughtful imitations.

In other WIP films, whatever happens to the women happens solely for the gratification of the male audience, but with naturalistic female nudity and the women constantly having the upper hand over the men in the face of all attempts to suppress them and break their spirit, it's easy to see why the film became a favorite of feminist types. Every single man in Caged Heat is weak and stupid, but this is cleverly covered by including a few weak and stupid women as well.

If there is a fault with Caged Heat, it is with the casting of Erica Gavin in the lead (even though she was very good in Beyond the Valley of the Dolls). The supporting cast, particularly Collins and Smith, have far more in the looks, ability, and personality department, and the arrival of the attractive and effervescent Crystin Sinclaire (here billed as Lynda Gold) as Crazy Alice mid-story after the escape boosts the film considerably. It is telling that quite often WIP films fall apart when they move outside the confines of the prison, losing all their appeal, but in Caged Heat, the action revs up a notch. This can only be because we care about the characters; they have become interesting for something other than their bodies.

I haven’t seen Demme’s Silence of the Lambs or Philadelphia, and don't intend to; I don’t care for heart-eaters or heart-tuggers. However, I have seen the wonderful Crazy Mama, his other Corman effort, and there are certainly examples of that film’s offbeat quirky humor in Caged Heat. I particularly liked that when the hostages were being slaughtered by the guards’ “friendly fire” (leaving all the girls untouched), an entire tour bus full of sight-seers inexplicably trundles past full of witnesses just in time to scuttle any chance of a cover-up!

Women imprisoned: Jobs for the Girls

Private Duty Nurses (1971), Night Call Nurses (1972), The Young Nurses (1973), Candy Stripe Nurses (1974), The Stewardesses (1969), The Cheerleaders (1973), Revenge of the Cheerleaders (1976), The Pom-Pom Girls (1976), Cheerleader’s Wild Weekend (1979), Au Pair Girls (1972)

It started with Stephanie Rothman’s Student Nurses in 1970, a mix of right-on relevance aimed at teens combined with the new-found freedom to show sex and nudity to an extent unparalleled in cinema up to that date. As ever, it was Roger Corman at the forefront.

Corman and his collaborators at American International in the 1950s had discovered--some said created--the teen market for movies to grope to while their parents sat at home watching television. Those teens wanted--and received in abundance--sci-fi monster movies, hot rod and biker movies, and rock and roll movies, all made on the lowest budgets possible for a quick killing at the drive-in. The titles came first, then the posters, then the ad campaign, and finally, someone made the movie.

In the ‘60s it was beach movies and biker films, with the occasional dabble in the overcrowded arena of sci-fi or horror, where there was considerable competition in the low-budget market from Britain, Italy, and Japan. There was always the implication, the suggestion of sex, even in the ‘50s... but as the '60s became the ‘70s, sexual content and nudity not only became acceptable, they became essential. It was not enough for these films to tease or imply, they had to deliver.

Corman had no problem with that. In fact, he insisted on it, giving his writers and directors free rein with storyline and content as long as the pre-requisite sex, nudity and violence made an appearance every ten minutes or so (some have said Corman insisted on seven minutes, others fifteen; to his credit, his films are entertaining enough that I’ve never had the inclination to count). He was also smart enough to insist that the girls in his films sort out their problems for themselves, rather than be rescued by boyfriends, police officers, or authority figures, and it was this all-important instruction that made his films different from both the mainstream TV and film fare where women were still damsels in distress and the more reactionary and sleazy exploitation films to whose writers and directors such a notion would never even have occurred. Consequently, Corman’s female-themed exploiters, while pandering to male urges with come-on titles and ad campaigns, never descended into either smutty comedy or pornography. In movie terms, it was genius. They were genuine date movies, not chick flicks, not macho porn. The reactionaries tolerated the liberal politics to enjoy the pretty girls, the dour lefties tolerated the sex and nudity for the rare opportunity to see their politics represented onscreen. However, Corman and his team were no blinkered supporters of fashionable right-on pretensions; they were careful enough to pepper their plots with an assortment of phonies and frauds from right across the political spectrum. Nothing was cut and dried, but the biggest problem, in a time before women could apply for real jobs, was finding a career role. The 1970s settled for candy-stripers, cheerleaders, and maids.

Unfortunately, 1970’s Student Nurses, one of the first to come from Corman’s New World operation, and the template, is not included on the two disc DVD collection from the invaluable Shout Factory. Made in three weeks for 150,000 dollars it took in a million almost immediately. During the same period, New World subsequently also put out the tedious Fly Me (sexy stewardesses), Student Teachers, Summer School Teachers, Street Girls (hookers), the dull Cover Girl Models, and of course all the usual horror, sci-fi, car crash and gangster cheapies they were renowned for, as well as the women in prison films discussed elsewhere. The waters were also muddied by a variety of bandwagon-jumpers, some good, some bad. Corman’s offerings were themselves variable.

Student Nurses was followed almost immediately by 1971’s Private Duty Nurses because Corman received a letter of complaint about the movie from an organisation calling itself the Private Duty Nurses Association saying that Rothman’s film demeaned and denigrated the nursing profession. Corman had never heard of Private Duty nurses, but it sounded wonderfully provocative and illicit, and into production it went. Consequently, the Association’s letter complaining that the first film misrepresented and embarrassed the profession inspired, and named, the sequel!

Sadly, Private Duty Nurses did not live up to its wonderful origin story. It’s the poorest of the four follow-ups, a disorganised shambles with the weakest of the four ensemble casts (TV guest regular Kathy Cannon, set decoration Joyce Williams, and supporting player Pegi Boucher), and the lamest storylines.

Dramatically, Private Duty Nurses is a non-starter. All the nurses, partners, patients, and supporting characters are all so completely unsympathetic no-one could get involved with their outcome. Indeed, Herb Jefferson’s black radical doctor is so unpleasant to Williams and everyone else around him that one almost sides with the elderly white administrator (TV stalwart Robert F. Simon) who opposes him, especially when Jefferson’s loutish thugs occupy the man’s office to force him into a positive discrimination policy. Despite being a straw man who is never allowed to put across his reasons, Simon’s bad white guy comes across as utterly pragmatic and reasonable. In terms of humor, the only laugh is an unintentional visual one when we’re treated to a particularly crass example of that beloved ‘70s cliche of indicating an unsympathetic character by displaying a photograph of the odious paranoid Nixon on his wall. This was 1970s shorthand for bad guy, and has remained so ever since.

1972’s marginally superior Night Call Nurses is also unfortunately a shambling, rambling mess of a movie, coyly shot and incoherent. Something is always going on, but the film never gels into a cohesive storyline; perhaps teenage audiences, otherwise occupied, simply assumed they’d missed a few plot points while fumbling with each other. In actuality, the film ducks and dives all over the place, never making anything clear. The opening scene leads to nothing, one storyline suddenly appears mid-way without any build-up, and a transvestite killer story just simply stops. What puts the film above its predecessor is that the casting of the three leads is better. However, pretty Patti Byrne, unfortunately, left the business almost as soon as she entered it, Mitti Lawrence was a TV series bit player also about to leave the industry, and the stunning Alana Collins, who made numerous appearances in various assorted TV series, was married to actor George Hamilton and would later marry pop singer Rod Stewart. The plot revolves around their bad choices of boyfriend rather than their nursing--a speed freak trucker, another angry black radical, and a creepy encounter group leader. On top of all this, two of the girls are being stalked by a crazy male colleague in drag.

Things are looking up by the time 1973’s The Young Nurses makes the scene. This retains all the virtues of the previous two endeavors and starts to fix the flaws of its predecessors. Jean Manson plays sexy blonde Kitty, whose story concerns a father-dominated sailor who meets his match in this feisty blonde bimbo who pulls him out of the drink and nurses him back to health with special privileges. Unfortunately, the guy she’s fallen for is such a pathetic drip, and portrayed by such a bad actor, that you feel sorry for both the father and the first of our young nurses. Neither deserves this wimp.

Ashley Porter plays idealist Joanne, who wavers between working at a feminist free clinic and pursuing her career choice to become a doctor at the hospital. When her over-enthusiasm for taking charge results in a fatality that is ultimately revealed to be not entirely her fault, she marches proudly away from the self-serving corporate suits who were willing to let her take a fall for the dubious delights of do-it-yourself medicine… but not before displaying a superb figure skinnydipping.

Finally, the bike-riding Michelle (Angela Gibbs, still working today) is perhaps inevitably involved in a drugs-related storyline, albeit a little less cliched and predictable that her predecessors. Linda Towne, daughter of writer Robert Towne, plays the girl running the womens’ clinic, Nan Martin plays a Republican-style reporter planning a hatchet job on the clinic, Kimberly Hyde is a typical movieland candy-striper, Dick Miller has a great bit as a world-weary callous cop, and Sally Kirkland, Mantan Moreland, and film director Sam Fuller all have cameo bits. Behind the scenes, Linda Towne covers wardrobe, future Corman director Barbara Peeters was art director, and Tim Kincaid of Breeders notoriety worked on production design.

The entire shebang is graced with an instantly loveable funky music score from Gregory Prestopino that positively exudes the ‘70s, the photography is bright and attractive, and the plotline also squeezes in two gory murders, a drugs trip, some road rage, and an attempted rape. The voyeurism is well-handled as well, teasing the audience in a good way, and delivering the nude scenes in a well-paced, gradual, but ultimately generous manner.

Saving the best for last, Candy Stripe Nurses (1974) features sex film regular Candice Rialson (there’s a particularly funny scene where she literally, and fake-inadvertently, dangles her breasts in the face of a hapless student who she’s coerced into doing her schoolwork) and the slimline delights of Robin Mattson as the more dedicated Dianne, who wants to work her way up the medical ladder. Rounding out the cast is Maria Rojo as Marisa, who has the best and most interesting storyline as she tries to clear a recuperating patient wrongly presumed to be part of a robbery he stumbled into simply because he’s of the same ethnic group.

Rialson was very busy throughout the ‘70s in exploitation and sexploitation, and appeared in numerous enjoyable and not-so-enjoyable sleazefests throughout the decade including Submission, Mama’s Dirty Girls, Moonshine County Express, Hollywood Boulevarde, and as a girl with a talking vagina in the insane Chatterbox. She was also in Corman’s Summer School Teachers the same year as Candy Stripe Nurses. Robin Mattson started out as a child actress in cute animal films and series, segued into exploitation for the likes of Bonnie’s Kids, Candy Stripe Nurses, and Return to Macon County, and after several guest roles in 1970s TV series, became a soap queen, working her way through most of the daytime soaps up to the present day. Despite giving a fine performance here, Candy Stripe Nurses was Maria Rojos’ only known film credit. She has worked extensively in Mexican television.

Like its predecessors, this 1974 outing is not a sex film, but there’s enough nudity for the guys and enough incident and content for the film to work as the date movie it was intended to be. Most importantly for this sort of film, the bad guys and creeps are all boo-hissable and the main cast are all likeable. It’s ironic that the Corman nurses films got progressively better as they went along, but when the formula was finally perfected, the series ended.

Bizarrely, there’s a girl in each of the the promotional posters who is not in the film; she wasn’t cut out, she was just never in it.

The wisdom and ability of Roger Corman’s work in the exploitation markets is always highlighted more by the failings of his imitators (Crown, Arthur Marks, Maury Dexter, Al Adamson, etc.) than by the accomplishments of Corman himself. While the finished product from Corman is always variable (The Nurses Collection being a perfect example), his success rate in terms of films worth seeing (as opposed to his success rate making money, which he claims is 100 percent!) makes him always worth a look.

A mish-mash like The Stewardesses, which is brought to you by writer and director Al Silliman, who made only one other film, Surfer Girls, ten years later, illustrates perfectly why Corman, in the field of American exploitation, is the best of a bad lot.

First of all, there’s far too many cookie-cutter girls and not enough storylines (it doesn't help that being stewardesses, even off-duty, they’re all frequently dressed the same, like hostesses on Devil’s Island). Secondly, the storylines that are there meander pointlessly and go nowhere. And thirdly, the performances are atrocious, most of the girls being either one-off players or from the fringes of the hardcore industry. Only two of the cast, including Christina Hart of Games Girls Play, went on to modest television work afterwards.

It opens with one of the girls taking the term cockpit literally and descends from there into a series of unrelated chunks of footage shot in relentless close-up and extrapolating pseudo-storylines that go nowhere. The sound and camerawork are so haphazard, and the acting and directing so disorganised that the film almost has a bogus verite look about it. Despite this, Silliman was ambitious enough to attempt to produce this mess in 3D, but the girls are not even interesting in 2D, and unless you’re keen on three-dimensional snooker or a foot fetishist excited by having various unattractive feet thrust in your face, there’s little point in putting on the glasses. Rather than view everything in red and green, it’s much more fun to wallow in the garish 1969 color schemes. The Stewardesses is much more interesting as a period piece than as a sex film, and the decor and unintentional incidental detail is awesome.

While Corman was provoking the nabobs of the nursing profession, the all-American cheerleader was becoming the poster girl of U.S. porn. Cheerleader films were particularly popular in the days (daze?) of 1970s soft-core, and The Cheerleaders (1973) and Revenge of the Cheerleaders (1976) are two typical examples.

The brainchild of the appropriately named Jerry Gross (the producer and distributor who gave the world such dismal, depressing, and dubious delights as Vice Girls Ltd., Girl on a Chain Gang, Teenage Mother, Female Animal, and I Eat Your Skin, as well as several notorious contributions to the idiotic U.K. “Video Nasties List”), The Cheerleaders is wall-to-wall sex and nudity from start to finish, and it may seem the height of hypocrisy and ingratitude to criticise a film that delivers the goods when so many fail to deliver. However, this film is slightly discomfiting to watch if you're a middle-aged man, or even, say, over twenty.

Although the girls are older than they look, that is the problem; they still look too young to be participating, particularly the lead actress, the unconvincingly named Stephanie Fondue. If you’re the target audience of too-young-to-be-watching teens, then this doesn’t much matter, and The Cheerleaders is the gold standard of softcore sex thrills, but if you’re not, then things get a little more uncomfortable and complicated.

It is quite possible to make a bright, bouncy sex film about cheerleaders which is awash with nudity and celebrates sex and youth and life for audiences of all ages, and examples will follow. But The Cheerleaders isn’t it. In a minefield where common sense tells you to tread cautiously, writer/director Paul Glickler has gone bounding in like a demented rhinoceros on caffeine to tap dance vigorously in army boots.

Just how badly does he get it wrong? Firstly, the film is full of dirty old men, such as a scrawny old dad who leers at his daughter’s friends and ends up happily accepting sex from one of them, and a voyeuristic school caretaker, who not only peeps, but attempts to have sex with one of the girls. Secondly, the plot revolves around Fondue’s character trying to lose her virginity by any means possible, no matter how inappropriate. And thirdly, to exacerbate problems, the camera is the most leering ever employed in a teen comedy, roaming up and down skinny legs and peering up mini-skirts, and the film’s most notorious scene has Fondue’s character tricked into stripping off in the guys’ shower room, where she’s chased around aggressively by an entire football team whose intentions are beyond debate. This film doesn’t just step over the line, it stamps on it and violently erases it with its heel.

There are tricks of the trade, in camerawork, storyline, characterisation, and presentation, by which you could make a very funny and sexy film about cheerleaders who sexually exhaust their own football team and then have to figure out a way to wear out the opposing players too (this is the main storyline, and the final scenes with the two teams prostrate on the field are quite funny). Private School is a perfect example, as are Beach Girls, Fraternity Vacation, and up to a point, even Porky’s. Even hardcore reality porn like the 21st century Dare Dorm and College Rules series are knowing and self-aware. Coercion, trickery, naivete, inappropriate age differences, and implied or implicit sexual assault are all pointedly avoided, whereas The Cheerleaders wallows in all of these. The audience is left feeling as though we’re hiding underneath the bleachers with a bag of lollipops in one hand and a bag of grass in the other.

The Cheerleaders, unbelievably charmless though it is, does get a few things right. It delivers the endless sex scenes and T&A that other films skimp on, and unusually, it focusses on the girls’ faces when they’re having sex, showing their pleasure rather than just the guys getting their rocks off. Like Dare Dorm, Party Hardcore, and College Rules et al nearly half a century later, the girls are pro-active and clearly enjoying themselves, and everything’s above board. It’s just a shame that the overall ambience of The Cheerleaders is so unpleasantly and unnecessarily creepy.

By contrast, everything The Cheerleaders gets spectacularly wrong, Richard Lerner’s Revenge of the Cheerleaders gets magnificently right (and yet Lerner wrote the original story draft for the previous film too!). It opens with the five leads brazenly changing out of their street clothes into their cheerleader outfits in an open-top car, and never lets up from there, with great sight gags (watch for the underwear coming off in the open zoo outside the college) and crude verbal gags (“Get the flags out, it’s VD day” says the school snob when the cheerleaders roll in).

There are also inevitable heavy-handed pokes at all the standard authority figures of the 1970s (corrupt cops, crooked capitalists, officious officials, military hardheads, etc.). The preposterous pure-‘70s plot has an investment group headed by the school snob’s dad (TV veteran William Bramley), and aided by the evil stereotypical overweight school nurse, intending to turn the school grounds into a shopping mall, and who are only too thrilled to see the school digging its own grave and facing merger (read closure) with it's most heinous rivals.

The cheerleaders are represented by Patrice Rohmer (Jackson County Jail), Jerii Woods (Switchblade Sisters), Helen Lang, Susie Elene, and a very pregnant Cheryl ‘Rainbeaux’ Smith (the producers aren’t sure whether to hide it or flaunt it; ultimately they go for the latter, giving us a charming and poignant final frame). Nobody reviews this movie without gleefully mentioning that a very young David Hasselhoff is among the basketball players who get their kit off. To those who have suggested Hasselhoff might be embarrassed to have this on his CV... really?? Next to Spongebob Squarepants and Piranha 3DD?? This and his unsold Nick Fury pilot are the best things on it...

Pre-dating Porky’s by a decade, and surpassing it, we find the cheerleaders ogling the boys during basketball practice and then joining them in the showers for a giant bubble bath. No peeping through knot-holes necessary here. Pre-dating Animal House by half a decade, but not surpassing it, there’s a drugs-fuelled orgy of a food fight. And rebooting the early ‘60s Disney film Son of Flubber, we have the big game, with the replacement cheerleaders screwing up, and our leading ladies storming to the rescue (one reviving a chloroformed star player sabotaged by the nurse with a reviving whiff of her just removed knickers!). Forty years later, it’s still the best cheerleader film ever made, and if the storyline falls apart in the bizarro climax, by that time you’ll be too sappy to care; it’s a funny, cheerful, stupid film with loads of laughing, dancing, high spirits and nudity.

This is also probably a good time to mention The Pom-Pom Girls, an aimless catalogue of teenage antics for Crown International’s drive-in market. Like most of Crown’s stuff, it’s available as a poor print that no-one’s been looking after. Cheryl Smith is in this one too, but there’s very little sex and no nudity at all in some prints (other than a shower scene... with naked guys!). The cheerleader try-outs sequence is genuinely, tragically funny, reminiscent of Michael Ritchie’s beauty pageant satire Smile from the same period, and a stolen fire-truck segment is fun, but the leading man is Revenge of the Nerds’ Robert Carradine, which makes the horny guy quotient even less desirable than usual. There is a wonderful 1970s ambience about it all, but that’s down to it actually being made in the ‘70s, of course.

The Pom-Pom Girls is available singly or as part of an eight-film cheapo compilation called Too Cool for School. The more complete version with the girls in the locker room is on the compilation Drive-In Cult Classics vol. 3. There are a fair number of these compilations of dreck on Amazon, and there are several reasons why they’re so cheap and why they should generally be avoided by everyone except completists, sociology students, and the more undemanding obscurity hunters. Firstly, the prints are usually appalling, and secondly, the films are rubbish anyway. After all, if they were any good, they’d come out singly, and the few half-way decent ones (Beach Girls, for example, or Van Nuys Boulevard) have done.

And then there is Cheerleader’s Wild Weekend (aka The Great American Girl Robbery, 1979), which begins promising what the title suggests, but then segues into a tedious hostage drama.

If the content of The Cheerleaders could be de-sleazed and mixed with the imagination of Revenge... and the innocence of The Pom-Pom Girls, the end result would be a perfect cheerleader film. Instead, we have a creepy one, an okay one, and an empty one.

Jobs for the Girls continued

Britain didn't have cheerleaders in the 1970s, but British males were not short of demeaning female fantasy roles. 1972’s Au Pair Girls was a 1970s time capsule if ever there was one. Overly cheerful pop music with soppy lyrics, airplane pilots following girls in short skirts, polite old gents in bowler hats staring at girls in short skirts, overly courteous jack-the-lads drooling over girls in short skirts... and nobody’s feeling guilty. It could only have been 1972, when color televisions and hot showers were aspirational rather than standard, and something to show off. And not only will you suffer the sight of 1970s underpants, but to add insult to injury, Astrid Frank’s Anita wears panty-hose. Tights!! This must be the only British sex film to cater for tights fetishists (most of us guys want to murder the guy who invented them).

The aforementioned overscore, which sounds like a collision between the theme song for Top Cat and a Martini ad is relentless and goes on for a full five minutes... and a couple of minutes later, tries to start again, defeated only by the inevitable progress of the story. Yes, there’s a story in this sex film--four of them, in fact, all proceeding simultaneously, which is fortunate, because like all films that veer off in several different directions, some episodes are more successful than others, and by being carved up into one continuous romp, the poorer are at least in tolerable fun-size segments rather than dragging proceedings to a full stop.

For all the talk of swinging London, most suburban British males of the ‘50s, ‘60s, and ‘70s entertained fantasies of foreign girls--exotic, servile Orientals, flustered wide-eyed French girls carelessly falling out of their lingerie, or lusty, busty, uninhibited Nordic Euro-babes; it helped to explain why they weren’t getting any. And needless to say, the foreign girls who were most accessible were the ones coming over to Britain. The beauty of the au pair girl fantasy was that, like Anita/Astrid and her chirpy, innocent friends, they just turned up at your door with their suitcase, all ready for the spare room. Yep--they just rang the bell, walked in, and stripped off. Then they made you breakfast and made the beds, so even the wife was okay with it.

Au Pair Girls is a real guilty delight, surprisingly, genuinely funny, awash with iconic ‘70s imagery, obsessions, assumptions, and just enough familiar faces to tip you off that you're in filmland’s version of Britain. It would be nice if it was a typical British sex comedy, but few of them were this competently made, and even fewer delivered the goods.

Despite an incredibly sleazy trailer (and a blink-and-miss unfortunate jokey rape reference, typical of the 1970s), the film itself is noticeably more innocent than some of the lurid fare splurging out of the Ford, Sullivan, and Long sewage pipes, and yet it features a vast amount of nudity and has nothing but sex in the script from start to finish. Bizarrely, the director, veteran Val Guest, hated sex films, and couldn't wait to disown his brief tenure in the genre and return to his mediocre career of forgotten B-movies and television. He’s best known for a trio of dreary British sci-fi films of the ‘50s, and only then because sci-fi fans have the best memories of all film buffs. You'd have thought he could’ve stood a little excitement.

We open at the airport, that symbol of ‘60s freedom, adventure, and romance, as four girls, all portrayed by then-current or future sex film starlets, Anita (Astrid Frank), Randi (Gabrielle Drake of UFO fame), Nan Lee (Me Me Lai), and Christa (Nancie Wait) arrive to be taken to the au pair agency. Once there, a stern, elderly lady assigns the girls their families, and all four escapades start in earnest.

The best storyline features Richard O’Sullivan, only months away from six seasons as Robin Tripp in Man About the House (the source of America’s Three’s Company), as the nerdy son of a brusque and impatient businessman (a splendid cameo by veteran character actor John Le Mesurier of the BBC’s venerable Dad’s Army, who tells him to “piss off”, easily the most shocking scene in the film). Afflicted by frequent daydreams of naked women (which we are happily allowed to enjoy with him), he’s assigned to take Gabrielle Drake’s leggy Randi to the family home, but the car breaks down in the middle of the countryside--not because he’s a scheming jack-the-lad, but because he’s an oaf. Gabby flaunts her assets in the traditional sex-com way to hitch a lift, and the two end up in a farmyard barn waiting for the car to be returned from the garage.

In a series of events that can only happen in sex-coms, Randi’s dress gets progressively shorter as it rips and tears on the barn’s convenient nails and splinters, and the two of them end up romping in the hay. The playfulness ends in a double soaking in a grubby water trough, and our hapless hero is now in the company of a girl who’s naked and soaking wet.

O’Sullivan does accident-prone brilliantly, and is basically Robin Tripp freed of the restraints of television, but the difference is mostly in the absence of the sit-com’s professional dialogue, the lack of which is glaring. O’Sullivan can do all his usual mannerisms, and does (watch for the famous floundering “you know” when he forgets his lines), but the wit and the quips are missing. The barnyard debacle ends up with Robin, er, Stephen, and his charge at the studio of a photographer friend, played by Trevor Bannister of the BBC’s less venerable but equally fondly remembered Are You Being Served?, who is surprisingly sweat-free and line-perfect for once.

When they show up looking for a change of clothes from his models’ wardrobe, he’s irritably trying to photograph the naked and beautiful Christine Donna (another UFO girl and a sex-com regular in the ‘70s, turning up in Confessions of a Window Cleaner, Adventures of a Plumber’s Mate, The Two Ronnies, and The World Is Full of Married Men) for Bubbles Bath Oil (“Boo-blays” corrects Donna quietly). Bannister promptly decides he wants Drake in the shot as well, but as the two UFO babes assume their poses, he has an inspiration--one girl wet, one dry!--and soaks her again. She’s upset, Robin, er, Stephen, punches his lights out, and they’re on the street again, she still wet and naked. I won’t spoil the conclusion to this, but he does better here than with his Man About the House flat-mates…

Equally fun and sexy is the storyline with Astrid Frank, who flounces around the Howard household naked, floods the bathroom, and obsesses over the availability of color TV, which had just arrived in Britain for the fortunate few. The script is funny, and she plays it beautifully, showing a genuine talent for comedy; it’s surprising she wasn't used more on ‘70s British TV, which was tailor-made for her now politically incorrect silly foreigner/scatty bimbo persona. She ends up in a ridiculous Arabian Nights scenario with veteran stereotype merchant Ferdy Mayne and a bubble-bath.

The other two storylines work less well, but at least they don’t drag. The poorest has Nan shipped off to a gothic mansion where she takes pity on a lonely, lovelorn, childlike weirdo pianist called Rupert. This thankfully failed romance is supposed to be fluffy and poignant, but is actually just creepy.

The fourth and final storyline is sexier, but is a perfect example of how some 1970s material dates wonderfully, and some of it dates horribly. It’s all good fun when bad girl groupie Carol (Lyn Yeldham, fresh from the BBC’s Casanova) takes virginal Christa shopping to get some groovy threads, but when she conspires to have her new friend’s virginity taken by a hirsute and ridiculous pop star, it all gets grim, with our hurt heroine being consoled by middle-aged lech and inadequate John Standing, in what is surely the most embarrassing role of his career, Peter Greenaway obviously excepted, as he always must be.

On the whole though, Au Pair Girls is almost charming in its lustful naivete, and surprisingly adequate in the eye candy department, given that it was directed by the proficient, professional, but openly disinterested Mr. Guest, who also reluctantly got lumbered with the task of directing the iconic Confessions of a Window Cleaner against his wishes. There, he was a little more sparing with the visual delights.

Less prudish were the girls. Astrid Frank had such titles as Swedish Love Games and Swinging Wives to her name, Gabrielle Drake had appeared in Surburban Wives, Me Me Lai would turn up in She’ll Follow You Anywhere, and Nancie Wait for The Amorous Milkman. Unlike those male-dominated stories, this one’s all about the girls, although it’s very much a guy’s film. If you’re a guy living in the suburbs of 1972.

The Year of the Pig : Bad Attitudes Die Hard (1)

Sex and the Other Woman (1972), She’ll Follow You Anywhere (1973), The Sex Thief (1973), On the Game (1974)

Although 1971 was officially China’s Year of the Pig, in the Western world, where the term was being used by the feminist movement to describe the mindset of a certain kind of man (and by some particularly aggrieved and bigoted souls, all men!), the honor more accurately goes to either 1972 or 1973.

Sex and the Other Woman (1972) is another of the prolific Stanley Long’s short story collections in the manner of This, That and the Other and Wife Swappers. Four sad and sleazy stories are linked by the tedious and sardonic wry pontificating of Brit-com veteran Richard Wattis, an owlish gay whose snide remarks betray the age and outdated mindset of the film. The point of his lectures between stories were to scrape these cynical confessionals past the rather unpredictable censors of the time, who--despite Wattis’ boorish remarks--were more inclined to let material through to the impressionable public if a wise man at a desk was involved, regardless of what he might actually be saying.

As usual, it’s about what’s cheap and easy for Long, who made one sex-com after another in the 1970s, culminating in the Adventures... series, and whose most intriguing corner-cutting ruse was what makes his films most interesting retrospectively--not the shabby, outdated ideas on display here, but the mondo on-the-street filming, here betrayed by gawping head-turning onlookers as the opening credits roll, and his borrowing of locations. For this one he asks himself nicely if he can film in his own tacky penthouse, his distributors’ offices, and even his own light aircraft. Of course you may, said Stanley, use the waterbed if you like (anyone remember waterbeds?).

After a brief opening gag about blow-up dolls, little bald men, and their fat, domineering wives to set the tone low enough for the rest of the film, we launch into a straightforward twist-free story about a trouble-maker (skinny Maggie Wright, a veteran of assorted ITC adventure series) who tempts a permed sugar-daddy millionaire away from his wife and ruins his marriage, only to find out that he’s now broke, because his wife had all the money. The clue was surely in the casting of his aggrieved wife, who looks more like his great aunt.

Stilted performances from everybody, accompanied by pitiful background music, render the second equally straightforward story of the office seductress (curvy Jane Cardew) as tepid as the first. As the story of the office new boy being pounced on wends its way to the inevitable lies, deceptions, and ‘phone calls about working late, Wattis commends the patient wife for keeping quiet about the fact that she found Cardew’s underwear in her idiot husband’s pocket, which she puts back with an “oh, that little scamp!” look on her face, very similar to those looks mums give little schoolboys who come home covered in mud in TV detergent commercials. Apparently she “understands” that this is obviously just a one-off, and that he really loves her. As the two of them clearly enjoyed themselves and believe they got away with sex in the boss’s office, there's actually no reason why our hero shouldn’t have his bread buttered on both sides on a regular basis. Isn’t it great when a woman “understands”, guys?

The third and best of the four tells the tale of two over-aged schoolgirls who are clearly a few years further on from the seventeen they’re playing, and the weak-willed dad who is ensnared by his daughter’s best friend (Felicity Devonshire, who bleats “Paint me nude” as a pretext to get him ready for sex and takes all her clothes off).

The fourth story is the most ludicrous of all, and tells how a cheating husband’s secret affair with his wife’s best friend across the road is exposed by a busybody neighbor, and the three of them decide that the only way to preserve both the marriage and the friendship is to all move in together in a menage-a-trois. Being British, they don’t all jump into bed together, but work out a very sensible rota, with a threesome on his birthday; seems fair. What the neighbor thinks of having inadvertently facilitated all this we can sadly only guess, but we certainly hear what mother-in-law has got to say; she shoots herself in the foot by threatening not to come round again until the arrangement is void, which suits everybody just fine. Playing the outraged harridan quite sympathetically is the only real actor in all four stories, the sit-com veteran Stella Tanner, who worked frequently with British surrealist comedian Spike Milligan and can be seen bossing a brow-beaten husband around in Fawlty Towers’ infamous “Waldorf Salad” episode.

Far from being the cautionary tales about how wicked, manipulative and scheming women ruin poor guys’ lives that Wattis and Long suggest, this is actually a quartet of rather pathetic male-skewed fantasies in which the four guys involved each get away with doing things that most men get their comeuppance for. The first guy sends the gold-digger packing with empty hands, the second guy gets away with cheating because his wife is “understanding”, the third guy has sex with his daughter’s friend from school and is congratulated by his daughter and successful in keeping his adventure from mother, and the fourth, when discovered, moves his lover in with the wife and--icing on the cake--gets rid of an imposing mother-in-law to boot. In reality, all four men would have lost everything and been commiserating in the same bed-sit while all the women slighted would have been vomiting with rage!

She’ll Follow You Anywhere (1973) is another one of those British efforts where the guys think they might want sex, but aren’t quite sure. Kenneth Cope of My Partner, the Ghost, aka Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased), in full Marty Hopkirk mode and Keith Barron doing his befuddled sit-com routine play two likely lads who work in a laboratory making smells... or as the cosmetic industry would have it, fragrances. After a particularly potent batch goes down the drain, the surviving bottle turns out to be a super-strong aphrodisiac, or more accurately, hallucinogen, as all the women affected imagine they’re giving their bodies to assorted forgotten ‘70s heart-throbs.

Of course, being a British ‘70s sex-com, our jolly jokers spend all their time backing away from potential sexual encounters with looks of horror transfixed across their faces, a highlight being a sequence in which Cope is chased around various London landmarks by a girl in lingerie (Jennifer Watts), the flight culminating in a car showroom managed by The Benny Hill Show’s Bob Todd. Sit-com stalwart Richard Vernon plays, as usual, the blustering boss with wandering hands.

Unlike most films of this nature and era, the lads take the feelings of the wives into consideration (Hilary Pritchard and Philippa Gail in the Wilma and Betty roles), although of course if the writers hadn’t written wives into the film in the first place, it would have been a real sex film. Instead, it’s a childish TV-style male fantasy that can’t be fully realised, even though it most certainly is attempted. Thus, the wives must be circumnavigated, the guilt must be dealt with, and the formula is lost and must be re-invented, the latter business taking up most of the storyline in between tame love-nest romps. The fact that the women are essentially being drugged and violated under false pretences is not considered because a) it’s a comedy, and b) it’s the ’70s, the only decade in the 20th century when this would have been found funny.

A likeable cast makes this film tolerable and amusing in a late-night coma sort of way, but nudity is negligible, coy, and fleeting, even when the legendary Collinson twins of evil turn up. As with most such fare, the real fun to be had is in revisiting the jaw-dropping Britain of the 1970s; however, this is nothing next to The Sex Thief (also 1973).

Here, smug and self-satisfied David Warbeck is trashy paperback author Grant Henry, who moonlights--literally--as a Raffles-like gentleman thief who burgles the homes of wealthy bored women, fucks them into complicit silence, and then fences the take with his crooked publisher. The women are so desperate to protect him, and so determined to get a return visit, that thick copper Inspector Smith (Terence Edmond) and his Sweeney-style minions are running around in circles (“You did say it was 2.30. a.m. this happened? Tell me, why didn’t you ‘phone the police until 6.00. in the morning?”), accompanied by cute insurance investigator Judy Martin (professional wide-eyed TV sit-com numbskull Diane Keen).

The multiple blatantly false and disparate physical descriptions of the thief offered by the victims would indicate to most people with the job description of detective that the women were in on it, but this bunch wouldn’t recognise a clue if Scooby-Doo himself stepped out of the television set and barfed it up, and consequently present one of the most accurate portraits of bungling 1970s police officers ever portrayed in popular culture. 55 minutes into the film the obvious finally dawns on insurance investigator Judy, who also enjoys the attentions of our rogue-ish anti-hero in a most extraordinary conclusion after she sets up a honey trap with the comedy cops.

If you're expecting a happy ending whereby Keen finds true love with the shy and over-protective police inspector besotted with her throughout, think again. Once the thief is apprehended, she ties him up and fucks him herself, after which he sits in bed beside her free as a bird and in a bit of a sulk, awaiting the authorities while benignly planning his post-prison life of wedded bliss.

The Sex Thief is a real face-slapper, even for a British sex-com. For sheer insanity in a genre already as mad as a bag of cats it is rivalled only by Secrets of Sex and the hallowed Come Play With Me. It mixes pointed and barbed spot-on social commentary of the day with a story premise that is grossly insulting to women and deeply offensive to anyone with more than a couple of brain cells to rub together. The script by Michael Armstrong, much subtler than his acclaimed but heavy-handed Eskimo Nell, is cleverer by far than the usual sub-standard sex-com scribble, witty and satirical, and gunning for every 1970s target to peep over the parapet, including sanctimonious social workers, upper-class twits, casually corrupt porn-obsessed police, empty-headed headline-chasing starlets, and television-blaming tabloid hacks making up the news instead of reporting it. All this sits alongside a dispiriting ignorance of, and insensitivity to, the female of the species, although their desperation for a real man is certainly understandable given the standard of the potential candidates on offer here, preening, posturing ignoramuses who huddle in the corners of pubs, cafes, or male-dominated offices poring over pornographic fantasies. The Sex Thief doesn’t just accurately represent the dark side of the 1970s, it wallows in the decade’s best forgotten characteristics so laboriously that if every other item of pop culture from the period was lost forever, this one film could illustrate and illuminate the entire sorry spectacle of the sexual relations of the post-‘60s/pre-‘80s Great British heartland single-handedly.

Director Martin Campbell began his career in film with sex-coms, directing this, Eskimo Nell, and parts of Intimate Games before spending several years in television, after which he more recently directed Zorro and James Bond films and the Green Lantern movie. However, hopeful film buffs attempting to re-evaluate these films with hindsight in the light of his subsequent Hollywood success will not find much to inspire them. There is a sequence pre-dating Nic Roeg’s similar conceit in The Man Who Fell to Earth two years later, contrasting a particularly lively sex session with a wrestling match attended by upper-class buffoons, and perhaps the first appearance of the uniquely British cliche of the strip club scene in which tense and very serious old men with faces of granite concentrate very hard on coy, quick flashes of an on-stage stripper. In 1970s Britain, this was apparently the only way to film a strip club for film or TV.

Bringing up the rear, as late as 1974, was On the Game (aka Sex Through the Ages), a compilation of bits and pieces about the oldest pig-approved profession for women of all, prostitution through history. An inevitable mish-mash of styles, briefly sexy, never funny, occasionally disturbing, it as likely to make you screw your face up as rewind and freeze-frame. For this, Long was reunited with writer and occasional girlfriend Suzanne Mercer to sling together a succession of scenes rarely longer than a few minutes.

Mercer, no feminist, had also scripted Groupie Girl based on her own experiences, and would later write Adventures of a Taxi Driver, the first and most misogynist of the series (and that's saying something), but On the Game, initially perceived primarily as an opportunity to get clothes off and pander to prurience, becomes inadvertently a historical litany of man’s mistreatment of women. That said, one of the grimmest and most unerotic sequences features an old man being whipped by a formidable Victorian dominatrix.

On the Game does not proceed in chronological order, but hops, skips, and jumps backwards and forwards through the centuries, in search of nuggets of lurid information. It doesn’t tell you anything you probably don’t already know, shows the minimum required to illustrate it, and ultimately, the film is very depressing. There is one sequence of an attractive girl being mauled by several guys, and it is probably the only well-lit scene Long and his crew ever filmed... but this is hardly cause to sit through the rest.

In Too Deep

Deep Throat (1972), Inside Deep Throat (2005)

Like all faddish cause celebres, Deep Throat (as Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato's amusing documentary, Inside Deep Throat, demonstrated a few years ago) is today forgotten, but during the 1970s it acquired a reputation far above and beyond its worth, primarily for popularising the blow job, a sex act today so common that it almost ritually begins any sexual encounter put on film.

Filmed in 1972 by hairdresser turned hardcore porn hack Gerard Damiano, it seized the imagination not so much of the public as the censors, who went to town on it, and in so doing made it the most profitable porn film in the history of cinema. It almost goes without saying that the film is rubbish. A supposed comedy, it starred the dotty Linda Lovelace, a frizzy-haired nitwit who apparently gave great head, as a woman whose clitoris is in her throat. Playing her doctor was the genial Harry Reems, who--legend had it--was a mere camera operator until his chance came when the original player went AWOL. In fact, if the IMDB is to believed (and it isn’t always), Reems had been before the hardcore cameras before.

Bailey and Barbato’s documentary is far more interesting than the film itself, and paints a fascinating picture of the battle for artistic freedom in the 1970s. While I share the moralists’ amusement at the film-makers calling themselves artists, the bottom line is that the religious zealots, law enforcers, and the (pardon the expression) hardcore feminists (not the real ones, working toward equal rights and pay, but the blamers and haters)—unlikely bedfellows all--were behaving like the demented fascists they were. Even if their actions could have been in some way justified to anyone other than their blinkered selves, the censorious minority achieved--as always--the exact opposite of what they intended to. To put it bluntly, a film made for 25,000 dollars with a fair chance of making its money back, ended up securing yards of media column inches and TV coverage, became the must-see film of 1972, legitimised hardcore porn, and made six hundred million dollars (that we know of). The intimidating toughies collecting the takings from the movie houses eventually gave up counting the money, and ended up just weighing it. Weighing it. Couldn’t have done it without you, guys…

In a series of only-in-America footnotes, Reems later became a supposedly unemployable alcoholic until finding religion in the 1990s (although the IMDB has him working steadily until 1989), and Lovelace became a valuable anti-porn protester for a while, writing a tell-all autobiography in which among other sordid revelations, the then-unknown performs in Deep Throat at gunpoint (there being no other porn actresses available, presumably) before actually daring to have the gall to return to the industry freshly empowered in her fifties. The most revealing comment in Inside Deep Throat about this contradictory troubled soul is that she was easily lead, always believing the last thing she had been told about herself by people with their own agenda, whether manipulative agents, devious directors, coercive cops, posturing moralists, or smug feminists (catch the two self-righteous cliches sparring with Hugh Hefner); there’s a fascinating scene of Lovelace on a TV talk show, with a new best friend and a where-am-I-today? look on her face, being manipulated puppet-like by a well-known professional media feminist who may as well be holding a pulp sci-fi-style control box in her hand. Since the documentary was made in 2005, Damiano, Reems, and Lovelace have all passed on (old age, organ failure, and car crash respectively), so the bandwagon has finally stopped rolling.

As for the big players in Hollywood, they all came out to be photographed standing up for Reems (who, at one point was actually threatened with jail for taking the role, and fled to Europe), but quickly withdrew job offers of mainstream work when the hubbub died down and they realised the gesture wasn’t worth the cost or controversy it entailed. And so it was that thanks to an unholy alliance of police, pornographers, politicians, gangsters, religious zealots, fascists, militant feminists, moralists, and self-publicists, that the free world learned about fellatio, whether it wanted to or not. Turns out it’s not a character in Shakespeare…

Last Tango in Paris

Although today Last Tango in Paris (aka Ultimo tango a Parigi, 1972) is one of many, in 1972/3 it caused a furore in Italy, then America, and then around the world, for its frank and honest portrayal of not so much sex, as lust. And it’s the inescapable and undeniable spectre of lust that always complicates and ridicules debates on both art and porn, of which Last Tango in Paris is a little of both. It’s also a haunting film about loneliness, but the emotional aspects of the film were swamped by lurid and disproportionate media coverage that, to be fair, in turn encouraged a fair amount of intelligent and sincere comment.

The film that made writer/director Bernardo Bertolucci a global name, rather than one recognised and admired by a handful of film buffs, scandalised the media mostly for featuring a name Hollywood actor as one of the two central characters. This was the eccentric but extraordinary Marlon Brando, an American Method actor who pissed his talent away in a series of indulgent performances in mostly poor choices of film.

Best known today for his much-parodied performance in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather in 1972, and lending gravitas to the opening of 1978 movie event Superman with his poignant appearance as Superman’s father Jor-El, his best work was done and dusted early. His co-star, the young and beautiful Maria Schneider, was a newcomer whose only other claim to fame would be appearing with Jack Nicholson in the tedious The Passenger, and who crashed and burned faster than was customary for troubled starlets even in the 1970s, fighting with directors, and giving and getting bad press.

One of the better things about the 1970s was that despite the extraordinary amount of bad news and social upheaval, there was still, post-‘60s, a sense that the good guys were winning, particularly when pushing the envelope. The behavior of the tabloids where Last Tango in Paris was concerned, lead by a hysterical misrepresentation in the U.K.’s Sunday Mirror, and jumped on instantly by the rest of the pack, was both predictable and inevitable, and immediately understood--even by many of those who lapped it up--to be false and hypocritical, all part of the game. “Brando, hung up over wife’s suicide, meets sex-hungry colonel’s daughter. Their minds click. He seduces her in five minutes flat. Then follows a series of blistering sequences calculated to knock the bottom out of the back-street porno market!” it squealed. Phwoar!! Er, no.

While male members twitched at the beauty of the high maintenance and pre-meltdown Maria Schneider, all the critical accolades went deservedly to Brando for his astonishing performance. The Guardian announced that Brando had given “his best performance in twenty years. This is no mere ‘character part’ as in The Godfather, but the real thing”. “Acted by Brando as surely as never acted before” said the London Telegraph, “without a single mannerism, as if acting from life”. “Brando gives a performance of shattering intensity” said the London Times. “He transforms Last Tango into an emotional experience that leaves one totally exhausted, and yet eager to see it again as soon as possible”. Variety spoke of “a stunning portrait of one of life’s casualties, rich in pathos, self-disgust, and surprising humor. This is no mannered walk-through, nor does it smack of ‘performance’ as did his much-praised Godfather stint... and to Brando’s credit, it is never embarrassing”.

Brando is Paul, a man at the end of his tether. Walking the streets of Paris distraught and dishevelled, he is trying to come to terms with the suicide of his wife, who was having an affair with another man in the apartment block they managed. A waster and a wanderer, Paul married into money, and the police (who never intrude on the film) are suspicious of the suicide, which was messy. Prophetically walking past him with a sideways glance of sympathy before moving swiftly on, is Jeanne (Schneider), a baby-faced beauty, whose perky child-like demeanor, we will discover, covers a mature and fiery disposition.

Jeanne sees him again in the restroom of a bar, where she ‘phones her mother to tell her that she's looking at an apartment she’s found. Obtaining the spare key from the crazy old concierge, she discovers that the mysterious Paul is already there, having taken the original. With the moody and mercurial Brando lumbering around the apartment like a combination of grumpy old bear and serial killer, most intelligent women would flee... but this is a movie, a meaningful, artistic, and very French movie, and so when he lunges at her and has his way, it’s the start of a weird relationship. In the real world, he’d have his face slapped at best, a charge of rape at worst, but his brutish advances are responded to, knickers are torn off, and fully clothed, they fuck away, fast and furious.

American writer Norman Mailer, in his book Transit to Narcissus, was one dissenter. He wanted “Brando’s real cock up Schneider’s real vagina”, saying that “We are being given a fuck film without the fuck. It is like a western without the horses”! Or a gunfight without real bullets, perhaps. Putting aside for a moment that John Wayne and Clint Eastwood are not real cowboys, and Mailer’s forgetfulness that Brando and Schneider were not sex workers but actors, and that their business is thus defined as convincing fakery, there are some nice shots that are pure cinema. When Jeanne leaves the apartment after their first fuck, she runs across the road to meet her boyfriend’s train, as the camera pans up to show Paul walking across the pedestrian bridge above the traffic, and then up again to show boyfriend Tom’s train arriving.

Tom is a ludicrous character, an excitable, over-enthusiastic film-maker who surprises her by arriving with his entourage, a perpetually filming camera crew and a couple of gofers. Completely oblivious to what Jeanne is really up to (“I waited for you day and night, and cried” she mocks), he turns the camera on her at every opportunity, supposedly filming the story of their romance. Tom’s ridiculous idiocy, trying to set up corny verite scenarios where all around him is the quirky reality he’s missing, contrasts the cliches of romance that he is manufacturing for the camera nicely with the reality of Jeanne’s strange clandestine affair with Paul, which the boyfriend is completely oblivious to, and which Paul will only conduct anonymously at the shared apartment, with no names and at no other location.

Jeanne returns to the flat to find it being furnished. There are further love-making sessions, with Paul continuously laying down the law—they’ll only be together at the flat, but never reveal their names or if anything they say is the truth. There’s to be no past, no present, no future. Still not running…

Last Tango in Paris continued

When the two leads are together, Schneider holds her own against Brando superbly, never once falling under his shadow, either when they are looking over the empty apartment, or later, when they are playing silly lovers’ games, teasing each other and having playful conversations, Brando carefully and tenderly correcting her when the actress makes a hash of the English dialogue. It’s at moments like this when you realise what an effortless actor Brando was; as we know from countless blooper reels, 99 out of 100 actors would have broken character with a hoot of laughter and presumed a re-take was in order, and 99 out of 100 directors would have immediately asked for one—Schneider’s charming slips and Brando’s quiet correcting of them, steering the dialogue to where it should be, all the while expressing Paul’s growing love for her and staying in character, shows true stage-learned professionalism.

When they play their individual scenes apart from each other, Schneider fares less well, overpowered by the lame movie-making storyline she has been lumbered with (only her scenes with her racist mother stand out), and the film is Brando’s all the way, whether skulking around the blood-stained bathroom with his sister-in-law, who is bitterly cleaning up the mess and cursing the callous police officers, rowing noisily with his mother-in-law over the funeral arrangements (and then calmly but firmly closing all the nosey neighbors’ doors as he leaves), or visiting his wife’s faintly absurd and not much moved lover. Most powerful of all, of course, is his notorious improvised monologue with his dead wife’s body, as he cries and rages quietly over his inability to talk through with her about what she did and why she did it, a scene that rivals Jack Nicholson’s cathartic outpouring with his invalid father in Five Easy Pieces a couple of years earlier. Paul/Brando pours his heart out to Rosa’s dead body, lying on a bed surrounded in flowers, everything wrong and unreal, “her mother’s masterpiece”. Breaking down in tears, his reverie is interrupted by a ragged old whore howling for a room. When her customer has second thoughts and leaves, Brando runs after him and takes out his frustrations on the luckless punter.

Discovering the flat empty again, and the furniture removed, Jeanne calls Tom and tells him she’s found the perfect flat for them when they’re married... but he rejects it, still blissfully unaware of Paul, calling it squalid and unpleasant. He leaves to find them a different place, while Jeanne remains, closing everything up. But when she leaves, Paul appears, and they row in the street. They end up in the ballroom of a sterile hotel, sitting among the numerous empty tables and chairs while a Carnival of Souls-like tango competition is being conducted. While the ritualised, unromantic absurdity of the robotic tango goes on mechanically before them, Paul finally tells Jeanne everything about himself--which isn’t much. As the abysmal competition enters its closing phase with the final ten couples--the last tango--Paul and Jeanne get progressively drunk, and in those heady days of lax, non-existent security, they flounce around among the placid contestants as the judges tut and murmur, piggy-backing, rolling around, and mooning as they go.

The only downside to Last Tango, and it seems there always is one, is the harsh and discordant music from composer Oliver Nelson and saxophonist Gato Barbeiri, which is absurdly inappropriate, far too loud and in all the wrong places; Nelson seems to think he’s scoring Hitchcock. Otherwise, it is difficult to fault Last Tango in Paris, one huge plus being the opening images of paintings by Francis Bacon, which immediately disorient and dispel all expectations of standard movie eroticism drummed up by the publicity.

It has been pointed out by bean-counters that the sex and nudity in the film accounts for about just ten minutes of the running time, and that may be true (I suspect more, but who cares?), but the film nevertheless teems with lust, sexuality, and human emotion from beginning to end, carrying a tense erotic charge from the first scenes to the last. There does not have to be red-hot action on the screen for a film to be sensual; indeed, many of the softcore films reviewed in this book are sexier than the mechanical repetition of hardcore. There is actually very little on-screen fucking at all, and no cliched weaving cameras and flickering fireplaces when there is; most of the scenes between Paul and Jeanne are playful before and after sequences, the most sexy in my opinion being the moments in the bathroom, which delineate togetherness and closeness in an erotic way, rather than with the equally realistic but more distanced, clinical approach taken by Nic Roeg’s Don't Look Now at around the same time.

No less a grizzled cynic than Robert Altman announced that Last Tango was “a standard for looking at films of the past and judging films of the future”; Altman was not known for his sexual content, but there are moments in Thieves Like Us and McCabe and Mrs. Miller that are kick-ass erotic without being actual sex scenes. This assertion turned out to be more hyperbole than reality, but the early 1970s was a helluva time for ground-breaking cinema, and the film undoubtedly inspired other film-makers; it was almost certainly the catalyst for not just quality erotica across the decades like Immoral Tales, Private Vices, Public Virtues, Devil in the Flesh, La Donna Lupo, almost everything by Tinto Brass, and Q, but commercial boundary breakers like Emmanuelle and its imitators, provocateurs like Ma Mere and Shortbus etc. and the work of poseurs like Alain Robbe-Grillet and Catherine Breillat as well. Just about any film taking eroticism seriously or showing explicit sex in a context other than pornography was encouraged and enabled by the financial and artistic success of Last Tango in Paris.

No Sex Please, We're British

D.H. Lawrence… No Sex Please, We’re British (1973), The Picnic (1975), By the Sea (1982), The Look of Love (2013), Paul Raymond’s Erotica (1982)… and Mary Whitehouse

While the writing of Henry Miller was shockin’ ‘em and rockin’ ‘em in America’s law courts, the considerably less talented Mr. D.H. Lawrence was causing a similar sexual stir in Britain. The six day trial of Penguin Books at the Old Bailey in London, for affronting the Obscene Publications Act of 1959 by publishing Lady Chatterley’s Lover, was, wrote the political and social commentator Bernard Levin “a circus so hilarious, fascinating, tense, and satisfying that none who sat through all its six days will ever forget them”. 200,000 copies were sitting in a warehouse awaiting their fate, and when the jury raised the curtain on the 1960s with an acquittal, Lawrence's step-daughter trilled “I feel that a window has been opened, and fresh air has blown right through England!”. Two years later, the book had sold over three million copies. One wonders what the figures would have been if the circus hadn’t come to town.

There’s a wonderfully wicked and heartbreaking piece of film that researchers at the BBC always cruelly pounce on when putting together documentaries on censorship or sex in Britain. It shows a television interviewer creeping along a furtive and embarrassed queue of Britishers defiantly lining up outside a booksellers to purchase their copy of the freshly vindicated Lady Chatterley’s Lover. All the men shake their heads silently, backs to the camera, but he latches onto a Python-esque middle-class housewife who tries very hard not to acknowledge him, but eventually turns round and irritably snaps “I’m buying it for someone else!”. In many ways, the poor humiliated woman was.

One can imagine her getting home, shutting the door on the prying, judgemental world outside, and with a tight grip pulling the bookshop’s brown paper bag out of her handbag. Safe! Got it home! I’ll read it later! And then recalling her shame and, in a manner bringing to mind Basil Fawlty, burying her head in her hands at the thought of that film turning up on the 5.50. news. Who can I say I bought it for? I really and truly hope she enjoyed every page of her prize.

Ironically, the ‘60s ended as it had begun, with another crushing defeat of the old guard, when the Oz trial, against a wretched underground hippie magazine of the time, ended in conviction but then a spectacular overturning when even the Establishment rebelled against its own excesses, calling the subsequent sentences spiteful and vindictive--which they were. Like 1990s pop culture icon Homer Simpson, the reactionary element in society had smugly and self-satisfyingly “learned absolutely nothing”, and throughout the 1970s and 1980s, and on to the end of the century, every time the prudes and the bluenoses tried to ban, curtail, or censor the arts, the end result was always the same--a massively increased media profile and profit margin for the offending item. However, the prosecution of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, once set in motion, could not be halted. If it had been, the ludicrous Obscene Publications Act would have been redundant and ridiculed only months after coming into force. It was very much a test case.

This, of course, would have been preferable for both the liberal contingent, who didn't want it, and the reactionaries, who would possibly have eventually got a more cleverly conceived and more effective hammer with which to hit the pointy heads of the art world. Instead, the decade ended as it had begun, a prelude to years of pointless and ineffectual persecution of film, print, theatre, and music.

Lady Chatterley’s Lover has been filmed many times, inevitably, but few attempts are worthy of consideration here. Needless to say, the French were the first to have a go, as early as 1955, with L’amant de lady Chatterley, with the Americans providing a porn version, Fanny Hill meets Lady Chatterley in 1967. Britain’s similar attempt, also with Fanny Hill, was Games That Lovers Play, in 1971, with Joanna Lumley of The New Avengers, Penny Brahms (She’ll Follow You Anywhere), and Richard Wattis (Sex and the Other Woman). There have also been Italian (1977, 1989, and 1995), Japanese (1979), and Czech (1998) versions, and like these, even more closer to home versions have been more interested in cashing in on the Chatterley name than producing an accurate and faithful adaptation of what is, in truth, a rather tame and boring chick-lit book (Auntie BBC was even able to adapt it into a television serial in 1993). With regard to more literal adaptations, perhaps inevitably, Just Jaeckin and Sylvia Kristel got into the act with the quickly forgotten Lady Chatterley’s Lover of 1981, and most recently the wheel has turned full circle with France’s Lady Chatterley in 2006.

With even Lawrence having apparently rolled out three different versions of his novel, it is difficult for even purists to complain about all the spin-offs and rip-offs stealing either the Chatterley name or the rather unoriginal plot elements of what is essentially a very uptight British female fantasy. One could argue that the theme of having it off with the help (in the novel, the unsatisfied Lady Chatterley enjoys a bit of rough with the estate's hunky handyman) is essentially not only the plot of the Confessions films and numerous British ‘70s sex-coms, but every porn film that ever featured a delivery man who delivers. And it’s a delivery man who sets things in motion for No Sex Please, We’re British (1973), the title better known than its plot.

The best thing about this film (which was originally a stage play by Alistair Foot and Anthony Marriott) is of course the wonderful title. The second best thing is that it’s adapted from the play by Marriott (whose writing career began on the legendary Fireball XL-5 sci-fi puppet show) and one-liner merchants Brian Cooke and Johnnie Mortimer of Man About the House fame, one of the few genuinely amusing British television comedies to come from ITV, and the basis for America’s Three’s Company. The third is that it's graced with a superb supporting cast of British character actors, headed by the mighty Arthur Lowe and the awesome Beryl Reid.

The story is quite a clever one--a package of pornographic material gets misdelivered to the local Barclays Bank in Windsor, where the manager (Lowe) is a pompous anti-porn obsessive (and, it goes without saying, hypocrite). Rather than passing the illicit stash round and everybody having a good laugh before it hits the bin, panic ensues. Ronnie Corbett’s Brian Runnicles, a hapless scoutmaster-style nerd, first seen hop, skipping, and jumping to work, has signed for it thinking it’s Norwegian glass, and that makes him legally responsible for something that in 1970s Britain was very, very illegal.

Made for nervous and giggly BBC-watching Brits who could only begin to guess at what pornographic material might actually be like since they last saw some, No Sex Please, We’re British is a dream role for Corbett’s flustered and repressed TV persona, and stars an array of television faces and skilled veteran performers who couldn’t fail to get away with such--gosh!--risque material. As well as showcasing Arthur Lowe of Dad’s Army as the stuffy bank manager, and Corbett (one half of the The Two Ronnies) as the stammering lackey landed with the task of disposing of the dreadful stuff before somebody (gulp) sees it, we get cameos from Michael Robbins of On the Buses as an irate driver, Hammer regular Michael Ripper as a traffic warden, Gerald Sim as a vicar, Frank Thornton of Are You Being Served? as a shop manager, real-life scoundrel John Bindon (Performance, The Sweeney) as a porn shop proprietor, Brian Wilde of Porridge as a policeman, Derek Guyler of Please Sir (edited out of some prints) as a park keeper, and even Robin Askwith of the Confessions, his face obscured by cream cake slapstick but instantly recognisable by voice, as a bakery delivery boy. Heading the cast are Ian Ogilvy (Return of the Saint) and Susan Penhaligon (Bouquet of Barbed Wire) as the young marrieds around whom the story revolves. Ogilvy is okay as a second string Hugh Grant type, but Penhaligon (usually cast in soapy dramas) shines in a role that shows off her comedic talents superbly. Girl next door type Cheryl Hall is sweet as the biker/bank worker inexplicably attracted to Corbett.

With such a cast of professional troupers to hand, the film's only slight problem is that it never once pauses for breath, sustaining the endless hysteria for the entire running time as Corbett and the young couple are inundated with first photos, then reels of film, and finally massive erotic art books faster than they can bury, burn, or flush them, while hiding their activities from their pious two-faced boss (who naturally ends up running the film at the vicar’s evening soiree) and Ogilvy’s pushy mother-in-law from hell (Beryl Reid in her element), who has imposed herself on the newlyweds (who we first see having the only actual sex in the entire production in their flat above the bank). Asked why she’s bought enough luggage for two weeks when she’s only staying the night, Reid replies that she can’t possibly stay a fortnight, but might manage a week.

The dialogue (delivered by a flawless cast with military precision) is genuinely clever, as are the makers, who cleverly ensure that all audiences, whatever their true attitudes to sex, will enjoy the show. However, the film will have no truck with fence-sitting hypocrisy. Corbett’s coup-de-grace is to somehow manage, while trying to return everything else, to place an order for two genuinely attractive prostitutes (not the usual stereotypical blowzy ratbags of TV tradition) who turn up in the form of Bond girls, regular Carry On eye-candy, and TV rent-a-bimbos Valerie Leon and Margaret Nolan, and immediately recognise Lowe as “Mr. Smith”, cheerfully informing him that they take credit cards now…

Corbett was first paired with comedy show partner Ronnie Barker (a portly chameleon) on the mid-‘60s satirical review show The Frost Report, where they performed in short sketches with many of the early Monty Python people among the writing staff. Branching off on their own in 1971, they appeared for the following fifteen years as The Two Ronnies in a studio-bound comedy show for the BBC composed of sketches, solo bits, musical numbers, a filmed serial, and mock news items.

Both witty and smutty, and initially perceived too risque for the delicate palates of BBC1, they swiftly transferred from experimental BBC2 to mainstream peak-time. They maintained their series’ quality throughout, while simultaneously pursuing separate successful sit-com careers, but were often funnier when not doing squirmy sex-based schoolboy material; fondly remembered bits include a general knowledge show where the answers had double meanings because the questions were one out of sync; two separate telephone conversations that heard together have a double meaning; a butler who, pre-Soap’s Benson, is brazenly cheeking his buffoonish employer; an optician whose customer is so myopic that instead of reading the eye-chart finds letter shapes in the furniture; two dullards, one of whom keeps trying to finish the other’s sentences through inept but impertinent guesswork; a minister for equality who was literally half-man, half-woman, and so on.

However, there is no denying that the immature innuendo was a part of their success; in fifteen years, their substitute words for balls and breasts must have numbered three figures, and this was parodied so precisely and brilliantly on the 1980s satire show Not the Nine O’Clock News that the furious Barker promptly announced his retirement.

Their two half-hour, dialogue-free filmed comedies (just sound-effects, mutterings, and a wonderful music score), The Picnic (1975) and By the Sea (1982) are widely considered to be among the best work of an already impressive collection, and are intended as visual seaside postcards in the Donald McGill tradition (McGill was the premiere provider of smutty holiday cards in the 1950s, and was briefly and unbelievably jailed for his efforts). As the titles indicate, each film revolves around a uniquely British institution, all stereotypes present and undoubtedly correct. The image of the butler and the maid embedded in the back of a haystack after an emergency stop remains with me today. Had they been full-length and produced for the cinema at this time, they could have included sex and nudity and rivalled the Confessions and Adventures market, but the duo were comfortable and secure with the BBC, and would certainly have known that it was best to go the respectable route and keep clean with Auntie and their undoubtedly conservative audience. That may well have been their preferred choice anyhow; they avoided the Carry On franchise.

Despite this, and thanks to good old British double-standards, there are plenty of raunchy sequences to go with the straight spot-gags, most of them involving knickers and including one gem brazenly stolen unaltered from the great Laurel and Hardy (Men o’ War, 1929). There’s lust, and there’s intent. Many of the gags are equally ancient, but there isn’t a single dud, and Barker and Corbett’s comic timing was always faultless and infallible. If a joke is too old to muster a chuckle, you can at least marvel at the flawless execution.

Example: Corbett gets out of the car to find the toilets, and--employing his trademark brisk, self-important, slightly repressed fast walk--disappears round the corner of a quaint country cottage. A gardener is watering the grounds with a hose. With immaculate synchronicity, Corbett disappears from view, and a massive jet of water spews forth from the hose, turned off just a few perfect seconds before Corbett re-emerges. The looks on the faces of the waiting passengers are priceless, and this is the substance of the very British humor--the fact that no-one will actually talk about what they have seen, either to Corbett or to each other. The humor comes not from the corny old gags, but the players’ reaction to what they have seen or done. Every joke is based on the idea that everyone in Britain knows about sex, wants sex, and tries to have sex, but never openly discusses it; both dialogue-free films consist entirely of nudges, winks, raised eyebrows, knowing glances, and reaction shots. They work beautifully as silent films because even though sex is everywhere--peep show machines and smutty postcards both make an appearance--it is never spoken of.

However, next time someone’s getting all pompous and precious about how the British don’t want or like pornography, or that people who indulge are in the minority, just gently drop the name of sleazy, seedy Paul Raymond into the conversation. Raymond staged Britain’s first sex shows at the Raymond Revue Bar in Soho in 1958, followed it with a string of other nightclubs and West End shows, and started a porn magazine empire that dominated the sex industry for the latter half of the 20th century and enabled him to buy up the best part of Soho’s property market. Raymond’s dull, glossy, formulaic, unnatural, uninspired, loveless, humorless, and extremely limited definition of what was euphemistically called glamour photography dominated the oxymoron of British erotica for fifty years. When he died in 2008, his shabby combination of affluence and effluence had made him the richest man in Britain. He had started life as Geoffrey Quinn, with a mind-reading act in the seaside town of Clacton, before discovering the delights of showgirls and a tolerant wife.

Lumbered with the meaningless and commercially clumsy title The Look of Love, this 2013 production is the fourth film project of improvisational director Michael Winterbottom and the often inspired comic actor Steve Coogan (with whom he made the superb six part TV series The Trip, and its less inspired follow-up, The Trip to Italy). Despite the disastrously incompetent title, it is not a bad film, and never boring, but it is flawed and instantly forgettable, lacking any kind of purpose, sense of the absurd, or point of view. It attempts to portray the life of the flamboyant but intensely private Raymond, but dwells too little on the porn empire (which provides only a backdrop for the story), and too much on the wives (including Anna Friel as Jean), girlfriends (including Tamsin Egerton as the fabricated sex celebrity Fiona Richmond), and kids (brilliantly performed though those roles are). It’s more the story of Raymond’s one faithful relationship, with his favored daughter (and best friend) Debbie (Imogen Poots), which ended in the over-familiar tragedy of drugs abuse.

Yes, there is nudity, but it’s of the swiftly edited, carefully positioned, don’t-enjoy-yourself-too-much variety that afflicts far too many Brit-films more concerned with the director’s credibility with the Guardian/Sight and Sound crowd than the embarrassment of commercial success. Winterbottom’s shy, respectful direction and modest needs-must camerawork, alongside Coogan’s charm and Egerton’s class all work against the finished product, which shows only what it absolutely must and quite a bit less than it should, both in terms of skin and exposition (quite a bit of which can be found belatedly in the DVD extras—some really shit decisions were made in the editing).

Coogan is far too handsome and charismatic to replicate the reptile Raymond, in reality the stereotypical personification of the dull, tasteless spiv he was, and Egerton far too fresh-faced and attractive to re-create the hard-faced tired slapper persona of Fiona Richmond that Norfolk vicar’s daughter Julia Harrison skilfully presented as her public face. Only Chris Addison as the furry-faced pornographer Tony Powers and James Lance as the wonderfully named businessman Carl Snitcher resemble who they are supposed to be. As for the ooh-look cameos, meaningless to the international audience, and another curse of the Brit-film, with the exception of the heavily cut David Walliams, they are far too brief to either enhance or distract, and anyone rummaging in their handbag for their mints may well miss them. Stephen Fry is so brief as a brief that his entire performance appears to be in the trailer, Dara O’Briain is seen only in the distance, and this viewer completely missed Simon Bird and Matt Lucas, finding them only in the cast-in-order-of-appearance credits. Witty TV panel show participant Miles Jupp deserves a mention for his scenes as a curious and slightly uncomfortable TV interviewer; there's also a blink-and-miss moment featuring a cartoonish Lord Longford, the ludicrous and beyond parody do-gooder (and do-badder—look him up) and anti-porn campaigner of the era, forever doing “research”.

Scenes crucial to understanding Raymond, his entourage, and his customers, are all belatedly found on the DVD extras menu, instead of in the film, where they would have added about five or ten useful minutes to the running time. These include an exotic fan dance to illustrate the limitations of the daring early stage shows, a business meeting in a pub where Raymond and Snitcher discuss their empire (and marvel incredulously at the success of the desperately downmarket Razzle, which originally, as its models demonstrated, cost less than a pound coin), Raymond indulging in drugs (which explains his tolerance of his daughter’s habit), and the explanation for David Walliams’ kinky vicar character. The soundtrack, which in a film of this sort would be expected to indicate specific time periods, is chronologically all over the place.

In a perfect world, this would have been an unavoidably heavy-handed but wicked parody of British porn that only fleetingly mentioned Raymond’s family life. Second best would have been a pro-porn, Tinto Brass-style celebration of lust and hedonism, with a few fun jabs at the British attitude to sex. At worst, it could have been a dry, dour, denunciation of Raymond and everything he stood for, praised by the last remaining dim old-school feminists and the lower middle class tabloids, and pandering to the smug hypocrisies of the sexually repressed Britain that secretly bought into Raymond’s narrow view of sex and showmanship. Even that would have been preferable to saying nothing at all about anything. As things stand, The Look of Love isn’t even an excuse for some good, honest voyeurism.

But telling the Paul Raymond story from any perspective is more complicated than it looks. It would be easy to point the finger at Raymond and imply that his lifestyle caused all his misfortunes, but in fact, his years as a second-rate Hugh Hefner surrounded him with wealth, women, and comfort. The things that went wrong in his life--infidelity, divorce, and a daughter on drugs--had nothing to do with his money or his business, and are too often the events in the lives of many married couples from all walks of life. Winterbottom and Coogan wisely do not try and make their film a morality tale, as the moral would appear to be that if you have to suffer loss in life, at least suffer in comfort. You do not have to run a porn empire to mess up a marriage, ignore or indulge your offspring, or lose a child to the allure of drugs. In business terms, the reclusive Raymond did everything right, his commercial failures (including two vanity projects) easily supported by his more profitable ventures.

Those two costly vanity projects were an indulgent musical stage show showcasing his daughter’s lack of talent, and an ill-advised ego-boosting sex film showing off his empire, but while his daughter’s song and dance routines have fortunately faded into the mists of time, the 1982 film Paul Raymond’s Erotica survives in all its sordid glory, ushering in a decade far more tawdry and tasteless in retrospect than the 1970s it frequently mocked. Produced by Brian Smedley-Ashton and James Kenelm Clarke, the same dynamic duo who made Fiona Richmond’s dismal sex films Let’s Get Laid and Hardcore (which wasn’t), it opens with a Fiona Richmond lookalike performing a supposedly erotic dance in front of some very depressed-looking men, one of whom is Raymond. An assortment of shabby stage acts and ludicrous badly-shot sex scenes with scissors, saunas, stables, bottles, and pirate costumes follow as only the ‘80s could do them, interspersed with shots of Raymond trying to look like he’s in charge and making fake decisions. The very thin premise (one hesitates to use the term story) concerns French hardcore actress Brigitte Lahaie as a Parisian journalist who has arrived in London to investigate the world of Paul Raymond, but it isn’t long before everything onscreen has conspired to make everybody concerned look ridiculous.

Watching the pitiful array of dick-shrinking dance routines and dreary sex in Paul Raymond’s Erotica illustrates perfectly the side of Raymond’s success that the Winterbottom film shied away from. This was all there was, skinny, bored slappers going through aerobics routines with feather boas, and Raymond’s magazines had the infuriating ability to take six diverse and attractive young women and make them look like identical painted pipecleaners, arranged in seven or eight standard poses; every single issue of Men Only and Club International, this month’s issue, next month’s issue, and last month’s issue, looked exactly like each other, and as this film demonstrates, every Paul Raymond model looked exactly the same--thin body, perfect breasts, permed hair, and way too much make-up. It was little wonder that the young lads of the day flocked immediately to the more normal, natural, everyday bodies of the working class girls who flashed boob and bum for his more downmarket Escort and Razzle titles.

When video arrived, Raymond was swiftly outmanoeuvred if not exactly outclassed by the abundance of in-your-face amateur porn and the likes of Electric Blue, who put Raymond’s magazine images into moving pictures. Why sit in silence at a sticky table in Soho, with an expensive drink, immobile face, and a raincoat on your lap, watching girls flounce around a stage in the distance, when you could lounge in comfort on your sofa in glorious privacy, with stop, still-frame, zoom, and fast-forward and rewind in one hand and guess what in the other? Raymond thought he was offering his audience glamour (and indeed “erotica”), but they had turned up for the tit and ass, not the song and dance. He hadn’t noticed that the British preferred Carry On and Confessions to Emmanuelle and Playboy. Even with David Sullivan’s hideous works staring him in the face, he still made Paul Raymond’s Erotica, giving them Brigitte Lahaie from Paris, when all the evidence suggested they wanted Mavis from Basingstoke.

Raymond’s absurd and narrow body fascism would have been the perfect confirmation of the 1980s feminist view that porn was a male conspiracy to encourage both men and women to disdain the genuine female form in all its variety of beauty, if it hadn’t have been for the annoying presence of the confidence-destroying three-headed hydra of mainstream weight-loss, fashion, and beauty magazines supported by cosmetics and clothes advertising and purchased willingly and en masse by women. Raymond’s detractors were probably less concerned with the image of women he was promoting as the fact that they were unclothed and ready and willing for sex. It was this that made such critics a joke in the eyes of the general public, exhibiting a point of view clearly provoked by fear of sex, and barely concealed rage that their inhibitions, opinions, and agenda were not accepted by the majority, and deemed unworthy of taking seriously.

No Sex Please, We're British continued

One group that did take this sort of thing very seriously were in the 1970s represented by a laughable stereotype named Mary Whitehouse, a floral-print fascist with mad eyes gleaming righteously from behind thick spectacles; satirist Ned Sherrin once quipped that if Mary Whitehouse had not existed, the BBC would have had to invent her. Certainly no other media outlet gave her so many opportunities to oppose them; rather than defending their own programming, so often did the BBC lead the way in giving her a platform for her views that it almost qualified as self-harming. Unfortunately, although my generation was and is heartily sick of her, no book that spends as much time in the 1970s as this one can justly ignore this peculiar person.

Frequently surrounded by a bizarre entourage of flowery-hatted clones, Whitehouse claimed to be representing what she memorably termed Britain’s “silent majority”. It was actually a very vocal minority; she only had to publicly oppose something, and viewing figures or sales figures for that particular subject shot up, not down. She called her organisation the Festival of Light, but it was a celebration of darkness and she would have been as comical a figure as she looked but for one thing: the media loved her ability to create a fuss and fill pages and airwaves with controversy, and entered into an unholy pact with her as the physical form of the enemy of all things liberal, pandering to and feeding her zealous fervour against all things sexual. The BBC, forever trying to justify itself with what they called “balance” (as long as “balance” was defined by the status quo), were particularly to blame for making her the go-to person for lively quotes, rather like a weak-willed woman who keeps returning to an abusive partner, although their sole rival broadcaster of the 1970s, the commercial ITV network, alongside sections of the press which should have known better, also played their part in boosting her profile for the sake of fermenting sex-themed controversy. In doing this, they facilitated her bullying machinations against the artistic community, and were often culpable in her few successful assaults on individual and artistic freedom by giving her a platform in the first place.

Initially dismissed in the 1960s by her most powerful enemy, BBC Director General Sir Hugh Carlton-Greene, as a bad joke, somehow, as the years wore on, this nasty, small-minded little woman convinced them that she was a force to be reckoned with, and had an argument worth listening to. Neither was true; she was irrational and bigoted, and supply and demand and viewing figures proved conclusively and consistently that she was unrepresentative of the general public. During the 1980s, Broadcast, the industry trade paper for television, revealed that a minimum of 178,000 viewers were needed to register on the television ratings system. Whitehouse, who used to bump up her membership by asking local vicars and other worthies if they would like the numbers of their organisations or congregations to be made “affiliated members” (many people no doubt didn't even know they were signed up!) still only had 148,000 names--thirty thousand less than the required viewers to acquire a zero ratings point. Even with unwitting members of other organisations often unknowingly backing her opinions, Whitehouse’s membership was so insignificant, it couldn't even be measured on the standard television ratings system. Silent perhaps, but hardly a majority!

It was also not true that she was an ordinary housewife who started her campaign because of outrage at BBC programming in the ‘60s; she had been a member of reactionary morals groups since her schooldays, and by her own admission literally believed she was getting messages from God. Although she forced a legal apology from Johnny Speight, a television scriptwriter whose work she had attacked, for calling her a fascist, she brazenly opposed freedom of expression, homosexuality, and pacifism, as well as the broadcast of Holocaust footage in documentaries (“very off-putting”, she said).

Whitehouse was undeniably absurd, which is why she was considered harmless by smug bookers and researchers, but she was also devious and dangerous and ever-available as the easy option for lazy programme-makers during the 1970s and ‘80s. If the BBC had simply ignored her, or even put forward a cogent reasoned argument, she wouldn’t have received half the press attention she enjoyed--but she was good television. Although she was a bully, she was also an elderly woman, and many recoiled from being seen to stand up to her for fear of looking like bullies themselves. However, like all bullies, on the rare occasion she was challenged, she crumbled and retreated quickly, if only to regroup; beaten down by logic in one live ITV debate, she left the studio during the commercial break.

Amusingly, she was the daughter of a travelling salesman, and she and her husband not only had separate beds, but separate bedrooms (“different sleeping patterns”, she explained). As a teacher, she had taught sex education (she believed, she wrote, that homosexuality could be cured, and was the result of “abnormal sex during pregnancy”), but her students clearly knew more than she felt they ought to. When they simulated intercourse in front of the horrified educator who was supposed to be informing them, they told her they were copying Christine Keeler and Mandy Rice-Davies, as seen on television. A moment’s rational thought would have told anyone else that they could have seen no such thing, but Whitehouse was never known for rational thought. However, one obvious development did eventually dawn on her, and it was the turning point for her success/failure ratio. It was the acceptance that she did not, in fact, have the support of the masses.

Once she realised that she was acting as an accidental publicist for the things she despised, and inadvertently promoting them, she trawled the law books for ancient legislation to force her narrow-minded views to victory in spite of public opinion. This became one of her typical ploys, to mis-use arcane and ridiculous old laws that were still on the books gathering dust to bring vexatious and costly lawsuits against works she took exception to--an ancient law on blasphemy to close down a gay theatre production, or a vagrancy law against a private members cinema club screening of the weird Blow Out.

The assault on the play was successful, simply by bringing a prohibitively expensive legal battle to the courts despite massive and prominent fund-raising by galvanised liberals, and by the 1980s, Whitehouse had ceased to be a figure of fun and become a genuinely dangerous opponent of individual and artistic freedoms. In the free-wheeling, open-minded ‘60s and ‘70s, Whitehouse was a much-mocked and heavily-parodied figure of fun, memorably sent up in TV’s The Goodies by Beryl Reid as “Desiree Carthorse”, and pilloried in sex films and sit-coms (The Goodies comedy troupe went for her to restore their street-cred after she praised their TV show!). But after two decades of tireless and persistent publicity, both sought and offered, the blue skies had darkened. The ‘80s were coming.

Allied with the new reactionaries in political power, she found a Tweedledee in Margaret Thatcher (another supposed middle-aged handbag-wielding joke who turned out to be misjudged) to her Tweedledum. Previously, the Conservatives had treated her with the same disdain and mild amusement as everyone else, but in 1983, a phoney moral panic to distract attention from the failure of the new government’s four-year-old policies cynically suited their purposes, and she found sympathy from publicity-seeking MPs when she launched a devastating attack on the new-born video industry which crippled home entertainment for a decade--something she could never have achieved, had she been properly and rightfully ignored like all other cranks by the liberal media in the 1970s.

In the case of film censorship in the early ‘70s however, Whitehouse and the other God-botherers suffered a string of embarrassing defeats, often satisfyingly tinged with humor and ridicule. For a start, she put the British Board of Film Classification, themselves a surreal bad joke, in the ludicrous position of opposing censorship, as they frequently had to defend their butchering, rather than banning, of controversial films (the Board existed, after all, not to protect the public, but to protect the film industry’s profits from government intervention, so they would rather cut a film than prevent release). The Devils, Straw Dogs, and A Clockwork Orange all suffered snips and stabs, the first two courting controversy deliberately, all part of the 1970s media game as tabloids feigned outrage and the censors feigned liberalism, everyone making money as they went. Smaller controversies and cuts dogged WR--Mysteries of the Organism, The Nightcomers, El Topo, Don’t Look Now, Last Tango in Paris, and The Night Crawlers.

The history of censorship in Britain has always been dominated by two consistently recurring assumptions that have blighted the efforts of both the guardians of morality and the advocates of personal and artistic freedom. The censors have never understood that the professional complainers are never placated by token gestures such as small, stupid cuts to sex scenes or the amount of punches thrown or bullets fired, but simply encouraged... and as a result of this, many films are needlessly mutilated by broadcasters and distributors for the benefit of people who are either never going to see the film anyway, or will still be upset if they do. For their part, the vociferous professional complainers took decades to grasp the consistently proven truth that the publicity they stoke up by railing against plays, music, and films that offend them simply increases the notoriety, profile, and profits of the very material they are trying to dispose of. Both of these factors came into play during the assault against Last Tango in Paris.

The fuss about Last Tango in Paris was particularly delightful because it concerned sex, rather than violence, and was thus surely a gift from God rather than an affront to him. Last Tango in Paris was passed by the censor with what the Board itself admitted was a “purely political” ten second cut in the infamous “butter and buggery” scene, of Brando putting the butter on Schneider’s anus to facilitate anal sex. To a British cinema audience raised on Carry On films and The Benny Hill Show, this rendered the entire business successfully vague and mysterious, with few people prepared to admit they either knew, or didn't know, exactly what Brando was doing with something most Brits only spread on their breakfast toast.

The fun continued as Whitehouse escalated her attack by encouraging local councils to ban the film outright in the areas they presided over. When conservative councils in reactionary backwaters duly obliged, the same papers that had encouraged the outcry in the first place took great pleasure in gleefully reporting that regular coach trips to more liberal locations were being organised by victims of censorship anxious to see what all the fuss was about. Consequently, hordes of coach parties from say, locations with the mentality of Worthing or Eastbourne descended on, for example, Brighton or London for a jolly day trip to see a Bernardo Bertolucci art film at the cinema they would otherwise never have noticed, in two-fingered defiance of their spluttering self-appointed guardians.

It got better. The critical and commercial success of Last Tango in Paris in 1973 provoked one of Whitehouse’s acolytes--a member of the Salvation Army in his seventies--to bring a private prosecution against United Artists on the basis that the film was not fictional because Brando and Schneider were physically acting out the sex act in a manner “that very few human eyes had ever been called to look at”. This sweetly naive view of the entire history of the human race, coupled with a brazen confusion between acting and reality, was enabled by the frequently abused and discredited Obscene Publications Act that had previously allowed the famously entertaining and counter-productive prosecutions of the novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover and counter-culture magazine Oz, and the case unbelievably went to trial, ending with a verdict of no case to answer... but not before the defence had been obliged to list numerous other instances of buggery in the movies for the public’s enlightenment, including Scorpio Rising, Deliverance, and Pasolini’s Canterbury Tales.

As the ‘70s progressed, Whitehouse and her advocates tried repeatedly and unsuccessfully to dispose of films they were in fact helping to publicise, including the aforementioned Canterbury Tales, the undeserving The Exorcist (a dismal piece of tripe elevated to iconic status by its opponents), and the innocuous and silly Emmanuelle films. However, the biggest battles would be fought over Pasolini’s Salo (when the law used to attack the cinema showing it was “keeping a disorderly house”!) and--more fun--Monty Python’s Life of Brian.

Whitehouse died in 2001 at age 91, still a figure of confusion and controversy. Today, all the films, music, and TV shows that she opposed are freely available (with the exception of some of Speight’s TV work, which was, like much BBC programming of the period, routinely junked), many of the poorer endeavors much better known after her interference.

Sex and Satire

Flesh Gordon (1974), Flesh Gordon 2: Flesh Gordon meets the Cosmic Cheerleaders (1990), Games Girls Play (1974), Eskimo Nell (1975), Justine’s Hot Nights (1975), Conviene Fare Bene L’Amore (1975)

One of the most extraordinary porn films of the sizzling ‘70s was undoubtedly Flesh Gordon (1974), a lurid satire of Alex Raymond’s superlative Flash Gordon comic strip, which had been transformed into one of the cinema’s earliest science fiction productions by Universal in 1936. When the camp craze initiated by the 1966 Batman TV series caused some of the classic serials from Universal, Columbia, and Republic to be revived on college campuses across America, it was only a matter of time before Flash Gordon returned. However, it would be 1980--two years after the Salkinds brought back Superman--that a rather redundant and silly Hollywood remake of Flash Gordon would appear. Seven years earlier, the rather more innovative, but equally puerile Flesh Gordon had hit movie screens with the dull thud of a rotten tomato.

A peculiar mix of Mad magazine-style satire and sophomore smut, Flesh Gordon--while cleverly done--showed few signs of wit. Dale Arden was renamed Dale Ardor, Dr. Zarkov became Dr. Jerkoff, and the villainous Ming the Merciless was now Emperor Wang... and so on. With a phallic-shaped spaceship produced bluntly in the shape of a penis, a sex-ray hitting the Earth whose effects are sadly left mostly to our imagination, a comedy lesbian with a cigar, and a bunch of extraterrestrial merry men portrayed as stereotypical gays, it proffered the sort of humor that would embarrass a ten-year-old.

The cast are uniformly awful, the two leads clearly having been dubbed--a futile exercise given the muddy sound quality. Jason Williams had been cast due to his resemblance to the comic strip character, while porn actress Suzanne Fields had the face of a blow-up doll but not the body. None of the players or extras are particularly attractive, which in 1970s American porn is par for the course (even though you might consider it a major misunderstanding of the medium), and the print is foggy and blurry anyway, with no-one filmed to look their best. A never-ending sex orgy in Wang’s palace is perpetually filmed in long-shot.

In a failed attempt to give the film credibility and gravitas, familiar sci-fi film face and SF TV veteran John Hoyt (When Worlds Collide, Attack of the Puppet People, The Time Travellers) was drafted in to open proceedings as Gordon’s father. Hoyt had appeared in The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits, and Star Trek’s first pilot, among many others, and even if audiences couldn’t place him, he brought subliminal verisimilitude to the production. Writer/director/producers Michael Benveniste and Howard Ziehm were also smart enough not to cut corners on the schlocky special effects, drafting in Rick Baker (with the abysmal 1976 King Kong remake, An American Werewolf in London, Michael Jackson’s Thriller all still ahead of him) for visual effects and an anagramatically pseudonymous Jim Danforth (The Outer Limits, Jack the Giant Killer, The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm, When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth) to provide cheesy stop-motion monsters.

Despite a poorly chosen voiceover, Danforth’s stop-motion monster in the style of Twenty Million Miles to Earth’s Ymir by Ray Harryhausen is the only contribution to raise a real laugh, doing a King Kong-style dive from a towering building to a muttered “Oh shit” when he falls to his doom. Also straying in from the rival Republic serials are some splendid tin robots clearly inspired by Undersea Kingdom and others from that studio. There are, mainly due to the law of averages, a few minor laughs along the way, such as the destruction of the city, when all the orgy participants are seen running for their lives while holding their various sexual positions. However, the makers don’t seem to have that clear an idea about sex in general, mostly displaying the attitudes and awareness of twelve year olds. Flesh Gordon, as well as snickering at tits and dicks as only the Brits and Yanks can do, is also yet another of those 1970s films that thinks the concept of rape is frivolous.

Some of the visual gags precede 1979’s Airplane!, but none of them are particularly funny. There is little to amuse the easy-going Flash Gordon aficionado, other than the spoofing of Buster Crabbe’s tendency to lose his temper in “Why, you…!” fashion at the drop of a threat. The main appeal of this sort of spoof in 1973 was that nothing similar had yet been done in film (only in comics like Mad and Not Brand Echh), and that there was nowhere else to see such a thing (as it was much too strong for TV at the time). Consequently, Flesh Gordon attracted far more attention than it deserved to, or would today.

This was the problem that faced the sequel, which was completely ignored with a universal “Meh”. Just as the original Flash Gordon serial spawned two sequels, Ziehm returned to the well many years later in 1990 for Flesh Gordon 2: Flesh Gordon meets the Cosmic Cheerleaders. Kickboxer Vince Murdocco was now cast as Flesh Gordon, with Robyn Kelly as Dale. It featured endless bodily function jokes and mounds upon mounds of tits, and amazingly was even more infantile than the first one. With a mullet-headed Flash and an auburn-haired Dale Arden, the film made less effort to replicate the original than the first offering, being more a duplication of Flesh Gordon than Flash Gordon. Once again, a vast amount of effort went into the child-like effects, costumes, and set design just to tell a few toilet jokes, and the film never really recovers from one of those corny openings where the initial scenes of jeopardy turn out to be a movie shoot, a tired and irritating ploy which instantly dissolves any small amount of goodwill on the part of a tolerant and impartial audience that the producers might have started out with.

A slightly more adult attempt at satire was attempted the following year in 1974’s Games Girls Play (aka The Bunny Caper, aka Sex Play), a fascinating period piece, and a real oddity--an American film that aspires to political satire, set and filmed in England, but peopled with the sort of reliable comic foils and Aunt Sallys usually found in both American high school comedies and British ‘60s and ‘70s smut--prim, uptight, jolly hockeysticks headmistress, bull-dyke gym teacher with a whistle-fetish... you get the picture. The plot concerns the daughter of an American diplomat whose embarrassing sexual antics are starting to make waves. She is promptly sent across them, to England, in the hope that she will be transformed into a prim young miss. Needless to say, she immediately corrupts all around her. These three English roses and their American instigator will never win any acting honors, but this is beside the point.

The director, incredibly, was Jack Arnold, he of 1950s creature feature fame, who was well on his way down the slippery slope at this time, and headed for TV schlockland. Perhaps this was for the best, as Christina Hart tells in the DVD extras how embarrassed he was asking her to get naked at the auditions. American cinema in the 1970s would have been tough for him!

The comedy, such as it is, is generally funny in its infantile way, and there’s plenty of the requisite nudity, despite the director’s obvious shyness. A skinnydipping scene is good high-spirited fun, and there could have been more of the prudes going apopletic, but a promising basketball game sequence completely falls apart from lack of imagination and doesn't even offer the suggested Revenge of the Cheerleaders-style shower scene. Even so, the first half of the film, set in a sort of Carry On at St. Trinians manner by way of Private School and Porky’s, is much more successful than the latter half, when the girls go into London to bed political high rollers for a bet. While still amusing, there was still considerable mileage to be had out of the stuffy school scenario, and the second half drags in places as well as being as dated as political satire always swiftly is. Built around the sex life of a Henry Kissinger type, the well-known womaniser of the Nixon administration, and the ping-pong tournament incident that ultimately lead to Nixon’s visit to China, it dates the film’s script almost to the month. Naturally, none of this meant anything ten years later, leaving just the tired bare bones plot of a diplomatic incident. Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of the film, apart from the ghastly line-readings of Jane Anthony (whose greatest attributes quickly become obvious in the nude scenes), are the glimpses of the clutter-free 1970s capital, and the airport sign that reads “Rothmans welcomes you to London”! What a different world it was.

That same year saw cinema screens blighted with Eskimo Nell, a heavy-handed satire on the sex-com industry by Stanley Long, who certainly had the credentials. Long had been what used to be euphemistically called a glamour photographer since the ‘50s, and then made what were euphemistically called naturist films in the early ‘60s, gradually moving on to contribute to the sex film glut of the 1970s with what were um, euphemistically called social documentary films. In each case it was an excuse to get naked women past the absurd censorship authorities that blighted Blighty in the ‘60s and ‘70s; every time somebody let it all hang out, the censors told them to put it all back in again. His main claim to fame was as the director and producer of the Adventures of... series that ripped off the superior and more successful Confessions of... films... after which, he retired with all his money! Good for him.

The audience for this rubbish came off a little less enriched. Eskimo Nell is a British sex-com as only the British can make them--unsexy and unfunny! There are about six good jokes and two funny moments in this infantile effort, which relates the adventures of a couple of naive beginners who quickly learn the reality of the British film industry of the 1970s when they get conned into guaranteeing four different versions of the same film for four different backers by sleazy film producer and sweaty philistine Benny U. Murdoch... of BUM Pictures. That’s basically the level of the humor, which begins with naive and ambitious young film director Michael Armstrong (who also wrote the script) being thrown out of all the major distributors in Wardour Street to the sound of penny whistles and kaboings. The entire production is smothered by the sort of loud, squawking music that tries to prompt the audience into laughing in the absence of any actual laughs.

A huge cast composed equally of comedy veterans and Stanley Long reliables deliver the sledgehammer wit, with Armstrong, Christopher Timothy as the virginal scriptwriter with a passion for penguins, and Terence Edmond as a serial shagger, making three likeable leads. Dear old Roy Kinnear works hard as Benny, ably assisted by Diane Langton of Confessions of a Pop Performer as the Diana Dors-like Gladys Armitage, Benny’s popsie and intended leading lady. Working too hard are Long regular Anna Quayle, who chews the scenery like a lunatic, Beth Porter ripping off Singing in the Rain as a New Yoik bimbo, and scary Prudence Drage, another ‘70s sex-com regular, as a singer specialising in kung fu. More measured performances come from Christopher Neil (future star of the Adventures), Katy Manning of Doctor Who fame, and Rosalind Knight with a gift of a role as the token prude.

One of the cleverer scenes switches back and forth between the pretentious director and the breast-fixated Benny relating the plot--or their version of it--to the prospective buyers. While Armstrong’s Dennis drivels on to the puritans about “lots and lots of snow... vast panoramas of white”, Benny’s version seems to contain the word “tits” a lot... Inevitably (ho, ho) the cans of film all get mixed up and the wrong version (chortle) gets delivered to the Royal Charity Performance! Oh, no!! The Queen’s there!! (Snicker).

Like the Adventures films, Long’s efforts are most interesting for the mondo filming around the streets of London, including 1970s Leicester Square, as the cast members scurry across car-honking, traffic-laden main streets in character. All the film cans, borrowed with a promise of being returned safely, were battered and bruised when they went home, some beyond all hope of ever being used again. Perhaps that’s where The Wicker Man went...

“I didn’t go to drama school to show off my bum” says actress Nina to her film director husband in Justine’s Hot Nights (1975)... while showing her bum as she gets in the bath. Jean Claude Roy’s satire on the trend towards pornography was both timely and probably the most interesting film he made, although it’s the least erotic in a string of near-misses including Dressage, Education Anglaise, and The Good Little Girls. The implication throughout is that everybody is playing the sex card purely for profit, but no-one really wants to do it. This would certainly explain the lacklustre quality of his other films. Roy’s heart may not have been in the porn industry, but his head was.

We’re in Paris, France. Nina (Michele Baron) has been offered a stage play in which she spends most of her time in bed with a German Shepherd--of the dog variety (“It’s a co-production” says her agent). Husband Mik (Philippe Gaste) has been forced to accept a job directing a sex film--the first offer he’s had in two years--but hasn’t any ideas (apparently he has to write it too?). Most of the gags to follow come from the fabrications of the two of them as they create the imaginary Justine, who comes to visit them in the form of dancer Nadia Kapler and join in their sex fantasies, obligingly presented to us by Roy, who inevitably goes for Emmanuelle, Last Tango in Paris, Immoral Tales, and gags about high-class brothel-keeper Madame Claude and our old friend Henry Kissinger again, as well as inevitably taking a poke at the church’s naughty nuns and pervy priests, the latter of whom has Chatterley-style fantasies related to him through the confessional’s grill.

It has become apparent from researching this book that there was an element of truth to Roy’s thesis that the film industry’s interest in sex was often cynical, pragmatic, and surrendering. We know for certain that there were several British directors--Val Guest, Lindsay Shonteff, Norman J. Warren--who didn’t particularly want to make these films but wanted to work, and that there were others in the business--Stanley Long, the Fords, Paul Raymond, David Sullivan--who were more interested in porn and money than art and erotica. However, for every Guest, Shonteff, and Warren there was a Roeg or a Russell or a Bertolucci who did want to leave the coy, mannered, and sexually sterile films of the ‘50s behind and push the envelope a little, and several others--Jansco, Borowczyk, Brass, Jaeckin, Giacobetti--who had an eye for the erotic and a genuine, lusty appreciation of feminine, and occasionally masculine, beauty.

It is also undeniable that this increased sexuality and frankness was what most of the paying audience wanted, nostalgists, traditionalists, academics, and critics be damned. Whether it was porn, art, erotica, or sex-coms, or just more realism in mainstream film, sex was all that was selling in the ‘70s, and the only weapon in cinema’s armoury to overcome the allure of a safe and self-censoring television industry.

It was a bizarre and personal subject for Roy to tackle, particularly under a traditional sex film pseudonym. Did he really mean what he was saying? Why hide? He made nothing but sex films, and this is another one. The pot was calling the kettle black. By 1975, the peak of the sex film boom, many of the cliches of pornography--erotic nuns, Emmanuelle, sado-masochism, black leather, etc. etc.--had become over-familiar and ripe for satire, and references to Diderot and De Sade make the final cut, along with dear old King Kong, a nod to the Freudian gorilla fantasies that were strangely prevalent in the 1930s and ‘40s. Roy’s unhappiness with the world also briefly extends further, with a subject-irrelevant sequence comparing a cat food commercial with real film footage of starving Africans, an immature, crude and naive shot at the consumerism that was keeping him in comfort and work. Were we supposed to be starving our pets until the political situation in Africa resolved itself, or sending cat food over there?

Roy makes his most pertinent point for posterity inadvertently. Any film showing a glimpse of oral sex in the last thirty years would not pass unnoticed by the media pundits. And yet, Justine’s Hot Nights, which features three or four blink-and-miss shots of hardcore fellatio, came and went in the night like a quick knee-trembler, virtually ignored by press and public alike.

Amazingly, Michele Baron never made another film after her debut here, even though the actress is attractive, uninhibited, and sparkles in the role of Nina, her personality leaping from the screen. In contrast, Nadia Kapler, who also never made another film, and had only two prior bit parts way down the cast lists, is a rather dull and ordinary-looking fantasy figure. She’s a dancer playing a dancer, but she hardly dances. Had Roy used some of the imagination he asks of his lead characters, he might have stunt-cast a traditional beauty and ended up with a film people noticed. This was also Philippe Gaste’s only leading role, although he made numerous films before and after, mostly sex films and almost always bits; he appears briefly in Tropic of Cancer, Requiem for a Vampire, and Schoolgirl Report no. 5, among many others of a similar nature. Together, Gaste and Baron make a believable and likeable couple, and their bathtub scene together in particular is pleasantly natural and sexual, full of the relaxed, playful lust that comes with the familiarity of a steady relationship. Mik and Nina are not bored with life, or each other, or sex, and the film is pleasingly free of bickering over his acceptance of the sex movie.

The film ends with a surreal shot of Mik, Nina, Justine, the German Shepherd, and a naked bellboy all assembled in a mock-up of a hotel room and preparing to pair off. There’s enough here to keep you interested for the duration, as is usual with Roy, and plenty of bodies on display, but the never-naked Nadia is a serious casting misstep, and there’s nothing deader than out-of-date satire.

Then again, Conviene Fare Bene L’Amore (aka Love and Energy, also 1975), written and directed by Pasquale Festa Campanile (writer/director of cult obscurity Hitch Hike), is that rare exception, a very ‘70s satire as relevant today as it ever was. The big media fear fantasy of the 1970s (based in part on reality, as they all are, and then blown out of all proportion to take in theory and fable) was the so-called energy crisis, the big debate about what the world would do if the West ran out of oil, or worse, the East withheld it. It was certainly a possibility if one assembled a selection of projected futures, and Conviene Fare Bene L’Amore is a fanciful and fun satire on one just such world.

The film opens on a wonderful montage of a world bereft of power, as all manner of strange transport--skateboards, cyclists, roller-skaters, rickshaws, and horse-and-buggy contraptions--fill the now empty motorways. The eco-fascists have inadvertently got their way. Everyone wears an extra layer of clothes, and rusting motor-vehicles lie abandoned in the streets--but for one slightly mad collector, who keeps his car shining and covered under a protective sheet, sitting inside it and making driving noises like a child. Across the nation, and presumably the free world, the oil crisis has come to its natural conclusion. Families sit in semi-darkness without TV, and a crowd of mournful adults point at grounded ‘planes, trying to explain to their children how they used to fly! It’s all good, funny, clever stuff.

Enter mad professor Enrico Nobili (Luigi Proetti), who has devised a contraption (with the help of some remarkably dedicated assistants willing to drop underwear on command!) to get the world moving again by harnessing the power of sexual energy--cue interesting scene of three assistants, two male and one female, running their hands over the naked Eleonora Giorgi. A wank flickers a light-bulb, foreplay lights several, a quickie illuminates a chandelier briefly, and so on. To continue his experiments he needs a really good-looking couple who are totally into each other. Rather than simply advertise, or book a couple of porn stars, he takes the far more intriguing course of kidnapping two potential strangers off the street, sticking them in bed together, and keeping them captive until they copulate!

Francesca De Renzi (pretty Agostina Belli), who has a small army of children to prove her enthusiasm, and amiable everyman Daniele Venturoli (Christian De Sica, a sort of Italian version of the reluctant shaggers in the British sex-coms) are the lucky couple. Naturally, despite their reluctance to be coerced into sex, they fall in love.

As the experiments escalate, the film builds on the initial idea, bringing in church (a big deal in Catholic Italy) and government, pragmatic and devious respectively. At one point, a small army of worthies take over a hotel with a two-way mirror, where everyone watches our young couple attempt to power three elevators (two and a half return to the ground floor, whereupon a reserve player is quickly brought in to leap on De Sica and bring the other volunteer home!). There’s another very funny scene when the couple are kidnapped and encouraged to power up a locomotive.

When the general public find out, all of Italy is banging away to put the lights back on, and encouragement is given to men and women alike by having footballs look like bums and phallic lipsticks and hairdryers to get the girls in the mood. Two parents hump away furiously in the bedroom for the benefit of the kids, who are downstairs watching the TV--interrupted by a literal news flash from a topless newsreader. Ordinary stock footage of ‘planes flying, cars moving, and buildings, streets and fairgrounds suddenly lighting up transforms into punchlines.

There is undoubtedly much more satirical content than was available to me in the visuals, but without any subtitles of either the English or Italian language on the DVD, the fifty percent that was dialogue was lost to me. Visually, the other fifty percent is very witty; sexually, although the concept reads well on paper, there was not much inspiration in the filming of sequences which, in the hands of a more adventurous film-maker, could have been much bigger and better. Campanile is one of those directors who uses whatever is needed to tell the story, but no more, a sort of Italian Stanley Long or Norman J. Warren, and so you see exactly what is necessary to move events along, and that’s it. Consequently, the love-making is perfunctory (Eleonora Giorgi, the only asset of the dreary Story of a Cloistered Nun, is particularly attractive as the professor’s ready and willing assistant, jumping on Daniele every time Francesca flags), and set-pieces that could have been extraordinary, such as the bussing in of willing participants for the huge sex orgy, are suggested rather than shown. The film ends with our young couple together by choice rather than circumstance, and a dreary Greens’ wet dream of a world bereft of warmth and power is transformed into a joyful world of lust and sex. If ever there was a film begging to be remade for the twenty-first century (and with a little more oomph), it's Conviene Fare Bene L’Amore.

Don’t Look Now, it’s Nic Roeg

Here’s genius. If you haven’t yet seen the legendary Don’t Look Now (1973), I won't betray the ending, but I will betray details, so watch the film first. You won’t regret it.

John and Laura Baxter (Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie) are on a working vacation in Venice, shortly after a haunting Autumn afternoon when they lost their daughter in a freak back garden drowning incident (this scene is so horrific and heart-felt that I couldn’t watch this film all the years my own daughter was growing up). John painstakingly reconstructs mosaics, and is working on a fresco in a beautiful Venetian church. Laura has never really got over the death of her daughter, hauled out of the garden pond still wearing her red raincoat, and neither has he, but they’re struggling to deal with their very individual feelings as a couple still very much in love. Fate has dealt them a terrible hand, but life goes on.

Still grasping at straws, Laura meets two weird old ladies in the hotel restaurant, one of whom is blind and claims to be psychic. She tells her--without any provocation or clue--that she’s seen her daughter standing between them in her red raincoat and she wants them to know she’s fine and happy. Are they mad, cruel, supernatural, or all three? A random ambiguous shot of the two old dears laughing their heads off over something we're not privy to is typical Roeg. Laura enters a strange state of euphoria, desperate to believe, but it’s the sceptic John who chases a tiny figure in a red mackintosh through the sidestreets of Venice to meet a bizarre fate that Laura’s old woman had a genuine psychic vision of.

Roeg makes intelligent and sensible films for intelligent and sensible people, and took some flak from critics for suggesting that psychic visions actually exist, but that’s not what the movie is really about. It is, after all, a fantasy horror film, and in a fantasy, anything illogical can happen, and usually does. Don’t Look Now, although it tells us that psychic phenomena is an actual thing, is not a stupid film, and has not been made to push charlatanism onto gullible people. It is, basically, just a big shaggy dog story, based around an experience the author Daphne du Maurier had when she saw a young couple sitting together in a restaurant who were clearly very much in love but going through a troubled time. The casual affection and familiarity that John and Laura have between themselves was created by Sutherland and Christie from an already high quality script, and it is not often that performers improve a script by changing it, as it’s most commonly done out of self-interest and egotism. That’s not the case here; in fact, Sutherland has stated that it was the first time he’s ever put himself completely in the hands of the director without question.

The changes are small, but subtle. Lines that were supposed to be snapped, or said bitterly or sarcastically, are now said with a smile; for example, when Laura mistakenly thinks John is praying in the church, and says “Hypocrite!”, or when John tells Laura to “go and see your crazy women, then”. The only line of cruelty left in, and which now looks out of character and incongruous, is when Laura suggests that their daughter is trying to forgive him for letting her play unsupervised (it would have been right to see a scene similar to that in Roeg’s Man Who Fell to Earth, when Mary Lou suggests to Newton that his wife was “no bloody good”, and then instantly regrets it). As we saw, they were both present when the accident occurred outside, and it was John--his latent psychic powers again--who first sensed danger. Some of the gentle crude remarks that couples make between each other have been dropped; a line about looking for “the dirty bits” in John’s published work, and the sequence where Laura absurdly kisses the monsignor’s ring. In the script (published by Sight and Sound magazine as a giveaway in January 1997), when John asks her why she kissed his ring, she says “Better than kissing his arse” as a dig. In the film, she just giggles in embarrassment at her faux pas. Despite all their misery, they are still in love and can still have fun together.

Director Roeg, who by his own admission, prefers to “let things happen”, found himself paring an already excellent and perceptive script from Allan Scott and Chris Bryant down to the bone. A scene in a church, for example, lost two pages of dialogue when Roeg realised he could make the same point through a two-line exchange that Sutherland and Christie had actually made to each other on the day of filming. Another sequence, showing Sutherland fiddling with a light switch while Christie lights candles, served to visually illustrate the difference between John’s pragmatism and practicality, and Laura’s willingness to believe in the mystical and supernatural. The brilliant cosmic joke, of course, is that it is John who has the latent psychic powers, and as a result of a vision, becomes the panicky hysteric, losing his life when he abandons his logic.

Roeg’s groundbreaking sex scene, which attracted only brief and modest press attention because the tabloid editors realised their moron readers wouldn't be flocking en masse to a Nic Roeg film anyway, cleverly breaks the shots of lovemaking with inserts of the couple getting dressed and undressed and going through their mundane bathroom ritual. I don’t usually fall into the critic’s trap of speaking for the director and crassly daring to define his meaning (if he or she hasn’t got it across in the film, then it’s redundant anyway), but Roeg was clearly saying (and has since confirmed in interviews), that yes, this is a completely ordinary couple, they have sex like we all do, and it’s very special to them, but you know what, it’s really a very ordinary activity. We’re looking through the keyhole, but so what? Don’t they look just like you, me, and everybody else that ever shared comfort and affection with another? And glumly, we have to admit that, yes, they do. What are we actually watching? Thanks for ruining voyeurism, Nic.

I’m a great fan of gratuitous sex and nudity (I’ve never known such scenes to spoil a film, and they almost always improve one), but I’ve also always maintained that there’s no such thing as a sex or skin scene that's “essential to the plot”, as so many sly directors like to tell gullible actresses, but Roeg’s intelligent, sensible, and yes, grown-up attitude to sex rises above all this, and I’m willing to concede that whereas most standard obligatory sex scenes in movies are usually corny and porny, the love scene between John and Laura does enhance our appreciation and understanding of their relationship as he has suggested, and make the subsequent events even more tragic, and in one specific way, even uplifting; the sex scene is essential to the film. It is because we appreciate and understand the ordinary, everyday, unspoken relationship between the couple that we fully grasp the awful loss of first daughter, and then husband. Without this effect on the audience, the film means absolutely nothing. Most importantly, it explains the gentle smile on Laura’s face during the funeral in the final scene. She’s thinking about what she had, not what she lost. This is a woman who's come to terms with fate.

As Roeg has stated, most sex scenes in films are seductions. Affection, particularly affection borne of familiarity with your partner, is not something you often find in either sex films or horror films. Don’t Look Now is neither, but it has one scene of sex and two scenes of horror that have become legendary for their innovation and individuality.

Erotic Horror (1) : A Short Guide to Which Witch is Which

Girl Slaves of Morgan Le Fay (1971), Vampire Ecstasy (1973), Baba Yaga--the Final Cut (1973)

You wouldn’t expect erotica and horror films to mix, for the simple reason that horror is about ugliness and eroticism is about beauty, and indeed there is a certain kind of horror aficionado who gets quite irate at the excessive inclusion of sex and nudity in the genre, whether as a commercial ploy, or as a desirable raison d’etre. However, there must be enough of the kind of horror buff who likes to see the cast in the buff, as sexually themed horror is remarkably prominent, and never more so than in the 1970s.

Girl Slaves of Morgan Le Fay, made in 1971, is a creepy and haunting erotic fairytale about two silly girlfriends on a motoring holiday somewhere in Europe who ignore all the usual warnings and end up in a mysterious castle occupied by the inevitable hunchbacked dwarf and a bunch of wispy, waspy women in flowing gowns. It’s rather like a Jean Rollin film made in daylight, and it could only have been made in the early 1970s. Writer and director Bruno Gantillan never did anything like it again, and dropped into active obscurity on mainstream French TV, presumably having got this out of his system. He borrows liberally, almost fannishly, from the old Universal and Hammer films, particularly early in the film, with the warning not to go drive through the village (ignored), the warning not to stay in the village (ignored), the weird silent men in the pub-where-nobody-speaks (presumably the wife-less villagers who have lost all their womenfolk), and the Outer Limits-like strange, sunlit forest. Gantillan’s team have found some superb locations, including the magnificent castle that must be reached by boat across the lake. Not a single set was built; the entire dream-like fantasy was filmed inside the castle but for a couple of interiors, which is the real star of the whole production, the Chateau du Val at Bort-les-Orgues in the Correze district of France.

It’s a slow film, but never actually boring, atmospheric rather than sexy, and erotic without being particularly exciting. The girls (blonde Anna, played by Michele Perello and petite Francoise, played by Mirielle Saunin) fall asleep in a barn after a bit of a lezz, but when Francoise wakes up, Anna has vanished. The weird dwarf (Alfred Baillou) tells her she’s across the lake in the castle, and without much discussion, she’s in the boat, being greeted by a selection of sirens in various flimsy gowns (two of whom also worked in Rollin’s vampire films). There’s a noticeable lack of questions or hysteria as Morgan Le Fay (witchy Dominique Delpierre) tries to seduce her with the promise of immortality if she stays, but it’s a very tiresome, tedious existence in the castle, even allowing for all the lesbianism, and there’s a distinct threatening air of menace (lots of despairing old ladies in the dungeons--dissenters?), as well as the jealousy of her three favorite handmaidens (Regine Motte, Ursule Pauly, Nathalie Chaine) to cope with.

The sex scenes are extremely tame, and certainly no reason to see this film. It is worth watching the once if you’re into unusual Rollin-esque gothic erotica, but the few scenes of lesbian love-making have the same dropped-in look that you find when hard-core inserts have been put into a soft-core film. The girls languidly groping each other in that not-quite-sure-what-lesbians-do way that you find in super-soft porn made with bored moonlighting models are not the same girls in the rest of the film--you can see which ones have been slipped an extra fiver to do the nude work, and pretty much tot up the bill. Sure enough, there does appear to be an even tamer version out there, so buyer beware; the Mondo Macabre/Another World version pictured here appears to be complete, the one with the photo cover perhaps not. Perello and Delpierre don’t get naked at all (Delpierre was actually pregnant while filming, which rather shatters the illusion of a male-free existence), but leading lady Mirielle Saunin (who bizarrely never made another film) shows the lot at one point or another, and is very nice indeed.

The most peculiar thing about the film, in a work that’s admittedly going out of its way to be weird, is how little the two best friends seem to worry about the other once they’ve been split up. It’s this, more than anything else, that gives the story its dream-like quality. Neither asks after the other, except for one brief mention that Anna is also in the castle; even then, Francoise never asks to see her, and when escape becomes a possibility, makes no effort to retrieve the obviously mesmerised Anna with her, and bizarrely just leaves. However, there’s one final twist to come. The melancholy ending is quite unsatisfying, especially given the sacrifice made, but I actually kind of like it. After all, the whole film is off-kilter, so why not have an off-kilter conclusion?

Various visitors turn up at the Castle Varga (all at the same time), another creepy residence in a similar vein (so to speak), unaware that the housekeeper and her staff are all vampire girls who dance around in the buff all night to infuriatingly repetitive voodoo drums. Nymphomaniac nymphet Maria Forsa (Baby Love, Butterflies) makes her screen debut as one of the guests, but the real star is the genuine Bavarian castle the production secured for the location shoot. The film is porn merchant Joe Sarno’s Vampire Ecstasy (which goes under several different titles, aka The Devil’s Plaything, aka Veil of Blood, aka Der Fluch der schwarzen Schwestern, 1973).

You would probably have had to see this at the local fleapit back in the 1970s to have any affection for this take on the Countess Bathory legend, but it is not without merit. It’s not too dissimilar from the sort of fare you get today from the Bound Heat franchise (which has its own medium-rare version of the Bathory story on offer), except that the girls are a bit more girl-next-castle, shall we say, in this one, and not photographed to their best advantage.

Not scary enough or gory enough to be a good horror film, and not sexy enough to satisfy the skin-flick market, this is mostly interesting for mood and atmosphere, for which it scores ten out of ten. The housekeeper is wonderfully weird, all Amish and Norman Rockwell in the daytime, all sleazy strip club and Morticia Addams at night. The other vampires all look like moonlighting bored checkout girls and hairdressing students, although one skinny girl on the right of the screen is in her own little world and has a nice wiggle. It’s... interesting. However, serious horror fans don’t seem to be as enamored of nudity as I am, and will probably think this is top-heavy on the sex front. It certainly isn’t remotely scary. Connoisseurs of sex and nudity will probably prefer quality over quantity; Walerian Borowczyk’s take on the Bathory legend in Immoral Tales, also filmed in the mid-‘70s, offers both.

Based on Russian supernatural legend and an Italian comic strip, Baba Yaga--the Final Cut (1973), an oddity saved from obscurity by DVD merchants Shameless, is for connoisseurs of the weird and wonderful.

The comic strip is the beautiful Valentina by Guido Crepax, a vacuous and erotic series that ran in the legendary Linus magazine that rode on the back of the 1960s-born notion that comics are not just for kids, a train of thought primarily encouraged by Stan Lee’s Marvel Comics and Charles Schulz’ Peanuts. Linus, named after a Peanuts character, revelled in publishing the daring contemporary strips that emerged in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, as well as the growing sophistication of comic art in general in America and Europe, but championed older works such as Little Nemo and Krazy Kat, and the notion of comics being good n’ healthy for kids as well. And it did all this without being pompous about it. Cool.

Valentina Rosselli is a fashion photographer living a day to day Bohemian lifestyle in a rather shabby early ‘70s Milan. One evening, after attending a bizarre open-air performance art production in a cemetery that is broken up early by the police, she is approached by an equally shabby white-faced witch who has contrived a phoney chance meeting with her. Introducing herself brazenly as Baba Yaga, a creature of supernatural folklore, she returns Valentina to her doorstep, even though she’s never been there and was never given the address, claiming they were destined to come together. Valentina’s friends quickly and correctly assess that the creepy old woman intends that coming together to be of a sexual nature. They are less perceptive about her being an actual witch, albeit one dressed by garage sale.

That night, Valentina has the first in a series of strange, perverse erotic dreams. The witch also puts a hypnotic hex of sorts on her, and on her camera, which whenever used causes accidents or death to the subject. She also gifts her a nasty little doll in fetish gear, less hideous but ten times more creepy than Child’s Play’s Chucky. After Valentina attends a cinema screening of the German Expressionist film of The Golem, the doll transforms into a lethal, living being of sly, seductive beauty, and is hardly the talisman to protect her from evil as promised, exposed on film stabbing one of Val’s models. As hypnotically instructed, Valentina visits the witch’s derelict, crumbling home, which comes complete with a clutter of antiques and a bottomless hole in the hallway obscured by a rug, and potentially descending to Hell itself.

As the Valentina series developed, Crepax felt he could do more... do anything... if he entered Valentina’s dreams on a regular basis, and so the already very trippy ‘60s strip gradually became increasingly bizarre, more esoteric, more erotic, and ultimately--as was Crepax’s bent--more sado-masochistic. The film's writer/director Corrado Farina, a fellow journeyman, taken with the comics medium and Crepax’ work, but less so with the fetishism and what he called “champagne socialism” (they were both refugees from the advertising industry, spoofed herein), nevertheless respected the original, and did his best to recreate the ambience of the strip on film, which is composed, shot, and edited like a comic strip, borrowing the tilted camera angles and colorful backgrounds of the innovative Batman TV series. Comics and comic-book art litter the sets and walls, ranging from Carl Barks’ sputtering Donald Duck to Gene Colan’s magisterial revamp of Captain Marvel. In a sex scene between Valentina and her occasional fuck buddy Arno (George Eastman), the love-making is portrayed through a series of monochrome still photographs in comic-strip panels interspersed with moving color images.

It’s a fascinating film to watch, and yet never really grabs the attention, despite all the quick cuts, clever edits, and nudity. A curiously empty film, it’s packed full of incidence, and yet has no substance, neither a sense of urgency or suspense. Even Farina was never entirely satisfied with it, having fought with the producers after cuts were made without his knowledge or desire, and failed to get his original choices for the leads. Carroll Baker, replacing Anne Heywood after creative differences, makes a sexier and more attractive Baba Yaga than the script implies, although make-up have done their best to make her pale and sun-shy. As Farino rightly points out, French actress Isabelle de Funes is too skinny and unusual to resemble the more traditionally erotic comic-strip Valentina, who is all curves and pout, although she otherwise looks the part, and is a competent actress who comes across as suitably contrary and unconventional.

Despite her nudity, some of it and Baker’s excised by the Italian censors (mainly from fear of pubic hair), the wow factor belongs to Valentina’s models (Daniela Balzaretti and Angela Covello) and the living incarnation of the murderous doll Annette (Ely Galleani). In the traditional comic-strip manner, ad-man and male hero Arno charges to the rescue, and Baba Yaga meets her end.

To Farina's delight and specifications, Shameless managed to reconstruct the film as it was originally intended to be seen, making this the third and as close to the original version to be issued. The similarities between film and comics in general are manifest, of course; comics and film have been intertwined since Felix the Cat and Flash Gordon. What are storyboards, if not comic strips? Crepax was not too dissatisfied with the result, although he wrote to Farino at length concerning his likes and dislikes. As Farino wryly observed, “To adapt a comic strip into a film script is quite easy... The trouble starts when you have to shoot the film!”.

Erotic Horror (2) : I Used to be a Werewolf, But I’m Alright Nowwwww…

Werewolf Shadow (1971), Werewolf Woman (1976)

Which brings us from vampires and witches to Werewolf Shadow (aka The Werewolf vs. Vampire Woman, aka La Noche de Walpurgis, 1971), a comic strip if ever there was. Like his French counterpart Jean Rollin, Spanish-born Paul Naschy was raised on comics, movie serials, and horror films, a major influence being, not surprisingly, Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman. Unlike many film buffs and comic fans, Naschy’s love of the arts, pop culture, and illustration was incongruously matched by his passion for athletics and weightlifting. At first earning his living as a writer of pulp western novels and as a film extra, he inevitably drifted towards a career in art direction, although never losing sight of his desire to produce a horror film.

After numerous rejections ranging from bemusement to irritability, he interested a director in the script that became Frankenstein’s Bloody Terror in 1968, and when his hero Lon Chaney Jnr. had to turn down the wolfman role, he took it himself. Thus began Paul Naschy’s career as tortured wolfman Waldemar Daninsky.

Werewolf Shadow is Naschy’s fourth horror title after Frankenstein’s Bloody Terror (aka Hell Creatures), the unfinished Las noches del Hombre Lobo the same year, and Dracula vs. Frankenstein in 1970. As well as appearing as his werewolf character--always Waldemar Daninsky--fourteen times, he also over the years portrayed Dracula, the Frankenstein monster, Jack the Ripper, a sinister Universal-style hunchback, Mr. Hyde, a mummy, and the Devil (Curse of the Werewolf, Fury of the Werewolf, and Night of the Werewolf are all great fun, and Human Beasts is quite extraordinary). Eventually, as his films became sexier and gorier to accommodate the needs of the 1970s, he took the director’s chair himself. Of all his films, Werewolf Shadow is one of the easiest to locate, as this film is in the public domain in America. It is also arguably his most erotic.

Two young students, Elvira (Gaby Fuchs of Around the World with Fanny Hill) and Genevieve (perky Barbara Capell, prophetically telling Dracula jokes throughout the film until she’s turned into a rather cute vampire herself) are travelling through the North of France in an effort to locate the long lost tomb of a legendary Countess Bathory-style nut-job who murdered virgins for their blood by the cartload in the 15th century. When they run out of gas, they find themselves seeking the shelter offered by Daninsky and his chateau. They are unaware that while searching for a 15th century vampire they’ve found a 20th century werewolf, who just slaughtered the sceptical coroner who removed the silver bullets from his formerly dead body, paying with his life and a couple of others. When they mention their mission, they send their host into stunned silence, and Daninsky goes, well, as quiet as a tomb.

That night, the girls nervously prepare for bed. “No vampire’s going to suck your blood!” laughs Genevieve to Elvira. “Don’t be afraid. This isn’t Dracula's house!”.

She’s right--their host is a werewolf, and his sinister sister is quite understandably mentally disturbed by the whole business. In one notably gory scene, she is staked and beheaded to prevent her transformation into a vampire after Genevieve, having found the tomb on Daninsky’s own property and accidentally reanimated the corpse of the Countess with drops of blood, becomes one of the undead herself. Before long, they’ve been attacked by a zombie monk and visited by a ghostly vampire. Elvira also goes on a very creepy, darkly comic, and well-written drive with the weirdo handyman.

A brief pause here to discuss names of characters and locations of events. As anyone who enjoys freedom, films, and the arts knows, censors are a little, uh, odd, to put it politely, and none more so than film censors, who can sometimes seem positively demented. In Spain, at least when this was made, content that was deemed inappropriate was often allowable as long as it was not in any way associated with Spain or the Spanish people. This bizarre combination of patriotism and racism meant that the only way Naschy could get his films made was to make it absolutely clear that all his characters were anything but Spanish, and that events in his film were happening anywhere but Spain. Consequently, all names and places in Naschy’s films are obliged to be clearly removed from his country (including his own name--he gave up his own Spanish identity of Jacinto Alvarez for a false German one, even though he was born, and died, in Madrid).

As long as Spain is not implicated in any of the proceedings, it’s okay to have horror happening. Thus we have a fake German pretending to be a Polish werewolf welcoming two girls with Mexican and English names to his home in the North of France in a film directed by the Russian Leon Klimovsky. At this point, the censor satisfied, the Spanish people may now enter the cinema and watch a horror film in Spain.

Klimovsky, by all accounts a bit of a hack, has two moments of inspiration in the film, both close together near the start. Our first meeting with the girls begins with what appears to be an establishing shot of Paris... until the camera pans back to show us a postcard rack. Even better, a flashback is indicated not with wavy lines or a loss of focus, but by super-imposing the inside of a child’s toy kaleidoscope over the picture! This is why I will always love B-movies.

Most criticisms of Werewolf Shadow have concerned the acting and the pace. It is impossible to judge the acting fairly when a film has been dubbed, because all actors look bad dubbed, and although slow to a generation raised on CGI histrionics, the film rarely drags its feet; there is always something going on, and it’s a wide range of incidence and insanity. Interestingly, the one point at which the film grinds to a halt is where Blue Underground have quite rightly found and put back in missing footage that had also quite rightly been taken out! This opens up a whole can of worms about the directors' intentions and producer and/or distributor interference. Who wanted the footage out?

Most of the excised scenes concern the dreary young cop who traces the girls’ footsteps, and the police investigation material does indeed bring the entire conclusion of the film to a standstill, even without the restored footage, which is identified by subtitled dialogue as it was never dubbed. The film would have benefitted if even more had been left on the cutting room floor, and rather than putting it back in, it probably should have been included in a deleted scenes section (and yes, I realise this is the exact opposite of what I recommend for the Rollin Encore releases, but I stand by both views). The character’s inclusion is purely a sign of the times, as convention required a male hero to come to the girls’ rescue. Apart from the fact that he’s too late to save Genevieve and ends up chained to a wall, this role could easily be fulfilled by Daninsky himself, who does indeed take on the vampire queen, thus justifying one of the film’s many alternate titles.

Italy, in the meantime, gave us Werewolf Woman (aka La Lupa Mannara, 1976).

When wealthy Daniela Enselmi (Annik Borel) is traumatised by a vicious gang-rape, her father, Count Enselmi, has the brilliant idea to not only remove her from the hustle and bustle of civilisation to a lonely mansion in the country, but the same mansion where their ancestor died a mysterious death at the hands of the locals, having been unquestioningly identified as the werewolf woman terrorising the area. The film opens with the only sequence featuring the werewolf, a flashback to the night of her bloody capture and burning.

This isn’t the usual rubber mask caper. Borel (portraying her ancestor) dances naked in the forest before transforming into a hairy, dog-nosed she-beast, skulks in the foliage salivating furiously, appearing to be truly animalistic and savage, but also human enough to plant an axe in some poor chump’s head before the more conventional ripping and rending. The scenes of Borel capering through the woods in full-on werewolf mode make Danielle Dax’s similar erotic nude scamper through the forest in 1984’s Company of Wolves look like the Vicarage tea party of critical cliche. The more the doctors try to bring Daniela into the present day, the more she chooses to hide in the past, identifying with her ancestor and marrying that sympatico position of persecution with her fierce hatred of sex brought on by the rape.

Cousin Elena (Dagmar Lassander) ill-advisedly arrives, with a husband who looks alarmingly like the guy who got the axe in the flashback sequence, and he becomes the first of Daniela’s many murder victims when she sexually ambushes him in the woods outside the mansion with a stark naked seduction, and then physically ambushes him by tearing his throat out with her teeth and dumping him over a cliff. Scenes contrasting Daniela undressing alone and untouched in her dreary room with Elena simultaneously enjoying the eager attentions of her husband are poignant and erotic. At first, everyone assumes he was running from guard dogs unfamiliar with him, and fell to his death, but when fresh victims turn up with similar slashes and gashes, Inspector Whoever and his men begin to suspect the worst.

A fascinating and bizarre blend of genius and awful-ness, this mid-‘70s Italian horror is graced with a brave and bold but hilariously bad fraught performance by Annik Borel and lurid and graphically explicit violence and gore. It’s the work of Rino de Silvestro, a particularly tasteless lowbrow sleaze-merchant of the ‘70s, and with that in mind, is better than it has any right to be. There’s just enough sex and nudity to keep things interesting between the talking, stalking, and gruesome attacks, but the real value of Werewolf Woman is its trash value. The makers missed a trick by not following through on the supernatural werewolf theme to the bitter end, ala Borowczyk’s The Beast, rather than just making Daniela horrifically bonkers.

There are several highly effective and quite brutal scenes, as Daniela knifes a female sexual obsessive who frees her from her restraints in the mental hospital, chokes to death and crashes the car of a nurse whose vehicle she’s stowed away in, and toothily tears into the female half of a couple of young lovers she spies on in a barn. Best of all, the inevitable sleazy motorist gets his comeuppance when he assaults her in his motel room. Shots of Borel peering through the bales of hay in the barn at the activities of the young lovers and in the nurse’s rear-view mirror are disconcerting and effective, but things turn blackly comic when Daniela finds true love with a slightly nuts stunt-man who appears to be living in a movie ghost town and performing tricks for no-one, and he discusses their future together blandly while she tries to stifle her homicidal tendencies and temptation to plunge a knife into him. He gets this anyway when she has the extraordinary misfortune to be assaulted by another three rapists, who’s killing of her lover as he rushes to her rescue causes all the old demons to rise to the surface. When one forces her into an oral sex act, we expect the inevitable to happen (chomp--ptui!)... but it doesn’t. Instead, she turns up at their workplace, a vehicle scrap yard, and one is bludgeoned, another crushed, and a third one burned alive in his home.

A bit-player in U.S. film, Borel acted between 1970 and 1978, and played minor roles in Weekend With the Babysitter, Blood Orgy of the She Devils, Prison Girls, Truck Turner, and The Last Porno Flick before travelling to Europe for Werewolf Woman (her claim to fame) and the Ajita Wilson vehicles Blue Passion and Erotic Encounters. Dagmar Lassander, the only other woman to get naked, is hilarious as the grieving widow dressed in black, sashaying around the hospital like a goth catwalk model.

Werewolf Woman is a classic great good-bad film for those who, like myself, treasure such finds, and belongs right up there with the likes of The Beast in Space, Lady Terminator, and Love Goddess of the Cannibals as tasteless fantasy trash.

Erotic Horror (3) : Jean Rollin's Vampires

The Nude Vampire (1970), Shiver of the Vampires (below, 1971), Requiem for a Vampire (1973, left), Lips of Blood (1975)

Although hardly at the forefront of horror film production, it was inevitably the French who had to show the rest of Europe how to do erotic horror properly. Jean Rollin made dozens of sex and horror films over the three decades he was working, all wildly variable, ranging from the sublime to the ridiculous. It’s amazing how interesting the good ones are, and staggering how unbelievably poor the bad ones were. He was undoubtedly at his most inspired during the early ‘70s, and his vampire films and porn films from this period are quite extraordinary. Rollin’s failures are often far more interesting than mainstream directors’ successes. An added bonus for myself is that Rollin was inspired by many of the things which intrigue me--eroticism, comic strips, and the Saturday morning serials of Republic, Columbia, and Universal. This isn’t always apparent (other than the eroticism of course, including inspiration from the esoteric paintings of nudes in incongruous places by Paul Delvaux), but it’s good to know it’s there. Rollin died in 2010, but how he lost his muse so conclusively and absolutely at the close of the ‘70s, when he should have just got better and better is a mystery for the ages. You can only judge for yourself, but if intrigued, the films featured in this book are the best place to start. Just don’t expect the later stuff to be anywhere near as good.

Rollin followed his first film, the unfortunately titled and monochrome Rape of the Vampire, with his full color triumph The Nude Vampire (1970). That dull thumping sound you could hear all across Europe as the 1970s began was the sound of producers and distributors kicking themselves for not thinking of this title before Jean Rollin did. Okay, the vampire is not quite nude, but rather clad in one of those colored diaphanous gowns Rollin regularly put his vampire women in, and this being 1969, and only Rollin’s second film, she still has her underwear on, an oversight remedied in his future vampire films. It is, however, stylish and erotic, the best scenes featuring the Castel twins, about whom, more later.

In a laboratory, mysterious hooded characters undress a similarly hooded woman and inject her with mysterious colored liquids. The title now justified, we follow a young girl (the beautiful Caroline Cartier, our vampire, although I’m unconvinced it’s not a body double in the opening lab scene) in a see-through orange gown pursued through the streets of Paris by strange men in bizarre animal masks. She seeks help from a young man (Olivier Martin, apparently Rollin’s half-brother), but they shoot her. He escapes, despite being an easy target, and the sinister figures carry away the body to the darkened townhouse she first emerged from. Seeing guests arrive in evening-wear, he tries to enter, but is rebuffed. The would-be rescuer, we now discover, is Pierre Radamonte, the son of the sinister fellow organising this soiree.

The following night, he returns and steals an invite. A woman is chosen at random from the guests, and steps forward and voluntarily suicides. Everyone puts their hoods on, and the animal-masked men emerge--with the girl from the previous night, now seemingly well--and place the body on a dais, from where she drinks the woman’s blood. It’s all very sombre and silent and mysterious. Now, despite the fact that his invite is stolen from someone else, the young man’s own face comes up as the second victim; where did they get his picture? Handed the gun, he instead shoots the master of ceremonies, and flees into the night... but not before an anonymous figure has warned him to go to his father's office... “where further mysteries await!”. Ooohh!

As should be becoming apparent by now, none of this makes very much sense on the printed page--but then Rollin’s films never do. But Rollin’s films--without getting pretentious about it, because let’s face it, he was inept--are more ephemeral than logical, more hallucinatory and dreamlike than reality-based and factual, a sort of delirium-like, atmospheric experience based on mood, menace, and eroticism. The man was no story-teller (his movie education by Republic’s wonderful Saturday morning cliffhangers rather than real films is readily apparent from his wandering plots), but a stringer-together of ideas and images, and he made beautiful and fascinating films...

Pierre’s father (Maurice Lemaitre), it transpires, is the leader of a tremulous scientific cabal that believes the kidnapped girl they have stashed away to be a vampire, immortal and indestructible. They lock her up at night, keep her away from sunlight and other people’s faces, and feed her on blood culled from the imbecilic suicide cult at the townhouse. The plan is to mate her with another of these vampires and use her blood to give themselves immortality. However, the vampires are on to them, and a constant state of attack and counter-attack is underway ala I Am Legend/The Omega Man. The Parisienne townhouse exposed, they retreat to a chateau in the countryside, unaware that it is being leased to them by the leader of their enemies (Michael Delahaye, to reappear in Rollin’s next, Shiver of the Vampires; his co-star Jacques Robiolles can be glimpsed among the extras).

Particularly interesting is that the torch-wielding throng that descend on the chateau in a climax surely inspired by the old Universal Frankenstein and Dracula films, are the so-called vampires, a clever role-reversal. In actuality, they are a mutant race from the future. The scientists are looking for vampires, explains their leader, and so they will find vampires... but the bullet-proof mutants are not to be defined by the credulous scientist’s limited range of supernatural explanations for their find. As for how the vampires recognise each other, a source of mystery for the kidnappers, and why the son has become involved... well, even Rollin’s rambling story is starting to come together.

Playing Radamonte senior’s cowardly collaborators are Bernard Musson as Voringe, and Jean Aron as Fredor. Radamonte’s kinky maidservants are played by Rollin regulars Catherine and Marie-Pierre Castel, two blonde twins, here dark-haired and billed as Cathy and Pony Tricot. The lovely Ursule Pauly plays Radamonte’s secretary Solange, and Pascal Fardoulis appears pointlessly as Pierre’s artist friend Robert.

Every single shot in The Nude Vampire is an innovative, creative treat for the eye, the women are beautiful, clothed or unclothed, and there is more inspiration in a single hauntingly memorable scene of Rollin’s than half-a-dozen CGI multiplex blockbusters, and it’s all done with no money and a ton of inspiration.

In Shiver of the Vampires (aka Le frisson des vampires, 1972), a dying vampire orders his mortal female slaves to destroy his fellow vampires in their tombs or be condemned to eternal bondage serving them for the rest of their days. But the girls are indeed too late...

Filmed after--and paying the bills for--The Nude Vampire, Jean Rollin’s Shiver of the Vampires is his masterpiece. It involves the participation of the usual suspects, along with the slim brunette Sandra Julien, the pixie-faced and often naked actress who went on to work with Max Pecas on I Am a Nymphomaniac and I Am Frigid--Why? Although she never looked more beautiful than here, she apparently didn’t enjoy the shoot much.

Julien and Jean-Marie Durand play Ilse and Antoine, a newly-married couple who intend to honeymoon at a castle owned by two male cousins she hasn’t seen for years. While asking directions, the husband is told that the cousins have died, and they’ve missed the funeral by days. They are welcomed to the castle by the two unsmiling and mysterious girls from the prologue, and Isle insists on visiting the cousins’ nearby tombs, where she encounters Isabella (Nicole Nancel), the woman who told her husband about the deaths. It’s an incongruous sight, one still in her wedding dress, the other in the funeral black garb of a widow. As Rollin perceptively points out in the DVD commentary, the bridal gown has now transformed her from fresh young bride to ghostly wraith, haunting the cemetery.

Depressed from this sad news, Ilse tells the unfortunate Antoine that she cannot consummate their marriage tonight, and wishes for separate rooms. No sooner is she alone than she encounters the vampire queen Isolde (cabaret singer and Moulin Rouge dancer Dominique), who starts seducing the naked Julien, who was getting ready for bed. Ilse hypnotically responds, and is taken for a moonlight flit through the cemetery, where lighting genius Jean Jacques Remon lays on the red filters beautifully. “This is where the living make a religion out of respecting the dead” she tells Ilse. “This is where the dead make a religion of preserving their lives”. They’re greeted by the near-naked handmaidens and Dominique’s Isolde puts the bite on Ilse.

Finding his bride gone from her room, Antoine starts creeping around the castle, where he sees and follows the girls... and witnesses weird satanic rites. Returning to Isle’s room, he finds her asleep in bed, and caresses her naked form before quietly covering up his reluctant young bride and returning to his room. At breakfast the next morning, Isle asks the girls what they will do and where they will go now that the cousins are dead. Reports of their deaths are greatly exaggerated, they say, and they have much work to complete. On cue, the two cousins suddenly appear, and Antoine realises that they are the people he saw last might. Later, Antoine visits the library where they are supposed to be at their studies (a separate set, filmed later), and is bombarded poltergeist-style by flying books that batter and bruise him.

That night, the girls are roaming around near-naked again, and at dinner, the two creepy cousins relate their findings from their research--a family history of Satanism and blasphemy.

Once again, and to Antoine’s increasing anger and frustration with both her attitude and the weirdo cousins, Isle sleeps alone, until Isolde arrives, equally nude, majestically and dramatically from behind the drapes on the bed. Once again, the teeth go in.

The two cousins, it transpires, were once successful vampire hunters who got careless, and were transformed into vampires themselves by Isolde and her crew; Isabelle, we discover, was lover to both the cousins, and Isolde takes the first opportunity to dispose of her, stabbing her--I kid you not--with spiked tits. The virginal Ilse, however, is deemed innocent enough to be converted to vampirism that night with a third and final fanging. Antoine, meanwhile, has been woken by the two servant girls naked in his bed. When they flee the room still giggling, he follows, unamused and armed (tough lay!).

In the cemetery, Isolde prepares for the final stage of Ilse’s initiation to the immortal undead. When Antoine fires his gun, they all disappear, and he returns Ilse to her bed, this time staying in the room. He begs her to leave with him, but she’s under their spell, the marriage still not consummated.

The next morning, Ilse is averse to the sunlight, and unknown to Antoine, has decided to accept her new life, completing the ceremony that night in a blood-drinking ritual. When Antoine produces a crucifix, he is overpowered by force of numbers (the actors accidentally broke the dinner table in two), and subdued and tied. He persuades the slave girls to release him, and together they can release all four of them and defeat the vampires forever. As the vampires prepare the naked bride for the final stages of the process, they are unaware that the girls have freed her husband. The girls successfully destroy Isolde by burning her coffin and trapping her in the cemetery by uncovering the crosses they have been habitually covering for the vampires throughout the film, but Antoine is less fortunate, Ilse having decided to be ravished on the beach by her vampiric cousins rather than return to her mortal life with him. All three perish in the morning sun, leaving poor Antoine alone in the world.

Cast as the two cousins were Michel Delahaye and Jacques Robiolles, two full-on performers who were between them widely experienced in most areas of theatre and film, and had both appeared in The Nude Vampire (the latter only fleetingly). This resulted in much competition between the two of them, with furious over-acting and upstaging prevalent throughout the entire film, each trying to upstage the other with props, bits of business, and increasingly elaborate costumes, as they festooned themselves with brightly colored clothes, baubles, rings, necklaces, jewels, chains, and assorted adornments, continuity be damned. They were less enthusiastic about learning their lines, and much of their dialogue is improvised, making the tense discomfort on the faces and body language of Sandra Julien and Jean-Marie Durand at the dinner table quite authentic.

Julien and Durand make a good couple, and it’s a shame things end badly for them; Rollin just about manages to convince that he made the right choice in the commentary, although disappointingly the climax takes place on Pourville beach, the location used so effectively in The Nude Vampire and used yet again in Requiem for a Vampire, Lips of Blood, and Dracula’s Fiancee, unfairly giving the erroneous impression that all Rollin’s vampire films are interchangeable. He should have resisted the temptation on this occasion, although as usual the location is as photogenic and atmospheric as ever.

The magnificent Gothic locations were found near Soissons--the cemetery and the dungeons of Septmont--and permitted some beautiful shots, the warren of nooks and crannies, stairwells and free-standing half-lost walls and corners giving ample opportunity for inspired angles that were greedily exploited by Rollin and his talented set-decorators, cameramen, and lighting wizards. Some of the ruins were almost like ancient stone flats and three-wall sets just waiting throughout time for the arrival of the gothic horror film. The locals did not quite feel the same way when the mock blood streaming out of one of the turrets soaked into the porous rock, and stayed there for several years afterwards. However, the opening scenes following the credits, in which the vampires’ mortal handmaidens Marie-Louise Castell (billed as Marie-Pierre) and Asian Kuelan Herce parade through now only half-built rooms, past windows and openings, and up a spiral stone stairwell are superb.

Rollin makes some unusual and effective bizarre directing choices, including having the camera pan round in a circle to the faces of each participant in close-up when they have a line, and in another scene having the two cousins take turns to lean into the camera and say their lines. Another extraordinary sequence has the two vampires walking round in a large circular motion as they improvise their story of their descent into vampirism, the cast members placed intermittently in the background, cowering against the walls as the camera swirls around in a circle following them.

Rollin was greatly influenced by, and trying to duplicate, the paintings of Renee Magritte and Paul Delvaux, but he was most successful with his own ideas and good luck; some of the silliest scenes, with vampire queen Isolde emerging from within an undersized grandfather clock or from a chimney (“like Santa Claus” admitted Rollin) were his favorites, and he fought successfully to keep these unexpected arrivals in the finished film, although they probably reminded most audiences more of Get Smart than Magritte. In this case, the producers were probably right, although you won’t forget the images in a hurry.

Jean Rollin’s Vampires continued

Rollin initially wanted to film in black and white, but of course this was not commercially feasible, and this is fortunate, because the colors and lighting on this film are exquisite, and bizarrely--as part of the mating dance to secure funding from a notoriously awkward benefactor--had agreed to film several scenes through single-color filters, an affectation that vastly helped the atmosphere of the film, such as when the girls ascend the spiral stairwell in glowing red, or emerge from chilly blue stone corridors into the cold of the night or the warmth of a room, clad only in diaphanous see-through gowns. The interiors are rich and warm, the skin tones of the girls perfect. Set designer Michel Delesalles and costume designer Nathalie Perrey achieve above and beyond the call of duty; Delesalles was also a sculptor, and decorates the barren dungeons with some extraordinary bizarre statues, and in one instance, a fishbowl built into the wall with a skull’s head immersed in the water, which the fish obligingly swim through. There’s an amazing painting on the wall during Nicole Nancel’s death scene, a pop art splodge of red to represent a splash of blood, with two fang marks in the middle on a white background. When Isabelle dies, the blood on her matches the painting.

The music, a sort of repetitive, rock-based strumming, is unusual and adds to the film’s unique flavor. As is often the case with horror films, and particularly Rollin’s fantasies, nothing makes much logical sense, and no-one behaves in a normal, natural manner. As ever with scary, supernatural stories, the story depends on everybody doing precisely the opposite of what one sensibly and usually would. Shiver of the Vampires is never actually scary, or gruesome, or shocking, even when there’s brief violence; it’s primarily dream-like erotica rather than horror-based nightmare, exploiting the sexual aspects of the vampire myth first touched on by the more down-to-earth, conventionally accessible, and less stylish British Hammer films.

Julien, frequently, Nancel briefly, and Dominique occasionally, all expose their bodies at various points in the proceedings, purely to provide the erotic frisson that makes the film what it is. Sandra Julien is particularly striking, with beautiful hair and a flawless body beautifully lit and filmed. The handmaidens spend at least half their time nude or semi-nude, but when dressed, all the women wear wonderful clothes. The wardrobe of the vampiric cousins is quite extraordinary, too.

Excised from the finished film were three very nice sex scenes Rollin shot on request, but which were never used. As with the Encore Special Edition of Demoniacs, these are included on the Encore double disc edition, but again as with Demoniacs, it’s a shame they couldn’t have been re-edited back into the movie for this re-release. The first scene shows the two servant girls having sex with each other in a variety of positions, the second has them being tied up and whipped and tortured by the vampires (which makes more sense of their ultimate decision to betray them, but would never have got past most censors of the day), and the third scene, with the print perhaps in too poor condition to be put back, shows the naked servant girls taking blood from a naked and prostrate Julien, followed by more lovemaking.

In Rollin’s next, Requiem for a Vampire (aka Vierges et vampires, 1973), two beautiful young girls, managing to look both innocent and corrupt at the same time, are fleeing the authorities for an unexplained criminal act. Initially dressed as clowns (Rollin loves his pierrot), they immolate the car and driver pursuing them, and hide out in a graveyard, where one is nearly buried alive by gravediggers, rescued by her friend as darkness falls. They stumble into a gothic castle and its grounds, and there’s much scenic creeping about until they find a fluffy bed and settle down for some welcome naked lesbianism. This being a horror, they are interrupted by strange noises and ultimately encounter an aspiring vampire queen, a gaunt, decaying male vampire resigned to losing his immortality, and his thuggish rapist acolytes.

Requiem for a Vampire is a stream of consciousness movie, written in just two days and, said Rollin, filmed virtually as envisaged. Inspired by the rambling on the spot musings of adults who told him ongoing scare stories as a child, the events in this film are deliberately as illogical as the events of a dream. Like Demoniacs and Lips of Blood, which followed, it’s not exactly a failure, more a flawed success. Rollin, after all, achieved what he set out to create, with few compromises, and it’s never boring; he regards it as one of his favorite films, “written naively without thought, without prior idea, and above all... no intellectual reflection, no intentional symbolism, nothing but this free and disordered imagery which I care so much about”. Peppered with several scenes of sex and nudity, a must to ensure sales in the 1970s, it was literally being sold from the rushes while Rollin was filming it, with three month deferred payments for the actors and technicians. Needless to say, this meant Rollin using familiar and trusted friends, who in turn trusted him.

Initially, Rollin had intended to use his beloved blonde twins the Castel sisters, but as with Shiver of the Vampire and the later Demoniacs (in which neither were available), one was not free. Marie-Louise Castel, nicknamed Pony, was accompanied by new find Mirielle D’Argent, who Rollin had disentangled from an unscrupulous agent. Nightclub singer Louise Dhour so impressed Rollin that she was rehired for the later Demoniacs.

As is so often the case with cheap independent films, guile and sleight of hand was used to obtain shots and locations. The sequence with the burning blood-stained car briefly excited the police, who thought they’d stumbled onto more than the minor misdemeanor of not notifying them of the filming, and convincing whip marks on Castel from an erotic sequence in the dungeons embarrassed a doctor who almost called the authorities in again before being shown how easily the make-up rubbed off. The owner of the castle, from whom had been hidden all manner of incriminating props, finally threw them out when she happened upon a carelessly abandoned copy of the script.

For the first forty minutes, there is hardly any dialogue at all, with almost everything being conveyed visually. As with The Nude Vampire, there is some splendid stuff going on with imagery and creative lighting. I particularly liked the blue glow in the cellar when the vampire queen emerged, and the flight through the fields with the vampires pursuing and advancing in the background. As for why these vampires are out and about in the sunlight, the process of transformation is not complete, and--reveals the elderly vampire later--never will be. He is the last vampire, and the affliction dies with him. The scene where he holds the girls immobile with bats on their chests is a weird one too. After failing to escape when every pathway returns them to the castle, and failing to stake the vampire, the girls are given the task of bringing fresh blood to the others. This they do with their feminine wiles.

The scenes with D’Argent scampering about the ruins nude while being chased by a slobbering yokel contrast cleverly with Castel’s more predatory and brazen seduction as she lures a better-looking fellow back to the castle grounds, where they screw uncomfortably on the gravel path before she orgasms over a crypt. There’s also, in the complete version, a full-on red-hued orgy in the dungeons. If you do become an admirer of Rollin, there are numerous copies of his films around, but it is well worth paying the extra to obtain the limited Encore collectors editions of Shiver of the Vampires (1971), Requiem for a Vampire (1973), Demoniacs (1974), and Lips of Blood (1975). Rollin made plenty of crap, but the stars were smiling down on him when he attempted these.

Regarded by many as the pinnacle of Jean Rollin’s career, Lips of Blood (aka Levres de Sang, 1975) is quite extraordinary. It has all the virtues and all the failings of all Rollin’s work, in excess; disjointed, dreamlike, illogical, erotic, meandering, fascinating, and packed with disparate ideas and directions. It’s possibly, and sadly, the last work of any great value he produced, and was the last, for a while, of his vampire cycle. When he returned to the theme, with Two Orphan Vampires (1997) and Dracula’s Fiancee (2002), he produced interesting but mostly unerotic works. He still leaves us with a fascinating body of work that would never have been tolerated by any kind of studio system; indeed, Lips of Blood was so poorly received that Rollin had to produce a porno version (the delightfully named Suck me, Vampire, aka Suce moi vampire) for the unfortunate producer/s who put up the money. Fortunately, many of the pretty young things Rollin draped around his movies for decorative distraction came from the softcore industry that was flourishing in France and elsewhere at that time, and when times got hard, Rollin often produced equally loopy porn films that were as uniquely weird and ridiculous as any of his more mainstream would-be horrors (Bacchanales Sexuelles, Schoolgirl Hitch-hikers, and Countess X among them).

Lips of Blood opens with a great hook--three burly thugs-for-hire haul four rather obvious well-wrapped bodies into a dark, dank basement on behalf of a resolute middle-aged woman and bundle them into coffins. Underneath the sheets, the bodies are clearly breathing, and the camera lingers rather too long and obviously for us to assume this is just carelessness on the part of the film-makers (I’m not taking cheap shots here; on two separate occasions later on, dead bodies will be caught blinking).

The action now shifts to a press soiree for a new perfume, where our hero Frederick is in attendance. There, he sees a photograph used to promote the product which jogs his memory; it’s a childhood location he’s been searching for years to re-visit, a place he had almost convinced himself he’d only dreamed of. There, as a young boy (played by Rollin’s son, Serge), he had become lost, and finding some medieval ruins, encountered a pretty, gentle, white-smocked, crop-haired female ghost who had offered him reassurance and shelter. This, we later discover, was once his older sister, and the woman disposing of the breathing bodies, we also discover, is his mother, now visibly alarmed that Frederick is regaining his memory.

How badly does this sinister woman want to keep him from remembering or revisiting his past? Badly enough to bribe, and then have murdered, the sexy young girl who took the photograph, to keep her silent about the location. Badly enough to have a rough old tart pretend to be the ghost twenty years older in the present day. And badly enough to have her own son kidnapped and bundled off to a sanitarium for brutal treatment to cure his madness. Where does his mother get all these resources? We don’t know, but we do know that she’s decided to finish the job she didn’t have the heart for all those years earlier.

The ghostly girl (slim and sexy Annie Brilland of Laure and Blue Belle fame) is in fact his older sister Jennifer, a former vampire who went on the rampage while he was too young to remember, killing their father, feeding off the locals, and recruiting four other young nubiles to the ranks of the undead (the lovely Castel sisters Marie-Pierre and Cathy, clad in cosy cardigans and nightdresses, alongside two other wet dreams in diaphanous gowns).

Unable to bring herself to cut off the head of vampire Jennifer after she’d been despatched, or to even kill her four young acolytes, she had the body of her daughter and the four semi-naked slave girls consigned to a living death, sealed in their coffins. This has proven to be her undoing, because the ghostly girl and her vampires are now helping him in his quest to revive the solid vampire form of Jennifer, and it is they who slaughter the luckless hooker, the hit man, and the doctor in the asylum (turning up at the sanitarium as nurses in surgical masks, the Castel twins--before revealing their fangs--look unsettlingly like the half-hidden alien surgeons from the famous “Eye of the Beholder” episode of The Twilight Zone!). In a truly grotesque scene, Frederick opens the coffins to find live fluttering bats which, in a superbly edited sequence, transform back into the four vampire girls.

I would love to credit the women individually for their roles, but have been unable to ascertain who is who at time of writing. The hooker is probably Claudine Beccarie, and the other actresses are Martine Grimaud (the photographer?), Helene Maquin (possibly the vampire in the purple gown), Anita Berglund (possibly the blonde vampire), Beatrice Harnois, Sylvia Bourdon, and Mirielle D’Argent. Beccarie, Berglund, Bourdon, the Castels, Grimaud, Harnois, and Eva Quang are the girls in the porno offshoot which apparently quite ingeniously ties into events in this film as a sort of side-dish/sub-plot.

Lips of Blood is not short of nudity itself, and caters to all preferences. For those who like their eroticism subtle, there are the flowing, wind-swept gowns of the vampire girls. For those who prefer the blunt approach, there’s the model being photographed when Frederick turns up at the photographer’s apartment, and who is shown substantially in various poses, and a classic bit of brazen 1970s-style sexual provocation when the photographer leaves to get out of her dressing gown and get dressed, but instead comes down the stairs naked, unconvincingly claiming to have mislaid her dress! Ten seconds later, she’s slinging her arms round him and declaring her interest. If ever a scene so perfectly represented the 1970s, it’s this one.

Lips of Blood owes much to its locations, which as ever with Rollin’s best films, are spot-on perfect. Many of the scenes running around in the back streets of Belleville were filmed literally hours before bulldozers moved in to demolish the visually beautiful old slums for redevelopment, Rollin and his crew at one point paying the workmen to delay for an hour while they secured the shots they needed! The flight from the photographer’s assassin was filmed in the Trocadero gardens, with special dispensation to turn on the fountains--a shot curtailed when leaves blocked the pipes, giving them only the all-important master shot. At one point, Frederick enters a cinema conveniently showing Rollin’s own Shiver of the Vampires (although the posters are for The Nude Vampire). The film’s main set piece has mother’s stake-wielding thugs pursuing the terrified vampire girls around some beautiful medieval ruins. What mother doesn’t know, as the bodies are burning that night, is that the head of Jennifer her son has turned up with is a shoddy fake, and there is a truly bizarre ending forthcoming in which brother pardons sister and joins her in an unknown fate together. It’s a remarkable and original twist.

Inevitably, the climax is shot on the beach at Pourville near Dieppe, Rollin’s instantly recognisable home from home (the Encore edition of Lips of Blood features an enjoyable documentary about the location, with Rollin). Amusingly, party girl Annie Brilland, the future softcore cutie Annie Belle and the film’s Jennifer, perhaps going method, was very reluctant to rise from her own bed before lunchtime, and had to be pulled from it half-asleep and then manually stripped and propped up for the mountain-top scene. Whatever she’d imbibed hopefully kept her warm for the incredibly strange final scenes on the beach, which involved lots of meaningful posing stark naked and then climbing with her screen brother into an open coffin. When the coffin floats away in the final shots, the actors fortunately removed by now, Rollin nearly drowned trying to push the recalcitrant prop out to sea... and lost his treasured pipe in the process. Such are the sacrifices made for art.

Erotic Horror (4) : Jess Franco and Lina Romay

The Erotic Rites of Frankenstein (aka Curse of Frankenstein, 1972), Female Vampire (1973), Lorna the Exorcist (1974), Exorcism (1974), How to Seduce A Virgin (1974), Countess Perverse (1974), Hot Nights of Linda (1975), Doriana Grey (1976)

Like fellow independents Paul Naschy and Jean Rollin, the prolific Jess Franco was keen to dabble in the field of horror, heading straight for the inevitable public domain marquee names. After dabbling a couple of times with Dracula (once with the participation of Christopher Lee, Hammer’s Dracula), a meeting between the Count and the Baron’s creation was inevitable, and following Dracula--Prisoner of Frankenstein in 1971, a solo Frankenstein outing, The Erotic Rites of Frankenstein (aka Curse of Frankenstein) followed in ’72.

As with many European films of the period, it was produced in two forms, most bluntly termed with clothes and without. It was quite common for producers to film the same scene twice, as described above, to fit the peculiarities of each country’s censorship laws and market requirements. The more widely available Curse of Frankenstein includes the screen debut of Franco’s muse Lina Romay in inserted sequences as Esmeralda the gypsy girl, but these are not the sex and nude scenes, but simply irrelevant padding. In fact, the more explicit Erotic Rites version, which includes longer cuts of certain sequences with women disrobed or disrobing, is actually shorter because it is bereft of Romay.

Although the story, which features both Baron Frankenstein (Franco deadbeat Dennis Price) and the legendary magician Cagliostro (a supremely camp Howard Vernon) makes little sense, Franco’s Frankenstein features surprisingly competent camerawork and some extraordinary and memorable images (not the least being Cagliostro’s minions, lead by Annie Libert’s extraordinary semi-feathered twittering bird-woman). With a lumbering, silver-skinned, robot-like Frankenstein monster and the appropriate period trappings, there are numerous opportunities for effective weirdness, and Franco has created a fascinating, if flawed, dream-like contribution to the mythos that is worth seeing.

Scenes veer between the hilarious and the wonderful (I’m not sure which Jess’ cameo in the Ygor role belongs to), and most of the daft ones concern the assault on the haunt of Cagliostro by the two comedy cops. Some of the older actors can barely keep a straight face, and who can blame them? And yet, there is much to enjoy from a good, clear print.

Which version you see depends very much on personal choice, and doesn’t make that much difference. Curse, which is available in a nice print from Germany’s Kult XX company in a hardbox, is dubbed, and features Lina Romay in pointless and pitch-black darkness in scenes completely unconnected to the rest of the film. Erotic Rites was viewed with subtitles on a double disc from Tartan with Dracula--Prisoner of Frankenstein, and features the nude scenes, but as the nudity is not terribly exciting, or filmed in a particularly interesting way, viewers of the Curse version are not missing much. The one exception is the whipping scene in the dungeon, which obviously plays more sensibly with the victims naked rather than in their underwear. And while to suggest that a film might be better without the gorgeous Romay might seem to be heresy bordering on insanity, the fact is that she is clothed and barely visible, and her scenes are only of interest for being her screen debut. Therefore, Erotic Rites has the edge as the more polished and honest finished product.

Public domain horror--that is to say making free use of legend, myth, and non-copyrighted literary characters like Frankenstein and Dracula--is something we’ll come back to in the following chapters. However, Franco being Franco, while still influenced and inspired by then-current trends in cinema, was soon going off in his own directions.

By 1973, Franco had severed his links with producer Harry Alan Towers, and was waving goodbye to name stars in his casts. Under a flurry of pseudonyms, he was now literally churning out back-to-back product in string-of-sausages fashion for producer Robert de Nesle, who would take mute filmed and edited footage and put voiceovers on in France. Franco was also starting to build up a reliable company of regular stock players who were up for anything, new girlfriend and future wife Lina Romay leading the charge.

Although far from being her first for Franco, it was 1973’s Female Vampire (aka Les avaleuses, aka The Bare-Breasted Countess, aka Erotic Kill, aka about six other titles) that made Lina Romay’s reputation, and features her as the thigh-high booted and cloaked teenage vampire of the title. The film never again attains the heights of the promising opening scenes, showing her wearing these and nothing else as she unblinkingly eyeballs the camera and walks through the fog toward the viewer, but by now we’re bewitched.

Lina Romay was born Rosa Maria Almirall Martinez in Barcelona, Spain, in 1954. She took her stage name from the 1940s singer and actress of the same name, which inevitably caused some confusion in the less informed obituaries when she passed away at the far too early age of 57 in 2012, and certainly makes buying her wares on Amazon more of a chore than it should be, mixed in as they are with Mickey Rooney films (even more of a bizarre experience for anyone trying to purchase products featuring the first Lina Romay, I suppose). What the original owner of the name thought (she passed in 2002, aged 90) of being paired with a gorgeous and shameless exhibitionist in softcore and hardcore sleaze can only be imagined. Let’s hope no-one was thoughtless or tactless enough to tell her.

As related above, Romay made her first appearance in 1972’s Erotic Rites of Frankenstein in a bit part as a gypsy girl, and eventually appeared in over 100 films, almost all of them for horror and porn schlockmeister Franco, with Female Vampire being followed by several starring or co-starring roles as she swiftly moved up the cast list. Her best-known roles during the 1970s were in Lorna the Exorcist (1974), Exorcism (aka the hard-core Sexorcism, 1974, re-edited and re-released as Demoniac in 1979), Women Behind Bars (1975), Barbed Wire Dolls (1975), Doriana Grey (1975), Die Sklavinnen (1976), and Ilsa the Wicked Warden (1977). Slightly plumper and wearing a blonde wig, Romay appeared in Franco’s 1980s films often inexplicably billed as Candy Coster; by now, she and Franco were making hardcore versions of many of their films, and in some cases, hardcore only.

This film, which would be long forgotten and ignored without her, is a lame and tedious time-waster that owes its significance to the breath-taking debut of Romay and a haunting recurring theme that alternates with more standard jazzy porno music. Romay plays the mute Countess Irina Karlstein, the last in the line of a family through which run alleged vampiric tendencies. Anna Watican plays a nosy journalist in the ludicrous white platform shoes of the day (also in thigh-high boot form), who experiences Irina's supernatural side first hand. She hears voices calling her, suffers ghostly apparitions, is sexually assaulted by the vampire, and eventually led away through the forest in a hypnotic trance, the last we see of her. Naked but for her platforms, it looks like a Robert Crumb cartoon girl’s being abducted. Once or twice we see Romay standing silently on high flapping her cloak like bat-wings, but she spends most of her time flailing about on a bed, sometimes with a man, sometimes with a woman, sometimes with a long, hard... pillow, sometimes making love to the bed itself.

Inbetween several bouts of Romay rolling around naked, we have Jess Franco himself snooping around to pad things out as a Doctor Roberts, and Jack Taylor nervously hovering as the besotted Baron Von Rathony. It’s a full hour into the film before he encounters Romay’s Irina and they have a brief romance that ends the only way a love affair between a cat and a mouse can do. She also sees to a pervy old professor (Jean-Pierre Bouyxou) carrying Franco’s favorite mad doctor name Orloff. There is a ridiculous and completely unexplained SM sequence in which Romay presents herself to hard-faced Monica Swinn and Alice Arno, Swinn supposedly a fellow aristocrat and Arno her aide, although the only way to discover who anybody is, is to look up the cast list on the IMDB. Romay gets a whipping, enduring it all with a ‘don’t you know you can't hurt a ghost?’ expression even though there’s blood, but then Arno turns on their tormentor and takes the lash to her. None of Swinn’s three scenes connect with each other, and this is the last we see of either of them until Swinn turns up on a coroner’s slab so that the pervy professor can enjoy a bit of necrophilia by touching up the body. There’s also a bizarre Countess Bathory-style sequence, with Romay bathing in blood.

The people who have a problem with Female Vampire are those unable to take a film at face value. There is absolutely no point in expecting films like Franco’s to be any more or any less than what they are--experimental, slapdash, imaginative, pornographic, makeshift. If ever there was a case of making it up as he goes along, it’s Jess Franco. You either buy into it, or you walk away and go Hollywood. No gothic sets? Okay, we’ll film at a holiday resort. Nothing started is properly explained, or properly resolved. If you took away Lina Romay, and her striding, writhing, wriggling perfect body the whole production would collapse like a house of cards. So why watch? For Lina Romay.

Exorcism (aka Demoniac, aka L’eventreur de Notre Dame, 1974) was one of Franco’s more lucid and coherent efforts, if judged purely against his other works. That said, its only real plus point was the inevitable and ever-welcome presence of Romay, fresh from her triumph in Female Vampire, her tour-de-force (and wearing the same knee-high boots with little else).

Bad guy Vogel (played by Franco himself) is a tortured S&M perv who murders others with the same preferences to purge himself of his inability to deal with his repressed desires (this must have been a difficult one for the prolific clean-up brigades of the 1970s to watch without flinching). Romay and her blonde buddy stage graphic black mass stage shows for bored high-rollers and Parisienne jet-setters in a private club in an abandoned church (and which appear to take place in the broad daylight of 12.00. mid-day rather than the more traditional midnight). Vogel, who’s been supplying lurid text for the sex magazine Romay works at with her self-centered boyfriend and editor, stumbles onto these shenanigans, and rents a hotel room opposite the apartment the girls share. There, with the curtains obligingly left open, they enjoy cuddly lesbian sex antics that drive the religious zealot to despair.

The murders are as phoney as the performances, and the girls so dumb they just lie around waiting to be slaughtered. No warning bells appear to ring when Vogel pulls out his knife and starts ranting, and they appear to be remarkably compliant in their own demise as they get themselves elaborately tied up in-between scenes without much apparent resistance. Most captives in a one-on-one situation with a sweaty, fumbling middle-aged man and his baggy-trousered nuts would be fairly difficult to truss up, I’d imagine, given the choice between death’s door and a nearby ordinary one.

There’s an utterly typical, unerotic, flabby-bodied, white-skinned, incompetently shot sex orgy of the sort that blighted numerous badly-made 1970s sex films of the period (apparently it was enough just to see lots of people squirming away in those days, it didn’t have to look good), followed by an old man with a hilarious purple rinse who complains that his young blonde bed partner doesn’t really fancy him. But of course the only plausible reason to watch this or any of Franco’s efforts are for the sexual content, which with the exception of the above, is adequate here. The dubbing is less so, and rather bizarrely, the girl who replaces Romay in the stage show screams in exactly the same voice as her predecessor.

Individual scenes with Franco, mercifully clothed, and his lacklustre victims offer more appealing treats for the eye, although one murder has absurd close-ups of Franco stabbing a side of meat from the butchers intercut with it, even though the master shots of the body don’t match the bloody disembowellings of the clumsy inserts. These are quite unconvincing and unnecessary, although they might have been more effective in the early ‘70s, when audiences hadn’t seen so much of this drivel. Hilariously, a police officer walks around brandishing a Sherlock Holmes magnifying glass as if he’s in a Snooper and Blabber cartoon... and still doesn’t notice, as we surely do, that the injuries don’t match the butchery we witnessed in the close-ups. I haven’t seen anyone this uncomfortable with a prop since Elvis was instructed to use an oar for a mock guitar in Easy Come, Easy Go.

A heavily edited version of this film was released under the title Demoniac from Redemption (it’s not to be confused with Jean Rollin’s sublime Demoniacs), and it’s perfectly adequate if all you want to see is Romay, but the more complete version from the worthy and reliable Synapse makes more sense story-wise, and includes the abduction and torture of Romay’s character. To add to the confusion of Franco’s tendency to create multiple versions of his epics, this box has a dual cover.

The film also has nothing to do with exorcisms (at one time it was more appropriately titled The Sadist of Notre Dame), but was released just after The Exorcist inexplicably broke box office records on the back of some skilfully orchestrated publicity that hysterical religious groups merrily fell for hook, line, and sinker. Consequently, Franco, no stranger to exploitation, swiftly retitled it. If it had been made ten years earlier it would have been called The Sound of Music 2.

Jess Franco and Lina Romay continued

It was swiftly followed by the blatant cash-in Lorna the Exorcist (aka Les possedees du diable, 1974), hindered as was so often the case by the lack of a suitable locale, or indeed any atmosphere whatsoever. Franco never let a simple thing like the lack of appropriate sets, locations, and props get in the way of his movie-making; most of us, given a beach, would make a beach movie. Given an office block and a sterile towering hotel in broad daylight, as here, we’d cobble together a boardroom drama, illicit daytime shag-a-thon, or conspiracy thriller. Not Franco—he’s decided to make a devil-takes-your-daughter film, and that’s it. In many ways though, while I have no doubts that Franco would have plumped for the traditional surroundings had they been available, this lack of a more appropriate gothic locale actually helps to make the film more original and unique in its own way, and avoid the usual cliches. Evil can happen anywhere; you don't need thunder and lightning crackling over castles and mansions.

Franco regular Pamela Stanford is Lorna Green, a mysterious witch-like woman whom businessman Patrick Mariel (Guy Delorme) encounters in a South of France casino while down on his luck. Not really taking her seriously (big mistake), he enters into a Faustian deal to exchange his unborn daughter when she is eighteen for financial success immediately. Eighteen years later, this daughter has become a reality, a beautiful creature in the form of the ravishing Romay, no longer just an abstract future possibility for a light-hearted barter, but a real, live, much-loved human being with a life and a personality and a name--Linda. Sure enough, on her eighteenth birthday, the ‘phone rings...

Forced to meet the sinister Lorna in the casino town he first encountered her in, a spartan, spacious nightmare of towering geometric 1970s architecture that is impersonal, intimidating and unwelcoming, Patrick worries his wife and daughter by continually sneaking off. Rather unsettlingly, Lorna hasn’t aged or changed one bit, although she’s now threatening and menacing, and has a camp goon in the form of the ever-present Howard Vernon (left, with Romay), the most unlikely heavy in the history of thug-dom as he minces in to attack Patrick with a jagged sea-shell ornament. Lorna the Exorcist (she’s actually more of a succubus; there’s plenty of possession here, but no exorcisms) is as empty and disorganised as Franco’s detractors insist his films are, but as usual, they have a certain unidentifiable something.

After all, a horror film is supposed to make you feel chilly and uneasy, and Lorna certainly does that, through the likability of Patrick’s innocent family, the sterile and unfriendly surroundings (even the hotel disco is a dreary, sad dump), and the howls of the unhappy souls who encounter Lorna’s powers. The most extraordinary scene is the appalling supernatural attack on Mariel’s poor wife (Jacqueline Laurent), in which nasty little crabs the size of a large coin start emerging from her vagina! It’s typical of Franco, although fortunate for the poor actress, who must roll around the set naked and screaming at length, that the creatures are nowhere to be seen in longshot (not even as tiny models), but are real living creatures in the dreadful close-ups.

Once again, all other entertainment value lies with the stunningly beautiful Lina and her aversion to a) clothes and b) standing up. Let’s face it, Franco films are about whatever Jess and Lina can persuade the rest of the cast to get up to. The film opens with almost ten minutes of tedious lesbian sex between Romay and Pamela Stanford, of value only for the unclothed Romay, and making no sense plot-wise. Later, there’s some rather uncomfortable pretend lesbian sixty-nining in the bathtub, although as ever, while Stanford acts, Lina gets well stuck in. There’s a brief shower scene in which Romay sparkles, and she also eventually gets together with Catherine Lafferiere, who plays one of Lorna’s earlier victims. Lafferiere spends most of the film rolling around half-naked on a bed in a sanitarium presided over by Dr. Franco himself, suffering some sort of telepathic link to the proceedings. Finally, there’s a deliberately gross and provocative bit of business with a dildo.

Those who say Lina Romay was no actress are once again exposed as showing their prejudices against the often unclothed. She’s excellent here in what are essentially three roles, as Mariel’s sweet daughter, lustful lesbian, and the possessed demon she later becomes. The transformation from one to the other is superb. Despite Franco’s legendary ineptitude and lack of professionalism (watch him trying to film the family walking through the Mariel mansion from behind), the film is much more unusual and entertaining than the original The Exorcist, which is the film it’s brazenly ripping off. There’s a strong sense of scenes being padded and deliberately drawn out, and yet somehow all this disparate nonsense and shameless pandering gels together into one of Franco’s most unusual and original films.

Next up was a double-bill, Countess Perverse, actually La Comtesse Perverse (The Perverse Countess, 1974) being filmed alongside the equally derivative How to Seduce a Virgin, utilising the same cast, crew, and sets. This time, Franco had some good locations, and exploited them to the hilt.

Behind the stupid and typically seedy 1970s title, How to Seduce a Virgin (aka Plaisir a Trois, 1974) is another of Jess Franco’s better films of the early ‘70s. Alice Arno and Robert Woods are Martine and Charles, a couple of good-looking and charming evil wacko sadists who bring Tania Busselier’s Cecile to their home after befriending her naive parents, dumb enough to let her stay with a seemingly harmless couple they’ve only just met. In fact, Arno is fresh out of the nut house, her husband having bought her freedom from corrupt doctors and judges, and she keeps a hideous torture chamber and House of Wax-style museum of horror in her basement.

At the same residence are weird simpleton gardener Malou (Alfred Baillou of Girl Slaves of Morgana Le Fay), and broken butterfly Adele (Lina Romay), a subjugated sex slave, both plainly damaged by their association with this gruesome couple. Baillou and Romay over-act with camp abandon, ably assisted and effortlessly outmatched by that king of camp, Howard Vernon, as the creepy Karloffian manservant. The 1970s fashions on Woods and the decor are a delight, although the tacky music is best muted (or you can gently speed the film up without missing anything). The whole exercise is kept interesting by the frequent sex scenes (Busselier was one of Franco’s better finds, and Romay fans must attend), beautifully photographed and presented in a flawless print by Mondo Macabre (another of Franco’s periodic reworkings of Eugenie, this is right up their alley). Franco’s wandering viewfinder is kept in check to such a degree that one wonders if he actually worked the camera, surely held by other more capable and competent hands? Either way, Franco made an astonishing fourteen films that year, eleven of which he actually managed to finish, and as soon as this one was completed he took almost the entire cast away for an extra five days to film the equally impressive Countess Perverse.

If How to Seduce a Virgin was Eugenie meets House of Wax, the origins of Countess Perverse were even more transparent… and yet, it is one of Franco’s more original films.

In 1932, the King Kong people filmed Richard Connell’s book The Hounds of Zaroff as The Most Dangerous Game, which was about a big game hunter who hunts human beings, and Hollywood pounced on the premise like kids on a cookie jar. Halliwell lists steals and imitators in 1945, 1948, 1950, 1956, and 1966, and just a list of the 1960s TV shows alone (a speciality area of mine) that have used this storyline would include The Outer Limits, The Twilight Zone, Burke’s Law, The Avengers, Star Trek, The Green Hornet, The Time Tunnel, Lost in Space, and The Man from UNCLE--and that’s just off the top of my head! Needless to say, further examples in the decades to follow are equally plentiful, including Z-movie Slave Girls from Beyond Infinity, and John Woo’s butchered first Hollywood feature, Hard Target. Given that the theme requires a minimum of dialogue and acting talent, and was often a handy option if either scripts or time were in short supply, it was surely inevitable that Franco would join the throng, and even more so that he’d add sex, nudity, and steals from De Sade to the mix.

A naked girl is washed up on the beach and taken in by the young couple whose balcony overlooks same. She tells a bizarre tale of searching for her missing sister, and how she was stripped and hunted like game by the deranged couple on a neighboring island. Unfortunately for her, this mad tale is quite credible to her rescuers, as they are in fact in on it, procurers for Count Radov Zaroff (a hammy Howard Vernon) and his severe-looking but shapely wife Ivana (Alice Arno). The Zaroffs are wealthy bored exiles who liven up their days by paying local no-goods Bob and Moira (Robert Woods and Tania Busselier) to find and send fresh young meat to them. The poor girl is swiftly sent back to the island, and never seen again, other than at the dinner table--on a platter. The Countess Zaroff takes her pleasure hunting the poor victims, while the Count gets his jollies roasting them in the large oven downstairs and serving the results to the next unsuspecting victim. In this case, it’s pretty but dim Sylvie, played by Romay at her most curvy, full-lipped and big-eyed best. That night, they force themselves on her sexually, and when Sylvie later stumbles onto a previous guest undergoing preparation for the next banquet, even she figures out where the souvenir heads on the living room wall came from.

A competent film-maker could have worked wonders with this cast, concept, and setting, but Franco just stumbles and bumbles along, creating no tension or suspense of any kind. Obviously, any movie with this cast and locale is worth a look, and even Franco’s bungling can’t overpower the beauty of the girls or location. Either through design or incompetence, the film is slow to start, and padded out, a presumed leading character disappearing quite quickly. Fortunately, Franco recognises and exploits, at least, the striking geometrical design of the Escher-esque house they’ve used, an extraordinary structure in red (interior stairs) and grey (foreboding exterior, clinical and alien in its beauty).

Back at his hideaway, our Bob is starting to come to terms with what he’s been doing, the realisation of what he’s become now too much for him. When Busselier’s Moira blithely announces that Sylvie should be worth another two million in the kitty, he snaps, furiously strangles his accomplice to death and heads to the island to rescue her in a fit of contrition. Finally, an hour in, the film kicks off into overdrive and Z-movie heaven as the healthy Arno, naked but for bow and arrow, pursues the equally naked Lina Romay around the island. This is why B-movies and Z-movies are so glorious, and why it’s worth putting up with the flaws that their budgets and practitioners bring with them. You just wouldn’t get to see a scene like this in a mainstream movie. I won’t spoil the ending, but it’s typical Franco.

Once again, thanks to the nature of the exploitation business, there are several different versions of this film out there, but the classy DVD release from Mondo Macabre is of the standard original, without any of the future additions (framing sequences and hard porn inserts) tacked on later by desperate producers who, incredibly, couldn’t find a taker for this at Cannes two years in a row. Okay, pickings were richer and more plentiful then, but still...!

Jess Franco and Lina Romay concluded

Like so many Jess Franco films, particularly those from the prolific Eurocine years, Hot Nights of Linda (right, aka Les nuits brulantes de Linda, 1975) also has a complicated and confusing history of alternate cuts and foreign versions (Franco reckoned there may have been as many as ten different edits), and the best explanation of this film’s history can be found via the IMDB page for this film provided by DVD Drive-In under Critic Reviews. It’s tediously intriguing, but for this book’s purposes, and our sanity, we need only discuss what is freely available to regular punters, and as usual the story revolves around a young innocent (Alice Arno as a French nurse) thrown into a household populated by a deranged and duplicitous old-dark-house family alternatively referred to as Radeck or Steiner.

Eurocine’s policy of filming without sound and then adding different dubs for different markets means there is no original soundtrack, and as usual, the dubbing is terrible. In the case of Hot Nights it is particularly inept (only the shabby French hardcore version has subs), but it is undeniable that Franco made some extraordinary and unique films during this period, and so it is worth persevering. Beggars can’t be choosers, and the Severin DVD/Blu-Ray release is the first half-way watchable version of this film to be made available since it was shown in cinemas (early buyers got a third disc offering a poor quality but tolerable print of the French hardcore version, to be discussed further on).

The atmosphere of Hot Nights is enhanced by a near-constant layer of music over the proceedings, consisting of either lazy, languid guitar strumming or faux-Greek music to convey a constant reminder of the supposed location (filming actually took place in the Canary Islands, after some tourist-style striding around Paris during the opening titles). The grim story, with its depressing characters--an angry, guilty patriarch (Paul Muller), a repressed mute manservant (Pierre Taylou), a mentally scarred daughter (Catherine Lafferiere), and a malicious, trouble-making sprite (Lina Romay at her most beautiful)--unfolds to a virtually continuous display of female nudity in luxury and sunshine. Arno succumbs quite quickly, getting sucked into the sexual shenanigans of Romay, while Muller spends his days consumed with drunken rage and remorse for not his murder of his wife and her lover, but his personal fate of loss, guilt, and betrayal.

Franco shows genuine skill and creativity in this film, with several stand-out scenes mid-film--his use of lighting and cigarette smoke during a bonding moment between Arno and Romay (similar to the equally stylish intro to the more mundane Tender and Perverse Emmanuelle), followed by Romay’s shocking assault on the helpless Lafferiere, which begins tenderly in bed and uses mirror images and a master shot of Muller listening curiously to the sounds from the room above, are inspired. We then see Muller weeping over the body of his deceased wife (a small role for the dependable Monica Swinn) after he’s murdered her and her lover, cut to Romay spying on the moment through a slim opening (Romay initially witnessed the murders), and then back to Muller, for the same shot but with an empty bed. Switch to the next day and a sunny balcony, and a stunning Romay sunbathing naked, announcing to Arno that “I don’t even know if it’s early or late... it’s marvellous to live without a sense of time”. Another excellent scene has the shadowy silhouette of Romay pouncing on the baffled manservant and stalking him to his room for a seduction.

Available only as a tolerable transfer from a poor quality VHS tape, the hardcore version is more the Franco we know from his fumbling women-in-prison escapades, the inept, distracted, drooling Franco of the wandering, seemingly disorientated camera obsessed with genitalia. Arno’s first meeting with Romay at the sun-lounger is completely re-shot, with the camera now zooming eagerly between Lina’s legs, and the assault on Lafferiere, and the seduction of the manservant are now extended to include two sloppy, shabby sex scenes in which the camera imposes so greatly into the genital area that you can barely see that it’s Romay participating in the cunnilingus and fellatio involved (which it is). Each to their own, but I find the graphic, in-your-face gynaecological camerawork of 1970s sex films, all pubes and white flesh, deeply unattractive, crass, and immature, infamous “banana scene” and all, and prefer to see faces and admire bodies from a well-composed and well-lit camera angle. Even allowing for the low quality transfer and the welcome absence of now edited-out comedy voyeurs, what was previously a sophisticated and surprisingly well-shot erotic fantasy is now a tacky, slobbering mess. Arno is now much more sexually active (and failing even more irresponsibly and unethically in her job), and the manservant does very well for himself, having spent most of the softcore version as a voyeur. It’s a shame that the short nude sunbathing scene is missing, but in every other respect the softcore version is vastly superior (during the sexual assault in the hardcore version, for example, the exquisite establishing shot of Muller in his chair has been excised). Oddly, a graphic but character-delineating scene of sadism involving Muller and the servant is also absent from the harder version. There’s a supposed twist ending on both that’s barely worth mentioning. It only remains to almost needlessly point out that it’s Romay’s Olivia that has all the hot nights, and not the luckless Linda.

1976’s Doriana Grey (aka Die Marquis von Sade, aka Das Bildnis der Doriana Gray) is quite well shot for a Franco film, but the first time I saw this, every time a sex scene loomed, we cut away to panoramic vistas of the admittedly beautiful scenery, which provoked suspicions that all the good stuff was missing. Sure enough, there is an uncut version out there on DVD with the missing sex scenes (avoid the Erotic Classics version), but there still isn’t much to this.

Romay is as stunning as ever, wandering around in a pink diaphanous gown, and the film is essentially a vanity project for a beautiful woman who had no vanity (she was at her most beautiful in the 1970s, and this is smack in the middle, when her hair was cut shorter). The supporting cast is far less attractive, although fortunately, the beautiful blonde Martine Stedil from Barbed Wire Dolls is on hand. Franco regular Monica Swinn also wanders in, as a journalist initially investigating the beautiful recluse, but teasing the story out of Doriana in flashback narrative, later seduced.

Whatever story there is, is rendered incomprehensible by both Franco’s usual incompetence and the massive chunks of missing footage, but with an English dub it transpires that Romay is portraying two sisters, one living in luxury but sexually unsatisfied despite numerous liasons, the other locked up in a sanitarium, but experiencing psychically transmitted orgasms every time her selfish sister has it away. To further complicate things, Doriana is a succubus, who drains the life force out of her sexual partners. This has nothing whatsoever to do with Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Grey, who had an ageing painting in his attic that got older while he didn’t, but with Erwin Dietrich and Jess Franco involved it’s pointless even bothering to question it. Bottom line--you're paying for the privilege of sinking into Lina Romay’s beautiful big brown eyes and little else.

It is literally the overpowering presence of Romay that makes these films, and despite all the phoney names in the credits, any failings are full on Franco. She would continue to carry him for the rest of her life.

Erotic Horror (5) : Fall of the Hammer

The Vampire Lovers (1970), The Wicker Man (1973), Vampyres (1975)

While all this was going on in the rest of Europe, back in isolationist Blighty, Hammer Films--which blazed progressively into the 1960s from the late ‘50s with their taboo-smashing reboots of Frankenstein and Dracula--was trying to keep up with the crowd in the 1970s.

Hammer Films, despite their aggressive name, actually began business as a producer of comedies and crime thrillers, but had their first big success with The Quatermass Experiment (also briefly known as The Quatermass Xperiment, to exploit the new X film certificate), an adaptation of a BBC science-fiction series that had gripped the nation ten years earlier than Doctor Who with three serials (all eventually adapted by Hammer). However, it was in 1957, with their first color film, The Curse of Frankenstein, directed by Terence Fisher and bringing together for the first time Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing, that they inaugurated overnight their house image.

In the early 1960s, as the arrival of Universal’s classic horrors of the ‘30s and ‘40s were feeding the voracious needs of the new medium of television and being discovered by a whole new generation of kids and teens via the mocking Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine and its imitators, Hammer were at the forefront in fulfilling the requirements of starving adult horror fans. As American pop culture took horror into parody for the bubble-gum crowd with Abbott and Costello, The Munsters, and even actual bubble-gum cards, British pop culture (where even King Kong was deemed untransmittable by television nabobs, and Godzilla and friends were virtually unknown) was pushing the envelope on the big screen, and making instant stars of Lee and Cushing. Throughout the 1960s, from a converted country mansion, Hammer turned out a non-stop procession of gothic horror featuring public domain horror icons, which, despite the fond familiarity of locations, performers, and stock cliches, treated their themes with the utmost seriousness. “Hammer’s Frankenstein and Dracula set the tone” wrote Peter Hutchins in The BFI Guide to Horror. “Ruthless, predatory creatures not much inclined to self-justification or self-pity”.

Although Hammer had always dabbled in the erotic element of their product, it was inevitably in the ‘70s that they started featuring nudity as standard, beginning with Countess Dracula, The Vampire Lovers, Lust for a Vampire (all 1970), and Twins of Evil in 1971. Even so, it was very coy fare; a back view here, an exposed breast there, and many opportunities passed over. Lust for a Vampire and Twins of Evil are quite daring for their day, but the eroticism is better described as suppressed rather than subtle. Hammer wasn’t so much pushing the envelope as poking it with a long stick. What did the audience expect? What would the audience accept? And how much would the censor tolerate? Hammer erred on the side of caution.

Foremost in this brief flurry of sexual adventure was Polish-born actress Ingrid Pitt, who starred in Hammer’s literal retelling of the Bathory legend, Countess Dracula, and was then immediately cast the same year in The Vampire Lovers, as the title character of J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla, a Bathory-influenced lesbian vampire from an 1871 story written two years before his death that not only inspired countless cinematic interpretations including Franco’s Vampyros Lesbos and Female Vampire, Larazz’ Vampyres, and much of Jean Rollin’s early ‘70s output, but almost certainly Bram Stoker (creator of Dracula) himself. Anywhere there is a combination of vampirism and lesbianism, the shadow of Countess Carmilla Karlstein will be present, either in spirit or public domain personification.

By the start of the ‘70s, Lee and Cushing were getting tired, typecast, bored, and in Lee’s case, rebellious, and the rest of Hammer’s output, the meat and potatoes Frankenstein and Dracula stuff, was looking dated, foolish, and misguided as it lapsed into self-parody, fad-following, and camp. In the era of Count Yorga, Doctor Phibes, Kolchak, and Blacula, Hammer lost their nerve and their audience, falling in with the crowd. It would have been incredibly challenging, daring, and possibly uncommercial to have done otherwise, but it was a sad sight nonetheless, and Hammer closed its doors in 1976.

Far superior to anything Hammer did in the 1970s, and perhaps indicating the direction the company might have gone, was the one-off happy accident, The Wicker Man (1973). This bizarre film (still unique, despite a dismal American remake in 2006) is a classic of the 1970s, and stars Edward Woodward (TV’s Callan and The Equalizer) as an uptight, sexually repressed, church-going policeman sent to a weird arcane island to find a lost child and subsequently disgusted by all the pagan sex rife in the community. What he doesn’t know--and if you don’t want to know, stop reading here--is that the whole thing is a set-up to lure him into a horrific trap. The islanders, lead by Count Dracula himself, Christopher Lee, as smooth weirdo Lord Summerisle, need a virgin to sacrifice... and no-one said it had to be the usual blonde bimbo…

Written by the highly regarded Anthony Schaeffer, and directed by the former ad-man and newcomer Robin Hardy, The Wicker Man at first resembles a sort of Avengers-style mystery without Steed and Emma, as Woodward’s purse-lipped and appalled investigator is lead a merry folk-dance by the islanders, an assortment of the usual suspects including Lee’s fellow Hammer veteran vampire Ingrid Pitt, landlord’s daughter Britt Ekland (the unimaginative choice of every money-man looking for a billboard name from Get Carter to Bond), Aubrey Morris, Lindsay Kemp, and so on.

A wonderful sense of loneliness, isolation, and paranoia is evoked, although Woodward always has God n’ son for company; nobody else on the Godless isle has any use for ‘em. The film nicely portrays the absurdity of both Christian and pagan beliefs, by showing how they oppose each other, equally pointlessly. One curtails sex, the other revels in it; one sees sex as reproduction within marriage, the other as random, wanton, fertility for man, beast, and plant alike. One wants sex nowhere, the other sees it everywhere. One believes in resurrection, the other in sacrifice. That last one turns out to be a bummer.

Ironically, the film’s most famous scene, in which a supposedly nude Britt Ekland dances naked in the next room, bumping her body pointedly on the wall while the virginal copper sweats profusely on the other side of it, was performed with a body double (let’s all raise a glass to local hotel worker Jane Jackson). The only other potentially sexy scene, in which a bunch of naked nymphs perform a fertility dance before the baffled bobby, was filmed coyly and in soft focus, with only those present at the filming enjoying the show.

Sadly, the film was the victim of behind-the-scenes machinations and the usual after-the-fact butchering by unsympathetic producers, the main obstacle to the film’s success being a ridiculous and almost universal acceptance by everybody that the film was a tough sell to audiences. Guys, I think I see a way out here!

The Wicker Man has made it into the pages of this book on the strength of one of the most erotic scenes in British cinema and the fact that it’s about sex, that most commercial of commodities. Furthermore, it was and still is, a great film, suspenseful and original and memorable. If Hardy or one of his assistants had gone to the nearest field and re-filmed the fertility dance with a dozen nubile young girls so that it could be enjoyed by the audience as well as the production team, and then promoted the crap out of the one-of-a-kind Britt Ekland/Jane Jackson scene, there would have been word-of-mouth queues around the block. Apparently, despite a small army of interested parties from actors to makers to producers, distributors, exhibitors, and money-men, not a single one of them thought of this as a way of getting the rest of the film seen by the vast audience that later appreciated it as a cult film long after the opportunity to exploit this “unsaleable” property had passed.

Nevertheless, The Wicker Man is an extraordinary film, worthy of your attention, even if you may end up as frustrated at the end of it as our unfortunate policeman, who meets his maker as pure as he arrived, if a little crispy round the edges...

And then there’s Vampyres (1975).

Within this shabby but entertaining British horror of the early ‘70s, directed in the gloomy English countryside by Spanish-born Jose Ramon Larraz, are some lesbian vampire antics that make it a more than worthy contender for this book.

Models Marianne Morris (auburn-haired and British) and Anulka Dziubinska (blonde and Swedish) take the lead roles as Fran and Miriam, two young lovers who are discovered lezzing about by an unidentified intruder and pumped full of bullets for undisclosed reasons. Later, they’re seen haunting country roads in evening wear and luring luckless male motorists back to their gothic residence, where they have sex with them before slaughtering them and drinking their blood! It doesn’t make much sense, but it looks great on film. Vampyres out-hammers Hammer and puts Tigon and Amicus in the shade, but it’s a one-off. Director Larraz specialised in sex and horror, but his reputation, such as it is, apparently rests on this one.

One gets the impression that Larraz had Jean Rollin aspirations and imagination, but Jess Franco storytelling ability and budget. The house is great, but the sequence of Morris and Dziubinska trying to seduce motorists in a country lane surely couldn’t have turned out as envisaged in the mind of Larraz the scriptwriter (who bizarrely wrote under his wife’s name); the girls look like they’re doing the walk of shame after some late night clubbing. The story goes down two paths at the same time, one following intended victim Ted (Murray Brown), and the other from the perspective of dangerously disinterested John (Brian Deacon) and even more dangerously very interested Harriet (Sally Faulkner of I’m Not Feeling Myself Tonight and Confessions of a Driving Instructor), two vacationers who outstay their welcome (Margaret Heald, who stripped off to very pleasing effect in Confessions of a Pop Performer, is wasted as a fully-clothed receptionist in a brief bit-part at the beginning).

Despite the Swedish starlet and the Spanish director, with its wooly hats and wellies, am-dram acting, grey skies, and police cars with nee-ner sirens, Vampyres is defiantly British (there’s even a caravan), with a pale leading man who looked better dressed, cheap twangy music, Morris and Dziubinska needlessly but well dubbed, and an atmosphere of constant drizzle in the outdoor scenes, although the European origins of the director might account for the fact that the camera lingers on the girls rather than just glimpses them.

Most British of all are the sex scenes, which are not helped by the leading man’s brutish slobbering and pawing; he launches himself at Morris like a bulldog that thinks the dinner bowl’s going to be taken away before he’s finished. It’s a pretty dispiriting spectacle. All credit to middle-aged Murray Brown for getting his kit off, but I hope he gave the lighting guy a good kicking when he saw the end result.

Plot-lines are abandoned like dogs at Christmas. We never know who shot the girls to death in the first place, why they came back as solid ghostly daytime vampires, why it is inferred that Ted has been this way before when he suspiciously and unconvincingly insists he hasn’t, why Fran ill-advisedly keeps Ted alive for further sucking and fucking when all other victims are swiftly despatched, and why caravanners John and Harriet don't pack up and skedaddle after a night of screams and bloody hands at the window. Perhaps in the latter case, it was a matter of following horror movie tradition of doing the opposite of sensible.

If one adheres to the cliches of the genre, and apply logic where there is none, it may be presumed that Ted was the shooter and has in some sort of Twilight Zone-y way been returned to the scene of the crime for the ghostly girls to get their revenge; a final scene has an estate agent showing off the house to prospective American buyers by telling them of the killings and supposed hauntings, the camera visually pointing at Ted in his car, who perversely survives where four innocents haven’t. However, one can dispute and debate interminably. If the film-makers don’t care, why should you? There’s a commentary on the DVD which I haven’t yet bothered with, and rarely do; I enjoy anecdotes, gossip, and trivia, but my old school attitude is that you get the point across in the film, not by explaining it later.

Never mind. The nudity is plentiful and frequent from the outset, and the vampiric gore scenes are remarkably graphic and gruesome for the period, fang-free and with the girls literally cutting, slashing, and drinking the blood; Sally Faulkner’s death scene is particularly gung-ho (she’s a screamer), and Deacon meets his end swiftly but horribly. Another killing is enhanced by the two girls rushing at the camera to finish the job from a p.o.v. shot. If neither the ghostly or vampire elements are true to tradition, then it rightly appears to be a case of my film, my rules, which is fair enough for things that don’t exist, and also an essential attitude for artistic freedom, variety, and progress. What is very enjoyable is an interview in the extra features on the DVD with the happy and unrepentant leading ladies, who are both charming and great fun. Producer Brian Smedley-Aston was a jobbing film editor and occasional director (he worked on the obscure Strange Report TV series, Nic Roeg’s Performance, and cult horror Blue Sunshine). He became a producer with Vampyres and then went on to produce 1970s sex starlet Fiona Richmond’s long-forgotten films for London-based publisher and porn baron Paul Raymond.

The Girls Next Door: Joelle Coeur and Maria Forsa

The Demoniacs (1974), Schoolgirl Hitch-hikers (1973), Bacchanale Sexuelles (1974), Baby Love (1974), Butterflies (1975)

The French director Jean Rollin spent his career sliding back and forth between porn films and horror films, primarily but not exclusively in the 1970s and 1980s. Rollin is, like his almost interchangeable Spanish stablemates Paul Naschy and Jess Franco, interesting for his occasional flashes of artistic brilliance and his attempts to include what the sex-and-horror film promises, and often doesn’t remember to provide—the sex and horror. Few practitioners in the field seem able to deliver either, even when they come equipped with the technical skills or budgets that Rollin and Franco lack, and a list of those that fail to achieve either the sex or the horror would have a greater word count than this book.

The tragedy is that Rollin, and to a lesser extent, Franco, have the imagination and the mindset, but neither the ability nor the budget to put the images in their head on film. One suspects that even if Rollin and Franco had lavish budgets thrown at them, they still might not muster the talent to realise their mental images on the screen, and yet, agonisingly, the potential is there. Meanwhile, the big studios put their resources in the clumsy mitts of sex and horror hacks who, with all facilities at their disposal, frequently fail to provide either. How difficult is it, really, to deliver erotic horror? The techniques of the horror film must be glaringly obvious to the most moronic of film students, and it’s not that difficult to find young actresses willing to take their clothes off. Yet the practitioners of this genre fail to deliver more often than the makers of any other type of movie.

In the early 1970s, for a brief but busy period of time, two now anonymous young ladies with everyday but above average looks shone more brightly than the other starlets flickering in the firmanent—French-born Joelle Coeur and Swedish-born Maria Forsa. Neither was utilised to their full capacity, but both left behind a tantalising body of work that included a couple of genuine near-classics. The industry calls them girl-next-door types. They don’t have supermodel looks, but even better, the sort of attainable beauty that might cross your path in everyday life.

The Demoniacs (Les Demoniaques, and not to be confused with Franco’s Demoniac, also 1974, which features the same blend of female flesh and laughable ineptitude and comes from the same period), was made in the early 1970s but is set at the turn of the 19th to 20th century. The story concerns a fishing village where wreckers, as distinguished from the pirates who commit their murderous atrocities at sea, plunder the remains of ships they have tricked into running aground on the rocks. Ruthless murderers of all survivors, these four (three slobs and a stunning beauty, played by John Rico, Willy Braque, Paul Bisciglia, and Joelle Coeur respectively) are introduced before the opening credits by long, close-up profiles reminiscent of Rollin’s beloved Republic serials, and which, by rights, should be either laughable or boring, but somehow work.

Following a moody opening credits sequence filmed over the ocean, two pretty girls (Patricia Hermenier, Lieva Burr), clad only in white gowns, emerge from the sea, struggling to assist each other to survive. Brutally, as they stagger to the beach, the watching pirates proceed to terrorise, rape and attempt to murder them. The Captain, who has been introduced to us as a man driven mad by his sins, is then tormented by hallucinations of their ghostly apparitions, which the village seer (and brothel-keeper) warns him will end in the destruction of the entire corrupt community. The pirates decide to finish what they started, and return to the beach, where the two girls are hiding fearfully among the wrecks of the many boats washed up, a genuine location, and apparently a veritable shrine to the local yokels where Rollin filmed. The pirates burn the boats in a spectacular sequence (actually the islanders would only allow Rollin to torch one of them, and guarded the others during filming, quite seriously promising to shoot the filmmakers dead if sparks ignited the others!), but are too busy rescuing their female member (curvy Joelle, above) to ensure that the girls are finished.

In fact, the girls, bereft of their strange pallor, but now apparently spirits, meet other bizarre surreal characters in local ruins, including a female clown (see front of book) and a magus; another is a Satanic presence (Yugoslav hypnotist Micha Zivomir) who fucks them and in so doing grants them obscurely defined temporary powers to avenge themselves against their murderous tormentors. This must be the greatest chat-up scam ever. The girls return to the bar and terrorise the locals, and the pirates run and hide.

Bizarrely, and for reasons not made clear (a Rollin trademark), the girls do not take their revenge--a mistake, because Coeur’s female pirate Tina, disgusted with the cowardice of the others, travels to the ruins herself, and murders the clown and the magus. We are then led to believe that Tina has been crushed and killed by falling icons, but she and the pirates turn up on the beach again to torment the girls, who are tied to wreckage to drown after being brutalised and raped. The Captain, now completely insane, inexplicably strangles Tina (who is getting an erotic charge from the rapes and murders), and the other pirates die mysterious and supernatural deaths. Finally, the ghosts are able to rest.

While not taking every opportunity offered, the film delivers several erotic, rather than horrific, frissons. The film is never terrifying, it’s more like a strange dream, with a dream’s longueurs and memorable, disconcerting moments. Also like a dream, it’s disjointed and confusing. It’s a great film to watch at three or four in the morning, just before you drift away yourself, as are Rollin’s other weirdo erotic horrors—1970’s The Nude Vampire, 1971’s Shiver of the Vampire, 1973’s Requiem for a Vampire, and 1975’s Lips of Blood.

Filmed in freezing conditions, with less than happy actresses playing the ghost girls (DVD notes in the Special Edition betray a shocking Gallic callousness on the part of an unrepentant Rollin and his staff), several graphic soft-core sex scenes were cut down or edited out completely, although they can be seen as deleted scenes in the aforementioned limited edition. These involve some pretty wild and enthusiastic mattress action with Ms. Coeur, Franco regular Monika Swinn as an obliging barmaid, and extended footage of the two girls tied to the boat wreckage in the finale.

What is admirable about the amateurish Rollin, apart from the fact that he managed to sustain a career actually making films (an impressive enough achievement in itself--as a mere commentator, my first nod is always to acknowledge that the film maker has actually made a film), is that his dreamlike, incompetent erotic mysteries are so entertaining. Despite their dull moments, there are enough sudden flashes of accomplishment to keep the viewer watching. His films are often mysteriously watchable, even as each scene fails for a different small reason each time. Perhaps it’s down to the lateness of the hour that one tends to watch them. Whatever the truth, The Demoniacs is widely and rightly regarded as one of his best films.

Rollin is best known for his erotic vampire films discussed earlier, but his handful of 1970s sex films (often directed under the pseudonym of Michel Gentil) are possibly more successful in their aims than his better known so-called horror films. On the strength of these, Rollin should have spent more time making soft-core erotica and less time failing at lame horror, but despite a couple of very nice sex scenes early on, one senses his heart wasn’t really in it. Still, if this was what he could do if he was bored, imagine the results if he was actually inspired.

The dismally named Schoolgirl Hitch-hikers (aka Jeunes filles impudiques, 1973) starts well, building up interest and then delivering, but sadly degenerates half-way through into a ridiculous, illogical, and childishly conceived cops and robbers yarn when the bad guys show up. We could also have done with some good-looking guys for the girls to pretend to be interested in. Like so many 1970s sex films, the men are grotesque. Fortunately, at no time does Rollin bother with such action-delaying intrusions as character motivation--the schoolgirls are almost supernatural in their random behavior, little sex-crazed pixies with one-track minds. Faced with a malevolent-looking intruder in the house, they don’t scream and run, just strip off.

Unfortunately, what should have been further interesting sex scenes are replaced by daft gunplay over the saddest looking stolen jewels in the history of cinema. No-one objects to a plot in soft-core porn, but several incomprehensible and illogical developments are topped by the scene when, having escaped her captors, one of the girls--now armed--goes not to rescue her friend, or to the police, but flees into town and hires a joke detective to return for a shoot-out! From hereon, Rollin seems to have quite literally lost the plot in a product that never needed one. At least the blonde’s bad hair is explained—it’s a wig!

It was, after all, the 1970s. A fine time to be a teenager, although you’d never know it from the media left behind. In a decade rife with petty puritanical censorship and bereft of such contemporary luxuries as pause, fast-forward, and freeze-frame, the value of a film that lingers on beautiful bodies and keeps moving when they’re clothed could not be over-estimated. Schoolgirl Hitch-Hikers (the original French title translates as the far superior Impudent Young Girls) is magnificently stupid, but worth a look for the first two sex scenes (no phoney acrobatics or sweaty grunting, just laid-back touching and tenderness, with plenty of time to admire the bodies--all you can really ask of softcore) and the stupendously gorgeous Joelle Coeur. Most of the directors who dabbled in 1970s exploitation had their favorite starlets, and where Franco had Romay and Sarno had Maria Forsa, Jean Rollin had Coeur. Women were rarely photographed flatteringly in 1970s sex films (which is why Emmanuelle caused such a sensation), but Rollin, for all his failings, could at least do that. Although not quite as inept as his soulmate Franco, Rollin had no idea how to pace or edit a film, so it’s fortunate that we have the stunning Joelle to look at while nothing is happening. The slow pace pays dividends where the sex scenes are concerned, because they aren’t rushed.

Synapse have done an excellent job seeking out and making available decent prints of 1970s obscurities, many of them unworthy of their detailed and loving attention, but always interesting to investigate. With Rollin’s 1974 Bacchanale Sexuelles, also known, ludicrously and meaninglessly, as Fly Me the French Way, they hit the jackpot, finding a joyful, silly rarity well worth your time and money. This is pleasurable erotica with lovely female performers and plenty of mad moments for lovers of cult silliness, happily free of the attendant unpleasantness, either in the form of sexism, sadism, or poor production values, that so often mars 1970s softcore. It does, however, have remarkably silly background music, which somehow only adds to its charm.

Here, Coeur plays Valerie, a young girl house-sitting in her cousin’s Parisienne mansion with her lesbian friend Sophie (Marie-France Morel). Scared to be alone in the large vacant house, Valerie calls Sophie over to join her; then Sophie gets the jitters--justly, it turns out--and, unable to wake Valerie to relate her concerns about intruders, ‘phones her friend Fred to come over.

Fred (Alain Bastin) arrives to find only the sexy and willing Valerie; Sophie, after a bizarre, almost choreographed dance in the dark with cat-suited interlopers, has been abducted. After pausing to have sex, breakfast, and more sex, it finally occurs to Sophie’s friends to look for her.

They discover that Valerie’s cousin, the owner of the place they’re house-sitting, is a journalist who has infiltrated a weird sex cult run by the sadistic and decidedly unattractive Malina. Malina’s minions are onto him, and kidnapped Sophie to identify him by sight, thinking she is Valerie. Meanwhile, Malina has sent her pretty young maid (Agnes Lemercier, oddly credited as Jenny Trochu) to the house to find his incriminating photographs of the cult’s antics, but she loses interest and switches sides after some frolics in the bathtub with Fred n’ Val. The photos must be hot, even Valerie thinks they’re filthy, and she’s just had jam sucked off her nipples.

When the real maid arrives (the legendary Annie Belle), the game’s up, and a ludicrous catfight ensues, after which the fake maid reveals all in return for her share of the negatives. Fred and Val rescue Sophie and the cult’s latest initiate (Minia Malove), and free Malina’s sex slaves by destroying the remaining negatives. Cousin Paul is revealed, and amazingly, feels justified in shooting dead Malina’s two stooges before seducing the S&M-fixated Malina and turning her into a pussycat by giving her real sex!

It’s not as daft as it sounds—it’s dafter. The innocent fun of the uninhibited young cast in the vacated townhouse actually provides far more light entertainment than the utterly inoffensive and lame weird cult scenes, as bonkers as they are. Although madder and more creative than Schoolgirl Hitch-hikers, this is the more solid and sensible production, with a stronger story and less senseless stupidity; it goes from A to B to C without literally losing the plot, whereas Schoolgirl Hitch-hikers is all over the place. However, Coeur is in both, so if you like the one, you’d be nuts not to chase up the other. Rollin’s laid-back, unpretentious matter-of-fact direction is perfect for softcore; there’s no kinkiness in the sex or tiresome adventurous camerawork, and it’s a shame he didn’t do more of this, and less Grapes of Death and Killing Car drivel.

Joelle Coeur and Maria Forsa continued

Director Joe Sarno turned out literally dozens of mediocre porn films for four decades, from the beginning of the 1960s to the beginning of the 21st century. His films aren’t quite as crass and vulgar as some of his American compatriots in the U.S. porn industry, but they’re not that special either. Maria Forsa met Sarno when she was just sixteen, appearing in Vampire Ecstasy (aka Veil of Blood) in 1973, and the vapid Baby Love (aka Girls Meet Girls, aka Vild pa sex) in 1974. No relation to the U.K. Baby Love starring Linda Hayden, if you saw it in the U.K. in the 1970s as Confessions of a Sex Kitten, it was bereft of no less than 47 minutes! Baby Love wouldn’t be much better with the sex put back in if it wasn’t for the presence of the extraordinary Maria, whose orgasms put everyone else in the sex industry to shame. Although there are supposed to be twenty-one different sex scenes, I must admit I only counted seventeen, but that doesn’t mean I might not have been distracted--not only by the constant screwing, but by the bad 1970s hair and decor, wooden acting, and hilariously bad dialogue (when you can make it out, which is only about half the time; Swedish girls are talking English, and the sound is muddier than a censor’s motives). The conversations--which were presumably the only thing left when the censors had finished their foolish work--play like Woody Allen’s parody of Bergman in Love and Death, and the non-existent plot simply concerns Bibi (Forsa) collecting trinkets off everyone as mementos of all the sex she’s had.

After a bit part as one of Countess Bathory’s girls in the classy Immoral Tales in 1974, she began her association with Stockholm-based producer Inge Ivarson and director Mac Ahlberg, making Flossie (1974), Justine and Juliette (1975), Bel Ami (1976), and Molly (1977). Sarno’s Butterflies was filmed during this busy period.

Several stories have flitted around Butterflies (aka Blafferen, aka Broken Butterfly, 1975) over the years, Forsa’s follow-up film with Sarno, one concerning the hardcore sex that Forsa said she’d never do, even though she apparently fucked herself stupid with all and sundry on every film she ever made (it’s clearly her in the long-shots and the blow job scene), another concerning her real-life infatuation with co-star Eric Edwards, and a third involving the shoot at the plush Munich apartment block loaned as a cost-effective location by the producer, in which the neighbors came by not to complain, but to watch the filming of the sex scenes! None of this remotely matters, because what we poor mortals get is what’s on the screen.

And what’s on the screen is rather good. With the exception--perhaps we should say inclusion--of the films she made with Mac Ahlberg, Joe Sarno’s Butterflies is probably one of the best she made. This innocent-looking, fresh-faced Swedish girl was everything a boy or man could hope for in a young lover, and Sarno and Ahlberg both cleverly focussed on Forsa’s flushed and ecstatic face during her frenzied orgasms, making the ordinariness of her figure quite redundant. No-one in the sex industry enjoyed their work quite as much as Maria Forsa appeared to. The male response provoked by young Maria comes not from her tits or bum, or the material she appears in, but from the sheer successful pleasure on the screen that rips across her features when she’s fucking. Very few directors realise just how erotic a part of a woman the face is, and far too many porn actresses offer pathetic fake orgasms as they bump and grind for their paycheck, but all four of the attractive young women given a thorough seeing-to here by the absurd-looking sex film legend Harry Reems are plainly enjoying every minute of their time with him, so he clearly had something behind that comic-book ‘tache.

The story is simplicity itself. Country girl Forsa dumps her baffled boyfriend (Eric Edwards) and heads for the bright lights of Munich, unsuccessfully trying to hitch-hike until she shamelessly bares her bum at the traffic--probably unnecessary in this case, as it's a sweaty lingerie salesman who picks her up, and takes her into the woods to try on some of his product! Leaving the perspiring old pervert where he fell in his over-eagerness to retrieve his wares, she picks up nightclub owner Frank Carson (hardcore Harry), who’s pulled over to the side of the road for a nap.

Effortlessly replacing his current live-in girlfriend (an appalling performance, although to be fair, all the German or Swedish girls in this film are speaking stilted English, which is better than the usual dubbing disaster), Forsa finds her exciting new life marred by Frank’s constant indiscretions with other girls, and sure enough, after causing a scene, she is unceremoniously dumped in exactly the same way as her predecessor. Sadder but wiser, the film closes with Forsa’s blonde bumpkin wending her way back to the boonies.

So far, so what, you may say, but of course this film is about the sex scenes, not the story, and behind the word indiscretions in the previous paragraph are several steaming sex scenes. The first (and second) are between Edwards and Forsa, and the third between Forsa and Reems. After this, the film becomes the Harry Reems Show, as Frank works his way through Heidi Kappler (a sex film veteran), Nadia Henkowa (of Vampire Ecstasy and Baby Love), and Zoe Hendry (from assorted British sex-coms), while Forsa’s Denise fumes with jealousy, and pretty much becomes the co-star in what started out as her movie. As for the butterflies, well, there are a few flitting about in the countryside scenes, as Edwards and Forsa, and then Reems and Forsa, frolic in the flowers, gambol in the fields, and skip joyfully through the woods, a Sarno cliche that always brings to mind Monty Python and Benny Hill. Sarno, bless him, when not filming hardcore shots of dicks pumping relentlessly home, was a bit of an old romantic at heart.

Butterflies, as released stylishly and from an excellent print by Another World (who have also made available Baby Love and Bel Ami), is offered in a two-disc package that supplies both the hardcore and the softcore versions of the film, which enables interesting comparisons. What is interesting in this case is that the softcore version (as well as including a few worthwhile shots that clarify aspects of the film not revealed in the stronger version) is as satisfying as the hardcore, if not more so, because the strength of the film is not in a few nondescript unattractive close-ups of genitals, which frankly could be anybody, but in the orgasmic strength of the full-on, frantically enthusiastic intercourse.

Missing from the hard version, presumably to accommodate the hard inserts, are scenes with Denise making love to Ruth, Natasha emerging from the bedroom after sex (so explaining why she mysteriously says she’s leaving so soon), and the revelation that Winnie is the instant replacement for both Denise and Natasha when the heartbroken Denise heads homeward. Scenes of Natasha stripping off for Frank are clumsily cut from both. There are a few other snips and edits missing too, although bizarrely, all this couldn’t add up to more than an extra five minutes on the running time!

Frustrated actor and former camera operator Harry Reems found fame instantly when he stepped in front of the camera for 1972’s Deep Throat. Persecuted and hounded by American moralists and bible-thumpers, he relocated in Sweden for a few years where he made Butterflies, Justine and Juliette, and Bel Ami with Forsa, before returning to the States to find alcohol and religion in that order. Edwards and Forsa appeared together again in 1977’s Molly by Mac Ahlberg, while she and Reems worked together again on Ahlberg’s Justine and Juliette in 1975, and Bel Ami in 1976. As for Butterflies, 1970s sex films don’t come much better than this.

What puts Butterflies a cut above the rest, apart from the very obviously genuine orgasms enjoyed by the performers, is--as is so often the case--making the simple right choices. The sets are classy, the girls are sexy, the location filming attractive, and the clothes--yes, the clothes matter--smart and stylish. Best of all, there's no wakka-wakka porno music despoiling the sex scenes (Forsa sucks off Edwards to the sound of nothing but birdsong), so if you're lucky enough to have the house to yourself, you can enjoy the honest and arousing sounds of real sex, just as it would be if you were there... although with Reems in charge, don’t forget to think of the neighbors….

Around the World with Mac Ahlberg

Around the World with Fanny Hill (1974), The Second Coming of Eva (1974), Justine and Juliette (1975), Bel Ami (1976), Molly (1977)

British model and actress Shirley Corrigan appeared in over twenty productions during the 1970s, most but not all Z-grade horror and soft porn.

Around the World with Fanny Hill (aka Jorden runt med Fanny Hill, 1974) has absolutely nothing to do with John Cleland’s titular heroine, and frankly doesn’t need to make the connection; it could just have easily been “around the world with Shirley Corrigan” or any other name. However, it’s one of a number of 1970s soft-ish-porn films made by Mac Ahlberg, who made a more faithful but contemporary version of the Fanny Hill story in 1968 that was very successful, and was presumably returning to the well. He later moved to Hollywood as a cinematographer. A fair number of his films have been released on DVD by the Super Klubb 88 company in Sweden, who have given his productions the star treatment, and deservedly so. Strange words alien to the world of softcore can be used to describe them--words like pleasant, charming, amusing, inoffensive, delightful, light-hearted, easy going, feelgood.

Ahlberg’s films are not streaming with intelligence, great plotting, or superb acting, but they are beautiful to look at and treat sex as a harmless but delightful (see, I used delightful) aspect of everyday life. His films also have nothing to do with everyday life, and are total daydreams, but what is completely absent is any form of sleaze, sadism, or pitiful attempts to shock... unless the viewer is unfortunate enough to be shocked by wanton, rampant lust.

Around the World with Fanny Hill is his lightest, fluffiest, most feelgood film of them all. It’s supposed to be a comedy (there’s even a pair of manual workers dressed as Laurel and Hardy), but despite a speeded-up tribute to Benny Hill and a pie-fight, it’s truthfully more of--I kid you not--a romantic comedy. Yes, one of the few, perhaps the only, sex film rom-com. At one point, Fanny gets trapped inside a large violin case, and emerges from it completely naked at her own PR press party. At another, she tumbles into a swimming pool with her enraged host after accidentally ruining a video showing of his Laughton/Burton-style performance. Imagine if Doris Day and Dick Van Dyke had made a romantic comedy together in 1973 with numerous sex scenes and nudity, and you’ve pretty much captured the flavor of the film.

We open in Stockholm where the marriage between flaxen-haired and curvy Fanny Hill (Corrigan), and good-looking commercials director Roger Bowen (Peter Bonke, heh) is in trouble. Surrounded as he is by gorgeous starlets, she’s convinced he's playing around, and he’s not too sure about her (as one of his nymphets is Christina Lindberg, it’s a fair assumption).

The words hypocrisy and fidelity clearly don’t linger much in Fanny’s peanut brain, and another word that hasn’t made it into her very slim vocabulary is logic; she decides to prove his unfaithfulness by setting him up to be seduced by her best friend Monika (Gaby Fuchs, double heh), and then getting a divorce so that she can play around. It’s not revealed (nor does it much matter) where Fanny and Monika get their money from, but they’re clearly loaded.

After several failed attempts at seduction during which silly Roger fights her off (one ploy involves the old fake sleepwalking gambit), Fanny and Monika play the leaving town card, whereupon Monika slips back to the Hill-Bowen residence for one more good old college try. Creeping around behind her are Fanny, her lawyer, a photographer, and a secretary taking notes (“How do you spell fornicating!?”). In fact, with the house supposedly empty, Roger has indeed brought back sexy--and naked--Anita (Maria Ekorre of the Schoolgirl Reports), and when she stumbles furiously out of the cupboard complete with oysters and candles, to catch Fanny catching her catching Monica en flagrante, the game’s up.

Job done, Fanny and Monika set off around the world to justify the film’s title, first stop Hollywood. After much slapstick and hi-jinks, Fanny becomes a movie star in skin-flicks (her feeble protestations against appearing nude melting faster than an ice-cream), and as she flits from one country to the next on location, a now repentant Roger follows her to Hong Kong, not entirely to Fanny’s dismay. In Venice, after a dalliance with a bi-sexual Marquis who thinks she’s a boy (don’t ask, it’s not plausible anyway), she and Roger have come to the realisation that they’re both still in love with each other and would like to have an open marriage. On to Munich, where Roger is receiving an award for his commercial with Lindberg and co., and our flighty threesome attend a wild sex orgy, where glimpses of discreetly-shot hardcore fucking and sucking are matter-of-factly slipped in. Then it’s back to the froth, as Roger is arrested for non-specific crimes in a case of mistaken identity.

Fanny’s response, rather than simply hiring a competent lawyer or investigator, is to invite all the figures of authority involved round to her flat for a fucking at fifteen minute intervals to barter his freedom. A bedroom farce ensues as, even with events hilariously speeded up, there isn’t time to service everybody, and all three dignitaries are bundled into the wardrobe when Roger unexpectedly turns up. Not realising who the three naked oldsters are, he decides that the open marriage idea has got a little out of hand, and chaos erupts. With everything sorted out in the last five minutes, Fanny and Roger realise that they’re still deeply in love with other after all. And fade.

Okay, the characters are cartoons, the storyline is ludicrous, the dialogue is lame, and Corrigan and Fuchs recite their lines rather than perform them, but none of this really matters. Fuchs comes from the wide-eyed school of acting, and Corrigan the Keep Smiling Academy, but if you came for acting, story, or subtlety, you walked through the wrong door. It’s the ambience that counts, and the girls and the locations are beautifully filmed by Michael Saloman, who also later moved on to Hollywood. The exquisite multiple foreign locations are a treat for the eyes, with Venice and Hong Kong in particular as flawlessly photogenic as ever. Every single shot is an oil painting, and every single scene holds the interest. Someone put a truck-load of money into this film-within-a-film.

Now imagine the plot of an American high-school comedy (say, Porky’s or Private School) being played relatively straight, and as hardcore pornography. That is essentially what you get with The Second Coming of Eva (aka Porr i skandalskolan, 1974).

Eva (Teresa Svensson) is an over-aged schoolgirl who is sent to a strict private school by her outraged older sister (Kim Frank, aka Maija-Liisa Kokkonen), bespectacled and indignant, who--when she stumbles onto little sister masturbating--decides this is the final straw. What this prim and proper protector of morality doesn’t realise is that the school she has chosen to set young Eva on the road to moral righteousness is in fact a hot-bed of sin and lust that is in the process of being quietly investigated by the authorities as a haven of immoral and outstanding sexual misbehavior. The girls are all giggling nymphomaniacs, and the all-male staff smarmy leching sex maniacs.

As our Young Mary Whitehouse inadvertently drops off our leading lady into the clutches of head teacher Bo Goldenrod, the staff and girls alike can barely conceal their amusement as the new crop of innocents are delivered into their open arms. The head teacher has his eye on the attractive form of a young girl (Agda Dahl, aka Berit Agedal) being dropped off by her prudish husband-to-be (she later overcomes this minor setback by slinging her prohibitive engagement ring out of the door of the principal's bedroom).

After a marathon sex session as soon as the innocent fee-payers have left, several other pairings and assorted get-togethers ensue, including an al fresco threesome and eventual true lust for Eva, who felt a bit left out the night before. Trouble looms as the vehicle of an officious sex inspector approaches, and the head teacher frantically dashes round the school attempting to get everybody’s clothes on with varying degrees of success (two naked nymphets giggle away behind the door as the sober-looking government-appointed puritan stalks in).

After much stilted comedy hiding sexual liasons from this stuffy and repressed individual (it’s fun, but not funny, if you get the distinction), the highlight of the film features Jack Frank’s school inspector--who has seen through the facade and is about to expose everything--being seduced by a posse of pupils in the school library, where he exposes everything in a manner not originally intended (“you’ve had us all four times now!” twitters one).

In Flossie (aka Swedish Sex Kitten, 1974), Maria Forsa plays around with male lead Jack Frank for a while, and then they relate stories to each other. He tells of an apparently fantasy sex orgy (which in a pleasant and surprising change for the 1970s is well-lit and easy on the eye), and then she relates tales of her schooldays--sharing a bath with Anita Ericsson (billed as Andersson), spying on a schoolmate and her sleazy boyfriend, and having a bit of lesbian fun. There’s no predatory adults or creepy teachers, it’s all youthful fun and guilt-free sexual discovery. Ultimately, however, she generously hands him over to her mother (guardian?)! In other words, it’s the usual stuff, but like most of Forsa’s fare, it was probably pretty hot stuff in the 1970s, if run-of-the-mill for today, a stylish slice of late-night relaxation from the days when gentlemen watched sex films with a cough and a smoking jacket.

Justine and Juliette (1975) is a riff on De Sade’s Justine (but with the ending from Fanny Hill), who wrote the original (in which the girls are ousted from a nunnery; see also 1969, 1972, 1977, and 1979 versions). Justine and Juliette are two sisters (who look and behave nothing alike) who are thrown out of their home by an aunt who’s tired of looking after them. They hit the road, but each have wildly differing moralities; Juliette is a wild child who will do literally anything, while Justine is a nervous little prude who will do absolutely nothing.

Rather absurdly, the prudish and virtuous Justine is played by the infamous Forsa, surprisingly strong in the role of drippy and naive Puritan, with her mousy, hurt expression, glistening eyes, and hangdog mouth. Legend has it that although she wouldn’t do hardcore, Forsa preferred to actually fuck in her sex scenes, and if she wasn’t, she was a good actress. Having no problems with the role of Juliette is the game Anna Bie Warburg.

For a while, the film follows their differing paths, shifting between Justine’s misery and Juliette’s ribaldry almost comically. While one washes at a grubby sink, the other enjoys a champagne-fuelled romp in a luxury bathroom. Juliette is living the high life, having been introduced to the madam of a high-class whorehouse. A Benny Hill mentality pervades the early scenes, with ugly men pulling silly faces, as the chicken-legged Juliette pulls them.

Before long, she’s bedded over seventy customers, but the gold prize is American Don Miller (hardcore sex star Harry Reems), a robust stud with a weak heart, who has vowed to leave his considerable fortune to the woman he dies making love to. Meanwhile, Justine’s moral misgivings have sent her to a sleazy hotel and an even sleazier landlord, where broken furnishings and attempted rape test her resolve.

Ultimately rescued by a chance meeting with her now well-to-do sister, she is offered a room in Juliette’s home, but is soon being embarrassed and intimidated by the wild goings-on there. At one point, she works at an erotic revue nightclub serving drinks, but is so horrified by the stage show that she rushes onstage to intervene, and inadvertently becomes part of the action. Outraged, she refuses a permanent position (several positions, presumably) in the stage act. Gradually, the ice is broken, and although still anxiously uptight about anything to do with sex, Justine is brought out of her shell by an encounter with the smouldering Robert (Felix Franchy), one of Juliette’s party guests.

It’s true love of course, and for a while she's living in a 1970s Martini commercial (we see the Maria we know and love prancing around for naked home movies while ill-advisedly besotted), but she’s overlooked where she met him, and soon discovers that Robert likes to share his girlfriend with his friends, who he likes to enjoy watching making love to her. For a while she tolerates this, but eventually flees back to Juliette, where a wild party is taking place. As usual, she resists all advances while the hookers vie desperately for pole position on top of the fatalistic Mr. Miller... only to have the drunken Miller literally fall for her, and die on top of her in a futile attempt at penetration. Much to the dismay of all the hookers, the noble Justine inherits his fortune.

Justine et Juliette is marred, rather than enhanced, by ridiculous and ugly hardcore sex scenes at the nightclub and the orgies, which--as was the case with many 1970s sex films--are rather obviously inserted so that they can be effortlessly pulled out to make a softcore version when required. The print quality on the DVD is very poor, but the film is never dull. Warburg, Forsa, and Reems would be reunited the following year for Ahlberg’s Bel Ami.

Another mix of comedy and hardcore, Bel Ami (aka For Men Only, 1976) is for those who like their porn with a story. Reems plays George Duroy, a bumbling reporter for the prudish and reactionary magazine New Morality, who finds himself drawn into the world of a troubled porn magazine edited by the devious Charles Forrestier (Andre Chazel). Ironically, Reems, the American porn star who became famous after appearing in the infamous Deep Throat, had been virtually run out of the States by right-wing reactionaries, which was why he was in Sweden in the first place. However, Ahlberg has little to say about the morals crowd, and Reems is quickly converted to the world of sex and more sex by Warburg, Forsa, and Christa Linder, and it is the porn mag editor who is depicted as shifty, duplitious, and corrupting, buying Reems off with a shallow, half-hearted promise to publish his poetry to get the planned article condemning his erotic art exhibition spiked.

Warburg plays the sex-crazed secretary Clothilde, who frantically fucks Reems twice before he gets anywhere near any of the other girls (once al fresco by a lake, tumbling down a hill, and again in his apartment) while Forsa is Susanne, the daughter of the magazine’s owners, who seem a bit vague about the sort of publication they’re funding. Forsa is first seen at Forrestier’s mansion, dancing with two naked nymphs. She’s the only one not naked, but that never lasts, and before long she’s lured Reems up to her bedroom for a good seeing to. Reems, however, is lusting after photographic model Anita (Linder).

He eventually gets there, primarily because he’s now the editor of the magazine, having deposed his sneaky predecessor, but not before working his way through a selection of hungry women, including a red-haired researcher, the wife of an orchestra conductor (a particularly good scene), a visiting foreign princess, and other 1970s sex starlets. There’s also an interesting sequence with a rotating circular bed on which we see a montage of most of the previous partners coming back for seconds, including Warburg and Forsa simultaneously. Later, in a moment I particularly liked, Warburg, Forsa and Reems are all sitting quietly on the rotating bed casually playing cards, naked but resting from all this strenuous activity.

Generally, though, it’s best not to look for such subtle, special moments in a Mac Ahlberg film. This is just one sex scene after another, accompanied by some very annoying repetitive music, but they are good sex scenes, and there is at least a sense of a storyline. No-one can say it doesn’t deliver. Forsa and Warburg both have a cheeky sense of fun about them, and all the sex partners behave like real women, without any tedious teasing, posing or pouting. The women are encouraged to perform naturalistically; the magical Mr. Reems often gives them no choice, which proves once and for all on the evidence presented before Forsa that size isn’t everything.

Bel Ami is not as adventurous or substantial a project as Justine and Juliette, but appears to be a very routine effort Ahlberg and his producer Inge Ivarson knocked off while the same players were available and reliable. It’s no less entertaining for that, and they are interested enough in the end result to have achieved a worthwhile production.

Flitting back and forth between France and Sweden, 1977’s Molly (aka Sex in Sweden), and a co-production between the two countries, features a mix of Swedish, European, and American porn stars in the usual combination of attractive locations and equally attractive performers. As the four beautiful leading ladies stride out of the airport and into the sunshine of the Cote D’Azur, only the delightful ‘70s clothing and the poor quality of the print and ropey background music remind the viewer that all the players are now knocking on sixty. Such melancholia is swiftly dismissed by the ceaseless succession of sex scenes that follows.

Molly (Forsa, in what would be the last of her six major roles) spends most of her days in the South of France reminiscing about her time at the residence of the seedy Lord and Lady Fleming (Eric Edwards, Darby Lloyd Rains), which isn’t surprising, as her flashbacks consist of an uninterrupted string of hardcore sex scenes filmed in that peculiarly graphic up-close manner of the 1970s that seems more intent on proving the sex is actually taking place than creating an erotic atmosphere. It’s rapidly apparent that as is usually the case with Ahlberg’s films, a soft and a hard version have been filmed. Very often, the shots of Forsa and girlfriend Eva Axen’s big brown eyes watching the action are more sexy than the hairy and unflatteringly shot in-your-face genitalia. Unfortunately, unlike some Forsa films, the current DVDs of Molly do not offer the option of the alternative version. Fortunately, Forsa is her usual flushed-faced and orgasmic self in her sex scenes, and given adequate competition from co-star Anne Magle as the mischievous Peggy. Magle, a fresh-faced innocent-looking hardcore actress working during the same period as Forsa can be seen in some long-lost loops on the extras on the Pink Flamingo release from which this film was reviewed here, and despite the grim quality of both the film and the men, puts on quite a show.

Watching the laughable Lady Fleming getting it on with Emmerdale’s Christopher Chittell is a little less arousing, although he is fortunate enough to get his hands on Maria later… It all ends with a disastrous wedding at which bride and groom go off with different partners before the reception’s over… quite an accomplishment even for the seedy ‘70s!

Japan: Sex and Fury

Rica the Mixed-Blood Girl (1972), Girl Boss Guerilla (1972), Rica 2: Lonely Wanderer (1973), Rica 3 (1973), Sex and Fury (1973), Female Yakuza Tale (1973), Bohachi Bushido: Code of the Forgotten Eight (1973) Zero Woman: Red Handcuffs (1974)

While the Bionic Woman, Wonder Woman, and Charlie’s Angels were having tasteful, girlie-themed adventures in the 1970s, invariably involving puppies, orphans, and beauty pageants, Japanese delinquent girl gang movies were knifing, stabbing, shooting, kicking, hacking, whoring, pounding, beating, torturing, brawling, and occasionally even harpooning their way out of trouble in storylines involving gang wars, drugs, imprisonment, prostitution, human slavery, tragedy, and torture. In short, even though the 1970s was a kind of golden age for sex and violence in the movies, the Japanese girl gang, or ‘sukeban’ films made the ‘70s blaxploitation films of Jack Hill and co. look like episodes of Diff’rent Strokes in comparison.

The first of three in the Rica series, Rica the Mixed-Blood Girl (aka Konketsuji Rika, 1972), is quite tame by the general standards of this kind of film. Okay, there’s a dead baby, poisoned mother, and a vomiting before the opening credits, closely followed by some blood-spitting and eye-gouging, and a mass rape, but a threatened revenge killing on a rapist is delayed twice, a cat fight is broken up before it takes place (a mistake not made in the follow-ups), a nude dance is reneged on, and a storyline in a Tokyo reform school takes up none of the frequent opportunities for nudity. Still--never a dull moment.

As ever, there are some wonderful dialogue quotes from the sub-titles—“Devils! Only death can change you!” is a doozy--and some completely mental violence, most of it completely random and for no reason. Story structure has never been a strong point in Japanese exploitation films, and these things often give the impression of being made up as they go along. A particularly mad moment has all the girls freed from sealed boxes, with the director filming each one after the other popping out of her prison like a jack-in-a-box. It’s like a madder version of those scenes on the original Star Trek, when someone would see something weird on the viewscreen, and every character would have his own individual reaction shot.

Some films lose something in the translation. Girl Boss Guerilla (aka Sukeban gerira, 1972) gains.

“How can you offer yourself like that? It’s startling!”

“I’m so horny it’s not funny!”

Yeah, I love this film.

The Red Helmet gang ride into Kyoto from Tokyo and run up against a rival gang already established there. So far, so-so. But here’s the fun bit. They’re girl gangs, and this is another of the ‘sukeban’ genre of exploitation films made in Japan during the 1970s.

Not that you’d know it's the ‘70s, either from the film or the pristine print. Japan seems to have avoided the tacky fashions that make American and European films from this period so wondrously watchable, and the bright colors and groovy clothes of the girls and short hair and smart styles of the guys are one of the best things about these films; they could have been made in the ‘60s or the ‘90s or the present day.

The sukeban, or ‘pinky violence’ films are reknowned for their hilariously phoney and melodramatic sex and violence, and this one--like the Delinquent Girl Boss series and the Rica trilogy--is a gem. The plots veer all over the place as much as the motorbikes, the direction and subtitles are unintentionally comic, and the deliberately funny scenes are brilliantly unfunny.

The film opens with the girls being harangued by some boy bikers, and driving into some waste ground to sort them out. Individual reaction shots are offered for everybody, one after the other, as the lead girl biker bares her breast to reveal a terrifying dragon tattoo! Oh, no! But it’s too late to beg for mercy. The arrogant upstarts are swiftly done over, one being held in place for the queen bee to kick him where it most hurts (the guy kicked in the groin breaks the fourth wall to tell us exactly how much).

The girls then embark on a reign of terror to rival Butters’ Professor Chaos in South Park (one gang member beds an old man but enjoys herself so much she forgets to steal his wallet) before being confronted by the rival gang; the girls all crouch down threateningly with their hands on their thighs when they’re introducing themselves with as much menace as they can muster. After much cat-fighting, shirt-tearing, and breast-baring, the combat is interrupted by the spectacular arrival of another bad girl who’s returned to town--cue twangy music. There’s lots more posturing and face-slapping (“You are so carefree”/“I went astray at fifteen!”; “If anyone betrays me, even a little, they’ll pay for it!”).

During such bluenose-baiting diversions as a comedy abortionist who spends most of his time molesting the patients and disposing of his own indiscretions, and a bike-stealing nun who joins the gang and gets her tattoo administered with much painful struggling, Sachiko (the prolific Miki Sugimoto of Zero Woman) deposes Rika (they like the name Rika in these films), with the blessing of Nami (Reiko Ike of Sex and Fury), local hero, but then handsome boxer Ichiru (Sex and Fury’s Masataka Naruse) appears on the scene, complicating things.

Before long, all the girls have attracted the attention of the city’s real gangsters, and further mayhem, rape, and torture ensue--none of which is remotely troubling, as the whole picture is utterly unconvincing and in no way realistic. It all gets a bit unpleasant and operatically tragic toward the end, but the unintentional laughs keep on coming. The actual title is Sukeban gerira, the director Norifumi Suzuki (who also helmed, if it needs to be said by now, the legendary Sex and Fury and its sequel Female Yakuza Tale).

These films are an acquired taste, demonstrating the subtle differences between the cultures of the West and East in a very unsubtle manner, and if you haven’t got the right mindset (set brain on laid back and tolerant and the good humor dial to maximum), they may not be for you. But if you’re easy going and easily amused, with a taste for the offbeat and wacky, then these demented and loopy films, considered wildly unconventional and off the wall in their own land, are superb and you will wonder where they’ve been all your life. This is a great one to start with, and if you love it, proceed from here.

In Rica 2: Lonely Wanderer (aka Konketsuji Rika: Hitoriyuku sasuraitabi, 1973), the girls are hopping over the reform school fence yet again (this place resembles the prison camp in Hogan’s Heroes, except the warden knows that they’re skipping out), and the Vietnam sub-theme is stronger this go round (the first Rica flirted with a draft dodgers sub-plot). There’s a strong streak of resentful anti-Americanism in both this one and the next. Once again, the storyline involves gangsters, two thugs getting thrown under trains!

The third Rica film, Rica 3 (aka Konketsuji Rika: Hamagure komoriuta, 1973), while repeating the formula, is played for merry laughs, which is fortunate as everybody behaves in a constantly irrational, illogical and nonsensical manner, but unfortunate in that the storyline frequently involves rape, race relations and child molestation (in Britain or the U.S., a comedy approach would concern a comedy crime). Very little of the storyline makes sense, but it never gets boring. A sequence with motorbikes recalls Girl Boss Guerilla; they even wear red helmets. In all three films, the first two directed by Ko Nakahira, the third by Kozaburo Yoshimura, all three written by Taro Bonten and Kaneto Shindo, the girls, clothes, and scenery are excellent, the direction polished and professional, but far more lively, and far better known, are Norifumi Suzuki’s aforementioned Sex and Fury (aka Furyo anego den: Inoshika Ocho, 1973) and its immediate sequel, Female Yakuza Tale (aka Story of a Wild Elder Sister: Widespread Lynch Law, aka Yasagure anego den: sokatsu rinchi, also 1973).

Opening with the infamous bathtub scene, in which Reiko Ike is attacked by assassins while in the tub, and leaps out to slaughter them all naked, Sex and Fury (1973) lives up to its title by providing plenty of both. Set in Tokyo, 1905, Ike plays an orphan girl trained in the martial arts to secure her revenge against the three killers of her detective father, each easily identified by a tattoo on their backs--deer, boar, and butterfly. The cleverest revenge involves a sex session during which the intended victim licks his prize all over, unaware that he is ingesting a poison she has coated her naked body with. Another excellent sequence within a succession of many has a train carriage full of knife-wielding nuns. Religion gets the same severe thrashing Reiko does when she is captured and very nearly martyred for her cause in a church.

Assisting her is Swedish sex starlet Christina Lindberg as a British spy, who for once is not dubbed, and so sounds as Swedish as she actually is. Of course, there is no reason why the Japanese audience should distinguish between English and Swedish accents any more than a western audience would distinguish between various Eastern or Asian dialects. Lindberg has several sex scenes, the best being a superb sequence with Reiko Ike, which shows both girls off to advantage. Neither girl has ever looked so good.

The sequel to Sex and Fury, released the very same year, and directed by Teruo Ishi, has no hesitation in filleting the original and pulling out all the bits that worked the first time. Fair enough—that’s what you do with a sequel. Despite its strong visual qualities, and with no pretence at art or aesthetics, even though it qualifies for both, Female Yakuza Tale is pure exploitation cinema at its down and dirtiest--lurid sex and violence prevails.

As with the Delinquent Girl Boss ‘sukeban’ series or the Rica trilogy and other similar Toei fare, what it lacks in structure it makes up for in entertainment value. The original film had our heroine fighting naked after being attacked while bathing; the opening credits here have her slaughtering sexual attackers while gradually losing her clothes. Later, and for no good reason other than we want to see it, all the ninja girls strip off Bohachi Bushido-style for the climactic fight at the end of the adventure. The sex scenes manage to be both voyeuristic and naturalistic; as ever in this genre (see also Zero Woman, for example), the violence is both shocking and phoney. Disjointed but never dull, all this mayhem and unpleasantness is superbly directed; the shots have depth without being overly show-offy, and there are long, elaborately staged tracking shots utilising everything from hand-held cameras to crane shots (note the shanty town sequences).

Nevertheless, the aforementioned Bohachi Bushido: Code of the Forgotten Eight (aka Bohachi Bushido: Porno jidaigeki, 1973) rivals both.

In old Japan, Shino, a suicidal swordsman (Tetsuro Tanba of You Only Live Twice and Zero Woman: Red Handcuffs), decides that hell in the afterlife can’t be much worse than the hell he’s living in the real world, and jumps off a bridge to drown himself. He wakes up underneath two naked women warming his chilled body with their selves--heaven, perhaps? But this is a brothel in a village run by the Bohachi clan, a cruel cult which rejects religion, respect of your elders, loyalty to friends, trust, modesty, justice, conscience, and shame--the Forgotten Eight. They force their women into prostitution through whippings, rape, and torture, and we’ve seen all this in all its pulp mag lurid glory before the first ten minutes have passed.

Written by San Kaji, directed by Teruo Ishi (Female Yakuza Tale), and based on a comic strip by Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima (Lady Snowblood, Lone Wolf and Cub), there’s some extraordinary fight scenes including a cat fight between the girls and a sequence when all five of the swordsman’s private squad of protectors fight naked against a ninja horde. Forget western definitions of heroism; later, all five will make love to Shino at once before he fatally dispatches them for treachery.

The boss of the Bohachi long ago decided to control the regions through prostitution, and swamped by total corruption and cruelty, Shino realises that even as a convenient enforcer, he is too strong to be allowed to survive; the vile gang lord becomes a victim of the same grotesque fate he had planned for his right-hand man. The opium-induced finale is quite extraordinary, as Shino, having been drugged up by his former allies during their marathon sex session, fights the warriors of the enemy clans and a seriously pissed off governor of the Province. As strong as the competition from the Lady Snowblood, Wandering Ginza Butterfly, or Sex and Fury franchises is, I guarantee you’ve never seen anything quite so inventive, creative, and extraordinary as this film. And to think it was sitting on my waiting-to-watch pile for four months...

“People who touch me with their filthy hands all meet the same fate” snaps Miki Sugimoto of Girl Boss Guerilla and Terrifying Girls’ High School, and star of Zero Woman: Red Handcuffs (aka Zeroka no onna: Akai wappa, 1974), a lurid live-action Manga, the brutality of which is so hopelessly fake and over the top that it’s hilarious when it’s not disgusting. It’s incredibly violent, and means it, but Zero Woman is also brazenly cynical about cops and politicians, a commendable attitude prevalent in the 1970s when this was made. There are several cool deaths. But somehow, it’s not much fun.

Having said that, I enjoyed it much more the second time around, perhaps because I’d come to terms with the nihilism and the cruelty and knew what to expect. Based on a Japanese comic strip, our nameless and mostly silent heroine (she talks as little and as briefly as possible) wears a red raincoat, carries a red gun, and employs a pair of supernaturally efficient red handcuffs which, when thrown, attach themselves effortlessly to whatever she wants them to. She’s a sort of Satanic Wonder Woman. The same red paint appears to have been used for the gallons of spurting, streaming blood that flows unconvincingly throughout the whole sorry saga.

The opening scene, with a naked Sugimoto painfully despatching the politically protected but plainly demented American diplomat who murdered her friend, is probably the best and most conventional scene, and even that involves drugs, nudity, rape, and the guy being shot in the groin. The police decide that Zero has overstepped her bounds by blowing away a cackling monster with diplomatic immunity, and put her in jail, where a coven of hookers identify her and gleefully work her over. All this before the opening credits. It would be good to have some background on Zero Woman to find out exactly why she is so single-mindedly dedicated to the job that she’s willing to be beaten and raped to get to her targets, but frankly, enough has already been revealed to offer adequate motive, so perhaps no backstory is needed.

When a gang of psychotic, wild-eyed barbaric rapists kidnap a high-ranking politician’s daughter by chance, the police turn to Zero to do their dirty work. They’ve already broken the news to her high placed father that the gang will not release her, even if they get the money, as she’s almost certainly seen their faces during the vicious attack that took her. “The job is to bring the hostage back alive” says Osaka, her boss. “The kidnappers are to be killed in any way you wish”.

Zero infiltrates the gang--painfully--but is recognised by the gang’s resident mattress, one of the hookers she encountered in the cell, and who has already enlightened the louts as to who their potential white slave sale is--Nangumo Kyoko, the sheltered daughter of ruthless social climber and power-monger Nangumo Zengo (Tetsuro Tanba again). She keeps quiet about Zero’s identity while the five thugs conduct their own savage loyalty test, but when she quietly approaches Zero for a piece of the action in exchange for her silence, Zero bluntly and coldly explains that her job is to kill all the people responsible for Kyoko’s abduction, and that includes her. The gang find her floating in a bathtub full of blood.

In the meantime, the gang member sent to collect the ransom money (foolishly from a desolate area) sees instead several police officers digging a grave for him, and after begging for mercy, is shot in the head. Another naive young gang member who takes pity on the girl and tries to help her escape, is glassed repeatedly with a bottle by the gang's psychotic leader (he makes James Cagney’s Cody Jarrett look calm and collected in comparison) until he becomes a human ketchup fountain.

After much shooting, beating, arson, and torture, daddy pragmatically comes to the conclusion that his daughter is now a tainted liability to his political ambitions, and orders Osaka to do away with both her and Zero--everyone involved must be made to disappear. Zero realises this, and in an orgy of bullets and flame, wins the day, sending sadder and wiser daughter back to her callous father, who watches granite-faced from his vehicle as she is surrounded by reporters.

China: The Shaw Brothers

Bamboo House of Dolls (1973), Virgins of the Seven Seas (1974)

In the real world, the notion of women in prison is neither hilarious, exciting, or sexy, but quite sad and depressing. In the high-pitched hysteria, mordant melodrama, and shameless voyeurism of the women in prison genre, however, exploitation cinema rightly revels. However, the key to both making and enjoying the WIP movie is, of course, that the players and the audience know that it is not to be taken seriously; acting and story requirements often render women-in-prison movies comically inept anyway, entertaining for all the wrong reasons. Wise men either mock the formula, as with the superb Reform School Girls or Chained Heat, or dive in head first like Franco and his Love Camp/Barbed Wire Dolls camp-fests.

Unfortunately, nobody told the Shaw Brothers that back in 1973. Although masterfully directed, Bamboo House of Dolls (aka Nu ji zhong ying, 1973) is a curious mix of styles ranging from shocking brutality, to Hollywood war film, to Euro-sex comedy antics, and back again to barbarity--all laced with the strong loathing and anti-Japan sentiments still prevalent in 1970s China after the all-too-recent horrors perpetrated earlier in the 20th century.

As a result, none of this makes very much sense. Scenes switch maniacally back and forth between action, comedy, sadism, sex, horror, romance, tragedy, and adventure. For example, after opening with shocking scenes of brutal punishment that in reality would have the prisoners cowed into silent, shocked submission for the rest of the movie (whipping, electrocution, and a hot box), the next scene has a raucous food fight breaking out. After several innocents have been shot just to set an example, soldiers carry off nurses to be raped while the camera freeze-frames every time their underwear is exposed. During an escape attempt, girls strip off and pout and pose Carry On-style to seduce slobbering guards... and then kill them! After unpleasant scenes of forced sex, a shower scene, as entertaining as it is, is filmed like a high school teenage comedy, all smiles and splashing around--preposterous and quite frankly insulting to the tormented women who actually endured the real horror of Japanese prison camps (which was not that long ago in 1973). The film is sordid, stupid, and inappropriate on several levels.

The ironic thing is that sets, composition, and photography are superb, and this is easily one of, if not the most professionally produced WIP movie ever made, in a genre renowned for its poverty of both ideas and inspiration, its cheapness, banality, rotten cinematography and ineptitude. However, I’ll take Jack Hill’s asinine Big Bird Cage or Jess Franco’s incompetent arrant nonsense over this hateful unpleasantness any day.

For all the exotic photography and nudity, this film is never at any time erotic, except perhaps for a few moments during the clumsily staged shower scene (the lead actress, despite being Danish porn actress Birte Tove, keeps her knickers on behind a big barrel while the other girls sportingly bare their bums). Oddly, the true stand-out scenes, again brilliantly done, are the various battle scenes in the latter half; the appalling brutality of the opening scenes where the women are first taken hostage is horribly vicious and shockingly authentic. If this had been a straightforward, sex-free war film, it would have been a classic. Instead, it’s a prison camp hellhole film as tribute to Benny Hill.

The Shaw Brothers films are at their most palatable to Western sensibilities when not taking themselves too seriously. For example, what might you get if you mixed Ernst Hofbauer’s Schoolgirl Reports with the Shaw Brothers’ martial arts mayhem? Wonder no more, because Enter the Seven Virgins, or Virgins of the Seven Seas as it’s better known (aka Yang chi, 1974), even though there’s only five of them after a sixth gets made an example of.

If you’re expecting near-nude somersaulting schoolgirls kicking the crap out of hapless leering swarthy bandits and weapon-waving pirates alike, then... amazingly, you’re absolutely right. Sonja Jeannine, the doe-eyed Lindbergh lookalike from Schoolgirl Reports 5, 6, and 7 leads the charge as the delectable Donna, alongside fellow cast-mate Deborah Ralls as the timid Celia, the towering and titanic Gillian Bray as defiant no-nonsense toughie Brenda, newcomer and one-shot Diane Drube as blonde Anna, and U.S. TV player Tamara Elliot as the pretty Karen. For the Shaw Brothers, we have Hua Yueh as reformed renegade bandit Ko-Pai, pretty Hui-Ling Liu as Ko Mei Mei, his sister on the inside, Hsieh Wang as warlord Tiao, and Ti Hua Ko as the lesbian brothel-keeper Tao Fu.

Essentially, the paper-thin plot is as follows: Pirates in an ill-defined yesterday sometime between 1774 and 1974 kidnap a bunch of contemporary-looking supposed virgins on their way from Britain (the girls are all German or American!) to help populate Australia. They deliver them instead to the court of a sadistic Chinese warlord in league with the local bandits, where they are subjected to a variety of ignominious experiences, all of them involving various degrees of violence, sadism, and nudity. Meeting up with a renegade bandit and his equally kung-fu-trained sister, they turn the tables on the warlord (first seen having sex with a girl restrained in the air by tied hands and feet) and his assorted drooling henchmen and ninjas in a colorful and kaleidoscopic array of set-pieces that barely gives the audience time to blink for fear of missing something. There’s sex and nudity by the bucketload, senseless death, gore and violence, a cast that gives 110 percent, the usual grim and dismal attempts at humor (the darkest of which come off), and some great fights in the Shaw Brothers tradition. And unlike so many films that start well and then slowly fizzle out, this one just keeps getting better and better.

Filmed in 1974, and for many years a long-lost legend (which sometimes heralds disappointment upon rediscovery), you can ignore the drivel on the DVD sleeve using come-on buzzwords like grindhouse, sexist, and bellbottoms and just enjoy it for what it is--a classic of the era. Here are some things that happen, randomly selected in no particular order: three comic relief voyeuristic guards are beaten up by the girls, at which point the inside girl steps in and announces that to keep their martial arts abilities a secret they’ll have to kill them, which she does. When the pirates arrive in the village, little kids on watch sound the alarm and everyone cowers in their hovels... but one little boy rushes out to catch a stray chicken. The pirates stamp his mother senseless when she tries to take him inside, and slice up the father. Ninjas leap onto the roof of the renegade, who spots them and stabs his sword through the roof. Blood pours through the hole. The girls are skinnydipping when five warriors run down the hill to attack them. Pausing only to put their bikini bottoms back on, they murder the five instantly, and then, seeing another five, pretend to be making love with the propped-up bodies. When the second five come down the hill and demand their share, the girls impale them with their swords with choreographed precision. After being sold at the slave market, the girls go back to the bedrooms of their gruesome highest bidders, who all end up bloodied, humiliated, and seriously injured... And so it goes, for an exhausting 99 minutes…

With its shit-kicking females, one minute cowering from the slobbering comic-book pirates like traditional damsels in distress, the next athletically and flawlessly slicing and dicing ninjas and bandits like so much fruit salad, it’s the sort of film that leftish feminist-inclined film students like to put forward as empowering (so that they can watch it), and old-time reactionary misogynists like to promote as good old-fashioned don’t-make-‘em-like-this-any-more sex and violence (so that they can watch it). Ignore them all. Ultimately, it’s nothing more than what it is, that rarely seen treasure, a perfectly made slab of exploitation perfection, and every single scene that you expect to see in a white slave revenge action thriller is present and politically incorrect.

Women in Prison (2) : The Return of Jess and Lina

Women Behind Bars (1975), Barbed Wire Dolls (1976), Love Camp (1977), Ilsa the Wicked Warden (1977), Women of Cell Block Nine (1978)

The Jess Franco/Harry Alan Towers alliance of the late ‘60s, best known for adaptations of Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu novels and De Sade, has one other claim to fame, which is that it inadvertently kick-started the entire women-in-prison genre by finishing tepid Eurospy late entry The Girl from Rio early and leaving Franco with a spare week to kill, during which time he knocked off some sample scenes for what became 99 Women! Thus the dying gasps of a uniquely ‘60s genre inadvertently opened the door for a 1970s phenomenon.

There are those who consider this effort more restrained and laid back than Franco’s later lunacies, but for me, that rather defeats the object of the women-in-prison genre! A restrained and laid back WIP film is rather like a musical without any songs. Although Franco later came to own the WIP market by sheer force of numbers, 99 Women was in many ways a false start, and it was Roger Corman, with Jack Hill’s Big Doll House and Jonathan Demme’s Caged Heat, who really kickstarted the format. However, Franco certainly made up for lost time in the mid-‘70s.

Although Franco's legendary incompetence with the camera occasionally shows through, 1975’s Women Behind Bars (aka Des diamantes pour l’enfer) is one of the Great Man’s better efforts. For a start, it actually looks like a proper film (Blue Underground’s print is excellent--nice packaging, but I’m not sure this is as complete as imagined), and the actors actually look like actors (even Franco, in his usual shameless cameo). Secondly, there’s also an actual story, competently told. There’s narration, a beginning, middle, and end, and even credits that don’t wobble (although they are just as pointlessly bogus as usual).

The downside is that while much more entertaining than 99 Women, it’s also rather tame. Nevertheless, a favorite Franco-ism is demonstrated here hilariously; Franco occasionally seems to forget that he’s actually filming a story and just lets his lens wander up and down a landscape, architecture, or a female form!—“I wonder what’s for dinner... that’s a nice building... now, the next thing to happen is... ooh, naked!”. Instead of placing the camera and framing the subject so that we can look around, we have to follow his roving eye, rather like when Homer’s mind wanders on The Simpsons and he visits the land of chocolate or chases squirrels.

The broad-minded will have a sneaking admiration for the likes of Jess Franco and Jean Rollin. While others posture and pontificate, these guys actually pick up a camera, secure the funding, find the cast--and the girls--and get on with it. They know what they want (and what we want), and they occasionally find ways to achieve it with varying degrees of success. We then sit around criticising, as is our right as paying customers. However, put their efforts next to the legion of technically proficient directors who constantly disappoint with all the celebrity and studio-backing that Franco and Rollin are denied. Their films are always at the very least interesting, and how many chumps have wasted our time and massive amounts of money and resources on great reams of celluloid that aren't even that?

Women Behind Bars (dubbed, no subtitles, possibly cut) may be a tad short on the eye candy by Franco’s standards (there's still more gratuitous nudity than some in the genre), but this is more than compensated for by the stunning Lina Romay, Franco’s frequent leading lady, whose beauty in the 1970s was absolutely staggering, dressed or undressed. Franco’s muse and squeeze, this exhibitionist big-eyed beauty would do anything onscreen, and has ample opportunity to prove the point in the WIP genre. Don’t be fooled by the bitter and strange accusations from some quarters that she couldn’t act. After all, she’s playing in a Franco production, so no-one’s handed her anything resembling an actual script. But watch the scenes with the tyrannical prison governor in this film. Romay’s big brown eyes and expressive face say more in close-up than dozens of the Hollywood starlets who have grasped statuettes.

The following year, Franco and Romay returned to the genre with Barbed Wire Dolls (aka Caged Women, aka Frauengefangnis, 1976).

Their first collaboration with prolific German film producer Erwin Dietrich, this sleazy exercise in madness, torture, and nudity almost didn’t get released when Dietrich finally screened a copy and realised the level of Franco’s jack-of-all-trades incompetence. Fortunately for all concerned, the film was already in the can, and when it was released, the lurid content and abundance of female flesh on display overcame most audience members’ reservations about the amateur camerawork, comic-book characters, and pulp magazine storyline. With the exception of Monica Swinn’s monocled and bra-less commandant in crotch-stretching cut-offs, the portrayal of which transcends all limitations of normal criticism, the acting is actually quite good, even though appallingly dubbed.

Romay portrays Maria da Guerra, a young girl unaware that she’s been framed for the murder of her incestuous father, after he hit his head as she defended herself from his advances. In a magnificently insane plot twist (spoiler coming), it transpires that the true murderer was commandant Swinn, who was secretly having an affair with him and took her revenge on the unconscious old goat with a heavy metal lamp in anger over his greater interest in his own daughter. Now the daughter has been delivered to her own personal hell-hole, she can complete her revenge, with the aid of cowardly and morally bankrupt prison medic (and torturer) Paul Muller, who acquired his post as prison doctor by killing and assuming the identity of his predecessor!

Cell-mate Bertha is Martine Stedil, a sullen baby-faced blonde and frequent Franco player whose beauty rivalled Romay’s. Although bereft of many WIP cliches (the admissions process, the shower room, the bullying bitch, etc.), there are some extraordinary scenes, including happily thoroughly unconvincing torture sequences and a peculiar interlude in the warden’s office in which Stedil is first stripped and humiliated, subjected to a virginity inspection, sexually assaulted, and then ordered to abuse the warden, who turns out to be into masochism! Both the doctor and the Governor get to sample the luckless women, as does the head torturer (Franco regular Eric Falk as the musclebound brute Nestor). If you can get past such scenery-chewing as Peggy Markoff’s sex-crazed cell-mate Pompadour and Beni Cardoso as the deranged Rosa, driven insane from hunger before the film begins, the film is worth watching to bask in the presence of Romay and Stedil, who are perfect in their roles of defiant victims.

In the thin story premise, Stedil has slipped a note out of the prison to the local island Governor via a sympathetic guard (Ramon Ardid), unaware that he's as corrupt as the rest of them, and consequences are dire when the warden finds out about it. When the doctor tries it on with Marie, the girls seize the opportunity to overpower him, stab him with his own medical scissors, and escape through the jungle to the sea. The film falls apart at this point, both technically and narratively, and lumbers toward a disappointing shock ending, but it ain’t dull.

Setting the style, if style is the right word here, for all Franco’s further forays into the genre (leering males, lesbian guards, sadistic warden, torture, sex, punishment, and nudity), Barbed Wire Dolls was such a success that Franco periodically turned out remakes, rehashes, re-imaginings, and other variations on the women-in-prison genre for years afterwards, following it with Love Camp and Ilsa the Wicked Warden for Dietrich, and Women in Cell Block Nine later.

Love Camp (aka Frauen im Leibeslager, 1977) was Franco’s first follow-up to the hugely successful Barbed Wire Dolls. In South America, girls are snatched off the street and carried off into the jungle, where they’re deposited in a prison camp to service revolutionary soldiers who are otherwise occupied with trying to overthrow the capitalist government. It can’t be said he’s not politically impartial; last time the corrupt prison doctor feared that the removal of the capitalists would spoil their little deal.

Among the party we follow are two hookers (blonde Ingrid Kehr and generously proportioned Monika Kalin), a young innocent (Esther Studer as Lupita), and Angela, a new bride (Ada Tauler); Romay is absent from this one. It’s straight out of the foliage for our merry band (and they are merry, occasionally caught chuckling or disinterested on camera, while the voiceover artists have got their maximum suffering voices on), and into the showers. Interestingly, Monica Swinn, the comic-book commandant from Barbed Wire Dolls, is among the captives this time, looking her more attractive normal self and cast as the token lesbian, while the commandant this go round is someone called Nanda van Bergen (aka the equally anonymous Muriel Montosse of Cecilia). Advised that their fate is to service sweaty gun-carrying anti-capitalist campaigners, a nervous blonde panics, and is executed as an example to the others. Another rather ill-advisedly announces she’s a virgin. There’s enough rape, murder, sexual assault, lesbianism, violence, shootings, executions, thrashings and lashings to make Caged Heat look like Sesame Street, complete with wincing onlookers, and most wicked of all, flagrant cigarette smoking. There’s also a male shower scene; blehh! Franco didn’t make that mistake again.

Mixed in with all this is a storyline in which new bride Angela decides she likes sex with the commander of the revolutionaries more than poor old Alberto, her husband, who even treks into the jungle to find her. In the end, having caused the deaths of two of her cellmates, and endangered the lives of two more, she skips off into the jungle with her new hero, leaving her devoted and resourceful husband sadder and wiser.

Dismal performances and the usual dreadful dubbing render the entire proceedings utterly comedic. If it wasn’t a Franco film, the props, wardrobe, and make-up would suggest a spoof, but it is a Franco film, so we know we’re supposed to take these shenanigans seriously. Furthermore, Franco hadn’t finished. His nine 1977 films included his fourth WIP film, Ilsa the Wicked Warden, and more tropical prison antics in the grim Women in Cell Block Nine.

The Ilsa character, as played by the hideously unattractive Dyanne Thorne, first appeared in the 1975 Nazi-themed exploitation film Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS, which was as unpleasant as it sounds. Two more in a similar vein followed, but in the world of exploitation cinema nothing is sacred, so Jess Franco’s WIP movie with Thorne as prison warden Greta suddenly became Ilsa number four, Ilsa the Wicked Warden (aka Ilsa: Absolute Power, aka Greta--Haus ohne Manner, 1977), despite the dialogue still referring to her as Greta throughout.

While mean old Ilsa/Greta luxuriates in a private bath, butch, emotionless warders watch the inmates of her wretched clinic-cum-prison-camp showering. It’s the first of two lengthy shower scenes in this film, and with the granite-faced Thorne running the show as the crazed commandant, the emphasis is certainly on camp. When one of the inmates suddenly cracks up, another seizes the opportunity to make a break for freedom... and is gunned down after a flight through the surrounding jungle. Local physician Dr. Arcos (Franco himself, credible for once), attempts to treat her when she stumbles up the steps to his surgery, and has long been a critic of the dubious “clinic” Ilsa runs for understandably disturbed young women. If you weren’t seriously nuts when you went in, you could pretty much count on being a mangled mental mess when you came out... usually in a box. Arcos tries to treat the girl, but Ilsa shows up and pulls rank, taking her away. A few days later, the escapee is reported dead.

Having failed to secure an investigation of Ilsa’s activities in the past due to a lack of a credible witness, Arcos agrees to fabricate a reason to get the girl’s vengeful sister Abbie (Tania Busselier), a reporter, into the secure facility undercover as a patient, and then get her out two months later with enough evidence to close the place down. Once inside, the swiftly stripped Abbie meets the usual collection of WIP stereotypes--the nutcase, the nympho, the best buddy, the informer, and the inevitable lecherous, lip-smackin’ lesbian guards.

Fortunately, compensating for the presence of Thorne, who at least gives a hilariously enjoyable arch performance, is the delightful Lina, who is on hand to provide stimulation of the optic nerves as a magnificently malevolent little pixie who brawls in the showers and plays S&M games with her also attractive (I can’t say equally attractive) cellmates. You’ll spot Romay straight away, even naked, with her back to the camera; she’s the one periodically jumping in the air to attract your attention, scowling, smirking, and smoking her way through what must be one of her most memorable performances. During the course of what rapidly becomes one of Franco’s most lurid, unpleasant, and thoroughly nasty entries in the exploitation catalogue, we see water torture, acupuncture, cat fights in the shower, lesbianism, masturbation, electric shock therapy, whippings, thrashings, and enough degradation and humiliation to fill a year of TV reality shows, all presented with over-the-top pulp magazine relish and virtually non-stop nudity.

Some films are made for art, most are made for money. Some films are made to entertain, some to exploit, some to make a point, some to make us laugh. We all know why White Heat and Top Hat were made. We all know why The Sound of Music was made, why Creature from the Black Lagoon, Blue Hawaii, Goldfinger, Carry On Matron, True Grit, even The Exorcist were made. We certainly know what women in prison films are for. But what was the point of Women of Cell Block Nine (aka Frauen fur Zellenblock 9, aka Tropical Inferno, 1978), Franco’s last WIP film of the ‘70s?

Despite the failings to be discussed, this is actually quite thoughtfully directed in places where it doesn’t really matter. We open with the capture of the girls (who include Karine Gambier, Susan Hemingway, and Esther Studer), travelling through a politically volatile South American territory, and suspected of being politically active for the rebels. Rather foolishly, they’re on the route of a prison camp run by the usual hatchet-faced lesbian of all these films, who is politically savvy enough to always incarcerate the opponents of the top dogs.

All this is revealed in a surprisingly lucid and efficient manner by Franco, who is not usually known for the clarity of his storytelling and is surprisingly creative with some of his shots. The visual reveals in the opening scenes actually correspond with the poorly delivered dialogue to provide information gradually, in the right sequence, and in an interesting manner. Usually, the reverse is true where Mr. Franco is concerned; we watch because we know he’ll deliver the eye candy, even though we know he’s technically incompetent.

Sure enough, fifteen minutes in, and the girls are naked. And they stay that way for the rest of the film. Unfortunately, and unusually, Franco then films them as if they weren’t naked, as if they were walking around clothed and it didn’t matter where the camera was. During some quite unnecessary and dispiriting torture scenes, one of the girls (not the one you would expect) snaps and gives up information and the four decide they must break out.

Staging a pointlessly protracted overlong and uninspired lesbian foursome for the lascivious guard (during which we see nothing of any of them), the girls flee into the jungle. Faced with the prospect of filming four naked girls running around in the foliage, most exploitation directors would go to town, but curiously, Franco’s camera makes no attempt to enjoy the bodies.

In a supposedly shock ending--stop reading here, if you really care--that was perhaps quite unusual and surprising back in 1978, the film ends with all four girls shot and killed. Yep, the bad guys win, totally and with no ands, ifs, or buts. Okay, it’s different, but how different do we want WIP movies to be? The downbeat ending renders the entire ‘great escape’ film pointless and futile, and even more brutal than earlier, individual scenes.

Perhaps the film isn’t about naked girls, you say. Perhaps--like the similarly self-destructing Avere Vent’anni that same year—there’s a political point being made, an artistic statement? Well, no. Because first, this is a Jess Franco film, and he has about 150 others for us to judge his motives by. And secondly, if it is a political film, then it is essentially a feelgood film for sadistic, woman-hating fascists. And whatever his failings, that ain’t Franco.

Franco grew up under his namesake’s repressive regime in Spain, and for this reason made his films in France and other more liberal territories, so we can give him the benefit of the doubt, despite his writer and director credits here. It’s entirely possible he was just insensitive, thoughtless and stupid; there’s certainly evidence of that in his films.

The big problem with this film though is that it’s not serious enough to be taken as drama (the warden and her henchman, Franco’s old pal Howard Vernon, are as camp as ever), but not silly enough to be amusing, as WIP films must be. In fact, it’s downright unpleasant, and WIP films need to be camp and silly to justify all the wickedness the genre indulges in. As we shall see, during the decade that followed, that would be exactly what they were. There wasn’t much that the 1980s got right. but women-in-prison films were one of them...

The Great British Sex-Com

Secrets of a Door to Door Salesman (1973), Confessions of a Sex Maniac (1974), The Love Box (1972), Can You Keep It Up For a Week? (1975), Ups and Downs of a Handyman (1975), The Amorous Milkman (1975), Under the Doctor (1976), Intimate Games (1976), I'm Not Feeling Myself Tonight (1976), What’s Up Nurse! (1978), What’s Up, Superdoc! (1978)

Motorways, puerile pop songs, shoulder-length hair for men, an obnoxious creep at the wheel of an open-top car, and cheap onscreen titles. It can only be another British sex-com from the ‘70s.

The flagrant in-your-face exploitation of the Japanese, Chinese, and European WIP movies of the 1970s would only have embarrassed and appalled most cinema audiences in the U.K. As should already have become apparent from previous chapters, generally, unless you’re a sociologist studying the social mores of the late 20th century and accompanying media (as some do), or just generally interested in the kitsch clutter of 1970s low culture (as I am), it’s advisable to stay away from British sex films from that period. Although, as with inept sci-fi, badly realised horror, and pretentious erotica, there is entertainment to be had for all the wrong reasons, sexy they are not.

With perhaps the exception of American grindhouse, which is even more unappealing for being humorless, British sex-coms are unique in exhibiting an extraordinary knack for making attractive girls look quite unattractive through their bad lighting, rotten cinematography, and thoughtless camera angles. In Britain, it seemed as though the only way the mass audience could deal with their lusts was to laugh at them from the other side of a closed door. Of course, much of this was down to the censors as much as the market, but Britain was one of the very few countries in the world--perhaps the only one--where the censors made a virtue out of consulting the audience, and the public colluded with them.

“Believe me, these days you can show films that five years ago you couldn’t even get developed” announces randy salesman Johnny Briggs (Coronation Street’s Mike Baldwin) in Secrets of a Door to Door Salesman (1973), an early entry in the suburban wives stakes. Truer words were never spoken. As the ‘60s ended and the ‘70s began, the sexy shock-docs and moral message films gradually faded out of fashion to be replaced by more light-hearted but incredibly tame jolly sex romps that took themselves much less seriously but involved the same formula of cheeky chappies and randy housewives. As lame as they seem today, the films made in 1973/4 could never have seen the light of day five, or even three years earlier.

There was no shortage in the 1970s of girls (or guys) willing to undress in the movies. It was post-swinging ‘60s, pre-puritanical ‘80s, and in those days you could walk along Brighton promenade between the two piers of my home town and see heads bobbing up and down, bums bobbing up and down, tits wibbling around, and skinnydippers shrieking and waving at the still-clothed gazing down at them from April to August. Today, with violent fights on a weekly rather than yearly basis, and uptight idiots everywhere, your clothes and technology would be nicked and you’d be recorded for posterity before you could say You-Tube or Facebook. The problem in the ‘70s, as I’ve stated throughout this book, was not locating an uninhibited cast, but finding directors with the inclination and intuition to film them properly.

Pre-dating the Confessions films by a year, Secrets of a Door to Door Salesman is written by Joe McGrath (who later re-wrote and directed I’m Not Feeling Myself Tonight) and Denis Norden, a veteran comedy script-writer of U.K. TV. Directing--after none other than Jonathan Demme parted company with the production--was veteran Wolf Rilla, better known--okay, only known--for Village of the Damned.

Freed from his isolated existence as a lobster fisherman when his drunken father falls overboard and drowns, country boy David Clyde (Brendan Price) heads for the bright lights--er, make that grey skies and deserted early morning streets--of London, where he lucks out by taking lodgings in a boarding house otherwise occupied by an assortment of twee dollies with RADA-trained voices. There’s randy Rachel (Jacquie Afrique), jolly Nancy (Liz Romilly), prim repressed religious zealot Jane (Jan Servais), and naughty schoolgirl Suzanne (Felicity Devonshire), a total sexpot. There’s also sex film actress Penny (played by sex film actress Sue Longhurst) and later, absent air hostess Sally (Vicky Burgoyne) who comes back to find her room occupied and quickly goes bur-goyne bur-goyne on the bed with our hero.

But this is a British sex-com, and so, besieged by eager young girls from all sides, young David decides against living this dream scenario, and instead only has eyes for German girl Martina (Jean Harrington), who he picks up at the side of the road in nothing but a towel at the beginning of the film, but who otherwise keeps her clothes on as she turns up intermittently during the incredibly tame censor-friendly hi-jinks. Everyone talks in that very clipped “I’m about to start acting now” way that only exists in British comedy, a sort of despairing lilt with perfect pronunciation and phoney concern. You can almost hear their drama teacher trilling “Use your eyebrows, girls!! Higher! Higher!! Now, frown! Frown!”.

The problem with Secrets of a Door to Door Salesman is that it’s difficult, if not impossible, to empathise with a guy who turns down a houseful of admirers to moon over a girl who’s not very interested, and then passes over a career making porn films to sell badly-made vacuum cleaners for a belligerent bad-tempered boss (Brit-com veteran Graham Stark). It’s not that these films are difficult or unpleasant to watch, they’re not. They’re like television test cards with tits; one sits through them in complete emotionless silence. Despite the film’s title, nothing this simpleton does is a secret, or even needs to be.

The two main sex scenes, played for laughs, involve Sue Longhurst in her first role (or roll) in sex-coms, and Vicky Burgoyne, both actresses very game and up for it. However it’s Felicity Devonshire, despite sadly showing less, who steals the show in every scene she appears in, whether flustering pompous copper Chic Murray (he’d be a police officer again in Ups and Downs of a Handyman) in her nightdress, standing half-naked in her bedroom doorway, or pouncing on Brendan Price in his. Both Longhurst and Devonshire went on to long and busy careers throughout the ‘70s appearing in assorted sex-coms, Longhurst in Keep it Up, Jack, Can You Keep It Up for a Week?, Confessions of a Window Cleaner, What the Swedish Butler Saw, Girls Come First, Keep It Up Downstairs, and Come Play With Me, as well as The Benny Hill Show and many more, and Sun Page Three girl Devonshire, having already made appearances in The Magnificent Seven Deadly Sins, Sex and the Other Woman, The Four Dimensions of Greta, The Over-Amorous Artist, Blue Belle, Lisztomania, Intimate Games, and What’s Up, Nurse, among others.

Later, Tara Lynn takes the boy to bed with a sex-ed book (only for the inevitable husband to turn up), he flees from an admittedly alarming lady in black leather, and Noelle Finch exposes herself and the vacuum cleaner’s inadequacies after Price obeys his boss just when he shouldn’t and avoids sex with the customer, thus exposing his inadequacies. Karen Boyes (Four Dimensions of Greta) is on the boat with him when the film starts, and Judi Stevenson, Monika Ringwald, and Rosemary Chalmers appear in a barroom scene.

One of the cheapest and shabbiest of the British 1970s sex-coms (in a genre already not exactly famous for its lavish largesse), is Confessions of a Sex Maniac (aka The Man Who Couldn’t Get Enough, 1974), a far more interesting film to write about than it is to actually watch. Brandishing possibly the most pathetically desperate and obvious title of all the British sex-coms (alongside the second most obvious title for those who didn’t get it the first time), colors are washed out, with the naked bodies ranging from white to purple, but very rarely flesh-colored, and much of the filming was done in real interiors rather than on sets, including the writer/director’s house, much to the surprise and annoyance of his wife, a thought that gets funnier in my mind each time I think of it. Despite the presence of a handful of professional actors in the cast, some of whom went on to mainstream success, the dialogue is delivered flatter than a pancake. There’s ‘70s sexism and shaggy hair everywhere as a cast of future sit-com stalwarts and sex-com regulars sleepwalk through a ridiculous story premise that stands up like a doped dog.

Consider this: much-feted architect Sir Bertrand Storm (David Royle, the dead body from Fawlty Towers) is “too busy” to deal with a “multi-million” assignment to design a radical new building, and so hands it over to his long-haired layabout of an assistant, Henry Milligan, the supposed “sex maniac” of the title. Well, of course you would. So he gives him the usual “if you fuck this up…!” warning, and off he goes, on the apparently much more profitable lecture circuit.

Milligan (a very young Roger Lloyd Pack, later to co-star in TV Brit-coms Only Fools and Horses and The Vicar of Dibley), is more concerned with losing his favorite squeeze after whispering the wrong girl’s name in her ear. Consequently, he’s even more obsessed with sex than usual and, unable to concentrate on his assignment for thinking about the female anatomy, decides to build the new structure in the form of a breast. Now consider this: To create this structure (as if he’s never seen a woman’s breast before), he decides he must audition willing young women until he finds the perfectly formed model for his design, and places an ad in fashionable leftist/liberal London listings mag Time Out (that must have thrilled their film section). Luckily for the film-makers, the title was far too cool (or had to be seen to be so) to sue for damages!

A stream of sex-com regulars parade through the office, including Zoe Hendry (The Benny Hill Show, To the Devil a Daughter, Butterflies, What’s Up Nurse), Monika Ringwald (Intimate Games, The Sexplorer, and a dozen others, including our Benny), Glenda Allen (Confessions of a Window Cleaner, I’m Not Feeling Myself Tonight), Jo Peters (The Two Ronnies and ditto Allen), and, stealing the show, Ava Cadell (Confessions of a Window Cleaner, Ups and Downs of a Handyman, Spaced Out). All this is much to the annoyance of prudish secretary Hilary (played by famous ‘60s fashion model Vicki Hodge), after which our hero goes on the road to meet the stragglers, a sexy bored housewife (the delightful Cheryl Gilham of The Love Box, The Stud, and The Benny Hill Show), a pianist and presumed pothead (Carole Hayman, with a ton of mainstream TV credits), and just plain up-for-it Jeanette Marsden (previously in The Love Box and The Sinful Dwarf).

It’s doubtful that audiences in 1974 were disappointed, as the film undoubtedly delivers in the sex and nudity department, and if you’re a breast man you’ll be in heaven (every single woman in the cast gets her tits out except for Bobby Sparrow, who can be seen to advantage in I’m Not Feeling Myself Tonight and several similar films, and has a funny bit here in a pub), but the film is more interesting today for it’s portrayal of a world of red telephone boxes and smokey saloon bars with piano players pounding away, as well as an interminable but never dull self-conscious stroll through 1970s Soho. The film might have been more fun--and more typical of its genre--if the breast exams had been a huge Screwballs-style scam to get his mitts on some tits, but absurdly, the whole idea of looking at breasts to design a building is played absolutely straight. And given that the concept is being taken seriously, no-one appears to be going into the small detail of the interior! However, for all the leching and breast-fixation, it’s good to see a sex film that shows a little lovemaking rather than just cold, hard fucking, and I suppose my argument about the premise being absurd would hold up better if there wasn’t an oversized stumpy penis-shaped building standing in the middle of London today nicknamed ”the Pickle”.

Poor old Time Out gets it in the neck again in The Love Box (1972) after having its Cool seriously compromised in Confessions of a Sex Maniac, this time as the magazine’s notorious lonely hearts column is the clear inspiration for the tacky box number ads that provide the framing sequence for this series of variable vignettes about sex in the ‘70s.

For reasons most probably related to a lack of style, budget, and ability, British sex films always manage to make sex look cheap and tacky. The Love Box (the title relates to the box numbers for the ads) has no chance, as the storylines are cheap and tacky in the first place. Credited to the pseudonymous White brothers, it was in fact written, directed and produced by Wilbur Stark (father of actress Koo Stark) and Tudor Gates (dabbling in film and TV throughout the ‘60s and ‘70s, and writer and director of that opportunity lost, Intimate Games). Its pedigree thus handicapped from the off, it doesn’t take long for the DNA to kick in, and straight away we’re into a succession of flatly told, apathetically filmed anecdotes without rhyme or reason; a young lad loses his virginity--repeatedly, a rightly suspicious middle-aged man rings a doorbell for an orgy, four bored housewives assault a gigolo, an elderly man gets more than a massage, two couples go the Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice route, two drab flatmates become decidedly more interesting when they strip off, and an artist looking for “color” is swamped by ethnic beauties. Finally, the editor attempts to imagine a utopian uninhibited new world of open sexuality, but courtesy of our somnambulistic creative talents, summons up only the naked boredom of a second-rate naturist film (one of the male leads sits self-consciously naked in a lawn chair in a back garden the size of a football pitch, while the other is obliged to pose as Rodin’s thinker with backache).

Although the final sequence features the sort of nudity presented to long-suffering audiences for 1950s nudist camp exploiters, the direction completely ignores any opportunity to present the audience with anything voyeuristic in the preceding stories, even when the actors are naked (to give just one example, when a pretty young girl goes to take a shower, all we see is the shower head raining down on the camera, and then the girl in bed with the sheets over her--this is how it would be directed for television!).

As the stories are mostly pointless, their only hope to be entertaining was to offer something visual. This never comes. Every time a scene gives the impression it’s about to get going, it stops. In a full-length feature, the only treats are the presence of Marianne Morris of Vampyres in a wife swapping sketch (Cherri Gilham, a highlight of Confessions of a Sex Maniac and The Benny Hill Show is also in this, but is wasted) and a sex scene with the lovely Jane Cardew (Sex and the Other Woman, Four Dimensions of Greta). Also present are Maggie Wright (Sex and the Other Woman, Confessions of a Pop Performer), Lisbeth Lindborg, Minerva Smith, Leonora Lyttle, Elaine Baillie (Confessions of a Window Cleaner, The Sexplorer), Ann Henning, Georgina Symonds-Rose, Trudi Blue, Joan Alcorn (Monique), Minah Bird (Four Dimensions of Greta, The Stud), and in the Love Park fantasy that closes the film, rent-a-bods Nicola Austine, Rina Brown, Jeanette Marsden, Liz Carlson, and Sue Bowen. Despite the above roll call of sex-com regulars and one-offs alike, this is desperate, unerotic, tragic stuff, purely of interest as a curiosity.

On the other hand, 1975’s Can You Keep It Up For a Week? is one of the more watchable of the 1970s British sex-coms, even if it does follow the usual formula slavishly. Ribald and bawdy, completely uninhibited, and free of the snide sexual repression that permeates the Carry On films and British television sit-coms of the period, it’s a shameless and infantile excursion into a 1970s timewarp where Mayfair magazine collides with the humor of the British seaside postcard.

Hirsute hero Jeremy Bulloch is Gil, a passable clone of Robin Askwith and an everyman doofus engaged to busty Jill Damas of Games Girls Play. She’s Annette, the classic long-suffering, eye-rolling, deep-sighing devoted girlfriend of sit-com mythology, but she won’t marry the gormless Gil until he can hold down a job for more than a few days... a week, maybe? He bets he can keep a job for a whole seven days without being canned for being an accident-prone oaf.

It’s not long before we discover why Gil can’t find employment. He is an accident-prone oaf. At the garage where he works he topples a secretary off a ladder, pulls the pants off a mechanic, gooses a woman with the petrol pump, and drenches himself and a young girl driver in the car wash... all amid a stream of childish innuendoes of the can’t-get-it-in/up/off/out variety that would embarrass Benny Hill. Every single line of dialogue is either a double entendre, or setting one up.

He attends his first interview with his trouser zip open, but gets lucky when he turns up at Jill’s workplace--an employment agency for home help--and impresses Mrs. Grimwood, the boss’s wife, who's just off to France because she can’t trust husband Gerry (smarmy Neil Hallett of Virgin Witch) to inspect the French maids. But Gerry’s got his eyes on Annette, and when he realises his new employee is her boyfriend he sees a chance to chase off the competition while the wife’s absent. One mistake, and Gil’s not only fired, he’s out of the way. When Grimwood pointedly tells him that he must obey his clients’ every instruction at all costs, it’s pretty obvious that we’re about to venture into that sex film fantasyland where nearly every woman is desperate for it, and the rest don’t mind when they’re jumped on…

However, Gil’s true talents lie in the bedroom, and as every assignment seems to end up in a sex session, he’s getting nothing but compliments. Curvy Olivia Munday (also in Confessions of a Window Cleaner, Keep It Up Downstairs, and The Deadly Females) contrives to get her toe “accidentally” caught in the bath taps (soapy shenanigans ensue when the comedy husband comes home), and Richard O’Sullivan of Au Pair Girls and TV’s Man About the House gives what must be the worst impression of a stereotypical gay ever committed to celluloid until Lance Percival attended the casting call for Confessions from a Holiday Camp. Sue Longhurst is surprisingly good as the formidable Mrs. Bristol (bristols being old time Cockney slang for tits), who saw something that impressed her at the aforementioned zipper event and ends up in a threesome with Gil and the sleazy Grimwood, and there’s another threesome in a female doctor’s surgery with patient Venicia Day and Jenny Cox (Carry On Behind and Sextet) very good as the doctor.

When Annette turns up at the next job to sabotage him, she ends up with Valerie Leon (window dressing in numerous British ads, TV shows, and movies) as a take-charge lipstick lesbian. Handing him a babysitting assignment drops him into the clutches of topless jailbait, and so it goes, ad infinitum, until the finale at Grimwood’s residence, where he’s holding a grand orgy to celebrate both the anniversary of the agency and the fact that his wife’s in Paris. As all his clients from the previous scenes assemble, it’s best not to ask how he was intending to keep the event a secret when she returns... which she does unexpectedly of course, ruining his plans to break up our sappy couple. When Gil bails him out with a series of absurd impromptu excuses, easily refuted if necessary, Grimwood has no excuse but to let him stay on.

Special mention for actual acting ability in a film that doesn’t insist on it should be made of Olivia Munday in the bathroom scene, Sue Longhurst, who for once gives an excellent performance, Jenny Cox as the randy doctor, and particularly Lindsay Marsh, who’s hilarious as Gigi the au pair turned mattress tester.

This film is actually so nut-numbingly inane that it transcends being rubbish, goes way past stupid, and reaches such a plateau of idiocy that it actually becomes funny on a whole different level than intended. It’s impossible to imagine the sort of person who wouldn’t be able to laugh at this on one level or another; you’d have to be the most miserable individual on the planet. There is a fair amount of (very) casual nudity (this was a decade when actresses were more likely to complain if they didn’t get a nude scene), but you’ll be so transfixed by the 1970s fashions and decor, you may not notice. As late-night after-the-pub entertainment, it’s perfection. Watch it in the daytime and you may want to kill yourself.

Slow to start, but eventful after the first fifteen minutes have meandered by, Ups and Downs of a Handyman (1975) is a rather obvious rip-off of the Confessions franchise to be discussed later, an inevitable result of that series’ massive financial success. It’s a one-line premise: young couple inherit a country cottage and move out of grey, smokey London for an idyllic village life with him as the local handyman. Turns out he’s very handy indeed, in a Chatterley/Mellors sort of way, as all the local women are bored out of their tiny minds living out in the sticks, and dead keen on an interesting diversion. It’s very tame inoffensive stuff, and even though writer/director John Sealey is no more skilful at placing the camera than his predecessors in sex-coms, he is a little more enthusiastic than the jaded Stanley Long and friends. Nevertheless, if it wasn’t for the nudity and the fact that some poor souls still can't deal with it, you could run this on TV in the afternoon.

Barry Stokes, a tone-deaf veteran of Godspell and national joke ‘70s daytime soap Crossroads, was acceptable in the lead, with Penny Meredith as his cute, likeable wife. As the wife is a completely unnecessary addition to the storyline, it’s interesting to note that 1970s film-makers or their audience had no qualms about giving him a perfectly pleasant partner to be serially cheated on. To add insult to absurdity, she’s by far the most attractive woman in the cast! In any other decade, the writers would have contrived to make her a shrewish bitch who deserved to be deceived, a fellow adulterer, or a sympathetic faun who would later get revenge. Instead, all she gets for her loyalty and love is a limp dick, exhausted from all the extra-curricular activity in the village.

And what a village. All the women are sex-crazed, and all the men are perverse. Amusingly named Sodding Chipbury (after the absolutely genuine Chipping Sodbury), it’s full of randy babes with their tits out, and dirty old men like phoney photographer Robert Dorning (from Confessions of a Pop Performer), naked spanking Squire Bob Todd of The Benny Hill Show (eeewwww!!), and two-faced moralising local constable Chic Murray, of Secrets of a Door to Door Salesman. He’s the comedy copper with his own interminable theme music, frequently to be found inspecting the top shelf of the newsagents (although with big-eyed and big-boobed Helli Louise from Confessions of a Pop Performer behind the counter, this is rather like leafing through recipe books while the waiter awaits your order in a gourmet restaurant).

Both Penny Meredith and Julia Bond (as yes, the farmer’s daughter) will turn up in Confessions from a Holiday Camp. Also getting naked, Jeannie Collings of Carry On England as the girl in the bath, Nita Lorraine as the farmer’s wife, Olivia Syson as the Squire’s wife, Gay Soper (Stoke’s wife!) as Maisie the local hooker, and busy Ava Cadell wasted as the schoolgirl with her knickers round her ankles (a sign of the ‘70s if ever there was). Keeping their kit on, professional window dressing Sue Lloyd and Valerie Leon.

We’ve already established this is tame stuff. This is because although one sex scene follows another, they are all played as comedy rather than erotica, with much of the action speeded up for comic effect. Today we have freeze-frame and rewind, but it must have been a bit trying sitting in the cinema and not being able to slow down the sex or speed up the picture just enough to dispense with the diabolical score. Now that we can, this succession of high-speed shags is moderately amusing for the happily comatose, recommended as a pleasant-enough time-waster, but as usual with British sex-coms, you won’t be seeing as much as you’d like.

Only available in a very shoddy print from a company that picks up films nobody else wants, The Amorous Milkman (also 1975) is a pretty depressing affair set in the suburbs where everyone is trapped in their own little corner of hell and seems determined to make sure the rest of the household are as unhappy as they are. Sex-com dragon Diana Dors torments browbeaten husband Bill Fraser (more usually cast as a blustering toughie), a soppy daughter (Donna Reading of The Benny Hill Show and similar) pointlessly spites her doormat dad, a dowdy, raucous mother (Janet Webb, unrecognisable under glasses and pudding-bowl hair as the credit-snatching diva from The Morecambe and Wise Show) shouts expletives at her fretful daughter... it’s all inexplicably downbeat for what the jaunty music and casting keeps telling us is about to explode into a jolly romp.

The title, casting, and music would seem to suggest that the film is trying to be something else and has been subverted, but the entire shambles is in fact adapted, written, directed, and produced by one man, jobbing actor Derren Nesbitt. A familiar face in the ‘60s and ‘70s on seedy thrillers and detective shows, he presumably intended to produce what he did.

The Great British milkman, who delivers more than milk to bored housewives after the husbands have gone to work was one of the great staples of British music hall and seaside postcards, and a natural for 1970s soft porn, as Benny Hill himself proved with his innuendo-laden hit record “Ernie”, but creepy Nesbitt, who cameos as a replacement milkman after the leading man (Brendan Price’s Davey Canning) is charged with rape and beaten to a pulp gives the proceedings a distinctly dark side as the film progresses. This is hardly the direction you expect a hilarious comedy to go in, although The Amorous Milkman has failed to deliver the laughs as well as the dairy produce.

The film certainly starts like a lame sex-com, with Price (who had also played the lead in the relatively superior but just as stupid Secrets of a Door-to-Door Salesman) delivering milk and pathetic innuendo in equal measure to women still in their nightwear. However, this is hardly Max Miller or The Two Ronnies, or even Frankie Howerd. Every single question (“Do you like it?”, “Could I have a bit extra tomorrow?”) somehow becomes misinterpreted by our hero as a sexual comment, even though nobody, including him, is actually talking about sex, and quite clearly talking about something else. An entire conversation is based around a young girl’s “pussy” when the actual cat is sitting at her feet. These aren’t double-entendres, they’re single entendres. They make the Carry Ons look witty.

When the interminable pussy jokes have finally been exhausted, Davey arranges a date with the girl, and something vaguely resembling a story begins, during which he somehow promises to marry Reading’s Janice, amazingly beds charisma-free ice queen Diana (starlet Julie Ege) in his hovel (which for some reason is decorated in early Hulk memorabilia), attends a decadent suburban orgy (we know it's decadent because there’s blacks and gays present, all of whom are presented as an exotic novelty to the apparently insular audience) and awkwardly manages to find the only woman there looking for marriage (Nancie Wait of Au Pair Girls as Margo) and proposes to her too. The usual parade of familiar character actors turn up along the way, but all of them--Fraser and Dors, Dors’ hapless husband Alan Lake (Nesbitt will appear with Dors and Lake in David Sullivan’s The Playbirds), Roy Kinnear, Sam Kydd, Norman Chappell, Arnold Ridley of Dad’s Army--fall flat on their faces, bereft of a single good line to work with. Even the lovely Jenny Westbrook of The Sex Thief, as Lake’s long-suffering squeeze, is made to look like a potty-mouthed slapper.

There’s the customary nudity, but it’s all very fleeting, and often not even flesh-colored, Nesbitt either tinting the footage or filming in semi-darkness. Marianne Morris of Vampyres appears in one such blink-and-miss segment. The most sex is seen in the grubby porn film the astonishing oaf takes his girlfriend to see, art mirroring reality no doubt for some of the paying couples making up this film’s unhappy cinema audience of the day. As a final passion-killer, this already dreary and despondent film then takes a serious wrong turn when Ege’s insecure sugar daddy (a good performance by Ray Barrett) has the lad beaten up, and Dors, rebuffed and resentful, vindictively and falsely accuses our stumbling idiot of rape. After the trial, which Price attends beaten and bloody, the clueless Nesbitt--confirming that he has no idea what he’s doing--tries for some speeded-up Benny Hill laughs as one of Davey’s jilted girlfriends chases him around some trees while he’s still bandaged up and on crutches.

As a candidate in a crowded collection of contenders for worst British sex-com ever, The Amorous Milkman just about edges What’s Up Superdoc into second place--a shameful and awesome achievement.

Another personal project, this time for writer and producer Ron Bareham, who fails to live up to his surname, and directed by TV director Gerry Poulson, more recently working on U.K. TV prime-time slop, 1976’s Under the Doctor (which has a wonderful title) is another very minor entry in the British sex-com stakes that is notable mainly for the presence of Barry Evans in the lead, who had just turned down the sequel to cash cow Adventures of a Taxi Driver to improve his lot and avoid typecasting, but was then apparently financially compelled to take this low-rent drivel exploiting his Doctor at Large TV persona.

In a series of three vignettes with a small cast of dependables, he is first paired with Penny Spencer, who had similarly fled her TV persona of over-aged school slapper Sharon in the ridiculous Please, Sir sit-com, and is the only cast member besides Evans to get naked. Spencer plays a sexually repressed office secretary who nevertheless opens the film’s verite credits sequence by striding at length through West London topless in a very see-through blouse with a big grin on her face. It’s all downhill from here, with a period romp as sex-com veteran Hilary Pritchard’s fantasy, also featuring upper class snob specialist Jonathan Cecil and Spencer’s old sparring partner Peter Cleall, another Please, Sir alumni from the 16-going-on-27 sit-com schoolkids, amusing as a laddish butler. The film crawls to an embarrassing conclusion with a game Liz Fraser of the Carry Ons as a love-starved landlady type, still looking quite good for her years in a black lingerie ensemble.

There’s no sex or nudity after Spencer gets her kit off in the opening scenes (you’d think if they were going to short-change the audience they'd hold her ’til last), and the film is tiresomely talky as it pads out the running time with verbiage. Funny when it shouldn’t be, silly when it’s trying to be serious, and carelessly indifferent when it should be poignant (incestuous child abuse is callously used half-heartedly as a convenient plot device, and constitutes the film’s only fleeting erotic footage with the obviously well over sixteen Spencer), Under the Doctor is even more irrelevant and ugly now than it was in ’76.

In Intimate Games (1976), eight students--five girls and three boys--are given a curious project for the summer holidays--firstly, pair off and explore each others’ sexual fantasies, and then interview subjects from the outside world on same. Now, it’s a British sex-com, so there’s good news and there’s bad news. The bad news is that this film isn’t going to do anything to dispel the global image of Britons, particularly across Europe, as sniggering sexual simpletons and sad love-starved shy boys so terrified of eroticism that their fantasies emerge as musical dance numbers, feeling up pigeons in the garden shed, and most grotesque of all, a dwarf saddling up an obese stripper and riding her around the stage. These are just some of the images that writer and director Tudor Gates (whose apathy and lack of interest, imagination or ability had already tainted The Love Box) thought we should find funny and have left IMDB reviewers from the four corners of the world appalled and consumed with pity and horror. *

* Back in the 1980s, when I was a younger man and led a considerably less sedentary lifestyle than I do today, I was at the forefront of a crowd of people cheering on a girl who was dancing around and stripping naked on the dance floor in a disco in the South of France. Seeing my enthusiasm for her show, she then danced over and stripped me naked. At the end of the evening, I saw her with her friends and went over to say goodnight and have a laugh about it. When she heard me speak to her in English, she was horrified, and apologised profusely for what she had done. It took me ages to reassure her that despite being British, I had loved every minute of it. That, folks, is what Europe thinks of the British and their attitude to sex and nudity…

The good news is that the female students include the most impressive collection of 1970s sex-com starlets ever gathered together in one film. There's Ingmar’s daughter Anna Bergman (Penelope Pulls It Off, Adventures of a Taxi Driver, Come Play With Me), busy bit player Suzy Mandel (Confessions of a Driving Instructor, The Benny Hill Show, Adventures of a Plumber’s Mate, Come Play With Me), hardcore Heather Deeley (I’m Not Feeling Myself Tonight, Erotic Inferno, Secrets of a Superstud), former Page Three girl Felicity Devonshire (Sex and the Other Woman, Four Dimensions of Greta, Secrets of a Door to Door Salesman, Blue Belle, What’s Up Nurse), and newbie and one-off Maria St. Clair, who is absolutely gorgeous and was never seen again (other than in a couple of TV bit-parts--after this film!). What happened there?

Also present are Monika Ringwald as a sexy secretary, Susan Glanville as a frustrated housewife, and making her debut, Adventures of a Plumber’s Mate's Lindy Benson, showing just the briefest glimpse as the exhibitionist wife of a voyeur. On the downside, and once again sullying the reputation of Brits across the continents, the guys are three of the saddest specimens ever to bestride the decade. There’s John (Peter Blake), who’s arrogant, optimistic, and desperate, Nick, a gormless and goofy hippie (Chet Townsend), and Benny, a bow-tied, upper-class twit (Edward Kalinski). All three of them seem to be absolutely terrified of getting anything, even when Devonshire becomes a sex-crazed panther and St. Clair blithely removes every stitch to stop Blake fantasising about what she might look like! If only women exhibited such magnificently perverse logic in reality!

Interestingly, apart from a repressed businessman imagining secretary Ringwald in less and less clothing, and a sequence where the professor (George Baker) imagines all the women in his class are naked, and is subsequently carried off to an ambulance foaming at the mouth to close the film, the best sex scenes are not the fantasies, but those which are supposed to be taking place in actuality; Devonshire jumping on Kalinski, St. Clair stripping off in front of Blake, Deeley and Mandel having a coy lesbian experiment, Benson’s fur-coated exhibitionist jumping the hitch-hiking Townsend. Oh, and back on the subject of exhibiting logic, once again, if you “want to be raped”, it’s by definition not rape.

As you can tell, there is plenty of sex and nudity in this effort, as well as the inevitable stupidity, and if you were shortlisting British sex-coms of the ‘70s to sample, this would be in the top half-dozen... half-a-dozen titles perhaps being optimistic. However, with a cast like this, the film should have been legendary, and I’m guessing you probably never heard of it until you picked up this book. As always with Tudor Gates, as many opportunities are passed up as are taken up, and the premise begs for a more imaginative, indulgent and less creepy remake.

Ultimately, Intimate Games is notable for three things--a) embarrassing such veteran actors as George Baker (later to become granny’s favorite as TV’s Inspector Wexford) and Ian Hendry (The Avengers, Get Carter), then drunkenly stumbling to the end of his career, b) being one of the few British sex comedies featuring middle-class student types instead of working class cheeky chappies, and c) a lengthy suggestive sequence based around oral sex, a subject which very rarely raised its head, so to speak, in British sex-coms at all. This was very daring stuff for 1970s cinema, and it’s quite surprising it got past the draconian censorship of the period, at which time it was deemed okay to hilariously injure the penis, but not to pleasure it! Perhaps the censor really did think Anna Bergman was talking about sucking thumbs...

Incidentally, with some of the most beautiful girls of the 1970s in the cast to choose from, guess what features on the cover of the DVD? Yeah, The Benny Hill Show’s Johnny Vyvyan as the dwarf jockey riding up-for-it professional fat lady Claire Davenport (Adventures of a Plumber’s Mate, Jubilee). If that doesn't sum up the mentality of the British sex-com, I don't know what does. * ( * since changed!!)

Perhaps one of the most bizarre entries in the genre is the misfire I’m Not Feeling Myself Tonight (aka The Sex Ray, 1976). With a title that manages to be both crass and clever at the same time, it has the same plusses and minuses of every British sex-com made in the 1970s. You would imagine that a sex clinic scenario involving a plot with a sex-ray that induces people to immediately have it off would be a situation even a British sex-com couldn’t fuck up, but don't. You would think such a film would virtually shoot itself, but this one succeeds only in shooting itself in the foot. Despite the intriguing premise, it’s not remotely exciting or sexy. It is quite remarkable how all these films effortlessly copied each other without anybody learning anything from the failings of their predecessors. Every single one of them said “I could do that”. Not one of them ever said “I could do better than that”. Or worse--if they did... then they didn’t. Never have so many people got naked for so little reason.

Lead actor Barry Andrews (previously in the suggestively titled but quite clean Rentadick; for the full story of that disaster, see John Cleese’s autobiography So Anyway) is likeable and sympathetic, although one has to marvel at his character’s incompetence and limited ambition. Armed with an audio-aphrodisiac sex-ray that provokes people into having immediate lustful desires, not only is he still not getting any (the ray keeps hitting the wrong people), but he’s only interested in one particular mumsy secretary (Sally Faulkner, from Confessions from the David Galaxy Affair, Vampyres, and the golf course scene in Confessions of a Driving Instructor)--this despite the fact that his apartment looks like the back issues department of Northern and Shell. Imagine the fun you could really have with a sex-ray! When substitute secretary and sex maniac Wendy (Katya Wyeth of Confessions of a Window Cleaner) jumps on him, he does as all cheeky chappies do in the non-Confessions sex-coms and fights her off. It also beggars belief that he’s so short-changed when he works at a sex research clinic where eager participants run half-clothed through the corridors all day long as if it’s red alert on the Starship Enterprise.

Vying for worst performance in a sleazy sex comedy are Billy Hamon as teddy boy Keith, the hero’s thicko dummy friend, James Booth as a surprisingly uptight and aggravated boss for a sex clinic where everybody’s at it all day (Booth is probably just furious he’s in the film), and Ben Aris as a needlessly American money man (I say needlessly because Aris only remembers to put on his accent half the time, and the director might as well have told him to forget it). Compare this Fawlty-esque duo with the laid-back, well-shagged administration of the sex-crazed school in Second Coming of Eva. Why are they so frantic and angry all the time? Even in a roomful of baffled bimbos exercising in the nude?

The film’s then-young scriptwriter David McGillivray claimed that he was still a virgin when he wrote the script, which does explain a lot, including the Mary Whitehouse send-up and the weird nervous homophobic remarks scattered throughout (although McGillivray also claims he was heavily rewritten). He also tells us, in his book Doing Rude Things, that director Joe McGrath could barely stand to watch what he was filming anyway, thus upping the apathy quotient even for a British sex-com director. This would explain why so much of the film is in long-shot or master-shot, and why so many opportunities are missed.

All the usual stereotypes are here--postman, policeman, traffic warden, boy scout, vicar, security guard, tea lady--and a selection of veteran character actors show up for a morning’s work and a lifetime’s embarrassment; Brian Murphy of Man About the House turns up as a landlord sans Mildred, the ubiquitous Robert Dorning pops up in a party scene, Chic Murray swaps his policeman’s uniform from Secrets of a Door to Door Salesman and Ups and Downs of a Handyman for that of a security guard, Graham Stark is a doorman, and Rita Webb of The Benny Hill Show and Confessions of a Pop Performer is seriously under-exploited as the tea lady. The nudity quotient is confined to a few bored and confused-looking young girls with bare breasts (above), including familiar names such as Heather Deeley, Monika Ringwald, Lindy Benson, Andee Cromarty, Pat Astley, and Jeannie Collings. The fact that other films have shown that these women are all beautiful, Intimate Games in particular, and yet I didn’t recognise any of them illustrates perfectly how poor this film is.

You’ll notice the lack of a comma in the title of What’s Up Nurse! (1978).

Felicity Devonshire was one of the most beautiful of the young girls who stripped off in 1970s sex-coms, and it’s a pleasure to see her with a substantial part here, beginning with a flirtatious scene on a British Rail train smirking behind a copy of Story of O (graced with the poster art for the film Britain couldn't see--and wouldn’t see for another thirty years). She plays the love interest for Nicholas Field’s drippy young doctor in this rather ordinary but very enjoyable unofficial update of the 1950s Doctor... series of films that had become Doctor in the House, a sexist TV sit-com in the early ‘70s. Field is introduced as Doctor Robert Good by the individual stick-on letters that have been pasted onto his bag like a special needs schoolboy, and makes his introduction to the blustering, flustering administrator of Banham-on-Sea hospital with his dick trapped between the legs of the man’s daughter (Devonshire). There’s something about “Hello, Daddy!” in a difficult situation that always gets a laugh.

The nostalgia factor kicks in big-time with a well-chosen cast of fondly-remembered faces from the past. John Le Mesurier (Dad’s Army, Au Pair Girls, Confessions of a Window Cleaner) is the outraged father and boss (and future father-in-law, of course), Kate Williams, ever the down-trodden wife, finally gets a good role as Matron, Julia Bond (one of the best sights on offer in the seedy Ups and Downs of a Handyman and even seedier Confessions from a Holiday Camp) is delightful as an eccentric nurse who pirouettes around the place because she wants to be a dancer, and Graham Stark (one of the savvy producers) is Carthew the ambulance driver “who likes his nuts”. Yes, that is the level of the humor, which also includes that rusty old relic “No nurse, I said to prick his boil”...

Field is a game leading man, at one point running around the countryside muddy and naked, and taking a few soakings in the interim. A running gag has him repeatedly turning up at the hospital in an ambulance, either with a naked woman, in extreme embarrassment, or both. Devonshire, similarly up for anything and four months pregnant, spends half the film naked and all the film looking gorgeous. With better management, she could have been Britain’s Gloria Guida, but in many of her films--Four Dimensions of Greta, Secrets of a Door-to-Door Salesman, Blue Belle, and Intimate Games among them—she’s under-used and barely exploited. Only her sequence in the creepy Sex and the Other Woman displays her figure and ability to the close extent of this one. With parenthood pending, this was her last film.

A legion of long-gone character actors from the past are cleverly cast in even the smallest parts, so that when a ticket inspector appears, it’s not some random bit player, but Cardew Robinson (Come Play With Me), a worried wife who wants to know when she can have relations again (to come and stay, it transpires) is Dick Emery’s and Leslie Crowther’s comic foil Sheila Bernette, and a police sergeant is Peter Butterworth from the Carry On films. 1970s sit-com veteran Barbara Mitchell plays a randy neighbor at the doctor’s digs, where landlady Mrs. Arkwright turns out to be not the bitter battleaxe of legend but frequent Carry On girl Angie Grant, who likes neither land--she owns a large sailing boat--or being a lady. This film and its partner What’s Up, Superdoc (in which Grant also appears) being very much the bridge between the Carry Ons and the Confessions, she shows considerably more than she did to the Carry On lechers. Ronnie Brody, who worked continuously in sit-com bit parts for three decades, draws the short straw to show up with the inevitable item up the rear end (in this case, cementing a relationship with a jam jar), two more Dad’s Army veterans, Bill Pertwee and Frank Williams, turn up (the latter in his usual guise of fluttery vicar), Carry On’s twitchy Jack Douglas goes through his tedious and limited repertoire as a bungling police constable, Anna Karen shows up for a one-liner in her Olive persona from On the Buses, Ken Parry (of Come Play With Me) shows up for his stereotypical gay turn (the enemas given to his partner tasted horrible, and for all the good they did, he may just as well have stuck them up his arse), and Andrew Sachs, Fawlty Towers’ Manuel, appears as a somewhat more aggressive foreign waiter (imagine Manuel possessed by the demonic spirit of Basil). Pretty bit player Zoe Hendry, after several brief tit bits in Confessions of a Sex Maniac, Confessions of a Window Cleaner, and Butterflies, gets them out one last time as a patient, and Monika Ringwald (Intimate Games, The Sexplorer) says and does nothing in a party scene.

After selling a handful of scripts to mainstream TV in the ‘60s with brother Donald, the more ambitious Derek Ford allied himself with snapper-turned-soft porn merchant Stanley Long in the early '70s, directing Groupie Girl, The Wife Swappers, and This, That and the Other, before branching out on his own. What’s Up Nurse and truly dire companion piece What’s Up, Superdoc were his final fling. With muddy audio, cheap and cheerfully irritating music, and a less than sharp picture, What’s Up Nurse is riddled with absurd situations, and innuendo running through it like a stick of seaside rock. Not everything is left to the imagination, either; one ludicrous scene has six naked girls (the usual suspects) playing with a beachball in a field on a chilly grey day, and then three guys in underpants chasing the doc away from the scene. No one clip, from any of the 1970s sex-coms, could better illustrate the dismal quality of the genre than that one, but What’s Up Nurse, like the first three Confessions, and unlike so many of the others, manages to latch on to what was fun about the ‘70s, rather than what is best consigned to the garbage can. It’s a shame that the sound and picture quality isn’t better, but until the BFI rediscovers Derek Ford, this will have to do.

Of course they won’t be rediscovering him on the strength of What’s Up, Superdoc! (1978), which is inexplicably dreadful. It’s ironic that Ford wrote and directed two of the most innocuous and inoffensive sex-coms of the 1970s, as he was apparently one of the very few who relished his work and lived the sleazy lifestyle he documented in his early films like The Wife Swappers, Suburban Wives, and Commuter Husbands. And although the two What’s Up films, which could and should have been the legitimate follow-ups to the Carry On films (whose cast were dropping like flies), are the tamest of all the 1970s sex-coms, he even directed hardcore inserts for some of his films when they went to Europe. However, it’s hard to believe that this turkey came from the same farm as its companion piece (both films are dated 1978 and feature an overlap of players). What’s Up, Superdoc is as depressingly bad as What’s Up Nurse is surprisingly good.

What’s Up Superdoc and What’s Up Nurse! were made virtually back-to-back in 1978 and feature the same leading character (but different leading men) and many of the same supporting players (Ronnie Brody, Chic Murray, Bill Pertwee, Angie Grant), but they are as alike as chalk and cheese. The absence of the better players in Nurse--Felicity Devonshire, John Le Mesurier, Graham Stark, Julia Bond--is noticeable, with the bland, almost invisible Julia Goodman no substitute as the leading lady, and comic foil Harry H. Corbett (Steptoe and Son, Adventures of a Private Eye) as hopelessly unfunny as ever as he struggles laboriously with absolutely no material, nothing on the page at all. Furthermore, whereas the endless cameos by TV jobsworths moved the Nurse film into the comfort zone of nostalgia, the inclusion of the likes of obnoxious long-gone TV compere Hughie Green and the dismal Melvyn Hayes render their scenes virtually unwatchable. Of the remaining cast, a host of ‘70s dolly bird types are wasted, and only character actresses Sheila Steafel and Marianne Stone are able to raise a faint smile as two dotty nurses at the sperm clinic (“Awfully nice of you to agree to come!”).

Whereas Nurse got straight down to business with ample opportunities to see Felicity Devonshire’s finest attributes, after the pre-credits sequence with bit player Lisa Taylor uh, under the doctor, there is no sex or nudity in Superdoc for over half an hour as the simpering, whimpering so-called Superdoc follows in the grand tradition of most sex-com heroes by fleeing the attentions of all the women who want him while pursuing the one drippy do-nothing who is able to resist his charmless charms--in this case, Julia Goodman’s Annabelle, the doctor attempting to collect his sperm, but in a test tube. In the film’s most tedious sequence, he hides out in the audience of Soho’s famous Raymond Revue Bar, where he, and we, sit through a tacky and lengthy stage show of near-motionless nudity and the entire film, already not exactly gripping, grinds to a halt for ten minutes until the next stripper on, TV comedian Dick Emery’s girlfriend Fay Hillier, shrieks in recognition and the chase is on again. “What are you chasing him for?” she asks of a man in a cloth cap. “You’re just a bloody poof!”.

“I am not!” he replies indignantly, “I just help out when they’re busy!”. This surreal idiocy is not intended as a witty satirical comment on male identity.

But then, the whole film is a bit sexually confused. Leading man Christopher Mitchell, a tall and moustached next-door-neighbor sit-com type, has supposedly fathered over 800 top-notch super-kids after donating sperm, and been unceremoniously identified as Superdoc by the media. Now, various people want further samples of his super-sperm, although science tells us that mixing too much of the same into the gene pool will ultimately result in the opposite progeny (something known even in 1978). Of course it’s only a movie, and a silly one at that, so more to the point is the question of why the script (and the women) seems to equate the good doctor’s virility with desirability and sexual satisfaction, when all we really know is that his high sperm count equals pregnancy? Many of the girls who romp with our hero (including Angie Grant as a hooker working out of a chintzy floral nightmare over the Revue Bar who wants to pay him) are clearly not trying to get knocked up. The premise is absurd and illogical.

Even more absurd is that when the film starts, the doctor is clearly a philandering unscrupulous scoundrel who has just finished servicing some poor dupe’s wife under the guise of a house visit, and yet as soon as a small army of sex film starlets start chasing him round London he turns into a typical Brit-com reluctant Romeo, terrified of the touch of a woman. Of course if he took advantage of his sudden, if absurd, attraction to women then this puerile TV sit-com scenario would transform itself into a sex film... but wait a minute, it is supposed to be a sex film. Just what, exactly, is the fantasy here?

The film hits its lowest of numerous low points when the doctor goes on a TV show to be interviewed by obsequious host Hughie Green, a long-forgotten phoney from the ‘60s and ‘70s, a game show host who became a British Arthur Godfrey and an early precursor to Simon Cowell--or more accurately, The Gong Show’s Casey Kasem. Here, he carelessly exposes his unpleasant true self as he portrays a gruesome and false TV showman who rattles on about his “family audience” but ends up shouting “wanker” repeatedly on air. Perhaps he thought the cameo would never be seen by his TV market, but it was an extraordinary lapse for a smarmy old fraud who pandered successfully to old ladies for two decades.

With nowhere to go, the script introduces kidnappers Ronnie Brody, Chic Murray, and Milton Reid to the fray, who are working for the very British Bill Pertwee as Texan oilman Woodie Pecker, who wants Doc to impregnate his daughter Julie (sex starlet and pin-up girl Marie Harper). To break his will (because our hero is still stubbornly refusing to service anyone and leaping defiantly under cold showers), a small army of familiar sex-com starlets ply their trade, including Anna Bergman, Nicola Austine, Mary Millington, and Vickie Scott, none of whom (including Harper) show anything more than a flash, even when naked.

There’s only one thing left to do, and that’s end it all. Superdoc takes the easy way out of all films without an ending, with a slapstick finale of fire hoses and foam and a two sentence wrap-up. The audience in 1970s cinemas must have had very grim faces by now.

The failure of the 1970s sex-com to deliver as much as it promised is of course partially down to the draconian censorship of the time. Consequently, what these films really are comes down to comedies about sex, rather than comedies with sex. They can be interesting, they can be amusing, they can even sometimes be funny--but they are rarely sexy. With censorship so less restrictive now, but the Brits much the same as ever, it’s surprising no-one is making some real randy sex-coms for the 21st century…

Gloria Guida: La Liceale

Monika (aka La Raggazina, 1974), Blue Jeans (1975), Peccati di Gioventu (1975), Quella eta maliziosa (1975), Il Solco di Pesca (1975), La Liceale (1975), La Liceale nella classe dei Ripetenti (1978), La Liceale seduci il professori (1979), La Liceale, il diavolo, e L’Acquasanta (1978), Pension Paradais (1979)

Over a period of just eight years, Gloria Guida, the mesmerising Miss Teen Italy of 1974, made nearly thirty films in which she played either a naive innocent or scheming vixen, usually alternately--dramas, comedies, many interchangeable, but occasionally a brief digression into ghosts, gangsters or even sci-fi, with some typical 1970s Bermuda Triangle rubbish thrown in.

Guida’s first film (for Mario Imperoli, with whom she also made the similar Blue Jeans the following year) was the unassuming Monika (aka La Raggazina, 1974). She was still quite girlish and ungainly here, but in her twenties she would develop into one of the most devastatingly beautiful women of the 1970s, and make a series of over two dozen films one after the other, all of them different, but each in many ways an offshoot from this rather banal morality tale that started it all. Her literally flawless beauty, alongside her willingness to disrobe in practically every film she made, has resulted in many pundits falling into the trap of presuming that because she got naked in fluffy sex fantasies she couldn’t act, but even in this vapid yarn with its amateurish camerawork and low quality sub-titles you can see the lights are on.

Frequently a staple of light-hearted sex comedies, she was given her most substantial roles by writer and director Silvio Amadio, who reportedly--and understandably!--had quite a thing going for her, and did her proud in 1974’s La Minorenne and then 1975’s Quella eta Maliziosa, and Peccati di Gioventu, the latter two of which gave her two of her best ‘scheming minx’ roles. That same year she was also given a worthy showcase in Maurizio Liverani’s rumination on erotica, art, and religion, Il Solco di Pesca.

Her most popular role followed as the lead in the high school comedy La Liceale, directed lustily by Michele Tarantini, and which prompted two weaker but entertaining sequels, La Liceale nella classe dei ripetenti and La Liceale seduci il professori, both directed by Mariano Laurenti a few years later. Unfortunately, the prolific Laurenti was less interested in the sexual content, and more the comedy and teen romance, a flaw that also made Guida’s L’Infermiera di notte, Lilli Carati’s La Compagna di Banco and Anna Maria Rizzoli’s La ripetente fa l'occhietto al preside to name but three a little less exciting than they could have been, despite the usual comic shenanigans of Italian ‘70s sex-com stalwarts Lino Banfi and Alvaro Vitali. Tarantini’s talent, and the original’s success, was surely due to the equal balance of both.

While playing an assortment of typical 1970s waifs, vixens, beach bunnies, au pair girls and nurses, Guida’s talents had by now been noticed by some of the industry’s leading men, and she found herself being cast as girlfriends and wives for some of Italian cinema’s busiest players. She still manages to walk around naked while playing the mouthy but devoted girlfriend of Lando Buzzanca in Travolto dagli Affetti Familiari, even though the focus is on his trials with his dependents, a slobbering homeless dog and his dear old mum, but stays clothed while she participates in comedian Johnny Dorelli’s Sesso volentieri, a collection of comedic short stories in which she defies her critics and displays her clear talent for comedy, as well as in two modest outings with chubby everyman Renato Pozzetto, Fico D’India and La Casa Stregata, in which she plays his inexplicably knockout wife in both.

Her debut film, the banal Monika, which shows Guida in all her future locales--school, beach, disco, countryside, fast cars--and in all her future guises--naive sex object, innocent vamp, vengeful victim--is very much the template for everything that comes later. In this story, she is surrounded by sleazeballs, pursued by an immoral businessman, a fellow student who moonlights as a pimp, and her schoolteacher! It’s a sort of La Ronde viewed through distorted glass and reflected in a fairground mirror; after losing her virginity to the slimy schoolteacher, she discovers that he’s also seeing the bored wife of the businessman! When Moroni, the businessman, feigns consoling her and then tries to set her up in a secret love-nest, she refuses him, taunts him with the revelation about his wife, and then narrowly escapes being raped by him. A large heavy goods truck settles the argument…

The film teases rather than shows, the most bizarre scene being a sequence where Monika preens naked before the bathroom mirror while a sub-Morricone score is covered by a weird, tuneless whistling that is clearly meant to represent the tremulous tones of a voyeur; it’s most peculiar, and worth seeing the film just for that to connoisseurs of the bizarre. This sequence is without a doubt the strangest and most discomfiting I’ve ever seen in a sex film, and just to put that statement in perspective, this book includes Jess Franco, Joe D’Amato, and British sex-coms of the ‘70s.

It’s a very strange film that seems almost uncritical of the abysmal male behavior on display until Moroni unexpectedly gets his comeuppance at the end--although one gets the feeling the arbitrary justice from on high is more to punish him for his shady and callous business dealings than for his thoroughly unpleasant attitude to the women he procures. Earlier, there’s an extraordinary sequence at a school disco where several creeps including the pimp try unsuccessfully to expose her to the gathered throng--none of whom step in to assist her in her struggles! No-one comes out of this macabre little passion play shining with the spirit of human goodness, including Monika, even though she’s the most pleasant of the whole bunch! Nevertheless, the film made a star of the radiant Gloria, and directors were queueing up to employ her mercurial persona in similar but higher quality fare from then on until her retirement in the early 1980s when she married the aforementioned Johnny Dorelli, whom she’d met on the set of Bollenti Spiriti.

Despite the dark tone of the subject matter, Blue Jeans, her second with Mario Imperioli, looks, sounds, and plays like a typical carefree Gloria Guida vehicle, filmed brightly and brashly in the glorious Italian sunshine, and opening with a seemingly endless over-the-credits shot of Guida in what were then called hot pants (the 1970s follow-up to the mini-skirt, these were shorts that barely covered anything), tottering down the street on the ridiculous platform shoes of the period. An appalling pop song (crude sentiments in puerile lyrics sung as if they were about chocolate and bunnies, typical of the era) plays simultaneously. Guida’s Daniela Anselmi, known to all as “Blue Jeans”, is a wild and wanton prostitute who lives a joyful and pleasant existence of consequence-free abandon hopping in and out of cars as if they were taxis.

All this changes when the police pull her in, and refusing to accept the appellation of Blue Jeans for their form-filling, dig a little deeper and find a poor unfortunate middle-aged man, Doctor Carlo Anselmi (Paolo Carlini of Roman Holiday, also the corrupt businessman in Monika) contentedly restoring old buildings to their former beauty with his lovely new partner Marisa (Annie Carol Edel). This guy must have the most incompetent lawyers in legal history, but as if it were a sit-com premise, the authorities insist he is her wayward father, and without a shred of proof other than matching surnames and superficial circumstantial evidence, bully him to take responsibility for her (she also can’t be that far off her eighteenth birthday). Daniela, an adopted child who went her own way years earlier without much regret, is dumped on this poor schlub, who suddenly finds himself stuck with an uninhibited and wilful young sexpot who may or may not be his daughter, but sees him as a sex toy and meal ticket anyway.

All this is presented as comedy, with Carlo trying to be a strict father and stay faithful to the patient and tolerant Marisa, but slowly and surely succumbing to Guida’s quasi-incestuous advances. As his life gradually falls apart, friends embarrassed and girlfriend departing, events turn much darker with the arrival of a devious and deeply unpleasant young con-man (Gianluigi Chirizzi of both Malizia and Monika) who destroys everyone and everything around him before getting his comeuppance.

In many ways, Blue Jeans is a continuation of themes begun to be explored in Monika, the first film of both Guida and Imperioli, and a precursor of the misfire Avere Vent’anni, made much later. Guida played a similar simple, self-interested and exhibitionist character in many future films, including Quella eta Maliziosa, Peccati di Gioventu, Ragazza alla pari, and even the La Liceale series, and many reviewers were still carelessly assuming Guida to be the same shallow blue-eyed blonde she portrays.

Peccati di Gioventu (aka So Young, So Lovely, So Vicious, 1975, with English subtitles) is at heart a good old lesbian fantasy for the boys, with Guida as a spiteful daughter whose nose is put out of joint when her single, carefree, wealthy, loving father (“not young, but I’m not old either”) finds a new girlfriend who, unusually, is special to him. Even though she lounges naked in bed with her waster boyfriend, she can’t stand the idea of a rival for her father’s affections, and sets about falsely befriending his new love while undermining her and plotting the poor woman’s downfall. There’s no pleasure in watching Guida being evil, but the film is beautifully photographed, and so is she.

Fleeing a disastrous relationship, gardener Napoleone (Nino Castelnuovo) takes up a position in the sunny and tranquil grounds of the island beachfront home of a young widow (Anita Sanders) and her flirtatious knockout daughter Paola (Guida). Events in Quella eta maliziosa (aka That Malicious Age, 1975) proceed pretty much as you might expect in a Guida film, with the cautious Napoleone gradually succumbing to the exhibitionist seduction techniques of the sly young blonde, who has already provoked a local and somewhat demented fisherman to despair. Inevitably, with both mother and daughter eyeing up their new acquisition as if he were a meal on the table, the locale becomes a hot-house of purposeful lust.

Guida, first encountered sucking on a Lolita-ish lollipop at the docks where she’s ill-advisedly been sent to meet him off the boat, gives a wonderful performance, gradually upping the ante after the film’s highlight, a push and shove game with her body on a crowded bus. This lengthy scene, perfectly timed and judged, has the mischievous Paola skilfully bumping and grinding against the new arrival's body, the gardener in all innocence putting his unexpected turn-on down to the swerves and bumps of the bus, rather than his delighted guide.

As Guida increases her efforts with each encounter, knowingly stripping in front of an open window on a warm summer’s night, dancing around her room naked, and ultimately leaving a trail of clothes for Napoleone to follow throughout the grounds until he is encouraged to chase her naked through the woods, they finally consummate the chase, only to discover that the rapacious fisherman from earlier, already caught spying on the girl and trying to tempt her with a pathetic basket of fish, has had all he can stand, and attempts rape. Paola bricks him, and mother dumps the body, but Guida’s indiscretions and her mother’s manipulative designs on him drive Napoleone to abandon paradise, his tail between his legs.

Without an English dub or subtitles, Silvio Amadio’s simple but excellent Quella eta Maliziosa is still decipherable and sexy, with most of the sequences visually explicit and explanatory, if not defined. Although the detail would be nice, this film is about the visuals, and with a pristine print on offer on DVD, they do not disappoint.

Il Solco di Pesca (1975) is a wonderful 1970s sex comedy from Maurizio Liverani, co-starring Z-movie queen Martine Brochard in a film which includes numerous eminently quotable lines debating the relationship between sex and religion.

It was the venerable Tinto Brass, the undisputed maestro of erotica, who once said--in an Antonioni moment--that every derriere told a story and had its own personality... to which most would respond with a loud lower region raspberry. However professional photographer Davide (Alberto Terracina) in this story would appear to agree, as he photographs women's posteriors obsessively, including that of the amused eccentric and free spirited Viviane (a game Brochard, later to be seen in Paprika). Translated, the title of the film is “The Furrow of the Peach”, a reference to the female rear end by the poet Robert Browning.

Viviane and her equally bonkers husband (Diego Ghiglia), an actor and performance artist, live comfortably with their beautiful blonde maid, the shapely Tonina, portrayed, in a succession of glitzy outfits, by Guida. Davide gets a little too friendly with both, and while everybody is trying to be terribly sophisticated about the situation, fiery Italian tempers win the day as bohemian open-mindedness gives way to jealousy, scheming, and manipulation.

“Sin is the flavor of life” his uncle (Emilio Cigoli), a priest, tells him. “The church was the first to establish that. Vice vs. virtue from birth to death. Never a dull moment!!”. Rather than taking the usual standard position that sinners need to find God, Davide’s uncle appears to be of the opinion that not only does the Church need sin to survive, but sinners need the Church to stick around so that sin can be recognised to exist!

“Joy and punishment!” he muses. “Sin has created man’s concern for salvation! God created sin for man’s own good, and God’s glory increases with sin!”. He reels off a list ranging from artistic expression and achievement to torture and repression--everything from the Renaissance to the Spanish Inquisition--boasting that the Church is responsible for all of it. There’s more food for thought in five minutes of this film than the entire running time of anything by Godard, Antonioni, or Robbe-Grillet.

Several very funny moments and observations are scattered amongst some beautiful shots of Guida in various states of dress and undress as she slyly torments the household. Guida is always Guida, but whereas usually she is simply required to be a vacuous shallow bimbo in teen romances and sex-coms, here her shiny-eyed sauciness is being used to convey meaning... several meanings, in fact, as the story progresses; she is wrapping supposedly far cleverer people around her little finger.

Finally, Davide retreats to a monastic life with his uncle, where he continues his photography by taking photographs of the nuns’ beautiful... faces. Wryly, he observes that man can never win freedom from the beauty of women.

La Liceale, continued

Despite the quality of some of the above, Guida’s evil temptress persona was gradually being softened up for her most well-known films, La Liceale (1975), and the two sequels La Liceale nella classe dei Ripetenti (1978) and La Liceale seduci il professori (1979).

La Liceale is a colorful and cheerful Italian sex comedy lasciviously filmed by the prolific Michele Massimo Tarantini as he commenced a ten year flirtation with such fare. There are no subtitles on the Italian DVDs, but you won’t have too much trouble following developments. Guida plays her usual role of flirty, knowing innocent and mischief-maker, but in a film with a lighter tone than those she had done previously.

Guida is Loredana, a slightly mad-eyed blonde tease. Tousle-haired Gianni, a nice enough lad toodling around Rome on a motor bike is the target of her attentions, and spends the duration of the film being given the hot and cold treatment. If you care enough to find out why, you’ll have to learn Italian.

La Liceale was such a huge success that it spawned a slew of sequels and imitators, and quite possibly provoked and inspired--in a two-way street--the American teen comedies of the day. The trend certainly kept Italy’s three stooges--rubber-mouthed Lino Banfi, fish-faced Alvaro Vitali, and mad-haired Gianfranco D’Angelo--gainfully employed (not to mention demented harridan specialist Ermeline De Felici, queen of the spectacular somersault prat-fall). As with the Laurel and Hardy films and the British Carry On franchise, the same few faces recur each time, recast in new but similar roles.

Like the British and the Germans, the Italians seem to think inept ugly men are hilarious, but paradoxically, also in with a chance, and a bug-eyed weirdo (Vitali) and a bow-tied schoolteacher (D’Angelo) are among our Gloria’s helpless victims. It must have been pretty dispiriting being resigned to playing such roles; hopefully the pay and the close proximity to Guida was some sort of compensation for the morale of these scenery-chewing unfortunates.

Of course it’s easy to mock such lowbrow humor, but every country has something similar, and it's a glass house that British and American audiences in particular should not throw stones. The fact is, many of these vintage custard pie, split pants and explosive slapstick gags are still timelessly funny, and Banfi and Vitali in particular are masters of comic timing. In this one, buffoonish professor D’Angelo is cruelly set up by Loredana to make her boyfriend jealous, but defends himself from a band of young bikers with a devastating display of comedic self-defence which is shamelessly ripped off for a scene with Vitali in the sequel.

La Liceale nella classe dei Ripetenti is a somewhat disappointing follow-up, for concentrating primarily on the comedy stylings of Lino Banfi and Aldo Vitali rather than on the sex antics of the students; the first and original got the balance of sex and farce just about right. Vitali, who was a student in the first one, is now on the school staff as a music teacher! D’Angelo is back in much the same role as before, but a different character. Lino Banfi makes his debut in the series as Guida’s father (who is periodically putting on a hairpiece and posing as his younger brother to seduce the formidable Ria De Simone), and will play both Guida’s uncle and the head teacher in the next one!

Although very much a sequel in name and spirit, everyone has been recast. Guida is now called Angela, and her eager young suitor Rodolfo Bigotti is now the surly and charmless Carlo instead of the lovelorn Gianni (and has also grown about six feet in the interim). I kind of like the way nobody gives a damn about this.

The director for both the sequels (a 1978 Guida film with Liceale in the title is no relation, but offers more Banfi/Vitali antics) is now Mariano Laurenti. However, once past the disappointment of the voyeur Tarentini’s departure, there is plenty of fun to be had. Not even five minutes in, we’ve had fart gags, split pants, and prat falls; the visual gags are fast and relentlessly violent and infantile. There are five writers including the director furiously throwing incidents into the film, seemingly without consulting the other four, other than to perhaps check that nobody else has already done it. Several storylines roam around all over the place untroubled by the others. Trousers are dropped, toilets explode with old ladies seated on them, cars are dismantled, teachers are electrocuted, vehicles drive off dragging buffoons behind them, and so it goes, until even the most hardened misery must be caught smirking.

The convoluted story revolves around Guida’s misplaced concern for a fascist professor’s son (Stefano Amato), who fakes an injury after flying out of his car into a cowpat-covered farmer’s truck while molesting Guida in the passenger seat, but then sustains real damage diving into the sea but landing painfully in a fisherman’s rowboat. Banfi and Vitali, together or separately, are indeed an acquired taste, but whatever you think of their cartoonish lowbrow slapstick, you have to admire their energy, commitment, and talent; they never stumble.

Huge chunks of this film go by without Guida appearing at all, including a lengthy and tiresome sequence involving D’Angelo and his mistress, who rather dubiously enjoys sex games involving masked intruders, and is subsequently visited one after the other by several of the professor’s drainpipe-scaling students posing in his outfit, the implications of which are quite alarming. There’s a party game in which the girls display various body parts, and a short but substantial shower scene which pre-dates, and is owed a debt by, the similar one famously seen in Porky’s.

The third and final title La Liceale seduci il professori (seduces the professor) features Lorraine De Selle, a veteran of nude roles and many ghastly Italian horrors, and so fully prepared for Lino Banfi dressed as Tarzan, and one of the cousins dressed in drag. The college antics revolve around the usual classroom shenanigans and a performance by the school orchestra being supervised by Vitali’s music teacher (re-named of course, although Guida is Angela again). However, Guida has her eyes on a slightly younger schoolteacher, who succumbs to her considerable charms, and is alarmingly portrayed by the thirty-ish Fabrizio Moroni. In any other country, this would be a scandal; in Italy, it’s a romantic comedy.

The only drawback is that we are now chronologically in the disco era, and Guida belts out a deadly disco track, just as she did at length in her previous sex-com entry, L’infermiera di notte. Someone has told her she should also be a singer, and who is she to disagree? That’s for real female vocalists to get annoyed about.

Despite also hailing from the dreadful disco-era period that tainted everything, Gloria Guida has never looked more beautiful than in her short vignette for La Liceale, il diavolo, e L’Acquasanta (1978) as disco dancer Luna. It’s an unrelated collection of three stories concerning heavenly (and hellish) interference from the afterlife. The other two half-hours feature her frequent co-stars Vitali and Banfi.

In Guida’s story, an incompetent angel lands in her bathtub doing a lame impression of Jerry Lewis in sympathetic schlub mode and the usual invisible friend gags ensue. The best scenes involve a sleazy record producer who gets his comeuppance, two would-be burglars who see Guida dancing on the surface of a swimming pool with her unseen partner and plunge into the water while trying to run across it to safety, and a lecherous motorist who cops a feel of Guida at the traffic lights and finds his wheels have turned into wooden blocks. Perhaps the most bizarre sequences occur upstairs in the usual white, barren and misty “paradise”, where the aforementioned angel is first seen wearily coaching disinterested cherubs in Little Orphan Annie wigs to sing hymns, but then allowing them to change into gruesome disco gear and dance gymnastically when the bosses backs are turned. This sequence is jaw-droppingly awful, and the entire alarming event looks more like paradise for paedophiles than anyone else. I will watch Gloria Guida in almost anything, but if you’re not in shock, you’ll want to fast forward when she’s not on--which fortunately, in her vignette, is rarely.

After this, it’s all rapidly downhill for the other two half-hours, in which Banfi comes out marginally on top in terms of material. God only knows what’s going on in the second story, which involves Alvaro Vitali as some sort of police officer charged with guarding a transvestite, and ends with him being carried off by a caveman while wearing a fig-leaf. The third, which has Banfi running through his usual repertoire of facial tics and spluttering panicky outrage, features him as some sort of medic who has a demon in human form come to stay in his house. Only he knows what the devil is going on, and a funny sequence has him desperately trying to get his strange little visitor to tuck a snakey red tail back into his trousers.

Apart from an all-too-brief glimpse of Guida getting out of the bath and a couple of scantily clad nymphs in the Eden segment with Vitali, there is no adult content, with writer/director Nando Cicero going directly for low-brow laughs. It’s all very familiar old stuff, competently done, but for Gloria Guida and Vitali/Banfi completists only.

1979’s Pension Paradais (aka L’affittacamere, aka Pension Paraiso, one of which titles apparently means The Landlord), this is another of many (and there can never be too many) light-hearted 1970s sex-com romps made specifically to exploit the beauty of unclothed Italian women. Despite being digitally remastered (according to the DVD case), the picture is grey and dull, brightening up only when Miss Guida appears. Fortunately, although no English dub or subtitling is available, it is a funny and carefree sex comedy that is inevitably easy enough to follow (and who wants subtitles over Guida’s tits and bum anyway?).

Two sisters, shapely knock-out Giorgia (the blonde and svelte Guida), and literally barrel-shaped comedy relief Angela (billed, I kid you not, as Fran Fullenwider) inherit a run-down mansion. Angela, played bravely and full-on by the sort of comedy actress long ago resigned to playing comic relief in a cruel world, has a mournful, worried, over-made-up face that stops clocks, while Giorgia is the spitting image of Gloria Guida and stops traffic. With her usual delightful wide-eyed girlish optimism, Giorgia announces that they can fix up the mansion and rent it out room by room, making money from the hotel business... and Giorgia has the attributes to make it happen.

Before long, everyone is galvanised into action, and it’s cue the doing-it-up montage, accompanied by a bizarre Birdy Song-type score; builders hammer thumbs instead of nails while looking up Gloria’s skirt while she works above them, while another is concussed by a flying slate when he’s understandably distracted by the sight of a naked Gloria emerging from the shower. Later, Gloria will cycle into town, and turn heads; when a bus door catches her flimsy summer dress and departs with it, tearing it from her body effortlessly, she stands there in her underwear while spectacles shatter and motor-cyclists plough into piazzas of shoppers. Would you believe there’s even a banana peel tumble in this film?

The film is full of Benny Hill-style sight gags like this—she’s already changed clothes in the back of a car--but it’s difficult to argue with the sentiments. A racetrack scene filmed on location is unintentionally amusing as life imitates art when Guida strides through the genuine all-male crowds, oblivious to the punters understandably copping a lustful glance as she blithely makes her way to the betting office.

Angela, meanwhile, is prone to bouts of sleepwalking; we know she’s walking in her sleep because she rises robotically with her arms outstretched. Not only does she roam the hotel at night, wandering into the bedrooms--and beds--of hapless guests, but she does it in a variety of stage costumes ranging from Cleopatra to the Valkyrie.

In supporting roles are one of Guida’s usual foils, popular comic Lino Banfi, perpetually stuffing his face and finding in Angela a soulmate, and Adolfo Celi of Thunderball fame, wearing a little joke shop Hitler moustache and playing the inevitable 1970s standby of two-faced morals campaigner. His much younger and attractive wife (the game and good looking Giuliana Calandra), we discover in a well-played reveal, has been shagging adulterously throughout the entire picture. Like all such buffoons, Celi’s oafish prude sees sexual activity everywhere it isn’t, but misses it when it’s under his nose...

All the guests are a bit kinky, and their peccadillos provide the jokes and the sex scenes, with the childlike Giorgia slipping leerer lira into her underwear for services rendered; one guy writes his signature all over her naked body, another takes more normal pleasure in soaping it off. For another, she dresses up as a nurse. Inevitably it all hits the fan, with each character having enough on the others to agree to mutual silence! There’s no sex in the film (other than what the moralist’s wife is getting up to), and Guida, or her managers, were clever enough to surround her with professional and very capable comedy character actors. She provided the beauty and they provided the substance--which is, once again, not to suggest that Guida couldn’t act; she always gives a very knowing performance (see the extraordinary Il Solco di Pesca, the dark Peccati di Gioventu, the wacky Travolto dagli Affetti Familiari, the sexy Quella eta Maliziosa, or the boring La Novizia to see her acting) and there is the light of intelligence behind those doe-eyes, but the broad performances of the supporting players give the film weight. Guida’s reaction shots are always spot on; a less aware performer could not achieve that.

Emmanuelle

Emmanuelle (1974), Emmanuelle 2 (1975), Goodbye, Emmanuelle (1977), Emmanuelle IV (1984), Emmanuelle V (1987), Emmanuelle 6 (1988), Emilienne (1975), Rolls Royce Baby (1975), Cecilia (1982), Laure (1976), Blue Belle (1976), Nea (1976), Vanessa (1977), Felicity (1978), Christina (1984), Gwendoline (1984)

The Emmanuelle phenomenon--virtually forgotten today--began with Emmanuelle in 1974, and continued with Emmanuelle 2, aka L’antiverge in 1975, and then Goodbye, Emmanuelle--1977, IV--1984, V--1987, 6--1988, and endless TV sequels and shameless steals of the name around the world.

Producer Yves Rousset-Rouard and photographer and director Just Jaeckin had both been working in commercials for five or six years before the bug to make a film bit. Inspired by the international success of Bertolucci’s ground-breaking and taboo-busting Last Tango in Paris, Rousset-Rouard had his eye on the book Emmanuelle, an erotic semi-autobiographical fantasy about the open marriage of a womanising diplomat and his pretty young wife. He discovered to his great surprise and satisfaction that the guys who had been renewing the option annually since it had been written had let the rights lapse just two weeks before he approached the publisher.

It was, needless to say, written by a man, who really was in politics, and thus bizarrely used his wife’s real name--Emmanuelle Arsan--as a pen name (although Jaeckin, as late as 2003 on the DVD extras, was still blissfully unaware of this, defending his film from the usual irrelevant and trivial pokes and prods by pronouncing that no criticism counted because the author “was a woman”--as if one woman spoke for all!). Even more bizarrely, the real Arsan was an actress, albeit a minor one, who co-starred with Annie Belle in Laure, initially marketed as one of the Emmanuelle rip-offs, Forever Emmanuelle.

Although at first searching for a Eurasian girl, as Arsan was, both men became besotted with Sylvia Kristel, an uninhibited 22 year old Dutch actress they encountered in Amsterdam, perky, freckled, and big-eyed, with poise, class, and a perfect figure.

Selling a languid and luxurious jet-set life rarely offered in film during the down-to-earth grim and gritty 1970s, the film opens with Emmanuelle padding around her cosy, comfortable Paris apartment in a flimsy dressing gown and wooly red bedsocks. She’s preparing to fly to Bangkok, Thailand, to join her diplomat husband. When she arrives, she fucks him so joyously that the houseboy and chambermaid, watching voyeuristically, are compelled to rut in the grounds. On the journey over, she informs him, she joined the mile-high club... and the film shows us in flashback. Emmanuelle and her husband, we learn, don’t just enjoy each other to the max; they observe no sexual boundaries, inhibitions, or prohibitions--yet despite this, Emmanuelle is still somehow a novice in the world of sexual liberation. She appears to have no history, or even existence, prior to being snapped up by her husband, or even prior to the film beginning for that matter...

Up until Emmanuelle, sexy women were represented only three ways in the movies; either as clothed or swimsuited eye-candy in mainstream movies, nude or semi-nude in serious and respectable so-called art films, or in brazen pornography. Emmanuelle was filmed purely as entertainment, respectable erotica for its own sake, and so fit into all and none of these categories. It was this that caused the media furore and made it a film that everybody had to see, because everybody had to have an opinion of it. These opinions were all fairly predictable in their content, both pro and con, but Rousset-Rouard and Jaeckin unquestionably and undeniably achieved their aim to make a classy sex film; every frame was warm and sensual, a work of art thanks to Jaeckin’s experience and the talents of director of photography Richard Suzuki and cameraman Robert Fraisse. These scenes were in turn enhanced by the music of Herve Roy and Pierre Bachalet, and of course, the beauty and nonchalance of an array of beautiful women brought in to accompany Kristel’s Emmanuelle on her bi-sexual explorations and adventures.

Every shot is stunning, whether it’s a beautiful body or a gorgeous scenic location, a necessity not lost on the small army of imitators that followed; these films, vapid and vacuous as they were, would be the antithesis of the seedy, grainy trailer trash sex film, with its make-do lighting, drab motel surroundings, and pale, flabby, droopy bodies padding around on piss-stained carpet. Emmanuelle raised the bar so high that those that couldn’t compete simply slithered under it, doing business as usual. Elsewhere, the imitators were so obvious that they virtually became parodic; a whole new genre, with its own new set of cliches, was born virtually overnight. In these other, fresher, newer films, a sub-category of ‘70s porn, even the men were beautiful--a key factor in making them couples films.

Some things, of course, never change, and still haven’t. Like all men who act as purveyors of women’s beauty and sexuality, many of whom justly admire and adore the female form (Brass, Borowczyk, countless photographers), the makers of Emmanuelle--in the face of inevitable criticism from the usual bitter and repressed brigade of professional angries--played the respect-for-empowerment card. “The film was merely the story of a liberated woman” said Rousset-Rouard. “Until then, men had always been the initiators. Whereas here, as she is taught by Mario (my italics), women can behave like men, and be equal to men”.

Emmanuelle soon meets the rest of the bored wives, who are lying around the pool as though waiting for Rocco Siffredi and his fellow pug-uglies to arrive and start abusing them, and is instantly pursued by a laughable lustful lesbian type played by Jeanne Colletin, who has some of the most unintentionally hilarious lines in the film; when Mario lustily whispers “No matter what you have on, I’ll still see you nude, because I wish you were nude!!”, you will slap your legs so hard they’ll ache... but when Colletin breathily exclaims “You’re nude under your dress, aren't you!?” you will be on the floor.

Competing for the OMG award with further knee-slappers is the aforementioned Mario, a silver-haired fox and sleazy old roue played by veteran actor Alain Cuny. Husband Jean (played in the first film by Daniel Sarky) actively encourages Emmanuelle to spend time with the old boy, who is essentially given the authority to break her in like a wild horse; this he does by talking creepy crap over candle-lit dinners while passing her around to various drunks and reprobates for touch-ups, gropes, and gang-bangs. Absurdly obeying without question, she doesn’t much care for this, and neither did any of the girls I knew who saw this film back in the day; if I had fifty cents for every time I heard “I liked it up until the nasty old man came in…" I’d have five bucks. Respected actor Cuny was 65 when he played this role, and was already known for appearing in Fellini’s La Dolce Vita and Satyricon. He had begun acting in 1940 and survived this lunacy to continue acting for another twenty years.

All these years later, the Emmanuelle films and their imitators are still magnificent to look at, both in terms of the female flesh on display and the visual trappings and locales. Where they stumbled, both then and today, is in their interminable preaching of the author’s tediously transparent and tiresomely self-serving swinger’s philosophy, which just ten years later, would be less male-skewed than just after the ‘60s, as women realised that hey, they could behave just like men, if they personally chose to do so (and whether Mario said so or not).

In Emmanuelle, as in the satire Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice five years earlier, the sexual arrangements were still balanced in favor of the male, who expected the woman to be a willing provider rather than an equal player; she is supposed to enjoy what he enjoys, rather than what she enjoys. When Emmanuelle practices what her husband preaches, he immediately takes off to look for her, a point the film at least makes. As long as Emmanuelle is loyal to him while providing voyeuristic anecdotes and an excuse for his running around, everything is fine, but the hint that she might be enjoying herself just a little too much with substitute big sister Marika Green sends him hurtling round Thailand to check up on her. And of course it hardly needs to be pointed out that it’s not Cuny’s tired old frame that’s testing out all this twaddle, it’s almost comedically the luckless pupil, Emmanuelle, the human crash-test dummy for sexual philosophers.

Emmanuelle’s escapades with the lollipop-sucking Lolita Marie-Ange (shapely Christine Boisson), first introduced swimming naked in the pool, and her later impulsive tagalong with the slightly older and unwilling archaeologist Bee (the attractive Green, another unstoppable skinny-dipper, appealing to Emmanuelle because she's actively doing something while the other gossiping girls “practice idleness as a fine art”), are the most satisfying sequences of the film. Their antics, clothed or unclothed, are genuinely erotic. Then the men barge in and spoil the sapphic shenanigans for all of us, and the film ends enigmatically, with Emmanuelle bizarrely slapping on too much make-up in the mirror. And yes, the famous wicker chair makes several cameo appearances, the most famous prop since Rosebud, although it’s not the one in the iconic poster, which was part of a photo-shoot Kristel had done a few weeks before being cast, and which replaced the equally iconic snake-apple symbol of the paperback novel.

Nevertheless, for all its failings, but mostly for everything it got mind-blowingly right, Emmanuelle made a mint, and the sequel was a sure thing; Kristel, who got paid a fair 6,000 dollars for the first film, rightly snapped up 100,000 for the follow-up. Although still playing the same character, Kristel appears to be portraying a completely different individual in this one, a haughty, assured, and self-confident grown woman rather than the naughty nymph with the jaunty baseball cap and hurt feelings of the first. Gone also is the boyish short hair that sent every young woman between fourteen and thirty-four galloping to the hairdressers for the same look in 1974. This is a woman who knows exactly what she wants, and is going to bloody well have it.

Directing Emmanuelle 2, laughably sub-titled The Anti-Virgin in some territories, was Francis Giacobetti, the photographer with the wicker chair, with Robert Fraisse as director of photography. Taking on board that the main flaw of the first Emmanuelle, successful though it was, had been the very ordinary and traditionally controlling men, Emmanuelle 2 sought to strengthen the weakest link in the chain by casting two of the most infuriatingly gorgeous guys they could find as Emmanuelle’s love interest, the sickeningly good-looking Umberto Orsini in the recast role of husband Jean, and the youthful Frederic Lagache as the dashing but selfish young aviator Christopher, who likes to play with his propeller in bed and makes a hash of his chance to bed the babe herself by showing his (unpleasant) true colors. Thus does Emmanuelle, the victim and play-toy of the first film, become the genuinely independent and self-selecting free spirit of the superior sequel; one suspects that had the original, uptight Jean or the fearsome Mario tried it on with this babe, they’d have been on the receiving end of a slapped face or a knee in the balls... both of which are indeed administered to other luckless lechers during this follow-up adventure!

What hasn’t changed is that the series is still beautifully shot, the women are still nut-numbingly beautiful, the natives of other countries are still there just to be gawped at and patronised by rich whites, and the badly dubbed dialogue is still hilariously silly, particularly when poor Umberto Orsini must try to convince us that he doesn’t mind his wife screwing around, still the series’ weak point, and soon to be addressed in part three.

The setting is now Hong Kong, and several imitators (Blue Belle, Felicity, Vanessa) promptly followed suit. Memorable signature set pieces of the sequel include an acupuncture scene which leads to a sex fantasy with several nicely posed shots, a sequence in which Emmanuelle is taken from behind by a dance instructor while peering at an animated spit-roast in a peep show (too much, even in cartoon form, for the U.K. censor back in the day), and an encounter with a polo player she stumbles onto who is naked and irresistibly covered in tattoos. The highlight, however, is the infamous body massage sequence indulged in by the married couple, both of whom have their sights set on teenage blonde Anna Maria (the lovely Catherine Rivet as a pliable nymphet), in which three Eurasian girls (one of them future Black Emmanuelle Laura Gemser) slip, slide, and slither soapily over all three. Then it's on to Bali for a threesome to close the show. What the franchise has also kept from last time is a playful sense of humor to offset the po-faced posturing, of which there is happily just a little less. Unfortunately, Kristel is once again lumbered in several scenes with some very unfortunate cosmetics choices.

The third Emmanuelle, erroneously but advisedly titled Goodbye, Emmanuelle, actually has our girl tiring of the life of a swinger, and falling in good ol’ traditional love with a supposedly sexy film director. Nice for her, but snoozerama for us. There’s nothing worse than a reformed hellraiser; a prude is a prude, but a porn star who’s found religion or a swinger who’s found true love is a precious pain-in-the-butt, and Emmanuelle (Kristel returning), true to form, can’t resist lecturing everybody else. She dumps her husband from the previous two films, who then realises that their open marriage has been a little too open, and she’s left him for a “boy scout”.

When the film opens, they are up to their usual fun and frolics, with Emmanuelle leaving her bath to enjoy a threesome with her husband (Orsini again) and her curvy black dressmaker Angelique (Radiah Frye). It’s three years later, and the free-thinking couple have relocated to the Seychelles, where they have built up a small circle of likeminded friends. When Emmanuelle sets her sights on drippy film director Gregory (Jean-Pierre Bouvier), who’s scouting for locations, it doesn’t take much to make the walls of her resolve crumble when he ridicules their swingers’ lifestyle. She screws him, but instead of receiving the usual selfish approval, finds that he has old-fashioned ideas about fidelity. I suppose you think I’m a whore? she says, defiantly challenging him, with which he sidelines her by offering money. He was boring and bad in bed she tells Jean, but when he boasts of his latest conquest, blonde Celine (Caroline Laurence), she’s unusually not in the mood for the assumed threesome.

Of course the more Bouvier’s Gregory stays away from her, the more she wants him, and that night at a nightclub she’s provocatively dancing around him and his date like a silly schoolgirl and he’s calmly ignoring her. Suddenly, she’s pathetic. It transpires that he and his wife were failed swingers, and whereas for Emmanuelle and Jean it’s all gone happily right, for him it went horribly wrong, with tears, recriminations, tragedy, and ultimately desertion. Good old-fashioned jealousy rears its head and Emmanuelle is forced to take sides when she and Jean row, and he assaults the prudish dissenter. The sexual content in this sequel is very thin (one lone scene of the kick-ass beautiful Charlotte Alexandra running around naked, but otherwise just plenty of Kristel), but there’s a story to this one, and plenty of food for thought as everyone asks questions with no answers. It ends with Jean failing to prevent Emmanuelle from following her prize to Paris, but wryly observing (probably correctly) that it won’t last, and settling down with Alexandra’s sexy Chloe in the meantime. Thus ends the original series of three.

Director and co-writer (with Monique Lange) Francois Laterrier sustains the quality of the visuals superbly, scrupulously following the formula of 24 hours a day play for the easy-going wealthy in exotic climes, and the music is provided by the legendary Serge Gainsbourg, but the voices chosen for the dubbing are horribly inappropriate and spoil all the hard work elsewhere, with particularly bad choices for Orsini and Charlotte Alexandra. To make things worse, while the films are technically still streets ahead of all the imitators in execution, the subtitles are in a world of their own, with the hearing-impaired being treated to entirely different dialogue than those following the soundtrack. Words are chosen for their specific meaning; frequently, an entirely different impression is given by what’s being said and what’s coming up on the bottom of the screen. Which is the real script?

The film tanked, no doubt due to the abandonment of the sexual philosophy of the intended audience and lame sexual content, and to add insult to injury, its production coincided with a flurry of censoriousness from the French government, which held up the screening of Emmanuelle 2 in its own country until the audience tired of waiting for it. Goodbye... consequently followed almost indecently quickly, and the franchise stagnated until the ‘80s.

None of the subsequent Emmanuelles, or their rip-offs, match the quality and integrity of the original trilogy, and have anything to offer punters in the 21st century other than the beauty of their participants. Whereas vintage sex-coms, or even faux sex-docs, from various countries offer fascinating windows on their era and their audience, these bland, glossy, and very lame and tame productions are simply out of date and redundant. A handful (Laure, Blue Belle, Felicity) pushed the envelope and matched the first two Emmanuelle films for erotica, and a couple of others (Vanessa, Christina, Fanny Hill) came in close behind, but mostly they were tedious and poor.

The most prominent was the tacky Black Emmanuelle series from sex and gore merchant Joe D’Amato, starring Laura Gemser, who had appeared in a tiny bit part in Emmanuelle 2 as a masseuse in the film’s sexiest sequence. Tied for most unfortunate were a perfectly ordinary and acceptable 1976 sex film called Nea starring Ann Zacharias, which--produced from another story written under the Emmanuelle Arsan name--found itself released as A Young Emmanuelle, and the abysmal British sex-com Carry On, Emmanuelle in 1978, which did for the venerable sexually repressed Carry On sex-com franchise of the 1960s once and for all, already wilting from the competition of the more contemporary Confessions and Adventures films.

Goodbye, Emmanuelle fulfilled its prophetic title magnificently by having absolutely nothing in it other than the beautiful Charlotte Alexandra (Immoral Tales’ Therese) halfway down the cast list, and after a suitable break to purge memories of the letdown, 1984’s Emmanuelle 4 absurdly, unnecessarily, and distastefully featured a storyline in which Sylvia Kristel’s Emmanuelle, now unforgivably ten years older and thus apparently no longer fit to walk the earth, is transformed by a combination of surgery and the supernatural into the much younger and blander Mia Nygren.

As gormless and ill-mannered as this premise was, the real reason the Emmanuelle franchise was doomed was simply down to the massive social changes that had taken place between 1974 and 1984. Home video had arrived, and pornography both hard and soft, had flourished. Soft-focus images of pouty liberated women were no longer adventurously ground-breaking or unique; in a mere ten years, a series of films that couldn’t have been conceived of without causing a sensation just ten years earlier were now passe and redundant, swamped and swept away by a flood of in-your-face tits and bums in productions saying, doing, and showing anything and everything, in a world where all women simply presumed themselves equal and individual, without having to embark on a sexual odyssey and be mentored by pseudo-sophisticated and cod-philosophical dirty old men.

Producer Yves Rousset-Rouard was at least free of the pretentious baggage carried by his characters. “Many have said, because of you, there was a sexual revolution. No--that was due to the Pill, not Emmanuelle!” he said in 2003. “That’s what allowed women to change their sexual behavior, it gave them freedom and a certain degree of safety. People get carried away. We didn’t unite Iraq, we just made a film”.

Still the franchise stumbled on, trashing reputations as it went. Emmanuelles 5 and 6 were shambolic, despite 5 being assigned to Walerian Borowczyk (who hit his career low), and 6 to Jean Rollin, both of whom had the films taken away from them. However, there is little in what survived of the originals to suggest that these were on their way to being lost masterpieces. Monique Gabrielle and Natalie Uher took the soporific leads. It perhaps says everything that subsequent Emmanuelle offerings have not only been made for television, but also rarely purchased by programme buyers (even desperate ones).

Emmanuelle, continued

Back in the mid-‘70s however, the franchise proved positively inspirational, as profiteering film producers favoring sophistication and respectability over bottom-of-the-barrel hardcore saw an opportunity to cut a slice of the porn pie put in the oven by Last Tango and Emmanuelle. Some of these (about half-a-dozen) both rivalled and surpassed the Emmanuelle franchise, not usually the case with blatant imitations, but there were plenty of near-misses and crash-and-burns too. The problem with 1975’s Emilienne, for example, almost certainly so named to exploit the Emmanuelle franchise, is that the non-story concerns a most uninteresting couple and a rather plain high maintenance trouble-maker whose motives are never convincingly explained. None of the three leads are remotely intriguing, either naked, or as characters. There's also very little to see in general.

The premise has it that the delightfully named Nouky (Nathalie Guerin) turns up at the art gallery run by Emilienne (Betsy Mars) to show some erotic drawings. In fact, Nouky, actually named Nicole, is more interested in meeting Emilienne, a hatchet-faced middle-aged lesbian with a bad marriage who is the unsuspecting wife of the girl’s lover and art teacher, the boorish and boring Claude (Pierre Oudrey). He’s the sort of guy who buys a scarf from a hooker when he forgets her anniversary present. We know this, because we see him do it.

Nouky, aka Nicole, is starting to get difficult and demanding, and we spend the first half of the film watching him squirm as she mischievously insinuates her way into the separate lives, and then the home, of both of them (this has been done before, and better, in Blue Jeans, Three Into Two Won’t Go and Monique, to name but three). After lots of meaningful glares and stares, and some very bad American rock music (the version of this French film on DVD is dubbed by Americans), they get together and further complications ensue as each deals with their jealousies and hang-ups. Turns out neither of them can get by without Nouky.

There is one scene when Emilienne, now deeply involved with the lesbian underworld, goes to a party held by a group of wealthy, middle-aged lesbians where six naked young girls are on offer, bought and paid for, no doubt. In another interesting scene, the couple decide to get away from it all at a bleak seashore retreat and find themselves in a nest of half-a-dozen young lesbians! Both these sequences have, of course, enormous potential to have made this a classic. The fact that you’ve never heard of Emilienne until today betrays just how poorly these two splendid and original ideas were realised.

The fast forward was made for films like this, assuming you’ve been unfortunate enough to disregard my warning. If you watch this twice, whatever your sexual proclivities, you'll surely be making movie history.

Another film that tried and failed starred none other than Lina Romay, who was, in my personal opinion, (alongside Gloria Guida) one of the most beautiful woman put on film in the 1970s. She mostly worked with incompetent but endearing schlockmeister Jess Franco, who she married, and who filmed her lasciviously thereafter, as explored in other chapters. Rolls Royce Baby (1975) is one of the very few times she worked with anyone else, and it rapidly becomes apparent that this film is another that has been very heavily influenced by the 1974 tsunami of sex films, Emmanuelle; there is wicker and affluence everywhere, an appalling amount of easily satirised pseudo-sophisticated twaddle in the dialogue (get a load of the effluence dribbling forth in the motor-bike photo-shoot scene!), and pretension abounds. For the sake of your sanity, keep the volume mute, it’s only funny for five minutes.

Rolls Royce Baby is, of course, beautifully photographed (the sets are excellent), but inadvertently laughable, with very strange ideas about what’s erotic (at one point, Romay eats flower petals orgasmically; at another, a lesbian rubs her crotch up and down Romay’s lower leg!). Each to their own, of course, but this is quite frankly the sort of sex film sophisticated people laugh at, and so they should. Male and female viewers alike will bust a gut at the chauffeur’s naked martial arts performance, a major WTF moment.

Romay’s beauty survives all this, plus an overdone 1970s hairstyle, bright orange lipstick, and a listless director who occasionally photographs her at unflattering angles (of which Romay fortunately has few). A film student on his first day at college knows there's no point in shooting a girl-in-a-bath scene if she doesn’t rise out of it, dripping soapsuds.

There’s no plot; Romay basically plays herself--and with herself, endlessly--and spends the whole film being driven around in the Rolls Royce of the title while her musclebound narcissist chauffeur (Eric Falk, of course) literally bundles gobsmacked grateful and unquestioning hitchhikers into the back seat for a quickie. No-one pauses to ask for an explanation, and the film doesn’t feel obliged to offer one.

This endless dogging in first class isn’t as tedious as it sounds, although you will occasionally need the fast forward and certainly won’t want the sound on. If it was anyone other than Romay, I’d say pass on it, but it is Romay, and that’s the movie’s salvation. The best scene (bearing a strong resemblance to one in an Ingrid Steeger film from the same producer) is a flashback in which she puts out for two ungrateful truckers, who--having had their way with her, several ways--dump her naked on the roadside (contrary to reports elsewhere, she is not raped, but mysteriously and provocatively undresses for them in the cab).

Romay also appears in her husband’s Cecilia (aka Sexual Aberrations of a Housewife, 1982), on the surface, a bog-standard Emmanuelle rip-off to slavishly follow all the others, filmed in Sintra near Lisbon in Portugal. This is in fact Jess Franco’s wickedly subversive satire on the franchise and its by now numerous pretenders (gotta go with the distributors on this one, Jess, Cecilia is a better title, and not just because a spoiled rich bitch with a mansion full of staff doesn’t exactly qualify as a housewife).

Cecilia is the pouty, petulant, baby-faced wife of a jet-setting diplomat (an unconvincing Antonio Mayans, aka Robert Foster, looking more like a peasant boy who murdered his employer and took his identity). We first see her getting into her chauffeur-driven car and immediately stripping off in the back to prick-tease the driver. You get the impression this has happened before, because today he diverts the car to an old shack where his aggrieved brothers are waiting, recently sacked from her employ... for voyeuristically watching her naked.

She’s immediately set upon and raped to the sound of languid seaside organ music, but afterwards they all go for a nude swim in a large pond laden with lily pads and she decides she quite enjoyed it. This was a common misguided cliche of 1970s sex films, but by the 1980s its appearance was alarmingly outdated and justly vilified.

Much to the staff’s amazement (although you get the impression she’s done this before, as well) she drives herself home, stark naked. Taking his cue, her husband carries her upstairs and gives her one himself. This in turn provokes her to suggest to her husband that their love is so strong that they can screw around on the side and enjoy assorted sexual adventures to spice up their lives without killing the romance between them. To prove her point, she organises an inter-racial threesome with a sexy black girl (less a novelty by now than it was in the 1970s), who is encouraged to seduce him first, while she joins in later. A mighty orgasm ensues.

It’s clear from the heavy-handed comedy of the dinner party scenes that pepper this film that Franco has very little time for this sort of thing, and--producing content for Euro-Cine films to order--is sending the whole genre up mercilessly. The exotic locales, the division between the well-off and the locals who serve them, the hammy, over-acting wealthy jet-set crowd preening and insincerely fawning over each other, the manipulative elderly silver-haired roue, the predatory lesbian, the comically lusty seductions, the idea that rape is somehow sexually liberating, the pretentious philosophising, the skinnydipping, the threesomes and group sex orgies, no cliche is left untouched, and all filmed in lush, sunlit, flower-strewn gardens, beautiful beaches, and opulent indoor luxury. Franco even playfully mocks mainstream French film in general, with his characters running through the streets of Paris and stopping to mock a poster outside the cinema—“Well, that’s another one we’ll miss, huh?”.

Cast as Cecilia is the perpetually naked Muriel Montosse, here absurdly billed as Mary Monty, with Franco calling himself Claude Plaut(!). Of course something must be found for the muse, and Lina Romay is on hand to steal every scene she appears in of course, lolling on a boat in a deeply unnecessary swimsuit (Franco still goes meandering in for the crotch shot, bless him), and then doing a strip-tease at an orgy and fellating a mime’s finger (don’t ask, I said it was Lina).

Another connection Cecilia has with the Emmanuelle franchise is that the subtitles completely contradict the dub, which is always annoying. It’s impossible to comment on the acting itself because, English or French dub, the whole soundtrack has been put together in post production, like all Franco’s Euro-Cine product. Nevertheless, all problems aside, Franco made a lot of tedious and boring sex films, but this isn’t one of them. Cecilia is worth a watch, whether you’ve seen the Emmanuelle series or not.

Laure (aka Forever, Emmanuelle, 1976), 20th Century Fox’s attempt to jump onto the Emmanuelle bandwagon was given a serious publicity boost when they discovered a producer who knew the (male) author of the original. It received an even greater boost when the appalling miscasting of Deep Throat’s ditzy Linda Lovelace was scotched by Lovelace herself after ten days of abortive filming, and the beautiful Annie Belle was drafted in at the last minute. Belle, who acted under her real name of Annie Brilland in Jean Rollin’s Bacchanales Sexuelles and Lips of Blood (the latter misspelling her name), was a pretty, pixie-haired up-for-anything nymph and a bit of a party girl, having apparently turned up for the latter so drunk and debauched from the previous night’s activities that she practically had to be stripped and propped up for that film's erotic naked conclusion on the beach. This, however, was her big chance, and she didn’t blow it.

Set in the somewhat warmer climes of the Philippines, Laure had Annie and real-life boyfriend at the time Al Cliver (as photo-journo Nicolas) searching on behalf of her father’s research institute for a hidden native tribe... but not before romping round Manila. Brilland had a very ordinary, but tight, slim and compact model-like young body, which was enhanced by her most attractive feature, her face, all fuck-me eyes and dirty grin topped by a boyish crop hair-cut even shorter than Sylvia Kristel’s. Her career in the limelight was brief, but satisfying, memorable for several unique and erotic sequences unlike those presented anywhere else.

While the Emmanuelle series sunk under the weight of its own cliches, imitators like Laure, Blue Belle, and Felicity (to be discussed) transcended their limitations and broke new ground with their mondo creativity. Felicity is famous for its Hong Kong bus fuck; Laure and Blue Belle both feature outrageous al fresco moments, Laure’s being a super-sexy sequence where, having been told her dress is too long, she removes it completely, walking down a Manila street in just a shirt, which reveals all at the slightest bend over, including the fact that she’s wearing no underwear. Not only is this filmed in the middle of a busy day, but the local lads are equally brazenly stooping to peer up this unusual albino-blonde’s bare legs, while the local girls cup their hands over their grinning open mouths. Our Annie, of course, is revelling in it.

To a certain extent, Laure understandably follows the traditions of the genre in terms of satisfying audience expectations. There’s lavish foreign scenery, smirking, bubbly locals, rampant sexual experimentation, cocking a snook (and snooking a cock or two) at the norms of society, and high-flying, jet-set nudity, indulgence and wealth. And I’m sure I saw a wicker chair... The rule that all the male cast members talk endless drivel about both sex and women is observed faithfully, and all the guys chuckle and grin gormlessly while their dates service other men, and of course--another prerequisite of the genre--women.

The film’s main selling point was to be that it was written and directed by the original Emmanuelle author himself, Louis Jacques Rollet Andriane, but his script and directorial efforts drifted too far away from what Fox had been hoping for, and he found himself shifted sideways while others moved in. The project is subsequently somewhat disjointed, but as films of this genre were simply a series of separate sequences strung together anyway, it barely matters, other than to play the game of trying to decide which bit belongs to who.

Although it had been pre-sold as written and directed by Emmanuelle Arsan, the mystique was maintained by crediting the film to Anonymous, rather than a fictitious pen-name suggesting dis-ownership. To further complicate things, the author’s wife, Emmanuelle Arsan, the actress and model whose name he wrote the books under, appears in a co-starring role. Her real name was Marayat Andriane, and her only other recorded credits are a bit in the 1966 war film The Sand Pebbles and an episode of The Big Valley!

One of the better of the late-‘70s/early-‘80s sex travelogues, Laure (not to be confused with the similar-sounding Laura) features stunning photography of magnificent Philippines scenery, and a hypnotically beautiful score far superior to those that usually grace such fare. Fox clearly poured buckets of money into this production, and it’s good to find the location of so many Z-grade cheapies given such grade-A treatment while providing X-rated entertainment. Both the city and the jungle look fabulous, and so does Annie. Highlights include one of the most erotically charged moonlight swims ever filmed, a sequence showing the tradition of house-moving in that part of the country (they literally move the house), and a bonkers helicopter flight and in-air orgy over Manila with a trannie and his girlfriend. Yeah, really. On a more mundane level there are threesomes and various other couplings, but even these scenes are surpassed by those in which Belle is clothed; you cannot take your eyes off her.

The supporting cast are completely bereft of character or personality, but to swipe an unrelated quote for my own use, to be bored with Laure is to be bored with life itself; or, to borrow from Ronnie Corbett, if you don’t like the story, you can admire the scenery. This is a good film to crash out to, or drift in and out of.

Laure made its star an immediate sensation and resulted immediately in Brilland being cast in Massimo Dallamano’s Blue Belle (aka La Fine dell’ innocenza, 1976), which was supposedly loosely based on her life. In many ways, it’s Laure part two, with Annie playing much the same role again, this time with knockout British sex-com star Felicity Devonshire as her support.

Here, she’s the daughter of a sleazy investment banker who gets jailed while they’re in Hong Kong, leaving her at the mercy of his p.a. and her husband, a couple of swingers. As the p.a. is the lovely Felicity Devonshire of Secrets of a Door to Door Salesman, What’s Up Nurse, and Intimate Games notoriety, the film takes a decidedly attractive turn for the perverse. There’s a rather uninspired shag for Fliss in the stables, followed by some skinny-dipping in an outdoor pool (two of the most beautiful bodies of the 1970s filmed in longshot--thank goodness for the zoom facility).

The al fresco highlight this time has Annie fleeing a den of iniquity and running through the night-time streets stark naked, and then jumping on the back of a motor-bike to ride bare-assed and bare-everything else through the streets of Hong Kong. And loving it. Emmanuelle, eat my dust. Continuing with the Emmanuelle connection, she then made Black Emmanuelle follow-up Black Emmanuelle, White Emmanuelle (aka Velluto Nero) with Laura Gemser.

Brilland was stunning enough to have graduated to Bond girl in another reality, but somehow ended up at the bottom of the cast list in most of her subsequent films, one rare return to top billing uncompleted when the director died during filming... but as with so many of the 1970s sex starlets who enjoyed only half-a-dozen features in the limelight, she’s wonderful to look at in virtually everything.

Although photographer David Hamilton, king of upmarket soft-focus sleaze, cornered the market in whiny, spoiled, selfish brats in the ‘70s with the creepy Bilitis and several others in a similar slightly suspect vein, Nelly Kaplan gives him a run for his money with an apparently not very faithful adaptation of Nea, a book by Emmanuelle Arsan which, perhaps inevitably in 1976, ultimately became A Young Emmanuelle. The title refers to the (fictional) female author (it was, you will recall, actually her husband writing under her name) rather than the character played by Sylvia Kristel in the films, as the story concerns a nasty little girl who, in a slightly askew riff on the real-life origins of Story of O, writes an erotic novel but is too young to publicly reveal her identity... a situation which suits her exploitative publisher perfectly.

Slim and pretty Ann Zacharias (in her early twenties at the time) plays Sybille, a sixteen year old malicious tease and trouble-stirrer who local bookseller and friend of the family Axel (Sami Frey) discovers has been stealing books from his store for some months. For reasons not entirely clear, he challenges the defiant and unrepentant little thief to write a novel herself. She decides to write erotica, but there’s one small problem--she has no personal experience of sex, and announces that she needs to do it with him. Initially he sensibly bats her away, but once again with no clue given to his motives, he relents and starts a clandestine affair with her.

The subsequent novel becomes a raging success and media phenomenon, and the scenes of her stuffy family discussing the book and its mystery author in front of Sybille are quite amusing, as is the sequence where she is deemed underage to buy a copy (she steals it, of course). Axel, consumed by the thrill of success (the one response this character has that is understandable), starts manipulating Sybille, who has fallen under his spell. Underneath the besotted, lovelorn exterior however, is still the poisonous, malevolent little pixie we are already familiar with.

Nea is a very strange and difficult film to understand. While it’s always a pleasure to watch a film that doesn’t follow a predictable course or formula plot, one does require a smidgen of logic to the characters’ actions or the director’s motives. Are we supposed to like or care about young Sybille? Needlessly cruel to everyone around her, failing at school, she’s not just a typical teenage pain in the ass to her family, but a shoplifter and arsonist who callously and carefully frames a man for rape and goes about her secretive little life without a thought or care for anyone around her while snooping and spying on everyone else. She ridicules and shames an adolescent boy, mocking his complexion and masturbating him to get the (pre-DNA) semen for her rape set-up, and gives her older sister a birthday parcel that turns out to have dead insects in it (having already dressed to embarrass at her lavish evening party). This is more than just the growing pains of a sexually curious brat.

Are we supposed to care about Axel the bookseller, who makes a succession of bad choices and foolish decisions from start to very finish, and brings most of his misery upon himself? He cheats on the underage adolescent he shouldn’t be sleeping with anyway, claims credit for her book, hoardes her money, manipulates her feelings, flees from his trial, and is last seen disappearing into the night with the immature little idiot he’s just tried to strangle. It’s tough to care about any of these people.

Nudity is fleeting, but the film is well made and never boring. I’m unfamiliar with any of Kaplan’s other work, so it's difficult to figure out what her point is, if any, but you shouldn’t need to know a writer/director’s likely intent to understand a film’s content. Performances are good, and the actors playing Sybille’s long-suffering parents and sister are particularly strong. Do I recommend it? If I ever figure it out, I’ll let you know... It’s different, and it holds the attention, I’ll give it that.

Emmanuelle concluded

1977’s Vanessa, whatever the guys who made it might say in the fascinating Making of... documentary, is another of the small army of eponymous female-finding-herself films that flooded 1970s cinemas in the wake of the phenomenal success of the Emmanuelle series (the wicker chairs are apparently a complete coincidence; see, there were a lot of wicker chairs around in the ‘70s…).

Curious convent girl Vanessa inherits a small fortune, passes on the promise of further whippings and lesbianism, leaves the nasty nuns, and heads for British-owned Hong Kong... where she finds more whippings and lesbianism. Close behind her is a film crew headed by porn provider Hubert Frank and his team, none of whom have much of a script with which to bring you her adventures beyond a very rough draft (told by the director to introduce his character to an effusive blonde, co-star Anton Diffring pointed out that the woman was playing his wife).

As a result, this German-produced jump on the bandwagon weaves about a bit like a slightly drunk driver, but all things considered (Frank boasts he’s highly regarded as an improvisational director, i.e. he makes it up as he goes along), the results are not too bad. They may not necessarily be your personal cup of tea, but there’s no incompetence evident, just some very good camerawork by Franz Lederle and a lot of good luck; one of the most visually satisfying scenes between the two young female leads lolling about completely naked on a beach was shot after several abortive weather-related tries on the last day.

Of course, experience, professionalism, and common sense played a part; offered the use of the Shaw Studios complex, the producer politely declined, pointing out that as they’d travelled to Hong Kong, it made sense to film the real thing. This they did, and the results are never boring, whether we’re lapping up the atmosphere of 1970s Hong Kong or the naked beauty of the female cast, none of whom disappoint... and whereas many Emmanuelle knock-offs simply smeared the lens with vaseline and played copycat music, this production does use craftsmen capable of a little more creativity. If Vanessa falls down anywhere, it is in its dated attitude to both the fairer sex and foreign lands.

Frank is yet another 1970s soft-core director bored with his job, and seems much more interested in the Eastern artefacts and local scenery than the girls’ bodies; when the girls run up a hill from the beach naked, his camera zooms in on a patch of nondescript grass rather than follow them up the hill! Consequently, Vanessa is pretty much a Hong Kong travelogue with a bunch of attractive people occasionally crawling or writhing about naked (it’s that kind of sex). Among them are titanic Teutonic babes Uschi Zech, Eva Eden, Eva Leuze, and the magnificently named Astrid Boner, the latter two of whom also show up in Schoolgirl Report no. 9. Boner’s also in 10, and moved back into the mainstream television roles from whence she came after a mightily prolific sex film career in the 1970s.

In the lead is tall and slender German actress Olivia Pascal, a former office secretary in the film industry until she took her kit off, who had already made two previous sex films, and would make nearly a dozen more, including another for Frank, plus Behind Convent Walls for Borowczyk, and Bloody Moon, a tedious Jess Franco slasher film. She also then drifted into mainstream German television, where she has subsequently appeared in numerous episodes of the German variant of the sort of dreary detective or medical dross that gets churned out by indigenous mainstream TV channels the world over.

This was tasty morsel Uschi Zech’s first film, and quite a showcase, but also inexplicably and unfortunately the largest role she ever had. She appeared at the bottom of the cast list in Pascal’s next two films (so possibly a friendship developed), but after a few other minor roles, moved into a successful costume designing career.

Despite the protestations of the makers (and as Shakespeare tellingly said, methinks they do protest too much), if Emmanuelle is your thing, then Vanessa is a very good example of the genre. There’s no padding, and virtually every scene leads to a sexual encounter involving one of about half-a-dozen good-looking girls. Pascal, very young here obviously, is perfectly cast to convey that fresh, untouched, virginal looks-as-though-she-might persona required of her, with a slightly confused rabbit-in-the-headlights demeanor undoubtedly enhanced by the lack of a script. Had she known, as the lead actress, what she was supposed to be doing day by day, she might well have given a less naive and confused, and thus poorer performance. She robotically and obediently does everything the director asks, whether it makes sense or not. As in all these Emmanuelle clones, the girls look slightly baffled and awkward because they’re getting into poses and situations that no real woman in real life would ever have cause to attempt or accept.

Like many 1970s sex films, Vanessa merrily mocks the church, the Bible (“full of sex!”), and organised religion (when kinky nuns give Pascal a thrashing, it is to the thunderous tones of church organ music!). There are a lot of gyrating naked bodies, one of which dances under a rainfall of rice, women are constantly asking men to undress them (Diffring’s character’s wife wryly banters with a man not her husband in sophisticated conversation while being casually taken from behind), and there’s an embarrassing mystical sub-plot which seems to have relatively normal and staid Hong Kong confused with India or Africa... or California (“the fire in the thighs” indeed!).

Despite the laughable mystical mumbo-jumbo, a portent of the New Age idiocy that was to come, it's otherwise your father’s idea of erotica, a Bond film for the Bond male, but without the spies and killing. Everything is magnificently Fleming-esque, from the attitude to foreign lands (“Hong Kong is a strange city, marvellous and frightening at the same time!”), to the clearly defined roles of men and women, to the ideas of what seduction, eroticism, and shocking decadence might look like, to the standard suppositions of the British Empire mentality. The food, drink, natural resources, naked flesh, and opulence of the world are all there to be served to the wealthy white man by silent, swarthy foreigners, often aliens in their own country.

The men are in safari suits or riding gear (with obligatory riding crop), swilling wine and trying to be sophisticated in the sun, with their mandatory obedient but treacherously up-for-it-elsewhere bimbos on their arms in evening dresses, dripping jewels and attitude. Girls giggle and leaf through leather-bound books of erotic art, hatchet-faced self-satisfied nuns give convent girls a damn good thrashing, Asiatic girls prostitute themselves literally and figuratively, Eurasian girls are wide-eyed and ready to learn from pervy old men who have only their perversions to pass on as knowledge, wives are deceitful and unfaithful gold-diggers and arm-candy, and lesbians do strange things with grapes (wha...?).

Pascal is a pretty girl, and so are her co-stars (Zech’s a knockout, a pouty sexpot with fuck-me eyes and cut-off jeans who compares tits at bathtime and indulges in a bit of lesbianism-for-the-boys on a bed with Pascal), but there’s otherwise nothing special about this moderately entertaining romp through the cliches of the genre. Nevertheless, the photography is fulsome and frank, and there’s an opportunity to see all of the female leads at one time or another, so no-one goes away feeling cheated. Frank and Lederle may be more interested in the foliage, decor, and lighting, but they haven’t forgotten what they’re primarily there for, and so the presentation can’t be faulted. You can catch Vanessa, or you can miss it, and your life will remain exactly the same.

Incredibly, the perky and initially pig-tailed Glory Annen was 26 when she portrayed convent schoolgirl Felicity Robinson in the following year’s Felicity, a late entry in the Emmanuelle rip-off stakes. In fact, the opening soft-focus scenes of sultry dormitories and sun-lit bike rides encourage uncomfortable comparisons with the creepy David Hamilton canon of simpering soft-focus paedo-wankery that even the director admits to copying. Fortunately, we swiftly move on out of Bilitis and Tendres Cousins territory and into the sweatier, sexier environs of over-familiar British Hong Kong, which owes as much of its visual documentation in the 1970s to erotic Emmanuelle 2 rip-offs like Blue Belle and Vanessa etc. as it does to the kung-fu craze that saw even Spider-Man pay a visit.

Felicity (1978) is the eponymous Australian venture into the Emmanuelle market, and directed by reliable lech John D. Lamond. Leading lady Glory Annen, who otherwise only played tiny bit parts, has a beautiful body, and it is mostly enjoyed by us guilt-free (three different cartoon creeps, one of them portrayed by the director himself, have leered at our young leading lady before the opening credits, and all have been greeted with not disgust or disdain, but a winning smile). Another escapee from a brutal school regime, she swiftly matures on the flight to Hong Kong during the opening credits. In case the glossy photography, eponymous title, pretty music, forthcoming location shoot, wicker chairs, suave seducers, and drooling old men haven’t made it clear enough, Felicity reads the instantly recognisable paperback of Emmanuelle on the ‘plane, and also name-drops Story of O and Fear of Flying. Well... Australians are hardly known for their subtlety, and Lamond has a good eye and is happily one of those directors who hasn’t forgotten what he’s there for. Pretty blonde Jody Hanson as schoolfriend Jenny, Australian Marilyn Rodgers as married swinger Christine, and U.K. model Joni Flynn as exotic Mei Ling, all have substantial nude scenes. There's anonymous screwing on the ‘plane (a blatant swipe from Emmanuelle), she spies on the couple she's staying with after she hears them bumping and grinding next door (in Emmanuelle, it was the reverse, with a couple spying on her), there’s a lengthy trying-on-lingerie sequence that is shamelessly, delightfully voyeuristic, a bath-house scene to rival Emmanuelle 2, and a sex scene filmed on a bus travelling through the streets of Hong Kong, Annen astride co-star lover boy Christopher Milne (a future hunk on Neighbours, Australia’s premiere soap, apparently!). She takes it from behind in a floating bordello while watching curvaceous Joni Flynn wriggling around on top of a client, and gives her boyfriend a blow-job in the cinema (think about that for a moment--dating couples in a cinema, watching a couple in a cinema...well, let’s just say: talk about a date movie…).

Disasters along the way include the almost inevitable 1970s rape-we-love-it sequence with a laughable Harry Reems lookalike boasting a moustache that would reduce Wyatt Earp to tears, and a really, really, bad script in terms of dialogue. Script and delivery of same are things that don’t have to matter in a sex film though, and the things that do matter--casting, nudity, photography, camera, locations--are done well. Lamond clearly puts some thought into his sex scenes, showing us not only what we want to see, but aspects we didn’t know we wanted to see, always the mark of a good director.

And Felicity not only has a happy ending, but an untypical philosophy for this particular genre of 1970s sex film too. “Some people go through life having sex without affection” muses Fliss just before the end credits roll. “Others, affection without sex. My time with Miles taught me that the two must go together”. Blimey! It took Emmanuelle three films to figure that one out...

It also took a while for America to find the Emmanuelle formula--ten years, in fact--but when they did, the usual suspects were to hand. Christina (1984) is a rather tame but watchable effort directed by Harry Alan Towers and written under his pen-name Peter Welbeck for Playboy, once leaders, now followers chasing the Emmanuelle bandwagon. Tempting the fates, Playboy boldly labelled this the first in a series (which never happened, natch) of the sexual escapades of obnoxious jet-set heiress Christina Van Belle, played by American B-video starlet Jewel Shepard.

Anyhow, jet-setter Christina finds it all rather boring to be richer than the rest of us, and so we find her rather boring too. Fortunately, to compensate for the tedium of having to devote her every waking hour to pleasure and being on perpetual holiday, she strips off in discos (it’s the ‘80s), strips off after dinner, strips off for multiple showers and baths, strips off to get kidnapped, and of course strips off for numerous routinely filmed sexual liasons.

So okay, she’s a little tiresome, but the film never gets boring. It would, however, have qualified for moderately exciting with a little more imagination and a lot more of supporting actress Pepita Full James (her only other known credit a bit part in Story of O--Untold Stories), who makes up a foursome with the lead and two guys for the film’s best scenes.

Playboy were clearly aiming for a slice of the Emmanuelle market with Christina, but on a budget, and with our eponymous heroine fighting off lesbian ninja terrorists lead by Karin Schubert as the sinister Madame Rosa, it's more like Jean Rollin’s Bacchanales Sexuelles than Laure, Felicity, or Vanessa, with Welbeck/Towers stealing from Bond, Enter the Dragon, and the Emmanuelle franchise and its numerous copyists in his anxiety to find a new twist to the now ten-year-old formula.

Shepard rather prudishly announced in her book of interviews with she didn’t care for going naked in any of her films, and rather more understandably that she hated filming off-season and being dubbed. Hungry for better parts, her attitude was that she had no choice but to get her tits out to act in ‘80s Hollywood, and while there’s a certain degree of truth to that (although others have managed), if you’re a former stripper and bit player in Starsky and Hutch and Charlie’s Angels whose resume reads Zapped, Hollywood Hot Tubs, Return of the Living Dead, and Caged Heat 2: Stripped of Freedom, you can’t really complain that the best roles go to Meryl. It would be interesting to know whether she’s warmed to her career choices now that this supposed flop has become a cultish fond memory for boys of a certain age, even if she is of course stark bananas stitchless in several scenes herein. She doesn’t look too pissed off during the filming, and it was surely more fun than waitressing at Denny’s.

Taking us full circle, and also ten years after Emmanuelle, in 1984, Just Jaeckin was back with Gwendoline, perhaps one of the weirdest films of the 1980s, a sort of combination of the numerous 1980s European sex films toplining American bimbos (an inexplicable trend, as none of these Barbie dolls came anywhere close to the beauty of most European girls), his Story of O shenanigans, and the Indiana Jones adventures.

Opening with one of the most arch and phoney, expensive and over-rehearsed tracking shots in the history of cinema, Gwendoline is a ridiculous adventure fantasy marrying the cleaned-up 1940s pulp magazine values of Indiana Jones and its other imitators with the erotica of late 20th century adult fumetti. Although there is plenty of female flesh on display, it’s trussed up in unattractive bondage gear, and is not remotely erotic. Hero Brent Huff and heroine Tawny Kitaen (Bachelor Party) are the unlikeable and hollow leads, with Zabou Breitman as the slightly more tolerable but overly cute sidekick. Based on an obscure 1940s fetish magazine comic strip by the sensibly pseudonymous John Willie, the finished result is Undersea Kingdom meets Helmut Newton.

The bondage girls, supposedly dangerous female warriors, walk around completely oblivious to the lead players wandering around their city, and literally stand around waiting to be mindlessly and remorselessly fatally despatched like the human mannequins they are; the adventurers roam around the sterile surroundings like tourists. There is never any sense of jeopardy, and never any sense of what passes for a plot. With every line, nuance, gesture and glance sent guaranteed delivery, who could possibly take this drivel seriously? Step forward, the British Board of Film Censors...

Director Jaeckin, still primarily a former fashion photographer for top range titles (which explains why everyone poses and nothing moves), and his two leads completely misunderstand the techniques and procedures of filming camp, and give broad cardboard performances that completely sabotage and undermine the material... none of which prevented the British censor from overreacting and taking it all to heart, of course, in the absence of any eight-year-old Batman fans on the board to explain it to them.

A Barbarella for the ‘80s basically, and who better to sum it up than the director, who tells us on the DVD extras “When you go to St. Tropez, you have more nudity than in Gwendoline”. Couldn’t have made the point more succinctly myself.

The Shackles Are Off... And On Again...

Justine De Sade (1972), Cruel Passion (1977), Eugenie and the story of her Journey into Perversion (1969), Venus in Furs (1969), Story of O (1975), The Image (1975)

As cinema censorship began to buckle toward the very end of the 1960s, and in Britain the Lord Chamberlain’s office in London lost its power of veto over theatre, the inevitable effect of taking the draconian jackboot off the gradually filling and swelling hosepipe was a flood of contentious material. In the theatre, that mostly meant stage nudity in productions such as Hair, Oh Calcutta!, and many pretenders and imitators. Cinema went a little darker, and started looking at the writings of the Marquis De Sade--specifically, Philosophy of the Boudoir (Eugenie) and Justine.

The first attempt to film the novel Justine, a dark and depressing story of a virtuous girl who comes to grief (a sort of anti-matter Fanny Hill), was almost inevitably by schlockmeister Jess Franco, who cast Romina Power, the daughter of actor Tyrone Power, as the eponymous heroine in Marquis De Sade’s Justine in 1969, and then for good measure tackled Eugenie, with Marie Liljedahl, the following year. These, as other portions of this book attest, were not his only forays into portraying sado-masochism, perversion, and attempted rape, and--dissatisfied with Powers’ flat performance (talk about pot and kettle!)--he would return to Justine at a later date.

This he did, in 1972, with the oddly-named Justine De Sade. Following Mac Ahlberg’s enjoyable contemporary re-imagining Justine and Juliette in 1975, there were further heavy-handed efforts made in 1977 and 1979 to tell the tale. The lumbering 1977 British attempt was Cruel Passion (aka Justine), a noisy, coyly-shot, unerotic BBC-style costume melodrama conceived as a vehicle for the beautiful Koo Stark of the equally insipid Emily. Full of absurd stereotypes as our heroine attempts to avoid being raped by a series of Dick Dastardly-style pantomime villains, one can only marvel that it lumbered into being in the wake of the similar but superior 1972 version, as well as the likeminded Franco/Powers misfire, thus making it absurdly redundant as well as rubbish. Last and most definitely least came a Jess Franco/Joe Sarno mish-mash Justine De Sade in 1979 (aka Justine and the Whip), cobbled together out of bits of a sadly uncompleted 1975 version with the lovely Lina Romay, plus other off-cuts swept off the floor and filler filmed by Sarno.

And so, backtracking, this 1972 version, by Claude Pierson, is understandably considered the best so far by default. It is also the one featuring Alice Arno, the Countess Perverse herself, in the lead, despite a bizarre false credit on the 1979 version! Fate obliged me to review the various Justines out of sequence, but when even the film-makers get confused over which version they’re foisting on the public, my rambling efforts to make sense of the fracas look positively organised.

The blustering, posturing script of 1972’s Justine De Sade is unadulterated gibberish, and the pictures are an endless parade of cruel lechery, nudity, corruption, hypocrisy, betrayal, religious fervor, lust, perversity, and depravity, all directed at mocking the simple-minded virtue of the heroine, whose sister Juliette’s side of the story is dealt with before the credits. Alice Arno, the daughter of fanatical naturists and already a professional porn star before making this film (and continuing to be one long afterwards), racked up around forty titles over twenty years, and is by far the least innocent-looking of all the screen Justines. She’s also easily the most annoying, every blundering encounter begun with the words “I am but a poor orphan girl…!”, and going on to tell every sicko she meets just what he/they want to hear--that's she’s alone and unknown and at their mercy, kind sir. She is then promptly graphically used and abused, before escaping and talking herself into her next horrendous encounter with torture and tragedy. Yes, it’s a dark comedy... very dark.

Pierson’s version of De Sade’s gloomy montage of bad behavior, a co-production between Rome and Paris, allows no coyness or compromise in the telling of episodes fudged or watered down in the other versions. With the exception of the fire in the French prison, everything is shown rather than suggested, and although soft-core, often explicitly. Sequences the other films daintily skirt around--of masturbation, ejaculation, buggery, whipping, sodomy, white slavery, and rape--are fully indulged in graphically simulated form. There are many beautiful bodies on display, although few are treated very respectfully. The acting ranges from adequate (the men) to abysmal (most of the women), particularly the pretty young girl playing Rosalie, who, about to be raped, branded, and eviscerated, can only bite her lip apprehensively as though she’s just broken the Royal Doulton by dropping it on the Lalique.

Justine De Sade is also the truest in spirit to the dark drivel De Sade wrote all those years ago, in that Justine’s virtuous behavior leads directly, rather than incidentally, to her misfortunes. Whereas in the other versions, she’s often portrayed as a helpless victim of circumstance, this nitwit brings everything on herself through a mix of gullibility and recklessness; she makes more noise yelping while trying to escape than when she’s being sexually assaulted and her continuous run of bad luck becomes blackly comic as the film proceeds, as she perpetually and persistently drops herself into disaster time and again. Everywhere she goes for safety or sanctuary, she’s set upon by the people she trusts, respects, or admires.

One could take issue with De Sade’s relentlessly bleak vision of human nature, while tacitly admitting he has a point, albeit one made with a sledgehammer, but his opinions of women, spouted at length near the end of the film, are more contentious and dubious, mostly a misogynist rant from a hateful, twisted, and despondent little man. It certainly puts the lie to naive attempts at rehabilitation like the insipid Quills. As ever, imprisonment for his beliefs has made him another of history’s undeserving martyrs for loners and losers to slobber over. While it’s good to see a complete version (we hope) after all the truncated editions over the years, Justine De Sade does go on a bit, the ending is quite silly, and the constant cruelty and unpleasantness is somewhat exhausting. As the old saying goes, if you only have to see one version of Justine on film (and really, you do), make it this one.

Marie Liljedahl’s other major work of interest made between the Inga films is the bizarrely titled Eugenie and the story of her Journey into Perversion from 1969, a thankfully tame adaptation of the work of De Sade. Produced, like his first Justine, during the association of Franco and producer Harry Alan Towers (they made nine films together in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s), it exploits the name and presence of Christopher Lee, with whom they’d made a short series of Fu Manchu films together, although the film’s greatest pulling power is probably less De Sade and Lee (Hammer’s Dracula), and more the naked bodies of the lead actresses, Liljedahl and Maria Rohm, Towers’ wife.

The story concerns the seduction and corruption of the young Eugenie (Liljedahl) by bored, cruel, and wealthy married couple Marianne and Dervil (Rohm and Jack Taylor), who over the space of a single weekend make a mess of the naive and impressionable young girl Rohm has procured from her weak, equally corruptible father, seduced himself into believing his daughter would be safe in their hands for the price of a few bedroom sessions. There is little sense to any of it, including the weird ending.

Nevertheless, while hardly the essential cinematic experience its long absence has mythologised, the film holds the attention, and there is enough of Rohm and Liljedahl to satisfy. The film is slow, but atmospheric, and only really comes to life in the last few minutes when Liljedahl is running naked on the beach. The magnificently camp readings of De Sade’s drivel by Christopher Lee (drafted in at the last minute for two days work), the creepy, discomfiting, beady-eyed presence of Jack Taylor slithering around, and the professionalism and beauty of the women, all make this one of Towers’ and Franco’s better confections. The interior and exterior locations are very good, and for once Franco has a decent cinematographer in Manuel Merino, and excellent--and very ‘60s--music from Bruno Nicolai, both of whom also worked on Franco and Towers’ other De Sade adaptation that year, the even less satisfying Marquis De Sade’s Justine, with Romina Power.

Equally incomprehensible and incoherent is the Franco version of Venus in Furs. As well as being intrigued by De Sade, Franco was also quick to put the work of Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch, who gave the world the word masochism, on film, but despite an interesting cast (James Darren, Klaus Kinski, Maria Rohm), his is also rather dull. But there are two versions of Venus in Furs from 1969. As well as the aforementioned tiresome and shambolic Jess Franco version made for Harry Towers, there is also a trashy and unintentionally hilarious version directed in Italy by Massimo Dallamano, the cinematographer on a couple of Clint Eastwood’s Italian westerns who later made the memorable Blue Belle. His version of Venus in Furs (aka La malizie di Venere) is much more fun and bares more bodies.

If man is the sum total of his childhood traumas as Freud suggested, then that would certainly account for the voyeuristic self-hatred and guilt consuming leading man Severin (Regis Vallee, looking not unlike an illustration from an Italian romantic novel). We first meet him spying on the beautiful Wanda (a blonde Laura Antonelli, at the height of her beauty). In a flashback scene, we see Severin as a young child, this time spying on the maid, who is being give a good fuck by the gardener. Caught by surprise, the maid instinctively slaps the boy hard round the face, but then realising her cruelty and his innocence, hugs him close to her naked breast for consolation. Thus is born Severin’s unfortunate predilection for voyeurism and punishment.

Dallamano’s Venus in Furs oozes with essence of ‘60s. Bright colors and stylish locales are everywhere, and Dallamano saves a fortune on extras by filming in the neighboring town streets. This works wonderfully when Antonelli and Vallee parade through town as the focus of attention, showing off both their new-found passion and his smart chauffeur’s uniform, but less well earlier in their courtship, which appears to be overseen by a small army of gawping, smirking and mildly-bemused middle-aged chaperones. Every scene is swamped with a bouncy European 1960s film score, with wonderful romantic lounge music playing while the couple blithely discuss their perversions with serious faces and portentous, sober dialogue, strings building to crescendoes whenever things get hot. It transpires that Wanda is perfect for him, because she knew that he was watching her from the room next door, and deliberately put on a provocative show.

If, like me, you find the idea of sado-masochism--and all the whipping, thrashing, slapping, and play-acting that goes with it--intrinsically hilarious, then this will only add to the unintentional humor that makes this film such a treat (in one marvellous Pythonesque scene, the two disappear behind a garden wall and we just see a switch beating up and down above it, bringing to mind both Python’s “The Cyclist” and Basil Fawlty’s legendary thrashing of his misbehaving motor car).

Events move from giggly to rip-roaringly funny when, just after she’s shagged a young fisherman al fresco for him to watch, Severin proposes marriage and she earnestly promises to make him very unhappy. Over more dreamy music, he gives her a suicide note as a wedding present... so that she has an alibi if things ever get out of hand. When Severin announces that “such happiness as this almost makes me unhappy”, he inadvertently appears to be on a circular journey to normalcy!

Inevitably, she is finally filled with contempt for him, and the cruelty becomes real when she picks up a muscular motorcyclist (Loren Ewing) as a lover and they both gradually exclude him from the action. Whenever Severin insists on watching, the down-to-earth thug casually beats him up.

For all the beauty of the settings and the lead players, the constant focus on these two idiots does threaten to become a bit tiresome as the film forges on. There’s only so many times you can look at their shenanigans before the one joke premise gets old. Dallamano’s camera lingers over the frequently naked and uninhibited Laura Antonelli patiently, taking its time like a good lover should, and for his part, Regis Vallee shows Severin’s gradual transformation from a romance novel ideal to a gimlet-eyed pervert consumed with jealousy expertly in what is clearly a difficult and occasionally potentially embarrassing role.

Whatever your feelings toward the subject matter, Venus in Furs is well worth a look, whether taken seriously by the SM brigade (who will surely enjoy its no-holds-barred activity) or by those of us more amused by such carry-ons. Dallamano’s direction is otherwise a succession of colorful and perfectly composed images of beauty. Also, because at least half the story is told through voiceover narration, even the dubbing doesn't hurt so much. Which will probably disappoint the SM enthusiasts, ha ha.

Six years later in the mid-‘70s, with the Emmanuelle franchise he began now turned over to other hands, former fashion photographer Just Jaeckin needed a new property to top it. As Emmanuelle had derived from an erotic novel, Jaeckin went back to the bookshelves and perhaps inevitably returned with Dominique Aury’s infamous De Sadeian Story of O, which he filmed in 1975. Ironically, the one segment of Emmanuelle which had been the least successful was the part with the dirty old man abusing the title character, and while most of the Emmanuelle bandwagon-jumpers tried to steer clear of that element, Story of O embraces it. Clearly influenced by Emmanuelle, even to the point of bringing in that film’s director of photography Robert Fraisse and returning Pierre Bachelet for the score, this is a thoroughly distasteful story, filmed with great taste and style.

First of all, it must be said that Corinne Clery is absolutely beautiful, far lovelier than the promotional art suggests, even while made up and photographed to resemble Sylvia Kristel and adopting the same haughty posture. One genuinely sympathises with her character as she obediently accompanies her undeserving sleazeball partner Rene (Udo Kier) to the mansion of pervy old roue Sir Stephen (Anthony Steel), even if one doesn’t understand her. And if you don’t understand what makes this silly girl subject herself to all manner of pain and torture in order to demonstrate her love for someone who doesn't mind her undergoing it (and then dumps her on someone else to go out with her photographic model), then don't feel too left out. It took the British Board of Film Censors 26 years to come to terms with it before finally passing it uncut for DVD release in 2000.

Based on the early ‘50s story by bohemian bi-sexual intellectual Anne Desclos, who hid behind the dual pseudonyms of Pauline Reage and Dominque Aury for forty anonymous years before admitting authorship a few years before she died, Story of O is one of the most depressing male fantasies ever sent to the printers. Desclos herself suffered great insecurities as to how much she was truly loved by her lover and wrote Story of O covertly to prove a point. What point she proved is debatable, but she certainly won the argument that a woman could write an erotic novel. Bizarrely, she wrote one of the most sexist and misogynist yarns ever put to paper, and right up until her 1990s confession, many pundits refused to believe that it wasn’t--like Emmanuelle--written by a man using a feminine pen-name. In a way, it is a feminist diatribe, if we’re talking about those feminists who harbor hatred toward all men, because if men really thought like this, we’d all be curled up and dead from shame and embarrassment.

Once inside the chamber of horrors run by Sir Stephen, bound and blindfolded, the enigmatically named O is whipped and raped by a succession of male model types “to get tears out of her”, while being reminded that at any time she is “free to leave”. Every time the creeps have sex with them, the women sigh in exquisite pain, and toss their heads around in mock ecstasy. How inadequate a man do you have to be, to need a woman broken in like a horse!?

Udo Kier as the dead-eyed Judas Rene was coerced into starring in Andy Warhol’s two arthouse horror pics Flesh for Frankenstein and Blood for Dracula, and spent the rest of his career in cult films and horror films, his fate as camp icon sealed. Anthony Steel, at this point a hilarious bouffant-haired Jason King sort, spent half a century playing upper-class types, but in the late ‘70s was relegated to becoming a regular fixture in sleazy sex films such as Hardcore and Let’s Get Laid with Fiona Richmond, The World Is Full of Married Men, and Twilight of Love, a career low point for Annie Belle and Pam Grier. His career had never recovered after he broke his contract with Rank in an ill-judged attempt to break Hollywood during his brief marriage to Swedish starlet Anita Ekberg of La Dolce Vita notoriety in the late ‘50s.

Jaeckin has two get-out-of-jail-free cards, and he plays one at the very beginning of the film, and the other right at the end. At the very beginning of the film he out-nouvelle vagues the French New Wave by starting his film twice. First we see one Rashomon-like version of how O and Rene arrive at the mansion (in daylight), and then we are offered an alternate, similar opening with spot-the-difference aspects (at night). This is Jaeckin’s way of saying to the audience--through the narration--that this is just fantasy, make-believe. Nothing is real, it’s only as real you want it to be. Then, at the end, when Sir Stephen declares his love for O, his lordship is encouraged to agree that he would probably have gone through the same torments to prove his love to her... at which she promptly stubs her cigarette out on his hand, the tables turned. Unfortunately, any females in the audience who might have approved of turnaround being fair play must have long since walked out on this feast of misogyny!

In reality, away from the Story of O, women control men with sex, and hold the keys to the door. Possibly, these absurd, hurtful fantasies have their roots in this knowledge, and the desire of some men to take control the only way they know how--violently. There may be, in some relationships, during the six months or so that a woman might be besotted, a window of opportunity for these sorts of shenanigans... but it seems to be a pretty good way to ultimately lose a woman’s respect, not gain it. One wonders what the actresses were talking about between shots. They must have been laughing their heads off.

Is it erotic? Yes, it is. Beautifully lit and photographed, with superb sets and design accommodating a parade of incredibly beautiful women, most notably Li Selgren as the model Jacquie, Martine Kelly as the dark-haired aide, and Albane Navizet as the ginger-haired aide. It is also, to anyone with just a smidgen of self-awareness and a sense of humor, hilariously funny and begging for satirical attention. As with all fanatical nonsense taking itself too seriously, absolute rubbish is spoken with extreme grave seriousness for the benefit of the gullible. Example: “He felt the more he gave her to others, the dearer she was to him. The fact that he could, was the proof that she belonged to him”. This is complete and utter twaddle, flying in the face of all human knowledge and behavior since the dawn of time.

The relentless pretentious stupidity of Story of O becomes a bit wearing after a while, and it takes a lot to make me intolerant of a screen constantly awash with semi-naked women swanning around. There’s just no let-up from the sheer idiocy of the characters and their actions, and by the time it was over, my patience had received a damn good thrashing.

While Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris opened doors film-makers previously thought wedged shut, pushing the envelope for essentially artistic reasons, there were still brazen opportunists who were out to use the new cinematic freedoms purely for exploitation purposes and shock value. One such director/producer was Radley Metzger, an importer of European sex films to the U.S. who started making his own product, tinged with a European sensibility, but forever dragged down and betrayed by the overpowering American tendency toward sleaze. Metzger’s efforts to go Euro were always sabotaged by puritanical American predilections toward sex being nasty rather than natural, and this often found its way into the titles, dialogue, and presentation. For all his pretensions, Metzger was a slave to his presumptions.

The Image, also 1975, features a slave of a different kind, as this was Metzger’s attempt to cop some Last Tango/Story of O action. Typically set in Paris, we are presented with two classic cliches of 1970s erotica, the shop mannequin smoothie played by American Carl Parker, curiously given the French nom-de-plume Jean, and creepy Claire (Marilyn Roberts), a cartoon cut-out dominatrix who gets to utter all the earthy, throaty, diminishing commands to silent submissive Anne.

The film opens at a swanky dinner party, where Jean is reunited with old friend and hostess Claire, and ignorant of her new-found fascination with the dark side. Jean, a sort of fashion magazine Thunderbird puppet (perhaps under the circumstances I should say Team America puppet) with a voice that doesn’t seem to match him (he does a lot of narrating), is infatuated by the beautiful Anne, her friend “who belongs to me”. Anne is played by busy ‘70s sex starlet Rebecca Brooke, a recurring Metzger and Joe Sarno regular and Metzger’s girlfriend, going under the ridiculous and unflattering pseudonym of Mary Mendum. Jean swiftly becomes aware of the unhealthy relationship between the two when, in the beautifully filmed Rose Gardens of Bagatelle, Claire repeatedly orders Anne to demean, embarrass, and hurt herself, through public urination, petty vandalism, and the unconventional deployment of rose thorns. Claire, presumably bereft of any ability to be self-aware, justifies all this mean-spirited and soul-destroying behavior by perpetually proving to herself that Anne is sexually excited by being undermined, repeatedly stuffing her hand in the girl’s underwear and announcing how wet she is. Meanwhile, the jackass Jean just watches silently as the girl is humiliated, asking no questions, offering no criticism, and eventually being drawn into the abuse himself.

Amid all this depravity and degradation, there is some powerful straight sex footage, and perhaps reassuringly, with the consensual sado-masochism being in turns comically over-the-top, depressingly unpleasant, or dispiritingly perverse, it is the standard sex scenes that are the most satisfying. There is some hard-core footage of oral sex that is quite superb, firstly in the back seat of a car between Jean and Anne while Claire acts as a lookout, and later in a lingerie shop where an extraordinarily sexy salesgirl (minor-league ‘70s porn starlet Valerie Marron, aka Yvette Hiver) joins Jean and Anne in a threesome in the changing room. This is followed by some soapy action in the bathtub, after which everyone retires to the dungeons for the grand finale and predictable ending.

The sadism is cleverly faked, but the people who like this sort of stuff apparently consider The Image, also known as The Punishment of Anne, to be one of the best, if not the best, mainstream films on the subject, and I suspect they’re right (this text has been prepared before the film debut of Fifty Shades of Grey, and I’m in no particular hurry to see it). The story comes from a novel written by Catherine Robbe-Grillet, also pseudonymous as Jean Le Berg, and the wife of film-maker Alain Robbe-Grillet, who was also partial to this sort of thing, as his films attest.

What De Sade would have made of the 21st century, or even the 20th, is anyone’s guess, but one thing is undeniable, and that is that Philosophy in the Boudoir is about as dated, redundant, and un-shocking today as the average episode of I Dream of Jeannie.

On the Outside Looking In (1) : When I'm Cleaning Windows...

Confessions of a Window Cleaner (1974), Confessions of a Pop Performer (1975), Confessions of a Driving Instructor (1976), Confessions from a Holiday Camp (1977)

An exception to the rule, the legendary mid-‘70s sit-com Fawlty Towers was probably unique among British film and TV productions (certainly during the 1970s) for making fun of the sexually repressed lead character rather than expecting the audience to identify with him.

Fawlty Towers invites us on several occasions to laugh at Basil’s uptight misery rather than to cravenly giggle along with the inhibitions of other comedy characters. So much British comedy of the period was about acknowledging and exploiting Britain’s sexual repression rather than challenging and laughing at it (the single exception, and very much a carefully scripted fence-sitter, being Leonard Rossiter’s lecherous landlord Rigsby on Rising Damp; his hypocrisy is frequently on show when he lusts after lodger Miss Jones while announcing disgust at that ‘70s media concoction “the permissive society”). But for every Basil Fawlty, betrayed by his puritanism and faux-disgust into revealing a mind far more obsessed with sex than those simply getting on with it, and for every Benny Hill, cheerfully celebrating sex and mocking the male/female differences with joyous if heavy-handed vulgarity, there was a Two Ronnies or a Carry On film playing up to Britons’ nervous naughtiness phobia.

The only other 1970s TV sit-com to celebrate sex was Man About the House (formatted less liberally as Three’s Company in America), which for all its TV level of daring was still about the sexual frustrations of a leading man living with two women and having sex with neither of them. In reality in the early 1970s, it was quite common for flat-loads of sharing teens to be bed-hopping, or at the very least, living with a boyfriend or girlfriend in just the comfortable scenario lifetime comedy actor Richard O’Sullivan's character Robin Tripp fantasised about.

That series’ lead actress, Paula Wilcox, had been cast on the basis of her popularity as a baby-talking just-say-no virgin in a previous series, The Lovers (the title is sarcastic), which revolved around her determination to keep her frustrated boyfriend at bay until they married. Her boyfriend was played by Richard Beckinsale, a young lad who spent the 1970s playing sexual naifs first here, and then in Porridge and Rising Damp. Watching this rubbish in the real 1970s simply provoked an overwhelming desire to give the pair of them a good hard slap round the face and bang their (non-)fucking heads together.

This was the embarrassing level of immaturity in British television after, not before, the swinging ‘60s, and it was into this sort of comedy environment that the Confessions films, the bread and butter of the British film industry in the 1970s (which was literally kept alive by TV spin-offs and sex-coms throughout the decade), appeared.

The success of the Confessions films--Confessions of a Window Cleaner (1974), Confessions of a Pop Performer (1975), Confessions of a Driving Instructor (1976), and Confessions from a Holiday Camp (1977)--should, with the infallible super-vision powers of Captain Hindsight, have never been in doubt. By the 1970s, Britain was gagging for it, the population composed of people who had benefitted from the sexual revolution of the 1960s, and those who felt they had missed out. The latter group swiftly divided themselves into two halves--the bitter, puritanical prudes of the Mary Whitehouse camp who had decided that if they weren’t having it, no-one was having it, and those playing catch-up. To determine which of these groups was truly the silent majority, one only has to look at 1970s popular culture.

The world of the Confessions films is a world where sex dominates everything, and the streets of Britain are teeming with randy youths, saucy girls, wide-eyed boys, arrogant louts, stuffy old gits, knowing old ladies, and desperate housewives; it’s a near-perfect merger of fantasy and reality. It’s a portrait of the 1970s that hasn’t been defined by the BBC or the politicians or the social engineers, and wasn't approved of by any of them. In other words, honest.

The irony is that even I, a teenager in the 1970s, only caught up with these films when they turned up on television twenty years later; broadcasters finally felt able to show them in the 1990s. Ironic because it was, of course, the prudishness of the television industry that created the window of opportunity for these films in the first place; cinema was kept alive in the color television-dominated 1970s only by supplying what television channels wouldn’t or couldn’t bring themselves to provide--sex, nudity, violence, and a willingness to treat the audience as intelligent adults (programming like I, Claudius and The Sweeney is remembered because such content was so rare, not because it was representative). The second irony, that this also resulted in some of the most lowbrow, puerile, juvenile fare ever shown in cinemas, should not be missed. The premise of the peeping window cleaner goes all the way back at least forty years earlier to the 1936 audience pleaser Keep Your Seats Please, where infamous vaudevillian George Formby, the original cheeky chappie, sang his trademark song “When I’m Cleaning Windows” for posterity. I’m not allowed to reprint the lyrics here for copyright reasons, but you can find them easily enough on the internet, and when you do, you’ll realise, as ever, that nothing is new.

A third irony presents itself in David McGillivray’s pioneering and un-put-downable history of British sex films, Doing Rude Things, published in 1992. Poor David, in his introduction, states that he’s chosen his subject because the story is over, and in terms of the content, he’s right. But, he says, with this subject, he can’t be embarrassed by future developments. As early as his second paragraph in Chapter One, he begins “Nor is it likely that middle-class intellectuals will rediscover the films in order to laugh at them in late-night screenings. British sex films lack even the redeeming quality of being so bad they're good. They're simply unwatchable by any standards, and will consequently disappear without trace, leaving future generations to wonder ‘What were they like?’”. He concludes his book by announcing, quite categorically, that “the British sex film is gone forever... The films will never be seen again”.

Almost immediately the book had come back from the printers, the films started turning up on television, primarily on the lowbrow Channel 5 and the U.S.-heavy Paramount Comedy Channel, desperately seeking British content to appease the Euro-nannies. Shortly afterwards, middle-class academic studies did indeed start appearing, as did a superb mainstream study, Simon Sheridan’s Keeping the British End Up, and the autobiography of Stanley Long. And as we lurched into the 21st century, all manner of offensive, reactionary, and beloved 1970s shit from British television was smeared all over the shelves of the super-stores (On the Buses, Love Thy Neighbor, Mind Your Language, Are You Being Served?), with all the major sex-com films now released on DVD, and some of the most unwatchable released reverentially by the British Film Institute! I write this not to embarrass Mr. McGillivray, because--a fourth irony--his splendid book is almost certainly part of the reason for these films’ rediscovery.

At the time these films were made I was in my teens/early twenties, and enjoying the real thing far too much to sit in chilly fleapit cinemas watching cheeky chappies picking up my leftovers; but then I loathed the Carry On films and everything they said about by fellow countrymen, and if I went to the cinema to see nudity (and I did), it was upmarket fare like Last Tango in Paris, Private Vices, Public Virtues, and Immoral Tales. Indeed, the dividing line between the smart and the stupid was very much defined by whether you went to the cinema to see Bertolucci or Askwith. With classy, quality cinema pouring out of other parts of Europe and indeed Hollywood (yes, really), it was exceptionally easy to turn your nose up at the British sex-com.

It also no doubt helped that in terms of content, I was more satisfied by the efforts of Bertolucci and Borowczyk than Stanley Long and David Sullivan, although I did, like everyone else, see the self-parodic phenomenon Emmanuelle, the glossy middle ground between the sleazies and the art films. Many fine people of my acquaintance however, were among the legions of young couples sitting unembarrassed among the more traditional punters and older couples chortling away at the Confessions films. They weren’t exactly family films, but I daresay whole families went to see them in separate groups!

Today, after belatedly sitting through literally dozens of these things (oh, the embarrassment of my Amazon wish-list... and my daughter saw it), I can categorically state that the Confessions films were the best of a bad lot (to put it mildly), and here's why.

The premise of the Confessions films, beginning with that most basic of templates, Confessions of a Window Cleaner, was simplicity itself. Timmy Lea is an accident-prone virgin living with his working class family in everytown, U.K. He’s not the stereotypical media virgin, all zits, stammers and Star Trek, just an ordinary young guy who hasn’t had it yet. His brother-in-law (Tony Booth), with the classically Brit-film name of Sidney Noggett, is more interested in making money than getting laid, because although still readily up for it (and receiving it), he’s married with a wife and kid, and a little jaded about it all (as those getting it effortlessly understandably are). As in all British sex-coms of the 1970s, it’s taken for granted that the men are cheating on their wives. Now he’s saddled with keeping young Timmy gainfully employed, and has taken him on as an apprentice in his moderately successful window-cleaning business.

But this isn’t one of those squirmy, touchy-feely sensitive stories about first love. Sid takes Timmy round to the local strip club where he botches an opportunity to lose it with an obliging bimbo (the normally attractive Christine Donna)... but not to worry. Before long, Timmy is getting a swift education in the ways of the world and its women, with the story switching back and forth between his leering and peering through windows, where he sees everything from nude exercising to schoolgirls’ shower-rooms, to his ongoing soppy romance with young police officer Elizabeth (tolerant Linda Hayden, star of the scandalous 1969 sex thriller Baby Love, and the overrated Blood on Satan’s Claw). In between scenes of his clumsy fumblings with Hayden are interspersed numerous encounters with a succession of willing women composed of knowing, randy girls and sex-hungry housewives, all of whom cope with the spectre of premature ejaculation by never finishing the sex before catastrophe looms and something breaks, floods, explodes, or causes other people to barge in. As Martin Jones points out in his retro pop culture trawl Psychedelic Decadence, the Confessions films “contain more coitus interruptus than Mary Whitehouse at a suburban orgy”.

The delivery of these sex scenes to the audience is as clumsy, brief, artless and disappointing as Askwith’s efforts to satisfy his eager bored suburban wives, but at least the guys actually want the sex, unlike the trembling twits in the TV sit-coms and many of the Confessions’ numerous imitators and predecessors. Before long, both Tim and Sid are merrily banging away, with Timmy eventually discovering that true lust is infinitely more desirable and rewarding than true love (imagine an American teen sex film with that message!).

Robin Askwith was, like Sean Connery as Bond, Adam West as Batman, Stallone as Rocky and Rambo, and Bruce Willis in Die Hard, the right man in the right role at the right time (the scummy novels obligingly being published between 1971 and 1979; 1969 or 1981 would somehow have been so wrong). Not only was he just right for the Confessions films, he was almost too good for them; he had a genuine sense of comic timing and real acting ability, which he’d demonstrated in the then-scandalous Cool It, Carol some years earlier, in what might be termed a more serious, dramatic incarnation of his Confessions persona. That said, it’s difficult to conceive of any other role that would have been suitable for him beside paperback author Christopher Wood’s alter-ego, Timothy Lea.

When he did sit-com, which is where his stereotype could usually be found, Askwith seemed to be slumming it, too big for the small screen. He was too ugly to be a horror B-hero or romance film lead, yet he would have been wasted in a truly serious role. And he gave hope to every young working class male of the 1970s stuck in a dead-end job in a dead-end town; if someone with Askwith’s face could get the girls, anyone could. Timmy Lea was a swaggering, accident-prone chimp of a boy who proved categorically that being sexually attractive to women wasn’t all about looks. Askwith was also, by many accounts, in real life much the same sort of likeable salt-of-the-earth guy as he portrayed in the films.

Prior to his break-out role in Confessions of a Window Cleaner, he had been miscast in a handful of cheap horror adventures and appeared in sit-com movie Bless This House and the feeble Carry On Girls; he’d also had insignificant roles in a couple of mainstream films, but made no impact. With alarming hubris, he’s on the blink-and-miss-it receiving end of a slapstick cake in a 1973 comedy called No Sex Please, We’re British. He has one line and we never see his face, but by the following year, he and Roger Moore’s Bond (interestingly, Wood also wrote the screenplays for The Spy Who Loved Me and Moonraker) not only epitomised, but summed up British cinema of the 1970s. Observed closet fan Leon Hunt, “If Brian Jones and Sid James were put through the matter transporter from The Fly, Askwith resembles what might emerge from the other end”! He's “a missing link in flared denim... in a world where there is no ‘g’ in the word darling”, observes Jones.

Revealingly, Askwith claimed he was at least fourth choice for the role; Dennis Waterman, Richard Beckinsale, and Richard O’Sullivan had all turned it down or been crossed off the list. Waterman’s scowling masculinity would have been too aggressively humorless for the role (he is amiable in The Sweeney, but too self-assured and knowing to be a cheeky chappie, although he played a nervous opportunist in This, That and the Other), and Beckinsale's TV persona was too virginally drippy; O’Sullivan would have been too camp and middle-class (the audience for the sex-coms was overwhelmingly and virtually exclusively working class). Conversely, Askwith would have been too self-assured to be continuously unsuccessful with the girls had he been cast in Man About the House; Timmy Lea would have had them on their backs by the end of the first episode and then seen to Mrs. Roper!

The supporting cast of familiar television performers was also an essential and often overlooked element of the ‘70s sex-coms’ success, and more importantly, acceptance. The presence of friendly faces from television in a product that at that time wouldn’t have been broadcast, legitimised the production in a way nothing else could have, putting the prudish BBC in a very uncomfortable position (they attempted a hatchet job on their dubious documentary series Man Alive in 1975, a series renowned in the industry for its wicked manipulation in filming and editing, in which various practitioners from the sex industry merrily told a pack of brazen lies while playing to the camera, but it backfired spectacularly when the producer used it as an entry into the business himself, and made Let’s Get Laid--with Askwith).

Even though the anonymous faces behind the scenes at BBC and ITV management would never have countenanced such fare, the fact that the same people who entertained them in their homes in BBC and ITV productions were ‘up for it’, and apparently had no problem with the material, somehow made it allowable, in the same way that Benny Hill and Ronnie Barker could infer things on the small screen that would never have been tolerated from lesser mortals. These performers’ participation reassured nervous older viewers that these films were not threatening or intimidating in a way that brazen pornography would have been, and the comedy elements placed the films in the audience’s comfort zone. This ploy cut no ice with the critics, who had a more cynically aware view of the acting fraternity, but it certainly cut them off at the knees. In actual fact, as many of the performers have since pointed out, while generally (and fortunately) from an uninhibited and easy-going segment of society, the overwhelming consideration was that actors just wanted to work, and in the 1970s, perhaps more than any other decade including the 1960s, nudity was just no big deal.

In the premiere Confessions film, Confessions of a Window Cleaner, Bill Maynard (‘70s sit-com’s Selwyn Froggitt) and John Le Mesurier (simpering co-star of Dad’s Army and tolerant real-life husband of the Carry Ons’ Hattie Jacques) are the chalk-and-cheese fathers of Timmy and Liz, with Tony Booth’s co-star from ’Til Death Us Do Part Dandy Nichols as Mum (Doris Hare takes over the role from the second film on). Sheila White (Messalina in the BBC’s adaptation of I, Claudius) gets all the best lines as Timmy’s tightly-permed sister and Sidney’s baby-laden wife, a double-whammy of misfortune that has her constantly pursing her lips in pent-up rage and rolling her eyes like a pinball machine.

Katya Wyeth, Sue Longhurst, Christine Donna, Anita Graham, Olivia Munday, Judy Matheson, and Carole Augustine all get their kit off, as do shower girls Ava Cadell, Petula Noble, Glenda Allen, and Zoe Henry, although as is often the case with ‘70s sex-coms, you only see the bare minimum (true also of Hayden), and will need binoculars to see the latter four. British directors seem to take no pleasure in the female form, and simply see their naked performers as a necessary prop required to put the script on film. Consequently, when girls nip in and out of bed or bath, you’re as likely to see something as not. It’s not filmed to advantage; like life, it’s all down to chance. The famous bubble bath in the kitchen scene with Sue Longhurst that begat numerous other debacles in the sequels, spin-offs, and rip-offs, is over as soon as it starts and yet somehow took two days to film. It’s no wonder the languorous and banal Emmanuelle films caused such a stir.

The rapidly sought follow-up, Confessions of a Pop Performer, places Timmy and Sid somewhere between Larry Parnes and Malcolm McClaren (note it’s pop performer, not star; they were a more modestly realistic bunch back then!). “It’s all to do with management, there's no need for talent!” Sid reassures the vacant-looking Timmy, although even he doesn’t realise he just signed up a band that blew the power sockets and were just playing other peoples’ records.

The film opens with them still cleaning windows, and there are two husbands home early in the first twenty minutes. A spectacular scene-setting opening has Timmy escaping one angry husband through the window, and crashing through next door’s when his ladder tips over, to land on the bed where Sid is also taking care of business with another bored wife. No one scene epitomises the spirit of the sex-com more than this one.

Pop Performer, out of sheer necessity, has more of a story than Window Cleaner, although of course it benefits from having Window Cleaner as a scene-setting, format-establishing blueprint. It would have been easy and predictable simply to make the first film again, as so many sequels do, but all credit to producer Greg Smith, who tried to best the previous one each time, and probably did (until sadly, the fourth and final). Praise where it’s due, there aren't many film series whose sequels improve with each outing (the Magnificent Seven, for example, were a little less magnificent each time they returned; visits to the planet of the apes were similarly less inspired each time). Each Confessions film is different in story and structure, while still retaining the familiar cast and, most crucially, not fucking about with the formula.

In Pop Performer, Tony Booth, Bill Maynard (lugging home a giant panda charity box he “found in the street”; they used to stand outside shops), and Sheila White are all back, with Doris Hare of soulmate On the Buses taking over the role of mother from unavailable Dandy Nichols. The cast is much larger this time, with a wealth of familiar TV talent showing up, including frizzy-wigged Peter Cleall and pretty (and clothed) Carol Hawkins of Please Sir, Ian Lavender and Bill Pertwee of Dad’s Army as a lovelorn police constable and impotent husband respectively, smarmy disc jockey David Hamilton, and brief appearances by then-unknowns Rula Lenska and Dave Prowse. Professional blustering authoritarian Robert Dorning of Bootsie and Snudge spends most of the film getting stuff thrown over him, and professional hideous harridan Rita Webb is hilarious as an old bag who accosts a mini-bus full of rockers and groupies with the words “Have you seen my Fanny?!”. Fanny turns out to be the gorgeous Andee Cromarty (a groped shop window dresser in the first film) who leaps from the van as it makes a hasty retreat wearing nothing but knee-high boots, while Webb assails her with her handbag. Other treats include Margaret Heald as a stripy-socked groupie who thinks Timmy is “Mick Jagger making a comeback”, and Helli Louise (pictured) of the gruesome Daddy Darling as a sexy contortionist.

Also on hand are Bob Todd of The Benny Hill Show (who at one point is seen in bed with the Collinson sisters, as well as banging away with touchy-feely TV cop Jill Gasgoigne of The Gentle Touch, for whom touchy-feely takes on a whole new meaning as his serial-cheating wife), and Peter Jones of The Rag Trade and Whoops Apocalypse as a Hughie Green send-up (Green was an obsequious and phoney game show host and talent scout of the period). Diane Langton and Linda Regan are the scowling, sour-faced Climax Sisters, a rival act. As a Royal Variety Performance ends with several girls scrapping in their underwear and Langton inadvertently mooning the Royals (Phil reaches for the opera glasses), Tim and Sid flee the scene, pausing only to leer at a leggy babe about to take a driving lesson...

Both Pop Performer and third in the run Confessions of a Driving Instructor go out of their way to joyfully antagonise the sort of people who surely hated the sex-coms. As well as mocking the Royals (a practice only just beginning in the ‘70s), Pop Performer mocks both the porn-pestering police and the pretentious pseudery of academics who treat popular culture as folk art (gleefully exploited, Carol Hawkins’ local journo talks blithering crap about pop music and the working classes, while the band are just thinking about sex and money), while Driving Instructor plays to working class prejudices toward simple-minded snobs and dim posh people. Neither the Confessions or the Adventures ever took on the Mary Whitehouse contingent, perhaps because they knew their audience simply didn’t care; censorship was, and is, a middle-class obsession (the working class just get round it).

In Driving Instructor, all the regulars are back as the boys attempt to run, of course, a driving school... the lack of any qualifications not apparently seen as a problem (needless to say, Askwith acquires his credentials by flashing them to the female driving test official, in an unfunny and heavy-handed bump-and-grind). Next door to the rechristened Noglea Driving School are pompous rivals Windsor Davies of the depressing but popular It Ain’t Half Hot Mum, and snivelling minion Bender (in Britain, offensive slang for gay), played by the unlikeable George Layton of Doctor in the House/at Large, the sit-com fronted by rival sex-com star Barry Evans. Despite some appalling performances from some of the women, the veteran character actors are on top form; even the obnoxious Davies and Layton are funny, working well together and milking the script ’til it moos for mercy. A party scene where an out-of-his-element Askwith causes clumsy chaos wherever he goes is particularly strong. Maxine Casson, Suzy Mandel, and Chrissy Iddon provide the eye candy.

Highlight of the comedy sequences is Irene Handl as a wacky old dear who’s failed her driving test 43 times. Her catastrophic driving lesson on a busy high street is audaciously filmed on real streets in daytime, in real traffic, furiously honking buses and all (in the side streets stunt people flee for their lives!). A great sight gag has Handl recognising the road she drove down with Sid, as Askwith’s gaze falls on a car-shaped hole in a fence. This is followed by what must have been quite an expensive stunt sequence to set up, as Handl careens down a motorway the wrong way, destroying vehicles with Corman-esque abandon as she goes.

The award for the sexiest sight gags go to the scene where Askwith and Suzy Mandel slip into a building site storeroom for a quickie, only to have the entire structure lifted skyward as a crowd of delighted workmen cheer the discovery of naked bodies. There are some cheap laughs to be had in the golf course sequence, although Davies’ homophobic ranting is squirmingly outdated, and when Layton’s jealous Bender inadvertently takes some ill-defined form of Danish Viagra, he abducts Davies’ posh daughter (producer’s wife Lynda Bellingham) and hurtles through the traffic with Davies and Askwith in pursuit for more expensive destruction.

There’s also quite a lot of traffic between the Confessions films and its rivals; Lavender, Cleall, Fraser, Handl, Mandell and Regan all appear in various editions of the Adventures series, with Bob Todd and Irene Handl turning up in David Sullivan’s cock-shrinking Come Play With Me.

Faced with taking on a literal reconstruction of the seaside postcard, grim reality overpowers Confessions from a Holiday Camp, the fourth and final entry, which sees the series slip a little. Filmed off-peak in the wet, cold month of March, the film at least tries to explain away the grey skies and wet ground by setting the story at the same time of year it was filmed, but this then begs the question why everyone is trying to pretend that it’s July and laying around on sunbeds. At least the miserable British weather creates a feeling of authenticity, even if it renders the images of long-suffering extras leaping in and out of the pool even more absurd. Why is anyone even there? Profoundly depressing, it captures the dismal British holiday perfectly.

Equally absurdly, Linda Hayden, who played such a key role in Window Cleaner, is now recast as staff member Brigitte, hiding behind a rubbish French accent. This time she bares all, along with Nicola Blackman, Caroline Ellis, Deborah Brayshaw, and in various states of undress, Penny Meredith, Sue Upton, Carrie Jones, and Julia Bond. The storyline has Timmy and Sidney screwing and loafing at the Funfrall Holiday Camp until a bumptious new owner (the abysmal John Junkin, a bit player in the previous entry as an Italian waiter) and his randy wife (Liz Fraser, recreating her landlady from Driving Instructor) turn up to ruin their soft life (“The less we organise, the less we have to do!” explains Sid in Oliver Hardy mode to Timmy’s Laurel).

It speaks volumes about this entry that the funniest scene has nothing to do with the premise, but occurs when the Noggett family turn up at the station, looking for their ride to the camp; inadvertently getting into a funeral cortege, they attempt to engage the occupants (various relatives of Doris Hare) in a rowdy sing-song (“Lost yer bees?” asks Bill Maynard, lifting a veil).

Unfortunately, this is otherwise the weakest in the series, and to make matters worse, there are several grim and dated racial remarks aimed at blacks, Italians, and French and assorted jabs at homosexuals, with Lance Percival giving one of the worst performances as a mincing queen since Richard O’Sullivan tried to unconvincingly camp it up in Can You Keep It Up For a Week? One of the most extraordinary things about the asides made about gays in 1970s films and TV (which were often made not out of hostility or hatred, but nervous amusement at their sudden decriminalised presence in society) is how little understanding or awareness they display of exactly what homosexuals are or do. Remarks made here imply that gay men don’t have sex at all, can’t get it up, and--in an unintentionally funny-for-the-wrong-reasons bit at the custard pie climax during the beauty contest--can choose to be straight. Leaping onto one of the bikini-clad contestants during the closing melee, Percival snaps in his real voice “I’ve given it up!”.

Confessions from a Holiday Camp was in fact the last in the series. Following a brief legal squabble between Columbia and Stanley Long’s seedy independent Salon over who was going to make the plumber’s mate sex-com, Columbia dropped their legal challenge when suits-on-high decreed they pulled out of British production altogether. So after a brief spate of willy-waving, Columbia pulled out (oo-er!) and Salon got stuck in (crikey!).

If you’re not looking for sexual satisfaction, the Confessions films are at least very funny in their infantile way. It's impossible not to laugh at the sheer stupidity of the schoolboy smut and genuinely clever banter of the dialogue. It may be heresy to say this, but in some ways, the Confessions franchise doesn't belong in this book; as comedies they work well, but as sex films they’re rubbish.

On the Outside Looking In (2) : Outcasts and Mavericks

The Four Dimensions of Greta (1972), Escort Girls (1975), Home Before Midnight (1979), The Deadly Females (1976)

If Robin Askwith had been anywhere near Wardour Street in Soho while he was up his ladder peering into windows, he might have seen several other individuals similarly engaged. For every old-time director reluctantly taking on sex films to pay the bills, there was a hungrier, leaner and keener opportunist trying to get the offers they disdained. What kept them on the outside was their attitude. With film-making technology and distribution accessible only to the fortunate few in those pre-digital days, it was the industry’s way or the highway. Both Donovan Winters and Pete Walker knew that sex films were the way in, but they were going to do it their way.

The Four Dimensions of Greta (aka The Three Dimensions of Greta, 1972) is a genuine curiosity. With four flashback sequences filmed in 3-D (hence the two title options for various releases in different territories), this is a British sex film about a journalist searching London’s Soho Klute-style for a missing blonde bimbo who's almost certainly got into hot water with local criminal elements lead by a suitably sleazy and cheesy Alan Curtis as a gambling joint owner and the always welcome Bill Maynard of the Confessions as a strip show proprietor. Also in the cast, acquitting himself well as a typical ‘70s footballer and later the leading man’s sidekick and best bud, is Robin Askwith, previously in Walker’s Cool It, Carol. Watching Askwith in these two relatively similar but straight roles, one can only speculate as to where his career might have gone without the Confessions films on his CV. What is truly bizarre, because there’s no obvious need for it (Greta doesn't appear to be a co-production), is that hero Tristan Rogers is playing a German magazine reporter in London from Berlin, and so he and British sexpots Felicity Devonshire and Jane Cardew as two friends of the girl are all obliged to play the film in their best “For you zer vorr iss ofer” accents, which is just plain weird. In a country that was still simmering over two world wars in 1972, a guy called Hans was a very strange choice for a hero.

But then, go figure Peter Walker, Britain's very own Jess Franco. “I was the uninvited guest to the British film industry” he said. “Nobody wanted to know me. I had to make a living, and I wanted to get behind a camera and shout ‘action’, so I would go out and shoot something like School for Sex. God, that was a terrible film. (But) a few weeks later every cinema in the country would be showing it”.

Scoffing at the idealists wandering around Wardour Street with their unfilmed masterpieces, Walker was still honing his craft when he made Four Dimensions of Greta, as the sloppy editing and lifeless action sequences demonstrate, his high point being a series of notorious and salacious horror films with titles like Die Screaming, Marianne, The Flesh and Blood Show, and the legendary House of Whipcord, highly regarded and respected by horror film enthusiasts. Like most of the directors working in British cinema, he wasn’t that excited about the prospect of putting naked girls on screen, but he was an incurable prude-baiter and button-pusher, which automatically makes everything he did both fun and of sociological, cultural interest (note the matter-of-fact corrupt and clueless police constables in this one). No-one but Walker, then or now, would dare make a film like his brave but dull and dreary Home Before Midnight (1979), which tells the story of a man who unwittingly but carelessly has sex with an under-aged schoolgirl, and then makes some very valid points in the man’s defence without any effort to give equal time to the girl who would normally have the dice loaded in her favor (and does here story-wise when the man goes to prison after she delivers a tearful performance in court). Home Before Midnight dared to say out loud what many knew, which was that although nasty and cowardly sex fantasies about schoolgirls were rife in the ‘70s, it was very common for girls to dress like groupies outside of school, target weak men for adventure, money, or simple self-gratification, and then turn up in court in tunic and pigtails sobbing profusely with purse-lipped parents in tow. You would imagine that Walker was born for the video/DVD generation, but for all his eagerness to get started and resilience in keeping going, he left the film industry as suddenly as he entered it, willingly and without regret.

A novel idea, The Four Dimensions of Greta is mostly of interest for having a good script and some fantastic-looking girls in it; the 3-D sequences are rather badly executed and redundant, with a contradictory Rashomon quality. Partnering Rogers’ Hans is classy and up-for-it fuck buddy Sue, a former girlfriend about to marry for money, and portrayed by the stunning and sophisticated Karen Boyes, who appears in and out of some great outfits and is mesmerisingly beautiful throughout. As well as the aforementioned German girls, portrayed by the very British and very beautiful Felicity Devonshire and Jane Cardew, we have the tall and slim Minah Bird looking her best as stripper Cyn, and the awesome form of Leena Skoog as the mysterious missing au pair Greta, seen mostly in the three-dimensional flashbacks. Completing the roll call of beautiful blondes, we have Erika Raffael (from Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush and Walker’s red paint gangster film Man of Violence) as Hans’ fiancee Karen.

Fellow maverick 1970s sex film director Donovan Winters turned out very downbeat, downmarket films that, in any other genre, would have made him a critic’s darling, or at the very least, an auteur (he wrote and produced as well). Unfortunately for him, his poor man’s Pinter/Bennett/Leigh-style observational character pieces, frank, honest, and openly sexual, but bereft of wit or profundity, did not sit well with the then-current trends in British cinema, and the only way his grim little films could be sold to the public in early 1970s Britain was dishonestly, as sexploitation. Unfortunately, while they had their merits, they were not audience-friendly, and gave sexploitation a bad rep. Today, with the grim shroud of political correctness hanging over them, their spiteful truths are even less welcome, because while the world has changed since the 1970s, people haven’t.

Wisely retitled from the far more appropriate All Lovers are Strangers, which nevertheless sounds misleadingly like a romance novel, Donovan Winters’ Escort Girls (1975) took its subject far more seriously than the come-on title might suggest. Firstly, it’s about escorts in general, not all of them girls. Secondly, it’s openly upfront about the fact that everyone leafing through the ten-by-eights in the agency folder is expecting the evening to end in sex, whatever might be stated to the contrary. Thirdly, that when it comes to fulfilling those expectations, the ball is firmly in the court of the out-of-work actors and assorted opportunists providing the escort service, all of whom have their own agendas.

Like its subversive predecessor, Some Like It Sexy, which subtly defenestrated the sexist ‘60s shagger persona to be one day satirised by the Austin Powers films, Winters’ portrait of the dates-for-hire industry, borderline legalised prostitution for the lonely and desperate, is hardly playing in the same field, or even the same county, as the jolly jokers of the Confessions and Adventures films. With its chilly, near-suicidal Christmas setting, slyly contrasting shots of colored lights, traditional toys, and gifts with cheerful inebriated vagrants and equally brightly lit sex industry outlets (Winters later hammers his point home with a contemptuous condemnation of Christmas cards!), this deliberately despondent and demoralising film follows a section of hopelessly hopeful individuals as they wander the streets of a cold, cruel city looking for companionship in a London famous then and now for not offering it--a virginal and invisible office accountant, two middle-aged businesswomen, an American tourist, two drunken Scottish louts, and a dowdy pet shop worker trying to impress her upmarket, insecure, and openly racist friends. Oblivious to their unpleasantness, she turns up with a handsome black man as her escort, and in an interesting sequence, various party guests imagine him in assorted media stereotypes of the period. Inevitably, some critics saw this as racist in itself, but the party guests are clearly to be despised, and the young man defends himself deftly. Less well handled is the scene where the client reveals herself to be as racist as her friends, and demands sex by saying “rape me”, at which point he pounces on her, a very mixed message given the time period (Winters astutely pointed out in an early ‘90s TV interview with my old pal Allan Bryce that it was actually more difficult to get “fuck me” past the censors!). *

* This is easy to believe; rape was common in ‘70s drama, and trivialised in comedy, but the one thing the censors couldn’t abide was women enjoying sex. It was also a term frequently mis-used, often carelessly meaning ‘take me’ or ‘ravish me’, a dangerous error eagerly corrected by ‘80s feminists.

In two very well-played, brutally honest, and touching scenes, the two middle-aged women humiliate themselves, the American tourist is the victim of a scam, the two drunks end up in the gutter after trying to force themselves on their dates, and the only winner on the customers’ team is the slightly creepy accountant, who clumsily and shyly loses his virginity and returns to the office full of immature over-confidence. The sex scenes, needless to say, are frank, brave, and heartbreakingly and authentically unerotic. This was life for the unwillingly single before the internet, which has brought its own perils and disappointments to the table.

Winters’ films were cast with busy and competent unknowns, the most familiar faces here being the uncharismatic David Dixon, who did much TV including the well-remembered Hitch-Hikers’ Guide to the Galaxy, playing the accountant, and Veronica Doran, the pet shop poseur, who specialised in no-hopers and traffic warden types, most memorably in Adventures of a Private Eye.

Despite being referred to as an original story in the credits, The Deadly Females (1976) is in fact the well-worn gimmick of the female assassin/s, which in spirit dates back to the fear-of-women sci-fi films of the 1950s in which disbelieving astronauts would amaze disbelieving audiences with their discovery of sex-starved or sexually ignorant all-female races in contravention of all biological plausibility. In practice, it dates back less further, to the various secret agent TV series and films of the ‘60s, which frequently featured teams of female assassins, most notably in The Man from UNCLE, The Girl from UNCLE, and The Avengers, as well as In Like Flint and the Matt Helm Slaygirls. It lives on in such films and TV series as Kill Bill, Nikita, Elektra, Baise Moi, and Alias, to name a mere handful off the top of my head.

Once again, Winters’ The Deadly Females is only interesting as an artefact of its period. As a visual record of the 1970s, you couldn’t ask for anything better (Winters is a reluctant editor of his own material, so the smallest activity is seen in delirious retro detail). As a competently organised and structured sex thriller, you couldn’t witness anything much worse. The Deadly Females is a tedious shambles, most harmed, as ever, by Winters’ dark, downbeat, misanthropic views about everyone and everything, and a lack of collaborators to tell him when he’s being over-complicated or unclear, facetious or pretentious (as if almost for posterity, these silly fantasy murders are spliced with inserts of real newspapers headlining completely unrelated real world atrocities, an insult to the victims).

We are given no background or explanation as to why the women are killing people, or how the group got together, who knew whom and from where, just some weak justification about women being even more capable of callousness than men (a curious viewpoint given recorded history... and this was before Thatcher, who admittedly killed 800 boys in a gunboat on a whim). None of the killers have any character traits of any kind, being almost robotic in their evil acts, and they don’t interact with each other except in banal conversations about who should be assigned a job. The frankly misogynist Winters is clearly saying, even if he doesn’t mean to, that the very fact that they are women is justification enough; in his low reckoning of the gender, it’s enough that they are female. The Deadly Females implies nonsensically and absurdly that women are naturally treacherous and untrustworthy, and capable of anything except logic (although interestingly, and almost certainly coincidentally, the film ends in a very similar live-by-the-sword way to the mightily macho Get Carter). However, The Deadly Females will work for either sex, and murder either sex.

Three or four women are shown naked or in bed, or both, but there is little eroticism in their filming, as ever in a British film. There is one excellent shocking and surprising scene of horror when one of the girls ruthlessly and heartlessly commits the film’s second killing, but after 35 minutes of rambling and disjointed dialogue scenes between unconnected characters and assorted plots and sub-plots, it’s been a long time coming. This, perhaps, was the better choice for the opening scene (a good academic exercise for budding editors would be to try to reassemble Winters’ footage into a coherent story structure). The nicest touch is Winters’ brief but detailed visual accounts of the clean-up operation after the killings, always the most important part of any murder, as the women, seeking no satisfaction from outwitting or embarrassing the police (unlike male murderers, who like to leave self-aggrandising, over-confident calling cards in mockery), endeavor to make each death look accidental or suicidal.

With muddy sound and cliched dialogue when audible, Winters’ stilted writing always seems both authentic and artificial at once, as if being drawn out by improvisation, yet always sounding as though it’s being read straight off the page. Overwritten and mundane, it’s most odd. The film’s biggest problem though, comes back to structure, or rather the lack of it. A large array of characters, clients, killers, and victims have all been thrown into the pot, and some (such as the perfectly nice and normal guy killed in the pre-credits sequence) lost in the shuffle. As the film progresses, we jump backwards and forwards and sideways between scenes showing motive and scenes showing murder, without them being linked in any meaningful way. Somewhere in this swirling morass there might have been interesting characters with more detailed stories to tell; the murders themselves are done very well. Everything else, less so.

Although the Confessions and Adventures films weren’t exactly dishonest in their portrait of shabby, sexed-up ‘70s Britain, they certainly occupied a media construct world inhabited by familiar faces and comic situations, and however they might be viewed today by smug and stuffy 21st century audiences gifted with European hardcore and the internet, they were essentially feelgood films that were likely to put their paying audience in the mood for some similar activity at the end of the night. If your date hadn’t been offended by what he or she had seen on the screen, you were pretty much sorted. Those who went to see Winters’ films found to their dismay that they offered only slit-yer-wrists despair and the sort of home truths best not faced at the end of a long day; sexual fantasists would be brought down to Earth with a sobering, dick-shrinking, lust-crushing bump. Winters sold three films (the aforementioned, and Some Like It Sexy, discussed elsewhere) to the public by pretending to be part of the sex film phenomenon, when in fact he did more to crush sexual libidos than Mary Whitehouse and the British Board of Film Censors combined. Thus identified, and not a particularly inspired film-maker to begin with, he was disliked by audience, industry, and critics alike, a defiant and misanthropic loner with marginal but not microscopic talent.

Today, his films are interesting for their honesty and age. Their portrait of an alien world that has been swallowed up by options, intelligence, change, and technology make his films, like Stanley Long’s pre-Adventures of a Taxi Driver efforts, David Sullivan’s curiosities, and dismal one-offs such as Permissive and The Amorous Milkman, an equally fascinatingly dark but more truthful artefact of a lost age otherwise given a fantasy sheen by a complicit media then and now. Also then and now, despite this new inadvertent added value unintended by Winters, they are still depressing for what they say and how they say it. But for anyone remotely interested in a bit of quantum leaping, they should be seen the once.

Yes, But is it Art?

Immoral Tales (1974), The Beast (1975), Private Vices, Public Virtues (1976), Playing With Fire (1975), Successive Slidings of Pleasure (1974)

Not all the mavericks were pacing the streets of Soho.

Polish-born Walerian Borowczyk started out as an animator before making live-action features in the 1970s that became increasingly provocative and controversial in their sexual content. At first he attracted the attention of the critics for his daring, but when the eroticism became central to his work, they turned on him, branding him a pornographer with nothing to say. The jury is still out on the artistic value of his efforts, but no-one can deny the power of the erotic content. Unfortunately, there’s too much sex for the pseuds, and not enough for the punters, and mainstream admiration was further thwarted by the very unconventional subjects and themes that first attracted the poseurs, but who had then been intimidated by sexual content for the sake of it. So there was Val, sitting in the middle, the gooseberry again.

Immoral Tales (aka Contes immoraux, 1974) consists of four individual segments (a fifth, the most extreme, was sensibly removed and would have a feature-length film, the deranged The Beast, built around it), and if the first two are a little slow, this is the only fault that could be found with it. These four sequences are the very dictionary definition of eroticism, and are still a turn-on nearly forty years after they were filmed. The only lingering disappointment is that Borowczyk never made anything anywhere near as good as this again.

In the first story, an unpleasant and arrogant young man (Fabrice Luchini) plots to be at the beach with his attractive younger cousin (Lise Danvers) at precisely the right time to be trapped by the tide, thus enabling him to instigate a perfectly timed blow job. One waits in vain for the pretty young thing to brain this total creep with a large rock, but no, instead all goes to plan. Unfortunately, I suspect I’m imposing Anglo-Saxon values onto a film that’s very French (even though Borowczyk was Hungarian), because a) it’s his cousin for Chrissakes, and b) there’s no comeuppance.

The second story has nothing to offer but the unbelievably lovely Charlotte Alexandra (Goodbye, Emmanuelle). She’s thrown into isolation by religious zealots as punishment for some presumed wrong, and with only herself for company, gets um, a little playful, particularly with some handy courgettes…

Whether any of this appeals to you depends entirely on your personal preferences of course, but technically, it can't be faulted. Sets, composition, and photography are all superb. The third story of the four is without a doubt the most erotic piece of film I’ve ever seen, and still holds top place today. Set in Hungary in the middle ages, it's one of several interpretations of the legend of the Countess Erzsebet Bathory (portrayed here by Paloma Picasso, the daughter of the famous painter); Bathory was the mass murderer who supposedly bathed in the blood of virgins to retain her own personal beauty. Not a turn-on in itself I’m sure you’ll agree, and the scenes of her regally prowling around the countryside and forcibly removing young girls from their villages are quite chilling.

Transported to her castle, we follow a small group of the girls as they are stripped and washed and imprisoned naked in a large cell. Borowczyk cleverly and carefully compares their previous life as we saw it with this new luxurious environment, and in their ignorance, the girls are feeling flattered and pampered. It’s like a medieval health spa. Even naked in their quarters, they pull a hefty table up to the high windows to look out at the other parts of the castle in awe. Eventually, around forty naked girls are gathered in a large grand room, where the Countess taunts them with her wonderful clothes and fabulous jewellery. As the girls compete for the affections of the Countess, they get into a raging cat fight, and in the chaos--this last bit happily not shown, as we fade to red--the girls are cut down, their blood placed in a large tub for the Countess. Bathory’s Page (Pascale Christophe), for reasons not given (bearing in mind she’s an active participant in the grim procedure), informs the authorities, who show up to take the Countess away.

While few of the girls look young enough or innocent enough to be convincing as virgins (one of them--lounging in the master shot at far right, caressing another girl’s hair--is Maria Forsa!), they are all exceptionally beautiful, and in a natural way; there are no fashion model types. The leisurely and visually generous bathing sequences are pleasing enough, but the scene where the girls climb over each other to get up on the table and look out of their cell window is a knockout, and when all forty-plus girls are gathered in the massive bed-chamber to pamper the Countess we are presented with the icing on the cake. Perhaps I’m in the minority, as nothing similar has ever been attempted since, but to my eyes this was quality and quantity, and I could gaze at these beautiful young women scampering around in their birthday suits interminably.

The fourth story features Florence Bellamy as Lucretia Borgia, and is yet another dig at that arch-enemy of the erotic, organised religion, a popular obsession of European cinema where the church still holds sway in some territories (in Britain, slowly but surely during the ‘60s, the church was replaced by the media as the arbiter of moral values). There’s simulated sex in this segment, but this is most assuredly not pornography. Film critic Derek Malcolm put it best in the accompanying DVD documentary, an arch Sight and Sound-y production that displays his writing onscreen briefly, when he stated that Borowczyk is “a real artist, choosing to work on ground where most angels fear to tread and hacks frequently play. Immoral Tales is pure cinema, whatever you may think of its themes”.

Borowczyk never produced anything quite so spectacularly erotic again after this, although 1975’s The Beast raised eyebrows, and the blatantly commercial The Streetwalker in 1976, with Sylvia Kristel, had its moments (no DVD release for this yet). Otherwise, The Story of Sin (1975), Behind Convent Walls (1977), and Three Immoral Women (1979) (the author hasn’t yet seen Lulu, 1980), were as dull as his earlier monochrome Goto, Isle of Love (1969) and period drama Blanche (1971).

Is it Art? continued

A year later, in 1975, the critics were still arguing whether Borowczyk was making art films, sex films, erotica, erotic art films, or arty sex films. The Beast (aka La Bete), the first gothic bukakke porno sex comedy, did not help to clarify matters.

Based on the story Lokis by Prosper Merimee, not to mention Beauty and the Beast, it told of an impoverished French aristocrat’s devious attempt to save the family from impending financial ruin by marrying into money his hirsute idiot son Mathurin (Pierre Benedetti) to naive and unworldly British girl Lucy Broadhurst (Lisabeth Hummell), who has been seduced by a letter-writing campaign. In fact, this oaf can barely write his name.

Arriving at the secluded family home with her chaperone, the first sight she sees is that of horses copulating, a memorable image that will ultimately save her from making a hideous mistake... for the family has a terrible secret (which they display in books and cabinets for all to see), a hereditary genetic disorder that occasionally transforms young men such as Mathurin into beast-men... and Mathurin, being hastily shaved when their coach arrives, is slowly becoming the beast that the sympathetic Marquis (Marcel Dalin) has rather pointedly shown her in the library, along with the ripped and torn corset worn by unfortunate ancestor Romilda de L’Esperance.

Pitifully heavy-handed, but with a magnificently fraught and melodramatic reveal at the end, The Beast opens with an overlong and very explicit sequence of two horses having sex, just in case we don’t make the animal penis connection later. As this will be equally graphic, albeit functionally prosthetic, I suspect we will. The story, such as it is, meanders about all over the place, the characters wandering about aimlessly waiting for the big (ahem) climax, which (featuring Sirpa Lane as ancestor Romilda) was initially produced as part of Borowczyk’s superb Immoral Tales, but was happily omitted and turned into this separate film, the rest of the footage being belatedly built around it. In this last twenty minutes or so, the film becomes quite hysterical in both senses of the word, as do the actors, as a short film with Lane becomes a dream sequence as Lucy masturbates on the bed, provoked by her earlier glimpses of the horses and the family keepsakes.

Like the crowd that witnesses an appalling accident or violent crime, various audiences seem to have seen something different when identifying the beast, but by employing the wonder of the freeze-frame facility I see no rat or wolf, and I'm saying bear, bear with a big dick. Big dick. Big. I would have liked to see a tie on him, like Yogi Bear, or the Cookie Bear from The Andy Williams Show. Maybe sexy Sirpa Lane and the bear could have run around the woods to The Benny Hill Show theme. If the British censors hadn’t been so terror-stricken as to ban it for twenty-five years (it had a brief run in London), television satire was bright enough back in the day that we might have seen it come true

.

In all seriousness, one wonders if Borowczyk split The Beast from Immoral Tales to save that film, and then get this one banned for career-boosting purposes. Not satisfied with feigned bestiality and graphically explicit animal sex between horses, he threw in masturbation and inter-racial sex (both still a big deal in those days), rape, enjoying rape, criticism of the church (a paedophile priest and his two young aides), a guy with a devil’s tail, erotic art, and a truck-load of monster spunk. I genuinely wonder if he ever intended this film to be seen outside of film festivals at all.

The girls are beautiful, but visually the film is often graphically, and unnecessarily disgusting; audiences may well laugh defensively, turn away from the screen, or screw their noses up--I know I did. It’s possible that this film may have been made specifically to kill Mary Whitehouse (although Whitehouse famously never watched any of the productions she tried to stamp on). Scenes of Sirpa Lane tit-wanking the bear after it rapes her, finishing the job with her feet, and then smearing the ejaculate all over her breasts would have made interesting conversation points after the funeral.

“Discovered” by Roger Vadim of Barbarella notoriety, Sirpa Lane (above) had already acquired a reputation for appearing in dubious films, having recently taken the lead in Vadim’s auto-asphyxiation fantasy La jeune fille assassinee, aka Charlotte. After The Beast, she fared no better at avoiding controversial junk, showing up in such offensive drivel as Nazi Love Camp 27 (because those Nazis were so about love), Love Goddess of the Cannibals for Joe D’Amato, and The Secret Nights of Lucrezia Borgia. She was practically the poster girl for bad choices.

Former fashion model Lisabeth Hummell (above) took the lead in four films for admirer Luigi Russo over the next ten years, but little else. She has that upper class bad girl look about her (it’s in the eyes), and spends the first half of the film firmly clothed, so when she does eventually strip naked, it’s a pleasant surprise. The other skin is provided by tall young brunette Pascale Rivault as the would-be future sister-in-law, who--in a running joke in the film--keeps creeping off to suffer coitus interruptus with the manservant, with much scurrying around getting dressed involved, and even a hiding-in-the-wardrobe moment. It’s not a British film, so there’s no trombone and flute music; it’s all played amusingly straight, which is why it’s funny. All three girls have a natural beauty that adequately provides this mish-mash with its erotic moments.

By the 1980s, it was clear that Borowczyk was never going to surpass his ‘70s work, and nothing confirmed it more than The Art of Love (aka Ars amandi, 1983), his shambolic Ancient Roman film. It’s sumptuously decorated and photographed (although oddly with a hand-held camera in parts), but despite the occasional erotic frisson, quite boring and five years too late for the Claudius/Caligula fad. Narrated by Massimo Girotti as Ovide, and featuring the shapely but unspectacular Marina Pierro, it scatters moments of genius amongst others of utter tedium. The so-called lost Roman orgy footage is particularly lame, and a quick flash of several naked girls abysmally shot when compared with some of his other work. It also didn’t help that it turned up well after the sex-in-togas trend was done and dusted, and was saddled with the oldest surprise ending in the book.

As Borowczyk gave me Immoral Tales, I’ll forgive him anything, but I have to say that the rest of his output is pushing his luck, a disappointment every time. I think it’s the occasional flash of utter brilliance (the Roman soldiers forging ahead through the snow, for example) that makes the rest of his erratic erotica so infuriating. He passed away in 2006, so that’s all, folks.

Cut from the same cloth as Borowczyk, and suffering the same fate with the critics, Miklos Jansco was a Hungarian director who started out making political films with a tiny bit of sex and nudity in them (socialist wet dream Red Psalm has three naked peasant girls in it for no good reason whatsoever; a naked girl is made an example of and whipped to death in the sombre and heavy-going The Round Up), and then presumably woke up one day and realised what all thinking people eventually do--that political posturing is ultimately pointless, the world is the way it is because this is how the silly bastards want it, and life is too short for this shit.

At that point, he changed tack, reversed, and started making films with sex and nudity in them and just a tiny bit of politics. This lost him the respect and admiration of the intellectual contingent, but unless you’re desperate for the ponderous accolades of boring men and loud women, it was no great loss. It was the mid-‘70s, and the era of Emmanuelle, Immoral Tales, and Last Tango in Paris. There was no sex on TV, no videos or DVDs, and so, despite being sensible and sensuous, Private Vices and Public Virtues (aka Vizi privati, pubbliche virtu, 1976) played on the mainstream movie screens more often showing Confessions films rather than the arthouses, and despite the subject matter, was remarkably successful.

Nevertheless, despite dutifully killing off his sexually adventurous and liberated women, as the arthouse market, in unlikely solidarity with the splatterfilm audience, seems to demand, Jansco found himself--like compatriot Borowczyk following the achingly erotic Immoral Tales--branded a soft porn director, and his career suffered for it.

The plot of Private Vices is simple and straightforward. In an unidentified European country of the sort found in fairytales (it’s said to be loosely based on the Meyerling incident), the free-spirited, hedonistic son of the uptight and conservative Emperor is entertaining his flighty and rebellious friends at a country mansion in suicidal defiance of propriety. Wild parties and sex orgies are held, with the Dauphin’s bare-breasted consort spiking the drinks to release the visiting guests’ inhibitions (achieved spectacularly).

We can see from the Emperor’s stern visaged-portrait (spat on by the guests) that he is not the sort to be tolerant, forgiving, or amused. Inevitably, soldiers arrive, and are humiliated and mocked. The Dauphin and his three friends (one, a hermaphrodite, played by Caligula’s Theresa Ann Savoy) appear to have a death wish, and ultimately orders are given from on high, and their nihilistic ambitions are realised. As they lie exhausted from a marathon sex session underneath their sheets, a firing squad of assassins fills their spent bodies with bullets, and the revellers are forlornly rounded up.

The suicidal self-destructive motivation for this deliberately provoked execution is never explored or explained--are they blissfully, fatally naive, or seeking martyrdom to make a childish political point?--but the Duke’s response is grimly predictable and inevitable. Only Laura Betti’s chubby, motherly personal maid to the Dauphin seems to bitterly realise what will surely come to pass.

Private Vices has an intelligent point to make, and it makes it honestly, straightforwardly and poignantly without either fanfare, hysteria, or melodrama, but in all truth, it’s mostly about the hedonistic voyeuristic visual delights on offer. These delights are innocently youthful and bohemian, rather than--as in Salo, Immoral Tales and Caligula at around the same time--corrupt and perverse. The Dauphin and his friends may mock the hapless soldiers sent to study and report their indiscretions, but their decadence has not resulted in corruption or spite. There are no fights, jealousies, or sexual assaults. The party-goers, even those duped and drugged, have nothing to be ashamed of, and everyone is shown to be having a fine old time.

Jansco gave interviews to promote the film where he spoke of the film’s political message, but frankly, what political thoughts there are, are trite and obvious. Yes, the Duke’s regime is clearly oppressive and repressive, but the Dauphin and his friends could have enjoyed themselves equally well with discretion, and lived to see their beautiful bodies sag a little with old age.

Knowing the vicious and pragmatic old bastard for what he is, they give this political animal little room for imagination or manoeuvre, even if he had been capable or desirous of it. The Kamikaze Bacchanalians must have realised the inevitable outcome, and it is here that the film fails to explain. Also, in the case of the incident that inspired the film (the murder of the heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian empire and his lover, passed off unconvincingly as a double suicide), there is apparently much doubt that the Duke did it.

Is it Art? concluded

Consequently, regardless of any supposed political posturing or pontificating, this film is about straightforwardly and appealingly recording and enjoying the Dauphin’s excesses, and this is why Jansco took the heat from those who had enjoyed his earlier films. Three quarters of Private Vices and Public Virtues is purely about showing the good time had by all, with the consequences of antagonising the fascist purseholder tacked on at the end.

As the Dauphin, Lajos Balazovits spends more than half the film naked, while Pamela Villoresi, looking like a 19th century supermodel as his consort Sofia, is mostly seen at the very least bare-breasted, as are her equally beautiful handmaidens seen in various states of undress. Franco Brancioroli--who went on to roles in several Tinto Brass movies, including his scuzzy portrayals of sleazy seducers in All Ladies Do It and The Key--is likeable as the Duke, and Theresa Ann Savoy, as the hermaphrodite Mary, is as stunningly attractive and photogenic as she was in Caligula, even with a tiny dick between her legs which at one point discreetly does the business (yuk!).

Unlike a lot of films where the director gets a young and attractive cast to take their clothes off, and the audience is left with the distinct feeling that the cast and crew had more fun than they did, Jansco actually remembers to film the bodies (at least in the outdoors scenes), and his long, fluid takes give the viewer the time and space to enjoy the action. In short, he thinks about what the audience wants to see. In the wild, spirited, semi-naked, semi-clothed garden waltz after the drinks are spiked, Jansco’s cameras lasciviously follow the bobbing breasts and pretty pink buns of the most naked of the revellers.

He also, unlike the British and Americans in general, sees the human body as something beautiful, rather than hilarious and potentially ugly, and makes the effort to film it so. There is no American-style coyness in the shooting or performing, no British-style let’s-get-this-over-and-have-some-tea, no suggestion or implication that the players are being “naughty”. Watching British offerings from this era illustrates perfectly why there was such a tolerant market for foreign or “art” films in the otherwise insular Britain of the 1970s. If there’s an unattractive angle for a good-looking body to be filmed, or a flaw to highlight, or a dismal set or location available, the British sex film director will find it and film it in the most unflattering way possible. It’s quite extraordinary how little thought goes into the presentation of the bodies, the lighting, or placing of the camera for the maximum result. This was surely why the films of Bertolucci, Borowczyk, and Jansco et al, even Jaeckin and the laughable and disturbing David Hamilton, were so popular in the 1970s. Jansco films his best sequences outdoors, and although his indoor cameras are perhaps too close, he puts his camera where the viewer’s eye wants to be--a minimum requirement, you might think, but again, it’s surprising how many directors don’t seem to have the eye for it.

Equally, Jansco has ensured that there is little prude-baiting, and there is--amusingly--nothing for the censors to legitimately complain about. Unlike the other films of the period mentioned above, there are no weird, excessive, or provocative sex acts to fluster the green crayon and scissors brigade--although there are some luckless chickens that are used for purposes alien to Colonel Sanders (I hope).

Given the prestige, finance, good fortune and respect to make wonderful films on a par with Bertolucci or Borowczyk, it's one of the great tragedies of 20th century cinema that the writer and film-maker Alain Robbe-Grillet chose instead intellectual masturbation. Even actual masturbation, in the form of stylish porn, would be preferable to the series of damp squibs he tried to fire up after being painted into a corner by the poseurs who praised his monochrome surrealist success Last Year at Marienbad. Better to go the Tinto Brass route and indulge his obsessions and fetishes frankly and full-on, rather than the shabby pretensions of the obscure genius with something profound to say to those flattered enough to ‘get it’.

Here was a man who secured the services of Jean-Louis Trintignant and Philippe Noiret as his leading men, acquired permission to film in the Palais Garnier in Paris, and gathered together a definitive dream team of feminine beauty of the 1970s, and then presented the audience with Playing With Fire (aka Le jeu avec le feu, 1975). An anarchist? A subversive? No. Just a phoney with a few ideas he was unable to properly develop into anything anyone would want to see. Unable to construct a workable story, he “played with time and reality”... but Roeg and Rivette, with Performance, Don’t Look Now, and Celine and Julie Go Boating, even Tarantino with Pulp Fiction, played with time and reality, and provided a coherent and stimulating story. And yet what is there is so promising, as well as so half-hearted and self-indulgent.

Robbe-Grillet repeatedly secured the professional craftsmen, and undoubtedly had the ability, to produce at the very least a string of intriguing erotic mysteries, and instead threw it back in the faces of the audience to the point where even the majority of pseuds had given up on him. Each time, more shoes, more cars, more mystery men, mysterious women, more paintings, more photographs, more fladge, but every time, the cupboard was bare. Too proud to hire a writer or collaborate, he plundered the books and paintings of the dead in thinly veiled homage, and then dropped in the sex and nudity as all good artists must.

Businessman Georges de Saxe (Noiret) receives word that his daughter Caroline (Anicee Alvina from Robbe-Grillet’s previous Successive Slidings of Pleasure) has become the latest kidnap victim of white slavers who have been abducting women off the street to perform in sadistic sexual tableaus in an upmarket brothel... but de Saxe appears to not only frequent the den of inequity, but possibly run it, perhaps even own it. His daughter may even be complicit, although it rapidly becomes clear that she is being held against her will. She escapes, she is brought back. She wanders around the home of the French Opera, peering into rooms to witness erotic scenes, while scattered throughout are chronologically out-of-synch clips showing how the participants were abducted.

Vague, isn't it? All these allusions to possibly, perhaps, and maybe, are, of course, the calling cards of Robbe-Grillet, to whom plot, storytelling, imparting information and establishing facts mean nothing but an excuse to mention something, sometime, that may or may not contradict something else already shown. And a little surrealism couldn’t hurt either, so lets put Alvina in army boots and have her on parade with militia who otherwise play no other part in the proceedings.

As with all such intellectual indulgences, the viewer must take as much as he or she is able from the experience, if one considers it worth the time. With story and reason abandoned, that leaves us with visuals and mood, and Robbe-Grillet is very good with visuals. One doesn't get bored looking at his films, one just gets impatient (particularly when, like all bad film-makers lost for an ending, he resorts to the frantic comedy car chase). Gifted one of the greatest cast lists of the 1970s for an erotic film, Robbe-Grillet gives us the art film equivalent of What’s Up, Superdoc.

To soothe our anger and disappointment on this occasion we have perhaps the most extraordinary line-up of feminine beauty ever assembled in one film--the aforementioned Anicee Alvina as the leading lady, accompanied by all-too-brief but nevertheless appealing contributions from kittenish Italian sex film starlet Agostina Belli as the nosey maid, Sylvia Kristel and Christine Boisson from Emmanuelle as kidnap victims, French soft-core starlet Nathalie Zeiger (Seven Women for Satan) as the girl chased by the dogs, and Jean Rollin regular Joelle Coeur of Demoniacs and others (with big flower and later in bridal gown) and Sylvie Olivier from Story of O as captives in the brothel. The significance of the title becomes clear at the end, but little else makes sense. Is it worth watching? With that line-up, of course it is. But think what it could have been.

The aforementioned Successive Slidings of Pleasure (aka Glissements progressifs du plaisir, 1974) which preceded it is also supremely erotic, but a dull and stupid film with fabulous photography and two dazzlingly attractive leading ladies who have since sadly left us too soon, their beauty preserved here for posterity. With a title as nonsensical as the content of the film, an inconsequential and irrelevant murder inquiry, this Robbe-Grillet slab of pretentiousness again relied on the allure of eye candy, unusual composed shots of often naked young girls alternating with the arty weirdness of the offbeat Anicee Alvina, who also spends much of the film gratifyingly naked, a highlight being a solo riff on smartass performance artist Yves Klein’s Anthropometry, with red paint instead of blue.

Klein, who used naked girls as paintbrushes and pulled every trick in the book on the gullible from silent symphonies to empty art galleries, is in good company with Alain Robbe-Grillet. As the title indicates, this is more surrealist nonsense for the chin-strokers, but there are some extraordinary images worth seeing, some but not all revolving around Robbe-Grillet’s usual obsession with sex, pain, and pleasure. You may accuse me of stroking other parts, but as no two people have ever offered the same interpretation of the film’s events (which may or may not have happened and frequently contradict each other), I think my comments are fair. In fact, I would even go so far as to say that anyone who says they’re viewing Robbe-Grillet’s images for anything other than the sexual content is a fucking liar.

Nevertheless, Robbe-Grillet could always reel in a cast along with the critics. As well as securing the talents of such names as Michael Lonsdale and Jean-Louis Trintignant, a very young Isabelle Huppert can be glimpsed in the scene on the beach, if you don’t blink.

Strange Old World : Bad Attitudes Die Hard (2)

Super Vixens (1975), Up! (1976), Beneath the Valley of the Ultravixens (1979), Switchblade Sisters (1975), Thriller (1974), Sexy Girls of Denmark (1973), The Mini-Skirt Gang (1974), Swedish Wildcats (1974), What the Swedish Butler Saw (1979)

Some film-makers were a little more honest and upfront about their interests and ambition. Following the disappointing box-office of his previous two mainstream films, The Seven Minutes and Blacksnake!, Russ Meyer went back to independent production and what he knew with a vengeance, gathering together a whole new raft of strippers and bimbos and the usual suspects he could rely on--Haji, Uschi, Stuart Lancaster, Garth Pillsbury, and as many of the good old boys behind the scenes as possible. He also returned to the subject matter he knew best--impotent and/or exhausted men and insatiable, aggressive, and sharp-tongued, big breasted women. If Vixen had made money, he reasoned, here come... the Super Vixens!

Curiously, he also returned to the style of the one film that hadn’t made any money--Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! However, there was a rationale in this. In the ten years since it had been made, the film had been discovered by a new audience for Meyer’s films beyond the grindhouses—college kids, cult film buffs, and even a few critics (spurred on by the unlikely accolades of John Waters), and was now enjoying modest success as a campy cult classic.

That it was campy, there was no doubt; as ever, Meyer had been quick to spot trends in the movies and joined the throng of the mid-‘60s. However, camp was a false dawn, all but dead by the end of 1967, leaving numerous film and television casualties in its wake, and Pussycat! had bombed so badly Meyer had been forced to make a tits-out-for-the-boys bimbo quickie--the demented Mondo Topless--to replenish the bank balance. How campy Meyer’s subsequent--and indeed earlier--films had intended to be is still hotly debated, and the jury’s still out. Meyer certainly had a sense of humor, and indulged it in his films, but it was broad, lowbrow stuff hammered home with music cues, heavy-handed Hitler gags and the like, and some of his funniest scenes may not have been intended that way, more self-deprecating than particularly uproarious. Any jokes in the dialogue undoubtedly came from scriptwriters Jack Moran or, writing under a variety of pseudonyms, U.S. film critic Roger Ebert, and they are sorely missed when absent, as Finders, Keepers, for example, demonstrates.

“As a director, I don’t think he really knows what he’s doing when he does it” said Vixen’s Erica Gavin in the 1975 Peary interview. “He knows how to make a low-budget film quickly. He’s a good editor, I think. He’s great at shooting that slick look, having colors very good, the light very bright, with no muted tones and everything looking sharp. He doesn’t set out to make campy films. To him, they’re all serious. The reviews come out saying it’s camp and he goes along with them, yes, it’s all camp, it’s a big joke. That’s bullshit. He’s just still back in the ‘60s”.

Actually, Meyer had never left the ‘40s. There was also no doubt that a combination of changing times, encroaching old age, and his disastrous marriage to starlet Edy Williams was bringing out some of the bitterness in the misogynist old bully. Few failed to notice the increased violence and sadism that Meyer would put into his last three films, deliberately over-the-top though they were, all of it directed at women, and occasionally and intriguingly, at gays. Meyer may have taken his 1960s color melodramas more seriously than he would later admit, but now he was clearly venting his rage at women in general, and had stated as much to his writers and Super Vixens’ leading man Charles Napier, previously in Cherry, Harry, and Raquel. Fortunately, these films were so wonderfully ridiculous, and so in tune with the then-prevalent trends in cinema toward violence and envelope-pushing, that despite the dated campiness, they were contemporary (aside of blatantly gay entertainers fresh out of the closet, only Russ Meyer and Roger Moore’s Bond films were still doing camp in the ‘70s). The violence brought Meyer up to speed with the rest of Hollywood at that time, where Peckinpah, Scorsese, and others had raised the bar, and although credited to Meyer, other hands, such as former Meyer scriptwriters Jack Ryan and Roger Ebert, had doctored the finished script. Also new was the swearing, another concession to changing times (or perhaps Meyer was just that angry), and a bizarre brief shot of a ridiculously long prosthetic penis (limp--of course).

Super Vixens (1975) is great fun, and there’s never a dull moment, from the opening seduction at a gas station (apparently run by missing Nazi war criminal Martin Bormann, looking surprisingly fit) by Super Lorna (the stunning one-shot Christy Harburg, who drives off never to be seen again) to the subsequent al fresco knock-down and drag-out domestic that follows between heroic young everyman lead Clint Ramsey (Charles Pitts) and bad acting bombshell Shari Eubanks as his Edy-ish live-in girlfriend Super Angel (“a man-eating shrew of incredible proportions... the embodiment of evil, malice, and all castration anxieties” writes T.K. McMahon in Take One magazine), clad only in a very small, yet loose fitting black negligee. As is no doubt already apparent, all the female cast members--rather pleasingly without any explanation or justification--have the pre-fix Super in front of their names, seven in all, some of which are clearly indulgently self-referential to Meyer’s previous hits (and misses). “We’d bring one in every reel”, said Meyer, “like a linebacker. And I think it really works. You don’t have time to grow tired of one girl”. Tactful, Russ...

Gone are the melodramatic, complicated soap-opera storylines and pulp magazine plots of his late ‘60s efforts, along with any attempt to tell a tale with beginning, middle, or end; this is pure freewheeling pap, a premise, camp comedy and cartoon violence with tits... and now simulated sex as well. Russ still didn’t like it--he dished it out in quick-cut blink-and-miss edits--but he seemed to realise that it was a necessity of the times. “Brando, an Oscar winner, putting butter up some broad’s ass…” he is quoted as lamenting straight-faced in McDonough’s biography. “It’s hard to compete with that”.

The question was: in 1975, who was it for? Super Vixens was probably too camp, contemporary and near-the-knuckle for the traditionalists, the ex-army boys and hardhats Meyer identified with, too dated and reactionary in its attitudes for the college crowd, and redundant for the raincoat brigade now being treated to the hardcore of Damiano, Reems, and Lovelace. By the time of Super Vixens, Russ was listening to his admirers, the fad followers, and the critics more than he was listening to his gut instincts--but it was his gut that had greenlighted the back catalogue they were now applauding. Then again, his gut was out of date now anyway, and his films were anachronisms; the same writers who had feted him were now lining up to say he was past it, repeating himself, a dinosaur. Once the faddists had moved on to the next thing, the remaining audience watching just for the tits, was not--in the decade of Deep Throat and Charlie’s Angels--enough to “put asses on seats”, as Meyer so charmingly put it. And butter and Brando or no, Meyer’s knowledge of sex had not progressed much further than drooling over tits and pounding away, in spite of the efforts of Harry Reems and Emmanuelle; when Eubanks slides downwards in Super Vixens, Napier is obliged to lift his head from the pillow and tell her to “knock that queer shit off!”. There was no indication that this was intended to be parodic or satiric. This was an extraordinary view to hold in 1975, but Meyer was still locked into 1945, at which time I suspect he still held, let’s say, a minority opinion.

Written mostly by Meyer himself, still seething at the end result of his relationship with Edy Williams, Super Vixens, for all its delights, is a grim insight into Meyer’s ignorant, mean-spirited, and misanthropic mind. Although young Clint is blameless, and all the discord has been the result of Super Lorna’s wanton behavior, Eubanks’ Super Angel smashes up his truck with an axe (just as Edy was known to have set about their own vehicles for vengeance), and in the resulting melee, sadistic cop Harry Sledge (Napier) concusses and awakens him with cold water, arrests him, warns him off in no uncertain terms, and then moves in! Drowning his sorrows in a bar, Clint is consoled by barmaid Super Haji (still desirable in a virtually invisible bikini and noticeably ten years on from Motor Psycho and Pussycat!), who he spitefully snubs.

After this relatively minor-in-comparison act of cold cruelty, comes the scene that shocked even Meyer’s friends and associates. Super Vixen Eubanks, looking like a ‘40s floozie, takes Napier to bed, but--as is often the case in a Meyer film--he can’t get it up. Angry and disappointed, she spitefully laughs in his face, alternating between mockery and disgust that she discarded her young stud for him. After several relentless minutes of this, he flies into a rage and punches her violently in the stomach, and between them, they destroy her apartment throwing the contents at each other. As the tables turn, Eubanks, now terrified and bleeding, locks herself in the bathroom, and believing herself relatively safe, starts shimmying nonchalantly around and running a bath while Napier furiously tries to break the door down to the sound of more unending verbal abuse about her disappointment and his inadequacy. Horrified again when he eventually does break in, she is stabbed, pushed under the water, half-drowned, stamped on in the tub, and then--absurdly still conscious--electrocuted when Napier throws a radio into the blood-red bathwater and leaves as the house burns down. The whole sequence is insanely over the top, and very uncomfortable to watch as the stamping goes on much too long for the scene to be either credible, or amusing. Suddenly, Meyer wasn’t so funny.

Audience responses to this over the years have ranged from ahh shaddup, she haddit comin’, to goodness gracious, let’s ban everything... In the face of such contemporary supposedly meaningful misogyny as A Clockwork Orange or Straw Dogs, it’s pretty tame and unconvincing stuff, simply crass bad taste black humor. Connoisseurs of extreme silliness will laugh at the stupidity of it, but wince in the process. Like the mass slaughter at the end of The Wild Bunch, it is so extreme and relentless that one finds oneself getting past the horror and laughing at the excess. But choking the laughter, as Napier chokes Eubanks, is the realisation that Meyer is fantasising about what he’d really like to do to all his empowered, big-breasted bimbos. The angry man had gotten angrier.

Framed for the murder he didn’t commit, Junior heads for the open road like a Hulk-free David Banner, and the film becomes The Fugitive with big tits and dynamite, Quinn Martin meets Robert Crumb and Tex Avery. A series of amusing and highly entertaining set pieces follow, with Clint hitching a lift from a couple of thieving, violent, sex-obsessed swingers (Beyond the Valley of the Dolls’ John La Zar and prolific porn actress and bit-player Sharon Kelly as Super Cherry), who, having failed to seduce him, beat him up and steal his wallet.

Rescued by friendly farmer Stuart Lancaster, Clint is amused to find the genial fellow amply catered for by the busty, lusty Super Uschi Digard, an uninhibited and insatiable Teutonic mail-order bride, only to be alarmed when she tries to jump him, first in his room, and then in the barn where they are discovered by the broken-hearted and betrayed man of the land--who then slaps her around, places an order for breakfast (“Jawohl, mein herr” salutes Uschi, prone in the hay), and chases Clint off his land with a pitchfork. Set-ups showing Clint hard at work on the farm in happier hours, earning his keep while in the background, Lancaster and Digard romp and screw al fresco are among Meyer’s finest moments. The theme throughout is that every woman Clint encounters is a sex-crazed betrayer, every man desperate to be faithful and trusting against the odds, even while treating the girl like dirt; even Haji, having been cruelly and publicly insulted by Clint after offering sympathy, refuses to confirm his airtight alibi for his whereabouts (he was in her bar) during the murder and arson that sends him fleeing for his freedom.

More frivolity follows when Clint encounters mute, bikini-clad Super Eula (Deborah McGuire), who he ill-advisedly takes into the mountains for a topless drive in a dune buggy, inevitably pursued by her irate father (curiously white, while she is pure African-American in appearance) and the local sheriff. Way to not attract attention (and this after emphatically turning down and pushing away Haji, Cherry, and Uschi, Brit-com style).

Finally, Clint finds himself at a service station, where he befriends and falls for Super Vixen, a sweet and charming version of the sarcastically named Super Angel also portrayed by Eubanks. There's a fraught and far too long surrealistic Road Runner-style showdown in the mountains with Napier’s cop relentlessly tormenting Eubanks (once again displaying Meyer’s dark side), who blows himself up Looney Tunes-style after trying to dispatch our young lovers in a decidedly non-family-friendly manner (Clint dumped unconscious on top of the screaming Eubanks with a stick of dynamite wedged in his butt-cheeks). Our happy couple frolic naked into the end credits... but most bare is Russ Meyer’s soul.

For all the abuse Edy Williams undoubtedly gave to, and took from Meyer, she understood him and his films perfectly. While Meyer, at the same interview, was rambling on about making horror films, that the sex film was dead, and fishing for the compliments and opinions of the critics, Edy told Maureen Koch of Inter/View magazine that “He wants to be accepted, but I believe that what he will finally be accepted for is staying himself. The establishment puts down things that challenge it, but will respect it if it’s finally successful. There are plenty of sex films around that no-one goes to. Russ’ style really delights and amuses audiences... it’s a wild, comic-strip-type action that entertains everyone”.

Up!, which followed in 1976, was more neanderthal rubbish, although Raven De La Croix, despite being dubbed in a silly Mae West voice, was a real find. With Up!, it is easy to see the influence 1970s trends were having on Meyer--the in-your-face tits are now accompanied by in-your-face genitals, although Meyer still favored naked romps through the wilderness, curves, and bouncing flesh. 1970s hardcore porn had a most peculiar obsession with gynaecological detail, almost as if it couldn’t believe such things as sex organs existed, or that filming them was allowed--which, until recently, it hadn’t been; today, it looks absurdly immature. Softcore, in comparison, could be erotic, rather than explicit, more concerned with the beauty of the female form rather than a full-screen close-up of a semi-erect sausage being clumsily stuffed into an unkempt vagina. Meyer’s films sat uncomfortably between the two; lusty rather than romantic, as blunt, raunchy and unsubtle as hardcore, but with a coy, comedic Benny Hill touch and a camera at a respectful and more visually attractive distance. Meyer’s biggest problem, although it has since given his films their universal longevity, was that even including more sexual action didn’t permit him to compete with the unglamorous and unattractive hardcore porn of the period he understandably detested. While still cartoonish, the violence was still present, and still in poor taste, and Meyer also tried to accommodate kinky sex, although with a camp sensibility. His heart clearly wasn’t in the bondage, which he justifiably portrayed as absurd, although the scenes of violence involved the usual latitude from the long-suffering actresses, particularly the tolerant De La Croix (below), who found her film debut consisted of being half-drowned, run ragged through nettles, and aggressively manhandled.

Up! is brazenly padded out with a badly dubbed Kitten Natavidad (below), Meyer’s latest photographic find and bedmate, as a sort of Greek chorus, thus allowing Meyer to repeat clips of the footage we had just seen, while she drew perverse and irrelevant conclusions from the random mayhem, most of which was tasteless comedy revolving around an aged and still living Hitler (who gets whipped, anally raped, and eaten by piranhas) and disjointed outdoor sex scenes (De La Croix notes ruefully that some of the more extravagantly exotic positions inserted with hers are in fact the bobbing head and splayed legs of a supporting actress!). The nominal plot concerns an irrelevant murder story which resolves itself absurdly.

Despite promising The Jaws of Vixen (“She’ll eat you alive!”) as his next magnum opus, Meyer missed the mid-‘70s shark boat, and Beyond the Valley of the Ultravixens would be Meyer’s final film, the 1979 date seeming sadly appropriate. The ‘80s were on the way with a vengeance, and the Meyerlithic age was over; the ice age was coming, and Russ Meyer and Ronald Reagan would have been a bad match, as would AIDS and Meyer’s homophobia. Apart from the truly astonishing body of Kitten Natavidad, a human Thunderbird 2 that looked fantastic from all angles and was capable of carrying anything, the film was a carnival of grotesques, bereft of the excessive violence (excusing a couple of gruesome gags and an appalling bit of business with a lightbulb) and consisting mostly of energetic simulated sex between the new Mrs. Meyer and a face-pulling entourage of terrified men.

The storyline concerns the leading character’s obsession with anal sex, and wife Natividad’s desire for traditional satisfaction from others if not him. “Get your pussy out of my face, I’m American!” cries one of her victims, and as a variety of sad sacks expire spitting blue, green, or yellow colored blood, only his spits red. Both boring and interesting at the same time, the highlight is an embarrassing guilty pleasure in a dentist’s office, with the gay dentist trying to petulantly retrieve the leading man (Ken Kerr) from a closet with crowbar, shotgun, and chainsaw, while his sexy nurse (apparently the shapely ‘70s schlock queen Sharon Cecatti of Dawn of the Dead and Hellraiser III, working under the name Sharon Hill) gives Natavidad a seeing to. Giving unintended closure to the Meyer canon, the film is narrated by Stuart Lancaster as the farmer from Super Vixens, with wife Uschi and Meyer himself putting in cameos as the film blunders to an end.

During his brief career (essentially between 1965 and 1975), fellow porn director turned cult icon Jack Hill made a handful of okay exploitation films for various producers, including The Big Doll House, The Big Bird Cage, Coffy, Foxy Brown, and The Swinging Cheerleaders. Less impressive is Hill’s white girls movie Switchblade Sisters (aka The Jezebels, 1975), an ultimately disappointing but highly regarded exploitation film which unfortunately isn’t as good as its reputation suggests it should be. Like Jack Arnold and Don Siegel before him, Hill has been seized upon by the sort of film buffs who look for intentions that were never there and then try to impose them retroactively on the finished product, judging them favorably by contemporary standards they never aspired to. The difference with Hill is that whereas Arnold and Siegel revelled in the attention and milked it for all it was worth, the more modest Hill--having left the business--was happy to deny these exaggerated readings of his work when interviewed, pointing out repeatedly that his efforts were simply products of their time.

Switchblade Sisters, which could and should have been a trash classic, has three major handicaps, even for trash. Firstly, there’s way too much bad acting, even for an exploitation film. Secondly, there’s no sex or nudity whatsoever. Third, it’s brain dead anti-social crap that tries to win the audience over with a fraudulent Robin Hood mentality that doesn’t wash for a minute. Consequently, trying to read Switchblade Sisters as some kind of tribute to female empowerment (which makes behavior considered reprehensible when perpetrated by men somehow tolerable from women), while simultaneously coping with the film’s deference to men, stridently defensive heterosexuality, unsisterly woman-on-woman violence (catfights to you and me), and the classic rape-to-romance cliche, leaves over-excited pundits spinning in circles like a dog chasing its tail. With Hill’s work, such revisionist critics also had the awkward problem of making excuses for some of the not very politically correct content that didn’t fit the academic interpretation desired, something else Hill--always faintly bemused by the attention--also never encouraged. Suddenly, victims of intimidation (the repo man), persecution (the not very overweight Donut), and collateral damage (the skating rink casualties) become legitimate sacrifices to right-on sexual politics.

In order to affirm faddish prejudices of the moment, things which Hill never gave much consideration to have been invested with enormous significance, honest opinions are defined as irony, and sly jokes carelessly slipped in are taken seriously. Hill, bless him, will have none of it (see Calum Waddell’s interview with him about Switchblade Sisters and others in his interesting McFarland Jack Hill book, throughout which he constantly demolishes such assumptions).

Like the girl gang it features, this wildly overrated sleaze-fest is all talk. There are three major scenes of violence, the shoot-out in the roller skating rink, a battle in the streets with guns and an armored custom car, and a knife fight to resolve the storyline. These are all quite good, but they could have been better, and the first doesn’t occur until fifty minutes into the film. There is a nice punch-up between the girls and their prison guards earlier (again, it seems to be okay to kick the shit out of a woman if you’re also female), but most of the running time until then is taken up by the posturing and preening of the gang members, male and female, an endless stream of tiresome bullshit bravado.

Switchblade Sisters is seriously stupid rubbish that owes its inflated reputation to validation from that well-known respecter of women, Mr. Death Proof himself, Quentin Tarantino, who went to considerable trouble to revive it. His time would have been better spent remaking it, because it does have potential--the armored car is delightfully over the top, and the roller rink massacre was a marvellous idea. Try getting away from gunmen while on roller skates. In its current form, it’s one of Jack Hill’s less successful endeavors, not so much pinky violence as stinky violence.

The equally overrated and mundanely titled Thriller (aka Thriller--en grym film, 1974) is subtitled “a cruel picture”, so we know what we’re getting--a litany of unfair misery. And cruel it is, to the entire cast and the entire audience. Thrilling it isn’t. It’s certainly exploitation, but in all the wrong ways; exploitation films are supposed to be fun, the revenge cathartic. This is just sordid, drawn-out, dreary, and entirely lacking any sort of style beyond leading lady and professional 1970s sexpot Christine Lindberg and the clothes she does and doesn’t wear.

A combination of stupidity, naivete, and appalling bad luck causes a simple farmgirl (Lindberg) to become a heroin-addicted sex slave--albeit a feisty one. In a deliberately provocative and unpleasant scene designed purely to provoke notoriety, she has her eye destroyed for disobedience (if the publicity behind this scene is true, which is always dubious, it is contemptible), and thus becomes a formidable spectacle toting her revenge arsenal in long trench-coat and eyepatch. Okay, she looks great, but this is another weak and disappointing film with unrealised potential that--like Switchblade Sisters—has been talked up by Quentin Tarantino of Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill fame, who clearly makes far better films than he watches.

Rather bizarrely, presumably because she needs her heroin fix, she is allowed to leave her premises, and thus use some of her proceedings from prostitution to learn karate, use various guns, and drive like a lunatic. This is ludicrous logic on the part of her captors, who have already had to bring her back once, because what is to stop her going straight to rehab and the cops, or from getting her fix from an outside source (she takes the second option)? Thus, the creepy pimp bad guy is the architect of his own ultimately quite creative demise.

The direction is ponderous and amateurish, giving the film a lethargic pace that sits badly with a premise better suited to swift action. To perhaps compensate for this, the deaths are all shown in slo-mo, although this isn’t exactly in the same class of say, The Wild Bunch, and thus slows own proceedings even more. It doesn’t help that the lead character has been rendered mute by her horrific experiences in the clutches of a comic strip paedo. If filmed competently in America, this would be over in forty minutes.

Thriller is dull and dispiriting, and the infamous hardcore sex is unpleasant, unerotic, and unnecessary (and I have no problem with hardcore sex in films or porn). That point made, don’t be conned into thinking that this is some sort of art film, just because an eyeball is graphically sliced up and there's a few minutes of unsimulated sex.

A revenge thriller should be fun, otherwise what’s the point of it? There are no thrills here, just relentless inevitability. A revenge thriller with a female lead should be sexy, but this director clearly doesn’t appreciate women, because he has the willing and naked body of one of the most beautiful girls of the 1970s and fails to exploit it. This is a shame, because the packaging and concept demonstrate that this could have been a classic on a par with Kill Bill (this is yet another DVD that can be tagged ‘the film that inspired…’ on the box, as Daryl Hannah’s character is quite clearly influenced by it). Synapse have done a wonderful job on this; I only wish the film was worth the attention and notoriety. In fact, for all its contrived efforts to shock, it’s just a bore.

Bad Attitudes Die Hard (2) continued

Surely a film with a come-on title like Sexy Girls of Denmark (aka Dan ma jioa wa, aka Kineser ra sen Sengekanten, 1973) couldn’t be a bore, could it? No, but like the above, it could only have been made in the ‘70s.

Turns out that Chinese lads have the same problems as the pop-eyed proles in the British sex-coms of the same period... although at least our lads don’t physically faint at the sight of a sexually aggressive woman. Sexy Girls of Denmark, a Chinese sex comedy romance, might seem to be a very odd product to come out of the Shaw Brothers factory, but the myth of the uninhibited and sexually free Danish blonde rapidly became global in the ‘60s and ‘70s, and the Chinese were just as intrigued as the West. Enter the glowing Birte Tove, a beautiful blonde and the respectable face of Danish porn after starring in several of the peculiar and dreary cultural oddities known collectively as the Danish Bedside series (imagine a standard TV family sit-com, but with explicit sex scenes). A photographic model rather than an actress, but gifted with a delightful and uninhibited personality, Tove had been chosen after extensive auditions to star in the 1971 American-made, Denmark-filmed sex fantasy Christa, as the title character.

As with swinging London a few years earlier, liberated Denmark had started out as a collection of factual occurrences and undeniable truths, but gradually been transformed by the media into an escalating fantasy of wish-fulfillment, an imagined embodiment of the sexual freedom promised by the 1960s. That Christa, although cast and filmed in Denmark, was a fantasy based on the hopeful and idealistic assumptions of an American film-maker, was an irony that was happily overlooked by both the director and his audience, and indeed the Danes themselves. In the years that followed, numerous films about Danish frankness, freedom and promiscuity would be made in Denmark solely for the purpose of being sold abroad to eager foreign audiences in less permissive countries. Ironically, most of these films were way too tame to make any money in their homeland!

Eased out of the Bedside series for the crime of being over thirty, Tove had swiftly rejected America, and accepted an offer from exploitation kings the Shaw Brothers to make three films for the Hong Kong market--Sexy Girls of Denmark, which would be made in Copenhagen with Chinese stars and contrast liberated Europe with traditional China in a light comedic manner, the unpleasant Bamboo House of Dolls, a cruel WIP movie, and the wacky Mini-Skirt Gang, a comedic nudity-free imitation sukeban.

Sexy Girls of Denmark unfolds like this: Knowing that a Chinese executive has a weakness for European girls due to his interest in Danish pornography, rivals vying to secure his signature on a contract plan to make sure he’s not disappointed with their arrangements. What they don’t know is that the matriarch of the family, well aware of her husband’s predilections and sensing trouble ahead, has decreed that one sensible son shall go in his stead. Will he be seduced by a legion of Danish blondes, or will he find love with a nice Chinese girl? As it turns out, both.

There’s a mix of Chinese and English language dialogue in this film, and only a selection of Scandinavian subtitles on the Another World DVD release, but events are all fairly self-explanatory, and the visuals are very entertaining. Arriving in Copenhagen, Kwok-chuen (a likeable Chung Hua) is immediately set upon by Ulla Jessen, and frantically trying to evade her, our young stud stumbles into the arms of Birte, who he falls madly in love with, and unknown to her, sends a picture back to Japan cut from a magazine. Mother, a teensy bit racist or just traditional, depending on your point of view, goes into meltdown, and despatches his sister (Karen Yeh) to bring him home. In the meantime, a pretty Chinese journalist played by popular starlet Ching Lee has set her sights on our hero...

Beneath all the silliness is an interesting take on the usually role-reversed sexism of the time between a couple in which one is in love and the other in lust. Usually it’s the girl who thinks it’s forever, and the guy who just wants a bit of fun, but here its liberated sex-is-fun Europe vs. traditional Chinese romance, marriage and family. Kwok-chuen believes that because he and Tove’s Ann-Charlotte had fun together in bed, the natural procedure is for them to become a couple, and blithely informs his family of the impending marriage. When he finds out she makes porn films for a living, and then finds her co-star in her bed with her, it's a double-whammy that leaves him devastated... especially when she tells him she enjoys her life and has no intention of being spirited away to China or anywhere else. After much moping to montages of happier times, he commiserates with a fellow countryman in a bar and they pick up two Danish disco dollies who demand money for sex. Kwok-chuen is still inconsolable and makes his excuses, but as only happens in films, it turns out that not only has this very guy befriended Kwok-chuen’s sister, but the journalist is his sister. Small world, huh? Honor besmirched, they must fight, and there are a few good punch-ups, including a melee with the porn star and his mates that ends with an unsatisfying handshake instead of the hoped-for pile of crumpled idiots…

Different cultures aside, there are some massive double standards on display here, with the film clearly seeing the Danish girls not as independent free spirits, but as an easy lay, and the Chinese girls as porcelain princesses to be zealously guarded... undoubtedly a true reflection of the situation, nonetheless. And only the Shaw Brothers studio would think to symbolise Ann-Charlotte’s female resistance into a period martial arts combat analogy!

Swedish sex starlet Birte Tove’s last of three films for the deranged Shaw Brothers studio, The Mini-Skirt Gang (aka Feng kuang da ben zei, aka Bikinibanden, 1974), is best described as a sort of Chinese attempt to make a Japanese girl gang movie. Tove is the single Caucasian among a group of Chinese girls and two comic relief, one of whom provides the romance. During the course of the film they also pick up a scrappy juvenile delinquent and manage to antagonise a group of pimps/white slavers who pursue them in between their operations fleecing tourists. Despite having virtually no nudity, it’s a colorful and entertaining time-waster that consists almost entirely of the antics of the gang either callously picking pockets or seducing mugs who they rip off in the bedrooms of a nearby hotel in the film’s funniest and/or sexiest scenes. In the few scenes the bikini bandits aren’t lolling around in their underwear or--inexplicably--swimwear, their wardrobe is major league groovy (one funny sequence has the new underage arrival pop-eyed at all the semi-clad women stripping off wherever he looks).

There’s some fleeting sadism during the pimps’ victim’s backstory, and the closing scenes have some typically over-the-top fighting in the hilarious Shaw Brothers tradition, but it’s mostly innocuous, if highly immoral fluff. Characterisation is nil, story comes there none, the supposed comedy is mostly based around the bad eye of one of the guys (a disability gag that surely went out with the silents), and the girls are completely remorseless in their cruel thieving, but somehow (and despite no English audio or subs on Another World’s DVD), it works, if only as a string of set pieces. However, it’s safe to say that Miki Sugimoto and Reiko Ike had nothing to worry about…

Swedish Wildcats (aka De Danske Vildkatte, 1974), retitled after the original title of Every Afternoon unsurprisingly failed to pull in any punters, is another schizophrenic slice of 1970s sex cinema, with all the standard prejudices and assumptions intact (leering businessmen, effeminate houseboys, perverse rich people, etc. etc.). Uncertain of whether it wants to be a nudie, a romance, a crime drama, or a comedy, it lurches back and forth from one incongruous scene to another, with just enough flashes of sex and nudity to keep the rest of it interesting.

Former sex symbol Diana Dors (a sort of chubby, downmarket Marilyn in the 1950s, mostly in lowbrow hypocritical morality tales) found her niche in the 1970s appearing in these sort of sleazy sex films as a sort of grand dame figurehead. The liberalisation of cinema after the ‘60s saved her career, and she went from performer to ringmaster, quite literally in this case. Slightly too sleazy for the Carry On sort of material on television, she always played the same part, and always the same way, whether she was in Swedish Wildcats, What the Swedish Butler Saw, Adventures of a Taxi Driver, or The Sweeney, cast to type as a brassy old bag with a few miles left on the clock, a formidable take-charge harridan with sex on the brain (although in her Sweeney, she's amusingly prudish, a monstrous snob).

Although her style was broad, forced, and theatrical, the former Diana Fluck (she often joked that she changed it because people got confused and called her Diana Clunt) was in truth barely acting at all. Offscreen, she lived a life of excess, scandal, and notoriety that, had she been up to the same things in the 21st century, would have knocked all the other celebs off the front pages every day. If she wasn’t holding raucous sex parties in her purpose-made country mansion she was hanging out with gangsters in the smoke. She was in the right place at the right time, and having no ideas above her station, had no pretensions and knew her limitations.

Here, she’s the madame of a Copenhagen brothel who has corrupted the two orphaned sisters she took charge of when the parents were killed in a car crash. Now this wicked aunt is slowly dragging them deeper into the mire of sexual perversion, and the teens are getting nervous and want out. As these girls are played by busy ‘70s sex queen Solveig Andersson and fresh from a stage production of Hair, Cia Lowgren, neither are terribly convincing as shy girls, and paradoxically give their most convincing performances in the brief and clumsy sex scenes.

We follow the (mis-)adventures of the two girls as they get involved in daytime romances (hence the every afternoon of the original title), Andersson’s completely off-screen and the fantasising Lowgren’s with a so-called test pilot (Peder Lindgren) who is also lying his face off; she’s told him she’s a ballet dancer, and he is in fact a shipping clerk trying not to get involved with criminal activity at the airport. When one of the bad guys turns out to be a client of the brothel, and recognises feisty Cia as the girl who shunned him, things get messy.

If you’re wondering by now where the wildcats come in, the title refers to the striking opening scene in which the two sisters and three others (including the legendary Christina Lindberg in a cameo, popping in for a quickie later on) wear only animalistic body-paint for Dors’ stage show for privileged clients. Sadly, these performances are never seen or referred to again, and a succession of dozy and inadequate strip shows and Franco-esque pseudo-sadism take their place, which is a shame because they are genuinely erotic and all too brief.

Prolific sleaze director Joe Sarno claimed the SM content was forced on him by the producer and co-writer. Whatever the case, the sleazy club sequences contrast weirdly with his Pythonesque scenes of daytime romance (at one point, the happy couple are actually skipping around the trees hiding from each other in a giggly frolic). Fast forward and it’s Benny Hill. The background music is a hoot, borderline pastiche and verging on rather brilliant parody, except they mean it.

Meanwhile, interspersed with this is the ugliness of the criminal element, lead by nasty Ib Mossin, and Diana Dors, doing typical 1970s Brit-com comic relief—“Get the statue of Venus up from the basement... shame the arms are broken” (husband Alan Lake can be seen in the background as a bodyguard). It all ends in tears, of course, but then it doesn’t, and it’s happy endings all round.

The sociological point of interest here is that the two girls would have been condemned in any decade before the 1970s. Here, as in so many 1970s sex films, their promiscuity is not exactly celebrated as presumed, expected, and taken for granted. It’s virtually forgotten today, but for a dozen or so wonderful years between the counter-culture, patriarchy and the Pill in the ‘60s, and the New Puritanism, militant feminism and AIDS scares of the ‘80s, girls in the western world could do and be anything without fear of censure or judgement.

It’s all a long way from the statement that preceded it: “Mother says you’re not supposed to enjoy it. A woman must endure it”.

So speaks the prissy little madam who is the object of our sad sack hero’s lust in What the Swedish Butler Saw (aka Champagnegalopp, 1979), an utterly ordinary ‘70s sex-com that took virtually the entire decade to get financed, filmed, and shown. Set in the Victorian era, this overlong comedy sketch stars Swedish actor Ole Soltoft (a veteran of the pathetic Danish Mazurka franchise) alongside British ‘70s sex-com regular Sue Longhurst (Secrets of a Door to Door Salesman, Confessions of a Window Cleaner, Can You Keep It Up For a Week?), with Diana Dors appearing in a wheelchair (after a fall during cabaret) as the owner of a local brothel. It’s probably one of those films that was more fun to make than to watch.

The story is a succession of pathetic coincidences, and there are a couple of good jokes, but the lead characters are so unsympathetic that it’s a long haul, enlivened only by the butler and the maid, who are the most appealing characters. As for Soltoft’s character, we are supposed to sympathise with this chump, who is quite the opposite of the cheeky chappie of most ‘70s sex-coms, a repressed, suicidal, cowardly, pathetic loser who literally has to lock a girl in a room and pin her down to get anywhere with her... which amazingly, he does. Somewhere in the proceedings is a pantomime Jack the Ripper, who is hiding in the walls of the building, and literally emerges purely to do look-behind-you gags.

The film was the brainchild of American writer/director/producer Vernon Becker of Swedish Wildcats fame, who had originally intended it to be filmed in 3-D. This is quite ironic in itself, because the whole thing is as flat as a pancake from start to finish. Despite being filmed in a lavish Stockholm mansion (Becker filmed in Sweden, where he had already give the world The Seduction of Inga and Dagmar’s Hot Pants), it could just as easily have been a Holiday Inn, and several scenes are shot with the participants literally positioned in front of a wall, rather than displaying the sumptuous surroundings of a hideaway frequented by Scandinavian royalty. The film looks like it’s been shot with three-wall sets furnished by Dickinson’s Real Deal. After several abortive attempts to persevere with the 3-D gimmick, the film finally crawled into British theatres at the end of the 1970s, just in time to be one of the last sex-com successes before the arrival of home video. Apparently, the Swedish title refers to the piece of music played over the opening credits sequence.

All the Swedish actors are dubbed into English, and all the British actors are looped. It’s a very sub-standard primitive mess technically, and not helped by the broad, school play-style performances of Dors and Longhurst or the sub-Python performances of Soltoft and Charlie Gluegard as the unfunny butler of the title. Giving her all in every respect is Malou Cartwright as the maid (Fanny, of course, despite the credits calling her Penny), whose bold and uninhibited performance lusting for Sam the butler provides the only interest either dramatically or sexually. Yes, there are a couple of laughs to be had (mostly due to the law of averages rather than any talent on offer), but not only did Benny Hill do this sort of stuff in ten minutes, he was ten times funnier.

Adventures of a Sleazeball

Adventures of a Taxi Driver (1976), Adventures of a Private Eye (1977), Adventures of a Plumber's Mate (1978)

“No-one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the general public” said the great American showman P.T. Barnum--and neither did Stanley Long.

Among all the individual sex-coms that emptied the hearts, minds and wallets of the sexually inhibited in 1970s Britain (and they were aimed at narrow-minded mainstream audiences, not open-minded liberals), two continuing series dominated the British film circuit: the groundbreaking and influential Confessions... series (four in all and considered a few pages back), and these, the tatty, tacky, opportunist bandwagon-jumping Adventures of... series (of which there were three). Today, in their home country, all seven, plus a few others of the same period, generally tend to be either madly vilified (by over-reacting snobs and uptight angries) or absurdly overrated (usually by over-excited academics trying to justify their nostalgia to their silly sexual politics, or bitter reactionaries obsessed with “political correctness gone mad”).

However, in an objective study, two points need to be made. Firstly, British sex comedies--particularly those co-featuring television sit-com stars of the era--were phenomenally popular and successful at the box office, so they must have been doing something right. And secondly, in a book about sex films, certain titles are just too big to ignore, and so I must put my boots on and wade once more into the muddy waters soiled by the likes of George Harrison Marks, David Sullivan, and Stanley Long.

Don’t be fooled by the shabby look or the sit-com standards of the lowly British sex-com, even if much of their financial success in the 1970s was almost certainly owed to the paucity of alternatives and the massive sexual inhibitions of the Great British heartland, the most heavily censored region of the free world. When it comes to making money, you can forget about Star Wars. According to British films sexpert Simon Sheridan, who’s written at length about these things, Adventures of a Taxi Driver was made in 1976 for ￡30,000 and took just under ￡48,000 in it’s opening week in Birmingham alone. The queues went round the block three times. This phenomenon was then duplicated in every major city. It then additionally sold around the world, and like almost every other major sex comedy of the ‘70s, ultimately grossed millions. The truly abysmal Come Play With Me is the most profitable British film of all time. They won’t tell you that at the BAFTAs.

The reason the 1970s sex film boom has remained a dirty little secret is that almost everybody, from the British film industry, to the audience for them, to many of the people who made them and appeared in them (not all), considers them a colossal embarrassment from the past. And so do I. But having had no desire to see such lowbrow garbage when I was a teenager in the ‘70s, I now find myself--like the academic apologists at the unis and the British Film Institute--enjoying them with morbid fascination as social documents and film history, the 1970s captured and frozen in time. It was partly the sheer alien awfulness of these films, and their inexplicable popularity, that provoked me into taking on this book project.

While most of the British critics and cultural commentators of the 1970s approached the sex-coms on smell-under-the-nose auto-pilot (which, along with eventual belated screenings on television, has probably helped encourage their cult revival), they got one thing right--these films just aren’t sexy; they may on occasion actually be funny (I’ve smiled, I’ve laughed), and they may be fascinating (get a load of the high streets, the cars, the clothes, the haircuts, the decor, the ambience), but erotic they most certainly are not. There may be some sex and nudity, but there isn’t nearly as much as you might be entitled to expect, and what there is does not usually satisfy. Like a lot of trashy films (inept sci-fi, badly realised horror, pretentious erotica), the British sex-coms are fun to watch for the wrong reasons (or at least, reasons contrary to the intentions of the makers).

Much has been made in recent years of the critics’ sneering and pompous response to these travesties, which was frequently way out of proportion; “the increasingly exasperated reviews of the Daily Mail... are fairly representative, although few critics projected the same sense that the films had been created for the sole purpose of ruining their day” notes Leon Hunt in the academic study British Low Culture. “I always hated those snobby, disparaging film critics” announced Adventures of a Taxi Driver director/producer Stanley Long in his biography. “What the fuck do they know about entertaining people? Ultimately, it’s the public that decides whether a film is a hit or not. Critics... just try to be clever”.

Far from being acknowledged as the salvation of the British film industry that they actually were, keeping studios working and actors employed at a time when television ruled supreme and no-one was going to see anything else, the sex-coms were often unfairly portrayed in the media as the cause of the cinema’s decline, which is just not true. Using that old prudes’ standby, “what about the children?”, critics and cultural commentators would imply that these films were somehow bullying more wholesome fare off the screen, whereas family films were not being made because families in 1970s Britain were sitting at home watching On the Buses, The Benny Hill Show, The Two Ronnies, and Morecambe and Wise on their new color televisions.

Furthermore, the market for sex films is, while finite (one Soho shopkeeper ruefully pointed out to me that one particular company put itself out of business by inadvertently flooding the market so that none of its titles went into profit), somewhat greater than the market for school holidays films. If more than two big budget family films come out at a time, nobody makes any money. The significant factor about the sex-com was that it was cheap to make, and the market was insatiable, which is why there were lots of them; it was very difficult to lose money (although a few idiots did). That cheapness and ease of financial return naturally impacted on the quality, even as the scarcity of sexual entertainment in pre-Internet Britain was making them profitable.

There seems little doubt, that--as is so often the case with sexually-themed material--many reviewers were reviewing their own problematic attitudes toward sex and nudity, rather than the subject to hand (see Amazon and the IMDB for a veritable psychoanalysts’ convention-worth of present day examples). Presenting a sex film to a moralising right-wing prude or a dogma-entrenched left-wing pedant is like presenting a roast meat dinner to a vegetarian--it might look enticing, but they’re already committed to not approving, and are indeed uncomfortably obliged to disapprove. However, motives and self-deception aside, the terrible truth is, the critics were at least right about how bad they were.

You may say at this point that it’s a matter of personal taste, and you’d be right--good taste and bad taste.

Unfair? It's worth remembering that at the same time British cinema was surviving thanks to TV spin-offs and sex films, cinema in other countries was going through a golden age of quality and creativity. It’s no wonder the film buffs were bleating. I took cinema just a little too seriously myself in my teens, and it was galling to look at what was going on all over Europe, or in Hollywood with Sam Peckinpah, Martin Scorsese, Woody Allen, Robert Altman, and a dozen others at the top of their game, and then look at British output consisting almost entirely of shabby, badly-made tit and bum fantasies for repressed working class conservatives.

And with this audience in mind, there’s ultimately very little actual sex in Adventures of a Taxi Driver; much of it follows the British television sit-com ploy of having its men perpetually on a promise (TV self-censorship demands coitus interruptus; what would British television have done without the ringing telephone or doorbell?). For every shag taxi driver Joe gets, he seems to miss two; the scene where the husband comes home unexpectedly and/or the cheeky chappie flees in a state of undress is the defining image of the sex-com (it happens in Adventures of a Taxi Driver twice, and actually opens the sequel, pre-credits; ditto, Confessions...). Even when he gets laid with Anna Bergman’s Helga, our hero’s outraged girlfriend--a needy doe-eyed monster played magnificently by Adrienne Posta--walks in on him and ruins everything.

Some scriptwriting habits, it seems, were hard to break, even when freedom was offered; only the Confessions films genuinely pushed the envelope to break with television-land morality--not so much with regard to what was shown (British drama of the ‘70s had as much nudity as the cinema sex-coms), but as with the messages they sent out... the Confessions films, for all their myriad failings, said that sex was fun, that it didn’t have to mean anything, that it was okay to want it, pursue it, and actually have it, without falling in love, feeling guilty or frightened, or getting married. Television would have had none of that.

Before the eager beaver serial shaggers of Greg Smith’s Confessions films stumbled into cinema-goer’s hearts with their trousers expectantly round their ankles, pre-Confessions sex-coms featured the same trembling virgins and timid males as the TV sit-coms of the time. Offered plentiful sex, they recoiled, and fled back to their wives and girlfriends. When the Confessions and Adventures films eventually upped the ante, male viewers were not intimidated by these randy opportunists because they suffered the same hit-and-miss ratio of all men, and female audiences tolerated these predatory jolly jokers because they occasionally got their comeuppance, and in truth, admired their cheek, confidence and effort. The situations may have been exaggerated, but there was an honesty about them that teenage couples identified with and adult audiences understood. They were good date movies because they were horny rather than porny.

Nevertheless, as Sheridan points out, it’s interesting that it was a female scriptwriter (ex-groupie and pop paper writer Suzanne Mercer) who served up such an unsympathetic parade of unhappy basket-cases to partner the male of Adventures of a Taxi Driver--needy whiners, brazenly unfaithful wives, and scheming bitches dominate. The popularity of the sex-coms with couples demonstrates the depressing truth that the more strident feminists, blamers, professional victims and man-haters of the ‘70s and ‘80s never quite grasped, which is that a vast number of women held--and to a smaller extent today still hold--exactly the same double-standard prejudices against women that many narrow-minded men did.

But Jack the lad and his naked birds was a cleverly conceived formula, found more by luck than planning (the Confessions films started life as a really unpleasant series of paperbacks). After all, how do you commercially exploit sex for a mass audience when that audience is a national joke around the world for its studied disinterest and hypocrisy, cope with the uniquely British insistence of the audience on pretending they’re watching a production with sex or nudity in it for any other reason than the sex and nudity, and deal with pre-internet censorship that was the most severe and absurd in the free world? The answer, of course, for film-makers, has always been to zero in on those very British character traits rather than try to skirt round them. Who couldn’t love the title No Sex Please, We’re British?

All that said and done, the sex and nudity in all three of these films is minimal. Much like the sex lives of some of the potential audience perhaps, it is more talked about than acted upon. Producer/director Stanley Long had been making nudies since the late 1950s, so was perhaps a little jaded. “I only ever put nudity in my films if it was funny and, more importantly, if it was realistic” he pronounced in his biography. “I hated seeing sexy films where women climbed out of bed wearing bra and knickers. Who honestly sleeps in their bra and panties? You’re either in pajamas or nude. It’s the same with a bath scene. If you’re going to shoot an actress in a bath, she must be naked”. The author’s sentiments exactly, but like so many in the sex industry, Long aspired to make anything but. For all his talk about what the audience wanted, he served short measures when it came to ogling the girls. “I was filming comedy, not erotica”, he insisted.

And despite Long’s stated intention to replace the Carry On/Confessions innuendo and one-liners with situational comedy, it might have been a good idea to throw in some gags along with the sit-com star cameos as well, as the Adventures films just end up looking like the vastly superior Confessions films without the substance, a sex-com sandwich without the filling; Stephen Lewis turns up in Adventures of a Taxi Driver in his On the Buses Blakey persona in a blatant “ooh, look, it’s him!” moment, but without the verbal sparring of TV co-star Reg Varney to accompany him, he’s lost. Compare this with the material presented to the likes of Bill Maynard and Tony Booth in the Confessions (which is often more naturalistic working class witty than Carry On-style corn), and the Adventures are left high and dry. After all, the Confessions films have the same set-ups and resolutions (Long made no secret of the fact that he was jumping on the bandwagon), but throw in the gags as well.

There is one other major characteristic of the Confessions that Long missed when brazenly plundering the format, and it’s the difference between the Two Ronnies approach to sex and the Benny Hill Show approach. The former is about the embarrassment and discomfort large swathes of the West feel about sex, the characters hiding behind double meanings or social decorum, whereas the second is bawdy, brazen, mischievous, and celebratory. Ronnie Barker often claimed that his humor was the spirit of the bawdy British seaside postcard (vulgar and suggestive cartoons to be found in every holiday resort), but he only truly achieved that with the two short films By the Sea and The Picnic; it was the Benny Hill skits that truly embraced the spirit of those postcards, with their scrawny men, cheeky chappies, pop-eyed kids, busty women, and monstrous wives.

Throughout all four of the Confessions films, rampant single-minded shaggers Timmy and Sidney are actively searching for, and obtaining sex; they can’t wait for it. But what is present throughout all the Adventures sex comedies is the British fear of sex. The leads spend more time running away from it than having it, and when they do have it, it ends, prophecy fulfilled, in disastrous interruption or embarrassment (the slapstick disaster in the Confessions films usually comes after the thrill, not instead of it, although there are surely exceptions in both). In the Adventures, sex is a challenge rather than a joy, and when breasts are pushed in their faces it becomes a matter of concern rather than pleasure. The sight of a naked woman is only enjoyed when there is no chance of it going anywhere, i.e. it’s a strip show, or the watcher is hiding. When a woman disrobes blatantly in front of them, they panic.

Most of the dick jokes in the Adventures films concern castration or injury--a guy getting a blow job in the back of the cab comes to grief when the car brakes suddenly; a guy gets into a bed full of mousetraps and we are left with little doubt as to what has been caught; an oscillating fan falls into the lap of a man being attended by his girlfriend, and so on, ad infinitum. And it speaks volumes about both the films and their audience that there is very little swearing, if any, in the typical British sex-com.

Another tradition of the Confessions films, and so adopted by the Adventures films, was a device known as breaking the fourth wall; that is, a stage or film set has three walls and the actor breaks the reality by making asides to the audience. It dated back to Oliver Hardy’s despairing looks to camera and the traditions of pantomime, some might say to Shakespeare’s soliloquies, but had recently made a memorable comeback in the dubious 1966 Michael Caine film Alfie, a film about sex rather than a sex film, a belated kitchen sink entry that had been a huge success.

The constant breaking of the fourth wall by leading man Barry Evans to talk to the camera Alfie-style (not to mention Askwith Confessions-style) gets a bit tedious after a while, overworked as it is. The Confessions films used it as little as possible, but in the Adventures, it’s frequently used as a handy device for getting out of writing an actual conclusion to the various incidents. Evans often verbally wraps things up in the next scene, en route to the next catastrophe.

In fact, the funniest part of the film, and which wins the audience over far more effectively than Evan’s straight-to-camera faux-cheerfulness, is the parody of the Pathe News-style voiceover extolling the virtues of the friendly, helpful cabbie over a visual montage suggesting the complete opposite (apparently this had a test audience of real London cabbies rolling in the aisles). As a bored leather-jacketed lout sits at his wheel impassively watching an elderly lady struggling with a dozen packages, and a hapless chump is ignored at the roadside, the cheesy, idiot propaganda of 1950s-style wishful thinking from the narrator contrasts hilariously with the grim pseudo-reality of 1970s likelihood on the screen. “Within seconds, you can be speeding to the destination of your choice” recites no doubt beaming David Brierly, in a terribly, terribly British voice, as another prospective passenger is zoomed past to accommodate the first of many leggy dolly birds.

Needless to say, everywhere Evans drives, dishy babes of the sort that routinely decorated the covers of 1970s magazines and compilation cover albums are conveniently showing off their best assets whenever he drives past, while Adrienne Posta’s perky, pure-‘70s pop song plays merrily in the background (this, plus the 1970s locations--and not to mention the ghastly underwear--make this a total period piece).

Another problem with the sex-coms comes with the casting of the leading men, or more specifically, the absence of the Confessions’ Robin Askwith. As with the TV personalities who traded in sexual innuendo throughout the 1970s on British television (Benny Hill, Frankie Howerd, Ronnie Barker, et al), for whom it was essential when playing to a target audience of uptight British hypocrites to be loveable, likeable, and personable, the audience had to find the charmless cheeky cheater charming. This delicate wire-walking act was accomplished by Askwith, but Barry Evans, like many contemporaries, including successor Christopher Neil in Plumber’s Mate, primarily comes across as selfish and inconsiderate.

The difference between Askwith’s Timothy Lea persona and Evans’ cabbie is that taxi driver Joe North is thoroughly self-interested and exploitative. Asquith’s Lea was a nice bloke; Joe North isn’t. Immersed in his one-way conversation with himself, he airily drives a young girl to a suicide spot and saves her only because she hasn’t paid her fare; after numerous backhanded compliments along the lines of her being too pretty to take her own life (apparently, others may jump), he takes her home and prepares to take advantage of her--ultimately let off the hook when her husband comes home unexpectedly (as they always do in these films) and reveals that she does this on a regular basis. Later, he makes a play for his best buddy’s girlfriend (after he’s reluctantly let him stay in the spare room).

One of the most revealing scenes in Adventures of a Taxi Driver has Evans’ randy young buck gloating and mocking the older cabbies, who take his arrogance in their stride, and return his youthful posturing with weary worldly wisdom. As it was exactly these sort of middle-aged men who comprised of half the audience, living vicariously through the young lad’s film fantasy exploits, the jovial roar of mocking approval when Evans scores a date with counter-girl Gloria Walker in full earshot of everyone is a defining moment in the movie.

Of the supporting cast, young but already experienced film actress Judy Geeson is naturally beautiful and beautifully natural. From TV, there’s Robert Lindsay of Citizen Smith, Ian Lavender of Dad’s Army, Brian Wilde from Ronnie Barker’s Porridge, Henry McGee of The Benny Hill Show, and the queen of the am-dram school play performance, Diana Dors, in her usual 1970s incarnation of blowsy old dragon. Co-stars Gloria Walker, Anna Bergman (daughter of Ingmar, as everyone enjoys pointing out), and the formidable Prudence Drage dropped their clothes in several tatty films of the ‘70s. As broad performances go, Adrienne Posta’s frightful, forceful, and forgiving girlfriend is a comic triumph, if a little overly prominent. Posta works bloody hard, putting in twice the effort of everybody else, and creates a nice little showcase piece, but it’s ultimately just another heavy handed, unsympathetic cartoon, rather than touching and poignant--right for this project, but she deserved the chance to do better.

Adventures of a Sleazeball continued

For all its failings, Adventures of a Taxi Driver was a raging success, through a combination of flagrant populism, superb publicity efforts, and throwing crumbs to the starving. Long’s next problem turned out to be to the series’ advantage. Despite his best efforts, Long was unable to tempt Barry Evans back for a sequel, and was obliged to begin the search for a successor. He found him in Christopher Neil, an all-round entertainer with better stage credits than film.

In fact, Christopher Neil was infinitely more likeable than Evans, at least in Adventures of a Private Eye (1977), using the speaking-to-camera technique even more skilfully and naturally than Evans, and so Joe North effortlessly morphed into Bob West, and Adventures of a Private Eye went into production, shamelessly opening with the old husband-coming-home-and-getting-into-bed-with-the-wrong-person gag. “Up early? I’m on nights this week!” he cheerfully informs the milkman as he heads for his door. Apparently his wife (regular sex film bit player Nicola Austine) hadn’t noticed...

Neil’s West was also more of an instigator than Evans’ North; things just seem to happen to taxi-driver Joe, whereas Bob West is much more pro-active both in chasing women and finding disaster. Evans just fell into trouble, a pawn of the fates, but Neil’s would-be p.i. seeks it out. And whereas Evans spoke uncomfortably and falsely to the camera to lament his fate or display his naivete (see also the leaden first five minutes of 1969’s Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush, Evans’ debut and the unofficial starting gun for the sex-com), Neil’s West milks it, frequently making sly comments and gag asides that go mysteriously ignored by the other people in earshot. He frequently breaks the fourth wall just to raise an eyebrow or give a sly wink to the camera, a sort of combination of Oliver Hardy’s exasperation and George Reeves’ in-on-the-joke Clark Kent. Some of his wide repertoire of knowing or despairing glances are genuinely funny.

New protagonist Bob West is an ambitious young opportunist working for unlikely bouffant-haired private eye Jon Pertwee (yes, the third Doctor Who), who departs the office with his stunning (and oft-naked) secretary, foolishly leaving West in charge. Our hero is still a hapless oaf, lecturing the audience on his powers of observation outside a newsagents while his wallet is effortlessly lifted, and is specifically told simply to mind the store. Two women then walk through the door--the stoic Veronica Doran as West’s replacement secretary, a homely girl with comedy name instead of the beauty he’d hoped for (“Thankyou, Miss Garbage”/“Gubbidge!”), and the archetypal mysterious woman (Suzy Kendall, the former Frieda Harrison and rising star of the ‘60s, slumming it), desperate to retrieve some dodgy photographs. The possibility of solving a real pulp novel case is irresistible.

Doran carved herself a niche in the 1970s playing less desirable women, and has a larger and more sympathetic role than she usually acquired in this one as the homely but happy agency secretary, merrily deluded about her desirability... although she pulls West’s pal at the end of it, thus thwarting the body-fascism contingency! She often played don't-fancy-yours-much character parts in the sit-coms and sex-coms of the era. A memorable role was as a dowdy simpleton picked up by Richard O’Sullivan's buddy Larry (laddish Doug Fisher) in the way better-than-average ITV sit-com Man About the House, who is resigned to the fact that this is the best he can get that night, and makes his move. “Here, I’m a decent girl!!” she announces indignantly with a voice that could break glass after being lured to his bedroom, to which he replies aghast “You can’t be!”.

Similarly typecast was the wonderful heavy and professional wrestler Milton Reid (also in Au Pair Girls and many more like it). Despite having played background toughies and thugs from the first James Bond film onwards, he was most famous in the ‘70s, for being the bald, tanned bodyguard of the laughable St. Bruno man. This was a tobacco advertisement shown interminably in the ‘70s in which a hilarious smarmy git (of the Jason King/Persuaders sort you see now on those birthday cards that use out-of-date fashion photographs and write ‘wanker’ across them) is pursued by hordes of dolly birds attracted by his pipe stuffed with St. Bruno. Reid slams an iron gate in front of the lot of them until Smarmy nods just one lucky lady through. Even in the ‘70s, the ad was not supposed to be taken seriously, but The Goodies killed it stone dead in a hilarious spoof in which pipe-sucking Tim Brooke-Taylor has the gate slammed shut in the girls’ faces and then minces off with Reid.

Wearing a pitifully obvious fake moustache which the supporting cast react to superbly, Neil invades a photographer’s studio being cleaned by the redoubtable Diana Dors, ending up in an old dark house plot with a collection of stereotypes--a loopy clairvoyant, a pill-popping vegetarian, a sleazy photographer, a corrupt property developer (of which there was a glut in 1970s Britain), and the inevitable creepy butler, busty maid, and dizzy blonde.

Occasionally, a joke is brilliantly subtle, such as when West discusses his attractive client's “confidential” sexy photographs in a pub, openly displaying them to his best mate while an awestruck crowd of gawpers slowly gathers surreptitiously around him... but generally, every joke trumpets its forthcoming arrival like a demented elephant and tramples the audience to death when it arrives. The bed full of mousetraps awaits it’s victim’s male member patiently, an attempt to hide out in drag at a burlesque show ends up with our hero on stage, there's a rowing boat sequence which features every predictable possibility imaginable, and there are no less than two more husband-home-unexpectedly routines. As the critic from Time Out pointed out despondently, “it has a plot not even worth recounting”.

Several of the cast members from the first film return, but in different roles, so perpetuating the notion of a series in the Carry On tradition; Ian Lavender, Liz Fraser, Adrienne Posta, Angela Scoular, and Diana Dors are all back, with Stephen Lewis returning in the third one alongside a few faces from the second.

New to the series are Irene Handl from Confessions of a Driving Instructor as an elderly lady obsessed with the thought of prowlers invading her bedroom, Harry H. Corbett trying to shake off his Steptoe and Son albatross as a posh twit (unfortunately, his non-Steptoe characters revealed that he couldn’t act), Anna Quayle as the barmy mystic, Willie Rushton as a seedy reporter, and the previously mentioned Suzy Kendall, who not only ensured she had a no nudity clause in her contract, but very cleverly added a caveat ensuring there would be no inserts with body doubles!

Less bothered were Linda Regan (also in Confessions of a Pop Performer), who gets naked for the rowing boat debacle, Angela Scoular, who bares for Britain in all three of the series, and in minor roles sex film stalwarts Nicola Austine, Teresa Wood, and a scary and formidable Hilary Pritchard as a leather-clad, whip-wielding dominatrix.

Neil is far less likeable as--wait for it--Sid South in Adventures of a Plumber’s Mate (1978), the last in the series, in which he very closely resembles Barry Evans, both in manner and hairstyle (two possible prospects were not pursued, ...Electrician, and ...Roving Reporter). Nominally scripted by an elderly guy who wrote dirty detective novels, Sid’s shabby treatment of his girlfriend in the opening scenes will be alarming to contemporary audiences. Without a doubt, the appealing Nina West is the highlight of the third and final entry in the series, opening Plumber’s Mate with an extraordinary verite scene in which her dress is accidentally ripped off in the high street, leaving her completely naked in public. Like the scenes with Evans and Neil scampering down leafy suburban streets in the raw, this was filmed mondo, but unlike theirs, in the middle of the day rather than the early morning! It must have been Christmas for the busload of passengers who drove by at that precise moment, but as usual in the Adventures series, the audience sees far less, especially in those pre-freeze-frame days.

Most of the story actually has very little to do with plumbing, although there is one genuinely amusing sequence with Lindy Benson as a housewife (with a steamingly furious and muscular husband) who gets her dress ripped off when it’s caught in the waste disposal. It’s Sid who gets thrown into the bins. However, humorous moments such as these with West and Benson are few and far between. Much of the running time is taken up with sleazy Sid’s shady dealings with a local fixer played with appropriate seediness by Willie Rushton, who sends him on various disastrously botched jobs using his plumber’s identity as a cover. As a wise man once said, a man with a tool belt round his waist can walk into any building in the land.

There’s a suddenly swiftly wrapped-up storyline about a toilet seat made of gold, a sequence where Sid is manacled to the bed by a gangster’s wife who’s lost the key to the handcuffs, an episode in a bogus massage parlour where Sid gets pummelled by, and then suffocated in the giant breasts of a middle-aged woman (going naked was hefty Claire Davenport’s speciality act, although she kept her clothes on for the Fawlty Towers fire drill), and a joyless sex party scene where all the hedonists are either pretty girls not in camera, or ugly weirdoes who are. Never has sex looked so unattractive, unwanted, or undesirable.

At one point, Sid goes to do a job in, yes, a ladies changing room. Cue endless shots of stripping and showering? Of course not; this is a British sex-com! Once discovered, and the screaming is over, the girls are highly amused... and aroused. Then the door is quite literally closed on us!

The shot of the four girls peering into the shower cubicle at Sid and laughing is several years before the strikingly similar scene in Porky’s, but the difference is that in Porky’s the audience got a good look at the girls. Whereas Bob Clark milked the scene, Long can’t wait to wrap it up and get off home for his tea. Trapped with four girls at least two of whom regularly got naked in ‘70s cinema, we see only the clumsiest, briefest glimpses of anything. In fact, there’s a still on the paperback cover of the movie adaptation that shows more than the film itself!

Naked girls aside, the cast is uniformly hideous. There’s Stephen Lewis with tea dribbling out of his moustache as the delightfully named Crapper (British slang for toilet); elderly Arthur Mullard with his trousers pulled up to his chin as a thug who terrifies Sid, but who could be escaped from just by swiftly walking away; Prudence Drage looking like a mannequin from a fetish boutique; camp Peter Cleall putting on his Please Sir! tough guy persona again as a hood; Anna Quayle as a pop-eyed pervert hosting a seedy sex party; and a young and sweaty Christopher Biggins walking around with a blow-up doll. If this had truly been representative of sex in the ‘70s, I’d be writing this book with a quill and parchment from a monastery.

If there is one thing to be said in favor of the sexless British sex-coms, which were rarely sexy and only occasionally funny, it is that they did effectively put an end to the pompous and hypocritical sex-as-social-problem films that preceded them. Better faux-comedy and incompetently shot nude scenes than the pathetic two-faced hypocrisy of the sex-and-nudity “social documentary”.

The Last Science-Fiction Film

The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976)

“Don’t you feel bitter about it...? Everything?” asks Rip Torn as Nathan Bryce, while giving one of his finest performances ever.

“Nahh... We’d have probably treated you the same if you’d come over to our place”, muses stranded and abandoned alien Thomas Jerome Newton, The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976), after being used, abused, illegally imprisoned, probed, temporarily blinded, turned into an alcoholic TV zombie, betrayed, ignored, abandoned, ripped off, financially ruined, and prevented from saving his family and indeed species from death.

Performance; Walkabout; Don't Look Now; The Man Who Fell to Earth. They’re all in this book for one reason or another, mainly their matter-of-fact everyday attitude toward sex. Some people don’t get it. Unable to think of sex and nudity without immediately relating it to keywords boobs and porn, they don’t realise that there’s sex in Nicolas Roeg’s films because there’s sex in real life. You might as well ask why there's drinking scenes or eating scenes, or beds and sofas in the rooms. Of course sex sells, and it certainly helped to sell Don’t Look Now, but Roeg’s depictions of sex are perfectly natural and normal, and unusual in cinema for being that. When Nic Roeg films a sex scene, there’s no glue on the bed-sheets when the women sit up (they’re rarely under the sheets to start with), nothing tastefully positioned in front of the actor’s dick (sex scenes are still being filmed like this today, although Roeg’s no longer the only director to throw away the stickytape and tall ornaments). And for all their sex and nudity, Roeg’s films can't seriously be called exploitation or commercial, because they’ve rarely made any real money.

But of course there’s far more to baffle and confuse in Roeg’s films than a bit of sex and nudity. Non-linear story-telling, for example. The avoidance of movie cliches (so much that Roeg can show Newton watching ordinary Hollywood movies on multiple TV sets and make them look odd, instead of comfortably familiar). Extraordinary treatments of extraordinary subjects. And Roeg doesn’t always make it easy; only with the freeze-frame will you properly have time to read W.H. Auden’s “Musee des Beaux Arts”, the all-important reference to Icarus in The Man Who Fell to Earth.

An extraterrestrial with the assumed identity of Thomas Jerome Newton arrives on Earth with a splash, deposited in the middle of New Mexico, U.S.A. with a duffel coat, a British passport, and nine basic patents that will wipe out two or three American corporations within a few days. All he really wants is water, but Earth doesn’t do space travel properly yet, so he has to start from scratch, and he has to do it fast--his family are among those dying from the drought on his parched home world. Fortunately, time passes at a different rate for him; it shifts and warps, but it still marches on. And there’s a downside to being an alien on Earth, as well; too much speed and light are two bugbears, and the dangers of drink haven’t made themselves aware to him yet. He’s incognito (although he’s already being watched from afar by the inevitable men-in-suits), looking a bit like Kenny from South Park until he removes his hood to reveal bright red hair--a curious choice, given that it’s fake, but then he’s a dead ringer for former child actor and 1970s pop phenomenon David Bowie, the creator of Space Oddity and Ziggy Stardust, the perfect choice to play Roeg’s alien visitor, and as co-star Candy Clark pointed out, at the height of his beauty in the mid-‘70s when this film was made.

Newton turns up at the home of patents lawyer Oliver Farnsworth (writer, satirist, and sometime actor Buck Henry) with paper worth three hundred million dollars. He creates the company World Enterprises, an early incarnation of Microsoft or Apple, although of course in 1976, nobody knew that then; self-developing film and disposable cameras were science-fiction when Roeg and writer Paul Mayersberg presented them here. Farnsworth is offered the job of President of the largest corporation in America (“When Mr. Newton came into my apartment, my old life went straight out the window”).

Next we meet Rip Torn’s Nathan Bryce, a Chicago chemistry professor going through a mid-life crisis and as many of his eager young female students as he can get through the door. He’s bored to death with the college, and what he sees as the small minds and narrow perspectives in charge there, and fascinated by what’s going on in the real world. He sees what’s happening at World Enterprises, and feels he’s missing out. He’s feeling old, but, he snaps at his smug employer, “most of those kids are older than I am!”. He means mentally, of course; physically, they’re top notch, and he’s screwing as many of the girls as he can line up. His jealous and jaded boss Canutti knows it, too.

“Why don’t you go and join World Enterprises, then?” he goads him. “I do believe I will!” brags Bryce. “I do believe you won’t” mutters Canutti under his breath. But Bryce starts sending letters... “For a whole year I concentrated equally on two things--fucking and World Enterprises” announces Bryce in a random one-off narration. It pays off when Newton tells Farnsworth to bring him on board.

Hiding out with the hicks in Haneyville, where he first arrived, Newton meets pretty, perky hotel worker Mary Lou, who--despite a harrowing first meeting in a too-fast elevator--falls for him, and becomes his lover. Mary Lou’s a church-goer and a hard drinker, and the sort of girl who points at trains... but she does for him, and, as she whispers provocatively in his ear in a pivotal scene, “there’s nobody who’ll do for you, like I’ve done for you!”.

Bryce has had his suspicions about Newton from the outset, and when Newton initiates a space program but doesn’t appear to be too concerned about the recovery, he begins to get even more curious--is it a one-way trip?? “Are you...a Lithuanian?” he responds cautiously in one of the best of two dialogue exchanges he has with Newton, who has told him to ask the question he wants to. “I have a British passport” smirks Newton.

Bryce decides to set a trap, but as Newton later explains (“I realise you’ve made certain assumptions about me…”), he can see the flash of an x-ray. Later, they have a wonderful, more honest exchange when Bryce asks him where he came from. “I’m no astronomer” replies Newton, apparently seriously, but--and he points down the road—“somewhere down there”.

Mary Lou becomes his constant companion, and they build a house overlooking the huge lake Newton crash-landed in when he arrived. She’s also figured it out, and in a harrowing revelation scene, he unmasks for her, and appears from the bathroom in his alien form, clear-skinned, bald-headed, with reptilian eyes. “I don’t care who you are, or what you are, I can’t let you go” she tells him, and later attempts to make love to him, but in a powerful, and still unique and original scene, confronted with the reality of his unreality, she runs screaming from the room, pissing herself and crouching in a corner in the fetal position.

Just as Newton is about to realise his dream, the government moves in for the kill--literally. Newton is just a little bit too successful, and much too powerful. Farnsworth, who has been obstructive and loyal (to the point of paying off the gibbering Mary-Lou, who can’t deal with Newton returning to his alien wife and life, despite their bedroom debacle), is thrown out of his high-rise window, along with his boyfriend’s gym equipment and his boyfriend. It’s an extraordinary and ugly sequence, the banality of evil incarnate (like Laurel and Hardy exchanging bowler hats, the two assassins switch mismatched motor-cycle helmets before knocking at the door). Farnsworth gets it immediately, impotently trying to shut the door on them. Deeply in shock, he even apologises to his killers when he doesn’t go through the plate glass the first time. There’s another wonderful throwaway bit of business when Canutti, Bryce’s former employer, can be glimpsed on TV as a talking head, wallowing smugly with the gift of hindsight in the fall of World Enterprises.

Everyone Newton ever met has betrayed him, except, ironically, the cynical opportunist lawyer now falling interminably to his doom. The idealistic Nathan Bryce has grudgingly turned him in, the naive Mary Lou has tearfully taken a pay-off, even Arthur the chauffeur (Tony Mascia, Bowie’s actual bodyguard at the time) has switched sides and is now the valet for Bernie Casey’s mysterious army man and nameless government fixer who absent-mindedly asks his beautiful blonde wife (an uncredited Claudia Jennings) “Do you ever wonder if we do the right things?”. He doesn’t have to watch two dull middle-aged thugs throw Farnsworth and his musclebound lover out of the skyscraper window in an agonisingly lengthy struggle.

Everyone ages but Newton. Years after the government has blunderingly experimented with him, idiot scientists with beaming faces pulling him apart like a car engine, Newton awakens one morning in his luxury prison to find himself completely abandoned, and staggers out into the daylight. The government’s personnel, priorities, and agenda have changed, shifted. The world has moved on. He wanders down the road alone, free, and forgotten. Bryce, now a bearded sad old man, and Mary Lou, a puffy-faced middle-aged lush, are shacked up together, and in a peculiar and slightly silly Christmas scene, Bryce finds a record album that has apparently been recorded by Newton, who--in the film’s only misstep and foolish conceit--has found a new career making avant-garde music (“I didn’t make it for you, anyway” he smirks at Bryce’s upturned nose, after he’s been tracked down).

There are so many nice touches that, as everyone says about Roeg’s films, you see something new and different every time, or sometimes just remember how wonderful or clever a certain idea was--the inflatable playground toy that looms up in front of Newton like a real-world equivalent to the moon monsters of the 1950s, the drunk, the gun in the till, Mary Lou pissing herself with fear and then trying hopelessly to make love to his alien form, the falling body of Farnsworth transforming into the naked body of the military man emerging from his luxurious swimming pool to caress his gorgeous and equally naked wife.

The sex scenes in The Man Who Fell to Earth are unique, provocative, genuine, and mischievous. We first discover Bryce’s proclivities when one of his students (Linda Hutton) sneaks up behind him, throws her schoolbooks on the sofa, and attacks him playfully from behind. Rough, wild, rampant sex follows, with Hutton deliberately draping her underwear over a photo of Bryce’s wife and daughter. Roeg decides to contrast all this with simultaneous footage of Bowie watching a violent Japanese kabuki performance, and in a Godardian conceit, deliberately mixes up the soundtracks of the grunts and crashes of the stage production with the howls and groans of the crazed and feverish lovemaking (a similar, more conventionally filmed scene, had appeared in The Sex Thief a few years earlier). Later, Bryce’s endless stream of conquests are shown by filming the same scene in triplicate, each skinny new arrival making the same moves and the same observations as Bryce lies back smugly and admiringly as the teenage temptresses go to work on him, working their way down his body to his dick (“Hello!” says one girl to his penis, as if addressing a kitten) and each comparing him to their fathers.

Farnsworth and his muscleman have a much more civilised time together, lounging around in dinner jackets drinking wine and exchanging their stories of the day. As for Newton and Mary-Lou, early in their relationship, the lovemaking is tender, gentle, romantic, and erotic. Much later, the horrors of the alien revelation receding, Mary Lou gets permission to visit Newton in his luxurious government prison, and the two have rough, violent, manic, almost malevolently cruel sex, Mary Lou hysterically laughing as they play with a loaded gun to a backing track of Buddy Holly’s “Hello, Mary Lou”.

While he is incarcerated, and World Enterprises dismantled, his family die from the drought. Then comes the beautiful, brilliant punchline referred to at the beginning of this piece, the fuzzy, sozzled Newton, corrupted by Earthly vices, head falling forward, glass falling to the floor. Heads turn. “I think perhaps Mr. Newton has had enough” says the waiter tactfully. “I think perhaps he has” muses Bryce as Artie Shaw’s now oddly melancholy “Stardust” plays over the closing credits.

After Performance (made with Donald Cammell, although Roeg’s input is glaringly obvious), Walkabout, Don’t Look Now, and The Man Who Fell to Earth, the disappointments came fast and furious. Bad Timing was a crashing bore. Eureka had flashes of the old brilliance, but the whole was clumsy and disjointed, a fabulous theme and cast thrown away. Castaway, with the dynamite combination of Oliver Reed and Amanda Donahoe, should and could have been another Walkabout, but was utterly conventional. The Nic Roeg experience was over, and I could never figure out why.

The year following The Man Who Fell to Earth, everyone went to see the Buck Rogers-inspired Star Wars, a pale reflection of everything George Pal, Alland and Arnold, Stevens and Stefano, Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Mort Weisinger and his writers and artists, Gene Roddenberry, Irwin Allen, Terry Nation and Raymond Cusack, and Gerry Anderson had achieved in the previous twenty years, and I could never figure that out either. Filmed sci-fi had apparently come as far as possible with 2001, Planet of the Apes, Soylent Green, and The Man Who Fell to Earth, and with Lucas and Spielberg, everything started from the beginning again.

Burn out? Or did Roeg get too comfortable? You don’t produce four masterpieces in a row by a fluke. But as crushed as I was to see the comet crash and burn, the man gave us one, two, three, four jewels to marvel at. If that was his peak, if that was all he had in him, it was still a massive contribution to pop culture, and I’ve always been slightly perplexed that while Roeg is quietly admired and respected, he’s never been idolised or adored by other film buffs or even fad-seeking trendies, just quietly acknowledged as being Quite Good. I wanted to dance in the streets after I’d seen The Man Who Fell to Earth. There I was, doing mental somersaults of admiration and enthusiasm, while everybody else was just nodding approvingly. So perhaps I should fall into line, and just say to people, you know, Nic Roeg’s films were Quite Good. But I thought they were bloody marvellous.

The Man Who Loved Women

Although it could feasibly have been made in any European country but Britain, Francois Truffaut’s The Man Who Loved Women (aka L’homme qui aimait les femmes, 1977) is wonderfully, stereotypically French. Despite its modesty and conservatism, this was a brave film to make in 1977 at the height of the brainless bigotry that corrupted the much-needed womens’ rights movement as the prudes and the man-haters barged in and appropriated what was supposed to be a movement for equality for their own bitter agenda. It was not the most appropriate time in the 20th century to make a non-judgemental film about a comfortable, well-off womanising white male with a string of interesting, willing, and (mostly) self-assured lovers.

Charles Denner is Bertrand Morane, a Thunderbirds puppet who to put it more precisely looks spookily like Supercar’s pilot Mike Mercury. There’s no secret made of our hero’s fate; the film opens with his funeral, only two dozen or so women in attendance, and no men, all of the mourners sad but coping females paying their respects. This is a bit of a cheat, as his workplace would surely have sent a couple of male colleagues, if only out of deference to conformity and convention, but the point being made is that Bertrand is not what you would call a man’s man. As one of the aforementioned work-mates points out when a drink is proposed, he will never be found in the company of other men after six o’clock. “I think Bertrand would have enjoyed the sight of his own funeral” muses his publisher, played sweetly by Brigitte Fossey. “Not a man in sight--only women. Nothing but women”.

All we ever learn about Bertrand in terms of his character is that he pursues women with alarming single-minded persistence and works in some sort of scientific lab connected vaguely with aeronautics. Shameless in his pursuit of a pair of legs, these women fall for his bullshit hook line and sinker. “It’s hard to refuse you anything” says one woman, defining the film. “You have a special way of asking”.

Earlier, he walks past a wedding. “Those two believe in Santa Claus” he muses. “Today it’s true love, but in seven years she’ll run off with another guy or he’ll be with a young girl. The house will be sold and the kids will be scattered”. “Not only do you not want to love, you refuse to be loved” scolds a woman reluctantly breaking up with him. Through flashbacks, we gradually discover why he is the way he is. Yes, mother, it’s your fault.

Mother “would walk half-naked in front of me--not to provoke me, but rather to reassure herself that I didn’t exist. In giving me her love letters to post, she showed me confidence I didn’t deserve. They seldom reached their destination…”.

There are some laughs to be had from a contrary nut-case who gets off on dangerous liasons (shades of Woody Allen’s Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Sex… coming up next), but the best scene involves a waitress who loses her job for dealing rather drastically with an obnoxious customer, the living opposite of the sophisticated and mature Bertrand who she warns off the veal while calmly taking the wanker’s order for same. Neither gets to eat, as the jerk gets judo-thrown across the room after playfully undoing her apron-strings one time too many in a too-successful attempt to get her attention. Well, he got it. Bertrand gets her a new job as his receptionist. “You can’t make love all day” says his doctor, writing a prescription for a mild sexually transmitted disease (happy days). “That’s why work was invented!”.

Denner is not entirely convincing in his role. Firstly, he kisses like a Dalek. Secondly, it’s hard to believe that a man as successful as he is with women would tolerate the basket-case Delphine. Most men with his effortless ease at getting laid would run a mile from a high maintenance loony; troublemakers and game-players are for the desperate, willing to put up with it, or needing the attention. And thirdly, he shows no affection for the women he beds, whereas most womanisers, if they’re not also misogynists or narcissists, genuinely like women. We never see Bertrand and his conquests enjoying any sexual activity, or even any quality time together. This respectful lack of eroticism renders the film, and the character, sterile--not a word to be associated with sexuality. And a minor point: a man like Bertrand would know better than to have erotic art on his wall. He’s not a swinger, and neither are the women he beds.

Bertrand decides to write his escapades down in book form, which one would imagine would require a smidgen of self-analysis, or at least self-awareness. The fact that his writing is totally non-judgemental and frank makes him appealing to Fossey’s publisher, and we get the impression that this lovely woman might be The One. But we also realise that as Christmas 1978 approaches, so does Bertrand Morane’s demise. In a wry and poignantly amusing ending, Bertrand is hit by a car while pursuing a pair of legs he’s taken a fancy to. Lying in his hospital bed, he raises himself to ogle a shapely nurse and thus pulls his life-preserving drip-feed out. It’s the only way to go.

Truffaut has boldly made a film about sex without any sex, and to be fair, the film was never marketed as erotica. There are a few inevitable brief flashes of bare breasts, but nothing else. The end result is entertaining, but nothing special, lacking the all-important humanity, humor and insight of character comedy, and most significantly, lacking warmth. But it was an interesting film at an interesting time.

Woody gets a Woody

Take the Money and Run (1969), Bananas (1971), Play It Again, Sam (1972), Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex * But Were Afraid to Ask (1972), Sleeper (1973), Love and Death (1975), Annie Hall (1977)

In Woody Allen’s pretentious and self-indulgent 1980 movie Stardust Memories, his film-maker alter-ego encounters some aliens from a UFO. They’ve seen his films, they tell him, “but they prefer his early, funny ones”. Allen meant it as an ironic, satirical comment, but I’m with the aliens.

There’s a lot to be said about (and for) Allen Konigsberg, aka stand-up and gag writer turned film-maker Woody Allen, and not much space to do it here. Suffice it to say that a guy who played a nerd, or a nebbish as his culture would say, because he had little option to play anything else, had become by 1977 the most unlikely romantic hero Hollywood ever created (at least until Dudley Moore emigrated). Of course he wasn’t a sex symbol in the true sense, even though he had landed the pretty oddball actress Diane Keaton and turned their offscreen relationship into the offbeat Annie Hall. He was the living embodiment of that famous maxim popularised by Michael Caine’s Alfie—make ‘em laugh, and you’re half way there.

Allen started as a writer for other comedians, but soon began doing his own stand-up, exploiting his wimpish weakling persona much like the similarly stereotyped Ronnie Corbett, Wally Cox and Howard Morris turned their appearance into a full-time career; he was a nerd before the term was invented. He broke into films with an assortment of bizarre, very ‘60s off-the-wall projects that didn’t quite work, but had their moments; when he started writing and directing his own work, the results were equally patchy and slapdash, but showed moments of brilliance. His talent is the self-deprecating throwaway line, mixed with visual humor inspired by the silents. He peaked with the superb Annie Hall, but made the fatal mistake of listening to the critics--the accolades turned him toward the aforementioned pretension and self-indulgence of the likes of Interiors and Stardust Memories. Just as cinema needed him the most, he disappeared up his own arse.

Allen’s humor, while rooted in such timeless traditions as punchlines and slapstick (he was a serious film buff, and a huge fan of the silent comedians and the Marx Brothers), was witty, thoughtful, sensitive, and painfully true, and combined with the flawless comic timing he’d learned from the greats, his films—raw in editing, construction, and direction—were quickly recognised for their above average intelligence and lawless, independent indulgence. Smarter and more substantial than the average satirical TV sit-com of the ‘60s, which their themes and gags often resembled, but not as polished or professional as the less funny studio confections passing for sophistication, his only serious rival in the early ‘70s was the equally brilliant (and the equally very Jewish humor) of Mel Brooks. However, while Brooks went for all out parody with the likes of Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein, and was far more lowbrow, Allen put himself in front of the camera and aimed unashamedly for the intellectual, and into parodic scenarios of Castro’s Cuba, Orwell and Huxley’s sci-fi dystopias, and Tolstoy’s Russia, almost like a time-travelling fish-out-of-water observer, mocking his own film and the other actors, asked to play straight.

After the occasionally amusing Take the Money and Run, a childish and fragmented series of sophomoric sketches in which he portrays a luckless petty thief, Allen made a run of undisputed laff-a-minute comedy classics laced with an undercurrent of lovelorn sexual misery—Bananas (1971), Play It Again, Sam (based on his own stage play, but directed by Herbert Ross, also 1971), Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex * But Were Afraid to Ask (1972), Sleeper (1973), and Love and Death (1975), all leading up to his triumph, the innovative and ground-breaking Annie Hall (1977), another Allen film about sex without actually featuring any sex or nudity.

The most interesting thing about all Allen’s films are the relationships. They are not so much about sex itself, as all the bullshit before and after. In the ludicrous satire Bananas (1971), a bitty but brilliant early effort followed by his game-changing Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Sex... (1972), it is his character’s infatuation with a radical politicised blonde (Louise Lasser, his real world girlfriend) that takes him into the middle of a revolution in a banana republic, where he becomes a fake-bearded, cigar-smoking parody of Castro for a series of spot gags and one-liners—all to get this one girl into bed. Bananas was not the most professional film-making on display (even though it featured early forays into the surrealism of Annie Hall, such as his first time in bed with Lasser turning into a televised sports event), but this rag-tag collage of events surrounding a lovesick nerd who ends up running with revolutionaries in foreign jungles has both a story and some inspired and quite mad set pieces, enhanced by the fact that everyone is playing their parts straight except Allen. It was completely undisciplined, but brilliant. Stylistically, this leads directly to his two finest comedies, the sci-fi satire Sleeper (1973) and the Tolstoy send-up Love and Death (1975), both with new girlfriend Diane Keaton, but first came the extraordinary collection of sex sketches Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Sex…

Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex * But Were Afraid to Ask (1972), Allen’s witty, Python-esque, and frequently deadpan send-up of a genuine 1970s self-help sex manual, features an array of familiar faces in variable but frequently funny individual sketches mocking such thorny subjects as frigidity, impotence, transvestitism, and bestiality, along with anyone who dared take such topics seriously! John Carradine appears in a horror film parody that ends with a giant breast terrorising the countryside, Gene Wilder falls in love with a sheep, and Allen himself sends up pretentious European art films about sex in a yarn about a woman who can only have orgasms in public for fear of being caught (audiences should bear in mind this New Wave-ish idiocy came after Venus in Furs and before Emmanuelle).

The final segment (with the penis being operated by an urgently efficient and optimistic moonshot-style mission control manned by Tony Randall and Burt Reynolds) has the same sterile white look about it as 1973’s Sleeper, perhaps one of the most prescient stabs at predicting the present day ever produced, even though he set it two hundred years into the future rather than the mere fifty required. Replace the Orgasmatron, a machine for solo, lonely self-indulgent sex with the Internet’s sex sites, and the beauty contest parody with reality TV, and then study his take on phoney political demagogues based more on image than truth (Reagan, Blair, and onwards) and the talk of identity cards for everyone, and you pretty much have the 21st century world in a nutshell.

Particularly amusing are scenes where Allen deliberately gives out misinformation to researchers asking about the past (an early premonition of Wikipedia or the IMDB?), and the people of the future discussing how all the foods people thought were good for them in the 20th century were a waste of time, and we should have been eating steak dinners and cake. All this is laced with a glorious undercurrent of the incompetence and banality of fascism. Allen’s storyline has him as the owner of a health food shop who goes into hospital for a minor routine operation, and wakes up in a far future dystopia as a valuable commodity to the enemies of the state as he is the only person without an official identity. It’s full of wonderful ideas and bits of business. He followed this in 1975 with the balls-achingly funny Love and Death, a wicked spoof of Tolstoy set in the time of Napoleon (see bottom of page, and right) which again has everyone playing their roles straight except for him, wisecracking away in the manner of a contemporary smartass.

Expecting more of the same, film-goers were genuinely astonished by the surprising Annie Hall, still regarded by most as his masterpiece. Owing more than a little to his earlier Play It Again, Sam, the only film from this period he hadn’t directed himself, it was a similar tale of a lovelorn wimp pursuing a quirky but somehow accessible object of desire. Allen’s obsession with movies had come to the fore in this adaptation of his successful Broadway play contrasting the reality of everyday life and love with the movie star machismo of hopelessly idealised romanticism, here expressed in the form of a self-assured tough guy Humphrey Bogart lookalike from Allen’s imagination, coaching him in how to land “a dame”... The film was the first of his to feature his recurring stock players Diane Keaton and Tony Roberts. The director was Herbert Ross, and the title based on the famously misquoted line from Casablanca. 

Although Annie Hall’s Alvy Singer, like Allen himself by now, is armed with a little more self-confidence than the more simply named Allan of Play It…, it retains the self-deprecating (and sometimes self-defeating) smartass comments, but places the story within a surreal montage of set pieces both more fantastic and more realistic than anything he (or almost anyone else at that time) had attempted before. Like Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex, it had the same Monty Python-style innovation to it, acknowledging both the unexplored possibilities and the limitations of the medium, but this time telling a linear story in a non-linear fashion. Thus, when Allen accompanies Keaton and Roberts to locations in his past—home, school, family occasions—they stand amid the proceedings observing like ghosts, with Allen and the creations of his memory breaking the fourth wall to secure the sympathies of the audience (the film opens with a straight-to-camera monologue and features both an animated sequence and a wonderful scene where the young lovers meet each other for the first time, babbling small talk and trying to impress and explore each other, while Mad magazine-style subtitles reveal their lusts, motives, and insecurities). Whereas before, Bogart was the imaginary friend of Allan, this time it is Allen’s Alvy and friends who wander around within their own movie. Consequently, Alvy/Allen relates how he broke up with Annie/Keaton while we see the relationship beginning and developing, Allen projecting himself into his 1950s schoolroom to argue with his teacher and young classmates, pulling media magus Marshall McLuhan from offscreen to win an argument with a film bore in the cinema queue (and breaking the fourth wall to say “if only life were really like that”), and arguing with passers-by in the streets who seem spookily equipped with the background information of his life to comment. Despite all this sophistication and innovation, Allen and Keaton spend most of the movie being wacky and lovable, which is undoubtedly the factor that sold the film to a wide and disparate audience of early rom-com addicts, New York liberals, and awards committees. Annie Hall, creative, original, and groundbreaking, beat Star Wars, derivative, banal, backward-looking, to the Best Picture Oscar in 1977, but talk about your pyrrhic victories… If any one moment signified the end of real cinema and the beginning of the dark ages of the big budget popcorn movie, it was 1977.

After this, a fallow period, a brief spell in purgatory as the critics’ darling, and then reinvented, reinvigorated, and re-established in the mid-‘80s with Hannah and Her Sisters and Radio Days. But that’s just my opinion. From hereon, no two people agree about anything where Woody Allen is concerned, but almost everyone agrees that Annie Hall may be his greatest triumph. The quality, depth, and significance of Allen’s subsequent films remain the subject of fierce debate, but the opinions expressed are usually a matter of personal preference. Most of his films are worth seeing at least once, and fall into the love-or-hate category, but when you find one you like, it becomes a very special film (mine is Crimes and Misdemeanors), so I’ll just slyly lament that Allen started reading his reviews, and leave it at that. He is without doubt a unique and original film-maker, a curious combination of typical Jewish New York wit and European sensibilities. But like a few other dissenters in the minority, I prefer the early, funny ones. One of my most memorable movie house experiences was sitting in the Brighton Film Theatre in the 1970s (it’s a Burger King now) for a late-night double-bill of Sleeper and Love and Death, both of which I was seeing for the first time, with an audience howling with such hysterical laughter that I had to see the films again a few weeks later to hear the numerous jokes I’d missed the first time because they’d been lost in the roar.

So I’m not going to get into all that stuff about Woody Allen being a serious film-maker or a profound philosophical genius. Maybe he is, maybe he isn’t. I’m simply going to point you toward his early 1970s comedy films, because they put the paint-by-numbers conveyor belt comedies of the last thirty years to shame.

Nude for Satan

Nude for Satan (1974), Satanica Pandemonium (1975), Seven Women for Satan (1976), Satan's Blood (1978), Alucarda (1978), Images in a Convent (1979), Convent of Sinners (1986), Satan's Baby Doll (1982)

What I like about a film called Nude for Satan (aka Nuda Per Satana, 1974) is that it pretty much lays it’s cards on the table right from the get-go. There’s not much ambiguity there. You’d be very disappointed if a film with such a crass come-on title as Nude for Satan didn’t deliver on the nudity, despite Jon’s First Law of Film and Television, which is that any film or TV show with the word Naked in the title is guaranteed not to feature any actual visible nakedness (I’m rarely wrong on this).

And so, with some cynicism, I placed Nude for Satan in the DVD player, and was not lulled into a false sense of forthcoming perversity by the fact that the first shot was of a naked girl running through the forest. Let’s face it, Nude for Satan could still mean ten seconds of nudity at the beginning or the end of a major turkey. However, I’m happy to report that leading lady Rita Calderoni (star of Black Magic Rites, which did not make it onto the keepers shelf) spends much of this film in various states of undress, and several young women (and a couple of weirdos in banana hammocks) do indeed get nude for Satan (who looks suitably jaded, as he has, of course, spent all eternity toasting bare bodies anyway).

Written and directed by Luigi Batzella (who sounds like he should be the vampiric half-cousin of Godzilla), Nude for Satan doesn’t make a whole lot of sense in the plot department, and to further complicate matters, there’s two each of the lead characters. Doctor Bill Benson (Stello Candelli) and, driving in the same direction, Susan Smith (Calderoni), are both involved in minor traffic accidents and seek assistance from a nearby sinister castle. Like all good horror films, Doctor Benson has been warned not to go there by a local creepy, and again like all good horror films, has ignored the warning.

All horror film plots seem to rely on the leads not only doing the wrong thing, but the dumbest and most unlikely thing, and Nude for Satan is no exception. If horror film characters made logical choices, no horror film would last longer than ten minutes. Everybody would not go to the castle/mansion/lake/hotel, not open the door/box/grave/coffin, and not split up into easily murdered smaller units. Consequently, Benson wanders around the house having strange experiences, including stumbling onto a hardcore sex orgy with three girls and a guy performing oral sex and a standing-up sixty-niner, and then reads from a book of Satanic gibberish (or that might happen the other way around, it doesn’t matter, because as we will be informed, time has no meaning in this place). Meanwhile, Rita has met the master of the house, who literally undresses her with his eyes (for a few brief seconds, her clothes mysteriously disappear from her body--sproink--and then come back again).

If you were in strange discomfiting surroundings, and slightly suspicious of everything around you, would you a) gulp down a weird brightly-colored drink that’s handed to you and b) accept the guy’s suggestion to go and have a bath, two of the most vulnerable positions you could put yourself into? Our Susan does both in short order. Then a maidservant appears, and for no reason whatsoever, they start making out.

There’s not much point in my giving a blow-by-blow-job account of the proceedings from hereon. As one of the characters points out, “So many things seem to exist, but do not. And so many things do exist, and seem not to exist at all!”. Seasoned film buffs with experience of both art films and fantasy films will recognise this twaddle immediately as the writer and director absolving themselves of any commitment to story development, meaning, message, logic, physics, natural human behavior, real emotions, or common sense in the scenes to follow, and Nude for Satan is no exception. There’s a bit of babble about past lives and a supernatural painting that comes to life, but basically, the idea is that the two leads are confronting their dark sides, evil personas which Susan ultimately succumbs to, last seen sitting in the devil’s lap (fairly nude-ish), and Bill frantically escapes from, in a fiery finale. Before then, there is much running about and creeping about, Rita and the girls getting nude for Satan, and day turning into night and back again.

Despite my sarcastic tone, Nude for Satan is a good bad film, not a bad bad film. The sets and photography are excellent, there is much inventiveness in the execution (colored gels are used to good effect), and most importantly, it’s never dull; you won’t get a chance to use the fast forward. It’s disjointed, senseless, and absurd, but it’s a horror film after all (although hardcore horror fans may be unimpressed, and certainly not suitably scared). There are a fair number of sex scenes, soft and hard (you’ll need the Dutch release from the appropriately named sodementedcinema--read it carefully--to be sure of the full version), including a bloody but rather unconvincing whipping, and last and most certainly not least, everybody gets nude for Satan. What more could you ask for?

In Satanica Pandemonium (aka La Sexorcista, 1975), Cecilia Pezet plays a young nun who is pursued, tormented, and then seduced by Satan himself (with an apple!) in the form of Mexican TV heart-throb Enrique Rocha, leading her to commit increasingly wicked acts that ultimately lead to... well, satanic pandemonium in her convent. However, unlike many of these films about nuns going berserk, in which the convent practically has a Satan Stop Here sign planted outside the door, poor Sister Maria (Pezet) does her, uh, damnedest to resist, making her a genuinely sympathetic figure as she succumbs, and her suffering after her terrible actions genuinely horrific.

Adapted from Jorge Barragan by father and son team Gilberto and Adolfo Martinez Solares, Satanica Pandemonium is directed by the prolific Gilberto, a producer and director in Mexico who has apparently directed more films than anyone, five or six a year at his peak. Most of these appear to be in the exploitation genre, and include Santo the wrestler films and their like, but when it comes to religion, and despite the obvious cash-in value of a bit of Satanism, they clearly have something to say. At one point, as a nun reads the lesson, announcing that “It’s impossible to describe the face of a sinner... (as in) a society of the damned they all look the same”, the camera pans cruelly across rows of identical nuns, all clad in their uniform habits. Elsewhere, two black nuns are put upon by the white nuns, and made to serve food to all the others--something that is clearly their regular task, as one vicious old bag raps them with a wooden spoon, berating them for being “late again”. This blatant racism from these supposed loving sisters results in one of the despairing two hanging herself... with a little push from the possessed Maria, incredibly the least of her horrific acts.

It’s a creepy, cruel, atmospheric film, more interested in bashing the Church than in the pre-requisite eroticism, although there is a fair bit of nudity, including inevitably, lesbianism (with a twist), and one or two moments of extreme gore and terrible horror, notably the bloody knife murder of the shepherd boy and the hallucinations of the Spanish Inquisition. Despite such moments, the film is beautifully shot, and every frame--particularly outdoors--is excellent, with Martinez Solares as proficient at shooting idyllic sunlit beauty and tranquility as sinister goings-on in shadowy corners in the convent, where paintings of saints transform into lurid portraits of demons, and still and silent figures lurk ominously in corners waiting to be discovered by the others in the frame long after the audience has found them. Martinez Solares is a master at building tension out of stillness.

Discovered removing tell-tale evidence from the charred bodies of her victims, Maria strangles the Mother Superior to death to keep her silence, but the game is up. At the funerals, Maria is exposed, and flees to some caves... but when she makes an incredibly moving and beautifully scripted speech to God, praying for her to be saved from Satan, it is only Satan who answers, offering her the post of Mother Superior... a deal which she at first angrily refuses, but which she realises is a welcome alternative to the forthcoming callous tortures offered by the nuns in graphic hallucinations, and whose fiery torches are transformed upon her reluctant acceptance into garlands of flowers. But there’s an interesting twist to come that almost subverts the entire message of the film... until a second twist coldly reinstates it.

“It is looking itself that matters--not what we see” pronounces writer, star, and director Michel Lemoin absurdly, during Seven Women for Satan (aka Les weekends malefiques du Comte Zaroff, 1976), a wacky, daft, and fascinating attempt at daytime gothic horror based loosely on the much-ripped-off The Most Dangerous Game. Nice try, Michel, but you’re not Antonioni, and that’s patently untrue. Neatly sidestepping this suggestion, we plunge in and onward in search of reason.

Only in France would a pretty girl not only accept a lift on a country road with an obviously unhinged raving lunatic, but also agree to spend the night at his gothic mansion and continue the journey the next day. Only in France would the same pretty girl, having demurred on a glass of champagne, agree to let him pour his glass all over her naked body and lick it off. The following morning they resume their journey, while he rants and raves at the wheel, running hot and cold while he declares his undying passionate love for a girl who, let’s not forget, he met the day before. Then he runs her down, stuffs her in the boot, and drops her in the river. As you do.

An unfortunate girl who applies for a secretarial position is also silly enough to spend the night, where she is drugged and spied on through two-way mirrors, chased through the mansion by a vicious dog, and falls to her doom. A shmuck couple whose car breaks down accept a bed for the night, but even after seeing the prospective p.a. being buried in the grounds, show a far too unhealthy interest in the torture chamber in the dungeons and end up as human pincushions.

Boris Zaroff is under the evil influence of his manservant, whose wicked father served the equally wicked Zaroff senior. On his deathbed, this Dr. Jekyll Jeeves instructed his son, also on staff, to fulfill his employer’s last wish and encourage young Boris to maintain the household’s wicked ways (both the butler and his dying dad are portrayed by the supremely camp Howard Vernon, king of Euro-sleaze shlock horror). He’s also being haunted by the ghost of his late wife (the beautiful Joelle Coeur, for it is she--with her hair up).

Elegantly but amateurishly shot (where do these French directors find all these amazing gothic chateaus?), with the added advantage of plenty of female nudity (Lemoin went on to make both softcore and hardcore erotica when his career stalled), it’s a fascinating and mesmerising film that is neither good nor bad. The locations are a gift to Lemoin, given that much of the film’s class appears to be coincidental; you can’t go wrong with players like Joelle Coeur and Howard Vernon on board (as well-meaning bunglers like Jean Rollin and Jess Franco have ably demonstrated), even if Lemoin’s camera presence suggests--no, screams--vanity project. He does have a knack for placing the camera, though.

The foolishness of this film, plus the lack of any characterisation or motives on the part of the victims, renders the dreamlike deaths unrealistic and meaningless, so it doesn’t really work as horror. It’s probably needless to say at this point that Satan, or even Satanism, never comes into it; the girls are innocent, so if Satan's gettin’ anyone, it’ll be the guys. The gratuitous nudity keeps things interesting, and in that respect is essential, but this isn’t really a sex film, despite moments of eroticism. The other girls in the cast include Nathalie Zeiger, Martine Azencot, Stephane Lorry, Sophie Grynhoic, Patricia Mionnet, and Maria Mancini, almost all of whom had worked for Lemoin before. The music sounds like that jangly junk they played through ITC adventure series of the ‘60s.

However, the very fact that the French authorities, with no great tradition of horror films in France compared with the rest of Europe, panicked and banned this home movie for nearly twenty years, makes it intriguing, perhaps even a must-see. It’s given the film an afterlife, and a significance it would never have achieved otherwise, but it didn't help Lemoin’s finances much, and the film business is, after all, about making money, not losing it in the name of Great Art.

Whatever a film’s technical quality, it should at least be watchable, and Seven Women for Satan is certainly that; it’s very difficult to stop watching. What you’ve actually seen at the end of it, however, remains open to interpretation! You have a choice between watching it poorly dubbed or inadequately subtitled! And finally, don’t you just hate it when you put the subtitles on and they say the same thing as the dialogue, but in different words!?

Never mind. Mondo Macabre release a lot of this sort of stuff, and are also responsible for putting Alucarda, Countess Perverse, and Lorna the Exorcist out there, three other gems featured in this book. Like Arrow, Synapse, Shameless, Another World, Impulse, and Dark Sky, they do an excellent job putting flawed but fascinating lost treasures back into circulation.

Behind the dull and ordinary title of Satan’s Blood (aka Escalofrio, aka Don’t Panic, 1978, shown left) is a discomfiting and creepy little Spanish horror, best seen with subtitles and by yourself; there’s plenty of provocative sexual content to get you in the mood, but if you’re watching with your partner, you won’t get much sex afterwards.

A young couple encounter a man and his wife who claim to know the man from his schooldays. Coerced into accompanying them back to their run-down large house in the countryside, and still not sure who they really are, this likeable pair find themselves getting increasingly unnerved--particularly when it turns out their new/old friends are into Satanism! This they discover when they walk into a bit of naked hero worship by the fire, and a foursome ensues. Before that, the happy and careless young couple have had some light-hearted fun in the bathtub.

The supernatural side of the plot is pure Twilight Zone, and the film never bores, opening with a completely unrelated Satanic grope-fest between an attractive sacrificial victim and a high priest we see again briefly later, and escalating from there. There is not much logic to the events that follow, but it’s linear and not nonsensical. The end result is very much like a cold, unnerving dream, not the sort that makes you wake frightened, but the sort that haunts you afterwards as you sit quietly in bed reacquainting yourself with reality and wondering where the hell that came from.

As ever, a number of horror buffs have actually complained about the extensive nudity (heaven forbid that some natural, pleasant urges should spoil the fear and terror), but this is one of those films where the uninhibited sexual antics are an integral part of the plot and atmosphere. The light-touch cavorting in the bathroom and the brief but explicit sex scenes between the likeable couple (Jose Maria Guillen and Mariana Karr) and their visually appealing new friends have the Don’t Look Now effect of bringing us closer to the baby-expectant-pair, who are quite pleasant and ordinary, and don’t deserve any of the terrible things that happen to them (or their lovely dog). It's all very well being in a hurry to see the next shock scene or Victorian doll toddling through the doorway, but true horror comes from the irreversible tragedies that occur when very small wrong decisions are made. Our young and entirely sympathetic couple make one major bad move to start with, and then a series of bad choices thereafter. Both decide they want to run away from the house at different points in the proceedings, but fatally never at the same time.

Everything gets quite hysterical at the end when things turn nasty, and positively nightmarish when the couple attempt to flee and finally make it home to the non-safety of their apartment. Hysteria finally morphs into blessed relief and then horror, gore, and a chilly twist ending. This is, in my opinion, a mostly unsung and underrated minor masterpiece of ‘70s horror, that features a casual and uninhibited attitude to sex without--like so many other horrors--making it a bad thing.

As with the above, the best horror films are set in the real world where all things supernatural are recognised to be false--except suddenly they’re not. This is so in the aforementioned Alucarda (aka Alucarda, la hija de las tinieblas, 1978), where the abominable behavior of the church toward two young girls turns out to be horrifically justified if only in the name of self-defence rather than any deity, and which for added effect is set in the already deeply superstitious and religious 19th century.

Alucarda, despite the implications of her name, is not a vampire movie, but a yarn concerning demonic possession, possibly inspired by The Exorcist and The Devils, but vastly superior to both of them, and undoubtedly influenced by Carrie. The year is 1865, and after being orphaned, young Justine is taken in to a convent (stay well away from religious buildings if your name is Justine!). Once in her quarters, out of the darkness materialises Alucarda, a strange-eyed girl with a bug fetish and an obsession with death—“You have to die! Everyone must die! But there can be happiness beyond death!”. From here begins a moody and magnificent gothic horror of fire and brimstone, a hysterical jaw-dropping fantasy with simple but fabulous effects and astonishing performances from the two young leads, Tina Romero as Alucarda, and Susana Kamini as Justine. Every frame is extraordinary, the choices of color (mostly washed out reds, greens, and greys) superb, and the costumes and sets are exquisite.

For once, a horror film--while not awash with nudity—doesn’t shy away from presenting the sexual side of Satanism that is often only hinted at in standard, lesser productions (the overrated Virgin Witch and Blood on Satan’s Claw, for example); we see not the usual languid dancing and unenthusiastic sacrifices of bare-breasted bimbos, but a full-on orgy in the woods. We also see a mystic battle between a blood-soaked levitating nun and the gypsy-like coven in the forest, the disruption of a religious education class at the convent, when Alucarda and Justine blaspheme and send the other girls screaming and scurrying from the hall, and a fair amount of medieval histrionics and bizarre imagery, including an amazing thunder-and-lightning scene when a coven member materialises in the girls’ quarters to join them in a blood pact.

As the film draws to a close, Justine emerges from a blood-filled coffin as a naked, blood-soaked demon, and is dissolved into a pile of bones by holy water. Meanwhile, Alucarda has returned to the convent, where she is busily immolating nuns and priests with Satanic chants and quite literally bringing the house down in true prom night fashion.

Alucarda, one of just three 1970s horrors made by Mexican director Juan Lopez Monteczuma, blows away all other similar-themed endeavors; he was a cult film-maker before cult became a common word... which may account for his undeserved obscurity.

The decidedly unobscure Joe D’Amato, or Aristede Massaccesi (his real name) on the other hand, made around 200 films in thirty years under dozens of pseudonyms in a wide range of genres, all of them lowbrow and provocatively offensive. For someone who started in the business as a cameraman and then director of photography, his films look pretty awful. Completely lacking in either inspiration or style, watching this man’s efforts is an effort in itself--the very opposite of being entertained. At best, his films--like Jess Franco’s--are interesting in parts, at worst, his films look clumsy and amateurish. Entirely immoral and conscience-free, he had no problems pandering to the lowest tastes, and there was little he wouldn’t put on the screen, freely mixing often unpleasant sexual content with gore and violence. When he wasn't being crass (one of his best known films is the cannibal sex film Porno Holocaust), he was being dull (the Eleven Days, Eleven Nights series, for example). His lack of judgement was matched only by his lack of taste. Nevertheless, he has his fans. And again as with Franco, another prolific hack who dabbled in both hardcore and softcore exploitation, every so often the law of averages kicks in. Images in a Convent is, astonishingly, superb.

Although it wasn’t the first film to plunder history for stories of crazed sexually repressed nuns and religious hysteria, hypocrisy, and violence, it was Ken Russell’s notorious The Devils (ably assisted by that other church-baiting effort The Exorcist) that opened the floodgates for the 1970s exploitation genre amusingly termed “nunsploitation” by aficionados. Together, The Devils in 1971 and The Exorcist in 1973 created a mostly manufactured uproar among the gullible, assorted religious hysterics, and the eager to be offended, and were thus hugely influential on the trash cinema of the day, provoking dozens of even uglier movies about exorcisms and/or nuns. Of the dozen or so recognised major titles, Images in a Convent arrives on the scene fairly late, in 1979, and is an extraordinarily accomplished work.

Despite consisting almost entirely of one sex scene after another, and being punctuated by scattershot scenes of violence, Images in a Convent is remarkably restrained for a) a nunsploitation picture, and b) a Joe D’Amato extravaganza. Ordinarily, when people tell you that erotic films bore them, they’re either lying or they’ve sat through a couple of Joe D’Amato films. However, Images in a Convent has beautiful photography, beautiful women, a beautiful location, intelligent and credible dialogue apparently from D’Amato himself (!?!), and a gentle and appropriate score from Nico Fidenco. The words subtle and dreamlike rarely get an airing when D’Amato is being discussed, but Images in a Convent is almost a work of art, neither as grim and hysterical as The Devils, The Demons, Alucarda, or Flavia the Heretic, or as dull and earnest as Borowczyk’s Behind Convent Walls, Franco’s Love Letters of a Portugese Nun, or the disappointing Story of a Cloistered Nun that wastes the beauty of Eleonora Giorgi.

Isabella (Paola Senatore), the defiant daughter of a deceased man of the cloth, is incarcerated in a convent as part of a religious plot to keep her from the care of her next of kin, a corrupt and wealthy uncle with influential criminal connections who has been having a consensual incestuous relationship with her. Despite the best intentions of the Mother Superior (a hand-wringing, butt-clenched performance from Aiche Nana), the convent is already and perhaps inevitably a hotbed of lust, lesbianism, and sexual frustration, and Isabella--who displays her breasts to the distressed woman through her vandalised habit as her first act of rebellion--is soon plunged into the thick of it. Isabella blasphemes magnificently and truthfully and is soon succumbing not to religious piety and self-sacrifice, but erotic and incestuous dreams of her uncle and the all too real lesbian attentions of her sisters. Into this brewing cauldron of anarchy comes a devastatingly handsome young man, artist and sculptor Guido Bencio (Angelo Arquilla), found unconscious in the grounds after being attacked by a band of local brigands roaming the area. His presence brings out the natural girlish excitement in the sex-starved women, and Isabella sees him as a way to get word of her whereabouts to her uncle, who has no idea where she is sequestered.

The sex scenes start ten minutes in, and rarely cease after that, but this is not a film without substance or story, and each sex sequence propels the narrative forward to the next development, every coupling leading logically to the next, until an extraordinary climax. They’re often quite explicit and enhanced by some supremely disconcerting music combining Morricone-ish chanting with a sort of pseudo-Tubular Bells motif (that then-contemporary piece having being used throughout The Exorcist, of course). Nuns and convents are of little interest to me (I find the whole business all very alien and depressing), but there is no denying that this film, so perfectly lit, scored, and cast, is profoundly and genuinely erotic. The women (Marina Hedman, Paola Maiolini, Marina Ambrosini, Maria Riuzzi, Sylviane Plard, and of course Senatore herself) all have fantastic bodies, and the film never once fades out on a sex scene early.

The convent, it transpires, was built on the grounds of an abandoned pagan temple, long razed to the ground, but for some reason, the statue of a Pan-like satyr was left where it stood. Coyly referred to as the unknown god, it is clearly Satan, and Bencio bears a curious resemblance to it. As an artist and sculptor, Bencio says he came to the region to see it, but he plainly wants more than that, plotting to use the nuns’ fear of Satan to manipulate the women into sating his desires.

Bencio taunts the nuns with his presence and tries to seduce the Mother Superior, forcing himself on her when she resists; help arrives just in time. In the meantime, with Sister Marta reluctant to act an as intermediary, Isabella plans to get him into her quarters by blackmailing her lesbian lover. Bencio mocks the lesbian nun by drawing attention to the statue, which he later places inside the convent for maximum effect. When he finally gets in, Isabella tricks him into having sex with a novice under the impression it’s her.

One night, the nuns are terrified to see a vision of the Satan statue in the chapel, a sight they all witness. Marta is sent to fetch Padre Arnaldo, an exorcist, but is waylaid and raped by the brigands in an ugly and explicit outdoor scene (the awfulness of the forced oral sex scene partly alleviated by the knowledge that Marta is portrayed by prolific porn star Marina Hedman, whose films include Satan’s Baby Doll and The Beast in Space, both in this book, and thus avoiding a nasty sort of Brown Bunny situation). It is Arnaldo, already mysteriously on his way to the convent, who finds her lying abandoned in the road and brings her back to the convent in shock. As each of the nuns quietly succumbs to corruption and sin, Bencio inevitably secures the keys to the convent and equally inevitably, he and Isabella get together for some steamy sex. As the exorcist strides through the corridors of the convent, the nuns in their quarters sate their lusts in various ways and then block his way, displaying their bodies to tempt him from his task. There’s not much we don’t see as the nuns run amok, and this is not a film for sensitive souls.

Some commentators have implied that the convent is being corrupted by Satan, either in the form of the statue or the young artist or both, suggesting that the nuns are blameless and possessed, but it seems fairly evident that the nuns have been behaving hypocritically for some time and have in this way drawn Satan to them for the cataclysmic finale. Either way, the end result is an endless parade of sins both slight and careless and immense and frequent committed by women consumed by guilt and the unnatural suppression of their natural urges. The convent is a den of debauchery and depravity involving almost everybody squirming with lust.

There is no more logic to the storyline than there is to religion itself or the unreasonable and ultimately destructive demands of deprivation made on the unfortunate nuns, but Images in a Convent is more about the ideas and various scenes than a coherent story about what is, after all, a string of absurd supernatural events. Is Bencio what he says he is, an immoral and irreligious artist who fell foul of bandits while seeking the statue, or is he an incarnation of Satan, or the statue, or both? Has he been sent to tempt the nuns, and by what force? Or is he just a very naughty boy? And why did his liason with Isabella end the way it did when she needed him to help her escape? This scene, which I won’t reveal, would have made more sense if her uncle had walked in the door at that moment, having located her himself. Why was the exorcist already on his way to the convent, provoked by just a feeling that he was needed? And what happened to him between being assaulted in the convent and turning up in the chapel? It’s figure it out for yourself time. But of all the numerous and mostly dreary films made about persecuted nuns and sex-crazed convents riddled with hypocrisy, this is the only one that holds the interest continuously with spectacle, mood, atmosphere, eerie supernatural diversions, and plentiful sex.

D’Amato returned to the well again some years later in 1986, for Convent of Sinners (aka La demonaca del peccato), which like the above, was supposedly based on La Religeuse, an 18th century novel by Denis Diderot. This time, there's a more linear story, but a much less stylish and more conventional film, although it does hold the attention.

It was a funny old world in 1760. Raped by her stepfather, it’s young Susannah (Italian sex starlet Eva Grimaldi) who’s put in a cell--a convent cell, against her will but supposedly for her own good. In a sick way, perhaps it is. She’s religious, but has no calling; nevertheless, she tries to fit in and make the most of a bad lot, while at the same time quietly campaigning to be allowed to leave--something the Church hierarchy sees as intolerable as it sets a bad example for religious faith. To add to her misery, the Mother Superior's sinister deputy, the lesbian Theresa (Karin Well), is steamingly jealous of the attention Susannah is getting from her secret lover, and is concerned about her power base being eroded. Adding to all this, several of the other nuns are feeling a bit of a lapse coming on...

Convent of Sinners is a slow starter, but 25 minutes in things pick up with a series of thrashings, lashings, bathings, lustings, snoggings, and even a bit of rampant heterosexuality thrown in. It’s rather interesting how well choral church music goes so well with scenes of erotic imagery and sex! When old Ma Superior is taken ill, evil Theresa sees her chance, and creates the impression among the gullible and in some cases complicit nuns that Susannah has been taken over by the devil... All this intrigue, incidence, and manipulation ends up in that old tried and tested arena, the courtroom.

There is no real comparison between the unique and outstanding Images in a Convent and the far more routine Convent of Sinners, which seems to have come from an entirely different director (scripting this time were Antonio Bonifacio and Daniele Stroppa). While the sentiments and basic premise are the same (and closer to Diderot, whose novel had also been filmed in 1966 as The Nun by Jacques Rivette), Convent of Sinners goes for the obvious every time. The script is a lot more heavy handed and the dialogue less subtle than the superior predecessor... and while there is nudity, there’s less actual sex, although there is some. There are also no supernatural Satanic elements here either, as in Images in a Convent or the likes of Satanico Pandemonium, just human scheming, hypocrisy, and conspiracy. Both films have no mercy for either nuns or religion (as Diderot himself said, what use has God for so many foolish virgins?). Of all the women in Convent of Sinners, Susannah, the only woman who hasn’t chosen to be there, is the only one actually behaving like a nun. All the others are like spiteful, fluttery, or sexually curious fourteen year old schoolgirls in twenty-something bodies, their personal growth unnaturally frozen in time.

And finally, we have Satan’s Baby Doll (aka La Bimba di Satana, 1982). A film with such a unique title as this deserves better than the corny cliche-strewn checklist of horror film ingredients being checked off here, half a dozen ticked off in the first two minutes before the credits. Sometimes though, it’s the cornball predictability of it all that makes it fun. Padded and drawn out, there’s not much substance or content, and scenes that should take seconds take minutes. Despite this, Satan’s Baby Doll is amusing enough for an after-midnight entertainment.

Miria (Jacqueline Du Pre, but not, IMDB, the cellist with the same name), is a dead-eyed dimwit with a fit figure. She and her mother Maria (porn star Marina Hedman) are telepathically linked... all the more alarming as Maria is currently lying dead on a slab in the castle morgue. Consequently, with mother supposedly inactive, it’s down to the tormented and bewitched Miria to sort out some unfinished business with almost everybody in the big, chilly gothic outpost that is the Aguilar residence--her brutish, controlling, drug-addicted, bullying predator father, the morally-struggling novice nun he lusts after as she struggles with her bi-sexual desires, the paraplegic voyeur brother, and the inevitable fearful, superstitious, swivel-eyed manservant.

First to get it is the family doctor. In an unintentionally comical moment, Aguilar decides not to panic and suggests burying the body in the cellar and dumping the doctor’s car in the lake. One wonders what the plan would have been if they had panicked...

Not that they have long to think up an alternative plan, because everybody is swiftly despatched by the wronged Maria, as the two women animate a decaying corpse to throttle the manservant, force the paraplegic to rise from his chair and walk to his doom, and generally switch back and forth between their two forms to drive their deserving victims nuts.

Speaking of nuts, nudity is sparse, except on those occasions when you’d rather a bit of decorum had been exercised. The disabled brother is left abandoned in the middle of his bed-bath at one point, lying cold and naked while the novice storms off to argue with the burly Aguilar, whose underwear comes and goes in the climactic scene in which he also comes and goes. Every so often the print goes super-scratchy as Shameless have quite rightly put back some of the sex scenes left on the cutting room floor by certain regions’ censors.

All these films are all the more fascinating and enjoyable for being films that are not only very much of their time but will not be made in similar fashion for the forseeable future. Make of that what you will. Nevertheless, by far the best thing about Satan’s Baby Doll is the superb poster art on the sleeve, with a satanic figure nowhere to be seen in the movie enveloping a naked woman. So far, so typical; see also the equally wonderful poster for The Beast in Space. Not the first time a fantasy film poster had nothing to do with the actual film. The Region 2 editions of both from Shameless show them in all their, er, shameless pulp magazine beauty, while other versions have been tragically interfered with by the sort of people who would put underwear on Greco-Roman statues and giant black oblongs over body parts--often in the name of the God they believe made them.

Darkness Falls

Strip Nude for Your Killer (1975), Island of Death (1977), Love Goddess of the Cannibals (1978), The Sister of Ursula (1978), Avere Vent’Anni (1978)

What can you say to a film called Strip Nude for Your Killer (aka Nude per l’assassino, 1975) as you hold the shiny disc in your hand? I think we understand each other. We have an expression in Britain—“it does what it says on the tin”. As with such blunt and classic titles as Satan’s Baby Doll and Nude for Satan, you can’t really watch this film and then complain about it later. The girls do, in fact, strip nude for their killer. Most of the time, they’re already naked, but on the few occasions they’re not, they will. One girl even obligingly loses her bra between being stabbed and dying.

Okay, so it’s not the nicest film in the world. It’s an exploitation film filled with sex, nudity, and murder, and nothing else. But it’s also remarkably inoffensive, stupid, and tame; it’s plainly not to be taken seriously and is the sort of film that makes a monkey out of anyone who does.

Utterly silly and ridiculous, the story makes no sense at all, and is simply there as an excuse for the film’s true purpose of displaying women and gore for profit, with innocent people lying to the police about irrelevant things that not only don’t matter, but which will make them look quite guilty if their clumsy fibs are exposed. Why not help the police? Especially when the killer is plainly interested in methodically slaughtering all the people in your workplace? But then, upon hearing something suspicious, why wander around your home semi-nude in the darkness, waiting to be surprised by the least surprising shock moments in the history of cinema, and violently killed? Oh, yeah... the title.

The man responsible is Andrea Bianchi, who has written and directed far worse than this during his short and useless career, and produced such a tasteless finished product that the writer, a bit of a dubious character himself, claims he insisted Bianchi take a ‘story by’ credit, if that can be believed. Frankly, the plot is as old as stone-age campfires. Set in Milan, a mystery killer with a perceived grudge from the past, is bumping off the employees of a photographic model studio, who obligingly behave like illogical idiots and set themselves up to be stabbed to death like raw steak waiting for a fondue.

As well as being extremely silly, the transparently thin plot is also built around one of the oldest tricks in the book, and jaded regular viewers of any sort of mystery film at all will swiftly figure out why our villain is totally covered from head to toe and kept in the shadows. Spoiler ahead, youngsters...

As we all know, if the supposedly male killer is completely concealed, and you can’t see the face or any part of the body, it’s a woman. However, this film cheats so much (at one point, we see clearly male bare hands), that it wouldn’t have surprised me to see the big fat guy unmasked at the end. All this nonsense just about holds the interest because of all the constant nudity on display, the sheer lack of conviction in the scare scenes or red paint-smeared murders (graphic though they are), and a superb background score from Berto Pisano, heavily influenced not only by the inevitable second-rate Morricone knock-offs that swamped Italian cinema, but black music impresario Norman Whitfield, then producing lengthy urban pseudo-movie score tracks for the Temptations (the magnificent and modestly titled Masterpiece) and the Undisputed Truth.

All the girls are beautiful, so there’s plenty to look at, starting with leading lady Edwige I’ll-take-anything-as-long-as-my-clothes-come-off Fenech, who with her hair cut in a short, boyish pixie-cut, has never looked better. As well as spending most of the film in various states of undress, she gives personality and depth to a two-dimensional and demeaning doormat girlfriend role, possibly because she’s not taking any of it seriously and her real self slips through to alleviate the offensiveness of her character. On the other hand, portraying a cartoon strip bimbo in exactly that way is the beautiful and busy Femi Bemussi, first seen wiggly-walking through a public swimming pool facility with a stereotypical drooling Italian male pursuing her like an annoying child. As this is an Italian film, one can hardly accuse the makers of racial stereotyping, and the man-boy concerned turns out to be our deeply unpleasant and irrational leading man (the prolific Nino Castelnuovo, no stranger to such fare). And this being the 1970s, there are also some rather mortifying examples of male swimwear and assorted underpants moments to get past. I’ll say this, though—it’s a game cast, and it’s not only the women who go near-naked in the name of their craft.

Colorful, quaint, idyllic and scenic, Greece--or more specifically, the island of Mykonos--has never looked more beautiful as attractive British couple Christopher and Celia (Robert Behling and Jane Lyall) arrive for a vacation. Unfortunately, before long, we begin to realise that this camera-happy couple aren’t quite as delightful as they first seem, as they click away at the local characters, and we are about to visit the (gasp!) Island of Death (aka Ta paida tou Diavolou, aka Devils in Mykonos, 1977). He’s a violent raving Bible-thumping psycho, and she’s a callous but nervous trouble-making slut along for the ride, and far from being a freewheeling travelogue as the sun-drenched images and bouncy pop music suggest, this is a mean-spirited and pointless film about two sadistic killers, and the succession of perfectly nice, pleasant people (and a couple of hippie rapists) who come to grim, gruesome ends at their hands.

Like so many gruesome horror films, Island of Death has been put on a pedestal by the people most keen to suppress it. Every free country, at one point or another, has an occasional moral panic and/or flurry of censorious behavior, often simultaneously accompanied by a mild outbreak of petty fascism or reactionary attitudes—it’s like a little demon was flitting around the world, zapping regions at random with outbreaks of fear and stupidity. One of Britain’s silliest occurred in 1983, when--aided and abetted, as is often the case, by a government in trouble and looking for diversions, scapegoats, and escape routes--the Video Recordings Act was introduced, culminating in what obviously became for small vulnerable minds a shopping list of random video titles that the authorities marked as forbidden fruit and banned. As even some of the directors have pointed out, including Nico Mastorakis, who made this one, these films would have lapsed into obscurity years ago, had they not been privileged to be selected for the famous “video nasties” forbidden list.

Many of them were so laughable and lame that their naming and shaming was pretty much a bad joke for those in the know, and the dark mood was frequently lightened by amusing stories of over-zealous coppers and customs officers with dirty minds seizing films that turned out to be completely innocuous, but Island of Death is unique in two ways. Firstly, it’s a very well made and creative film. Secondly, it totally deserved to be on the list. Even before the great press-induced panic of ’83 it had been cut to ribbons by the censors in 1977, with a grand total of 45 minutes removed. As the director laughingly mocked, over the years subsequent versions have gradually been getting longer and longer and “in two or three years the censors will be adding scenes”. Despite the hackneyed theme of lovers on a thrill-kill spree, Island of Death is a true original. Arrow video released this (below) complete version in 2008.

The murders, it must be said, are some of the most ingenious and imaginative ever put on film since the days of Steed and Emma’s investigations in The Avengers, but as they can be effortlessly committed without the use of super-strong robots and man-eating plants, you can kind of see where the censors are coming from on this one, impressionable minds and all that. I’m not a connoisseur of murder films, but I’ve never seen any of these devilish deaths before; a heroin overdose, an oldie but goodie, is given a spiteful twist, a strangling is finished off with an extraordinary guillotining, and most cruelly, a girl who succeeds in hiding from her assailant leans on the door to catch her breath and is skewered accidentally by the frustrated murderer throwing his implement in rage! A police inspector who we briefly suspect may triumphantly arrest them has a noose slung around his neck, and is dragged into the sky by ‘plane, the murderers laughing out of the cockpit at him while he desperately tries to hang on to the outside... and fails, instantly hung and then dropped in the sea (okay, it’s an obvious dummy in the longshots, but I don’t think we can hold that against them). Never has so much talent, effort, and creativity gone into producing anything so deeply unpleasant; even the lead actors perform under pseudonyms.

Weirdly, none of the doors have locks (even the director walks into their apartment for a quick cameo), and those that do are apparently missing their keys. Also, two of the victims who get a chance to run--at length (all the murders are drawn out for as long as possible)--never think to scream or shout for help, even though they’re running through heavily populated areas at night.

The young couple are so good-looking, charming and friendly, no-one suspects them of the terrible crimes being perpetrated on the island, but even though they’re clever enough to cover their steps, they’re also dumb enough to photograph everything (to masturbate over, later). This will be their undoing, but even as the police close in, there are more twists and depravity to come.

Mastorakis has an eye, and works well with the surroundings, and it’s a beautifully made film... but why make it? Mastorakis is honest enough to admit that the aim was purely to ensure a sure-fire profit, and horror films laced with sex come with a cast-iron guarantee. As well as all the horrific drawn-out murders (Mastorakis claims he had two lists, one of extreme ways to die, and another of extreme sex acts), the film manages to include bestiality, animal cruelty, rape, incest, homophobia, sadism, urination, mutual masturbation, drugs, and decapitation, strangulation, and crucifixion, all in picture postcard surroundings!

Mastorakis is one of that small army of European exploitation directors who can put on a great show as wag and raconteur, but is not always a fount of accuracy. Although Lyall only made three films (all of them in Greece at around this time), she and Behling were hardly amateurs picked up off the street, as he suggests in the DVD extras. Both had already worked in films, as had busy porn star Jannice McConnell; Jessica Dublin, a future Troma regular who plays a ghastly old trollop who gets pissed on, had already made a film for him--in the lead. While some players did indeed have the same number of film appearances to their credit as the goat, the guy playing the mute shepherd has 130 roles to his name, with Island of Death sitting smack in the middle.

In a similar vein is Joe D’Amato's Love Goddess of the Cannibals (aka Carribean Papaya, aka Papaya del Caraibi, 1978). It’s readily apparent why they changed the title; the original sounds like a recipe in a cookbook, but now it reads like we know what the ingredients really are.

Love Goddess of the Cannibals starts with Melissa Chimenti’s Papaya biting off a guy’s dick and then burning his house down, and moves on from there to blonde journalist Sara (Sirpa Lane of The Beast and The Beast in Space) enjoying a cock fight (the birds, you fool). Later we will see a mass voodoo dance and a tribal leader ripping a guy’s heart out and eating it. This is the only actual onscreen cannibalism in the movie, which is essentially about voodoo, a sort of Carribean version of The Wicker Man.

Papaya and the locals have taken umbrage at the intrusion of the white men who have bundled them all out of their village and relocated them so that an atomic power station can be built on the island. Protests have been to no avail, and leading man Maurice Poli as Vincent is a prime example of the arrogance and insensitivity that has put up a brick wall between his culture and theirs and will ultimately result in his doom. He makes derogatory comments about the local festivals and traditions, and mocks the Ceremony of the Round Table, his fatal mistake.

Lane’s journalist character is already acquainted with Poli’s Vincent, and they quickly pick up where they left off previously for an impromptu meaningless spot of lovemaking. Lured to the local festivities by local girl Papaya and her buddies Ramon and Ruiz, they attend a weird cannibalistic voodoo sex orgy and wake up naked in a strange bed (we’ve all been there).

While Vincent frolics in the bath with Papaya, Sara is abducted by Papaya’s suspicious-looking pals, but he’s having far too fine a time being seduced to worry about where Sara’s gone, and casually dismisses her absence. Hardly the hero type, Vincent thinks with his dick, and Sara’s on her own. This makes an interesting change to the usual horror hero, who--if the girl disappears--will spend the next few scenes searching for her. If he had, they might both have returned to civilisation for a more conventional ending. Besotted with the alluring Papaya, he won’t listen to Sara’s concerns, and Sara falls in with a sexy black guy, incurring the wrath of the jealous Papaya…

The twist ending is interesting, but in a way, not surprising. The relationship between the two leads, casual, caring up to a point, but hardly committed, is curious and probably not intended to be as unusual or as original as it is. Sara does what she can for Vincent, but she doesn’t grieve much, and she’s found bigger things to care about. Vincent knows she's a capable free spirit, and isn’t much bothered when she moves on, particularly as he is enjoying the attentions of Melissa Chimenti. The cruel closing scene seems creepily inevitable.

Edited in a blender, Love Goddess of the Cannibals is not particularly horrific throughout, but has two or three horrific moments. It is quite sexy, and there is enough sex and nudity to satisfy, although there could have been more. It doesn’t disappoint, but it doesn’t get you worked up with the thrill of having found a hidden trash classic. Joe D’Amato filmed a fair bit of softcore and hardcore at this location, including the ludicrously titled Porno Holocaust, but although prolific and profitable in his thirty year career, his films were moderately successful in their aims because he knew what he was doing, not because he cared. He was a master of exploitation through and through, and that meant exploiting everybody from the moment he started casting to the closing of the deal when he took your money. We knew what we were asking for when we bought titles like Love Goddess of the Cannibals, and that’s what he gave us, no more and no less. Buy a tin of D’Amato soup, and you get what it says on the label.

Coming in on the end of Italy’s giallo trend (that is to say lurid pulp horror, traditionally with a soupcon of sex), Enzio Miloni’s The Sister of Ursula (also 1978)--despite its perfectly adequate theme—doesn’t really work either as horror film, gore film, suspense thriller, sex film, or mystery... which is rather unfortunate, because it’s supposed to be all of them.

Firstly, it’s blatantly obvious who the killer is from the very start; in fact, it’s so obvious, you may well think it’s a heavy-handed red herring to distract you from the real culprit. But no, it isn’t. They even set up an early exit strategy from this mortal coil for the villain (the glass door that looks open when it’s closed), but then don’t use it; perhaps it was too complicated or costly to film. The film is set in too bright a locale to be dark and suspenseful, and there are no surprises; everything is so clearly telegraphed, you may have to sign for delivery.

Despite a gruesome murder method (would you believe... dildoed to death??), nothing is shown, with scenes fading out before the murder on a corny final scream and only a brief flash of the aftermath, so gore fans will be disappointed. As for the skin scenes, director Miloni does not have an eye for erotica, and all sex and nudity is filmed with very ordinary participants and with very little imagination. In fact, the whole film has an overwhelming sense of easy options and make-do about it.

The thin and familiar plot concerns two sisters, one dull and simple and one rude and mental, who have come for half-assed legal reasons to a holiday resort hotel in search of the mother who abandoned them. As the sharp-tongued nutter, Barbara Magnolfi (from Dario Argento’s Suspiria) is suitably steely-eyed and obnoxious, while Stefania D’Amario--as the sister of Ursula--stands to one side stripping down to her underwear at every opportunity just to get noticed. For this sort of storyline, a much more dynamic personality is required than D’Amario is equipped with to bring to the party. When the subsidiary character of the hotel manager is the most interesting personality on display, you’re in trouble. Add to the mix a ridiculous creature called Yvonne Harlow as a cabaret singer calling herself Stella Shining, and a women’s romance magazine type as the resident hotel stud and very healthy looking heroin addict (Marc Porel, who died a few years later, from drugs) and you have a pretty unappetising bunch.

You have to kiss a lot of frogs before you stumble onto an Alucarda or Beast in Space that makes it all worthwhile, and Sister of Ursula hops, plops, and goes ribbit ribbit. Director Miloni is interviewed as a DVD extra, but almost everything he says is either mistaken, ill-informed, or dubious (Magnolfi, for example, has not disappeared), and being the sole interviewee is not corrected or contradicted (if Yvonne Harlow is related to Jean Harlow then my leather jacket makes me James Dean; dressing up like someone doesn’t retrospectively give you their DNA). Sister of Ursula is worth watching once, so think of it as a one-night stand that you won’t see again, rather than a ‘phone number worth writing down.

Now here’s an interesting one. Avere Vent’Anni (aka Being Twenty, 1978) offered the most unpleasant and callous ending since Franco’s Women in Cell Block Nine, and the public hated it. When the nihilistic director who made this sex adventure in 1978 tacked on a brutal, moralistic unhappy ending from 1878 onto the otherwise light comedy exploits of two of Italy’s prettiest and most popular teenage film stars, word of mouth caused audiences to stay away in droves. The girls (Gloria Guida and Lilli Carati) exploit their sexuality to get about, and after much in the way of carefree fun and frolics are raped and killed for it by bitter neanderthals. The film was quickly withdrawn and clumsily re-edited into a consequence-free caper, but to no avail. It was too late to save the project, and the real moral of the story turned out to be: don’t hire a director known for dark melodramas to helm a bright and bubbly sex film.

The re-edited version in which the girls happily survive their ordeal (because “the police are coming!”) changes things pointlessly and a little too enthusiastically, shortening scenes, re-inserting outtakes, putting the end at the beginning so that the girls can escape, removing an enjoyable beach party from the very beginning, editing out a lame lesbian love scene, and generally shuffling scenes around like a caffeine-crazed monkey. Frankly, it’s a mess.

“The film only makes sense if the two girls who think they are free... are killed for being free”, pronounces director Ferdinand Di Leo in an intriguing and revealing short documentary on the DVD release, which includes both versions and some interesting examples of re-dubbed dialogue. A feminist viewpoint, or a misogynist one? Depends on your perspective, but intriguingly it suits both.

Certainly it was a dark, cynical, downbeat and negative ending in a film which up until the last ten minutes had been the exact opposite. It was a fair point well made, but it was a bit like choosing a wedding reception to make the case for the joys of the single life, a baby shower to advocate a woman’s right to abortion, or a cake-baking competition to pontificate about healthy eating.

To be fair, Di Leo was philosophical, and admitted that the film he made, hailed by film buffs and critics of course, was not the film the audience wanted to see and had expected. He realised they felt cheated and told their friends, don’t bother. Critics and publicity are powerless, he observed, in the face of word of mouth. And thank heavens for that, because in a world dominated by publicists and hype, our own opinions based on the truth as we see it are our last weapons in our arsenal against the monolithic media.

Your author got into writing about film and TV, like a handful of others in the early ‘80s, not because I was a film student or media studies graduate, or because I was the editor’s useless nephew, but because I actually liked film and TV so much I couldn’t shut up about it. At this point, you either bore your friends into oblivion, or you share your background knowledge and experience by writing for likeminded readers.

Point being, I’m not one of Di Leo’s academics or social engineers cheering on the Great Artist who’s Making a Statement, I’m an ordinary guy with an informed opinion and a desire to be entertained by what is marketed as a feelgood sex film. I’m one of the punters too, and like the mainstream Italian audience, I didn’t want to see these girls punished, raped and slaughtered to make a pompous pretentious statement either.

The error, of course, if Di Leo really wanted to make his moral fable, was casting Italian starlets Guida and Carati as the two girls. The film defeats its original point by casting actresses already liked and making the audience like them even more in spite of themselves. Guida and Carati had spent the 1970s prickteasing besotted young men and middle-aged oafs in light-hearted romps that forgave them for their beauty. Both carried baggage from previous films, whereas casting two less likeable unknowns and running an honest and more appropriate ad campaign would have given him a blank slate to say what he wanted.

So what about the film itself? The ending and the alterations cast a shadow over everything, but individually the scenes are entertaining, and the joyful and colorful atmosphere until the last ten minutes makes the audience far more forgiving of the girls’ antics than the writer and director apparently intended. There’s also a sense that the girls have been unfairly singled out. Earlier on the beach, the film captured effortlessly the casual carefree nudity of the era, and despite the lateness of the 1978 date, in terms of fashions and attitude, this film could be as early as 1968-’76. There’s not nearly enough sex and nudity, given that two actresses who readily disrobe have been cast; many scenes finish before the sex starts. In the beach scene that opens the original but has inexplicably been cut from the supposedly more carefree re-edit (it could be a clip from a Frankie and Annette beach party movie or an Elvis film if it didn’t have a couple copulating in the middle of it), two young lovers skinnydip while the leading ladies wear swimsuits!

Even though the girls hitch-hike seductively, shoplift, offer sexual favours for minor considerations, and generally flounce about showing long legs and knickers, the ambience of the film is free and happy, dumb and forgiving, bright and bouncy (there’s a superb impromptu Austin Powers-style dance through the streets), and generally easy-going (although there’s far too much emphasis on the antics in a communal squat, radical politics being very much in the Italian media at the time). Until the final scenes, and in the revised edition, the message appears to be to have fun while you’re young and can get away with it. Until they don’t, and the film’s ambience is cruelly subverted.

How the girls are de-raped and un-murdered in the revised version is quite fascinating; had the producers not been daft enough to release Di Leo’s mess-terpiece in the original form to start with, they’d probably have got away with it.

Caligula

The BBC’s small-scale, stagebound, but highly acclaimed adaptation of Robert Graves’ I, Claudius had made such a splash in the wasteland of 1970s television in both the U.K. and the U.S., that it was perhaps inevitable that producers with more money and resources would realise the potential for a major movie exploiting the infallible elements of sex, power, evil, and political intrigue, all indulged in to excess. It was, after all, the adventurousness of the cinema that had created the environment for the BBC to make I, Claudius as brashly and as boldly as they had (spurred on, no doubt, by the excitement at recent abolition of the Lord Chamberlain’s ludicrous powers of censorship in British theatre), and by being shown on public arts television in the States it had circumvented network censorship and dazzled the Americans with its nudity, horror, and daring. Sneaking onto the airwaves under the cover of the Four Great Exceptions—Theatre, Art, Historical Fact, and the BBC--I, Claudius could press everyone’s buttons with impunity.

While Graves’ story had revolved around the character of the bumbling Claudius (portrayed by Derek Jacobi as a sly fox posing as a stammering simpleton who survived the deathly machinations of the Roman power game by playing dumb), it was John Hurt in a career-making performance as the camp and monstrous Caligula who stole the show, a development that did not go unnoticed by the acclaimed writer and massive snob Gore Vidal. Filming of Gore Vidal’s Caligula (aka Caligula, My Son aka Caligola) began in 1976, with virtually unlimited funds provided by the publishing empire of Penthouse magazine, a sleazy but hugely successful porn magazine that had followed in the footsteps of Playboy, but ventured further into the realms of what was considered permissible. Now absurdly wealthy, Penthouse publisher Bob Guccione was looking for artistic credibility and respect, but it would not be long before he would revert to form.

With hindsight, it seems right that Caligula is dated 1979; it's difficult to think of a film like this belonging to any other decade. Guccione’s monstrous, bloated, overblown, out of control Roman orgy of a Roman orgy film was (after Nic Roeg dodged the bullet) directed by Tinto Brass, who in a highly publicised dispute, was removed from the film when Guccione started tampering with his edit, putting in ultra-pervy inserts (and how unerotic must they have been for the lusty Mr. Brass to object?). At this time, Brass had not yet begun producing his own highly successful series of wildly uninhibited sex films (documented later in these pages), but had attracted attention with his Nazi-themed Salon Kitty, a sleaze-fest about the Third Reich’s brothels and breeding houses that had featured exactly the sort of perverted debauchery Vidal wanted to portray in Caligula.

Cast as the demented Caligula was Malcolm McDowell (above), an offbeat, edgy actor very much in favor at the time for his appearances in such cutting edge film productions as If..., A Clockwork Orange, and O, Lucky Man. He turned out to be a major asset both to Brass and the finished production, and perfect for the role. He also brought a happy-to-be-sight-seeing Helen Mirren to Rome, his friend and co-star from O, Lucky Man, partly because he knew she was right for the part of Caesonia, but mostly to have a friendly face on hand! Unfortunately, Mirren’s super-charged sex scene (foot massage, temper tantrum, and lustful lovemaking), a key character moment as important to her role as the lovemaking sequence in Nic Roeg’s Don’t Look Now, was cut, leaving her as little more than sensuous decoration. Although she and Tinto apparently got on, he never favors her once; even when Caligula forces her to perform an erotic dance, the camera is on everybody else.

Also climbing on board were British actors Peter O’Toole as the corrupt and sickly Tiberius, who having been forced to give up drinking spent most of the production off his head on pot, and the imperiously camp Sir John Gielgud as suicidal aide Nerva, who has had quite enough of Tiberius’ excesses and depravity, and rightly foresees more of the same when Caligula succeeds him. Just as Marlon Brando’s early sequences in Superman a couple of years later would lend gravitas to the entire production, so do the memorable performances of O’Toole and Gielgud give Caligula a marvellous kick-start that none of the later misjudgements can diminish.

Both O’Toole and Gielgud had finished their contributions within a few weeks, but gone even quicker was self-destructing starlet Maria Schneider of Last Tango in Paris notoriety, who managed to get fired by both Brass and Bunuel before disappearing from films for good. Caligula was no great loss, and would probably have neither helped nor harmed her opportunities, but Bunuel’s That Obscure Object of Desire would have set her up as unassailable. No matter what travesties she suffered later she could always regain her momentum by pointing to Bertolucci and Bunuel on her CV. Her association with Last Tango had made her a natural first choice for Drusilla, and she’d seen the script and the production, but Schneider had shown up looking thin and tired, and was refusing direction and causing hold-ups from the moment the cameras rolled; she was replaced to the film’s advantage by the lovely Teresa Ann Savoy (below, with McDowell) of Private Vices, Public Virtues, who had worked with Brass on Salon Kitty.

As for the later departure of Tinto Brass, despite the assertion that Guccione intervened because the film was not visually attractive enough, the finished product speaks for itself, and while Brass’ camera isn’t quite as pointedly voyeuristic as it would be in later years, there is plenty for the eye to enjoy in-between Vidal’s slavering sadism and Guccione’s heavy-handed porno. In order of appearance, we see McDowell and Savoy making love al fresco, McDowell and Savoy rolling around on bed together, the water-nymphs of Tiberius’ hideaway on Capri, the decadence of Tiberius’ menagerie of sexual athletes, the antics in the Isis pool, the rape of Livia (Mirella D’Angelo), the menage a trois between Caligula, Drusilla, and Caesonia after the rainstorm, Caligula’s grief with the naked body of Drusilla, the boat orgy, and some homo-erotic antics with the army. Any one of these scenes would have made the reputation of a lesser film. We also have the misfortune to witness various atrocities and perversions from the world’s terrible past (and occasionally and awfully, present), including disembowelling, dismemberment, impalement, torture, rape, sodomy, bestiality, beheadings, infanticide, and borderline necrophilia. It seems that everybody who does something horrible to someone in this film eventually has something equally evil done to them. Just another day in the court of Caligula.

Although completed at the close of 1976 after six months shooting, the massive clash of egos that ensued kept the production in the courts for three years before it finally spluttered onto the screen satisfying no-one (except perhaps Guccione, who lacked the perception to understand what had been lost). Equally disappointed were Vidal, a man of words, and Brass, who saw things visually, and they did not work well together. Brass won and Vidal walked, but it was a short celebration. Guccione and a swiftly promoted cameraman, Giancarlo Lui, slithered onto the sets without Brass’ knowledge and upped the ante with wild hardcore sex scenes that completely destroyed the balance of the film--and they took out some of Brass’ footage to fit it in. What survives of Brass’ vision exists solely because of lead actor McDowell and set designer, art director, and costume designer Danilo Donati. The visual beauty of his sets and costumes and the power of McDowell’s performance still stand, and in fact stand out more next to the clear and obvious interference of the vulgar Guccione.

The contribution of Donati cannot be over-emphasised. For years, audiences who missed Caligula at the cinema saw more on VHS, but had to put up with fuzzy, unclear pictures. Arrow’s sumptuous DVD release, awash with extras, finally lets us see, with beautiful clarity, the film as it should be seen, different film stocks, clumsy inserts, and all. The variations between what Brass and Donati initially achieved, and what Lui and Guccione later stitched in, is now even more glaring and apparent.

“I felt a great sense of betrayal from Guccione” said McDowell on the DVD commentary in 2007. “I mean, there’s plenty for everyone in the film, let’s face it. (The added footage was) so modern, and so stupid and child-like, and so ridiculous... Listen, the man paid for it, I guess he can do whatever he wants, but how naive of us--and I include Gore Vidal in this--to think that he could make a piece of art…”.

There are a few fallacies and misapprehensions about Caligula that need to be cleared up, and they are mostly to do with the timeline, and the sequence of events that took Caligula from serious film to sex film. Firstly, it is not true to imply, as some have, that some of the big names associated with the film did not know about the content, or were even upset by it (Gielgud told McDowell mischievously he'd seen it three times “and paid twice”). The sex and the sadism was in Gore Vidal’s script right from the beginning, and in fact Vidal’s main bone of contention was that Tinto Brass reduced the amount of time spent with Tiberius and his den of inequity on Capri to concentrate the focus on Caligula; much of the initial perversity and barbarism occurred in these scenes (half of it left on the cutting room floor), escalated by Caligula in Rome later. Peter O’Toole, Maria Schneider, and John Gielgud were all perfectly aware of the film’s content; photographs exist of Schneider posing with the freakish extras from the Capri scenes, and O’Toole and Gielgud quite clearly performed with the actors on those sets (Gielgud’s first comments on meeting McDowell were that he’d “never seen so much cock in my life, dear boy”, and O’Toole fell out with Brass because he saw his role as Tiberius being diminished).

Secondly, the initial inclusion of the infamous Penthouse Pets (Guccione’s version of the Playboy bunnies, but less innocent) occurred while Brass was still working on the film, and he had no great objection to slotting them in among the other extras. They were not brought in specifically for the hardcore that was later shot with their participation, but to sex up the background (the girls, however, had presumed they were getting more significant roles than they eventually got, having been told that Brass hadn’t filmed any sex scenes). Brass, obviously, had no problem with including beautiful women, and contrary to Guccione’s extremely narrow view of female perfection, had already filmed numerous nude scenes with the Italian extras. He ensured that the dozen-or-so Penthouse girls (represented by Anneke di Lorenzo and Lori Wagner, who got screen credit) were seen, but not to the detriment of the film’s credibility. The only sequence filmed by him in which their presence is jarring is in the countryside when Caligula frolics with Drusilla, and the three bimbos can be seen unconvincingly molesting a hapless shepherd boy (in his commentary, McDowell laughs at how obviously Di Lorenzo bares her arse for the camera). The girls could only perform porn-style, and it jars with the more naturalistic eroticism of McDowell and Savoy’s cavorting. Amusingly, whether intentional or not, a large flock of sheep obscure the three girls after their initial assault on the poor fellow, thus restoring the erotic ambience of the moment (unless, of course, you’re into sheep).

It was only later, as Brass was being removed from the project (he had gone so far as to complete the first edit), that Guccione filmed his notorious hardcore sex scenes that ultimately brought the film into disrepute. This is literally about ten minutes of film inserted at three points in the production, some groping in the Isis pool, a pathetic lesbian scene intercut with the genuinely erotic footage of Mirren and Savoy attending to McDowell after his breakdown in the rainstorm, and some sucking and fucking cut into the boat orgy footage. This latter material was, at first, so well integrated with the film that McDowell and Mirren were astonished to see themselves presiding over a full-on explicit sex orgy rather than the somewhat muted background action Brass had provided with his bored and rebellious extras (filming on the boat took a week, interrupted by a strike when their pay didn’t come through... hardly creating a mood for abandoned revelry). However, when the added hardcore footage clearly couldn’t be passed by the censors for theatrical distribution, the film was (rather than being restored to its original form) re-cut again with what is plainly material made up of less contentious rough-cuts and test footage, and the entire sequence is a shambles.

Much of this detail has only come to light through the abundance of extras on the so-called Imperial Edition of Caligula released by Arrow Films in 2007, where the full-length hardcore cut, the so-called ‘alternative version’ (which is the closest approximation to what Brass was trying to achieve), and the botched and seriously censored ‘theatrical version’ that was released in cinemas can all be viewed side by side with deleted footage, interviews with Brass and co-stars, and wonderfully amusing and revealing commentaries from McDowell and Mirren, who have both remained properly unapologetic and remarkably sensible and sanguine about the project over the years.

The extras also include a laughable making of... promo from the period, made before the egos imploded, some rather shambolic orgy scene outtakes from Brass when literally nothing was working out, numerous publicity photographs both posed and candid, an interview with John Steiner, the British bad boy of Italian exploitation, and two with Penthouse Pet Lori Wagner, the first of which seems fairly accurate and in accordance with everybody else, the second being one of those litanys of the I-didn't-know-what-I-was-doing variety which can perhaps be taken with a pinch of salt (or dollop of egg white if you prefer, which is what she maintains is all over the cum-shot). In this version, an embarrassed Wagner cringes at the thought of what she did on screen, gets a couple of bit parts in mainstream ‘80s film and returns to her singing ambitions, leaving the Caligula lifestyle behind her. Overlooked for discussion are some of her IMDB listings for the 1990s, which include Buttman at Nudes a Poppin 2, Frankenpenis, The Busty Bombshells, Heavenly Hooters, and Older Women, Hotter Sex. Later, fully recovered from her ordeal, she displays some of her souvenirs from the production, and her triple-X-rated CD of songs to have sex to. As enticing and revealing as these are, we get the real meat of the story from Tinto Brass himself, who, interviewed nearly thirty years after the debacle, sets out the position of each major player in the power game fairly and succinctly, with paint-by-numbers visuals from the production team. “In my own mind, the film should have been about the orgy of power” he says calmly. “In their version, it became the power of the orgy”.

Both McDowell and Brass saw Caligula the same way. “Caligula was not crazy, he was a child” says Brass. “When a child has a toy, he plays with it, and enjoys taking it apart. What was in my original version, and partially remains in this one, is that power is a madness. Caligula was a young man who mocked power”.

For his part, Guccione was not so much intent on excising Brass’ vision, but in imposing his own desires on it. In some ways, although it might be perceived as an easy and crass analogy, Guccione became like Caligula himself, mesmerised by the sets, and the spectacle, and the small army of naked and fornicating extras. Political points, reflecting Brass’ satirical and anarchic view of the world, came out to accommodate the antics of the Penthouse Pets. Guccione, with his limited vision, had rather absurdly found the natural beauty of the Italian extras “ugly”, and the identikit bimbos he drafted in, amusingly nicknamed Huey, Dewey, and Louie behind their backs, represented his idea of beauty. This in itself would not have been damaging, but when they took center stage to perform sexually, the gulf between the natural lusty erotica of Tinto Brass, and the crass vulgarity of the girls’ traditional overdone and cliched porno performing made it painfully obvious which sex scenes had been filmed by Brass, and which had been shoehorned in by hastily promoted camera operator Lui for Guccione. Guccione’s pretensions were also betrayed by his attempt to use classical music in the score rather than commission an original score, Prokofiev’s “Montagues and Capulets” theme from Romeo and Juliet being several centuries and a continent awry, and instantly and inappropriately recognisable, while through no fault of his own, but possibly karmic, his other choice was best known as the equally over-familiar public domain theme music for a BBC soap.

To add insult to injury, when the film was finally released in Italy, the one place Brass' artistic rights had been recognised before the film fell under copyright law in Britain and America (where it was “edited by the production” to their hearts’ content), Brass was briefly prosecuted for obscenity. As it happened, Brass had forsaken his law degree for film-making, and noted the irony that he had now spent three years in the courts over Caligula instead of making films. When he was swiftly cleared, the starting gun for the rip-off merchants had been fired (censorship, as usual, achieving the opposite of what it desired), and Caligula inevitably gave birth to numerous blatant cash-ins and copies, two of the most prominent and thoroughly unpleasant examples being the taste-resistant Bruno Mattei’s Caligula and Messalina in 1981 and creepy schlock specialist Joe D’Amato’s Caligula--the Untold Story in 1982... untold, as one IMDB reviewer pointed out, because it wasn’t true. Meanwhile, Guccione himself had been back to the still-standing sets with Di Lorenzo, Wagner, and the rest of his entourage, and made the exploitation film Messalina, Messalina.

For the last word on the subject, we go to McDowell, who’s earned it. “It potentially should have been an amazing film, and it almost is a terrific movie... but it just doesn’t quite make it. But there are certain things in it that are fabulous”.

Better Late Than Never? : David Sullivan

Come Play With Me (1977), The Playbirds (1978), Confessions from the David Galaxy Affair (1979), Emmanuelle in Soho (1981)

The one good thing I can say about finally seeing the infamous Come Play With Me well over thirty years after it was made (and purely for the purposes of this book, I can assure you), is that I wasn’t disappointed. And the reason I can say that, is that I already knew exactly how godawful it was. I still ended up amused and amazed with my jaw on the floor.

It’s difficult to imagine, even for those of us old enough to remember the ‘70s, how audiences must have felt, walking out of the cinema after paying good money to be turned on by this tripe. Twice as bad, perhaps, as I felt walking out of Star Trek--The Motionless Picture (it was one of the first TV adaptations for the screen, and we didn't know back then just how bad they could be), which has been my most depressing cinematic experience since I and my schoolboy buddies came out of Thunderbird Six completely crushed, having just discovered that the much-anticipated title reveal was just a crappy old bi-plane. Yeah, I know, spoiler... in every sense of the word.

As even the film-makers themselves have pointed out, the British sex films of the ‘70s were money makers because they were the only option in inhibited, uptight police state Britain (half of Soho’s vice squad was jailed for corruption in the ‘70s, and it was police harassment that drove porn actress Mary Millington to suicide, not sexual unhappiness or social embarrassment). Britain in the 20th century was the most heavily, bizarrely, and unreasonably censored country in the free world.

And yet, Britishers born after 1980, and particularly young people today, are generally oblivious to these films and their players, and indeed often blissfully ignorant of the whole phenomenon of the British sex comedy. Today, with sights available on the Internet that make David Sullivan’s films look like Renaissance paintings, and hardcore porn easily accessible without even leaving the house, let alone sitting in a shabby 1970s cinema, young people would find such product incomprehensible. Those who have found such fare on Amazon write reviews in which they are aghast at the crappiness on display. Most simply don’t bother.

In the 1970s sex-com industry, audiences were the very last consideration of the people who made the product. Some were in it to climb up the ladder and bury their embarrassing start sometime in the future; some were in it to make money; some were just passing through; some were in it for the girls; some were just grateful for the work. As David McGillivray documents hilariously in his book Doing Rude Things, at least four sex film directors not only didn’t care for either sex, nudity, or pornography, but were happy to go on record saying so. Three others used pseudonyms, and three more denied that their sex films were sex films, one of whom even threatened to sue when McGillivray said so. Readers are invited to view Au Pair Girls, The Deadly Females, Permissive, and The Yes Girls, and decide for themselves.

George Harrison Marks (“Sex bores the arse off me”) was a Soho big shot who made a mint as one of the earliest still photographers of naked women. In 1961, he joined the growing army of opportunists exploiting the wacky nudist camp fad that made nudity tolerable for the pathetic censors of the day, simply because taking your clothes off in the British climate couldn’t possibly be for the purposes of erotic pleasure. Nudity in Britain is not quite the sun-tan and sex set-up offered in warmer climes, and was (and still is) strictly the preserve of slightly strange fanatics, but it was the only way for Brits of the 1950s or early ‘60s to see breasts other than buying porn, visiting strip clubs, or getting married. When sex films started making serious money in the 1970s, quality apparently not being one of the criteria for success, and some of them made by his fellow nudie snapper Stanley Long (“Pornography doesn't turn me on”), Marks quite naturally assumed that he should be cutting himself a slice of the pie. Porn mag mogul David Sullivan, later the owner of that 1980s icon The Sunday Sport (a sort of cross between Hustler and a British National Enquirer), and one of the more recent new boys on the block, allied himself with one of the oldest pornographers still active, and an unholy alliance was struck. It was late in the day for the sex film in 1977, but Sullivan, already a successful businessman and millionaire, made money because he pretty much had the playing field all to himself.

As I said, the result turns out to be amusing and amazing. Describing Come Play With Me (and what a wretched, creepy title) in mere words still doesn’t make it any more believable, nor can I do it justice. It literally has to be seen to be believed. We open in Downing Street, where a collection of worthies (all played by familiar British character actors) are discussing the urgent need to apprehend a counterfeit ring which is cutting a financial swathe through Britain and looks set to hit the South Coast next. In a sequence of events that appears to have been filmed entirely separately from the rest of the film, simpering MI5 man Podsnap (the splendid Ken Parry) is sent to Brighton on the South Coast in hot pursuit, where he encounters an assortment of character players on the Palace Pier including the wonderful Rita Webb as a grotesque fortune teller with a loose-bowelled parrot which has already given his opinion of the film all down Parry even before the gag has been cued up.

In fact, counterfeiters Clapworthy and Kelly--two middle-aged idiots played by writer, director and producer Marks in a Prince Valiant Beatle wig and veteran comic Alfie Bass (The Army Game, Bootsie and Snudge)--have scuttled off to Scotland, having betrayed the East End gang boss (Ronald Fraser) who did indeed hope to flood the South Coast with fake banknotes. The plan is to set up operations for themselves in a fusty, dusty health spa run by British National Institutions Irene Handl and Cardew Robinson in a seedy mansion which is perpetually empty as the staff are even more tired and run-down than the premises. What nobody knows is that Handl’s no-good son Rodney (who has told mummy he's been in France with a troupe of ballet dancers, when in fact he’s just returned to Britain with a busload of strippers) is on his way with a coach full of what can only be described, even by a gentleman, as what we call in Blighty, slappers. I’m sorry, but when half of them stagger off the coach in high heels wearing nothing but their underwear, there is no place for discretion. Compliments just won’t do. The spectacle of this shower stumbling toward the mansion in high heels and various degrees of undress is one of the great moments of British cinema. The old joke about not being able to walk and chew gum at the same time was never so perfectly illustrated as these game birds totter around in whatever laundry was on the floor when the audition was called and recite their lines like children in a school play. Rather than criticising them for not reading them with conviction, you feel like applauding that they remembered their words and cue.

When young Rodney decides that his girls can be used to boost business at the spa with some extra-curricular activities, business booms, and one of the new customers eager for a stay is elderly enforcer Tommy Godfrey and his dolly bird girlfriend Sue Longhurst of Confessions of a Window Cleaner and many others in the same vein. Once Clapworthy and Kelly are discovered, hilarity ensues…

Part of the fun of these dreadful films is that they look cheap and nasty from the outset. The moment the cheesy Tigon label comes up--a stripey lion that looks like a child drew it--we know we're scraping the bottom of the barrel. Sullivan and Marks’ genius was in casting well-known British character actors, playing the Carry On/Confessions card that transported audiences into their comfort zone. The professionalism of old stagers like Alfie Bass, Irene Handl, Tommy Godfrey, and The Benny Hill Show’s Henry McGee and Bob Todd carries the film despite its brazen no retakes policy (you’ll also find out why Milton Reid was never given any lines and always cast as the strong silent type). The girls are so god-awful at reciting their lines as they run around naked and semi-naked that the film goes past being just bad and actually becomes so bad that it transcends so bad it’s good and becomes genuinely entertaining on a whole new plane of existence until one is truthfully enjoying the show in a parallel universe that would chill the blood of Salvador Dali. The turning point of no return for the viewer’s sanity is when the two counterfeiters attempt to flee the building and are prevented from leaving by the nurses. At this point, everyone suddenly breaks into a completely unexpected and under-rehearsed song-and-dance number, the only one in the film.

Just when you think this can’t get any more face-slappingly surreal, the performance moves outside, into the cold, grey, chilly driveway of the mansion (there’s a car parked in the background that nobody’s thought to move; one gets the feeling that it would still be there even if the film was set in 1875). The girls are still dancing in their nurses’ uniforms, still out of step with each other, performing a stage show in what appears to be a light shower, each in their own little uncoordinated world. Even if they had been properly rehearsed the camera couldn’t have caught it because although motionless, it’s never in the right place.

Not weird enough yet? We now cut to Clapworthy and Kelly in their longjohns, also dancing and singing, with a clumsy girl staggering around in lingerie between them. Can’t get any weirder? Now she’s naked. Later, despite the autumnal gloom, everyone is sitting round the pool in various states of undress sipping fruit juices in towels or less and trying not to catch hypothermia. An equally chilly nighttime orgy occurs in the same location, after dark. They may not have been able to walk, talk, or dance, but those girls were troupers.

Oddly enough, word of mouth doesn’t seem to have hurt Come Play With Me. It played for months and turned a fair profit. Possibly, people who went to see it were too appalled and embarrassed to admit that they’d been, or say what they’d seen. Naturally Sullivan invested in a follow-up, The Playbirds (1978).

Sullivan’s next feature film was his most conventional and his most professional, despite starring fading sex starlet Diana Dors’ ridiculous husband, the inept and sleazy Alan Lake, the talentless oaf who would ruin his third and final feature, Confessions from the David Galaxy Affair. What saves The Playbirds is that Lake is not carrying the film single-handedly, and only appears in a few scenes. The marquee name on the movie is Sullivan’s number one model Mary Millington, who, even among her fellow glamour models, let alone the professional cast members, is way out of her depth. Next to a Millington performance, Charlie’s Angels comes across as gritty realism.

Essentially a standard detective procedural with nude scenes interspersed, The Playbirds alternates between theatrical, cornball murders and scenes of moderately entertaining voyeurism. On paper, this sounds as seedy as the finished product certainly is, but the murders are so unconvincing and TV-style traditional, and the girls so hopeless at playing dead, that it never becomes as offensive as it otherwise might.

Much of the nudity revolves around the photo sessions for Sullivan’s Playbirds magazine, which actually existed and so created the ultimate in cross-promotion possibilities. So flagrant is the cross-promotion, that at one point the cops are waving a copy of Playbirds around that is clearly carrying a cinema ad for Millington in Come Play With Me, even as the actress stands there in person, portraying a policewoman. As in that film, the poor girl has lead billing here over everyone else, but plays a minor, if significant role, and her few lines are played appallingly.

The lead is really Sullivan regular Glynn Edwards, who carries the whole production’s credibility on his familiar TV persona of capable, amiable everyman, while all around him give diabolical performances, the top three bad acting honors going to Gavin Campbell as his assistant, Michael Gradwell as a creepy photographer, and of course Lake. Although Edwards ended his thirty-year-plus career playing barman Dave in the Euston series Minder, and is probably best known for getting stabbed in Get Carter, the vast majority of his roles were as various levels of police officer. Another old pro and Sullivan regular, Fawlty Towers’ Ballard Berkeley, has a minor role as a horse trainer, and another 1970s sex film regular, the obnoxious Windsor Davies, does a day’s work in a couple of scenes as the police commissioner that is virtually a table reading. If memory serves me right, he doesn’t even have to get up out of his chair. The scene stealer is Suzy Mandel, another sex-com regular who would shortly skip off to America, and who here strips off for Lake at our leisure, but sadly and uncharacteristically keeps her underwear on for the rest of her scenes.

For all the ‘70s ambience and decor (several yards of lime green curtains put in an appearance at one point), the film’s age is mostly betrayed by the clumsy police technology, an early appearance of the sterile, box-like computers that will shortly come to dominate everybody’s lives.

Extras on the Playbirds DVD include a profoundly depressing strip show contest that seems to go on forever, even on fast forward, and hosted by the creepy John East and the perpetually washed up TV leftover Bernie Winters, the only comedian who started his career in decline, and a short stag film starring Millington and a prettier, unidentified girl which has a missing soundtrack (punters had to pay ten quid extra for sound, and the previous owner of this one declined to). She plays an office girl who fantasises about sex with co-worker Millington while being bored in bed in both senses of the word by her anonymous boyfriend.

Sullivan’s next was Confessions from the David Galaxy Affair (aka The David Galaxy Affair, aka Star Sex, 1979). Brazenly exploiting the Confessions trademark, this dreary anachronism comes from the absolute dog-end of the British sex-com cycle, which was a pretty scuzzy pooch when it left home ten years earlier. In this, Lake portrays a smarmy astrologer and con-man with a crooked past who the police are calmly and casually trying to fit up for a twenty year stretch as the getaway driver in an armed robbery that they are fully aware he had nothing to do with. Presumably we’re supposed to care, but so inept and inadequate is his performance that it’s virtually impossible to tell whether by ‘70s standards we're supposed to consider him hero or anti-hero. Should we be rooting for him, or smugly watching him get his comeuppance? He’s an unfunny obnoxious creep, but then so were most of the heroes in 1970s British film and television—Moore’s Bond, the laughable Jason King, shop window mannequin Gambit of The New Avengers, the smug gits and arrogant thugs of Target, Special Branch, The Persuaders, The Professionals... only Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) and The Sweeney offered men to impress.

Given the unfortunate and unpleasant experiences of producer Sullivan and limited leading lady and sex starlet Millington during that hypocritical era, it comes as no surprise that it is considered a given that the 1970s cops are corrupt. The police of that era made today’s police look like cherubic angels from the starry heavens in comparison, and virtually the entire London Vice Squad of the ‘70s ended up in prison themselves or, if they were lucky, taking early retirement. It is this perfectly natural and unquestioned assumption that makes The David Galaxy Affair (the opportunist pre-fix was added at the last minute to exploit the presence of Anthony Booth from the Confessions... series) of any interest at all. The cops aren’t even portrayed as shifty thugs; they’re just doing what comes naturally.

For anyone who remembers the ‘70s, just witnessing the names of the participants as they come up in the credits is a pretty dispiriting experience. Has-beens, wannabees, never wasses, third-rate comedians, two-bit celebrities, and people who should have known better all queue up to reflect the worst of a decade that wasn’t too bad to live in, but never fails to look horrible on film. The film opens with a profoundly depressing topless beauty contest. They’re not deliberately trying to make it look tacky. It is tacky.

Lake, only cast because of his marital connection with ‘50s glamour girl Dors, was a bit player completely incapable of carrying a film, and is a liability and an embarrassment to the genuine professionals playing alongside him. It becomes a fascinating exercise in car crash viewing just watching the trained and experienced performers going about their business, just coping with maintaining their own performance as best they can while Lake stands there like a drunken member of the audience who’s wandered onto the stage. Dors herself, no stranger to giving am dram performances, puts in an appearance in her favored activity of mocking people with airs and graces, and presumably keeping a protective eye on husband Lake at the same time, constantly surrounded as he is by naked or bare-breasted women throughout the film. With her own glamour girl days behind her, she loved to portray cartoonish and often class-conscious phonies, and once she was away was an uncontrolled as Lake. The huge difference was, she was entertaining (comedy episodes of drama series are notoriously dismal, but her complete domination of a Sweeney episode at around this time was forgivably hilarious). Here, she’s a preening virtually alcoholic landlady who pretends not to drink, and intriguingly, practically the only woman in the film Lake doesn't get to flirt with, or bed.

Like many a loser before him trying too hard to impress, Lake peppers his performance with his repertoire of bad impersonations of Hollywood actors, TV personalities, unself-conscious racial stereotypes, and--in one appalling sequence--a mincing queen. The idea itself is quite clever; as a serial womaniser, he deflects a furious menacing husband (Sullivan regular Milton Reid) with a loud tape recording of a fearsome dog barking—“Down, Fang!”--and the pretence of being gay, but the sequence goes on far too long, badly realised and as embarrassingly poor as all his other bits of business. Only one gag in the entire film is funny, and it’s a now dated and obscure reference to a BBC game show that will only be picked up by a few middle-aged Brits. It’s a you-had-to-be-there moment and a total period piece.

Otherwise, in the entire hour-and-a-half running time, every joke, seduction, or dramatic moment is mismanaged by this ludicrous clown. Because helmsman Willy Roe was no more a director than Lake was an actor, Lake’s performance is completely uncontrolled and without guidance. A couple of old pros (Tony Booth and Queenie Watts) literally ‘phone in their performance, unaware of the gurning response at the other end of the line. Less fortunate is the luckless aforementioned Bernie Winters, who visibly winces on camera when Lake slips in an ad-lib mocking his goofy British Jerry Lewis persona, as he is clearly trying to avoid his established and recently abandoned comedy image by taking this different character part.

There is sex and nudity in this film, but be aware that it is the usual 1970s variety that paid very little attention to camera angles, cinematography, or lighting, or gave any thought at all to even the quality of the clothing being removed. As usual, the costume department has simply raided the nearest washing line, although Sullivan had a better eye for physical beauty than some sex film producers of the ‘70s, even if the filming of the girls was as inept as ever. Rosemary English is particularly pleasing to the eye, as is the double act performed by Barbara Eatwell and Vicki Scott. A sex session with Cindy Truman’s traffic warden is typically British, as is a bit of S&M culminating in a threatened castration, while Sally Faulkner plays another of her shrill upmarket bitches. What audiences saw in the ever-popular Mary Millington remains a mystery to me.

Aesthetically, it was another disaster, although unlike the bizarre Come Play With Me, it was a financial disaster as well. Whereas the awfulness of Come Play With Me was enhanced by watching seasoned old stagers desperately trying to work with Sullivan’s entourage of artistically-challenged strippers, The David Galaxy Affair is depressingly sunk by its charisma-free leading man.

When it became apparent he was likely to lose money on this one, Sullivan astutely gathered together several members of the lower end of the cast, and put together Queen of the Blues, with Mary Millington and Rosemary English leading a cast of strippers doing what they did best--stripping. Stage acts were interspersed with a slapdash subplot about a protection racket, with thug-for-hire Milton Reid (in reality, apparently a pussycat and a gentleman) and Fawlty Towers’ Ballard Berkeley among the more recognisable faces. This debacle features on the DVD release of David Galaxy, along with a fuzzy VCR transfer of the boring bits of the hardcore Arabian Nights.

Things ended badly for Lake as well as Millington, giving an added poignancy to the despondent ambience of the whole sorry mess. When Dors died of cancer a few years later, Lake shot himself.

By the end of the 1970s, with VCR technology being used for pornography almost instantly, the only person stlll making sex films for the cinema was Sullivan, the Captain of a slowly sinking ship. Britain's premiere sex starlet, Mary Millington, had committed suicide, after persistent police persecution, in August 1979, a sad end to a sordid chapter in British pop cultural history. At that time, however, Sullivan had no intention of shutting down his film operation (his other films had all made a ton of money), and was looking for “the new Mary Millington”. His next M.M. was to be Mandy Miller (actually sex starlet Angie Quick), after it was belatedly discovered that Julie Lee, the first choice for the lead role in Millington’s completely revamped next script, couldn’t act. As it turned out, Miller wasn't much better, or indeed were any of her co-stars. In the final product, not only does Lee, a half-Chinese girl with a Yorkshire accent, seem to have as much screen time as anybody else, but the rest of the cast of Emmanuelle in Soho (1981) are as bereft of acting ability as she is.

Emmanuelle in name only, any value this wretched film has is purely as historical artefact and cultural curiosity. The story behind it is far more interesting than anything on the screen, and that which is interesting has become so for the wrong reasons.

A real period piece, the film is tragically funny from the moment it starts. A guy with an amazing Bay City Rollers haircut--and who looks younger than any of them--is conducting a photo-shoot with two models in full Austin Powers mode. Not only are they ignoring every single one of his instructions while grappling with each other, but everything he says contradicts what he next says. Despite this, he manages to point the camera in the right direction and click, and finds a market for his wares with sleazy entrepreneur Bill Anderson, who looks and dresses like a ventriloquist’s dummy and talks him into inviting a few of his friends round for an orgy and selling him the subsequent photos. This dubious benefactor, later betrayed in a lame and illogical storyline that makes up the bulk of this endeavor, is played by producer and co-writer John East, an extraordinary character even by British porn industry standards.

East’s main ambition seems to have been to transform himself into a porno version of risque vaudevillian Max Miller, who had lived with his mother for a while, and whom he idolised. East became an actor, or more accurately a bit player (he claimed to have appeared alongside numerous big name comedians during the ‘60s and ‘70s, but the IMDB begs to differ, finding only bit parts and walk-ons), later meeting Sullivan and appearing in most of his films. He befriended Mary Millington, and despite ignoring a desperate ‘phone call from her on the night she killed herself, exploited his association with her shamelessly after her death. By all accounts deeply disliked for his pimping, publicity stunts, and economy with the truth, he passed un-noticed in 2003. Poor Julie Lee died a few months after the film was made in a car crash, while many of the other girls on display here turned up in the tame and lame Electric Blue videos and Gerry O’Hara’s raunchy Fanny Hill, the British sex film’s grand finale.

With obvious padding in East’s office (decorated with posters for Sullivan’s films and, bizarrely, a newspaper billboard announcing an increase in the rape statistics), the film then veers back and forth between East’s conversations with the Bay City Roller lookalike and the auditions for a sleazy stage show, at which East is also present! Not only is he participating in both these sequences, he's wearing different clothes for each, and as the scenes skip back and forth, so does his wardrobe. At one point, everyone pulls phoney surprised faces as--oh dear, how do I put this tactfully--someone who probably shouldn’t, does a truly appalling strip. The rest of the film consists of the party-cum-orgy and, to be fair, is reasonably sexy, although the edit keeps switching to—let’s get this right--the rather unappetising softcore versions of the hard-core inserts East ordered shot for the overseas market.

Needless to say, no-one much cares what East is doing, or what he’s wearing, or how he’s in two places at the same time, just what’s on show. There’s no shortage of boobs and bums in this film; in fact, apart from East’s tiresome presence, there's little else--this is bimbo heaven. A small army of Britain’s so-called “glamour” models attend both the strip show revue rehearsals and the party, and it would be quicker to list who isn’t there than who is. They are all very pretty, all have 1980s hair-styles and real breasts, and all look exactly the same as each other (Linzi Drew cleverly wore a pink wig!), so if you’re a fan of this era’s women, this is the motherlode, preserved for posterior... sorry, posterity. Today, David Sullivan is one of the wealthiest men in Britain, and as an avid football fan, living the dream, co-owner of West Ham football club, the team he’s supported all his life.

The Unofficial Start of the '80s: Joan Collins and Bo Derek

The Stud (1978), The Bitch (1979), 10 (1979)

Why is it, I genuinely wonder, that when the French, Italians, or even occasionally the Germans make a film like this it looks red-hot and raunchy, perhaps even sexy and sophisticated... but whenever the Brits drift out of their comfort zone of window-cleaners and taxi-drivers, the results just look sad and sleazy. Joan, get down off that swing and put some bloody clothes on…

Let’s get these two turkeys out of the way together. When Joan Collins was young, she made the rookie mistake of trying to be a sex symbol in Britain, a country that would rather have had Joan Sims than Joan Collins (it seems that English audiences en masse just can’t cope with brazen sexuality unless it comes packaged as a joke, Diana Dors-style). Off she went to America, where she spent two decades doing television shows (including classy cult series The Man from UNCLE, Mission: Impossible, Batman, and Star Trek) and films nobody had heard of. Financially down on her luck, she reluctantly scraped the bottom of the barrel and took the lead in the 1978 film adaptation of sex n’ sleaze novel The Stud, and its equally lame follow-up The Bitch the following year. A couple of years later she had become a national treasure (U.S.) and national joke (U.K.) because of these two films and her role in the super-soap Dynasty, which revitalised her career. She has spent her time since gently sending herself up and playing Lady this, that, or the other in assorted soaps and series. Very much a family affair in reality as well (although what a family!), The Stud was co-written by her sister Jackie Collins, and produced by their respective husbands.

Night club manager Tony Blake (Oliver Tobias, a catalogue model type) is the toyboy and trophy boyfriend of his boss, wealthy slapper Fontaine Khaled (Collins) and the monied, jet-set wasters who make up her friends and family. He wants out, but unfortunately the assorted familial connections and sexual liasons between this tightly-knit bunch cause him to be manipulated from pillar to post by Fontaine, her best friend Vanessa (Sue Lloyd), her step-daughter Alex (Emma Jacobs), her friend Maddy (Natalie Ogle), and treacherous businessman Thane (Ian Lukas).

Disco, no doubt because the music was predominantly black, was--with the exception of Tamla Motown--a sub-culture of bright lights, loose clothes, and sweat that was completely and without exception totally ignored by the media (including the music press) until the wretched and foul 1977 film Saturday Night Fever misrepresented it and turned it into a fad in the very late ‘70s and early ‘80s. Fantasy became the reality, the jeans and t-shirt kids were ousted by the profiteers, the floors were lit up, the lights turned down, and the room filled with smoke machines, strobe lights, and posers. The music turned to drivel, and by the time the medallion men had finished ridiculing themselves, an onslaught of opportunists had swept everything away with the force of a tsunami. Disco became a derogatory term and a bad joke, and these two films, sandwiched between Saturday Night Fever and its copyists and the similar American Gigolo, are not only also a joke, but--painful to say--a fairly accurate representation of the era. Certainly the soundtracks are one hundred percent authentic and on the nose.

The story, perhaps, is less so. As the waiter turned manager, Tobias’ Tony Blake has swiftly lost whatever working class sympathies he may have once had long before the film begins, and has effortlessly become one of the people he inwardly despises, enjoying his power and control as much as Fontaine and her followers. His two friends are a creepy gigolo who cleans out rich old widows and a smarmy wideboy played by laddish Doug Fisher, the best buddy from Man About the House (now there was an unrealised sex-com star), who in a similar but sleazier persona here, exploits silly young jailbait amid a shower of under-age schoolgirl jokes. Rather improbably, Blake falls for Fontaine’s step-daughter, prim and plain Alex, played by Emma Jacobs as if she has a smell under her nose, which in this film, she well might. Both his world and Fontaine’s crumble when no-fool-like-an-old-fool millionaire Mr. Khaled is inexplicably surprised when he finds a videotape of their illicit liasons.

Although the film is Tobias’ story, it exists purely to showcase Collins in the buff, a task she sets to with what might best be described as coy abandon, in a series of cautious quick flashes. Contrary to general misconception, The Stud is actually quite well directed, by Quentin Masters, although he did little else and promptly disappeared, and the dialogue (from two writers adapting Jackie Collins) is quite sharp. The sound quality is horrible (fortunately the DVDs have subtitles, although of the sort that irritatingly sub every sentence down). The people are also horrible, but then, they were; the shabby, shallow disco era is authentically and accurately observed for posterity. An empty, vacuous film, it couldn’t be anything else.

Shapely sex starlets Pat Astley and Susie Silvey put in a blink-and-miss appearance in a shower, but there is precious little to look at until the inevitable sequel, distastefully titled The Bitch, which benefits from the presence of future Fanny Hill director Gerry O’Hara as writer and director. Here, Fontaine has survived being abandoned by toyboy and husband simultaneously, and is soon embroiled in a ludicrous caper concerning stolen jewels and horse-race fixing straight out of one of O’Hara’s television or B-movie scripts.

While The Bitch is very much a typical lame and contrived follow-up recreating a hit movie, The Stud is a little more interesting as it conveys exactly the opposite image and ambience it’s aiming for, whereas The Bitch is just another routine thriller, with tits. However, O’Hara has done his homework, and includes the all-important disco, Joan in Helmut Newton mode again, and a pool orgy that for once, the audience might actually want to attend. The Bitch is just as jaw-droppingly squirmy and ludicrous as The Stud, particularly when Fontaine seduces her chauffeur, and several cast members return from the original, but while the bedroom scenes are perfunctory, the pool orgy is some compensation for the previous hour or so of Saint-like diamond smuggling antics. Ian Hendry plays a two-bit thug, but with none of the finesse he brought to the table (or the race-track) in Get Carter, despite being given a few choice lines, and Pamela Salem is diverting as a high-class hooker. So if you must revisit the disco era, these are your best bet.

The other 1980s film that appeared early was 10, in 1979. This now-forgotten surprise box-office hit is an intermittently hilarious but often pretentious comedy starring Britain’s Dudley Moore as the unlikely romantic lead, and directed by Blake Edwards of Pink Panther fame. If you were a cinema-goer in 1979/’80, then you saw this film along with the rest of the civilised world. If you weren’t, then you probably never heard of it. Bo Derek, the feline, corn-row-haired “discovery” of her actor/husband John Derek, had been and gone within about five years.

Dud’s George Webber is a forty-ish songwriter suffering a mid-life crisis Beverly Hills-style as he lusts after bland, lights-are-on-but-nobody’s-home bim-Bo, a nameless beauty he becomes besotted with after a chance encounter, while long-suffering partner Julie Andrews (wife of the director) and best buddy and familiar TV face Robert Webber (a regular Rockford Files bad guy) look on helplessly. Despite the fact that the object of his attentions has just departed on her honeymoon (with Flash Gordon himself, Sam Jones, no less), he drunkenly pursues her to Mexico (the film’s funniest gag has Moore frantically blasted to sobriety by a mariachi band suddenly blaring to life under his hotel balcony).

Equally funny is his tumble down a Californian hillside while trying to spy on his neighbor with his telescope, who’s in the habit of holding regular nude orgies around his swimming pool. Crawling out of the Californian brush like a dishevelled Wile E. Coyote, Moore is subsequently welcomed in, at which point his purse-lipped partner (the unappealing Julie) looks through the abandoned lens and sees him partying down with two gorgeous naked girls, oblivious to the steam pouring out of his wife’s ears. Call me the minority, but these two nameless unidentified cuties are infinitely sexier to me than either Derek or Andrews, and are the highlight of the movie.

Bizarrely, Moore realises his deepest wishes with the bland and vacuous Bo, to the tune of Ravel’s Bolero no less (thus ruining that piece forever), but ultimately it’s only Moore’s inherent likability and comic timing that makes the film even remotely tolerable. In a way, 10 demonstrates why the public went for the British sex-coms of the ‘70s; the likely lads in these were identifiable and sympathetic, losers trying to be winners, whereas these are life’s winners working hard to become losers. It's incredibly difficult to care about the miniscule problems and desires of the pampered and privileged bored non-entities of Beverly Hills. So Moore wants a blank-eyed dream girl... awwww. Most of us would be happy just attending the lackadaisically-filmed orgy!

Lust in Space

Zeta One (1969), Invasion of the Bee Girls (1973), The Sexplorer (1975), Spaced Out (1979), The Beast in Space (1979)

Perhaps appropriately for a chapter on sci-fi sex films, we must first time-travel back to the late 1960s. The extraordinary Zeta One precedes all of the following, having appeared in 1969, and in the field of sci-fi sex films, set the bar at limbo-dancing level. A low point for all concerned, there are some worryingly well-known names in the credits of this infamous stiff and cult turkey, which are accompanied by some blaring ITC adventure-style music from Johnny Hawkesworth.

Despite having the same name and identity, Eric Cort the writer and Eric Cort the director not only seem to be miles apart from other, but have apparently never met--certainly not to discuss the movie. According to Simon Sheridan’s booklet notes for the DVD, the film came in at under an hour and an entire framing sequence featuring Robin Hawdon and Lust for a Vampire’s Yutte Stensgaard telling the story in flashback had to be put around it to bring it up to length. This despite several scenes just simply stopping, and one major character disappearing from the story completely, one sentence in the framing sequence tying things up.

Hawdon is the clumsily named James Word (some players pronounce it ‘werd’, others ‘ward’), a supposed secret agent working for the mysterious W (apparently on our side) to locate a band of female alien invaders. A completely useless mannequin, he does virtually nothing throughout the film but sit in bed. To the surprise of no-one, the girl pumping our idiot agent for information turns out to be one of the space-girls. Don’t cry spoiler--she's wearing the same color clothes they do. Happily, they do eventually come off. Well, it is a Tony Tenser film.

She’ll get nothing from him, because none of the characters have any motivation for what they do. The framing sequence turning this shambles into a flashback makes much more sense once you realise it is one. The dialogue is sharper, the incompetence of the secret agent and the actor playing him is made into a joke, and the plot-holes are filled in as best as possible. Even so, everything is just ever-so-slightly below par, from the suburban streets our hero drives his car through in the opening scenes to his shabby loft apartment.

All we know is that Word is some sort of good guy agent, James Robertson Justice’s Major Bourdon is some kind of gentrified bad guy with a country house and a posse of goons dressed up as gamekeepers, and the space-girls, existing in some sort of parallel universe in time and space, add to their numbers by bagging bimbos off the street, who are then “converted”. Any subliminal suggestion that they are supposed to be lesbians is quickly undermined by their desperate interest in Hawdon, which rather begs the question why they don’t bag a few good-looking blokes on their recruitment exercises. Bourdon wants the girls for some sort of unspecified purpose, and the authorities know these girls are out there but are ever-so-slowly half-heartedly investigating with the aid of this third-rate Jason King (bearing in mind that the original Jason King was barely second-rate!).

Hilariously inept when it was originally made, it’s even funnier now. To illustrate the level of incompetence, there’s one of those scenes where a character has to blink out of existence (whereby the actress simply has to walk off camera while the director pauses the film and everybody stands still--you've seen it on everything from Bewitched to Lost in Space). Not only does everybody shift position slightly, embarrassed Carry On film veteran Charles Hawtrey is actually (perhaps spitefully?) standing on a different step! What did they do, stop for lunch??

The space-girls sit around in colored lights surrounded by building blocks and curtains of shiny wrapping paper, watching events unfold on one of those all-knowing, all-purpose TV screens, jumping into the action when they feel it’s appropriate (usually to aid one of their number in trouble). The film is enhanced by several attractive young women wearing next to nothing, and a few who look like the back of the bus that clippie Rita Webb is in charge of in one of those pointless but enjoyable period pieces you find in such films as she and Hawtrey try their best to milk an unfunny bus fare routine. As space-girls skip on and off the moving vehicle with Bourdon’s bumbling aide in luke-warm pursuit, London buses now have a new bit of sci-fi business to add to their role in the fantasy hall of fame alongside the Harry Potter franchise and Ian and Barbara’s return to Earth in Doctor Who.

Hawtrey, when not overshadowed by the legendary Rita Webb, is the only one trying to make something of his role, and is quite funny in the torture scenes (“Ooh, my favorite!” he announces when he sees the medieval rack Bourdon keeps in his attic; “The impertinence!” he sniffs, when the space-girl pushes him aside to escape). If he took the role simply to prove that other producers wanted him besides Peter Rogers, all he proved was that he’s the same character in every part he plays, whether it has the Carry On pre-fix or not. Which is all we ask of him. Other kudos go to the attractive, personable, and occasionally naked Wendy Lingham as Edwina ‘Teddy’ Strain, the showgirl whose adventures we follow until she just disappears from the film after being given the grand tour of space-girl headquarters. Dawn Addams simply has to stand around and look pretty, which she does, and the girls are clearly making an effort, bemused and baffled though they clearly are. Carol Hawkins (the fully clothed journalist of Confessions of a Pop Performer) and sex starlet Anna Gael are given the most to do, and make the most of it. Yutte Stensgarde holds the attention in the framing sequences, and an unrepentant Addams clearly had no regrets, as a few years later she signed on for the absolutely abysmal television travesty Space Maidens--the title tells all. As Simon Sheridan points out, if it wasn’t for the nudity, you’d think you were watching an early ‘70s kids show. In fact, the nudity is exactly the sort that excites fourteen year olds. I’d have been up for it at that age, and no doubt have rated it above 2001: A Space Odyssey, but it somehow evaded my radar.

In the final scenes, all participants so far occupying their own little boxes in the film converge on Bourdon’s country estate, where they finally meet for a half-hearted attempt at one of the oldest plot-lines in the book (and certainly this one), a Most Dangerous Game-style hunting humans diversion, during which Anna Gael becomes human prey until the semi-naked space-babes pull themselves away from their big screen TV and come to the rescue. This they do by zapping the slavering gamekeepers with non-existent weapons bereft of any kind of special effects. As the guys keel over in comedy manner, we can assume these invisible force beams are non-fatal. If not, there’s a pile of about a dozen dead gamekeepers in the woods, all with silly I-saw-tits smiles on their faces.

Based on a very short-lived adult comic strip, Zeta One is an awful film, but it’s not as unwatchable as some would suggest. Of course, it helps to know that it’s going to be awful before you sit down and watch it, but the well-deserved reputation as Britain’s very own Plan Nine from Outer Space (Queen of Outer Space? Cat Women of the Moon?) is on the nose. Whereas Britain’s other entry in the Amazon Women on the Moon stakes, Fire Maidens from Outer Space, is genuinely irredeemable, Zeta One is good for a retro giggle after the pub (and there are some amazing retro trailers on the Slap and Tickle DVD release). But be warned--if you had two brain cells to rub together when you started watching, by the end of the film one of them will be rather lonely.

A sexy ‘70s riff on the 1950s Corman cheapie The Wasp Woman and the old Outer Limits episode “ZZzzz”, 1973’s Invasion of the Bee Girls offers a bunch of lethal lovers in black mini-skirts and sunglasses who are luring love-starved schlubs to their deaths in a small-town epidemic that has the local cops mystified. It reads better than it looks.

What gives this shoddily filmed and unimaginatively directed film what little ambience it has is the pervasive sense of sexual disappointment and despair that haunts it. This is a town where the living are already dead. Everybody is enduring such an empty life before and during the murder epidemic that it hardly seems to matter that they die; it’s difficult to escape the feeling that the first decent sex in a million years that they get in their death throes almost makes dying worthwhile! William Smith plays the tough guy investigator who resists the Bee-Girls’ alluring bee-havior because he fancies blonde and bespectacled Victoria Vetri (aka Angela Dorian), who was a better actress than the ‘60s and ‘70s allowed her to be (see also her Batman and Man from UNCLE guest spots). Anitra Ford is the ice-queen leading the hapless slobs who make up her co-workers to their demise, Cliff Osmond is the police chief out of his depth, and 1960s bit part veterans Jack Perkins (particularly good as an irate citizen), Ben Hammer, and Wright King are among those honey-trapped.

Filmed with a bit more style and imagination, this could have been a classic, but the whole thing looks like a typical sleazy ‘70s sex film, which it partially is. The best print to date is on Midnite Movies Double Feature: Invasion of the Star-Creatures/Invasion of the Bee Girls, but be warned that the supporting feature is abysmal.

There were a surprisingly large number of sci-fi-themed sex films in the 1970s, but all of them without exception found themselves shot down instantly by their lack of funds as much as their lack of imagination. A sci-fi sex film could withstand one such failing, but not both. Opening with a dismal parody of the Star Trek intro, 1975’s shabby, shoddy The Sexplorer may be the most cash-strapped of them all, and that's saying something, but worst of all is its total inability to show any actual sex and nudity, even when the leading lady and space visitor (sex-film bit player Monika Ringwald in her largest part) is walking around naked, as she is when she arrives in London’s Soho sex shop district clothes-free Terminator-style.

Fortunately, the rooftop she has been deposited on houses a womens’ gym, where two assistants assume she’s a customer whose clothes have been stolen and provide alternate cover. From here, Ringwald wanders Adam Adamant-style around Soho and Piccadilly until she stumbles into a sex shop run by real-life sex starlet agent Alan Selwyn playing the proprietor and inadvertently agrees to a photo session with flustered bit player Derek Rayner. Selwyn, surrounded by porn mags, is reading a Billy the Kid comic. She also, with the writer completely unable to control the time-line, attends a wedding and avoids the attentions of an unpleasant skinny naked man in a room full of balloons. Most bizarrely, she finds a seat in a sex cinema, and is stalked by a seat-hopping opportunist who, when he finds himself getting exactly what he hoped for as the alien girl copies the blow job procedure on screen, now breaks into a sweaty sex-com panic.

Finally, after being befriended by a bag lady, and meeting a friendly young lad in a launderette, she finds true love and decides to stay on Earth with him. Words truly fail me in describing quite how dull, ugly, uninspired, and stupid all this is, although on reflection, those four seem perfectly adequate.

Written by Andrew Payne (although how producer David Speechley can claim to have had an “original idea” is fascinating, Captain), is 1979’s Spaced Out, directed by horror veteran Norman J. Warren, yet another of the dozens of British sex-com directors more interested in his tea break than filming the girls. There’s also an art director credited, even though the spaceship resembles one of those magazine puzzles where the task is to identify the household object photographed in a strange way (note the airbrick grill on one control panel,while fans of retro tat will enjoy the vintage stereo knobs).

If there’s one thing not to be found in Spaced Out (also marketed as Outer Touch), it’s an original idea; director Warren even admits he saw it as a modern version of all those glamour-girls-in-space fear of women films of the ‘50s, like Fire Maidens from Outer Space, Cat Women of the Moon, Queen of Outer Space, Missile to the Moon, and so on ad infinitum. Approaching Earth, a place renowned for its “noxious life-forms”, courtesy of stock footage nicked from Gerry Anderson’s Space: 1999, are three girly aliens of the sort found in the above, whose planet has never seen men before, and yet whose inhabitants have not only managed to somehow reproduce, but developed flirtatiousness and all the sexual characteristics to accommodate the terrified males. Stopping off at Clapham Common for repairs, their ship (described painfully accurately by numerous sources as “a mobile disco”) is discovered by three sex-starved men, Oliver (Barry Stokes), a bespectacled nerd intimidated by his pretty but prudish wife (Lynne Ross, also taken on board), Willy (Tony Maiden), a nerdy virgin wandering homeward with a stash of porn mags, and Cliff (Michael Rowlatt), a lusty, dog-walking voyeur—“noxious life-forms” indeed. The alien ship is the first thing any of them have entered in quite a while...

Everything happens exactly as expected; the husband-to-be finds his balls, the wife-to-be gets defrosted, the virgin gets laid (and stays aboard when the ship leaves, Close Encounters-style), and the voyeur gets his comeuppance in the old can’t-take-any-more-shagging scenario.

The girls are Kate Ferguson as the Captain, Glory Annen of Felicity as the single crewperson, and prolific rent-a-body bit player Ava Cadell in her first major role as the engineer... not that it matters, as you don’t see anything except a few breasts here and there. Dreadful school play-style broad performances from everyone, and background music which blunders on in its own merry way regardless of whatever is actually happening onscreen, renders this cheap trash virtually unwatchable, even as entertaining rubbish. Rubbish it is, entertaining it isn’t.

There is also an American version which has allegedly included some actual jokes in the dialogue and re-dubbed some of the voices.

Now here’s where you've gotta love the Italian exploitation film industry. Realising that Walerian Borowczyk had a copyright neither on the word Beast or on the concept of a giant penis, prolific schlock merchant Alfonso Brescia hired actress Sirpa Lane five years later, and made a supremely silly sci-fi copy of his outrageous The Beast in 1979, an unofficial follow-up titled La Bestia Nello Spazio (aka The Beast in Space), co-written by Brescia and the magnificently named Aldo Crudo.

Now, Lane (who featured in the original) is Lt. Sondra Richardson. Unbeknownst to the lusty Captain Larry Madison (Vassili Karis), who is literally fighting off her suitors in an, um, astro-bar serving cosmo-drinks in an attempt to bed her, she has been assigned to his spaceship crew for a forthcoming mission to the planet Lorigon in search of the element Antalium, which apparently is helpful in the manufacture of neutron bombs. After beating up half the bar with some hilariously one-sided over-choreographed fight moves for the sultry space-vamp, Sondra’s up for it, and a fevered night of love-making ensues. However, she’s been having nightmares Lucy Broadhurst-style, dreams of running through a forest in vintage under-garments, dreams that look suspiciously like a re-creation of Borowczyk’s The Beast, even down to the same p.o.v. shots.

Off they go into space with a progressively equality-conscious evenly-matched crew of sexes that will ironically serve the needs of the rather less feminist-friendly events to follow. Like all desperately bad sci-fi (particularly that which emanates from middle-England), everyone fills up time with large bouts of techno-babble spoken with tense, robotic severity while staring sternly at buttons and colored lights. Unfortunately, one of the lustful lugs Madison gave a thumping in the bar is the brigand/trader Juan Cardosa (Venantino Ventanini), who also knows where the Antalium is, and wants it for the highest bidder. After a short space-battle in which their ship is shot down, they fortuitously crash-land on the very planet Lorigan that Cardosa was trying to keep them away from. There, they find themselves attacked by the cheapest robot aggressor in cinema history (you only see the head and feet in separate shots) and end up wandering through the forest in Sondra’s dreams, to have their minds sexually assaulted by a strange force. We now encounter the film’s low point, ill-matched stock footage of horses mating, simply because it was a theme in the original.

The Beast in Space has my vote for being the most brazen rip-off, sorry, homage/spoof, in the history of cinema--even by Italian standards. Brescia even manages to misspell both his leading actors’ names in the credits (two others use pseudonyms). Nevertheless, considering the budget and intellects involved, it’s not a bad film of its kind, creative, sexy, fun, and never boring. Everybody talks the sort of Dan Dare/Tom Corbett/Fireball XL-5 space lingo of the 1950s/early ‘60s, dropping words like ‘asteroid’ and ‘Venusian’ into their everyday speech at all opportunities; the spaceships even launch with little sparklers coming out of the base as on Torchy the Battery Boy, and given that this is on the doorstep of 1980, the wardrobe can only be described as nothing less than retro-sci-fi, pure Gerry Anderson and Irwin Allen rather than Star Wars.

The spaceship crew find, or are led to, a plastic-looking futuristic dwelling in the woods, and after much wandering around typical 1970s sci-fi interiors, they meet up with Onaph (Claudio Undari masquerading as Robert Hundar), the burly leader of his own little kingdom of golden robot men, and Cardosa, who has already established a relationship with Onaph at an earlier date. Cardosa reveals, and Onaph admits, that the planet is in fact run by an ancient computer, Zocor, which is powered by Antalium, and which has no intention of giving up its life-giving supply. Onaph is immortal while the Antalium lasts, and he has his eyes on the girls.

After a lavish banquet, the space travellers are, courtesy of Zocor’s mind-fucks, overcome with lust, and the long-awaited sex scenes follow, and do not disappoint. As the girls are being ravished by the guys, Onaph leads Sondra out to the forest, where her dreams come true and he produces a massive prosthetic penis from his loins. Underneath his gown, Onaph is a centaur-like satyr in with-or-without dick versions (“with Shameless, you get the whole picture!” ends a brief DVD extra comparing the two--so to speak). Realising which side his bread’s buttered, Cardosa slips Madison and the others a magic pill that nullifies the computer’s control over them (wha...?), and they set off to destroy Zocor and fight over the Antalium later.

The Beast in Space is great fun and better than it has any right to be; the only viewers to be disappointed will be those hectoring bores with absurd expectations beyond the film’s obvious intentions or limitations. It is a cash-in, plain and simple. Yes, it’s clunky grade Z pulp sci-fi, but it’s good of its kind. In fact, it’s best described as Wild, Wild Planet meets the original Battlestar Galactica, Brescia having taken the Glen Larson approach to science-fiction four times already, with standard post-Star Wars pulp sci-fi. Only in Italy would a producer have looked at the previous four and thought--quite rightly--hmmm, you know what this needs...? Shagging! The cast are likeable, the sets are creatively put together from nothing, and the film delivers what it promises.

By 1980, Lane was already looking a bit the worse for wear after 27 Nazi Love Camps, but displays a lithe, slim body in this film, and fellow space girls Erika and Frida (Maria D’Allesandro and Marina Hedman) aren’t too bad either, and there’s no shortage of moments to confirm it. When all three of them are fornicating in the woods and in the banquet hall with their fellow astronauts, you realise that this is the Star Trek episode dirty Gene Roddenberry always wanted to make.

The 'S' Films

Sinfonia Erotica (1980), Opalo de fuego: Mercaderes del sexo (1980), La frigida y la viciosa (1981), El fontanero, su mujer, y otras cosas de meter... (1981), El sexo esta loco (1981), Sadomania (1981), Apocalipsis sexual (1982), Mi conejo es el major (1982), Las orgias inconfessables de Emmanuelle (1982), Gemidos de placer (1983), Macumba Sexual (1983), Historia sexual de O (1984), Mil sexos tiene la noche (1984)

The general pattern in the West was that cinema and society in general loosened up in the ‘60s and became steadily more sexually liberated as the ‘70s proceeded. In Fascist-controlled Spain, this process was inevitably hampered, but when General Franco’s death in 1975 ended forty years of repression, Spain--and Spanish cinema--made up for lost time, and film-makers revelled in their new commercial freedom (with another Franco, the unstoppable exploitation machine Jess, as one of the most prolific practitioners).

Naturally, in the grand scheme of things, film censorship was not top of the list for sorting out, but when the new government got round to it in November 1977, they initiated a very wise system of four categories--suitable for all, over 14, over 18, and S, which was essentially a red flag to the easily offended, but in practice almost always represented sexual content. Nudity had been tentatively sneaking into Spanish cinema during the early ‘70s, and with the ban on nudity abolished in ’75, and “permitted according to the director's needs” (a wonderfully ambiguous phrase), many directors unsurprisingly found that they did indeed have a need for nudes.

At first, film-makers were cautious, but within a couple of years, S films with wall-to-wall sex scenes were being churned out one after the other, with Jess and Lina leading the charge (although they were effortlessly outmatched by other directors in the matter of crass titling). Ironically, all this was happening just as previous locales for pushing sexual boundaries, such as America and France, were backtracking, and isolating sexual content again.

Just as Spain belatedly joined the explosion of sexually themed film production, so the country also belatedly succumbed to censorship again in December 1983, with the introduction of the apparently liberating, but in fact repressive new X certificate, which had the effect of wiping out the softcore industry within a few months.

If what happened was the intended result, then the move was ingenious. The X certificate gave the nod to hardcore porn, making the S film redundant, but with softcore porn no longer part of the mainstream, the X certificate in fact isolated the audience by sending them to special licensed cinemas and shunting them out of the mass market venues. It was simple mathematics. There were 1,500 mainstream outlets for S films, and a mere 85 for the hardcore X.

The producers of porn and exploitation films go where the money is. The new Socialist government elected in 1982, social engineering as ever, withdrew the subsidies from popular cinema, heaved a hefty tax burden on hardcore, and started funding prestigious, upmarket fare of the sort they wanted to see made. Funding “difficult” films would have been fine if the commercial market had been left to its own devices, but not only were funds diverted to supposedly higher quality fare, but populist cinema was simultaneously financially penalised. Mainstream cinema became respectable, and while highbrow critics simpered approvingly, cinema audiences stayed away in droves and retreated to video and TV. The Spanish film industry still hasn’t quite recovered from this abundance of quality product! Still, at least they’re winning awards at film festivals now...

By restricting access to sex films while simultaneously allowing them to become more explicit, the authorities removed them from the general market, a far more effective strategy to sanitise cinema than the drum-beating, attention-drawing antics of the clean-up brigades of other countries such as Britain and America. What the government had done, deliberately or otherwise, was legalised but marginalised the porn industry, and then directed a third of hardcore profits to themselves in the form of tax. Rather than trying to ban them, and attracting attention and controversy, they effectively okayed them, took their cut, and buried them simultaneously.

Nevertheless, for a few heady years while commercialism prevailed, the Spanish audience revelled in a flurry of activity in various genres of film they had previously been denied, a vast amount of it inevitably of a lurid sex n’ horror nature. Hundreds of films were produced in this brief period of capitalist abandon and naked opportunism, but some of the easier ones to track down include the following...

Sinfonia Erotica (1980): Franco’s wandering camera (for it is he) is magnificently inept in this one, which attempts to cloud the incompetence with beautiful music and a nice wardrobe and location. With Susan Hemingway dressed as a nun, Lina Romay’s performance (as Candace Coster) ruined by the dubbing and a bad wig, and Franco’s pretensions exposed as soon as the sexual assaults kick in, it’s all a bit of a shambles. Not that we expect anything else, but the joy in a Jess Franco film is finding the good stuff in spite of the rest, and here there’s no compensation unless you're into simulated gay sex. It’s impossible to tell even what Franco was thinking for this one.

Opalo de fuego: Mercaderes del sexo (1980): Bonkers spy caper with Lina Romay, not much to see, but fun to watch. Nadine Pascal, one of Franco’s prettier regular faces, co-stars.

La frigida y la viciosa (1981): Carlos Aured, who had been making monster movies with Paul Naschy in the early ‘70s, dived into the S market head first with this title, which translates into the pulpish The Frigid and the Depraved. The frigid is unhappy housewife Sara Mora, the depraved is apparently the lustful bi-sexual home help Andrea Guzon, who defrosts her in assorted soft-porn lesbian scenarios. Depraved seems a bit harsh, but perhaps I should locate a copy first…!

El fontanero, su mujer, y otras cosas de meter... (1981): Aured teamed up with Franco girls Lina Romay and Montserrat Prous for this infamous sex romp that is a sort of joke-free version of the Confessions films, with a plumber and his mate dividing their services between wives and clients. The title translates as The Plumber, His Wife, and Other Things to Put Into...!

El sexo esta loco (1981): This translates as sex is crazy, but features some of the lamest sex scenes Franco ever put on film. The plot is that old faithful whereby aliens from space study Earth behavior, but that inadvertently makes it sound vaguely interesting. This is worse than The Sexplorer. I think that makes it clear!

Sadomania (1981): And yet, here we have a Franco classic, one of the best films he ever made, reviewed in the following chapter.

Apocalipsis sexual (1982): Deeply unpleasant roughie in hard and soft formats has Lina Romay and Ajita Wilson among a gang of thugs who self-destruct.

Mi conejo es el major (1982): Romay, a little heavier here as she nears her thirties, still gets away with portraying a runaway from a juvenile detention center who escapes into the night and falls into the clutches of a sado-masochistic sugar daddy.

Las orgias inconfessables de Emmanuelle (1982): Translating as The Inconfessable Orgies of Emmanuelle, this needs little more explanation…

Gemidos de placer (1983): Opening with a guitarist gently strumming away while a dead body floats in the swimming pool at his side, the film then flashbacks to show us what happened. Surprisingly visually attractive for an ‘80s film (it looks more like 1976), there are three beautiful women involved, and it’s just one lustful sex scene after another. The title translates as Cries of Pleasure. Cries of pleasure maybe, but there certainly won’t be any gasps of surprise at the ending. Jess Franco riffing on De Sade again.

Macumba Sexual (1983): Wilson and Romay again, as dream and dreamer, filmed on the Canary Islands by Jess Franco.

Historia sexual de O (1984): One of Franco’s wilder versions of De Sade’s Eugenie, with a touch of Countess Perverse in there, but little to do with Story of O. Alicia Principe is Odile.

Mil sexos tiene la noche (1984): One of the last and best Jess Franco films of merit, this is the old chestnut of the evil stage hypnotist who mesmerises victims into committing crimes for him--in this case, a series of vengeful murders perpetrated by his assistant Irena, the frequently unclothed Lina Romay. She’s on top form and carries the film with a superb and uninhibited performance. The photography and locations are excellent, the colors vivid, and Franco amazingly quite competent. Similar but quite superior to his Nightmares Come at Night and Voodoo Passion, this supernatural potboiler translates absurdly as Night of 10,000 Sexes. It’s slightly disconcerting to hear a few bars from Female Vampire as Romay first undresses, her stunning establishing role from over a decade earlier.

Franco, who even during the S phenomenon had been making hardcore versions of his films for stronger markets, was one of the few Spanish film-makers who adapted, making hardcore films for a few years before drifting into friendlier waters and dabbling in dire action films in the late ‘80s. His last films of interest were Lillian the Perverted Virgin, to which he added hardcore scenes without the lead actress’ knowledge (the grubby title was a bit of a giveaway), and 1986’s Fury in the Tropics, his final and most extreme women-in-prison film, both with the ever loyal Romay in attendance.

Women in Prison (3) : The Pretenders

Bare Behind Bars (1980), Women's Penitentiary VII (1980), Sadomania (1981), Amazon Jail (1982), Chained Heat (1983), Red Heat (1987), Reform School Girls (1986)

As you have worked your way through this book it has surely become apparent that the 1970s (and to a slightly lesser extent, the first half of the 1980s) was the Golden Age of sleaze cinema. Whereas today, filmmakers will often remove contentious material and tone down even exploitation fare to avoid an adult rating and thus make their films available to the widest potential audience, back in the 1970s it was commercial suicide to pull anything lower than an eighteen restriction if you were making a film that was sexy, violent, or seeking credibility. Audiences just wouldn’t turn up for anything not rated X (18), and directors and distributors were well-known for actually adding sex and violence to lacklustre finished product if the censor was having a lenient day, the actress was feeling shy, or the director was more interested in his cup of tea and chocolate biscuit.

What happened? What had changed? The death of the American drive-in, and its replacement by the family multiplex, alongside the arrival of the Nanny State and the Video Recordings Act in Britain, dealt both provocative intelligent cinema, and brazen exploitation cinema in Britain and America a crippling blow simultaneously during the 1980s and into the ‘90s. What was left was safe and mainstream. Similar cultural shifts in different countries, often provoked by the easy access to privately viewed hardcore, either on DVD or the Internet, have currently marginalised sex and violence, separating it from other genres it used to infiltrate, and created a mass dumbing down of daring content in any programming not intended to be specifically sexual or violent. Sex and violence have ceased to become saleable elements as side-dishes as they are now available directly in purpose-made bargain buckets.

In Brazil, the special circumstances were that the oppressive government reluctantly tolerated sex and violence in exploitation films because such bread and circuses appealed more than more serious films which might have raised issues that the government wished were rather not discussed (in America, the reverse was true, with small independent and exploitation films more likely to be controversial, anti-authority, and questioning). When hard-core porn arrived in the 1980s, it ended the market for soft-core lunacy like the legendary Bare Behind Bars (aka A Prisao, 1980).

And lunacy this surely is. With its blunt and brazen title, despondent and remorselessly depressing prison setting, dull, lifeless sets, flat direction, and lashings of gratuitous nudity and sadism, Bare Behind Bars displays numerous similarities to the films of Jess Franco. In many ways, the director was Brazil’s answer to Franco, having previously given the world such titles as Insatiable Fugitives, Amazon Jail, the unbelievable Bacchanales on the Isle of Nymphets, and--get this--Bruce Lee vs. Gay Power. Pursuing a title such as Bare Behind Bars, there’s only one thing the punter wants to know--how bare are the girls behind the bars?

And the answer is--very. Amazingly, for once a come-on title does deliver. Behind an extraordinarily lurid and grubby DVD case from Arrow is an even more lurid and grubby film. All credit to sleazeball writer and director Osvaldo de Oliveira that it delivers exactly what it says on the wrapper, which as purchasers forlornly know all too well is not always the case.

Three minutes in, and the girls are being hosed down in the yard after a stabbing during their basketball recreation, and breasts are being blasted out of prison rags, while thrashings and tortures are being administered to the suspected perpetrators. And the titles haven’t even come up yet... Cheap, crass, violent, ludicrous, and insanely, charmingly stupid, there is barely (sorry) a scene bereft of nudity, the highlights being a soapy shower scene in which the girls dance around gleefully like demented elves, and a deliberately provocative nude exercising session in the yard to antagonise the guards which includes legs and bum bicycling furiously in the air!

There’s joke lesbianism in the cells which involves peculiar sex acts that would surely be unrecognisable to any real lesbians (imagine using your partner for a sort of human pole dance... but then what do I know?), and dildos being sent from cell to cell by an elaborate wire system. It’s as if a bunch of very naughty schoolgirls had sat down and tried to imagine a sex fantasy for fourteen year old boys. It barely matters, if you’ll pardon the pun again, but the dubbing is dismal and there is no subtitle option on Arrow's magnificently vulgar and lurid package.

The mad-eyed warden, a demented lesbian and sadist with a pinched face but great body (of course), is constantly ordering crazed punishments and in one sub-plot, has even sold one of the inmates to a wealthy lesbian procurer--later drowned for her trouble. The food is served with rodents on the side (as per a similar sequence in template Barbed Wire Dolls), and after an impromptu random general inspection, the camera pans over in apparent seriousness to a hilarious yield of over forty painfully sharp instruments!

“I wonder how the warden is feeling today... after the gymnastics I put her through last night!” gloats one of the girls, while one of the guards is working her way through a variety of Joy of Sex positions with a delivery man in the basement, and a prisoner in solitary pushes her face through the food hatch to French kiss another. All this occurs to the background sounds of a lounge piano playing interlude music, the finishing touch.

Meanwhile, the warden is sitting in her office with an ice-pack on her head, and her disapproving aide walks around braless and her shirt undone, again ala Barbed Wire Dolls. The prison nurse is played for laughs as a Marilyn Monroe clone who’s off her head sniffing ether, regularly pulls concealed weapons out of inmates’ vaginas, and briefly gets it on with her own fiery Latino fuck buddy with a dildo carved out of a pineapple. What can you say about a WIP film so fabulously inept, and yet it delivers more than five similar endeavors put together?

It all ends with three escapees hiding out in the shanty slums they came from, one dragged back kicking and screaming, another recovered hiding out at her family home, and the third shot dead after cheating on a jealous, sleazy and violent benefactor... but not until after they’ve shot and castrated a father in front of his son, and killed the mother.

Bare Behind Bars is almost a parody of a genre beyond parody, as if a bunch of smartass buffoons had decided to make fun of the women-in-prison genre and accidentally made a better film than the ones they were mocking. However, I don’t share the opinion of the DVD case notes which imply that this film is a deliberate send-up. Forgive me, but South American exploitation cinema just isn’t that sophisticated. I think it’s on the level, which makes it even funnier. The film stars Maria Stella Splendore (love to announce that name), Martha Anderson, and Danielle Ferretti.

Erwin Dietrich’s Women’s Penitentiary VII (aka Gefangen Frauen, 1980), despite sounding identical to Franco’s Women in Cell Block Nine, is the exact mirror opposite. Was the master trying to show the pupil how it should be done?

It’s very difficult to fault this as entertaining softcore. It opens with the Most Beautiful Breasts Awards for absolutely no reason whatsoever, moves on to a peep show and brothel, and we then see most of the vice girls carried off naked by soldiers. They are then incarcerated in an island prison--a sort of South American Alcatraz--and actually don’t seem to mind that much. And why should they? They’re being visited every night by the guards, and a fine old time is being had by all.

The ludicrous premise is this: a South American dictator is expecting a visit from United Nations investigators, who suspect that this sleazeball is populating the local brothels and assorted vice-dens with white slave trade. And they’re absolutely right. The sleazeball’s mistress, Karine Gambier (Rollin’s Countess X, fresh from Franco’s Frauen fur Zellenblock 9, but billed as Simone Samson; why do they do this?), suggests that for the duration of the visit, all the captive hookers are incarcerated on a handy out-of-the-way prison island until such time as it’s safe to bring them back--sometime never.

Off they go, with the mistress as the commandant, but what the sleazeball dictator doesn’t know is that she's secretly at it with hunky Franco regular Eric Falk, the head guard (we know, because we get to see their tastefully filmed tryst at the beach).

With the bare minimum of sordid torture scenes usually associated with the genre (a feeble and unconvincing whipping scene), and the sharp photography, perfect print and extraordinary locations, Gefangen Frauen is enormous fun from start to finish. First of all, there’s the Roman Empire style location of the prison, which looks like an abandoned gladiatorial arena, and is the best set ever for a WIP flick. Secondly, there’s Gambier in a hilarious black leather outfit complete with whip and lightning bolt insignia (“You cannot and will not leave this island! As a reminder, you will no longer wear your clothes!” she storms, “Everyone undress!”). And third, the girls--while not foolishly being cast from centrefold types--are all far more healthy and attractive than the usual women hired for prison movies.

Highlights include a hosing down sequence when they arrive (although I could have done with less of Falk’s grinning face), an extraordinary naked judo contest between Falk and the knockout France Lomay (calling herself Francette Mailloi, because she’s so unrecognisable completely naked), and the aforementioned taking-your-clothes-away scene, which is unintentionally hilarious for being so crass. After this, there’s a naked chain gang scene (everything is naked now, remember, because she’s taken their clothes away), the great escape, and a genuinely clever twist ending. Beautifully photographed, and never a dull moment.

Women in Prison (3) continued

Not to be outdone, Sadomania (1981), yet another of Jess Franco’s women-in-chains sexploiters, wastes no time in getting down to business. New bride Olga (Uta Koepke) is stopped on the road with her husband and spirited away to evil Ajita Wilson’s open prison even as the opening credits roll, and the usual Franco fun begins. Literally within minutes we have the sadistic warden, the corrupt politician, and the semi-naked slave labour all in position.

Despite the title, this is no more or less sadistic than any of Franco’s other prison films, but it is one of his better efforts technically, and a little more diverse and creative than some. Every so often, Franco made an absolute stormer, and newbies trying his films for the first time would be angry at the people who put him down if they saw Sadomania as their taster. On the other hand, they could just as easily see one of his absolute stinkers first, and be left wondering what all the fuss is about, never to return. Highlights in this one are a re-tread of Countess Perverse, as the warden and the Governor hunt human game in the form of naked inmates (it looks like Nadine Pascal to me), and a chain-gang in denim cut-offs, a sort of role-reversal of Cool Hand Luke’s car wash scene!

Sex film regulars Ursula Buchfellner as the slim and sexy Tara and Gina Janssen as the Governor’s wife get down to some hot lesbian action in an intriguingly decorated and photographed mansion, only to have the Governor spoil the atmos by trying to join in and turning out to be impotent, and Andrea Guzon (a beautiful Turkish find cursed in the dubbing with a silly Betty Boop voice) and lithe black guard Patricia Quow cat-fight in short shorts and then meet in armed naked combat (the latter scene quite stylishly shot at sunset). This could be Franco’s classiest sequence ever (he says without irony).

Showing off a perfect pair of legs, Buchfellner strides around in an amazing black leather ensemble for the delectation of the slobbering locals during the slave-trade sequence at the docks, and Franco himself appears, camping it up in a cameo as an effeminate white slaver. Olga’s husband returns to the prison site with a loyal but unmourned disposable friend to stage a rescue, and there’s much running around topless with guns. Foolish beyond belief, pulp sexploitation doesn’t get any better than this.

This is also one of the few Franco films with a satisfying ending, and unlike the slashing and gnawing that closes Ilsa, his lurid but happy resolution is quite subtle, as the girls are freed and evil Ajita is made to walk naked into the same crocodile-infested lake she sent her hunting victims, with a fade-out as the crocs slide into the water...

The women-in-prison genre continued through the 1980s ‘70s-style with Amazon Jail (aka Curral de Mulheres, 1982). A bungle in the jungle, this is a ludicrous over-the-top cartoon, with all the actors seemingly competing with each other to give the worst and silliest performance. As hilarious as the girls are, it’s probably a tie between the roaring bearded psychopath running the show and his lip-smacking lesbian warden, who’s a hoot.

Particularly daft is the naked girl who gets shot several times without a mark on her--a failing that could have been overlooked if she’d hit the ground immediately and not writhed around for an eternity before falling! But she has good competition from the mad-eyed villains and her fellow snarling, pouting prisoners, moodily flouncing around in their prison in underwear with about as much fear and terror as a bimbo whose date forgot the flowers and ordered the wrong wine. They wait for their chance to escape as if they’re waiting for a taxi on a busy weekend.

But you can’t say it doesn't deliver exactly what it says on the box, and as usual Blue Underground have found a decent print. There are girls, and they do get naked; it’s just that not a lot of thought went into filming them. Most of the misery and suffering is inflicted on the audience.

The director, also writing and producing and no doubt making the sandwiches etc. etc., was our old friend Osvaldo de Oliveira, who also made the bonkers Bare Behind Bars we began with, but this one fails in every department his earlier film succeeded in. It’s as if he’s forgotten everything he did two years earlier. Just as laughable and clumsily filmed, that one, at least, remembered what the audience was waiting for.

Amazon Jail aims low and limbo-dances effortlessly to the bullseye--sometimes a little too effortlessly, as promised shower scenes are not forthcoming, and twice the girls traipse past a river without skinny-dipping, a major misdemeanor in a skin-flick. Somehow, Amazon Jail manages to deliver, and yet still skimp, on the nudity.

Despite some mind-blowingly bad dialogue, mounds of 1980s big hair, and some absolutely dire acting from the inmates that would disgrace a porn film, 1983’s Chained Heat is one of the better of the countless women-in-prison films that graced the 1970s and 1980s. This is down to some seriously entertaining set pieces prerequisite to the genre and a larger than usual supporting cast of name actors. John Vernon is wonderful as the corrupt and brutal Warden Ernest Bacman, first seen in a hot tub with stoolie Monique Gabrielle (“Can I have a fix now, Ernie?”/“Godammit, why can’t you snort it like the rest of us?”), and Stella Stevens has been cast as his underling Captain Taylor, who has her own agenda. While Bacman makes porn films with the more malleable inmates, Taylor is running a prostitution ring with drugs dealer Henry Silva. Add to this the camp rivalry between Sybil Danning and Tamara Dobson (Cleopatra Jones herself), and Edy Williams soaping herself down in the showers, and the fact that our unsympathetic heroine is the squinty, chubby Linda Blair of Savage Streets infamy hardly matters.

If the big-haired bimbos playing the prisoners had seen their lines cut to the bare minimum required to advance the plot, leaving the established veterans to provide the storyline, Chained Heat would be a true classic of the genre.

In 1987’s Red Heat (no relation to the Schwarzenegger film from around the same time), Blair is back, playing a moody bride-to-be who witnesses a potential kidnapping, obliging the bad guys to take her along for the ride. Linda Blair made her fair share of Exorcist knock-offs after finding fame and notoriety in the 1973 original, but it was a TV movie made shortly afterwards that consigned her to the bargain bins as the white Pam Grier when she outraged middle-America by being raped off-screen with a broom handle in a WIP TV movie.

Tortured into signing a coerced confession that she’s a CIA agent, she’s imprisoned in the standard WIP hellhole, and the usual scenes of misery are interspersed with her boyfriend’s valiant attempts to locate her. This one has Sylvia Kristel as the devious warden, but doesn’t really exploit her. Once again, the unsympathetic Blair is miscast in a victim role, and her best scenes are when she’s berating her boyfriend about his decision to re-enlist. Most guys, if this ball and chain disappeared in the night, would thank their lucky stars and move on, but this chump actually goes looking for her. Unfortunately, Blair was just not cut out to play the puppy dog sympathy roles that her agent kept finding for her; a bad actress to begin with (although quite pleasant in reality, as the extras demonstrate), she only ever came to life when playing a defiant bitch.

Saving the best ’til last, the aforementioned Reform School Girls (1986) is the gold standard, the only way to do women-in-prison films--send ‘em up ruthlessly and shamelessly, with lashings of nudity and melodrama. The girls, posing and posturing in their underwear (and less) are lovin’ every minute of it. So should you.

To the lyrics “So young, so bad, so what?”, a vanload of new arrivals show up at Pridemore Juvenile Correction Facility. There’s no-shit-taking newbie Jenny (Linda Carol), frail little flower and foster runaway Lisa (Sherri Stoner), and habitual returnee Nickie (Laurie Schwartz), who sets the tone of the next ninety minutes with the retort “You can wipe your ass with my file, bitch”, and bends over readily for the threatened intimate inspection.

Writer and director Tom De Simone (who spent the ‘70s doing porn, the ‘80s doing exploitation, and the ‘90s doing television) has that surprisingly rare quality of understanding what the audience wants from a film like this, and so rapidly gets the girls stripped and showered and ready for the obligatory hosing down. We are then introduced to the hand-wringing wimp of a psychologist who makes bold promises of protection and help she can’t keep, and Edna (the gloating Pat Ast), the hate-filled horror who makes terrifying threats she can keep, first seen dipping into a box of chocolates, later seen burning a beloved toy bunny and then later still stamping on a kitten. But the worst is yet to come, as we meet Edna’s informer and bitch, the hatchet-faced, hard-living harridan known as Charlie (the late Plasmatics lead singer Wendy Williams) and a dorm full of lingerie-clad layabeds at her beck and call.

Williams, who is clearly twenty years too old to be in a juvenile jail, is a hoot as the demented ringleader of a gang of skinny, skanky, butt-branded bimbos fronted by two Friday the 13th franchise alumni, redhead Tiffany Helm and dark-haired Darcy De Moss, two slimline beauties having the time of their lives, never more so than when loitering naked in the showers. Although Helm tackles most of the exposition, De Moss, in particular, is a delight, a’leerin’ and a’jeerin’ and spitting water through her teeth. At 35 minutes in, the formidable Sybil Danning (Chained Heat, Howling II, Amazon Women of the Moon, The Phantom Empire), marches in to a fanfare as Ilsa of the ‘80s Warden Sutter (“It’s time you put on your fuck-you boots and started kicking!” she snaps at Edna). The idea that Sutter and the nasty pieces of work running the place would tolerate these ninnies strutting around like glammed-up rock groupies is even funnier than the sight of them, but apparently Charlie and Edna have an understanding--yup, “Charlie’s under, and Edna's standin’!” one of the girls gleefully enlightens us.

While Edna and Charlie sit in the shade under parasols, the girls sweat in the sun, tapping the crops lightly with gardening implements. For facing up to Williams and her rabble at a costly price, Jenny earns the respect and friendship of Nickie, Paulie (Denise Gordy, niece of Motown’s Berry) and Claudia (Andrea Darnell), but it’s not enough to keep her safe from the demented and vindictive Edna, who is gradually going even more insane and out of control. With Jennifer incarcerated in solitary, it’s open season on the whimpering, simpering Lisa...

When the fragile Lisa wigs out and is caught stealing back her confiscated bunny toy (which is summarily torched by Edna), she is then abducted and branded into the gang by Charlie and her stooges while Jenny is in solitary for an escape attempt. Lisa’s subsequent suicide is the final straw that ends in a rampaging rock-accompanied riot and a way over-the-top ending that is in keeping with the entire fraught and over-wrought spirit of this wild ride.

There’s never a dull moment in Reform School Girls, and if there was, you wouldn’t notice it for all the nudity, lingerie, hilarity, cat-fighting and blaring rock-fuelled soundtrack.

The Last British Sex Film

Fanny Hill (1983)

1983’s Fanny Hill, bizarrely briefly retitled Sex, Lies, and Renaissance, presumably to cash in on the fleeting art film reputation of Sex, Lies, and Videotape (although most of the IMDB reviewers used the rather more staid and respectable BBC adaptation as their excuse to purchase it--purely for comparison purposes, you understand), this is one of numerous versions--or swipes--of the John Cleland novel about a Victorian girl thrown into the murky world of prostitution by lack of funds. It’s also the last gasp of the mainstream British sex film, the subject from hereon left to the murky world of the art film. Where did the home audience go? To the video shop in the ‘80s, and German satellite channels in the ‘90s, as they streamed in on Astra, home of the newborn Sky TV, Britain’s version of Fox. Now they’re on the internet. Who needs stories?

The plot of all the faithful versions is very basic. A young Victorian girl is thrown into prostitution, and then rescued by a handsome hero. They enjoy brief blissful happiness before the wealthy young man is cruelly spirited away and sent abroad by his even wealthier father, who disapproves. When the father dies, the young man returns to England, and begins his search for his lost love. Meanwhile, Fanny has returned to prostitution, where she befriends an old fool, and is left great riches in his will. Reunited with her lover, they have enough money to resume their romance. There’s no politics, no point, it’s a fairytale, plain and simple.

The problem with the story of Fanny Hill, if indeed it is a problem, is that it is usually one or the other--an excuse for sex and nudity for the boys, or in more sober adaptations, as a melodramatic soap about one woman’s triumph against adversity for weepy women to wallow in. It was always intended not as social document, but idealised fantasy, skewed either for a certain type of man or a certain type of woman, but never for truth, and rarely for both. This version, directed by former TV writer and director Gerry O’Hara (The Avengers, The Professionals), more often an assistant director or second unit man, but whose most recent directing assignment had been legendary 1970s date movie The Bitch, crosses the divide.

Although it shows prostitution as a jolly romp, it’s that great rarity, a chick flick with sex, offering melodrama and romance for the girls, and enough nudity to keep the boys quiet. The brothel is more like a sorority house full of giggly girls, none of whom are remotely convincing as downtrodden, disease-ridden creatures from history. They date back to the 1980s rather than the 1880s, when this film was made in fact, exhibiting the bland, banal Electric Blue-style beauty (and hair-styles) considered the ideal at that time. Leading lady Lisa Raines has a beautiful body, and in a decade when many women were deliberately obscuring same under the ugly fashions of the day, is to be thanked for being more than happy to display it with a total lack of inhibition.

The film starts discouragingly, but quickly picks up. Accused of theft before she’s barely stepped off the coach into the streets of London, the poor girl is fleeced of all her money by a bunch of over-acting winkers and nudgers of the RADA/BBC/Ealing variety and is swiftly spirited off to a brothel. Once the pantomime peasants have finished playing to the back of the hall, we get a lengthy banal and vapid lesbian scene, and then Fanny is educated in the ways of the world through a warren of peep-holes and key-holes in the most inventive scene of the film, as we spy alongside her a variety of workmanlike shags in various compositions. Heroic Charles is Barry Stokes of Spaced Out and Ups and Downs of a Handyman, and Raines appears in sex scenes with him, a stable boy, and his horse-fixated employer, who not only rides Fanny with whip in hand, but enjoys being ridden hard too! Yikes!

As trite as the material is, it’s beautifully and more professionally shot than most British sex films (okay, any British sex films), and has a very glossy, American-style sheen to it quite unlike the usual sleazy, grainy half-lit picture that is the norm for such fare, even if it can’t escape the material, defeated by the dialogue and theatrical British acting. Raines (aka Foster) is excellent throughout, spending a large proportion of the film naked and giving a completely natural and un-self-conscious performance.

Of the three marquee names, Oliver Reed is shamefully hammy as a fey lawyer, trampling over the hapless director and everybody else and giving a truly dreadful performance, while doddery Wilfrid Hyde-White, who never learned a line in his life, is his usual stumbling, bumbling, mumbling self, moving the story along with ad-libbed mutters in what would be his final role. Shelley Winters, on the other hand, gives an unusually calm and measured performance as the second of the two brothel madames, a pleasant surprise given the fact that the name cast are apparently doing exactly as they please and that it was usually Winters leading the charge over the top. Many players are not credited, but among the girls are Page 3 regulars Marie Harper (What’s Up, Superdoc, Emmanuelle in Soho), Tracy Dixon, Lorraine Doyle (The Benny Hill Show), Angie Quick (aka Mandy Miller, Emmanuelle in Soho), Vicki Scott (Adventures of a Plumber’s Mate, The Stud, Confessions from the David Galaxy Affair, The Bitch, Electric Blue, etc.), and Susie Silvey (Come Play With Me, The Playbirds, The Stud, etc.). Retirement or the Electric Blue videotaped adult mags beckoned.

Back to the Future: The New 1950s--Porky's, Meatballs, and Screwballs

H.O.T.S. (1979), Porky’s (1982), Porky’s 2: the Next Day (1983), Porky’s Revenge (1985), Screwballs (1983), Loose Screws: Screwballs II (1985), Private Resort (1985), Hardbodies (1984), Hardbodies 2 (1986), Hot Moves (1983), Fraternity Vacation (1985), Private School (1983)

It's the snobs vs. the slobs. Looked down on by the monied and privileged Pi sorority, a bunch of non-starters decide to form their own clique--H.O.T.S. (1979)--to ruin the lives and steal the men of the girls who rejected and mocked them. H.O.T. on the heels of National Lampoon’s 1978 Animal House, which it is clearly inspired by (it even opens the same way), the material on offer here is considerably less comedically sophisticated in execution, and on a couple of occasions downright offensive in its assumptions, but with much more eye candy. No-one can accuse it of not containing the advertised ingredients.

This is T&A without the A, a parade of bouncing bare breasts in shorts surrounded by crass set pieces and lowbrow vulgarity delivered by a small army of Playboy Playmate types. It marries 1960s, 1970s and the then-forthcoming 1980s trends in trashy teen entertainment flawlessly in an energetic and honest three-way bereft of double-standards. Offensive to delicate flowers and all thinking mature adults in about twenty different ways, this is what it is. To whine about it is to completely miss the point.

It’s very difficult and pointlessly undesirable to fault a film for delivering exactly what it promised, and H.O.T.S., even more than Animal House, pretty much set the tone and standards for most of the teen comedies of the 1980s. See one and you've seen ‘em all, so you might as well see a good one. There’s an Aunt Sally dean with pretensions (a perpetually angry straw man with bald head and spectacles who displays his hypocrisy and comedy underwear while hanging from the rooftops), and professional veteran comedy gangsters Louis Guss and Richard Bakalyan are drafted in for a Frankie-and-Annette-style sub-plot involving hidden loot stashed somewhere in the ramshackle house the girls have taken over and done up (1960s Mamie Van Doren cheapie Sex Kittens Go to College did a variation on this first). This provides the film with its two real actors and is almost an afterthought; at one point there’s a hot air balloon involved, some moonlight skinnydipping, a wet t-shirt competition, and of course a pie-fight. Also echoing Sex Kittens Go to College, there’s a fake robot scam to get in the house with a tin-can cross between The Mysterious Doctor Satan and South Park’s Awesome-O (“I-do-not-do-win-dows”). The beautiful and busty Angela Aames (of The Lost Empire) parachutes in without her bikini top and of course glides past the sorority party to land in the pool at the Dean’s fancy soiree, but the main attraction is a strip football game in which all the girls on both teams end up topless. Did I mention the escaped bear? There’s an escaped bear.

Teenage film fare began in the ‘50s with the likes of Rock Around the Clock and Shake, Rattle and Roll, dallied with the dangers of James Dean and Elvis, got cute as color arrived with the Gidget films and the lame Beach Party movies, and were then dominated by the much-maligned but outstandingly successful Elvis family films of the mid-‘60s. After a brief flirtation with biker movies, teen films finally lost their virginal innocence as film-makers found themselves able to deliver actual sex and nudity in the multiple cheerleader and student nurse films of the sleazy ‘70s.

The arrival of the home video boom in the 1980s, alongside the surprise success of Animal House and then the Porky’s series, unleashed a whole new torrent of sex-crazed teenagers in a barrage of seemingly endless T&A films of True Lust trumped by True Love. They were perfectly suited to the burgeoning video and cable market, strong enough but safe enough for adolescent couples--or singles--to grope to, but usually with a sickly moral or a sappy, romantic happy ending, perhaps to make them date flicks rather than porn for singles, or perhaps because all virgins are romantics at heart. Most of the time they were utterly unsatisfying, the video equivalent of prickteasing; the most you could hope for was consolation comedy.

Video shops and cable channels in the ‘80s were overflowing with identikit sun-and-sand beach movies set in California or Florida and dominated by beach-bunnies in bikinis, high-school kids with eyes popping out of their heads, and cheap pop music playing incessantly over everything. Californian beaches and Beverly Hills swimming pools, Proms and Spring Breaks, and pledges and sororities featured in a whole new glossy and brightly-colored landscape to replace the sleazy drab locales of the 1970s exploiters. It’s a tradition that has continued on up to and including the American Pie franchise, where smut and shock often replace the T&A.

In the era of voyeurdorm, Dare Dorm, Party Hardcore, and College Rules, to name but four, and even Girls Gone Wild for those too young to order the real thing, it’s difficult to imagine there would be a market for this sort of stuff today. What was once desirable and daring now looks dated and tame, and the content of these sort of films, a sort of raunchy amalgam of the Beach Party plots of the early ‘60s and Girls Gone Wild coyness, all sort of merge into one. Most of them were play-safe, utterly lame and obnoxious, the 1980s equivalent of Jerry Lewis films (“feel sorry for me, I can’t get laid, and neither can you, right?!”), and pandered to the prudish hypocrisy of the Reagan era kids.

Even though I’ve been trying to forget the ‘80s ever since January 1990, your author has spent almost the equivalent of a week’s shopping bill and a few hours I’ll never get back disentangling the better known of these for you on fast forward, so I hope the effort is appreciated. What's this doing in a book about the 1970s? Because I feel that to fully understand the 1970s and put the decade into context, we need to not only look at where we were first in the ‘50s and ‘60s, but where we went next in the ‘80s, ‘90s, and 21st century.

The first of the cycle, insanely, brilliantly funny, with only a flash of tit but lashings of lust and vulgarity, was 1979’s aforementioned classic National Lampoon’s Animal House, toplining the legendary John Belushi. Politically incorrect before political incorrectness had arrived, it was non-stop hilarious.

It wasn’t long before imitators such as H.O.T.S. arrived, finding it easier to do horny teenagers and bare breasts than to do great comedy, which is considerably tougher. One of the first and most successful was 1982’s Porky’s, which laid its cards on the table from the opening scene, as one character’s mother walks in on an early morning teenage tent-pole stiffie.

Back to the Future: The New 1950s continued

Porky’s falls between two stools, which in this case would be brown and steaming; it’s that kind of humor, but it wants to be serious and poignant too. Set in Florida in 1952, its title referred to an infamous out-of-town whorehouse run by a porcine slobbish bastard and his redneck brother, the local sheriff. It lead to two unfunny sequels and even more imitations of variable quality.

Porky’s was not a brilliant film like Animal House, which was consistently and continuously funny from start to finish. For a start, it tried to accurately portray the 1950s setting it had chosen in slavish admiration of 1973’s American Graffiti with some misguided moralising that must have just made the film uncomfortable viewing for Jews and blacks. How so? Apart from a few hairstyles, college in 1950s America didn't look that different from college in the 1980s, and so attempts to show the casual racism of the period, even to condemn it, just came across as, well, casual racism, particularly in a comedy, when the audience is not particularly in the right frame of mind for a lecture. Writer and director Bob Clark works so hard to show how he and everyone else really disapproves of racism and bigotry, that it might have been a better idea simply to leave it out in the first place.

What made Porky’s successful was word of mouth based on three must-see scenes, which everybody came out of the cinemas hooting over, a ploy since indulged in by the makers of such films as There’s Something About Mary and American Pie. The first was the timeless “Has anyone seen Mike Hunt?” ruse; the second was the reason Kim Cattrall’s character was called Lassie, which is hammered home within an inch of its life; the third and most significant was the infamous shower scene during which a dick is shoved through a hole in the wall and grabbed in the vice-like grip of Nancy Parsons’ fearsome Miss Balbricker, and the subsequent staff room sequence in which Parsons gamely tries to keep a straight face while all around her collapse in unsuccessfully stifled merriment as she demands an identity parade for the offending knob.

This, plus the obvious and yet so often overlooked attraction of abundant nudity in the shower sequence, pulled the adolescent audience to the film in droves.

A (too) hastily arranged sequel, Porky’s 2: the Next Day (1983), amazingly managed to leave out Porky and Porky’s, but not the finger-wagging liberalism, which took on the easy target of a two-faced evangelist and even more amazingly, substituted the female nudity with male nudity, thus wilfully ignoring all the elements that made the first film work. Having thus disappointed a built-in guaranteed returning audience, the producers belatedly brought back the man-beast himself for Porky’s Revenge (1985), but it was too little, too late. The Porky’s franchise may be so much offal now, but the spirit lives on in every obnoxious teenagers comedy of subsequent decades, all of which owe a massive debt to the little sausage that could. And did.

Despite, like the 1960s-based Animal House, being set in a nostalgia-free portrayal of the past, Porky’s and its Lemon Popsicle-sucking stablemates belong firmly to the 1980s, as much as Naked as Nature Intended belongs to the ‘50s, Confessions of a Window Cleaner belongs to the ‘70s, and American Pie belongs to the 2000s.

With character names like Bootsie Goodhead, Melvin Jerkovski, Anna Tomical, and Miss Boudoir, and a 1960s setting that looks remarkably like the 1980s, you would be right to assume that yes, 1983’s Screwballs is a grim mix of Britain’s Carry On films and the 1980s T&A hi-jinks begun by American Graffiti, Animal House, and Porky’s. Basically, four reprobates (and a masturbates) at T&A High (yes, really) scheme to get revenge on the vicious school bitch who has set each of them up for a fall. In a series of assorted set-pieces, hilarity ensues. Sometimes.

The same creative team, if creative is the right term, returned two years later with Loose Screws: Screwballs II (1985) to entertain us with such inspiration as Hugh G. Rection, Tracy Gratehead, and Mona Lott. Virtually a remake of a film that was copying others already, the action now takes place at Coxswell Academy. While hardly the only provider of such fare, the same producer also churned out such copycat titles as Recruits (1986), Valet Girls (1987), and the dismal Screwball Hotel (1989), widely regarded as the death of the genre at the dog-end of the ‘80s, although this was very much wishful thinking. At the same time, Meatballs (1979) and three sequels (1984, 1986, and 1992) had also appeared alongside all the other summer camp, summer resort, summer jobs, and spring break fare.

Naturally this mindset requires that the film be offensive and off-putting to women, rather than considering their requirements, although the fact that the audience watching 1985’s Private Resort sees more of young leads Rob Morrow and Johnny Depp than any of the women in the cast may be some compensation to long-suffering female viewers. Morrow and Depp, playing the usual obnoxious oafs, were still some years away from their forthcoming TV fame in Northern Exposure and 21, Jump Street respectively; Morrow looks as if he’s fifteen, and Depp looks about twelve. To those hoping for at least a few laughs, these are provided as usual by the veterans in the cast, in this case the hard-working Hector Elizondo, who works his balls off carrying the whole film.

Despite glowing nostalgic reviews on the internet, and ridiculously high prices on Amazon, most of these films are not nearly as funny as suggested, nor do they deliver as much sex and nudity as implied. Some of them can be amusing, a few more amusing in parts. The vast majority are uninspired, unimaginative, unlikeable, and deeply unsatisfying; occasionally, a reviewer will admit that yes, this film wasn’t as hilarious or as sexy as he remembered it, and a terrible cold breeze of reality blows through the world-wide web... but mostly, everybody thinks they’re a regular laff-riot. Comedy is subjective; maybe they are. The skimping on the sex and nudity however is non-debatable.

Private Resort flashes tits like an old granny handing out sweeties two at a time, as if they’re on wartime rations, thus making it typical of its genre. And as for full-on nudity, forget it. There’s a blink-and-you-miss-it shower scene with one tasty morsel and three background extras, and not much else. It’s one of those films which--like numerous others in the same paint-by-numbers style--provides the bare minimum, rather than the maximum bared. Like the girls on display, it teases, rather than delivers.

1984’s Hardbodies is so blah that there is barely anything to say about it. It has a vaguely creepy title, and incredibly, there was a Hardbodies 2 in 1986. Both feature a fair amount of bare breasts. Then again, so do most other sex films. That said, the most interesting aspect of many of the 1980s teen comedies continues to be how little they provide of what the characters are trying to get. There are always dozens of beautiful girls strutting around seductively in bikinis, but they rarely remove them. When a pair of breasts accidentally appears--and it almost always is a contrived accident—it’s a major event. Consequently the audience for films about frustrated virgins was often limited to frustrated virgins, the only segment of the audience satisfied with whatever they can get, rather than what they would like.

Much of the back-dated praise for these films appears to be provoked by rose-tinted remembrances of misspent youth in the ‘80s, when any glimpse of female flesh was thrilling, and any gormless dick joke a Wildean witticism of the highest order. I can understand this, as I have a warm glow for such innocent teen trash as Bye Bye Birdie, Ski Party, The Ghost in the Invisible Bikini and the Elvis films, etc.... but then I don’t see sex scenes that aren’t there.

There’s also a strong whiff of giggly childish rebellion against that demon ogre of the present day, political correctness, with even those justly opposed to its excesses colluding in their own oppression by often fretting over the suitability of film content in their film reviews for the benefit of their censorious overlords--as if PC super-sensitivity on the part of the professionally indignant is some sort of affliction that has to be tolerated by everybody else.

Perhaps it helps to be American... or, if European, a fan of the equally awful and crass Carry Ons from England, or the lederhosen and farmer’s daughter films from Germany, or the Edwige Fenech sex-coms from Italy, for example. Maybe it’s just me, in which case you must investigate for yourselves (in actual fact, the vast majority of 1980s very soft-porn sex-coms, including many of the above, hail from Canada, for tax break purposes, the usual unforeseen and unintended result of government interference with the film market--which is, perhaps, the best joke of all). All I can point out is that scenes that should be sexy, like the strip bowling in Screwballs, or the swimsuits that dissolve in the water in identi-kit sequel Loose Screws, both of which films include a student posing as a doctor to conduct breast inspections, just don’t deliver more than a glimpse of skin, and that characters who are supposed to be funny and sympathetic more often come across as moronic and sad.

Back to the Future: The New 1950s concluded

Typical of the genre’s failings is Hot Moves (1983), yet another of the numerous coming-of-age movies of the 1980s featuring frat boys of varying degrees of undesirability trying to lose their virginity. If you can deal with seeing a heterosexual guy in short shorts and a crop top, there is an extensive all-girl nude beach scene later on; first they run one way, then they run the other, then they lie down. It has nothing to do with the movie, and it’s all over in a couple of minutes, but it’s the only bit worth watching, and this is not a recommendation.

Large chunks of the movie are taken up with montage shots of Venice Beach; there’s plenty of girls in bikinis, but its 1983 so you’ll have to endure breakdancers and mimes as well. These montages are interspersed with standard teen movie sequences featuring the usual cliches--spying on naked girls, getting a stiffie at the wrong time, not getting a stiffie at the right time, buying alcohol, being gross, pulling pranks, copping a feel, sneaking into a sex shop, nearly groping a trannie, confronting the bully, yada yada yada... Nearly groping a trannie?? Okay, that was relatively new in ’83. Everyone eventually gets laid, except the strange-looking one, who passes up a naked and understandably pissed-off Debi Richter to find true love with the sweet innocent one. Yeesh. Unless you’re into paint-by-numbers rites-of-passage movies, there really is nothing much here.

Directed by veteran comedy director James Frawley, who made his name directing over half the episodes of ground-breaking cult ‘60s show The Monkees, the moderately amusing Fraternity Vacation (1985) is basically a reverse of the Elvis movie Girl Happy, in which a gangster inadvertently lets the foxes into the henhouse when he sends Elvis and his over-aged teenage pals to Florida for Spring Break with instructions to guard his daughter from predatory party-goers--or else. Here, a well-meaning father (Max Wright, the dad in ALF) sends his nerdy son off with two randy teens (Cameron Dye and--in the inevitable embarrassing early role--Tim Robbins) to lose his virginity, the attraction being free room and board in Palm Springs for the Easter break. Robbins looks patently and tolerantly bored with the whole business.

The hint of a plot development not only goes back to Elvis again (G.I. Blues this time), but ten years earlier to Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis--the bet to see who gets the girl first. Cameron Dye and Tim Robbins were in the same acting group in their earliest days, and play the least obnoxious guys, Joe and Larry, the latter nicknamed Mother because his surname is Tucker. This is the level of the humor and perhaps so it should be.

They’ve agreed to babysit well-meaning man-child Wendell, played by cute and scrawny Stephen Geoffreys, who--despite looking like a computer-generated Disney kid--went on to make a few horror films before becoming, according to the IMDB, a prolific gay porn star in the 1990s (let’s hope they haven’t mixed two actors with the same name together, as they often do!). Equally amusingly for the casting department, the bright-eyed boyish-haired brunette who Wendell picks up to romance for the duration of the film is played by Amanda Bearse of Married--With Children, who--also in the early ‘90s--became the first prime-time TV star to publicly come out as gay while appearing on a series.

No sooner do the guys arrive in Palm Springs than they’re spotted by the wealthy and even more infantile Chas and J.C. (Leigh McCloskey and Matt McCoy) from a rival fraternity, who have a long-standing feud going. The only scene with any substantial nudity follows, as the even more obnoxious guys send their bimbo girlfriends (soap star and scream queen Barbara Crampton and tall and curvy future Renegade co-star Kathleen Kinmont) off to play a practical joke on the slightly less obnoxious guys.

War is declared when the slim, attractive, but quite frankly very ordinary Sheree J. North is deemed the most desirable woman in the hotel complex, and a thousand dollar bet is made over who gets her laid first--Joe, for the slightly obnoxious team, or Chas, for the very obnoxious team. While all four creeps’ plans for North go south, the nerd gets the bird--but you guessed that anyway. As is so often the case in these sex-com films about super-desirable dream girls, the mega-babe desired over all others is nowhere near as appealing as the girls in the supporting cast. Or perhaps that’s just me again.

As it’s the 1980s, it’s not easy to tell how much of this is tongue-in-cheek and how much we’re supposed to take at face value. That may be to the credit and professionalism of old hand James Frawley, who avoids many of the pitfalls that lesser directors hurl themselves into, and keeps things clean and funny rather than cruel and sordid. As I said, it’s the ‘80s, so there’s big hair, aerobics, and montages throughout, and girls in skimpy swimsuits everywhere. Few scenes drag, and no scenes are botched, and the feelgood factor remains defiantly high, despite the charmless male leads and vacuous, personality-free female characters. A round of applause for Roberta Whitehead, pointedly credited as the shy Miss North’s stand-in for the brief nudity. The fact that North will take a role in a film about teenage sex, in which she appears in two skimpy strips of a swimsuit made of less material than a gift box ribbon and an aerobics kit that leaves nothing to the imagination, and then have a body double for the few seconds of tit and bum says everything you need to know about the 1980s.

Without a doubt, the star of the show is John Vernon (Point Blank, Dirty Harry, Chained Heat), who does a reprise of his wonderful Dean Wormer characterisation from Animal House as the local police chief and seething fall guy, and, of course, just like Animal House, turns out to be the father of the girl Wendell is romancing. Let’s face it, we’d have been let down if he wasn’t. When puppy-dog Wendell is humiliated and jailed, it’s vengeance time for the grand finale. However, the funniest scene is undoubtedly Wendell’s arrival at the pool, during which numerous teens of both sexes and several items of pool furniture are sent careening into the water by the blissfully ignorant wimp and his armful of inflatables. Elsewhere, Britt Ekland, queen of the pointless cameos, appears briefly as a waitress, and Nita Talbot, coincidentally the stripper in the aforementioned Girl Happy, has a small role as Vernon’s snooty wife.

While Robbins won the lottery of luck and went on to an eclectic film career, Cameron Dye and the rest of the cast remained gainfully employed in TV, with both McCloskey and North taking roles in storylines of Dallas, and North moving on to a recurring role in Walker, Texas Ranger. Many of the cast, including the late, great John Vernon, have provided voices for animated cartoons over the years.

Fraternity Vacation is one of the better American teen comedies of the ‘80s, because the best ones see sex as a bit of flirty fun in itself, rather than as an awkward but essential passage to a life of future prudery. Although the guys are the usual embarrassing desperate oafs and loud-mouthed braggarts, the film has a sense of fun about it. Particularly amusing is the final scene when the parents walk in just as four of the cast members are mooning at the door. Naturally mother faints into father’s arms. It’s infantile, puerile, and hilarious.

I’m not averse to lecherous low-brow humor, and I believe in judging things for exactly what they are, by their own standards--but it has to work. There seems to be an attitude out there that because the laughs come cheap, it not only excuses a bad film, but makes poor quality and incompetence a given. A vast number of positive reviews for this genre on Amazon or the IMDB begin or end with comments along the lines of “Sure, it’s crap, but whaddaya expect?”. Well, we should expect funny jokes, likeable characters, an adequate amount of skin, and a smidgen of thought going into where to place the camera. It can be done, and occasionally is; see Animal House, Private School, near miss Beach Girls, or certain sequences in Porky’s, Fraternity Vacation, or Reform School Girls. But when even the director is quoted as apparently being too awkward to watch the nude scenes, one begins to get a sense of where the producers might be going wrong. The world is full of dirty minded, drooling young men who would like a job filming naked women; why give the task to shy guys?

It wasn’t so much that these films were bad, they just often weren’t good. And adequate just isn’t... well, adequate. Fortunately there’s always an exception to prove the rule, and that happy exception to this miserable state of affairs is Private School (filmed as early in the cycle as 1983). Take notes, T&A merchants--this is how it’s done.

Private School is a gem, a perfectly judged example of what this sort of film should have delivered every time. The guys are likeable and funny (two firsts for the typical teen comedy--usually they're obnoxious and despicable), the girls are gorgeous (and not prissy, bitchy, dim or arrogant), the individual comedy scenes actually work, there’s the gratuitous but surely mandatory shower scene to knock spots off all the others (including the more famous first-past-the-post Porky’s), and a supporting cast of treasured character actors lead by the magnificent Fran Ryan as the horrified head teacher.

Nobody looking for T&A comedy could possibly be dissatisfied by Private School. You would have to be dead from the waist down not to find this film sexy, and had your sense of humor surgically removed not to find such scenes as the sauna, literal bareback riding, and cross-dressing scam (lifted from Ski Party by way of Some Like It Hot) seriously amusing. Everyone gets into the spirit of the show and gives one hundred percent, and if the entire cast from the young leading players to the veteran character actors, to the up-for-it shower girls and the faux-outraged oldsters aren’t thoroughly enjoying themselves, then they’re better actors than could be imagined.

Bizarrely, reading other internet reviews, the audience seems divided fifty-fifty. Many agree with me, and the fans are equally abundant in their praise (co-star Michael Zorek has called it the Citizen Kane of teen sex films; he discusses the film at length in the on-screen interviews on the Hot Moves DVD), but in the interests of fairness and impartiality, I am obliged to point out that you will find some bad reviews out there in cyberspace; I have no idea what these people were expecting from a 1980s T&A comedy, or what they thought they should be watching as opposed to what was put in front of them. It’s one thing to be immune to the pleasures of low comedy and eye candy, but quite another to indulge and then complain about it.

Partly to blame for the divided opinion, perhaps, is the DVD packaging, which--unlike the original poster showing a mass mooning--plays up the romance between the lovestruck leads (some of the alternative posters displayed here are more representative of the film). In fact, the cloying but inevitable romance between soppy Matthew Modine and Phoebe Cates does not overwhelm the general atmosphere of abandon, and it’s all done without falling into any of the typical pitfalls of the genre--cruelty and crudity.

Private School is lowbrow and silly, as it should be, but never resorts to such desperate tactics as the fart gags, sex toys and tedious stoner jokes that similar films rely on. There’s no fat girl, no ugly girl, no inadequate girl for the scriptwriters to rip on. As for the nudity, if there’s any sight more spectacular than Betsy Russell’s tits flying around as she rides horseback, or Lynda Wiesmeyer’s ass soaking in the shower, I’d be afraid to look for fear of heart failure. As the old cliche goes, if you only see one teen comedy in your life... make it this one.

As for the others, there’s good bad, and there’s bad bad, but these films and their imitators are worse than that—they’re mediocre. And there’s no excuse for mediocrity, because that’s not failing, it’s not trying.

The Maestro

The Key (1983), Miranda (1985), Snack Bar Budapest (1988), Paprika (1991), All Ladies Do It (1992), The Voyeur (1994), P.O. Box Tinto Brass (1995), Frivolous Lola (1998), Cheeky (2000), Black Angel (2002), Private (2003), Mon Amour (2006)

But if that’s what the kids were watching in the 1980s, what about the adults? Although ironically and unfairly best known for the notorious Caligula, which he was famously removed from and subsequently disowned (as discussed earlier), the true cinematic legacy of Giovanni Tinto Brass is as the foremost maker of classy but in-your-face erotica. He has commanded and exercised complete control of his projects ever since the Caligula debacle, even to the point of doing his own editing. Also, unlike many other reliable providers of sexual content in film (D’Amato, Meyer, Franco, Rollin, etc.), Brass is neither objectionable or incompetent, having learned his trade with the likes of Fellini and Rossellini.

His films range from the poignant emotional drama of The Key and Black Angel to the brazenly silly and fluffy Cheeky and Private. Best known for his stunningly beautiful leading ladies, abundant fulsome uninhibited nudity, and joyous love of life (his work frequently features scenes of frivolity and dancing), his films are completely and wonderfully shameless in their lusty exhibitionism. Brass makes no concessions of any kind to prudishness, propriety, or puritanism, referencing it only to show his admirable contempt, and frequently mocks weak and controlling men and figures in authority, ridiculing hypocrites in church and government alike. His women are vivacious, selfish, demanding, and in complete control of their lives, the exact opposite of womens’ roles in most cinema, including much aimed at women.

Make no mistake though, these are films made purely for men, even though it’s impossible for anyone of either sex to criticise them without looking like a repressed chump. Invariably set in precise time periods that are nevertheless timeless in their presentation, his films rarely betray their era even when it is a part of the story; you hardly ever see technology or popular culture, although the early ‘60s films of his youth were exceptions, typically and unmistakably of that era, often in the worst possible way. Needless to say, his one attempt to be of the moment, the very ‘80s Miami Vice-like Snack Bar Budapest, is now, of course, his most dated, while almost all the others could have been made at any time during the last forty-odd years.

Following the depressing Nazi freak show Salon Kitty in 1976 and his disastrous experience with Caligula in 1979, Brass made the following erotica: The Key (aka La chiave, 1983), Miranda (1985), the disappointing Love and Passion (aka Capriccio, 1987), Snack Bar Budapest (1988), Paprika (1991), All Ladies Do It (aka Cosi fan tutte, 1992), The Voyeur (1994), P.O. Box Tinto Brass (1995), Frivolous Lola (1998), Cheeky (aka Trasgredire, 2000), Black Angel (2002), Private (2003), and Mon Amour (2006). While his 1980s erotica is interesting, by the beginning of the 1990s Brass was making probably the best soft-core pornography ever made, joyous celebrations of sex and the female form that could only offend the repressed and inhibited; in my personal opinion, very little else comes anywhere near to delivering female beauty on film... and Brass is still the boss. The term ‘erotic’ is used very generally and liberally in the arts and entertainment world, but there seems no better word to describe the output of Tinto Brass.

But back in 1983 (the year of Porky’s!), first up was The Key (aka La chiave). One of Tinto Brass’ more restrained efforts, it is also paradoxically his most perverse. I wouldn’t go so far as to say it’s his best work, as some do, but it’s definitely a worthy addition to the canon.

Adapted from the book of the same name by Junichiro Tanizaki, Brass has done what he always would with adaptations, and transferred it from its 1950s Tokyo setting to the safer, more secure ground he knows, Venice in 1940, where the marriage of dignified dirty old man Frank Finlay to the curvy Stefania Sandrelli, nearly half his age, is slowly disintegrating. She has become an abandoned, dissatisfied prude, and he is in poor health and prematurely ejaculating.

With well over one hundred roles to her credit, Sandrelli is best known for Bertolucci’s The Conformist and 1900 (aka Novocento). The louche Finlay had, in the 1970s, become the unlikely epitome of sexual dysfunction in both the BBC’s coy 1971 adaptation of Casanova, then considered daring, and ITV’s then provocative Friday night scandal-fest of family secrets Bouquet of Barbed Wire in 1976. He’s wonderful in this, clinging on to the last threads of his dignity as hotelier and art buff Nino Rolfe while unravelling at the thought of his wife Teresa’s indiscretions with none other than their daughter’s irritating fiancee, Lazlo (Franco Branciaroli of Jansco’s Private Vices, Public Virtues and four more for Brass). Barbara Cupisti of Eleven Days, Eleven Nights and numerous Italian horrors rounds out the four-sided triangle as the fascist-supporting Lisa, an adoring supporter of Il Duce.

The key of the title belongs to a “secret” diary which Rolfe deliberately leaves for his wife to find, and fully intends her to read, which he hopes will help explain his feelings to her. Instead, it propels her into the arms of her daughter’s foppish fiancee, and realising his ploy, she starts leaving her diary around for him to see. As Italy drifts toward decadence, it suits Britisher Rolfe just fine, and Finlay revels in his role as a sly old fox who is facing his demons and just doesn't give a shit for propriety any more. He’s at the age where all of life’s pleasures can kill him, and he intends to take what he can, while he can. When Teresa suffers a diabetic faint, the sleazy old boy takes the opportunity to cop a few feels and takes lurid photos of her... but gets his comeuppance when he fucks her while she’s out of it and she responds with Lazlo’s name. Hmm... perhaps it was a mistake to give Lazlo the photos to develop! When Lisa sees the pictures, she’s disgusted by all three of them, and taunts Rolfe with cryptic comments... As sex becomes more playful and Teresa comes out of her shell a new woman, Rolfe weeps and rages in his study with frustration.

The proceedings are as beautifully photographed as ever (by cinematographer Savano Ippoliti, Sandrelli dressed in bright reds as she comes out of her funk), Brass, of course, knows where to put his camera (although the erotic delights are confined to Sandranelli alone in this one, who goes above and beyond the call of duty for the charming old lech), and the music is as diverse and evocative as ever, helped in no small part--but just a part--by Ennio Morricone.

The rather plump Serena Grandi plays the titular character and local whore Miranda (1985) in the next slice of everyday lusty Italian life in the mid-20th century. Some rather crass close-ups more in the manner of Jess Franco than the maestro open this one, which never really amounts to much. There’s a couple of nice musical set pieces, a lot of flashing, and a fun mud fight at a rained-out picnic, but if you’ve never seen any Tinto Brass, don’t start with this one, start with Cheeky, Paprika, Private, or Frivolous Lola. This (one of the eight film box set, don’t buy it singly) is as close to boring as Tinto Brass ever gets, and it’s still adequate--a good one if you like full-figured women, although only Grandi gets completely naked. It was followed by the very similar and inferior Love and Passion (aka Capriccio, 1987), and perhaps sensing the danger of slipping into a rut, Brass swerved too far in the other direction.

Although considered to be one of Tinto Brass’ lesser efforts, 1988’s Snack Bar Budapest is not the disappointment some have said. An early scene with Valentine Demy as a raunchy prostitute is fun, and there’s a lengthy car ride showing off a perfectly rounded bum to the drivers following, and a raucous interlude at a beach-front restaurant followed by much preening, posing, and flashing by assorted prostitutes. We also enjoy the usual upskirt dance-floor session. All this is laid on by the local ganglord, Molecola (Francois Negret), a laughable arrogant little prick barely out of his teens and clad in suit, scarf, shades, and fedora. How this callous, petulant, spoiled little shrimp took control is not revealed, but he’s vicious and brutal, and the shabby, vandalised coastal town is windswept and run-down, unwanted, perhaps, by bigger fish. Molecola entertains childish fantasies of building a leisure resort bigger than Vegas, and no-one dares contradict him. Why should they, when life’s a party for those not unlucky enough to own competing businesses such as the Snack Bar Budapest.

Giancarlo Giannini (Rene Mathis in the Daniel Craig Bonds) plays a washed-up lawyer turned two-bit hood who drives into town with his knockout and knocked-up girlfriend (Raffaella Baracchi, Miss Italy 1985) to secure her an abortion in a Fellini-esque hospital. Jaded, pragmatic, and weary, and briefly seduced by Molecola’s indulgences, he ends up defending the snack bar from Molecola and a small army of coked-up, gun-wielding prostitutes, too far off their heads to realise their bullets are real.

Working with a different cinematographer than usual, this 1988 production, unlike all his other work, looks of its time, all blue neon, synthesiser music, flash clothes and Miami Vice-inspired imagery and decor. It’s Brass, but not as we know it. Of course by being modern in 1988, rather than as timeless as his other films, it is naturally this film that has dated least well. The film sags a bit in places, but there’s a poignant ending, and with the usual abundant nudity and gleeful, giggling whores, armed to the gills in the finale and shooting maniacally at the titular edifice and its pathetic owners, what’s not to like?

The Maestro, continued

Brass returned to safer ground with Paprika (1991), the maestro’s take on John Cleland’s Fanny Hill by way of Fellini, and this is, in the author’s opinion, his best, a combination of the substance of the ‘80s with the frivolity of the ‘90s. His leading lady is the bunny-eyed, full-lipped and full-figured Debora Caprioglio, who walks like she’s carrying her holiday luggage in each hand when she’s wearing heels, so huge are her tits and so plump her arse. Formerly romantically linked with the lunatic actor Klaus Kinski at a very young age, and cast in his unwatchable, unerotic vanity project Kinski Paganini at 21, she must have got her lessons in life early. She’s mesmerisingly beautiful, like all of Brass’ leading ladies, and went on to make a few more appearances in sexy roles before settling into a successful television career. Chase up the cop thriller Spiando Marina if you want to see more of her, but as you can imagine, by the time Tinto’s finished, there’s not much more left to see; it’s more like a return visit to the same beautiful surroundings.

Paprika is a happy little prostitute who merrily fucks her way from one brothel to another in 1950s Italy, looking for the easiest short-cut to the good life possible. The days are occasionally tinged with tragedy, intimidation from the law, or violence, but mostly she’s having a pretty good time. Everything’s a joke--the customers, the cops, the camaraderie. Nudity everywhere, and plenty of time to look at it, immoral characters living the high life, great music and photography... come on out, Tinto, we know it’s you…

Caprioglio’s Paprika (real name, Mimma) is introduced to prostitution as the naive young girlfriend of nasty Nino, the sort of sleazebag who hides his desperation behind sunglasses worn in all weather. She tells the world-weary doctor who examines her for the brothel (and advises her to go home) that she’s only doing this for two weeks, to make enough money to get the happy couple settled. He, and everyone else, tells her that Nino’s just a pimp, and that once she’s in, she'll surely stay. And she surely does. When she admits to the madame (Martine Brochard of Il Solco di Pesca, The Voyeur, and many more) that she doesn’t have much experience, she’s told that “one day in a whorehouse is worth ten years outside”. This proves to be the case.

Paprika pretty much covers every aspect of prostitution you can think of--politics, church, police, health, class, randy young men, pragmatic old men, wrong ‘uns, fetishists, abortionists, lesbianism (“so cleansing after a day of cocks” says her best friend Gina, the awesomely attractive Rossana Gavinel), seduction, corruption, unwanted pregnancy, pimps, wimps, thugs, and mugs. But if you imagine any of this comes in the form of social documentary or moralistic lecture, think again. The mood swings only from humor to erotica to poignant matter-of-factness. When the fun-filled Beba (Valentine Demy of Snackbar Budapest and Eleven Days, Eleven Nights part three) is taken seriously ill, a doctor and a priest are found effortlessly within the bordello. Other clients include a closeted factory boss who orders a threesome with Paprika and a fella, and finds himself being fucked in the ass by one of his disgruntled workers from the assembly line, and a nasty old man who turns out to be Paprika’s childhood uncle and recognises not her face but her arse, blackmailing her into freebies until local muscle piss-stainingly persuade him to move on.

“We give joy, hope, illusions... We scream and fake it to make them feel macho even if it’s the size of a cigarette” pronounces Paprika as she swiftly becomes a seasoned and experienced sex worker.

On a date with client Franco, an admiring sailor, she discovers Nino as a liar and a cheat, and falls in love with her new suitor, who appears and disappears throughout. Nino, who was stringing along another woman who didn’t know about Paprika, now loses both.

When wealthy Count Rosasco shows up at the brothel to give his 18 year old son his birthday present, he takes a fancy to young Paprika himself and she finds herself invited to an elegant soiree. There, she scandalises the guests and gets a proposal of marriage... from the 70 year old Count! The Count catches her bending over for a waiter, but instead of dismissing him, he doubles the man’s pay and takes over, his first hard-on in three years; all watch through the window, cheering them on. And when a spiteful old biddy deliberately spills her drink on Paprika, it’s her cue to strip off and stand on the table, as the Count shows off his intended bride to all. Once the inevitable happens shortly after the wedding (there’s a nice scene of her tenderly but calmly sitting at his deathbed), she sails off into the sunset with Franco.

The opening and closing scenes and the basic plot structure belong to Cleland, but the filling is pure Tinto--wonderfully bawdy and irreverent, with the inevitable jabs at prudery, authority, and the church, and the usual laughing, dancing, and fucking for everybody else. A wealthy woman, the Countess Paprika returns to the brothel where it all began, where fixtures and fittings are being sold off after a repressive new law banning brothels comes into force (“delinquency, disease, out on the streets--it's the end of eroticism” sighs one patron, mournfully). When a client tries to pay for Paprika, she dismisses protestations that she’s a Countess, and now unavailable. “I’m a whore, and proud of it!” she announces. “Thanks to these tits, ass, and cunt, I’ve become rich and respected. Champagne for all, it’s on me. Goodbye, half-hour romances. Goodbye, splashing bidets and bags of tokens. Goodbye to husbands looking for thrills they can’t get at home. Goodbye to sweet fetishists, charming students, goodbye everyone. Life is short, but pussy is eternal! Freebies for all today!”. The final scene has Paprika and Gina sitting on the veranda of her riverside estate and raising a glass to Franco, chugging past on his boat with the kids.

Brass again returned to more familiar territory with All Ladies Do It (aka Cosi Fan Tutte, 1992), a somewhat phoney fantasy about a man with what many of us might regard as the perfect wife, but who can’t enjoy a situation most men would kill for, because of his own hang-ups and hypocrisies. That said, it must be admitted that this perky little treasure would try the patience of a saint…

In fact, everybody’s doing it in this rich, lustrous fantasy, a light-hearted, less intense retread of The Key and Miranda, set in the romantic environs of Rome and Venice, and made between 1989’s more credible Paprika, and 1993’s The Voyeur, which would inaugurate a run of more of the same. As the 1990s began, Brass was taking the advice of his plump little prostitute, and thinking purely of having fun.

The extraordinary and uninhibited Claudia Koll (Claudia Colacione) plays Diana Brunin, a happily married nymphomaniac who giggles like a child, pants like a dog, and bangs like a firework. This would be wonderful for her husband Paolo (Paolo Lanza), but for three things--a) he’s a bit uptight, b) she doesn’t just have sex with him but everybody else who comes within three feet, and c) he’s perhaps understandably steaming jealous.

To add insult to injury, Diana works in a lingerie shop with her randy friend Antoinetta (Isabella Deiana) and her even randier employer. Her other friend Nadia (Ornella Marcucci) is equally up for it, and works in a gym that looks like a male fantasy from the old Electric Blue videos of the 1980s rather than anything resembling real life.

She torments her bookish husband with recitals of her erotic adventures, which are usually the only way to get him going, and embarrasses him in public. At an erotic poetry reading she skips into the toilets with a laughable French lech. On trams and trains she teases men by rubbing up against them and/or flashing them looks and more. When she travels to Venice following the death of her Aunt, she even flirts during the reading of the will, departing with a beautiful penthouse and the husband of the relative who was hoping for it. When he flees back to his evening meal, Diana--instead of ‘phoning husband Paolo as promised--calls Alphonse (Franco Branciaroli, below), the grubby weirdo from the recital, who introduces her to anal sex (friend Antoinette’s method of birth control). She also finds a wealth of vintage photographs and film of her aunt, who worked in the sex industry of days gone by and recorded her antics for posterity.

When she gets back to Rome, husband Paolo is turned on by the films of Auntie Emma. Telling him about the beautiful penthouse, she trills “For a young couple in love, the place is paradise!”. “Yeah, we can put it up for rent!” replies the bespectacled bore.

It eventually dawns on this twit that her sexy stories are in fact true, and when he finds out, he declares their marriage over. “He didn’t fuck me at all!” she wails with Clinton-esque mendacity, “I took it up the ass!!”. Friend Nadia is sent round to persuade him that Diane loves him, but loves her adventures as well, which she does by trying to fuck him to show that sexual escapades can go both ways, but he’s not having it, or her, claiming he’s not interested. “Your cock is calling you a liar!” she steams.

An already silly film is made even sillier by the dubbing, which always has the effect of making sex films seem like parodies of their own genre, but it doesn’t matter, as one girl after another bares herself for Brass’ camera. There isn’t a single scene in this film that doesn’t involve sex--which is exactly the way a sex film should be. And despite an orgy scene at a very 1980’s-style disco, Brass’ films are, as previously stated, also curiously timeless, giving the impression that you could place them at almost any chronological location.

Bearing in mind what she got up to while happily married, it beggars belief what the girls get up to now she’s separated. Attending an outdoor orgy, she thoughtfully rings her despairing beau while being gang-banged by three louts. Sitting on a beach alone and frustrated while a nearby loving couple get it on, poor Paolo realises that if she’s not going to change, he must.

“Men have always had the right to fly from one flower to the next... but not women” ponders Mr. Brass, who puts in a lusty cameo as a naughty old boy buying underwear for his popsie at the film’s close. “I put such awareness to use, in a funny and amusing manner, in my films”. Fair enough, and funny and amusing this sexy film surely is, but it overlooks the sad fact that poor old Paolo actually wanted to be faithful to his wife, and only asked that his wife be faithful to him in return. Sadly for him, he lives in Tinto Brass’ fantasy world of non-stop fucking--a place where many would be only too happy to reside!

The Maestro, concluded

By the time we get to The Voyeur (aka L’uomo che guarda, 1994), we easily recognise the character traits of college professor Eduardo (Francesco Casale), a typical Tinto Brass leading man--tall, thin, brooding, intellectual, and troubled by a beautiful but flighty wife. Blonde Silvia (the stunningly perfect Katarina Vasilissa) is indeed a typical Tinto Brass leading lady--a curvy, capricious, contrary, high maintenance full-figured flasher and free spirit, prone to bending over a lot. The exteriors are unmistakably Italian, the interiors are master shots dominated by warmth, style, ovals and semi-circles, books, mirrors, a total absence of technology other than lightbulbs, bedroom doors that close, and bathroom doors that don’t. So far, so Tinto.

Franco Branciaroli, now naturally somewhat older than when he made Private Vices, Public Virtues and The Key (the latter of which makes a cameo appearance during a blow job in a cinema), plays Eduardo’s randy father in a bad bald pate make-up. While Katarina Vasilissa shows everything most of the time, the petite, dark-haired, and full-lipped Cristina Garavaglia as daddy’s naughty nurse gets her various bits out one at a time. She’s first seen wearing denim shorts that only cover a third of her bum, and takes it from there. Both girls are absolutely gorgeous.

The insubstantial story, if anybody gives a damn, revolves around Eduardo’s penchant for voyeurism and fantasy, brought about from an early eyeful of daddy fucking mummy, who’s a dead ringer for Vasilissa. While the Freudians in the audience make umming and ahh-ing noises, I can pretty much guarantee that ours will be somewhat baser. To add the icing to yet another tasty cake from Tinto, there’s a fantasy sequence set on a naturist beach where a plentiful supply of beautiful girls performing various exercises or sex acts gradually morph into a grinning Vasilissa. As broad as her grin is, yours will be broader. As always, the technical and production competence on all levels is superb.

By now, Brass was confident and ready to be indulgent. P.O. Box Tinto Brass (1995) is a ridiculous conceit built around the letters he supposedly receives from hopeful fans, actresses, writers, and so on, keen to contribute to his lecherous films. No doubt he does, and as the great man sits in a swirl of trademark cigar smoke, attending to business with his secretary and surrounded by posters of past glories, we are treated to a string of variable vignettes and short stories, and as ever with these compilations, some are better than others.

After a magnificently erotic sequence on a beach (above), in which one participant each of two couples banging away acknowledges the other fleetingly and favorably, there is a silly yarn about a bored housewife and her jealous husband. The housewife takes a once-a-week job at the local brothel, and of course, her husband turns up. We’re then asked to believe that he chooses her, and doesn’t recognise his own wife in bed. After this, there’s a tedious bit about flashing in public filmed in the Coliseum (supposedly the best pick-up place in Rome), and then a cassette submission that turns out to show a girl in a maid’s outfit and a romp in the woods. The girls in this al fresco fuck are gorgeous. There’s also a funny sequence where a man barges into Brass’ office with his bimbo girlfriend and orders her to display herself in the hope of acting as her agent and securing her a part in one of the maestro’s epics. He’s right, she does have a great ass, and if it was anyone other than Brass I’d say it could never happen, but you know what? I bet it happens once a week.

Finally, a man loses his girlfriend to his mates in a poker game, so they get to poke her. Initially she’s understandably a bit peeved about this, but she comes home sloshed and well seen to. The film ends with the secretary’s fantasy, which features Brass in a comedy ‘tache and a stylish boutique where the customers are composed of all the girls from the previous stories.

This is not as successful as the vastly superior Private, made a few years later, and which takes a similar patchwork format but boasts women so beautiful they would make a priest kick a hole in a stained-glass window; although a couple of actresses appear in both, this is less impressive both in story content and performers. However, a second-rate offering from Tinto Brass is still infinitely superior to the best work of many others. The outdoor fucking scenes at the beach and in the countryside are probably the best reason to look this one over, and the girl coming back from the poker game provides a bit of amusement too. But you will have your own preferences, and it seems a safe bet there’s something here for everybody. Just not all the time.

In Frivolous Lola (aka Monella, 1998) it’s the 1950s again, and Lola (the full-lipped, full-figured Anna Ammirati; where does he find them?) bicycles around her small Italian village showing her bum. It’s a Tinto Brass film, so this goes on for a pleasingly lengthy amount of time, accompanied by jaunty, devil-may-care music (40 minutes in, she’s graduated to a motorbike). All the old women in the village hate her, all their lustful husbands love her. But while the older men dream their delightful dreams, and reminisce about their golden youth, Tomasso (or occasionally, Masetto, the dubbing differs from scene to scene), the baker’s young son, has ambition far more than dreams, and is engaged to be married to her. The problem is that the wanton lack of inhibition that seems initially so attractive when lusting with the rest of the male community is less appealing when you want her all to yourself.

Lola’s father (British smarm specialist Patrick Mower, from a dozen assorted detective shows of the ‘70s and ‘80s), is an unapologetic lusty old hedonist with a massive and still accumulating collection of erotica, while Tomasso’s mother is an uptight old prude with a massive and still accumulating collection of hang-ups. Much to the amusement of her husband, Tomasso’s father, Lola enjoys goading her, and everybody else; when slapped round the face, she responds by planting a big wet kiss on the old cow’s face. A cartoon voyeur in the woods and two pervy priests are also on the receiving end of Lola’s frivolity.

Playing the jealous and slightly prudish boyfriend longing for exclusivity and respectability is Mario/Max Parodi, in the first of many roles for Brass. In a recurring theme in Tinto Brass films, Tomasso wants to tame his wild lover, but she’s having none of it, and as usual he must take her as he finds her or not at all. Lola spends much of the film teasingly trying to tempt the conservative Tomasso, who clearly takes after his mother in morals, to have sex with her before the wedding. Finally, just hours before the big day, he loses his temper and she loses her cherry. As the conductor of the village band in the opening and closing scenes, Tinto looks approvingly on as Lola flaunts herself, the second time at her wedding, where joyous bawdy ribaldry prevails. Frivolous Lola is very much more of the same, and features Brass on top form, doing just what he does best--unashamed, unapologetic, and undisguised celebrations of uninhibited sex and nudity. There’s a great musical score, including a surreal barroom scene that is not one of Lola’s fantasies, in which she dances with three American GIs to Glenn Miller and then Curtis King on the jukebox (twisting again like he did last summer, a neat trick in the mid-‘50s).

Despite the terrible dubbing, you would have to be in a wooden box not to find this film sexy. Ammirati is displayed in an assortment of poses, trying on clothes, masturbating on her bed, being flour-fucked in the bakery, dancing in the rain, being dried off by dad, fending off seducers, and in several dream sequences in one of which she spies on her father’s earlier sexploits spanking her mother (a cameo from Serena Grandi, star of Brass’ 1985 Miranda), and in another, skinnydips with her husband-to-be, who is wearing her wedding dress. All of this is beautifully photographed and directed.

Nothing much happens in the way of story, but with all this going on, nothing much needs to happen, with Ammirati perpetually parading around in various states of undress, nudity, and semi-nudity. Like many actresses in European sex films, Ammirati had no problem securing perfectly ordinary roles in regular films and TV after her soft-core exploits with the maestro; Mower, for his sins, ended up in that well-known depository for ageing sex film actors, Emmerdale, a tedious British soap, where he served a twelve year sentence. Still, after a Tinto Brass experience, you’d need the rest...

Next came a film even more frivolous than Frivolous Lola. Cheeky (aka Trasgredire, 2000) is the lightest and fluffiest of all his sex films, obsessed with and dominated by the beautiful body of slim blonde Yuliya Mayarchuk, who spends at least half the film naked, idly wandering around her apartment or recalling the time she went skinny-dipping with her boyfriend. The pictures are bright and vivid, the clothes and sets colorful, the locations appealing, and the camera is in exactly the right place throughout. As a brazen turn-on, this film is difficult to fault.

The wafer-thin story concerns Carla Boren (Mayarchuk), a Monroe-like bimbo (thanks to the dubbing; she’s actually Ukranian) who has preceded her boyfriend to London by a month to seek out a flat for them, and is promptly seduced--well, grabbed, jumped on, and pawed--by lesbian estate agent Moira (curvy Francesca Nunzi in a succession of colored wigs), who becomes her accomplice in sexual adventures. Meanwhile, back in Tinto Brass’ Venice, all modern art, mirrors, big windows and colors, her boyfriend Matteo (Jarno Berardi) is being goaded by a so-called friend into a jealous panic that she’s enjoying her freedom in another country a little too much--which, to be fair, she is.

Although set in London, it’s actually more like Benny Hill-land, opening with Mayarchuk cheerfully strutting through a sunlit park swamped with every aspect of sexuality from groping gays to leering flashers (she flashes back) to frantic foreplay to jiggling joggers, to young lovers in the throes of fucking. A wonderful opening shot has a thuggish police constable fuming into the camera “Who’s in charge, here!?”, the implication being it’s neither him nor men in general, followed by credits over Mayarchuk’s cheerful stroll through this sparkling adult Disney-land, breasts bobbing under nothing but a t-shirt and short skirt (Carla doesn’t believe in underwear, unless she’s wearing it to be ripped off furiously later).

Like all Tinto’s films, the camera is obsessed with the rear end, and Mayarchuk’s bare bum is rarely off the screen. She and Nuniz spend as much time naked as clothed, and they are both total knockouts, Mayarchuk slim and flawless, Nuniz fleshy and curvy with big eyes and an amazing complexion. The film is beautifully photographed generally, bright and colorful, and on the rare occasions the women are clothed, they’re practically falling out of them. Emerging from the taxi to look at an apartment overlooking the Thames, Mayarchuk steps out in short shorts exposing half her butt cheeks and estate agent Nuniz is braless and shirtless, with her jacket open almost to her waist. It’s not so much a wardrobe malfunction as wardrobe perfection. The only downside is the dubbing, which rapidly slides past hilarious and straight through downright stupid to total incompetence. Not only is the dialogue frequently absurd anyway, but huge chunks of it are inaudible; I suspect the sound mixer was not using both his hands…

Fortunately, the plot barely qualifies for its dictionary definition, being paper-thin to the point of irrelevance: boyfriend Matteo finds photos, and after several anxious ‘phone calls to her, travels to London and joins her for make-up sex. And that’s it, that’s the story. I’d like to locate a subtitled version of this film one day, but it’s the stunning visuals that count in a Tinto Brass film, and boy, do they count. Mayarchuk gets a sensual massage, she attends an orgy, visits a women-only gym with a massive swimming pool (overflowing with playful beauties, of course), and goes skinny-dipping in a flashback with a previous boyfriend--all filmed and presented at leisure. Brass doesn’t film a few frames with available lighting and then nip off for a sandwich; he makes a three-course meal of the scene itself, meticulously and laboriously attending to every minor detail and then filming enough footage to mummify Stanley Long and his mates with the offcuts. When Brass films a shower sequence, it’s not the heroine with three five dollar extras slipped a few extra quid to get naked in the background, it’s a crowd scene... and when Mayarchuk rows down the river with her boyfriend flashing upskirt, it doesn’t stop with a few quick glimpses; pursued by other goggle-eyed coxmen living up to their name, she hoists her skirt up to sit on his dick, and we see a good soft-core fuck from several angles.

As in All Ladies Do It, The Voyeur, Frivolous Lola, and others, Matteo learns to put up and shut up; he’s lucky to have her at all. Only a fool would say that Brass makes female-friendly films, they’re strictly for the boys and the girls who are similarly inclined, but the women are always in charge. The British title of Cheeky fits the film far better than its too clever Italian original, a play on the words betrayal and transgression. Cheeky it certainly is, and the viewer will certainly not feel betrayed.

Betrayal, however, was certainly the dominant theme of his next. Every so often Brass gets an attack of seriousness, and makes an erotic film with a serious point, usually an anti-fascist one. One of these was the infamous freak-fest Salon Kitty, a sort of Nazi-era Caligula; another was Black Angel (aka Senso ’45). Not to be confused with the Black Angel duo of female assassin revenge films from Japan in the 1990s, this is a 2002 film concerning a monstrously cruel and selfish SS officer enjoying the high life in 1945 Venice, and the bored wife of a repugnant local party official who falls madly in love with him and then brings him down when heartlessly betrayed. One could sympathise with all the major players in this tragedy, if it wasn’t for the fact that they’re all total scumballs.

For Black Angel, Brass took a short story by Camillo Boito (the novella Senso), set during the 1865 Italy/Austria war, and moved it forward to the last days of World War II, where the characters, although doing what they must to survive in a terrible time, have all been irredeemably corrupted and are utterly unsympathetic. It’s beautifully photographed and meticulously directed, as usual for Brass, and for once sub-titled rather than dubbed, the more common option that usually spoils and undermines his films. He has cast professional and experienced actors, with the experienced Anna Galiena in the lead, and supported by a troupe of Tinto Brass reliables including Franco Branciaroli, Antonio Salines, and Erika Savistani. Professional pretty boy Gabriel Garko makes the most of a genuine acting opportunity as the ill-fated evil SS man, and the stunning Loredana Cannata, a beautiful young actress who has somehow managed to alternate between erotica and more general Italian film fare, steals the show in a single scene as the beautiful but mean Ninetta, the woman who replaces Livia in the cruel Helmut’s bed, and thus seals his fate.

Brass makes a few political points about both fascism and human behavior, but as ever, his production predominantly oozes sex throughout, and lust permeates every single scene in one way or another; there’s a typical Tinto orgy sequence that an excellent making of... feature focusses on in the extras. But even though this is no crass Nazi-sploitation offering, it’s only here at all because it's part of the highly recommended eight disc Tinto Brass collection from Arrow. It’s not that it’s a lesser film, it’s just that Brass is better when he does fun and sexy, and despite what a small selection of pervs might think, Nazis were neither.

Having indulged his serious side again, Private (aka Fallo!, 2003) took us back to the short story format, but with more consistent results. This collection of six rather silly short vignettes features some of the most beautiful women Tinto Brass has ever collected together for one of his films--so that’s really saying something. In a sort of “Around the World with Tinto Brass” we travel to Casablanca, Rome, Alto Adige (also Italy), Malaga in Spain, the Cap d’Agde naturist village in the South of France, and London.

Unfortunately, everything about this film other than the gorgeous girls is quite fake, from the supposed locations (there is no evidence anyone went further than Rome; most of the stories take place indoors or at outdoor locations that could be anywhere) to the ludicrous prosthetic penises Brass has taken to using in his recent works and which the male actors brandish like coshes (and which look even sillier next to the couple of tiny real ones we’re obliged to repeatedly inspect by an almost Franco-esque roving camera). Quite frankly, the content of the stories often seems to indicate that Brass’ sanity is slipping away in his old age. Happily, the girls are one hundred percent real, and this is what counts in a Tinto Brass production.

The awful dubbing of some already absurd dialogue makes this one to watch with the sound down and your own choice of music, because it works only (only!) as a superb visual treat. The Arrow DVD, bought either separately or as part of their dazzling eight disc collection, also features two different Making of... promo films which are as entertaining and as sexy as the actual film (one girl boasts that she’s the only performer who gave a real blow job in the film; it’s nice to see someone take pride in their work).

In the first story, a husband molests his wife with an electric toothbrush while she fantasises about a visit to the gynaecologist (from what appears to be a schoolboy’s perspective--she doesn’t know what to take off or how to sit). Then he arranges for her to be fucked by the hotel bellboy. The gorgeous Sara Cosmi (P.O. Box Tinto Brass) is the uninhibited lead.

The second story, which takes place on a tennis court and is reminiscent of that famous 1970s wall poster of the tennis girl without any knickers, concerns two wives blowing each others’ husbands. Both sequences, while only implying the act, are very sexy; one takes place in the changing room showers and turns into full-on sex, where fortuitously, no-one else is around, the second on the casting couch of an arrogant media man. Silvia Rossi is the tennis girl, Federica Tomassi the blonde hopeful, elegant with her hair up, earthy with it down. Tomassi has gone on to work in further similar fare, while Rossi has done other work for Brass in front of and behind the camera.

The third story concerns a grotesque couple of comedy fetishists and their buxom maid (right) in a wine region tourist idyll. The curvy young maid is exploiting them for money as they exploit her as a participant in their weirdness. The story moves back and forth between the maid’s activities (which include taking a spanking) and her more normal al fresco sex sessions with the hotel chef, which--if you keep your eyes on her rather than the grinning cheeky chappie she’s giving herself to--are quite sexy. In a replay of Paprika, he is allowing her to prostitute herself to set themselves up comfortably in future life. Raffaella Ponzo as the full-figured maid is a knockout.

The fourth story is Tinto’s favorite recurring theme, the jealous lover who must tolerate his female partner’s promiscuous ways, this time on a Spanish beach. Angela Ferlaino and Elisabetta Todde are the eye candy.

Slim and crop-haired Maruska Albertazzi is the fiancee of a man obsessed with having anal sex in the fifth segment. Bizarrely, she’s holding him off only until they’re married, but when they meet a couple of swingers in the naturist paradise of Cap d’Agde, while her man gets busy with wife Grazia Morelli, she gets broken in by the middle-aged husband. There are quite a few sexy sequences, particularly when the young couple are alone, and it’s quite amusing when she and the old boy (Antonio Salines, a Tinto regular) are crawling round the floor, but after viewing this story, I can’t help saying bring back the fake prosthetics, all is forgiven...!

Finally, the amazingly perfect Federica Palmer is the exhibitionist girlfriend Rosy in the final episode. The scenes of Brass “directing” her in the extras are as sexually charged as the images in the lame-o story. Private (the Italian title, which means Do It!, is equally pointless, as nothing is remotely private and several characters are saying “don’t do it”) is a gourmet feast for the eyes, but you will want to turn off the other senses and subsitute your own soundtrack.

By the time Tinto Brass got around to Mon Amour (2006), his last feature to date, he was pretty much repeating himself, sticking his fingers into all his previous films from The Key onward and pulling out ingredients to put in the mix for Mon Amour--a secret diary, a bored wife, erotic art, impromptu sex with a stranger, a saucy uninhibited dance in front of a mixed reception of lust and disgust, a husband who won’t buckle under to infidelity, and so on.

The plot is extremely familiar by now. Writer Darius (Max Parodi, also in Private) has only been married to Marta for six months, but is overwhelmed by and pre-occupied with work. Blonde and beautiful Marta (former gymnast Anna Jimskaia) gives new meaning to the word exhibitionist, and is hornier than a rampaging rhino, sashaying effortlessly into an affair with handsome and lusty Leon (Riccardo Marino). Rampant sex all over the place ensues, and there’s better dialogue than usual; best of all, the film is sub-titled.

A mixture of Henry Miller and Jess Franco, Mon Amour is occasionally overly explicit, sequences with Franco-esque zooms into private areas and sex scenes utilising hilarious over-sized prosthetic penises rather spoiling the sedate, classy eroticism elsewhere. Brass’ lecherous camera follows his sultry and curvy leading lady into the toilet no less than four times. For me, that’s five times too many. Jimskaia’s Marta attempts to make the leading ladies of Brass' previous films look like convent girls in comparison, and certainly gives them a run for their money. The best scenes are the girl talk in the massage parlor, which show Marta and best friend Silvia (Nela Lucic) off to superb effect, and the various fantasy sequences, which are original, very sexy, and a lot of fun. If this is to be his last major work (and there are worrying signs it ought to be), it’s not a bad one to go out on, the repetition thus attaining a greater significance as a celebration of all his other films’ themes. If not, a second-rate Tinto Brass film is still head and shoulders over anything you’re gonna get from anyone else.

Brass revels in sex, making films that are guilt-free and flowing with the joy of life; they’re the sort of films that would make the puritans of this world burst into tears of frustration for all their lost time, opportunities, and wasted youth. His characters may be happy or unhappy, but they’re never embarrassed, shy, inhibited, or ashamed. “Who made sex dirty?” he asks, in a DVD documentary on the box-set’s extras, provoking recollections of the late, great Bill Hicks’ superb “Did I miss a meeting?” routine. “Culture, not nature. In nature, sex is the most wonderful source of pleasure. It’s our culture which has created rules, taboos, prohibition, and laws”.

The Naked Emperor: The Death of the Art Film

Le Mepris (1963), First Name: Carmen (1983), Beyond the Clouds (1995), The Dreamers (2003), Une vraie jeune fille (1974/2000)

Opera, an entertainment for the masses, has been stolen by the snobs and phonies who put on their penguin suits and family jewels and pose and mutter and cough through some of the most beautiful music ever written in the history of humanity while simultaneously making the general public feel that it’s somehow above them. They alienate the common man and woman by pretending it’s inaccessible. It isn’t, it was the popular entertainment of the day. Each time you listen to a truly great aria, you will appreciate it a little more until it finally overwhelms you with its beauty and emotion.

Much the same thing has happened in cinema, where anything different or challenging or unusual is pontificated about by posers, pseuds, and fakes who can see the Emperor’s clothes, but must now argue about what they actually observed him wearing. While an audience demanding traditional fare will obviously be confused and disappointed by the ubiquitous “art film”, all anyone has to do to enjoy adventurous and unconventional cinema is stop looking for hidden meanings and simply take on board what is actually there on the screen. Anything deep or meaningful will then manifest itself naturally. If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck—it’s a duck, symbolic or otherwise. Who dares be the first film buff to point at certain naked Emperors and say they see no clothing?

The French New Wave were and still are a funny lot. On the one hand, they idolise the likes of John Ford and Fritz Lang (who is cast as himself in Godard’s Le Mepris), and even some of the film industry’s mediocre hacks, dropping heavy-handed references to their films throughout their work. Then they turn around and announce that they despise Hollywood, its methods and—echhh—commercialism, and while paying lip service to certain motifs such as femme fatales, spies, gangsters and/or guns, make a completely different kind of film, artistic and adventurous yes, but also often deliberately difficult and obscure. Jean-Luc Godard, although an insufferable snob about film, and one of the main offenders, was--like Truffaut, Rohmer, and Rivette--one of the genuine talents to come from the movement.

He certainly could be pretentious and self-indulgent, and his later work has been absurd. If anyone ever lived off his early reputation, either through laziness or lack of inspiration, it was Godard. But Godard in the ‘60s, like Nic Roeg in the ‘70s, was ten to fifteen years ahead of everybody else at the time, a notion that might be a little less obvious now that we’re in the 21st century and everyone else has caught up. It is, however, staggering to think that Le Mepris (aka Contempt), despite being a defiant and child-like heavy-handed attack on the methods used to make the commercial movies both onscreen and during the production process, was filmed in 1963. Think for a minute what the rest of cinema looked like in 1963. Le Mepris could have been filmed last week, if we didn’t know better.

Naturally, the figure-it-out-yourself/what-is-he-really-saying-here approach has encouraged laziness and opportunists, and the New Wave approach to film-making has thrown up plenty of bores, charlatans, and shock-merchants with nothing to say, all of them given house room in the hall of fame by critics afraid to shout “no clothes!”. And on the subject of no clothes, which is what we’re primarily discussing in this book, Godard blows the whistle on himself and many of his compatriots early in the game when he has his doppelganger make the following observation during the film-within-a-film shoot in Capri: “Are they going to undress?”—“Obviously”—“Amazing thing, film. Show women a camera, and they show you their behinds”. From First Name: Carmen to Hail Mary to Passion to Aria, Godard has worn the t-shirt ever since.

In fact, although Godard would turn out to be one of the main practitioners of this theory in his later work, his contrariness and hostility towards his mainstream producers won out over his hormones on this occasion, and not only does he not show us the three girls naked, but he went out of his way to tease the paying punters with the beautiful Brigitte Bardot, who he knew perfectly well was the selling point of this movie. The Marxist philosopher, while taking the money he despised from the producers he despised even more, used it to despise himself, through the character of Paul Javal (a disconcertingly young Michel Piccoli), a screenwriter who is selling his soul to a vulgar film producer (American, of course) for the love of a woman, his young trophy wife Camille (Bardot).

Javal wants to buy his devoted lover the apartment she desires, and has agreed to work for the philistine Jerry Prokosch (a surprisingly good Jack Palance), who wants him to rewrite an already shooting Hollywood adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey (although why the great Fritz Lang would be directing this tosh is not explained). Prokosch wants it suggested that Ulysses took so long to return home from sea to Penelope because he was trying to stay away from her! Bardot’s Camille has suddenly gone from hot to cold, and said so in no uncertain terms, but Javal believes she has fallen out of love with him because he’s sold out--for her. In fact, as we have clearly seen, it was a trivial slight that tipped her boat; she was upset that Javal told her to ride on ahead with Prokosch in his car, feeling abandoned and uncomfortable in his presence, and crushed that he clearly couldn’t understand that she wanted to go with him.

Ever the dutiful, beautiful Gallic wife, she complied, but resented him for it, angry that he couldn’t work out why she was hurt, or even notice that she was. While she plays her if-you-don’t-know-then-I’m-certainly-not-going-to-tell-you games that so many long-suffering husbands and partners will instantly recognise, he incredibly does exactly the same thing again on the boat in Capri, sending her off with Prokosch and his entourage while he follows later. This time it provokes more than an elongated sulk, and she finds solace with the smarmy, smirking vulgarian, taking off with him in the shiny red sports car he drives like a maniac, while the deluded and hapless Javal resigns from the assignment, convinced that his reborn artistic integrity will win her back...

While he apparently intended Le Mepris, liberally laced with anti-American vitriol, as a self-critiquing apology to his then-wife Anna Karina (hence the black bob wig Bardot puts on to accompany Piccoli’s Godard-like permanent cigarette and felt hat--which he even ultra-coolly keeps on in the bathtub), he was well aware that the money for cinemascope and luxurious locations was financing a star vehicle not for the Great Director and his Message, but for Bardot, the woman understandably considered at the time to be the most beautiful girl in the world.

It’s common knowledge that when the producers saw the sneaky little tricks Godard had pulled to undermine them (offscreen nudity, tempting flashes, long-shots rather than close-ups, even at one point a book draped across her bum; Bardot never drops her towel onscreen, even when she skinnydips), they insisted on nude scenes being inserted front and center. Consequently, the most erotic shots, including some knock-out inserts and the very sexy opening bedroom sequence when Bardot teasingly asks her laconic husband to express his appreciation for each body part one at a time, were only shot because Godard knew that if he didn’t put them in, some hack would. And even then, you don’t get to see Bardot’s front, only her exquisite bum, back, and legs.

Fortunately, Bardot looks fantastic even when clothed, the additional scenes serve to illustrate both her character’s insecurities and what he’s losing, and Godard’s pretensions are made much more bearable on this occasion by the presence of some superb performances. The young Michel Piccoli, although acting as early as 1945, virtually launched his career with this film, and has now worked for almost every major director in France in a career spanning over 200 different roles with major name co-stars, while Brigitte Bardot demonstrates quite clearly that she most certainly can act, even when working with Godard’s empty words. As for her fabled beauty, the camera doesn’t so much love her as fuck her brains out. Even Stanley Long couldn’t have made this girl look ordinary.

Also beautiful as the interpreter, p.a., and probably lover of Piccoli’s opposite and nemesis, the evil American despoiler, is Giorgia Moll, a veteran of forty different roles as a sultry beauty from 1955 to 1985. American Jack Palance, an actor who is usually seen going wildly overboard as hammy Hollywood villains, gives perhaps one of his finest and most measured performances as the crass, boorish film producer, even though he is playing his usual stereotype and probably didn’t put Le Mepris too high on his CV. It’s an unusually subtle and cliche-free interpretation of the typical broad, two-dimensional role he usually made a three course meal of. Try as he might, Godard reins him in every time, defusing his rants with the use of longshots and the cool reactions of the people he terrorises. When he first appears outside the screening room, pacing up and down maniacally, he is belittled by the camera superbly. As he throws film cans around the screening room impotently, minions--female ones, at that--silently bend and scoop them up off the floor without a sound or so much as a glance at him. His p.a.’s back becomes a writing desk, although it looks like she’s waiting for him to take her from behind.

Inevitably, Godard’s confrontational private jokes, sabotage, silly tricks, intrusive and over-wrought music cues, and general playful antagonism achieves its aim in alienating and infuriating those looking for traditional entertainment, but Le Mepris is not as difficult and complicated as Godard would like it to be, just stylish and accomplished in its execution, and the most common complaint from the rubes is boredom, not confusion. He also needs to get down on his knees before the cinematographer Raoul Coutard, whose vivid colors and lush, clear photography of interiors, exteriors, and Bardot look as stunning and contemporary today as they did all those years earlier. Bardot’s beauty deserves only the finest backdrops, and the locations are wonderful.

Godard may play with red herrings like guns that are never used, secret color co-ordination, not-so-subtle movie references, and colored filters, but when he wants to, he can put the camera where it’s supposed to be and do what it’s supposed to do. Many of the shots and compositions in Le Mepris are superb, and it’s not just when the camera is standing still. Watch how Godard maps out several scenes, sometimes in the outdoor locations, with various characters moving around like super-annuated chess pieces, but also in the infamous authentically over-long apartment scene, where the marriage breaks down and Godard’s camera follows both players through the doors, around the corners, and into different rooms as they bicker and bitch. No master shot and two shot back and forth for him.

Yes, Godard taunts and teases us with the endless squabbling about nothing, but these tedious, circular, going-nowhere arguments are exactly the sort that go on in marriages every day, and while the whining and spitefulness gets tiresome, the camerawork and staging is fascinating as they move from kitchen to lounge to bedroom to bathroom. I particularly like the door with no glass. You don’t realise just how flat and boring most everyday cinema is until you’ve followed the camera around with Godard’s eye for a while. If he had ever made real films--not formula films, or blockbusters, but plain, ordinary, entertaining stories for a mainstream audience--he could have been the greatest film director who ever worked. But instead of being a genius, he had to be Godard.

“All you need for a movie is a gun and a girl” said Godard, and then spent the rest of his career proving himself wrong. He forgot to add that a story is helpful, along with plot, dialogue, and motivation. Despite proposing that First Name: Carmen (aka Prenom Carmen, 1983) is a play on Bizet’s opera Carmen, the film has absolutely nothing in common with that story other than a doomed love affair, hardly exclusive either to Bizet or Godard, and the music that runs throughout is from Beethoven (and briefly, Tom Waits). The story concerns a band of undefined and unexplained robbers/terrorists/urban guerrillas who are using a film shoot as a cover for a vaguely thought-out kidnapping, but (chuckle), this is a film already, get it? Two of them--Marushka Detmer’s petulant Carmen and Jacques Bonnaffe’s obsessive loser Joseph--fall in love, and then suddenly aren’t, but we never know how, when, or why anything is happening, or what, if anything, has happened. Not for nothing was Godard’s best known film named Contempt... All Godard has ever needed to make a film was not a gun and a girl, both of which this film supplies, but rather contempt for the audience, a bent toward self-indulgence, and a couple of arts critics to compliment the cut of his invisible attire.

Speaking of which, suggestions that leading lady Marushka Detmers spends large parts of the film naked are greatly exaggerated. Detmers was typecast as the sort of bad news bimbo that we men will put up with any crap from just for the privilege of spending time in her company, and this is the fate of Bonnaffe’s security guard Joseph here. Nude scenes are brief, carelessly shot, and few and far between; there are moments of semi-nudity and quick flashes, but this is hardly erotica (needless to say, the three or four very brief moments of sexual daring are used in all the promotional art). More accurately, she spends the entire film alternately prick-teasing or spurning her admirer’s advances.

To see Detmers, who is staggeringly beautiful and exceedingly photogenic in all her uninhibited glory (even here), the film to pursue is Devil in the Flesh, made three years later with a competent craftsman, and reviewed herein. The living, breathing definition of eroticism, Detmers is similarly contrary, high maintenance and slightly mad in that superior film, but the lesser known Marco Bellochio, also a politically radical, ground-breaking and adventurous filmmaker of proven standing and ability, provides every nuance and frisson Godard botches.

In fact, Godard is competent, and creative, and has proven this in the past, but became shockingly and progressively indulgent once he had assembled his acolytes after Le Mepris. There are moments of brilliance in First Name: Carmen, but also moments of tedium and carelessness. Detmers and Bonnaffe stomp around and argue in the seaside hideaway and the hotel suite, but there is none of the sweeping camerawork and labyrinthine choreographed movement seen in the similar famous sequence in Le Mepris. By not putting in the effort and resting on his laurels, he’s being grossly unfair to his lead performers, who literally give their all at every opportunity.

With a risky project like this, actors such as Detmers and Bonnaffe put their trust in the director that their efforts to indulge his whims will result in some sort of magic on the screen. With many directors, this often happens, but every time, Godard and his non-existent script and storyline let them down and leave them abandoned to his apathy and open to ridicule. It’s never made clear, for example, if Bonnaffe’s security guard is in on it, or instantly seduced and besotted by Carmen during the raid. It seems to me like the former, as he appears to know it’s coming, but others see it differently; one should be challenged to interpret the meaning of a film, if it simply must have a message, but not to interpret key relevant plot points. For those of us not gifted with the intellectual smarts to see what a deep, thoughtful and profound creative talent Godard is, that’s just bad filmmaking, I don’t care how great a genius the director is supposed to be.

Godard has a wonderful eye for the absurd, such as when Detmers and Bonnaffe are chained together and fighting over which toilet to use; as Detmers squats over a urinal designed for male anatomy, a fat food thief calmly empties a jar of paste with his finger while ambivalently looking on, dead-eyed. Stupid, thuggish police, when arresting Bonnaffe, put him in the back of the car and then change their mind, and stuff him in the trunk. And during the deliberately surreal raid on what is supposed to be a bank, but looks more like a plush hotel, disinterested hostages quietly read while the terrorists run around wildly shooting their guns like little boys at play. A man sits in a chair idly watching the bullets flying around him, while a cleaning lady drearily mops up the blood around the two dead bodies of collateral damage. In a way, it’s understandable. At no time is the raid or the shooting remotely convincing.

Generally though, First Name: Carmen is as self-parodic and pretentious as all Godard’s later lazy, half-assed efforts such as Passion and Hail Mary, with overlapping sound, dialogue absent or in the wrong place, and sequences out of order and contradicting each other. Detmers and Bonnaffe discuss their plot in between laughably silly scenes of him on trial for the earlier shooting; I’m not averse to non-linear storytelling, but to see it done properly, go to Roeg or Rivette.

I’d be very interested to hear from film snobs in what way this film or the other two differs from those made by the likes of Jess Franco or Jean Rollin. Occasionally, the music stops suddenly and randomly, presumably to wake up the audience, drifting away with the endless shots of the tide at the beach, another location completely thrown away. When Jess Franco films like this, he’s an incompetent oaf; when Rollin films skinny girls in wispy near-invisible garments, his motives are apparently as transparent as their clothing; when Jean-Luc Godard does the same thing, he’s a genius, with professors queueing up to tell us why. Call me a philistine, but a bush is a bush and a mess is a mess. This is not a work of imperceptible genius for the chin-strokers to mull over, and which you and I are too dumb to understand, it’s just a really bad self-indulgent time-waster that’s an insult to the actors and the audience. But Godard’s defence is that since Alphaville, he’s stayed away from frivolous, populist pulp fiction, and only tackled the Big Themes, religion and politics. Argue now, if you dare.

Throughout all the chaos, including a throwaway ending and really lame gun battle that makes the rest of the film look like a meticulous masterpiece in comparison, Godard himself wanders around aimless and confused, playing the part of Detmer’s mentally deficient uncle, a former movie director first seen being tapped for the use of his shorefront home for what is supposed to be a film location, but is actually a hideaway. Dishevelled and unshaven, given up on life, and spouting incomprehensible and slightly radical blithering drivel, he drifts around in his own disastrous movie, looking lost and baffled. Perhaps there is a message here after all...

Meanwhile, back at the Emperor’s boutique...

In 1960, the film director Michelangelo Antonioni told Films and Filming that eroticism was “the disease of our age”. “It is the more obvious symptom of an emotional sickness. There would not be this eroticism if Eros were still in good health!” he pronounced.

You might be forgiven for thinking that eroticism and Eros usually went hand in hand, but as another of the French Nouvelle Vague (New Wave), Antonioni was already no stranger to talking pretentious claptrap. Six years later, both he and Eros must have been feeling even poorlier, because he was in London making his first English language (and most well known) film Blow Up, infamous for its nude models rolling around in a photographer’s studio where they showed mainstream cinema’s first glimpse of (gasp!) pubic hair. It was a film Film and Filming’s reviewer called “very, very erotic”.

By the time he was in America filming the obscure Zabriskie Point in 1969, he was surely very emotionally ill indeed, announcing to Look magazine “America has changed me... I have even changed my view of sexual love. In my other films, I looked upon sex as a disease of love…”.

Ever since Blow Up, Antonioni’s cinematic masterpieces have been notable for two things; persuading pretty girls to get their kit off in the name of art, and pontificating twaddle like the above, twaddle that sounds very meaningful and profound until you realise it’s pretty much meaningless, or better still, like the quatrains of Nostradamus, another old phoney, can be made to mean whatever the listener would like it to mean. And if everybody is nodding sagely, hearing what they want to hear, and getting an eyeful of beautiful girls at the same time, then this guy’s a genius, right?

Beyond the Clouds (aka Al di la delle nuvole, 1995) was the old fraud’s last film, and it’s almost a parody of an art film. It's the story of a handful of disparate and desperate people who may or may not have sex, but are all in doomed and disappointing relationships of a thoroughly unconvincing nature. Imagine La Ronde, but someone threw the characters up in the air and took away the roadsigns so that only a couple of them connect with each other. People wander along streets, they wander along corridors, they climb staircases, they gaze out of windows, they stroll around windswept beaches looking enigmatically out to sea. When they actually do something, it’s either inexplicable, absurd, pointless, or just wrong. And even though every journey begins with but a single step, you will see every single one of them.

Our story begins with Drippy the upmarket plumber (okay, Silvano) and the sexy young girl Carmen who pointedly delivers him to the hotel where she’s staying. After much thoughtful pacing and window-gazing, they attempt a conversation, although it often seems as though neither is listening to the other... which is possibly for the best, as they’re spouting drivel, of course.

“Have you noticed how nobody watches sunsets any more?”

Really?

“We always want to live in someone’s imagination”

Really??

“Voices never become part of you like other sounds. The sea, for instance. You end up not hearing it. But a voice, you can’t help listening to”

Really???

Even though they’re both clearly gagging for it, he backs down and she spends the night alone and disappointed. The next morning, she’s gone. Why they never meet again for two years when the proprietor said she simply got up early for work remains a mystery.

The inevitable chance reunion occurs when Drippy runs into her at the cinema. Bizarrely, they hook up again as if nothing ever happened between them good or bad, and make it to the bedroom. There, after she’s obligingly stripped off, he attempts to make love to her without actually touching her or removing her knickers. And backs out again. What a catch, eh, girls?

Thus ends Adventures of a Water Pump Engineer, which will now never have enough material to be made into a British sex comedy.

Next, a creepy-looking Peter Weller is drifting around an out-of-season coastal resort--and being intensely meaningful, of course--when he wanders into a clothes boutique and starts staring creepily at the pretty young shop assistant. He’s captivated, and wants her to be in his movie; yeah, right (we should definitely have had a moratorium on critics’ darlings making movies about movies). At this point, in the real world, Weller would be told to fuck off and the heavies would be called, but in Antonioni’s weird world she gives her perfectly normal boyfriend the bum’s rush and lets Creepy follow her around for a while. Then she announces that she killed her father by stabbing him twelve times. As you do.

Now it's Creepy’s turn not to take the hint. At this point, in the real world, Weller would run like his pants were on fire, but in Antonioni’s weird world, he becomes fascinated by the flame and they leap into bed. Then he leaves, and she becomes mournful.

And so it goes, our first couple, Drippy and Stupid, and our second couple, Creepy and Really Stupid, wandering about aimlessly, but, you know, meaningfully, talking bollocks until it’s time to show a bit of flesh to the director.

And what flesh it is, because this film displays the ample charms of Sophie Marceau. Yeah, Sophie Marceau, who could make a priest renounce his calling just by walking around the churchyard clothed. Sophie Marceau, who has worked for more pretentious frauds than a magician’s assistant with a student loan. You can almost hear Antonioni announcing “Today, we do ze nude scene!”.

There’s more, including Jean Reno as a deserted husband who hooks up with a cheated wife, and another impotent obsessive who falls in love with yet another attractive gullible girl on the night before she decides to join a convent... telling him so after she’s chatted with him all the way back to the door of her apartment... but you get the gist. In any other film, these guys would all be serial killers, and these idiot women would all be their victims. As a guide to what not to do when you meet a plainly unhinged man, Beyond the Clouds is a pretty useful public information film.

What pearls of wisdom come forth from the master herein? Well, the French are very good at being complimentary and offensive at the same time...

“I like your eyes. They’re so empty of everything... except sweetness”

Next time you’re dating, try that one and see how far it gets you. But don’t forget to duck. And this is the problem with Beyond the Clouds. Nobody in this movie behaves like a real person. They don’t respond in normal ways, they don’t react in normal ways, they don’t talk like normal human beings, they don’t do what a normal human being would do in a given situation. People walk around knowingly, as if they’re being filmed by, say, Michelangelo Antonioni, and once in a bit, suddenly run away. It’s like watching pod people, or as if Antonioni is playing a Sims game.

Antonioni belonged to that small cabal of supposed artistic geniuses who every actor wanted to work with and every critic spends the following few years trying to work out ‘what he was trying to say’. Curiously, and happily for us, it turns out that what these mighty minds are trying to say can’t be said without getting young girls naked.

Like Woody Allen, who so spectacularly gave the game away in his personal life while ruining Manhattan and several others of his canon, they’re just dirty old men like the rest of us. Woody, to the best of my limited knowledge (yes, you‘ll recall, I only like the early funny ones), never got anyone naked on film, but the Europeans, as we know, are not so shy. Quite often, not only has the emperor got no clothes, but neither have the performers…

I was only twelve years old in 1968, just old enough to remember the era without being able to participate in it, and this is the problem with 2003’s The Dreamers, set during the student riots in Paris in ’68--all the reviews that praise it start with “I was there…” and wax lyrical, and all the others go “Meh…”.

The Dreamers is a bit of a disappointment, coming as it does from Bernardo Bertolucci, the director of the erotic masterpiece Last Tango in Paris, and one of the acknowledged masters of the medium. It's infused with a laughable, almost parodic awe for the cinema (the film opens with the camera panning across a rapt audience of open-mouthed students gaping at Shock Corridor), a slightly embarrassed aw-shucks rose-tinted respect for the criminally naive student politics of the day (when the posters of Mao should be making them lunge for the same gas pipe as Eva Green in the closing scenes), and sex scenes that somehow manage to be both frank and coy at the same time. It’s always worrying when one of the greats drops a massive turd, because you can’t help wondering whether they’ve lost what they had, or worse, that their really superlative work was just a fluke.

It’s amazing how dull the supposedly daring sexual sequences are, and a measure of the cast’s two-dimensional presence that the lack of a voyeuristic cheap thrill in either photography or execution isn’t remotely irritating. When the girl in a menage-a-trois has the least attractive body of the three, one must clearly either blame the film or reconsider his sexuality. Fortunately, all the other films reviewed in this book can confirm to me that it is indeed the film.

The plot has been watered down from Gilbert Adair’s book (by Adair and the director) to this: American student Matthew (Michael Pitt) falls in with incestuous Parisian brother and sister Theo and Isabelle (Louis Garrel and Eva Green), who keep things just interesting enough with their sex games to stop him running out of the door screaming into the mayhem going on outside their privileged fortress... until a well-aimed brick through the window lets in the Molotov cocktail-illuminated light of the revolution-that-wasn’t.

This is the perfect example of the pseudy art film that exists solely to undress the cast and romanticise the past, and it’s quite a comedown for Bertolucci, who gave us Last Tango, but whose success rate has been variable since (there are some awesome individual scenes in 1900 and The Last Emperor). Once again an apartment is the star, but this time the players inhabiting it are not nearly so interesting, although equally self-indulgent. Filled with knowing film references that nudge and wink at the film students in the audience, some of them bookmarked with actual clips intercut with the recreations, some not, it’s like a cheeky little smug secret for the privileged few (“Oh look, they’re doing Jules et Jim!!”), but like all secret jokes, it will soon get old because there is nothing here to last. As for the period setting of ’68, The Dreamers is little more than self-gratification for the post-war teens who were the first in the 20th century who didn’t have to cope with world war or mass unemployment (the American of the trio refers to his peers who didn’t get to university and ended up in Vietnam as expendable, with only the slightest, most dubious hint of cynicism or regret).

Michael Pitt is a charisma-free baby-faced Leonardo Di Caprio lookalike who fails to provoke any audience empathy of any kind, and Louis Garrell so spot-on as the moody, arrogant, self-centred Bohemian Frenchman that a beret and roll-up would be overkill. As for the fuss about Eva Green, I don’t get it. She looks as though she’s having a major sulk even when laughing, is remarkably ungainly and unphotogenic for a model, and despite an impressive pair of tits has little else of interest, either in personality or appearance to compensate for her character’s insufferable high-maintenance demeanor. The biggest problem with both the cast and the apartment, despite effusive praise for authenticity from those who lived it, is that absolutely zero anyone or anything looks remotely like it lives in the 1960s. Perhaps this is how they wish it was, rather than how it really was, or perhaps I’m just plain wrong, but every frame of this film screams 1990s to me. It’s just too damn pretty, starting with Pitt’s hair and continuing through to the decor, lighting, and photography.

(Although the IMDB message boards quite often resemble the tormented rambling wails of the mad, sad, and bad, there's a hilarious thread satirising this film on the IMDB’s page for The Dreamers. It's called What I learned from The Dreamers, and several contributors puncture the film’s pretensions magnificently. Do have a look at your leisure.)

It must be tough, with the internet and the easy availability of hard-core porn to compete with, to maintain a career as one of those film directors trying desperately to shock their audiences and the media, in lieu of actually having anything interesting to say. The most shocking thing about writer and director Catherine Breillat, who began her career assisting Bertolucci as a gopher and bit player on Last Tango, is that she looks like a perfectly ordinary housewife and mother standing behind a shop counter or the school gates, rather than the gutter-trawling purveyor of nasty, empty thoughts and mean-spirited unpleasantness that her films make her out to be--all in the name, of course, of art, that much-maligned bringer of beauty constantly being belittled and besmirched by no-talents and frauds. Researching on the IMDB, one expects to see a wild-eyed, frizzy-haired portrait of a life gone wrong, a demented, self-absorbed madwoman adorned with too much costume jewellery, a bad choice of cosmetics, and far too many cats... and sees instead a smiling, tilted head of ordinariness.

Une vraie jeune fille (aka A Real Young Lady, aka L’Adolescent, 1974) is a film about a fourteen year old girl going through a peculiar perversion of adolescence in a boring backwater village in 1963. Charlotte Alexandra, the young beauty from Borowczyk’s Immoral Tales and the otherwise tepid Goodbye, Emmanuelle was not, of course, anywhere near fourteen, but much older, and looks it despite a girlish hairband and the absence of make-up, so you don’t need to feel bad about lusting after those eyes and lips. In fact, once you accept the position that Breillat is out only to shock, the power to shock is instantly diminished; she’s simply trying too hard, too often. You can almost smell the desperation in each scene; look, she’s masturbating! Look, she’s touching up her dad! Look, I’m killing a chicken, dammit!

The film is a succession of surreal and off-putting images, during which Alexandra pukes, pisses, smokes, squishes raw eggs in her hands, flashes her slightly dodgy dad, daubs her erogenous zones with a mysterious red liquid that can represent anything unpleasant you’d like it to, goes bare-butt bike-riding (you don’t see anything), fantasises about being tied down and having worms and maggots put in her vagina (I’m not making this up), sits in the sand and sea with her pants off, sits on a railway line and does same, flirts with older men at the fairground, fantasises about her dad’s dick (still not making this up), watches her mother slowly and painfully drain the blood from a live chicken’s neck, shoves a water bottle up her ass (offscreen, thankfully), fantasises about her father fucking a whore al fresco, and haunts a handsome young worker from her dad’s workplace to the point of stalking him while imagining that they’re masturbating together and he’s pulling chicken feathers out of her bum with his teeth. Still. Not. Making. This. Up.

If you think you might want to see some of this just out of curiosity, trust me, you don’t. Needless to say, not a single frame of the above is in any way pleasurable or erotic, and is almost entirely nudity-free. The implication is that she’s struggling with adolescence and discovering her sexuality, but girls, don’t worry if you’ve never had the inclination to shuffle around a field with your knickers round your ankles, or indeed exhibit a tendency or desire to do any of the above. And please don’t be offended by any of this idiocy (except perhaps, unavoidably, the animal cruelty) because that’s exactly what the maker wants.

Ironically, she succeeded too well, and the film was banned for a quarter of a century by the French authorities, thus achieving what was intended, and making her name as a stifled genius and martyr to the arts. As most of the world has apparently since realised, save for a few religious maniacs, the quickest way to deal with so-called artists like Breillat--because their ego, success, notoriety, reputation and profit depends entirely and absolutely on outrage and media attention--is to ignore them as you would a potty-mouthed child, which rather amusingly is exactly what happened to Une vraie jeune fille when it finally secured a release. With delicious irony, it was finally released in the year 2000, and roundly ignored, overshadowed by the media furore for the equally nasty Baise-Moi, another wretched and tedious attention-getter which was literally playing across the road!

But at least Bertolucci gave us Last Tango in Paris and a few others before and after. Watching the inept, troubled, predatory weirdoes of Beyond the Clouds ruining the days of attractive young women, you have to wonder about ol’ Antonioni. I wonder how many naked girls he would have seen if he hadn’t been a genius making movies? Anyhow, I’ve found my calling. I ‘ave, ‘ow you say, many profound insights to impart, mon cherie... Beyond the Clouds was his last film before his passing, and with him, I suspect, died the art movie.

Back to the Future (2) : Revisiting the '60s

Scandal (1983), Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life (2010)

“There was a young girl called Christine

Who shattered the Party machine.

It isn’t too rude

To lie in the nude,

But to lie in the House is obscene”

“Look, Jack, the basic question is: Did you fuck her?”

The Profumo affair was the first great modern media-stoked scandal. We’ve had many since, but when the knives came out for British Defence Minister John Profumo, it was the media that did the carving. No sweeping under the carpet, no deference to authority, no nudge and a wink, no old boys network, no you scratch my back, old chap... they were like a dog with a bone. Like the Chatterley trial, the Christine Keeler affair defined the end of the ‘50s and the start of the ‘60s. And it was all so silly.

Christine Keeler was a showgirl and escort, one of a number in a stable lorded over by social climber and fixer Stephen Ward. She was a simple, silly girl, as all her kind are, but savvy in the areas she needed to be. She knew the rules of the game, because Ward and the other girls taught them to her. Like many of her sort, she thought she was more important to the men than she actually was. Ivanov, the known Soviet spy she fell into bed with at the same time Profumo was asking for her number, referred to her as “a semi-literate, naive provincial girl with loose morals... a dangerous creature, sly and treacherous... a devil of a girl who could seduce anybody”. Just the sort that appealed to Ward as a rough diamond to shine up.

Keeler, however, was only dangerous because she was careless. Completely naive about cause and effect in politics, and interested only in her own shiny little world, a year and a half after the event, she shot her mouth off about her four week dalliance with Profumo to potential enemies of both Ward and Profumo, and winks and whispers gradually reached the press. It was here that Profumo made his catastrophic mistake. Anxious to save his marriage, he denied to his political bosses that he had ever had an affair with Keeler at all. What he didn’t know was that Keeler had mementoes and handwritten evidence to prove it. Had he simply admitted his carelessness it would have been just another fleeting infidelity for a hurt wife to deal with, smiling faces and gritted teeth in the papers, and nothing of any political significance at all, just a few days of embarrassment in the gossip columns, an eighteen month old four week indiscretion. Slap on the wrist, silly boy, red faces all round, don’t do it again.

But the press were by now foaming at the mouth. If Profumo was telling the truth, and he was innocent, then Keeler was an attention-seeking opportunist trying to make a few quid and it could cost them dearly in court. But if Keeler was on the level, to prove Profumo was lying would unleash a torrent of tumultuous newsprint about Keeler’s antics in the interim... drugs, gangsters, revenge attacks, and--the icing on the cake--at the same time she was seeing Profumo, she had been to bed with a Soviet spy. Days and days of glorious front page scandal loomed.

It was also a gift to the MacMillan government’s political rivals. The sly and scheming opposition party leader Harold Wilson wasted no time in playing up the national security angle, even though it was well known that Ivanov was a spy, and MI5 were deliberately cultivating a relationship between Ward and his girls and Ivanov for their own purposes. MacMillan, an old-fashioned gent who recoiled from sexual matters and was of a generation that believed a man’s word was his bond, was no match for wily Wilson, who shredded him like a cat with a mouse.

In an almost Fawlty-esque speech, MacMillan despaired. “I do not remember, in the whole of my life, or even in the political history of the past, a case of a Minister of the Crown who has told a deliberate lie to his wife, to his legal advisers, to his ministerial colleagues, not once, but over and over again, who has then repeated this lie to the House of Commons as a personal statement... and has subsequently taken legal action and recovered damages (from two foreign publications that dared speculate) on the basis of a falsehood. This is almost unbelievable... but it is true”.

MacMillan was genuinely horrified and astonished. To him, it was incredible, outrageous. Decades of similar lies and cover-ups had not yet happened. “I do not live among young people fairly widely, myself” he explained forlornly when sexual manners were discussed.

It’s the mark of a good film that even when they’re telling you a story that you already know, particularly a factual one from history, it’s still gripping. Into this category fall Tora Tora Tora, the mini-series Washington: Behind Closed Doors, Hollywoodland, and JFK. 1989’s Scandal, written by Michael Thomas and directed by Michael Caton-Jones, is another, and owes much of its success to casting. Ian McKellen, heavily made up, is a great Profumo, Joanne Whalley a ringer for Keeler, and John Hurt superb as Ward. Jeroene Krabbe makes a strong Ivanov, and Bridget Fonda is a delight as Mandy Rice-Davies. Supporting are a horde of familiar faces, including Leslie Phillips, Ronald Fraser and Iain Cuthbertson as the upper classes, Keith Allen and Ken Campbell as the sleazy tabloid creeps, Johnny Shannon revisiting Performance territory as slumlord Peter Rachman, and in a cameo meaningful only to U.K. audiences, Jean Alexander, a very well-known soap actress from Britain’s long-running Coronation Street, stunt-cast as Keeler’s mother.

Scandal is full of incident, including Profumo’s first meeting with Keeler, caught naked after skinny-dipping, and a sex orgy which created some notoriety when a sharp-eyed censor insisted he saw an erection and actual fucking in progress (why not?). There are also some showgirls on display. However, this is that rare case of the politics being more interesting than the sex...

The same could definitely not be said for the story of Serge Gainsbourg, subject of the surreal 2010 biopic, Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life. A smoker, drinker, and womaniser (the first two would kill him in 1991 at 62), and a writer, artist, cartoonist, and musician, Gainsbourg was also, perhaps necessarily, certainly inevitably, selfish, shallow, vain, anti-authority, and arrogant. Born Lucien Ginsberg, and reinventing himself as the suave Serge Gainsbourg, this bold and impertinent kid became one of the luckiest seducers of the 1960s; he worked his way through four wives, and bedded some of the most famous sex symbols of the 1960s and still managed not to end up in the gutter. It was a hell of a heroic life, and he gives inspiration to us all!

A Jew in Nazi-occupied France in his childhood, he was perhaps understandably a fatalist when it came to justifying his hedonism to himself. He also adored creating scandal, derailing the career of a sugar-sweet teeny-bopper singer whose song “Lollipop” he produced for her turned out to have sexual connotations, revelling in his notorious heavy-breathing sex song “Je t’aime... moi non plus” (written for Bardot, but performed by himself and new love Jane Birkin), and scandalising French conservatives and war veterans with a reggae version of the French National Anthem long before Malcolm McLaren created the Sex Pistols.

Provocative and publicity hungry, one feels he would have approved of this film, which is based on a comic strip produced by the film’s writer and director Joann Sfar, who claimed to be more interested in the myth than the man, an intriguing take that shows in the finished product, not the least because Serge is frequently accompanied by, if not haunted by, an imaginary living cartoon version of himself. Throughout the film, Eric Elmosnino’s Gainsbourg is shadowed by a spindly Ralph Steadman-ish puppet muse and provocateur portrayed superbly by Doug Jones, the mime who played the creature with the removable eyes in Pan’s Labyrinth and the Silver Surfer in Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer.

Gainsbourg is a fascinating, intriguing bio-film that stays with you a while. The haunting surrealism--cats talk, cartoons move, photographs come to life--is particularly effective, and suits what is already a fairly bizarre story. The film ends suddenly, just as one is beginning to feel it’s dragging after Gainsbourg’s relationship with Jane Birkin (well played by the late Lucy Gordon, looking a little healthier than the skinny, bohemian Birkin) falls apart, all the female players casting an erotic spell without removing their clothes much. Deborah Grall plays Elizabeth Levitsky, Anna Mouglalis is Juliette Greco, and Mylene Jampanoi plays Bambou. There’s only one Bardot, but the highlight of the film (among many contenders) is the sequence with the magnificent Laeticia Casta as Brigitte (first seen sashaying through the building’s corridors in leopard-print and thigh-high boots with a dog she blithely instructs an uptight complaining neighbor to take care of!), dancing around Gainsbourg’s studio in a bedsheet as they play around with “Comic Strip”, a song satirising the Batman TV show and the pop art trend in comics.

This is the sort of oddity and obscurity that easily slips under the film buff’s radar, and despite only the most fleeting nudity, the film oozes sex and eroticism--far more so than Truffaut’s more conservative Man Who Loved Women, to which it bears parallels and comes off the better. If, like Gainsbourg himself, you love life and dislike mediocrity, it’s well worth an evening’s viewing. A heroic life indeed.

Hardcore is the new Softcore

Devil in the Flesh (1986), Romance (1999), All About Anna (2005), Shortbus (2006), Sex Stories (2010), Dirty Diaries (2010), Q (aka Desire, 2011)

The deeply unpleasant thriller director Alfred Hitchcock once said, when asked about the new frankness in films during the ‘70s, that one day someone would simply film the sex act openly and then film would have nowhere left to go. How little the bloated old sadist knew. The sex act has been performed by actors in films on several occasions now, usually to the sound of deep yawning from punters who have had to sit through the rest of the usually boring content, and whether it attracts the desired attention or not usually depends on whether it’s a slow news day. The days when a Pavlovian press barked furiously at the likes of Don’t Look Now and Last Tango in Paris on command are long gone, but catch an editor on a quiet news day and he’ll turn into Snuffles, the ecstatic biscuit-fancier from the Quick Draw McGraw cartoons. Directors of provocative, desperate, and otherwise unsellable junk cross their fingers and wait.

Not all such films are publicity-seeking rubbish, as Don’t Look Now and Last Tango in Paris demonstrated. Sometimes the intent has been genuine, if not always artistically successful. In Devil in the Flesh (aka Diavolo in corpo, 1986), high school student Andrea (Federico Pitzalis) becomes besotted with Giulia (Marushka Detmers), a girl he spots from the window of his classroom, unaware that she is a patient on the books of his psychiatrist father (Alberto Di Stasio). Impulsively, he follows her to the city courts, where he realises she has a boyfriend, the militant radical Giacomo (Riccardo De Torrebruna), incarcerated and soon to be tried and sentenced for terrorism. Things work out even better than Andrea, watching the trial from the gallery, dared hope when Giulia spots a couple making love in the cells (on display in this courtroom), an event that creates chaos among the crowd and not only causes them to find common ground, but get interested in each other.

Friendship quickly develops, and he finds himself in her apartment, inadvertently catching a glimpse of her naked when she takes a shower. This gives us an insight into his character; he respectfully says and does nothing foolish or inappropriate. Before long they are seeing each other regularly, and making love. The major obstacle to the progress of their relationship is not only the uncertainty of whether Giacomo will get off or be put away, his fate resting on these new laws of demonstrative repentance that have recently entered the Italian judicial system, but the fact that Giulia is living in the couple’s future home, a massive barrier being her fearsome future mother-in-law (an extraordinary performance from a superb Anita Laurenze as a grimacing three-dimensional tortured battle-axe). And there’s one other problem, exacerbated when mother-in-law contacts Andrea’s psychiatrist father to inform him of the situation; as delightful and fun-loving as Giulia is, it rapidly becomes apparent that she is, indeed, completely wacko.

Detmers gives a wonderful performance, and spends a fair amount of time naturalistically naked. With a big smile, warm, infectious laugh, and natural sexuality, it is an incredibly erotic film, whether she’s giving Giacomo a surreptitious hand job on visitors’ day, or drying Andrea with her own towelling robe that she’s brazenly removed from her own body, giving him what she believes is his first sight of her nude.

The director is clearly madly in love with her presence on camera--not a frame is cut. This tends to make the film just a touch overlong in places, although that criticism certainly doesn’t apply to a powerful real-time love-making scene, which while purely missionary is one of the most arousing I’ve seen in a long time. It may be unsimulated or it may not, but it’s undeniably convincing, filmed in a long, quiet take without all the usual gymnastics, violins, ducking and diving camerawork, and fades. Rather than the old cliche of the camera panning over half-lit bodies while showing everything and nothing, the camera simply sits still and steady, far more honest, and far more erotic, the invisible man’s dream.

Credit is also due to Federico Pitzalis, in what appears to be his only film role, who gives as bold a performance in his way as the eager young lover, and most importantly is sympathetic, good-looking and likeable, a very important factor in the success of any erotic film. Far too many sex films have been marred by casting pretty girls alongside unlikeable jerks or big drips who don’t warrant their efforts or attention.

However, the most interesting characters are not the innocent and naive youngsters, but the two adults. There’s the psychiatrist father, who it is implied (in a surreal fantasy sequence in which a dream version of Giulia runs around his office troublesome and naked), has abused his position and had sexual relations with her, and the aforementioned savvy and pragmatic Mother Pulcini, desperate to keep Giulia onside to maintain the veneer of bourgeois respectability needed to secure her son’s probation.

Based on a book written in the early 1920s by the young Raymond Radiguet when he was just eighteen, Le diable au corps was first filmed by the French director Claude Autant-Lara in 1946. Its’ tale of a French soldier who falls in love with a married country girl caused uproar in both France and America, where it was filmed. The controversial and leftist Italian director Marco Bellochio, himself no stranger to provocation, set his version in his home country, making the soldier a well-off civilian student and the abandoned husband a radical militant whose future held either marriage or prison, cleverly dependant on whether he sells out or not. His hopes for freedom rest on the contentious new legal strategy of the time in Italian courts that promises a soft sentence if he “repents”--in other words, publicly disowns and rejects the terrorists’ beliefs and causes, repentant being a politically comfortable term for informer. As Italy had been going through a particularly turbulent time with terrorism in the 1970s, this was a clever way of destabilising and discrediting terrorists, whose credibility depended on devotion to the cause, and it was an element of the film that secured more attention than the explicit sex and nudity.

In fact, the political perspective of the film is, to contemporary audiences outside of Italy at least, quite muted, the film concerning itself primarily with the passion and purity of the young couple’s love, and the self-serving motives of Andrea’s father, jealous and frightened of his son’s involvement with a woman he knows will be trouble for both of them, and Giacomo’s monstrous ogre of a mother, desperate to present her son as a respectable and reformed character and secure his safety and freedom from the lifetime in jail the more committed--indeed, unrepentant--fellow fanatics are condemning themselves to. The film ends, adults discarded, with Giacomo freed but jilted at the altar, and Giulia, sitting at the back of the school hall, tears streaming down her face, watching Andrea take the spoken part of the exams even she couldn’t distract him from. Andrea’s uncompromising and unconditional true love for her has done more to tame her demons than any of the others in her life, all of whom had their own selfish agendas.

“Pulcini passes from political extremism to complete bourgeois conformity, accepting all of its values, order, law, and religion. This for me is an illustration of the dramatic reality of Italy today” said Bellochio, in an interview for the film’s press book, reprinted in the DVD notes. “Andrea has this rare quality which allows him to combine love with courage and responsibility. His passion does not prevent him from wanting to pass his exams and take his place in society. He is able to control Giulia’s madness with love and sensuality in a way that his father, a psychoanalyst, could not”.

At time of writing, Bellochio, now in his seventies, is still working, and has never stopped. Devil in the Flesh, filmed in 1986, sits smack in the middle of his career, neither a decline or a comeback. It was unique, particularly in the mid-‘80s, for its infamous unsimulated oral sex scene which is quite feeble and unnecessary for the actors to have put themselves through, as it makes no point other than to show it happening, which could easily have been suggested (I’m a big fan of unsimulated sex in the right circumstances--say, Q for example, also reviewed in this chapter, or the botched All About Anna, a film which exists solely for that purpose--but I dislike seeing committed actors exploited ala The Brown Bunny). There is little doubt that the prominence outside of Italy of Devil in the Flesh over his other work is due to its uncompromising sexual content and eroticism, but with the exception of the tepid and embarrassing oral sex scene, this element of the film is so superbly and sensibly realised that I can’t think of a better reason for it to be known. Today, however, in comparison with similar controversial fare such as Last Tango in Paris, or even the inconsequential Emmanuelle, it is very much an under-publicised, almost unknown film, a hidden secret gem for those in the know.

Since then, there has been a steady trickle of uniformly unerotic art films which hope to cultivate a little media attention and column inches and alleviate the crashing boredom of their progress going nowhere by featuring real sex in the proceedings. For those unfortunates frozen in the headlights of political correctness and right-on sexual politics, such films are a welcome opportunity to indulge in some of the pleasures of voyeurism and pornography denied them by their obligatory repudiation of their natural urges! Sadly, while the common man enjoys his pornography, these tormented souls are left to study such unsexy sex films as The Idiots, Romance, The Pornographer, Intimacy, 9 Songs, and Destricted, to name just a handful.

One typical example of this genre (and one is enough) is the turgid and stupid Romance (1999). As it comes from writer/director Catherine Breillat, you can be sure the title is ironic. Pretty but ordinary Marie (Caroline Ducey) is stuck in a relationship with a complete drip who has suddenly and spitefully decided to withhold sex from her. Now obviously any normal woman, especially one as attractive as Ducey, realising she’s shacked up with a hurtful and sadistic weirdo, would immediately walk out and find a new lover within days--particularly as we are frequently reminded of Marie’s high sex drive and desperate need for physical contact and demonstration of love. As she doesn’t, and the film progresses, we are swiftly made aware of the only obvious conclusion: that Marie has got as many problems as her selfish bully of a boyfriend has.

The film proceeds at a snail’s pace, positively daring the viewer to fast forward to the next shabby and dull sex scene. Worse still, it appears to be following the wrong person. Needy, foolish women in destructive relationships are sadly not uncommon... but usually they stay because they’re getting sex, love, and attention, albeit selfish and sometimes violent... or because there’s a child involved. Neither applies here. The exit door is wide open. But what’s the guy’s story? We never learn why this thoroughly unpleasant sadist is treating Marie this way. Then Marie deliberately has a child by him even though the relationship is crashing against the rocks (thus giving Breillat the chance to show how daring and avant-garde she is by filming a real birth--wow!!), and the film ends with the revelation that nasty boy has died (murdered? accident? terminal illness? answer comes there none) and the baby will be named after him. Aaaahhh.

Actually, scrub that. The most interesting character here is Breillat. The characters make no sense, and the film has no discernible point. Why does she feel the need to show Ducey having real sex? Why does she delight in tormenting the character of Marie, who pointlessly and illogically embarks on a series of self-destructive relationships? Why does she make Marie a schoolteacher, and show her teaching clearly identifiable children who really don’t need to be, or are informed enough to choose to be, in a sex film portraying a sado-masochistic relationship? Why does she need to cast misogynist porn star Rocco Siffredi, one of the most brutal and unpleasant hardcore porn directors, in a tame and uneventful sex scene that any actor could have played? Why does she need to show real sex at all, when there is no erotic context (she makes the nasty exploitative blow job in The Brown Bunny look like a glowing example of artistic integrity in comparison)? Why does she need to make the pregnant Marie a volunteer for medical students, who are then shown lining up to stick their fingers into the actress’ vagina?

This film hates women, hates men, hates kids, and hates sex. It fucking hates everything. It hates life. And as usual, the DVD packaging has no trouble finding critics to rave: “Genius! Possibly the sexiest movie ever made!” trumpets someone you’ve never heard of, and who has apparently never seen any of the other 200-odd films in this book. But it's not just arguably deranged non-entities who are impressed. “An eyeful” says the venerable Newsweek. “The most sexually audacious film since Last Tango in Paris!”. An eyeful of snake venom, maybe. As for sexually audacious, Marie gives the worst blow jobs in film history, puts on a condom, and lies there; Team America was more sexually audacious. Doris Day films were more sexually audacious.

What conclusion can we draw from this drivelling praise? It was certainly an inspired idea to put 24 lascivious and provocative come-on chapter titles on the outside of the box. But don’t come on, or come in, walk away.

On the other hand, the most intriguing thing about All About Anna (2005), a very ordinary Swedish attempt to mix real sex with the standard storyline of a chick flick, is how completely divided the reviewers were into love it or hate it camps. It warrants neither such emotive response.

The second most intriguing thing about this utterly undistinguished effort is that the original production by writers Anya Aims and Loretta Fabiana and director Jessica Nilsson was taken away and re-cut with additional sequences by, presumably, the three producers (neither cut is any good). An interesting tactic for an erotic film made by women for women!

The hard sell, of course, was that this film would feature real actors having real sex (as opposed to soft-focus pans to the ceiling). Contrary to the assumptions of some that Nilsson didn’t deliver the raunch she was contracted to provide, most of the sex was toned down on the version that was released, along with any adventurous camera angles and editing and a fair bit of the material critical of male behavior, notably the creepy bird-suit actor, who is reduced to a virtual walk-on. The end result is that the official version is more like conventional porn, whereas the original is a little more unusual. Neither version is world shatteringly significant.

The two leads are attractive bland blonde Gry Bay, a Swedish pop singer whose credits apparently include stage performances of Grease and West Side Story, and hunky bit player Adrian Bouchet, hiding behind the hopelessly fake porn identity of Mark Stevens (my apologies to all the real Mark Stevenses). Stevens is the hard-to-dump hunk who abandoned our heroine to see the world, only to return and try to pick up where he left off five years earlier--a no-brainer for Anna, you would think, except for the slight problem that she never got over him and can’t help pouncing on his cock every time he pokes his head round the door. British indie scream queen Eileen Daly steals the show as a desperate flat-share tenant, and Thomas Raft is just weird as a slightly creepy and jealous fuck buddy with a most bizarre male bob hair-cut.

As far as hardcore goes, the sex scenes are rather mundane, even in their original form, although initially better edited. The producers appear to be unsure exactly how far they want to go with the concept of real sex, but the problem is that if you’re going to ask the actors to indulge, then you really need to have the balls to go all the way, and not produce what is ultimately a softcore version of hardcore. This uncertain timidity wouldn’t matter quite so much if the sex was ten percent of the film, but it’s more like sixty percent, and even with the confusion of including actual porn starlet Ovidie in a mostly clothed see-nothing lesbian scene (another typical example of creative indecision), it’s only Eileen Daly, who gets a great gob of spunk in her face after a very generous blow-job (by far the most graphic sequence), who shows any sort of enthusiasm or commitment to the production. And while Gry Bay has a very attractive but ordinary figure under her clothes, Daly’s flawed but inviting curves are by far the most interesting to enjoy. All in all, it’s a bit of a mess--and I don't just mean Eileen’s face.

Shortbus (2006) was conceived as an improvisational experimental film about people with dysfunctional sex lives--special needs, if you like. The title refers to the smaller, supervised school bus used to escort the more unusual or troubled schoolchildren to school each day, and is here the name of a sex club where the uninhibited collect for group sex of all descriptions. This is portrayed sparingly in the club scenes, but graphically and authentically; the cast were obliged to commit completely to the integrity of the project

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During the course of the film’s production, funding fell through, actors dropped out, and when the nature of the film hit the tabloids, the lead actress nearly lost her job in mainstream TV. The attendant publicity, naturally, did not hurt the film, but as usual in such cases, assured it of much needed promotion and attention.

End result? It’s a little heavy on the gay for me, with the two female characters represented by a girl who can’t come and a dominatrix who can’t connect with people (!). Gay guys are more likely to find it erotic or sexually stimulating than straight guys; there’s a fair bit of gay sex, very little female flesh on display, and the so-called ‘sextras’ are not as enthusiastically exploited as they might have been.

The DVD’s Making of... is as revealing, if not more so, than the film--certainly more interesting. I wonder why sex films so often--with a few notable exceptions featured in this book--seem to be made by directors embarrassed or bored by sex? This is supposed to be the guy’s pet project and a labor of love but he literally needs someone to hold his hand. If he’s made that nervous by sexual activity, one must question his motives for making the film.

The one thing to be said in its favor is that unlike almost every art film about sexually liberated female free spirits, from Turkish Delight, Rendezvous, and Betty Blue to Y Tu Mama Tambien, Born in ’68, and The Unbearable Lightness of Being, which invariably end with the women being punished by death, loss, tragedy, madness, or terminal illness, Shortbus ends with our female protagonist finally enjoying a spectacular orgasm. That alone merits four stars!!

In 2009, producers and porn stars Ovidie and Jack Ryder made Sex Stories (aka Histoires de sexe(s), a film that is neither fish nor fowl. The sex scenes, all related in flashback, are real, and visually shown to be real, but coyly and flatly presented, as if vying for respectability rather than effect. The format’s fairly straightforward. We dart back and forth between two dinner parties, one a group of guys, one a group of women, some of them knowingly or unknowingly connected. Obviously, the conversation turns to sex—who’s screwing who, how good is it, and what could make it better? Pretty much every sex act or sex problem is discussed, but because the cast (all experienced porn stars but for one newbie) are discussing sex seriously, rather than as fun, the sex scenes become clinical rather than erotic. Ovidie’s intention is clearly to illuminate, illustrate, and educate, and that can’t be a bad thing. But why feign respectability? Why not make a sophisticated porn film and raise the bar?

Too soft for hardcore, and too hard for softcore, Sex Stories seeks to redefine or blur the traditional boundaries and categories needlessly. It’s a bold attempt to do something more than the norm, but the storytelling is not clear and the sex scenes are too short. Sex Stories certainly has more substance than similar feeble fare like Private Moments, Four Lovers, or Young People Fucking... and more sex, albeit mediocre hardcore. The rest of it resembles an R-rated version of thirtysomething or Sex and the City. We’re on the way to a better world when people attempt projects like this, but in ten or twenty years time, this will look like a silent movie does next to CGI.

Meanwhile, all memories of the disastrous debacle that was All About Anna swept under the carpet, and living up to their reputation magnificently, the Swedish government gave documentary maker Mia Engberg funding to make an “alternative, non-commercial, feminist“ porn film (all the magic words of gloom and despondency from the idiot ‘80s still haunting us today). Curiously, the end result--the supposedly non-commercial but depressingly titled Dirty Diaries (2010)—isn’t being given away after all, but sold on Amazon, and at far more than you will want to pay at the moment, no doubt in small part to the list of keywords on the IMDB (you need to type in Engberg’s name rather than Dirty Diaries). Alternative it certainly is, but I suspect the majority of the market is composed of the usual punters, and destined to be disappointed.

There are twelve short films, all trying to do something different with the concept of pornography, as opposed to erotica. Out of twelve possibilities, there should be something to press your buttons, but some of these offerings are a little pretentious to say the least.

Inevitably and correctly opening with the best, Skin features a heterosexual couple encased in flesh-coloured bodysuits which are gradually torn and cut away to reveal the attractive young couple underneath and so accommodate some very explicit lovemaking (all the sequences in this film are hardcore, but it’s okay because this is Art, you see). Fruitcake rather crudely compares nature to arseholes, with neither shown at their best, Nighttime is sex shown via a fashionably fuzzy, grainy picture, Dildoman is underground comic-style animation, Body Control is about people meeting on the internet for sex, Red Like Cherry is so hyper-trendy in its execution that it consists of little more than the noises of sex, On Your Back Woman is rough lesbian sex with multiple participants in couples, Phone Fuck is lesbian ‘phone sex, Brown Cock is rather graphic masturbation culminating in fisting, Flash Girl on Tour is about female masturbation in public, Authority is about sexual violence and masochism (a fantasy about a female graffiti vandal who is chased by and traps a cop, and abuses her; it’s not clear whether this is a pre-arranged mutual fantasy), For the Liberation of Men is a definite fast-forward job about hideous masturbating trannies, and Come Together is a collage of women’s faces while they’re masturbating.

The idea of redefining pornography, particularly with a female slant, is quite a common one, but it’s also a misconceived one. Pornography works perfectly well as it is; some of it just isn’t very nice. What is needed is not a doomed fringe attempt to reinvent the wheel, but work that pushes the envelope, and adds to the positive possibilities, and in a perfect world, undermines the sadder elements of the genre so that they eventually become redundant and disappear naturally. Most prominent in this arena is female director Anna Span, whose work looks much the same as ordinary, everyday porn; the same is true of the women directors like Stephanie Rothman and Barbara Peeters who worked for Corman in the ‘70s, with eager critics desperately searching for a perceived difference that wasn’t there. The most that could be hoped for was an absence of the excesses and mistakes of the less self-aware male directors, or the inadequates who deliberately produce aggressive porn for misogynists (interestingly, several of the sequences in Dirty Diaries feature rough sex, so it’s not just a male bent; if researching this book turned up anything, it’s that women are just as culpable in the bad stuff as men—as writers, directors, producers, and performers).

One of the most successful in making a different sort of product so far (and it is product, not a government-funded art form) is Petra Joy, who also has a penchant for short vignettes, and--regardless of a rather smug and self-satisfied Making of... on her Feeling It DVD in which all the participants are extremely pleased with themselves--has produced some very sexy material that can satisfy both sexes (if they are not too conditioned, like some reviewers appear to be when faced with something unusual, by the narrow definitions of sex and beauty propagated by Hollywood). Joy--who wants to “create an alternative to the flood of images that reduces women to their genitals” and wants the focus to be “female pleasure rather than male gratification”--finances her own films, which are audience friendly rather than market-hostile (although it would be nice if she could aim for female pleasure and male gratification; inclusivity goes two ways y’know).

Her work is certainly variable, and needs to show more, but it’s undeniably different and experimental, certainly female-skewed, and yet accessible enough to both sexes to be profitable and not to need government handouts. After all, if Engberg and her pals were really going to successfully redefine pornography rather than just indulge in intellectual masturbation on the rates, it would need to be profitable to prove itself. I don’t see Ben Dover, Johnny Rebel, or Marc Dorcel getting government grants any time soon.

Engberg’s indulgences are doomed to failure, not just because they’ve been pre-determined to fail by the perceived need for public funds, but because the audience for porn is a paying audience, and it has to want something different; it can’t be forced on them. The providers have to think about what that paying audience might go for--not in terms of new fads, positions, genres, or activities, but in methods of presentation. Film-makers like those who offered Fruitcake, Nighttime, or For the Liberation of Men can’t just make obscure junk to impress their friends, they have to seduce the market while subverting the aspects of porn they don’t like, in other words, cater for the audience, but leave out the stuff they personally don’t care for. Sell it, and it’s a win.

Pornography exists for a clear and specific purpose, and so stuff that’s too clever to deliver, like Fruitcake, Nighttime, and Red Like Cherry, is smug, useless, and indulgent. Subverting porn with off-putting images, like For the Liberation of Men and again Fruitcake is a combination of arrogance and a kind of masturbation itself, the directors satisfying only themselves. There are certainly aspects and providers of porn that could use a good sluicing out with an IQ enema, but they’re best disposed of not by trying to redefine pornography, which already does its job as it is, but opening it out, expanding the possibilities. The audience for porn, like the market for books, groceries or anything else, will go for the good stuff.

Thus, the adventurous entries in Dirty Diaries (shame about the title, for a start) which are the most successful are the genuinely clever Skin, the verite Body Control, which features two ordinary young people having a lively but self-conscious shag after meeting on the internet (the way the girl keeps glancing at the camera is quite endearing), and the similarly unfortunately titled On Your Back, Woman (interesting how many of these great subverters and re-definers go straight to the dark side of porn themselves) which features barely visible and overly-edited energetic sexual grappling. All three perform their function as porn, which is surely the first consideration, while opening up the possibilities of doing something slightly different (conceptually, rather than sexually). Sequences such as Phone Fuck and Come Together also serve a purpose in that, although fairly inconsequential in themselves, they suggest sequences or approaches that might be adopted in a larger, more varied framework, by contemporary pornographers. Standing alone, there’s not much there, but as segments of a longer, more varied production, they offer clever potential diversions. So Engberg’s experiment has not been a complete loss (although tell that to the other perhaps more needy projects that didn’t get government funding).

Interestingly, for all the criticisms of the priorities of porn films (which began in earnest in the 1970s as porn became more visible), it has been the censors who have dictated style and content over the decades, by, for example, forbidding shots of erect penises and penetration, and most curiously forbidding showing women’s faces coming to orgasm, which I feel speaks volumes about the nature of censorship and who’s doing it. Bad acting is fine, but real red-faced, closed-eyed, full-lipped sexual satisfaction has traditionally been disallowed until very recently. It’s the pleasure the censors object to, and most specifically, female pleasure. Interesting.

Today’s moral policemen, militant man-haters, and PC fascists are, like yesterday’s clean-up campaigners whining about the “permissive society”, tomorrow’s laughing stocks. Pornography will always be with us, so rather than attempt a hostile assault on it, a far more workable and positive proposition is to change it from within, not by smugly trying to subvert it and disappointing the punters, but by slowly improving the content. Some of the shorts in the Dirty Diaries collection show the right way, others demonstrate the wrong way.

Can the audience for porn change? Sure. Just go to the reviews for 1970s softcore on the IMDB, and it won’t be long before you’ve found several reviewers rejoicing at the absence of fake tits, formerly the must-have commodity of the 1990s. Check out the number of people already mocking Botox. Eventually the audience looks back at the more repugnant aspects of the genre and marvels that anyone ever watched “that”... Just as we already goggle at the spotty male arses, huge hairy bushes, rape jokes, and homophobia of the ‘70s, and wince at the silicone tits of the ‘90s, so we will soon be recoiling en masse, rather than individually, from the stretched faces and balloon lips of the early 21st century. It is vastly encouraging that porn today, for all its failings, is the best and most diverse it’s ever been. Who knows, it may get even better... If Engberg and likeminded progressives of both sexes play their cards right, they may get to contribute instead of standing on the sidelines posturing.

Laurent Bhourick’s Q (aka Desire, 2011) is genuinely erotic, as advertised, but the sex, although it would be categorised as hardcore, is not pornographic. The women are allowed to enjoy themselves, and the sex is not portrayed as either perfect or unpleasant. The scenarios are realistic individually, but filmed as fantasy, with beautiful bodies, sexually interesting camera angles, and all the tricks of the trade--music, lighting, make-up, colors, edits.

Cecile--the beautiful Deborah Revy--is trouble. She’s a promiscuous prick-teaser who revels in her power to lead men around like puppy dogs. No-one in her circle of friends is safe, male or female, and neither are total strangers. She skips out on a date with her volatile boyfriend Chance (Johnny Aramo) to torment a sensitive soul named Matt (Gowan Didi), who only has eyes for the mousey and shy Alice (Helene Zimmer).

Alice is the direct opposite of Cecile, full of unrealistic fantasies of idyllic passion and loads of kids when she hasn’t even mastered sex yet. Matt, of course, thinks with his dick, and pursues both Cecile and Alice, who are both, in their separate ways, leading him on, while Cecile pursues both Matt and Alice with an equal malicious determination. Chance, meanwhile (Really? Chance?), quite likes the idea of not having to commit, especially as Cecile’s pro-active promiscuity is as much a turn-off as a turn-on for his working class machismo, and he frequently can’t be bothered to fuck her. Her antics have made her tiresome.

Alice has a seriously repressed mother, but Dad is a reasonable guy; Cecile’s behavior is all laid at the feet of her deceased father, who she can’t let go (literally; she won’t scatter his ashes). Into the fray come the older Yves and Virginie (Patrick Hauthier and Christelle Benoit), a married couple who are difficult to figure out, and have problems. She’s gone off sex, while her husband is being pursued by Cecile, which for some reason amuses them both.

The sex is indeed integral to the story, and although there’s no reason it couldn’t have been faked, it wasn’t. There’s plenty of nudity, sex in a variety of positions, masturbation, foreplay, and oral sex. Although this basic point is lost on the makers of the provocatively titled Young People Fucking, which is more like an overlong episode of Friends, it seems only fair that if you are presenting a film about sex, in which all the characters are constantly having sex, there should actually be some sex in it. Whether it actually needs to be real sex is arguable, but certainly acceptable.

Beautifully and thoughtfully shot by a competent and creative director, the film’s stated intentions are undermined by its own eroticism. We would never have been able to even guess at these supposed intentions, if it wasn’t for the current fashion of directors explaining themselves on DVD extras, here including an interview with director Laurent Bhourick. The interview is basically a rant, and although he makes several valid points, they can all be argued with. The gist of it is that he talks a lot about his interest in presenting a story from the female viewpoint, and male power over women and their oppression, but what he has actually made is a film about women’s power over men... and from a very male viewpoint. Sexual politics can be a minefield, and Bhourick comes out of this one looking like Wolfie from the Tex Avery cartoons--drooling over the female form and ragged from being blown to bits several times over. As a wise man once said (was it John Ford?), if you have to explain your film, then you’ve failed; but to turn success into failure by telling everybody you were trying to do the reverse of what you’ve accomplished takes a special talent.

Q may indeed be a film about women, but it’s written and filmed from an almost exclusively indulgent male viewpoint. Only one scene has a man going down on a woman; all the other heterosexual foreplay is hand jobs or blow jobs. Every other sex scene in the film is about women either submitting to, or exploiting sex by doing for, the men, not for pleasure, but as a means to an end. There are women’s bodies everywhere, displayed at almost every opportunity, and there’s a fair bit of lesbianism. The naked female bodies outnumber the males; there isn’t a single male butt shot except during a quick shag, and the common mistake of obscuring the female form with the humping male, so frequently made in sex films aimed primarily at men, is not here. I’m not saying that women wouldn’t get off on the sex scenes, which are indeed very erotic, just that like everything else in this film, they’re made with the male in mind. Had he announced that he was making a film about women’s power over men from a male viewpoint, Bhourick would have created a masterpiece, without even having to change a frame. But if this is a women’s film, then I'm off to buy six pairs of shoes and some chocolate.

Every male fantasy imaginable is in this film--from the girl who lets a sad old man feel her up, to the cheerful old boy who watches Alice change clothes in an alleyway. There is a scene where a slimy potential employer tries to get sex in exchange for employment, and justly and satisfyingly gets his nuts mangled in the iron grip of the furious applicant, and many of us will enjoy seeing him get his well-deserved comeuppance, but the message is still to watch out for treacherous women... and later, Cecile and Alice deliberately lead on a hopeful middle-aged businessman with promises of a quickie, and then steal his mobile ‘phone, humiliating him again when he confronts them with a security officer. Both these sequences confirm the angry misogynist’s prejudices against beautiful women.

Most male-skewed of all, the film is moved along by periodic scenes of girl talk in the showers, and while entirely typical and realistic of the way women talk to each other (I’ve worked predominantly with women all my life, and after a while you become invisible!), these scenes are filmed as beautiful nude bodies milling around. Furthermore, we don’t see the faces. Consequently, these sequences--tinted light blue--come across as pure erotic fantasy (even though the face is surely the most erotic part of the body), with the disembodied voices, bereft of facial expression or identification, turned into mere random chatter--a typical male view of female conversation, I confess. It’s one of many curious and insensitive choices, when the nature of the film dictates casual nudity rather than pop video fantasy. The approach taken here not only turns these perfect women’s bodies into mere erotic wallpaper, rendering the conversation irrelevant, but denies the viewer the pleasure of putting the bodies with the faces, and thus giving the women their identities. Bhourick could move on from here to become one of the best erotic film-makers working in mainstream cinema today, the heir to Tinto Brass... if he could just stop pretending to be one of the girls.

The film ends with the two greatest and most self-deceiving male fantasies of them all--the women as whores, giving sex freely and indiscriminately (albeit to men they have chosen) as some sort of ridiculous charity event, and the independent free spirit tamed and spirited away by the victorious male. Having manipulated everyone in the film into being as sexually adventurous and accessible as herself, Cecile takes flight, leaving her friends banging away in the brothel... and having told her choice of man, her boyfriend, that he doesn’t have to pay! Perhaps inevitably, there isn’t one credible plot development in the film. But no man will be bored. Or enlightened.

Q is perhaps by far and away the best of another in a long line of films that turn up every few months where the director has conned the actors into thinking that they have to have real sex to tell the story. Although this contractual boldness is always dishonest, the end result is often, and paradoxically, a more honest film--and if the actors are up for it, then let’s go. But remember, girls and boys--it's never “essential to the plot”.

Filmerotica: Porn without the side dish of self-loathing

Alongside the Party Hardcore series and the titles discussed in the next chapter, the Filmerotica productions are the only discs in this book that are so hardcore they can only be purchased in sex shops or on adult internet sites. I’ve avoided this particular area of the market in general because it’s massive, I’m no expert, and it would make this an entirely different book. Also, there’s only so much you can write about hardcore material before it becomes repetitive, even though it’s content and quality is currently more varied than at any other time in the history of home cinema, VHS and DVD (I'm referring here to different approaches to the material, rather than specific types, or categories, of porn). Today, hardcore porn ranges from the cheeky chappie approach of Ben Dover and the shabby naturalism of Johnny Rebel and Rude Britannia, to the kinky SM and pseudo-sophistication of Private and Harmony, the slap-and-tickle of Relish, the boorish, frat-house slobbishness of the U.S. college fuck-fests, all the endless wearisome gangsta/booty/ho crap, the misogyny and aggression of Rocco Siffredi, the sexually equal Dare Dorm, the female-friendly hen party antics of Dancing Bear, the girls-take-charge College Rules, and the fun, fizzy Euro-babe party/orgy fare of Eromaxx. However, Filmerotica deserve a special mention for making the effort to raise the bar.

They tried this primarily with the packaging. As anyone who’s ever scanned the adult internet sites or wandered into a Soho sex shop will know, the hardcore porn industry thinks that its marketplace is filled with crass, vulgar, sexist cretins who consider women to be about one step higher than a dog turd on the evolutionary scale, rather unproductively referring to their performers as “slags”, “sluts”, and “ho’s”. What this in turn makes these name-callers we dare not contemplate, but I suspect that deep down, they have an equally low opinion of themselves.

Undoubtedly some of the sorry bastards who empty their wallets for this stuff respond to such marketing, and hold those heartbreakingly lowbrow views of women, but it’s a hell of a shame for the rest of us who just like to see sex and the female form without the side-dish of hate and self-loathing.

Filmerotica tried something different. They selected natural beauties, attractive everyday girls, and put them with the sort of guys you don’t mind getting laid, rather than sleazy lowlifes; and most significantly, they gave their productions very bland titles and very sedate covers, secure in the knowledge of the quality of their product... but just to be safe, the back covers featured the usual array of mini-pics of rampant sexual abandon. As for the content, the makers took the radical approach of showing several minutes of everyday footage of the players before getting down to business. While some members of the audience undoubtedly fast forward through such material, and think they’re being conned out of five minutes of extra sucking and fucking, the seasoned voyeur will know that it’s much more satisfying to see the performers in everyday life situations before the clothes fly off.

Despite each film featuring a named lead performer, the Filmeroticas are very much ensemble pieces, with a variety of girls appearing equally, and usually culminating with group sex. With the bizarre exception of a rather Freudian interest in girls peeing, a tendency hardly likely to qualify them as the couples movies they strive to be and otherwise are, these discs generally exhibit a decidedly grown-up attitude toward sex, with no slut/bitch/milf name-calling, and the women as keen as the men, and none of the tired old tricking-them-into-sex crap of the 1990s that diminishes both sexes. As well as frequently featuring the incomparable Renee Richards, whose enthusiasm for her work knows no bounds, other class acts include skinny blonde Theo, dark-haired Frankie, shapely blonde Jasmine Guy, Northern girl Suzie Best, and girl next door type Ruby Red. Everyone will have their preferences, but The Estate Agent, Chelsea Girl, The Tour Guide, and The Secret Drawer are excellent, and Touch Wood, Chalet Girl, Made in Italy, and Villa Toscana are superb.

Apparently, far too many customers still feel the need to see massive tits and acres of flesh on a DVD cover before they’ll trust the content, as recently, Filmerotica’s productions have reverted to full-photograph covers on the DVD boxes (still tastefully sexy). More disappointingly, none of the girls in the most recent titles have managed to equal the personality, originality, or beauty of the regular players in the first twenty or so. This may change; one never knows when or where the next Renee Richards is coming from. Even if it doesn’t, Filmerotica have given us many hours of watchable--and uniquely, re-watchable--time with the likes of Renee, Jasmine, Ruby, Suzie, and the rest, and for that I’m more than happy to return the favor with this complimentary acknowledgement.

Filmerotica’s discs (at least the first two dozen I’ve seen) are the female-friendly sex-is-fun porn that the shabby and depressing Dirty Diaries wasn’t. But it is encouraging that both male and female participants in the genre are trying to seize control of the medium from the misogynists while still acknowledging the profit motive. The fatal flaw with most reformers is their efforts to make an artistic or political statement rather than a few bucks. Nobody cares.

As American culture has a far narrower view of what is natural and normal in physical beauty than most of Europe, it follows that they have a much wider definition of what might be termed ‘alternative’. As the 21st century began, a flurry of ‘alternative porn’ websites appeared, mostly featuring tattooed goth girl/emo types with piercings and colored hair, including Burning Angel, Supercult, and—best known and most notorious and controversial of all (although more for behind-the-scenes antics than content)—the Suicide Girls, the last of which have released a series of very tame but attractive DVDs, Suicide Girls--the First Tour (2005), Suicide Girls--Italian Villa (2006), Suicide Girls--Guide to Living (2009), Suicide Girls Must Die! (2010), and Suicide Girls: U.K. Vacation (2012).

I must say I was quite taken aback by the small-minded vitriol, narrow-minded offensiveness and sexual repression spewing forth from the more hostile reviewers on the IMDB for these daring young women and their unique and all-too-uncommon offerings from the States. Personally, I’m more than a little tired of the shallow, soft-focus, assembly-line Barbie dolls with their rubber tits and pained squealing that the makers of American sex films seemed to think was exciting during the 1990s, and some of the IMDB reviews for the Suicides and various world cinema offerings illustrate just how atrophied the U.S. idea of erotica had become when Sean Suhl and Selena Mooney (aka “Missy Suicide”) launched their website in 2001 amid a flurry of “alternative” porn sites. Anything that doesn't look exactly like a 1980s Spring Break calendar shot on an Aaron Spelling stage set appears to frighten and enrage a limited but significant section of the audience.

Whatever you might read in these so-called reviews, the truth is that all these normal, natural-looking girls are very pretty and pleasing to the eye, and have character, and if some of them have gone a little overboard with the tattoos, it only serves to illustrate the damage being done to the self-image American youth have of themselves when assorted dateless wonders throw stupid and pathetic derogatory terms like “skank” and “ho” around without thought as to who they’re actually applying them to. I have a strong suspicion that such judgemental jerks make the Big Bang Theory boys look like The Expendables.

In a world vastly improved but still quite rigid and repressed in some sexual matters, girls who are happy and eager to get naked are still one of the happier necessities of life, and they shouldn’t have to take puerile abuse from narrow-minded inadequates. If today’s angry get-littles and got-littles can’t see past the Botox and Silicon brigade to enjoy the spectacle of genuine feminine beauty, then they’re the ones who should be calling themselves potential suicide material. However, most of the Suicide Girls’ bad press has come not from morons or reactionaries, but from dissenters within the ranks, and it probably didn’t help that Suhl hid behind the scenes with Mooney’s “Missy Suicide” as his public face, pushing the idea in the press and on sex magazine TV shows that the site was some sort of girls only operation. While the models knew otherwise, this probably alienated as many customers and contributors as it attracted, and behind the punk image it’s pure business, with contracts and clauses and lawsuits and settlements. Nevertheless, if you’re bored with the usual paint-by-numbers assembly line erotica that floods out of the U.S., the Suicide Girls offer a highly rewarding alternative. They are not, of course, to everybody’s taste, but if you're tired of the same old same-old, but never tire of looking at girls, these discs are likeable and original.

Suicide Girls--the First Tour is basically a reality show-style doc of a burlesque road show that played across the States in 2005. Strip shows and burlesque have never much appealed to me, as I like my women either dressed beautifully or completely undressed, not in lingerie or swimsuits etc., and I don’t care for the prick-teasing element. However, that’s me. This particular show is not so bad, it’s raunchy, high-spirited, sexy, and fun. The girls are eagerly displaying, not concealing, and exhibitionism is one thing I do enjoy. The girls are all introduced individually as the film progresses, and they each give a brief talk to the camera, also appearing in their own individual strip video. These are the girls mother warned you about.

Suicide Girls--Italian Villa is the least successful of the first three, a straightforward model shoot that skimps on the nudity, talking as much as showing. That said, there’s still more on display than in your average teen comedy.

Suicide Girls--Guide to Living is a doozy. It consists of twelve themed segments, interspersed with slightly less riveting sequences of the girls showing off their tattoos, albeit bare-breasted. The segments cannot be faulted, however.

These are instructions on how to cast a Love Spell, the Sun Salutation, how to start a Fight Club (!), how to cure a hangover, how to prepare absinthe, how to ditch your wedding, how to fake an orgasm, how to roll a joint, how to kill a vampire (!!), how to tie a tie, how to do a strip tease, and how to get the girls to go skinnydipping in your pool!

“Love Spell” features a goth strip tease, while “Fight Club” features a horde of very hard-looking, bare-breasted girls covered in tattoos and wearing blue jeans—it's Bohachi Bushido meets Fight Club. A faux fist-fight follows, then another. There’s more tits on the screen than it’s possible to count without a freeze-frame; it’s like a contemporary Female Yakuza Tale.

“How to Cure a Hangover” is a goth lesbian fantasy with a pouty, full-lipped and dark-haired beauty with a great body tending to a supposedly hung-over but not very convincing blindfolded blonde. “How to Prepare Absinthe” ups the naked goth count to three more; these are also more traditional beauties, and again it’s all about alcohol and nudity. This is mostly a straightforward strip tease, enjoyed by a clothed female audience.

“How to Ditch a Wedding” is a pop video-style romp with a girl in a wedding dress doing a runner and then getting out of a wedding dress and ditching all her clothes in the process (you‘ll notice there’s a theme developing here). “How to Fake an Orgasm” is--perhaps appropriately--Electric Blue-style stuff with a skinny blonde rolling about on a bed.

“How to Roll a Joint” is slightly more adventurous stuff, with four knockouts taking it in turns to get naked and/or crawl around on a dining table, which will leave you none the wiser about rolling joints. There are some rolling papers evident, but you won’t be thinking about getting high with these bodies on display. All four of them--Rodeo, Kiefer, Rambo, and Lanie--appear to have been named while their parents were high…

“How to Kill a Vampire” is fake fangs nonsense with a gaggle of goths flouncing around in a horror scenario, each getting dispatched by a pretty vampire hunter until the tables are turned. There are some spectacular tits on display amongst the fake blood. It’s like the Satanic Sluts discs, but you actually get to see stuff.

“Tie a tie” is a standard strip, as indeed is “Strip Tease” itself, but there’s an above average pillow fight in there somewhere. My personal favorite is the “Sun Salutation”, which is basically seven semi-naked and then totally naked sweet young things doing a yoga-style workout.

All the girls are absolutely stunning, and put the lie to the notion that the Suicide Girls are about unconventional bodies. As I said earlier, the American definition of beauty now seems to be so narrow that nothing short of a Playboy playmate Barbie doll will qualify. These girls have natural beauty and are worth a dozen Botoxed balloon-titted bimbos apiece.

Finally, most of the girls seen, plus a few others, get together for a lengthy mass skinnydip in an indoor pool; unlike most such sequences in movies, this goes on for quite a while, is the disc’s main set-piece, and is, if I say so myself, excellent.

That point made, time to stick the knife in. Suicide Girls Must Die, the team’s horror effort, is by far the poorest of the five Suicide Girls DVDs to date, because the pleasure in watching the other SG productions is that the girls are having fun. Seeing them scared stupid and arguing with each other is not fun; this is the party from hell, and the girl in charge of the shoot comes across as a callous, bossy bitch, the first instance of one of the girls being unlikeable. In First Tour and Guide to Living however, the girls are very likeable.

The central conceit of Suicide Girls Must Die is that a supposed calendar shoot is actually a secretly filmed reality show lasting a whole week in which the girls, marooned out in the sticks, are gradually disappearing in spooky and mysterious circumstances.

In actual reality, this would be grounds for a major lawsuit and compensation heaven, particularly as the phoney situation puts the girls in genuine jeopardy, and a couple in need of psychiatric counselling, but of course the production itself is a sham, as several scenes, particularly the climax in the boat and then the woods, can only have been filmed by visible cameras and their operators. There are just too many different shots and cuts and editing choices to be the result of hidden cameras. Despite this, this absurd bullshit premise is maintained throughout by giving all the girls camcorders and putting CCTV all over the house and apparently, vast swathes of the Maine countryside as well.

None of this would matter so much if the show wasn’t such a let-down after the high expectations raised by its predecessors. To add insult to injury, the trademark camaraderie, nudity and partying is in noticeable short supply, making this the first SG DVD not to satisfy. A naked hot tub scene shows nothing and goes nowhere, whereas the pleasures of the skinnydipping scene in Guide to Living seemed to be endless. A far better product--and time--could have been had if the premise had been to show the girls knowingly making a sexy horror movie. As it stands, the show fails on all counts. As a horror film, it’s lame and tame, and will let down the blood and gore brigade the cover art entices. As erotica, it’s hopelessly short on the usual wacky antics of naked girls that are in abundance on the other three discs. After this massive misfire, Suicide Girls: U.K. Vacation saw a return to the Italian Villa format, this time in a restored windmill in the English countryside.

I respect and enjoy female beauty, and these girls’ DVDs are a delight, particularly the Guide to Living, which has a couple of sequences--the naked yoga and the skinnydipping--which are the most visually satisfying since Borowczyk had thirty or forty natural beauties running around naked in Immoral Tales over thirty years ago. These girls appear to know their own minds, and for every silly shallow comment referred to by uptight complainers, there are more than double sensible and/or sexy remarks made by the tasty morsels (if that’s really why you're watching, philosophy students). As one of the tattoo-emblazoned girls in Guide to Living said in the response to the query “what will you look like in years to come?”, “I’ll be old and wrinkled like you, but I’ll have had a more interesting life”. Zingg!!

Czechsploitation

The original Chained Heat was a women-in-prison movie starring Linda Blair in 1983, and should not be confused with the earlier Caged Heat in 1974. Over a decade later, the title was appropriated by a company called North American Films as a generic franchise, and as is so often the case in the realm of exploitation films, it then gets murky and complicated.

Lloyd Simandl’s Chained Heat films were the beginning and the template for the later and superior Bound Heat franchise, which had been steadily improving throughout the 21st century to become a leading soft-porn turn-on of the early noughties, until they recently went into decline, focussing less on erotica and more on sado-masochism. This, in turn, meant more phoney fladge and a lower class of performer willing to participate.

This is a shame as, after a shaky start, what had developed into the Bound Heat franchise had briefly become one of the most reliable delivery service of softcore erotic entertainment on the market. Like the legendary Tinto Brass, whose Cheeky, Private, and others of their ilk are landmarks of Euro-babe eye-candy, and unlike some of the sad sacks who try to make softcore, you get the impression that this man is not shy or embarrassed about his work--he wants to be there. If he wasn’t doing this, he’d make a brilliant trouble-shooting second-unit director, who could be put to good use putting the nude scenes into all those short-changing, opportunity-missing horror films and teen sex comedies whose eunuch directors were too busy, bored, or cynical to deliver what the audience naturally expects from a B-movie.

Early criticisms of lame and tepid content were valid, and the Chained Heat features, swamped in a mire of alternative and similar sounding titles, were not quite as good as the Bound Heat entries would be for admirers of the female form; it took a while for Simandl to jettison the cornball cod-sci-fi and B-movie action heroes and focus primarily on the naked girls who were selling the product. All credit to him for realising what so many other exploitation makers never catch on to, however.

Simandl started out as a producer/director making really bad--really bad--Z-movies headed straight for the bargain bins. He found his forte when he seems to have realised that he enjoyed filming the token nude scenes more than the rest of it.

He started making brazenly exploitative soft-core porn, which after a couple of misfires, morphed into the Bound Heat series, straightforward lech-fests with a hint of bondage and other kinkiness from the dark recesses of the general public’s sex fantasies. All Simandl’s films are made in Czechoslovakia with real non-silicon, Botox-free European beauties, and there are at least a dozen different productions at time of writing, some with dual identities; as is often the case with exploitation, some films have been released in different edits and with different titles.

The official Bound Heat productions appear to have started in 2001, but some earlier titles by Simandl have been re-released under the Bound Heat imprint (1995’s Dangerous Prey, for example). By this time, the Bound Heat formula had been pretty much refined and carved in stone, with all extraneous trappings jettisoned to concentrate on the gradually increasing quota of lesbianism and nudity... but in his pre-2001 efforts, there is too much padding and repetition.

The basic template of nearly all of the Bound Heat productions, all variations of the same basic plot, goes like this: Generally, there is a beautiful evil exploiter in her mid-to-late twenties who is in league with wicked men (always the same half-dozen reliables), and she has the lion’s share of the dialogue. These leading ladies generally resemble the standard American softcore stereotype, except without any fake bits, and they do bad things. Supporting are between six to a dozen younger girls who play the victims, have minimal dialogue, and are essentially there to be ogled at while getting naked or being naked, while the bad guys do their stuff.

What made all this palatable rather than unwatchable was the sheer phoniness of the exercise--despite the suffering slave-girls theme, and despite Simandl’s occasional forays into fetishism and kinkiness (Mistress of Souls and Blood Countess are probably the weirdest on this count), the Bound Heat films were guilt-free pleasures as the execution of these scenes was completely lame and unconvincing. It is the brazen artificiality of these films that makes them so endearing and enjoyable; there is no hint of genuine danger or pain, it’s pure sex fantasy. The girls are clearly in no discomfort, and make no effort to emote other than to look like they’ve been sent to bed with no dinner. These girls have not been hired to act, and don’t; they're all uninhibited Euro-babes from model agencies, and perfectly comfortable with nudity--almost bored, in some cases. And when they do deign to speak, those Czech accents are really sexy.

All Simandl’s films are basically the same deal, and frequently dip into the same stock of girls, plots, formula, and sets, although of course they vary just enough to each be slightly different. Some are set in the past (Demon’s Claw, Run With Fear, Blood Countess, Caligula’s Spawn), some in a future-world dystopia (Dakota Bound, Mistress of Souls, Slave Huntress), some in a brutal, undefined present or alternate history... but all are filmed on the same few sets, and in the same Czech countryside and locations, invariably starting with a bunch of girls fleeing some menace in the woods.

What I like about Simandl’s efforts (and some people don’t like them at all) is that despite the token nod in the direction of a vague plot they are basically honest about what they are up to, which is more than can be said about a lot of films exploiting nudity, which serve up half-measures or token gestures to sell the product while pretending to be about something else (indeed, this is how Simandl himself started). Here, the plots, storylines and characterisations take very much second or even third place to the copious dressings, undressings, inspections, washings, dryings, punishings, oilings, thrashings, gropings... well, you get the picture. Unlike the directors of many supposedly erotic movies, Simandl has--sometime during production of such early efforts as Dakota Bound and Demon’s Claw--worked out that it’s the girls we want to see, and he takes his sweet time filming them. If there’s no plot or characterisation, who cares? It would be nice to have everything in one package, but let’s prioritise.

And unlike the women-in-prison genre, which are Bound Heat’s closest relatives, and are inevitably sleazy, vicious, and operating in unpleasant surroundings, often with realistically mediocre women on display, Simandl’s white slave fantasies are warm and erotic and luxuriously photographed with women so perfectly beautiful you’d think they stepped out of your dreams; the single failing of Bound Heat is that the girls are only--only!--objects of great beauty. Simandl, being able--like Tinto Brass--to recognise and appreciate this beauty himself, knows exactly where to put his camera, and he usually lets it linger. This simplicity is to the Bound Heat franchise’s advantage, because it stops the films from being laughable due to bad acting or over-ambitious behind-camera personnel, a common failing in B-movies since Ed Wood put on his first frock.

Czechsploitation continued

What is also significant about the Bound Heat formula is that the few men in the background--and they are kept in the background--rarely touch the women. So, ironically, while the Bound Heat films are the perfect illustration of the often-wrong assumption that porn is “only” about women as mere bodies, this very factor also makes them the most lesbian-friendly softcore on the market, as they are generally man-free and long on looking over the girls. The only sex is usually when the evil empowered woman takes her pick from the pack for some languid sapphic shenanigans on the bed.

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Bound Heat has no pretensions, and makes no apology for the absence of anything so mundane as a story. If you are one of those who need an excuse for looking at naked girls, then the Bound Heat films are not for you. They are beautifully filmed, and there are no hidden messages, no comedy bits, no artistic indulgences, and no excuses, boys and girls. Unlike the art film types and the just-buying-it-for-the-articles brigade, Bound Heat purchasers have nothing to hide behind. We came for the show.

The Bound Heat titles include: Dangerous Prey (1995, not an official part of the series), Dakota Bound (2001), Bound Cargo (2003), Betrayed Innocence (2003), Stolen Souls (2003), School of Surrender (2003), Run With Fear (2004), Demon’s Claw (aka Chained Rose, 2004), Bound Tears (2006), Slave Huntress (2007), Mistress of Souls (2007), Blood Countess (2008), and Caligula’s Spawn (2009). Follow-up Slave Tears of Rome, filmed on the same sets in 2011 with a less appealing cast, is a disappointment, and the start of the series’ decline. The only thing that can be said in its favor is that it offers extensive scenes from part two at the end, to ward you off wasting twice as much money (the story is exactly the same, with the tables turned again and roles reversed).

The virtue of the finest of the Bound Heat offerings is the languid pace, that they linger and are in no hurry to move on. I have seen criticisms of this franchise from no doubt younger men than I complaining that sequences go on for too long, but we’re not all sitting with our dicks in our hands. We have the fast forward if we need it, and it’s nice to enjoy the girls’ bodies at leisure without having to freeze-frame. Pour yourself a glass of wine, boys, and take your time!

The other 21st century sex film phenomenon from Prague couldn’t be more different. A sort of European Girls Gone Wild that delivers, Eromaxx’s Party Hardcore series is well past its half-century in numbered editions as I write, heading for three figures, and simplicity itself. Each disc features around ninety minutes of a well-lubricated (in every sense) hen party involving around two hundred young women in a (generally) heterosexual girls-only nightclub with loud music, a limited supply of male strippers and barmen and an apparently unlimited supply of alcohol. These fortunate few males then get to service about a dozen of the most willing attendees every which way while the less adventurous look on enviously and the cameramen prowl around filming the action in real-time. What’s surprising is that it works.

Eromaxx also do a neat line in mass orgies with small armies of professional porn stars, but as entertaining as these are, they don’t match the amateur antics of Party Hardcore. You wouldn’t necessarily imagine that a sex party where ninety percent of the girls stay dressed, smirking self-satisfied studs get all the action, and the first fucking often doesn’t start until about half-way into the running time would be a voyeur’s delight, but it works surprisingly well. The more recent entries have started the action sooner, and now often include a sort of party games warm-up to get the girls in the mood to strip off (no. 42 is a classic), but there’s always the fast forward to nudge things along. Generally though, it’s not needed. It’s often much more entertaining (and cost-effective) to watch developments in the real-time they’re filmed in, as much of the fun is eventually finding out what all men since the beginning of time have wanted to know--who will, and who won’t. Sometimes, it’s a pleasant surprise, sometimes--how can I put this tactfully?--it isn’t such a surprise.

As the late, great Max Miller famously said: “I like the girls who do, but not the girls who don’t. And not the girls who say they will, and then they say they won’t. But the girls I like the most, and I’m sure you’ll say I’m right, are the girls who say they never do… but look as though they might”.

Some editions, needless to say, are better than others, and it’s a mystery why the parties that never really take off (and inevitably, a few don’t) are even released. Fair enough, the company doesn’t want to waste money staging a show that isn’t used, but if it’s that one that disappoints a new buyer and loses a future regular customer, releasing a dud anyway is surely a false economy. These must, after all, be incredibly cheap to make; the largest expense must be the cost of printing the release forms.

Although both the Bound Heat DVDs and the Party Hardcore series could never have been made in the ‘60s and the ‘70s, they are both very much products of that era. The contemporary casual attitude to nudity and sex acts began with those decades, and despite occasional cultural shifts and wobbles, that openness about sex in the ‘60s, and complacency about nudity in the ‘70s, has culminated in the admirable don’t-give-a-shit attitudes of 21st century youth towards sex and nudity, a phenomenon we shall close with in the next chapter.

Girls Gone Wild, Men Gone Mild

Elles (2011), Dare Dorm nos. 1—20 (2007—2015), College Rules nos. 1—19 (2011—2015)

Wife, mother of two sons, and magazine writer Anne (Juliette Binoche of the captivating and brilliant The Unbearable Lightness of Being and about a dozen other acclaimed arties) is working on a magazine article about teenage prostitutes. These are not girls desperate to feed their babies or find their next fix, nor are they the helpless, brainless dupes of pimps. They are the new generation of casual sex-workers who find their own clients through the internet and fund their shopping trips and school fees by tending to the whims of lonely and/or sexually dissatisfied men. There’s no pleasure involved for them, but no pain either—it’s just about the money. They approach servicing these guys the same way they approach painting their nails—it's tedious, but what’cha gonna do?

Binoche’s Anne, slightly naive but not stupid, finds two girls to interview (both actresses are older than they look). There’s bright and breezy Charlotte (Anais Demoustier), who calls herself Lola, and even has a boyfriend. And there’s wary and resilient Alicja (Joanna Kulig), a Polish girl alone in Paris. Both girls are in France to attend to their further education, and both are prostituting themselves purely for comfort and convenience. Charlotte has found menial work babysitting or working in fast food outlets, but soon realised there was more money and free time in internet prostitution, and far less drudgery. Alicja quickly found that with no accommodation available, and no-one caring very much if she found any, it was better to shower off the semen in a beautiful apartment with all the trimmings, than to shiver in a hovel with her principles. Elles, filmed in 2011, is Mac Ahlberg’s Justine and Juliette for the 21st century.

To both girls, the sex act means nothing. They have no romantic illusions about men, and find the various sexual requirements of their customers faintly amusing. Far from being tragic victims, what none of their clients will ever realise is how hard the girls are laughing inside. If anything, their experiences have made them more world-wise... but also cynical and jaded. When forced to choose between living in squalor while working all hours God sends in a burger bar, or engaging in the occasional few hours with needy saddoes, the internet escort service option wins hands down (challenged about not using protection, Charlotte points out that most of these men live at home with their cold and unwilling wives, and that she’s more likely to catch an STD from her boyfriend than any of these dateless wonders).

Co-writer Malgorzata Szumowska (with Tine Byrckel) is no director, and needs a good editor; there is far too much footage of Binoche showing us what a tiring and tedious life she has as a housewife and mother, and how thoughtless and useless her husband and two sons are. Okay already, we get it--bloody men! We don’t need endless dull and boring scenes of how dull and boring her life is. All this cross-comparing gets in the way of the most important and successful parts of the film, which are the experiences of the girls, their background information, and their conversations with Ann, which are credible and honest. Byrckel and Szumowska deftly avoid all the tired old morals-and-murder cliches that others instinctively lunge at, because they’ve done their research... but the screenplay, which dwells too much on the impending nervous breakdown of Binoche’s character, is as big a mess as the direction. Still, better the truth in Elles than a technically flawless Hollywood confection offering fake solutions, false jeopardy, and happy endings.

Fascinating, non-judgemental, and painfully truthful, it is up to the viewer to get around his or her own prejudices to accept and acknowledge the information presented here. There are no lies from either side of the fence; it is undeniable that the system failed these girls (the hatchet-faced bitch at the school does nothing to help Alicja, and clearly couldn’t care less), but it is also true that both these girls had other options. They simply chose not to take them. Consequently, we are spared all the usual “helpless victims of a cruel patriarchal world” drivel that blights overtly feminist films. In fact, because Elles and its recent stablemate Student Services aren’t pursuing the prejudices of a feminist agenda, they are far more painful, potent and embarrassing films for male viewers to come to terms with, because we can’t point our fingers at suspect sexual politics.

Elles somehow manages to avoid all the cliches we expect to see wheeled out, and yet at the same time, none of it is particularly surprising. From the pathetic social inadequacies of the dismal men who exploit these girls, to the casual insouciance with which the girls approach what is simply a means to an end and exploit male frailties, it is all completely typical and quite disheartening, reminiscent of that wicked scene in the superb Klute, the granddaddy of all cynical whore films, when Jane Fonda’s character oozes desire while furtively looking at her watch. Nobody comes out of these liasons looking good, or indeed, feeling good. For both parties involved in a bad but pragmatic decision, it is a necessity to be dealt with, as unavoidable as mealtimes or taxes. The political pedant looks in vain for a hook to hang his or her presumptions on.

The value of Elles is in the detail. It’s a poorly structured film that fails to introduce its characters (Who’s the old man in the bed? The cast list says Anne’s father, but so what?/Who’s the elderly woman rifling through a wardrobe? The boss’ wife? No, turns out it’s Alicja’s mother—where’d she come from?). Flitting from one character to the next randomly, it fails to systematically lead the viewer from one scene to the next, awkward when events are being related in chronological sequence but with flashback narratives. Consequently, viewers of Elles watch in a constant state of confusion (flashbacks, such as Alicja’s disastrous arrival in Paris, are not clearly indicated as such), but within this jumble are some real gems; watching Elles is like picking through a box of costume jewellery in a flea market to find the occasional shiny stone of value. One clever scene has Charlotte enjoying wonderful playful loving sex with the guy we assume is her boyfriend, because of the closeness and tenderness on display, but it’s not. This charming fellow is a customer. The very next scene shows her with her real boyfriend, and when she’s with him, it’s all bad.

Elles is in this book because, like the girls, it’s selling sex, but apart from a good look at Alicja’s amazing tits (which are then urinated on, rather spoiling the moment!) it certainly won’t put you in the mood for a shag. The first sex scene is just under half-an-hour in, starting with a sophisticated meal and playfulness at the table and culminating with a doggy-style pumping over the leftovers and him pissing on her. A lot of the time, the girls tell Anne, the men just talk, and usually about their wives or their jobs.

Occasionally, it all goes tits up; Charlotte endures what is suggested to be anal rape with a wine bottle at one soiree from hell. Such nights are written off to experience. “I was really lucky” Alicja tells Anne. “After one month, I had a great apartment”. What she had to go through to get it we have already seen, but what could be more humiliating than the way the world was treating her before she sold her body? Elles allows for the uncomfortable truth that frankly, it’s all relative.

Elles is essentially a chick flick. It certainly won’t make men feel good, even though, at the risk of sounding patronising, we should all watch it. Sadly, it’s more likely to make women despise men than the most strident and partisan feminist film tirade, in which of course the dice are loaded, and also to make bitter men even more misogynistic. After all, if the wife’s lost interest, girlfriends aren’t forthcoming, and even the prostitutes are secretly laughing at you, where do we go from here? It’s one small step from Elles and Student Services to the world of Jack the Ripper.

Is this how sex for pleasure in the 21st century is to take shape? Is this how this book must end after a half century of sexual liberation? With sex outside marriage and reproduction reduced to basic, practical needs? With both sexes miles apart, fun-free and cynical, counting their money? Not with a bang, but a whimper?

Perhaps the answer is not to take sex so seriously, but try and retain the idea that it’s supposed to be fun. Fun!! In this respect, the nation that has the pursuit of happiness enshrined in its Constitution might be onto something. American college kids might be smarter than we think. (Whaaa??!? The generation that revived the terms sluts, bitches, and whores?). Yep, the most recent trend in pornography suggests that today’s teens and twenties might have a better attitude toward sex than we did, despite their return to infantile terminology, harsh condemnation, and the need for alcohol to kill their inhibitions or justify their exhibitions.

Back to 2011, the year of Elles. Seven girls and three guys descend a staircase into a basement, where the lights are turned off and the proceedings filmed in night vision. The guy behind the camera eggs them on. “C’mon, pair up! Okay, everybody get naked!”. A couple of the girls look taken aback, but as they came down the staircase flashing their tits, it’s not terribly convincing. Everybody knows why they’re here (interestingly, whereas girls in 1970s sex films used to feign ready-and-waiting promiscuity toward anyone and everyone, in the 21st century they--very briefly--feign five second surprise and reluctance). “Let’s see some titties!” pleads the cameraman in that uniquely American childlike manner. But he doesn’t even need to ask, let alone beg. One couple are already at it.

The Morally Corrupt company, who may or may not be ironically named, are offering 10,000 dollars for every sex tape they accept for their website and hardcore DVD series College Rules. This is the first in a series well into double figures now, and these may not be maths students, as this will divide up into about only a thousand dollars each, but hey, sex is fun, right? This is easy money. By the time the lights go up, everybody’s naked and well into it.

The Americans have an amusing tendency to narrate their sexual performance with a constant soundtrack of Austin Powers-style “yeah, baby!” commentary (whereas the British, as some of our stand-up comedians love to point out, tend to pump away silently!), and there’s an awful lot of “dude” and “bro” talk, but what is particularly interesting about College Rules is that unlike this opening submission with its male MC, the vast majority of these sex shows (and there are four on each disc), perhaps as many as three of each four, are clearly organised by the girls. And those that aren’t are having no trouble finding girls to participate in the party.

Night vision parties, toga parties, bubble-wrap parties, anything but clothes parties, come as you are parties, and oh yes, the competitions...

“Hello, everybody” greets a lusty and sparkle-eyed young woman in College Rules no. 16. “Me and my girls here” (she waves her hands toward five beaming friends seated around her in summer wear), “we heard about this sort of contest for College Rules, and it’s for how much? Ten thousand dollars, yeah! So we kind of came up with the idea to have, um, this blow job race… So we have our helpless victims" (the camera pans across to six naked young men, waiting patiently with goofy grins on their faces)... “Yeah, they’re into it...Let the cock-sucking begin!”

“This weekend we’re having a competition” laughs one of another six beauties in CR 12. “And these bitches” (she waves at the three on the end) “are going down!”. There’s much inaudible banter, bravado, laughter and carrying on. “We’re gonna invite as many guys over (as we can) and make them all come!”.

A car occupied by four teenage girls cruises the streets. “Hey, guys, we’re doing this video for College Rules! Whooo! We’re driving around campus here to try and find the right candidate to get his cock sucked so we can win some frickin’ money!”. Job done, they abandon him at the roadside after tricking him out of the car...

“Are you really shooting this?” marvels a lucky catch who has just lost his load all over his captor’s face in CR 2. “Yeah, frat boy, what the fuck do you think we’re doin’ here?” snaps the girl holding the camera.

As we have already noted in a previous chapter, in the 21st century women are frequently still categorised in porn’s advertising and marketing as milfs, sluts, teens, and ho’s (is this really how we feel about our mothers, sisters, friends, and daughters?). However, the content has seen an interesting shift in the balance of power. There is undoubtedly a trend in pornography at present for women to take a pro-active role in the proceedings, no longer portrayed as the pliant, submissive sex toy succumbing to seduction or the silly bimbo pretending to be conned into a blow job. What is most interesting about this is that there’s no script; it’s not faked or story-based (although this is not to say the women are not performing; in the presence of a camera, everybody is). Suddenly, in large numbers of porn productions, particularly in the reality and amateur sections, in the uninhibited arena of group sex, or the party, nightclub, or dorm room, the women are calling the shots, the men subservient and for the taking. It’s no longer just about what men want, it’s about what women want as well. And what’s particularly amusing is how baffled and timid some of the guys have become when faced with girls who pointedly want it and are looking at guys the way we look at them…

From prone to pro-active, from deflowered to empowered, the role of women in pornography has undergone some interesting changes during the last few decades. Somewhere between Russ Meyer and the Dancing Bear, the rules changed. And while porn is still porn, and—let’s be honest—primarily for men, the women who play in it are very different.

An olive-skinned, full-figured, corn-haired girl with a great body beckons to the camera her friend is holding (College Rules 1 again). ”There’s some cock waiting for us, and remember, twelve blow jobs today, that’s the goal!”. They barge in on a third collaborator, already hard at work on a boyfriend. The blonde politely requests a turn. Soon, all three are slurping away, until a late arrival turns up and joins in. Naked in the dorm corridor, having finished that guy off, they descend on two perplexed but grateful victims, and then barge in on another friend mid-fuck, imposing themselves on this guy too. Neither he nor his girlfriend seem to object. When his friend returns unexpectedly, he begins to back politely out, but is swiftly corralled and roped into the fun, which has turned into a guess-who’s-sucking-your-cock game...

A stunningly beautiful blonde with amazing tits positions her camera while her four friends look on in College Rules 2. In a moment, they’ll be pushing their bare asses into the camera and inviting the audience to e-mail their votes for best butt. “Hey, College Rules, this is Brittany... We’re in college and we’re super-broke, so we want you to pick us and not the others... I promise you won’t be sorry for picking us... Okay, guys, this is a pussy contest, because I know what you guys like--pussy, pussy, puss-ehhhh!".

Three other equally stunning young women have an alternate plan for College Rules 4... “Here’s what we’re gonna do. We’re gonna take a step outside, we’re gonna find some of these guys, and we’re gonna rate their cocks…”. And that, after sucking them into shape, is exactly what they do, with giant home-made cards marked one to ten, the not-quite-believing-it boys sitting patiently outside to be called in and mercilessly judged…

So okay, you get the idea. These girls aren’t shy, and they aren’t rare. College Rules DVDs were preceded by the very similar Dare Dorm series * , which premiered in 2007 and was in turn preceded by websites such as voyeurdorm, which would place cameras in Big Brother-style fashion to film the moments in an all-girl residence which mainstream television wouldn’t or couldn’t show, for the benefit of lonely or lustful young men, who could--for a fee--sign up to peep at any time, 24/7, to see the girls wandering around naked or planning ‘events’. This is the true legacy of so-called reality TV, and it’s what the Big Brother audience always wanted to see and never could. But in the majority of College Rules productions, the girls are in charge, not the boys, and not the broadcasting authorities or Facebook and You Tube regulators.

* Dare Dorm, which cut to the chase by offering cash for outrageous sexual behavior, was hindered--and still is--not by morality or censors, but by the wobbly and incompetent amateur camerawork of its submissions, which frequently often missed or botched the action. Ceilings, walls, and feet would whiz past, and in some cases, the picture would even turn sideways. Whichever way round the camera was, it usually found itself in the wrong place at the wrong time. College Rules, either through technological advances, natural growing familiarity with the technology, or by offering perhaps a bit of professional help, dispensed with all the wild, whirling cameras and delivered the goods. Given the vastly superior quality of College Rules, it's remarkable that Dare Dorm hasn’t upped its game. But College Rules rules at time of writing.

This is not to imply that Morally Corrupt and its rivals and imitators are some sort of new breed of sexual philanthropists or pioneers in a new way of thinking. They also simultaneously issue the more conventional and unfortunately titled Real Slut Parties, which generally feature equally up-for-it girls in their early twenties in more routine group sex shoots, and the depressing Submit Your Bitch (a “Readers' Wives” for the digital generation, presumably for all those customers intimidated by the other titles). These derogatory terms appear to cater to a certain type of man unable to cope with the idea that women might enjoy, and even initiate sex themselves. However, it is because these companies are so purely commercially minded and driven by what they perceive the market desires, that it is notable that Morally Corrupt have chosen to introduce further series in which the woman initiates the action, two genuine curiosities each putting the women in charge, Dancing Bear and Haze Her.

The Dancing Bear series features at some point a male stripper in a giant teddy bear costume (!) who turns up at organised all-girl birthday bashes and hen parties attended by dozens of twenty or thirty-something very attractive women, at least a fair few of whom will suck off the assorted male strippers who are in human form until a lucky few get fucked. There is a vast amount of fellatio involved.

Haze Her is the most bizarre series of them all, based around that uniquely American tradition of humiliating newbies who want to join school sororities. In these plainly bogus scenarios (often featuring returnees from the College Rules submissions recruited to make further cash; locations are also sometimes familiar) half-a-dozen usually clothed mean girls initiate half-a-dozen always naked pledges by making them take part in supposedly embarrassing * sex acts, which can range from streaking, naked sports, and Satanic rituals, to demeaning household tasks, catfights, or sex orgies. There’s not much sisterly solidarity here, but of course it’s all a sham, and the oh-no-what’s-happening worried looks to camera and lip-biting is often unintentionally hilarious.

Occasionally some baffled boys will be drafted in, but the vast majority of these are girl-on-girl. The abundant nudity is enough for me, but who the hell is this for? It’s a sort of more mean-spirited version of the party game tasks of the Big Brother inspired reality shows, which appears to be the clue, but the draw seems to be less in the pseudo-sadism, which as mentioned earlier, is archly fake (to the point of making Bound Heat look like CCTV from Guantanamo Bay), as in the shock appeal of what these girls are willing to go through on camera for a couple of thousand bucks each.

As the Haze Her discs, like Dare Dorm and College Rules, are now well into double-figures (with four scenarios on each edition), the shock factor is beginning to wear thin. Perhaps I’m a little credulous, as I always have trouble taking this on board, but women keep telling me that girls are much nastier to each other than boys, and I always thought they were much more empathetic and communicative with each other than men. Perhaps I should still believe in the tooth fairy and the easter bunny too, but I still see (in very general terms) men as alienated and competing with each other, and women collectively supportive and sympathetic in sexual matters. On the other hand, get a load of these two little darlings from College Rules no. 9, sitting in a car they look barely old enough to drive.

“We don't want any money for this at all! We just want to prove to you that this sorority is fucking whores! All they want, and all they do, is sex. All day. And we’re gonna take this camera with us and prove to you that they’re fucking whores. And we graduate anyway, so we don’t give a fuck. Here’s to graduation!”.

It turns out that most of the sex acts are performed, or provoked, by them! “I’m just getting some exciting features of this wonderful night” says her camera-toting friend, as she barges in on two couples getting down to having sex. “Just keep going, don’t be a pussy!”.

Or there’s this, from College Rules 12…

“Hey, Tommy, I know that you cheated on me, you scumbag, so I made a little revenge tape, I hope y’all like it... I don’t really care if I win the ten grand for College Rules or not, because I have already done fucking everybody on your floor, and by the way, you have a really tiny dick, super-tiny (displays snapshot), and by the way, there’s cum on your toothbrush”.

Elsewhere, six girls energetically and acrobatically yank the clothes off each other while performing gymnastics of the traditional sort in their bedroom (CR 14). Then, while a couple engage in some girl-on-girl action, the others suck off their boyfriends.

In the 21st century porn dares to venture where the bullies and control freaks of reality TV flinch. But just how real is all this ‘reality’? Suppose this is just great acting?

To a certain extent, it is. The parties are organised, the camera is ready and waiting, the participants know what is expected of them. But despite putting on a performance, no-one, other than the Haze Her harridans and their ‘helpless victims’, is playing a part. They are themselves, with their real friends and partners, in real surroundings and locations. The closest thing to a scenario so far, other than a few lame faked “practical jokes”, has been a “peeping tom” storyline in CR4 and a couple of “birthday treats”.

It remains unclear how many of these party girls (or guys) regret their actions a week, month, or years later, although the clear implication is that this is regular behavior rather than a drinks-enhanced aberration (despite the tell-tale red paper cups scattered about the scene). Whatever excuses may be made belatedly, and no doubt a wailing repenter or two will one day be found, these discs are compiled over a period of time, not on one reckless night, and are very well organised, with plenty of time for backing out or sobering up (at time of writing, in the entire history of the College Rules series, only one instigator has been pixilated out, having apparently joined her friends in the intro and then reconsidered). So if anyone does suddenly need to rewrite their personal history, the “I was tricked/drunk/acting out of character/didn’t know what I was doing” retraction will not fly.

If pornography still has the potential to shock in the 21st century, then it is not so much the party-fuelled antics in the college dorm-rooms that are surprising, as the continued participation of any women--so many women--in the more conventional, demeaning porn shoots that make up the other fifty percent of the porn market for life’s inadequates, the men whose fears and insecurities require them to dominate or demean women through name-calling power games.

Some of the women (happily a minority) pander to this mindset to make the money. While there is occasional talk in derogatory terms of “whores” or “sluts” in College Rules (as often from the girls as from the boys), the atmosphere in the vast majority of submissions is generally one of casual indifference and bemusement, with no-one judging or demeaning anyone else. The occasional rare references to “whores” and “sluts” seem not to be hateful, but simply learned behavior as the players try to follow the conventions of the genre and the requirements of the market, sometimes picking the wrong ones (it has to be said that the blurbs on the CR sleeves are often tediously lame in this respect, trying to sound shocked and out of the loop, when the clear indication given by the product is that this is no big deal, fairly typical, another day, another party; in this respect, we have not moved on much from the Schoolgirl Reports). On the discs themselves, the guys in College Rules seem to regard these events as standard, par for the course. At the very least, they simply look pleasantly mystified as their shorts are pulled down.

Remember those arrogant ignoramuses in Stanley Long’s Naughty forty years ago, for whom sex was such a big deal? Today’s teens are living in the world they dreamt of, the world they cleared the way for. Uncensored, unrestricted, unabashed, unsurprised, unashamed. If they want it. Surprisingly, not all of them do. In one sequence found on College Rules 19, several guys are openly reluctant to participate, and as many are seen declining an invitation to strip off and and party down with a small army of naked nymphs as accepting. I know, I couldn’t believe it either, but there it is.

One boy literally flees (amid a hail of jeers and paper cups) as the room fills with naked bodies, so it should not be implied that these party animals are representative of all college kids in the 21st century. But, as I write, there are twenty College Rules discs on the market, with an average of ten participants in each segment, and six new releases a year. That’s approximately forty per disc, over six hundred over-eighteen college kids so far, and that’s not including Dare Dorm, Haze Her, or anything else on the market. Europe’s Party Hardcore, to name a comparable series, has racked up three times as many editions. As we observed and acknowledged earlier, there are many different types and styles of sex entertainments out there today to replace the cinema fare of the ‘70s, but this genre represents most clearly the changes in society that have occurred within less than a half-century. In the Schoolgirl Reports of the 1970s, it was the older generation, in suits and ties and floral print dresses, covered in the dust of the ages, who were shocked and appalled at the sexual adventurousness exhibited by the young, who for their part, took smug, joyous pleasure in lecturing the older generation on how normal and natural it all is, and what hypocrites they all were. The media called it “the generation gap”, but it was more of a canyon, as we saw during our Weekend with the Babysitter and others like it. But the generation gap has closed.

Somewhere along the way (and yes, I’m generalising), the post-‘60s generation grew up into mostly tolerant and understanding parents who knew and expected their kids to have a good time while they were young, just as they had. But during the 1980s, a new conservatism swept in across Britain and America, and many kids seem to have adopted a whole new range of judgemental prejudices and double-standards while simultaneously enjoying the sexual freedoms the previous generation fought for. Despite the young’s new laid-back take-sex-for-granted common sense (still generalising), and almost bored, half-hearted attitude toward the subject, society, and particularly American and British society, remains hyper-hypocritical about sexual matters. And yet, in the era of Facebook, smartphone, and YouTube, few young people have much to hide, or care to hide it. *

* The individual who loses employment or advancement or social status as a result of (lets call it) an internet appearance (as has happened with postings on social networking sites) will ultimately be as much a thing of the past as the gays who found themselves shunned and sacked from their jobs in the 1970s for coming out. There will be skeletons rattling in every closet like a fucking mariachi band. So much so, that when the door flies open once in a while, no-one will much care.

To the viewer born before, say, 1980 (and I include myself), the relaxed, casual abandon with which the young over-eighteens of the 21st century strip, suck, and fuck in front of the camera lens is genuinely jaw-dropping. These people are fucking for fun, for money, or both, and it’s not even exhibitionism. They just don’t care who’s watching. It doesn’t matter that they’re naked. As the girl in Cool It, Carol said, to the horror and excitement of the tabloids, “It’s just a fuck”.

But while sex and nudity may have been no big deal in the 1970s, there was a certain amount of privacy and discretion involved, a degree of caution over who saw what, how much, and when, even at wild parties. And the image was rarely permanent, or repeatable; kids did not carry recording devices around with them 24/7. If someone had pulled a camera out at a party that was, let’s say, heating up, there would have been instant and unanimous appalled disapproval. Who you screwed was often information imparted to only your closest friends and confidants, an open secret at best. Only your best friends saw you naked. Smartphones, You Tube, Facebook, holidays in Ibiza or Spring Break, naked bike rides and fun runs, mass skinnydipping and nude beaches have put paid to all of that. And I’m not getting all prissy and nostalgic here, we’re living in a better world because of it. No-one has any shame any more, it seems. And since when was shame a good thing?

Pornography invades every man’s life, and most of us invite it in. I smile when I hear a woman say she has a man who “just isn’t interested”. Yeah, right. If true, that man either has such a very low sex drive he should be pitied, or his interests lie elsewhere. Either way, she should be worried. A man can be devoted to one woman and still be interested in enjoying the beauty of others. It would be strange if he wasn’t.

Every guy has a stash somewhere of his “personal best”. Every guy. And every guy has his own wonderful memories (and fantasies). But I simply do not believe that most men enjoy seeing porn advertised and marketed by sleazy thugs referring to sluts, milfs, and ho’s. Men don't talk to each other as much as women, but when we do, we don’t talk like that, and I have far more faith in my fellow man than to believe that this is how the majority of other men think (some do, I know—but most of us look down on those guys). With porn, as with women, we simply take the best of what we can get, in the form it comes in. The Haze Her discs, for example, genuinely mystify me, but we choose from what is offered and available, both in reality and fantasy, and the options today have never been better, freer, or more varied. I don’t consider girls who go straight to bed to be “sluts”, or the girls in the Real Slut Party series to be “sluts”, and I feel deeply sorry for any sad sack who does. So why does porn do this? Is it really such a commercial negative to do as Filmerotica did, and to raise the bar?

America’s Playboy magazine, whatever one may think of it, was a major turning point in the sexual growth of society back in the ‘50s and ‘60s because it made its reputation on admiring women, rather than fearing them or hating them like, say, Russ Meyer’s audience of pulp mag-devouring hardhats… even if its attitude to their capabilities and possibilities was limited by the prejudices and assumptions of the time. The laughable image of the “bunny girl” and that patronising adoration (“Cindy likes reading books by the fireside and cuddling kittens…”) now looks hilariously out of date to most of us today, and yet by 1950s and ‘60s standards the magazine was progressive, presenting sex not as something secret and sordid, but with an air of intelligence and sophistication compatible with the era. So how did we get back to milfs, sluts, and whores? Who dropped the ball? In my opinion, it wasn’t the conservatives and reactionaries, who haven’t changed much over the years, it was the liberals, progressives, and supposed intelligentsia who lost the plot, and turned sex over to them…

We touched on, in the chapters on the Adventures and Confessions films, how the audience for those films was created by television’s reluctance, indeed outright refusal, to portray sex as simple fun and pleasure, rather than some sort of “problem” or “issue”. In 1970s Britain, the sex films flourished and cinema survived by providing the content that broadcasters wouldn’t or couldn’t bring themselves to offer, thanks to the presence of the censors and “regulators” in the television industry. In the 1980s, video made the European “art film” and private cinema club redundant by offering no-frills tit-and-bum videos that got straight down to business with all the crassness the amateur could muster. Now the technology existed for anybody to put bums on seats by putting breasts on TV screens.

In the 1990s, satellite and cable TV via the Astra footprint gave home viewers the television the mainstream broadcasters still couldn’t bring themselves to provide—stripper game shows and sex-coms from Germany and Italy. Bizarrely, British television’s need to cloak salacious come-on TV behind the facade of the documentary ensured that every sexual interest got an airing with the single exception of straightforward heterosexual sex. Everything had to be a joke (look at those drunken revellers, those wacky, crazy Europeans), sex education (we’re all fumbling idiots), an issue, or a concern, or a problem, or a largely hyped-up controversy debated by extreme views. Even Big Brother was initially promoted as a potentially fascinating sociological/psychological experiment, rather than the peculiar marriage of prudishness and peeping it became.

Thirty-five years after VCRs brought porn into the households that wanted it, and twenty-five years after the Astra satellite brought far more flexible European television into British homes, this extraordinary situation still survives. Ironically, while there is much normal, ordinary, everyday sex on the internet and DVD, British broadcast television still forbids it. Consequently, because mainstream television still forbids sex and nudity to be presented purely as entertainment, sex must be shown as Something Else, and certain channels in the U.K. are becoming the creeps, weirdoes, and perverts of the 21st century, showing odd behavior, sexual misfortune, and exploitative aberrations under the guise of documentary and social interest.

This approach of excusing or justifying voyeuristic exploitation has now moved beyond sexual matters, and seeped into all areas of documentary or debate on television, making hypocrites out of the entire industry, who in the 21st century have become contemporary carnival barkers pulling punters into slack-jawed, finger-pointing freak shows of increasing two-faced callousness, stupidity, and unpleasantness that demean us all… a direct result of the media’s belief, rightly or wrongly, that the British can’t admit they like sex as much as the rest of Europe. In the U.S., Hollywood sets the agenda, and the MPPA, You Tube and Facebook set the standards of “decency”, and decide what we may or may not see and/or show.

Is this healthy? Look how the sexual repression and restraint of 1970s television in Britain turned out—culminating with Operation Yewtree, a police investigation into massive cover-ups and ignorance of celebrity child abuse and sexual assault. And these are the chumps who have been making the rules, suggesting the limits the rest of us should live by, deciding what’s “acceptable” and what isn’t. On 21st century TV, everything but real, ordinary sex gets a look-in. For that, you need the internet, supposedly the bad boy of the media. Really? *

* To be fair, some satellite channels such as Sky and Bravo did attempt late-night sex shows presented purely as entertainment, but were constantly thwarted by the professional complainers and various official bodies. These shows, coy and cautious, and mostly about porn rather than sex, have faded away, no doubt made redundant by the internet.

But just as the broadcast and print media became the power that set the social agenda after the church and the government lost authority and respect in the 1960s, so in the 21st century has the internet now wrested it away from television and newspapers. The first thing to take a hit was censorship, or to put it more accurately, the ability of government, the MPPA, the BBC, or the BBFC or anyone else to completely control what we see, say, listen to, or read (the more prudish mainstream internet sites can only restrict their own content, not anybody else’s; thus, they restrict only themselves). The prudes in the press still rant impotently about sexual content on television and the internet (cinema long ago ceased to have any bite), but for better or for worse, we are all our own censors now.

So where have the supposedly open-minded, easy-going liberals been while all this has been going on? Playboy magazine and the 1960s counter-culture might seem like odd bed-mates, but they both viewed sex as normal and natural, an attitude that prevailed during the ‘60s and early ‘70s. However, the first people to take film and television seriously, beyond the confines of who was dating who, were the liberal left, who saw that popular culture influenced society hugely and was worthy of serious critical and analytical attention. The first magazine I ever wrote for professionally was a listings magazine with a left-wing agenda. That agenda, at the time, made sense when kept simple: racial equality, sexual equality. Freedom and tolerance. A fair and civilised world. Who could argue with that?

Unfortunately, as the ‘70s ended and the ‘80s began, the supposed intelligentsia had drifted down the twin blind alleys of militant man-loathing feminism (as opposed to equality and women’s rights, which everyone in their right mind agreed with) and that convenient bad guy for the bigot, political correctness (cue eye roll). Suddenly, as pre-1960s prudishness withered on the vine, and the conservatives lightened up, the liberal left had become panic-stricken prohibitive, puritanical bullies. No contradictory views were permitted, sex became interchangeable with sexism, and all images of heterosexual activity and even sexual images of women, whether porn, art, erotica, popular entertainment, advertising, or whatever, acquired varying degrees of unacceptability and offensiveness to a certain mindset. Suddenly, they had to be judged. Curiously, this mindset, while very obviously held only by a minority (popular culture being the evidence), and also very much today in retreat, still holds sway in all arenas of power and influence—the press, television and radio, education, academia, local government… anywhere policy is decided, these people have become the Thought Police.

Watching the media, academics, and other allegedly intelligent people squirm over the years as they try to reconcile their natural human urges with some of the films and images featured in this book (which they are obliged to disapprove of by dogma, but sometimes desperate to find excuses to like) has been an unedifying and embarrassing spectacle. See them wriggle, like worms on a hook. And still the films, books, and magazines keep coming, full of half-naked sexy girls and hunky guys. How frustrating for them. These supposed intellectuals, having rationalised and rejected religion, have, with “gender studies” (the misunderstanding of the bleedin’ obvious), taken themselves all the way back to the concept of sexual pleasure being sinful and guilty, and quite understandably, the rest of society doesn’t want to accompany them back to the middle ages. Nearly fifty years after the equal rights movement morphed into “women’s liberation” and men became monsters, still, the vast majority of women consume fashion magazines, diet books and romances, plot to secure partners and children, plan families, and delight in shopping and furnishing their home, even while enjoying the long overdue equality, career options, and belated freedoms of the present day. Much to the bafflement and fury of these oddballs, it turns out the vast majority of women like being women. And like sex. And like men.

With the once-progressives sidelined into absurdity and obscurity, everyday sexual attitudes and behavior in popular culture became the vacated and repossessed property of the lowbrow. In Britain that meant Confessions films, a Carry On revival, and Electric Blue videotapes, in America, grindhouse, Penthouse, and Screwballs-type films.

It was a sad end to the sexual revolution, but things have somehow levelled out and the end result during the 1990s and on has seen the nutters marginalised (prigs and pigs are on the defensive now) and a western society that, in the 21st century, is weaving around in the middle-of-the-road like a drunk driver, between openness and privacy, frankness and ignorance, amusement and outrage, knowledge and denial, indulgence and restraint, offence and acceptance.

What does the Fifty Shades of Grey phenomenon say about us? Why can’t we watch a sex orgy on television? Why have we still got Babe Station? Why are the lonely people in Escort Girls still out there? Why are there wife-beaters and paedophiles?

Why are so many people still unable to differentiate between sex, sexy, and sexism? Why does honest sexual desire still make so many people angry and confused? Society seems to be offended by everything and nothing simultaneously. Mostly these days, when the waters are calm, there seems to be grudging tolerance on all sides. Perhaps that’s the most we can hope for, or indeed ask for in this strange new world.

For most of us, the ‘60s and ‘70s loosened clothes, conventions, and morals that had been uncomfortably restricting. The decades I have lived through have seen vast improvements and advances in the quality of life and the capacity for happiness and satisfaction, even if they have brought new challenges and obstacles with them. In general, things are much better, even if occasionally society seems to take two steps forward and then one step back.

When we look at the unchallenged accepted wisdom of previous decades that we now so easily and often unanimously dismiss—women not allowed to own property or vote in elections, sex before marriage a disgrace, single mothers a social embarrassment, homosexuality a criminal offence, children should be seen and not heard, women in sexy clothes “asking” to be raped—it is a sobering reminder to continue to question the supposed truths of today. Currently in Britain, cheap TV productions love to cherrypick TV and film clips from the 1970s that haven’t aged well and present them out of context for contemporary audiences to gasp at, but it shouldn’t be too hard to do the same with current media when the time comes. After all, the same people who laughed their heads off at late-night screenings of Reefer Madness and Duck and Cover films in their youth are now sucking up Al Gore’s convenient lie An Inconvenient Truth, and telling our school children that carbon dioxide is bad, the world is running out of water and trees, and that the climate change that has been with us since the dinosaurs died is caused by modern industry. There will be no shortage of idiotic things or people to point at and laugh at.

All of this is just one man’s opinion, based on his experiences and observations. However, one thing is for sure, and irrefutable, carved in stone yesterday, today, and tomorrow, from wherever you stand personally and politically: hate breeds hate and feeds on hatred, whether it comes from inappropriate or degrading porn (of which there is still plenty) or uptight prudes, bigots and blamers, foisting their fears, politics, prejudices, and fantasies on the rest of us as they try and police our language, opinions, and private lives.

And there is one other thing I am absolutely sure of: Sexual repression feeds perversity like the abomination of paedophilia and other foul behavior. Sex crimes and their perpetrators are surely the result of sexual misfortune, cruelty, frustration, deprivation, and inadequacy, not joyful participation in pleasure. When men and women are happy and satisfied, sexually or otherwise, they tend not to be brutal, spiteful, anxious, and malicious. Yeah, I’m glad Clinton got a blow job in the Oval Office; I only wish some of our other politicians were that calm and contented!

Where do we go from here? We shall see. Life is what happens while the censors, snobs, bigots, moralists, prudes, hypocrites, and social engineers are making other plans. But let’s hope we all, men and women, continue to lighten up, have fun, and enjoy ourselves, both in life and love and in front of our ever-multiplying number of screens. Our culture shifts and changes, as this book has shown, but human nature does not change, and will not bend to the whims of religious zealotry, faddish fashionable opinion, or “political correctness”. Fascist bullies and ideological censors may secure their small victories at mad moments in time, but can never triumph over love, lust, and biology. And popular culture will continue to reflect the times in which we live far more honestly and accurately than any other source of opinion and information, and that is why I find it fascinating.

sources and resources

Aguilar, Carlos, Jess Franco, El Sexo Del Horror, Bizarre Sinema/Glittering Images,

1999

Amazon films and TV department

BBC News website, obituary of Mary Whitehouse, November 24th, 2001

Barker, Dennis, obituary of Mary Whitehouse, The Guardian, November 24th, 2001

Brown, Jared, Alan J. Pakula: his films and his life, Back Stage Books, 2005

C4 Press release, Last Tango in Paris, February 1993

C4 Press release quoting the Daily Mail review of Performance, December, 1987

Catterall, Ali, Wells, Simon, Your Face Here, Fourth Estate, 2001

College Rules, discs 1 to 20, Morally Corrupt, 2011--2015

Decharne, Max, King's Road; the Rise and Fall of the Hippest Street in the World,

Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2005/Orion, 2006

Dewe Mathews, Tom, Censored, Chatto and Windus, 1994

Ekeroth, Daniel, Swedish Sensationfilms, Bazillion Points Books, 2011

Fenton, Harvey (ed.), Flesh and Blood volumes one and two, FAB Press, 1998, 2011

Frasier, David K., The Russ Meyer Collection DVD booklet, 2011

Halliwell, Leslie, Filmgoer's Companion, seventh edition, Granada, 1980

Hunt, Leon, British Low Culture, Routledge, 1998

Internet Movie Data Base

Jones, Martin, Psychedelic Decadence, Headpress, 2001

Jones, Mick, Performance, Bloomsbury Pocket Movie Guide, 1999

Keesey, Douglas, Contemporary Erotic Cinema, kamera books, 2012

Koetting, Christopher, Mind Warp: the Story of New World Pictures, Hemlock Books,

2009

Long, Stanley, Sheridan, Simon, X-Rated: Adventures of an Exploitation Filmmaker,

Reynolds and Hearn, 2008

McDonough, Jimmy, Big Bosoms and Square Jaws; the biography of Russ Meyer,

Vintage/Jonathan Cape; Random House 2005

McGillivray, David, Doing Rude Things: the History of the British Sex Film, 1957-1981,

sun tavern fields, 1992

Medhurst, Andy, A National Joke: Popular Comedy and English Cultural Identities,

Routledge, 2007

Oberg, Rich, and others, Men's Adventure, Taschen, 2004

Petit, Chris, review of Adventures of a Private Eye, Time Out, 24th June 1977

Reboll, Antonio Lazaro, Willis, Andrew, Spanish Popular Cinema, Inside Popular Film

series, Manchester University Press, 2004

Romney, Jonathan, Seasoned Director (Eric Rohmer), City Limits June 14-21, 1990

Sandbrook, Dominic, Never Had It So Good, Little Brown, 2005

Savage, Jon, writing about Performance in Snapshots of the Sixties, Sight and Sound,

issue unknown, early 1990s

Schickel, Richard, Clint Eastwood; a biography, Random House, 1996

Shephard, Jewel, Invasion of the B-Girls, Eclipse, 1992

Sheridan, Simon, Keeping the British End Up, Titan Books, 2011

Siegel, Don, A Siegel Film, Faber and Faber, 1993

Sinyard, Neil, The Films of Nicolas Roeg, Letts Film Makers, 1991

Stevenson, Jack, Scandinavian Blue, McFarland, 2010

Tickell, Paul, writing about Performance in article on The Long Good Friday,

Time Out, January 16th, 1981

uncredited, obituary of Mary Whitehouse, The Telegraph, November 24th, 2001

unknown hack, Marlon Brando shocker, Sunday Mirror, December 17th, 1972

Waddell, Calum, Jack Hill, Film by Film, McFarland, 2009

Woods, Paul (ed.), The Very Breast of Russ Meyer, Ultrascreen/Plexus, 2004

DVD notes were also consulted when available or applicable, and, of course,

the DVDs themselves! Enjoy--and caveat emptor!

Once again, a big thanks to Chris for getting me through the formatting,

and to all those who provided art, video and DVDs, each and every one believing

they were the first to make lame jokes about sore wrists and poor eyesight etc. etc…!

Oh, how we laughed… The spirit of Rik Mayall lives on. (Whoof!) And apologies to my

daughter for the algorithms now running riot on her Amazon Recommendations…

about the author

Jon Abbott has been writing professionally for over thirty years, having started out in 1982 by writing brief previews and reviews for the London listings magazine City Limits. For two years he contributed an annual report on the U.S. TV season to the trade paper Television Weekly before it was amalgamated with Broadcast. Since then, he has written over 400 articles and features for around two dozen different trade, specialist, and populist publications, including numerous regular columns and features.

In 1983, he wrote his first article for the British science-fiction and fantasy media magazine Starburst, on the cult series The Prisoner. This was followed by features on The Outer Limits, Danger Man, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, The Man from UNCLE, V, The Greatest American Hero, Blue Thunder, Knight Rider, Airwolf, Streethawk, Otherworld, ALF, Batman, Battlestar Galactica, The Time Tunnel, Fantastic Journey, Land of the Giants, and The Invisible Man. For the companion title TV Zone, he has written about Misfits of Science, Beauty and the Beast, Planet of the Apes, Fantastic Journey, Quantum Leap, supernatural anthology shows, Starman, Man from Atlantis, The Incredible Hulk, Spider-Man, Logan's Run, The Invaders, The Avengers, and Hercules--the Legendary Journeys.

For six years he wrote TV news and individual features for Video Today in the popular column Time-Shift, which he proposed in 1984 and which became one of the most well-received features in the magazine. These pages included previews of new shows, retrospectives on popular old series, genre pieces, and regular updates on the U.S. TV scene. He wrote individual features on Night Gallery, Dallas, Dynasty, Soap, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Hill Street Blues, Mike Hammer, Britain's Euston Films, producers Donald Bellisario and Quinn Martin, Bilko, V, The Invaders, Cheers, Police Squad, Lou Grant, The A-Team, Crazy Like a Fox, The Equalizer, The Prisoner, The Twilight Zone, Lost in Space, L.A. Law, Moonlighting, Mission: Impossible, Star Trek--the Next Generation, The Time Tunnel, supernatural anthology shows, the anti-violence-on-TV lobby, and the arrival of satellite TV. He also reviewed video releases. Particularly successful were the occasional TV Index features listing the status of then-current American shows both in the U.S. and the U.K.

Between October 1984 and March 1986 he wrote a regular column of criticism and comment on U.K. scheduling policy for the highly regarded industry journal Stills, and from September 1986 he had a number of features on program planning developments in British, American and satellite TV published in Media Week. These features covered such issues as the program scheduling strategies of ITV, the birth and growth of Sky Television, a comparison of the original SuperChannel and Sky satellite services, the U.S. TV seasons, video releases of popular television series, merchandising spin-offs from television series, how British broadcasters used imported American programmes in their schedules, the perils of sponsorship and the American experience, television censorship, the merger of satellite broadcasters Sky and BSB, and the purchase of MTM by U.K. broadcaster TVS.

In 1988 he began contributing to What Satellite magazine, writing features on such shows as The Legend of Custer, Hawk, Lost in Space, 21, Jump Street, St. Elsewhere, Murphy Brown, The Flash, Melrose Place, Beverly Hills 90210, Steven Bochco's Civil Wars, Stephen Cannell's Stingray, The Simpsons, Land of the Giants, Tom and Jerry, Taxi, Cheers, Frasier and The Twilight Zone.

For The Dark Side, a horror and sci-fi magazine, he has provided features on Alien Nation, The Outer Limits, Werewolf, Land of the Giants, Star Trek, Star Trek--the Next Generation, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, Lost in Space, the Stephen King mini-series It, The Flash, and The X-Files.

For Video Buyer he covered the video release of Star Trek, V, The Avengers, Robin of Sherwood, Doctor Who, the Marvel Video Comics, '50s sci-fi films, the early Superman serials and TV shows, the output of the Hanna-Barbera and Warner Brothers animation studios, The Outer Limits, The Twilight Zone, and Twin Peaks. For Video World he covered the video release of Lost in Space, Cheers, The Simpsons, and Twin Peaks and wrote their Satellite Preview column, which has included features on Beverly Hills 90210, The New Avengers, Charlie's Angels, MASH, Twin Peaks, Robin Hood films, Quantum Leap, Lou Grant, Star Trek--Voyager, Earth 2, The Invaders, Kolchak--the Night Stalker, Planet of the Apes, Alien Nation, Automan, Manimal, Starsky and Hutch, Murder One, The X-Files, modern westerns, Space--Above and Beyond, Bewitched, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Starman, Strange Luck, and Hercules--the Legendary Journeys.

In November 1989 he was awarded a special commendation for his writing on American TV and satellite TV in Media Week from the first Broadcast Journalist Awards, sponsored by TV-am.

During 1990 and 1991 he produced the column Broadcast News, a monthly collection of strange stories, anecdotes, and comment and criticism on television for What Video magazine.

In 1995, he was asked to contribute a monthly TV news column for Home Entertainment, and also wrote additional features on the U.S. TV season, the Cartoon Network and TNT, and Bravo's ‘Weird Worlds’ strip. He was also invited to join the writing team of SFX, for which he reviewed Robocop--the series, The X-Files, Sliders, Highlander, and Space: Above and Beyond. For ‘Yesterday's Heroes’, a regular monthly feature in the early issues of SFX, he featured The Six Million Dollar Man, Wonder Woman, Blue Thunder, The Invisible Man, Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased), UFO, The Time Tunnel, Manimal, Max Headroom, The Man from UNCLE, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, Starman, V, Batman, Mission: Impossible, The Incredible Hulk and Land of the Giants. For another then-new publication, Cult Times, he wrote about Earth 2, The Six Million Dollar Man, Kolchak--the Night Stalker, and Sliders.

In 1996, he was invited to write for the SF media magazine Dreamwatch and the new publications Infinity and Comedy Review. For Comedy Review, he prepared features and episode listings for the series Soap and MASH. For Infinity, he wrote a monthly Cult TV column and contributed articles on The X-Files, War of the Worlds--the series, Space--Above and Beyond, V, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Dark Skies and Lois and Clark: New Adventures of Superman. For Dreamwatch, he wrote about The Green Hornet, the Fantasy Worlds of Irwin Allen documentary, The X-Files, sci-fi in The Simpsons, Fantastic Journey, The Man from Atlantis, Fireball XL-5, the 1950s Superman series, and The Pretender. His exclusive reviews of Millennium and Dark Skies were the first published in the U.K.

Over a five year period between 1997 and 2001, he covered over forty episodes of different vintage sci-fi series for the ‘Fantasy Flashback’ series for TV Zone, which featured an individual episode of a classic TV fantasy series examined in detail. Shows covered included Star Trek, The Outer Limits, The Time Tunnel, Lost in Space, Batman, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, Mork and Mindy, Battlestar Galactica, The Greatest American Hero, Once a Hero, The Flash, Land of the Giants, Otherworld, The Man from UNCLE, The Wild Wild West, Airwolf, Kolchak--the Night Stalker, The Invaders, Thunderbirds, Quantum Leap, Mission: Impossible, Bewitched, The Flintstones, The Twilight Zone, Streethawk, and I Dream of Jeannie. He also reviewed third season Stargate for TV Zone, and later wrote a ‘Retro TV’ column for TV Zone covering all aspects of classic TV.

In 2006, American publishers McFarland published his book Irwin Allen Television Productions 1964-1970, a detailed critical review of the 1960s sci-fi series Lost in Space, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, The Time Tunnel, and Land of the Giants, and in 2009 Stephen J. Cannell Television Productions: A History of All Series and Pilots, a critical study of 22 series from this prolific producer, including The Rockford Files, The A-Team, and Wiseguy. Also in 2009, the Irwin Allen book was reprinted in softback. Now concentrating solely on 20th century film and TV, and self-publishing on Amazon’s Createspace platform, he has published The Elvis Films, Cool TV of the 1960s: Three Shows That Changed the World, and Strange New World: Sex Films of the 1970s.

Free Reading: See my lists on the Internet Movie Data Base,

all under the pre-fix DISCOVER...

See my Amazon Author’s Page

also available from the same author

Irwin Allen Television Productions, 1964—1970

Before establishing himself as the "master of disaster” with the smash hit 1970s films The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno, and before there was even CGI, Irwin Allen created four of the most exciting and enduring television sci-fi series of the 1960s—Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, Lost in Space, The Time Tunnel, and Land of the Giants.

Filmed within yards of each other on the busy sound stages and backlots of 20th Century Fox, Allen’s shows were one third Jules Verne and Conan Doyle, one third Saturday morning serials, and one third 1950s bug-eyed monster movies. He also had a “house style” created through using the same actors, writers, directors, sets, props, locations and even aliens and monsters that made them 100 percent Irwin Allen. His tricks and techniques, sometimes adapted from earlier sources, others devised by himself and his award-winning special effects teams, have influenced other productions from Star Trek through to the present day.

Allen’s imprint is everywhere on fantasy TV. Every SF TV show owes him something, and yet none have matched his series for pace, excitement, innovation, or originality. If it was eloquence, scientific accuracy, or profound commentary on the meaning of life you were looking for, then it was best not to look in Irwin Allen productions—but for superb special effects of the day, excellent sets, superior guest performances, action and adventure, hard-nosed heroes, horrible monsters, sinister villains, and sheer escapism, then Irwin was the go-to guy. When Irwin Allen’s series were good, they were great. And when they were bad (and sometimes they were)—they were great fun.

This book—a critical history, written by a lifelong fan—documents and examines in detail the premise and origin of each show, and discusses fairly and objectively all 274 episodes of his four fantasy TV series, all of which promoted and perpetuated the traditions and trademarks of pulp sci-fi on film.

also available from the same author

Cool TV of the 1960s: Three shows that Changed the World

It was perhaps synchronicity, everything in the right place at the right time. After Prohibition, the Depression, WWII, and McCarthyism, mainstream America wanted some fun—in color. The post-War world was ready for a New Age and new ideas, for which Elvis and JFK had paved the way. When pop music, the art world, and the fashion world told the rest of the world to lighten up and loosen up, the timing was right. Television followed other aspects of popular culture just as enthusiastically as the public did—and the buzzword of 1960s popular culture and media was NEW! NEW! NEW!

The 1960s was an extraordinary time of creativity for television, with over thirty classic shows on the air in the mid-1960s simultaneously. September 1964 had seen the debut of secret agent show The Man from UNCLE, which in 1965, soared up the ratings to become an all-media phenomenon, influencing toys, books, comics, film, fashion, satirical comedy, and advertising.

Although its beginning was a little more complicated, The Man from UNCLE was conceived quite bluntly as a TV version of James Bond. It became an entity in its own right when development fell to the enormously creative Sam Rolfe, who single-handedly devised the complicated, multi-faceted organisation that was the United Network Command for Law Enforcement—UNCLE. The end result was the most dynamic, complex, fast-paced, action-packed, sexy, and exhilarating adventure show of the 20th century; as the first television series to employ the hand-held camera, the faddish, youth-orientated shows that preceded it moved at a snail’s pace in comparison. And with the casting of a co-star who became the most popular MGM actor of all time, UNCLE thawed the Cold War and created the buddy movie.

But with the death of President Kennedy, the brave new world of youthful hope and co-operation that the UNCLE franchise represented had taken a severe blow. As a result, The Man from UNCLE became less of a hopeful dream and more an escapist fantasy in the years to follow. UNCLE wanted global peace too, but instead of growing its hair long and throwing flowers around, it wore a dinner suit and used smoke bombs and bullets!

But 1966 was to get wilder still. The Batman TV series had arrived in January, 1966 as a mid-season replacement that, following dire test screenings, ABC had no great hopes for. This colorful and stylish parody of the comic-book character delighted kids and adults alike with its bizarre confrontations between the preposterous cowled boy scout Batman and his obnoxious do-gooding student Robin and marvellous performances from familiar Hollywood character actors as the heroes’ eccentric adversaries. It became television’s second major fad of the 1960s.

The primary legacy of the Batman TV series was to give everybody in film and TV permission to go completely loopy, and late ‘60s film and TV still looks quite bizarre because of it. Nowhere was this more evident than in the wacky TV series The Monkees, a half-hour freestyle sit-com imitating the madcap style of the Beatles’ feature films. The show was the precursor of the pop video, and the birth of the manufactured boy band, and the onscreen spot gags, parodies, and imaginings of the four leads pre-date series such as The Simpsons and Family Guy by decades. There had been nothing like these three series before. It would be well over twenty years before anyone dared attempt such levels of creativity again.

These three shows are unique among most television series of any decade in that their influence spread beyond television to affect all aspects of other arts and media as well—books, film, comics, toys, music, satire, fashion, and advertising.

This is the story of the secret agent craze, the super-hero fad, and the first boy band—three media phenomena that still influence popular culture today.

also available from the same author

Stephen J. Cannell Productions: A History of All Series and Pilots

For twenty years, Stephen J. Cannell was in the hero business. Or perhaps, the anti-hero business. Whatever the case, his heroes were on the side of the slightly tarnished angels.

During the late 1970s and early 1980s, Cannell was the single most influential figure in populist action/adventure television. His series range from the smart, wry humor of The Rockford Files to the comic-book exploits of The A-Team. In between, he has created, co-created, and overseen such productions as the pacifist but macho war series Black Sheep Squadron, super-hero spoof The Greatest American Hero, the beach boy bromance Riptide, the outrageous vigilante show Hardcastle and McCormick, and the Eastwood-inspired anti-cop show Hunter. In the late '80s, he produced the critically acclaimed 21, Jump Street, and the quietly horrific, grim, dark mob show Wiseguy.

In the 1970s, his marriage of B-western plots and values to the post-Watergate cynicism of 1970s cinema refreshed popular culture, drawing from themes explored and avenues opened by Robert Altman and Clint Eastwood, perhaps the two most influential film-makers of the period. His knowing, self-parodic approach to a tired and weary action/adventure genre permeated all of American television throughout the 1980s, and much cinema thereafter.

On the surface, Cannell's heroes are traditional conservative icons of Hollywood myth, cops, judges, vigilantes, military men, tough guys--but they are also renegades and rebels, individual malcontents at odds with the injustices of the world. And despite producing shows featuring handsome but flawed male heroes (or perhaps because of it), his shows were phenomenally popular with the female audience as well as the intended men, displaying a satisfying progressive attitude towards women both in front of, and behind the camera.

This book discusses in detail the programs of this writer-producer (and sometimes director and actor), and lists every episode of his 1970s and 1980s series, with storylines and writer, director, and cast credits for 22 shows. With extensive quotes and research, it discusses Cannell's methods of working, his critics, his recurring themes and obsessions, and his successes and failures, and includes publicity materials, information on unsold pilots, and a four-page bibliography and ten pages of sources and quotations to support the author's observations and opinions. Every statement is backed up by cross-referencing numerous examples not only of specific episodes of Cannell shows, but other producers' series as well. There is a 38 page index.

The book features: Part One: Beginnings--The Rockford Files; Baretta; City of Angels; Black Sheep Squadron; Richie Brockelman; The Duke; Stone; unsold pilots (one); Part Two: The Golden Years--Tenspeed and Brownshoe; The Greatest American Hero; The Quest; The A-Team; Hardcastle and McCormick; Rousters; Riptide; unsold pilots (two); Part Three: From L.A. To Canada--Hunter; Stingray; The Last Precinct; 21, Jump Street; Wiseguy; J.J. Starbuck; Sonny Spoon; Unsub; unsold pilots (three); The Wrap-Up (his later series, including Renegade); sources of quotations; bibliography; index (all featured series chapters include episode listings).

"Outstanding" (e-mail to publishers, Cannell Entertainment)

* * * * *

In June 2015, just as this book was going through it’s final revisions, I stumbled onto a complimentary review of my book The Elvis Films on a website called The Elvis Information Network, and thanked the writer, Nigel Patterson. He responded with a request for an interview with me for the site, and the following was the result, reprinted here (mainly as a bonus feature to make the page count back up after I reduced the size of the book’s font!… Trust me, it looks much better now!) Anyway, hope you find it interesting…

interview with Jon Abbott

by Nigel Patterson

for The Elvis Information Network, June 2015

EIN: Jon, it’s great to talk with you today. Before we discuss your books including The Elvis Films and your passion for pop culture please tell us a little about the Jon Abbott story.

JA: It’s a familiar one—like Elvis himself, and like a lot of British kids in the 1960s and subsequent decades, I was immersed in American popular culture, loved the music, the comics, the films, the TV shows, as I said in the book. I tried to get into writing either comics, or about TV, the comics stalled, and the TV writing took off, so I never looked back. There’s more to it than that, but that’s the short version. What I will say is that unlike most people who get into writing about film and TV, I had absolutely no interest in meeting “the stars”. It was the end product that interested me, and I was mostly motivated by the desire to a) keep the stuff being shown in Blighty, and b) spread the word. No DVDs or internet in those days, of course. We were entirely at the mercy of the broadcasters’ whims. Even when we could finally home-tape, the show had to air.

What younger readers have to appreciate is the complete and utter lack of information back then, no IMDB, no Wikipedia, no Google, nothing. My generation literally clipped cuttings out of listings mags. I knew nothing about how American TV worked, but I wanted to learn. So when I had the chance, I read everything, talked to everyone.

The episode guides in the book Fantastic Television, the first ever, were a revelation. My God, running orders, number of episodes, seasons! So I sought out program buyers and program sellers, made friends and contacts, rifled their files (with permission of course!), became the go-to guy for press offices or private individuals in the business for ideas and information, stuck my nose in everywhere, shot my mouth off in private and in print, wrote articles and TV news columns about what was being made, where and when we might see it. There was a three month lead time for monthlies in those days, which was just about right. You’d find something out in February, it’d be in print in April, the show itself could turn up anytime between March and December! It was ridiculously hard to get anyone to publish episode guides, which I had access to and knew everybody else like me wanted, so as well as my magazine work I ran a newsletter with guides throughout the ‘90s.

The internet eventually killed my TV news business (I used to get it the hard way, ringing up, calling in…), so I’ve made it work for me, rather than against me. My books are available worldwide, thanks to Amazon.

Part A: The Elvis Films:

EIN: Your recent book, The Elvis Films, is a delightfully fresh and off-centre approach to discussing the Elvis film canon. For me it worked so wonderfully because of your ability to weave together an abundance of facts, opinion and anecdote into an entertaining and informative examination of Elvis’ celluloid output.  How have other Elvis fans reacted to your book?

JA: Thanks. Actually there’s been a deafening silence mostly, if the Amazon reviews are anything to go by, but then I don’t seek out responses, I just go on to the next project. I should send out review copies, but I don’t. Fortunately, the books move anyway… well, all except the Cannell one, which just lies there like a dead fish! I only found your review because I clicked on my book cover on Google images out of curiosity!

If the books are selling, and they are, I figure I must be doing something right. Books sell, or don’t sell, by word of mouth, and no amount of advertising or hype will work as well as someone saying to a friend “have you seen…?” or “hey, read this”. People are buying it, they’re just not reviewing it. I get the occasional idiot, as we all do, but when people get what I’m doing, it’s a joy.

The weird thing about the reviews is that when people like my stuff they usually give reasons and examples, but the complainers say ‘oh, he got it wrong’ or ‘he made mistakes’ but rarely say where or how. That sort of criticism is useless, because you can’t respond to it. Why is it wrong? Maybe I can explain myself, or fix it. Often, what they mean is “I don’t agree”.

I used to get some lovely letters to the magazines I wrote for, often asking for me by name to cover specific shows, but I only ever saw them if they were printed! Editors don’t like you to know how popular you are, for various obvious reasons, but it did slip out in a careless moment that my TV column in Video Today got more letters than the rest of the mag put together! I was always quite chuffed about that.

EIN: Not surprisingly, given their teen focused/pop culture/‘B grade’ status, Elvis’ films featured many actors who were prominent in 1960s TV shows. Who were some of your favourites?

 JA: What we don’t have today is all those wonderful character actors, that’s what I love about the ‘60s and miss the most. There’s the chameleons, the guys like John Crawford, George Mitchell, Donald Harron, Harry Lauter, who the average punter doesn’t even realise they’re watching, and then there’s the specialists who they would go to if they wanted a certain kind of role filled, people like Joseph Ruskin, George Macready, Reta Shaw, Kathleen Freeman, Roy Jenson, Jonathan Hole, or Michael Ansara and Theo Marcuse of course! These are off the top of my head, there were hundreds! Remember all that corny vaudeville stuff that Guy Raymond and Stanley Adams did in Star Trek’s “Trouble with Tribbles”? They both turned up in the Elvis films. Stanley Adams was paired with Walter Burke, another great character, in Double Trouble. There’s no-one like them now. For about the last thirty years, with just a handful of exceptions (Seinfeld, Frasier, Friends, a few others), it’s been the handsome guy, the pretty girl, the best buddy (often the ethnic role), and the bald-headed boss who’s a bleep, over and over again, clones of clones. And nobody over forty! Where are the Mr. Mooneys, the Endoras, the Mr. Waverleys, the Doctor Smiths, the Miss Hathaways, the Colonel Klinks, the Aunt Harriets and Commissioner Gordons? All gone. It’s paint by numbers.

EIN: When reading The Elvis Films I really liked the tangents you veered off in, informing the reader of the non-Elvis film and TV careers of many of his co-stars and the back story to his films. In my review I mentioned these diversions were both a strength and a weakness of the book.

I see their strength being your adeptness at placing their context relative to the social and popular culture landscape in which they were made.  I was concerned though that at times, e.g. in reflecting on King Creole, you wrote vociferously and most interestingly about the political, cultural and personnel back story but less about the film itself, and to me this resulted in an imbalance in the narrative. What is your response to my observation?

 JA: Fair comment. If I’ve nothing to say I don’t say it, but I’d rather include too much information than leave it out. It’s interesting, one recurring criticism of my books is that I give too much information about the actors’ other credits, some people said that about the Irwin Allen book. But for me, that cross-pollination is the fun of it. I love it that the same people will turn up in an Elvis, a John Wayne, a Batman, a Star Trek, a Lucy Show, a Time Tunnel…

As you said, and as I made a big deal of in the introduction to the book, the USP was that it was about how the films slotted into the environment of the ‘60s and surrounding media, rather than just about the films themselves. I never like to do what’s already been done, I’m always looking for a different angle. I’ve turned down several suggestions from McFarland and Scarecrow because of that. Silly really, but there’s no great money in this, so if I’m going to spend at least a year, maybe two or three, on something, I’ve got to care. I’d dance like a drunken whore if it was big bucks, but it’s not, it’s pocket money, whether its mainstream publishing or self-publishing, so it’s my way or the highway. I can afford my principles!

With Elvis, there was more to say about some films than others, I don’t deny it. There was virtually nothing to say about Kid Galahad! King Creole, in terms of content, is basically the middle ground between Loving You and Jailhouse Rock, it’s all been done. What makes King Creole is the musical content, with Loving You a close second. It’s pure Elvis at his peak. 

The buzz for me was that the bulk of the films are so similar, yet so eclectic. I was able to write about so many different aspects of 1960s pop culture, and yet still stick to the subject—sex, race, pop art, TV, the generation gap. I mean, where else will you find so much completely useless but, to me, fascinating trivia about Tickle Me!? I mean, who cares? Not your average Elvis researcher, or your general film buff. They either know all about Elvis, or all about films. Not often both. What Elvis fan knows or cares about Jocelyn Lane’s spy shows or Hell’s Belles!? Only me. But I think the detail on say, Sam Katzman, really helps you understand where Kissin’ Cousins came from, puts it in perspective. And I love that Harum Scarum went out in a double-bill with a King Ghidora film. I could be the only person who would have enjoyed both films equally!

I had a ball doing The Elvis Films, the words just flowed. It’s not for everyone, I accept that, but my Amazon page makes it absolutely clear what you’re getting. People who want everything sealed into separate little boxes are not well served by my books. I embrace everything, not one show, genre, or category, that’s the joy of it. My forthcoming book on 1970s sex films takes in everything, comedies, comics, dramas, arties, sci-fi, horror, mainstream, the lot. It’s not just about plain old porn. Cool TV is as much about the ‘60s as it is about the three TV shows. They may not all like my books, but there’s nothing else like ‘em.

EIN: There are so many interesting pieces of information in The Elvis Films. One is that a title song was written for Tickle Me.  Could you share the back story to this and do you know who the songwriter(s) was (were)?

JA: It’s been a while, but I’m fairly sure that information came from the Guralnick book. It only skims the movies, but it’s absolutely essential reading for anyone interested in Presley, I mean, start here, you know? As I recall, they dropped the song, but kept the now meaningless title because all the publicity stuff had been prepared! I love that, classic Colonel Tom! I’d say go to Guralnick, and if I’m wrong, I apologise. Generally, if it ain’t in there, it ain’t anywhere.

EIN: You also mention that the ‘60s most popular sitcom, The Beverly Hillbillies, seems to haunt the book. Please tell our readers why you said this.

JA: Well, it was one of those shows that just kept cropping up in the research. Follow That Dream is very similar in spirit and appears at exactly the same time, Max Baer played football with the guys, there’s Donna Douglas, Raymond Bailey, Phil Shuken…

Bewitched, Burke’s Law, Batman and UNCLE kept turning up as well, as you might expect… and Star Trek, bizarrely, given its niche status at the time.

EIN: As I mentioned in my review of The Elvis Films you and I disagree on the final phase of Elvis’ film career, the late ‘60s releases (Charro, Stay Away Joe, Live a Little, Love a Little, The Trouble with Girls and Change of Habit). I view them favourably (due to their attempt to reinvent, admittedly unsuccessfully, Elvis’ flagging film career through an ‘adult makeover’) while you term them “the dreadful mistakes”. What is it about the films in this phase that you don’t like and do any of the films have redeeming features?

JA: They all had something going for them, and I mentioned those few things in the text. But “admittedly unsuccessfully” is not a description of a good time.

I tried to be fair, but it’s not just the Elvis films, the whole of American cinema seemed to be lost during the late ‘60s, absolutely clueless and out of touch. Then you get that artistically wonderful but financially poor early ‘70s period, and then along come Spielberg and Lucas. Yuk. Have you read Peter Biskind’s Easy Riders, Raging Bulls covering this period? It’s a revelation. 

EIN: What alternative approach would you like to have seen adopted to try and reinvent Elvis’ film career or was it a case that Elvis should have gone back to live performing earlier than he did?

JA: I think Easy Come Easy Go proves conclusively that the traditional Elvis movies were over, but I loved the so-called Comeback Special when it was just him and the boys and I think that was the way to go. But the ‘70s was the decade of bad taste, and Elvis was a part of that, there’s no denying it. He made some terrible musical choices, and some terrible lifestyle choices, and the colonel lost the plot when the movies ended, let’s face it. But Elvis was a big sheltered man-child who could have anything he wanted, and frankly it was a hell of an achievement that the colonel kept him alive into his forties. Look how much earlier all the other icons went.

EIN: The mid-70s appeared to provide Elvis an opportunity to resurrect his film career when he was offered or at least had discussions about co-starring with Barbra Streisand in A Star Is Born. Do you think this was a missed opportunity? Would Elvis have been up to the challenge?

JA: When you look at what the colonel said no to (in terms of film projects), I’m totally with him on all counts. It’s in my book somewhere. First of all, I can’t stand Streisand, but personal opinions aside, look at the plot. Elvis gives up his career to protect hers? Really!? And that biopic about a C&W singer… that’s like asking John Wayne to portray Roy Rogers. And Mae West in Roustabout? He protected Elvis far more than people acknowledge.

EIN: The visuals in The Elvis Films. I was disappointed that there weren’t a lot more, preferably also in colour and of a higher visual quality.  What was the reason you didn’t include a greater range of visuals?

JA: I agree, but there are some great pics in there. And I love the cover, if I say so myself. As I said in the book’s introduction, The Elvis Films, as a relatively small project, was the ideal guinea pig for me to try self-publishing. I went from using an archaic word processing system (WP5.1) on discs and a box-sized computer and screen to Apple MacBook Air and Createspace overnight, jumping completely over the last twenty years of the infuriating Microsoft, which I dreaded facing working on when Old Faithful finally crashed (which it never did), so it was a huge learning curve. In the last year, I’ve formatted three existing texts into three self-published books, and (with the aid of my tutor, obviously, a miracle worker who solves every damn silly thing I throw at him) I’ve done everything myself—designed the interiors, picked the art, selected the fonts, formatted the text, designed the covers, proofed and indexed… it’s been a massive and quite exhilarating experience. As proud as I am of The Elvis Films, inevitably, my subsequent two books, one 500 pages, the other 700 pages, do look better. To re-do The Elvis Films would be terribly unfair to the people who have already bought it, and I think it’s okay as is. I’ve never yet had a book out there I’ve been ashamed of or embarrassed by.

I have considered color, but my writing is already highly specialised (non-fiction doesn’t sell as well as fiction), and I don’t want to price myself out of the market. There are also, of course, copyright issues as to what I  can legitimately use. I have, for example, some wonderful magazine pictures of Elvis filming supposed exteriors of Fun in Acapulco in the studio, but I don’t have the right to use them. I have to restrict myself to freely available promotional materials, and can only use it for its specified purpose, which is to illustrate and promote. I mustn’t exploit or infringe, and color might be pushing it.

Quality of the visuals, well, there are limitations with self-publishing, but Createspace are getting better all the time, I’m getting better all the time, but we can only go as fast as the engine. I’m learning new tricks every month, and so are the guys making the technology. Apple’s support service is phenomenal, they don’t just sell you a computer and kick you out of the door. To be honest, I’m in awe of it all, if only I could have accessed this technology ten, twenty, forty years ago, my god, what I could have achieved!

EIN: It has been suggested by some analysts that because of Elvis’ status as the first mega-teen star in an increasingly mass production/profit driven/lowest common denominator entertainment industry, his film career was never going to be allowed to evolve like the film careers of Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra did. Is this a valid observation? 

JA: Did their film careers evolve? Crosby did the same reliable shtick every time, and who can name a Sinatra film that wasn’t a musical? Ocean’s Eleven maybe, but who remembers Tony Rome or Dirty Dingus McGee? Elvis surely had a more varied career, and as you know, I and the mass audience preferred the formula stuff.

I must say I hate “film studies” where the writer pretends he or she’s above the subject and looks down on the audience as if they’re mice from Mars. Popular culture is us. I tried to analyse why people went to see G.I. Blues, because I hated it. But “we” wanted Blue Hawaii and Girl Happy too, and so did I. So it’s a “mass production/profit driven/lowest common denominator entertainment industry”. Good! So it should be! Doesn’t he or she like movies? These so-called analysts talk about the entertainment industry in this sterile, derogatory way you describe, but we are the audience, the industry is us, all of us. If the industry is the horse and instead of looking at the beauty of the animal we’re following it with a bucket and a shovel, whose fault is it if we look in the bucket and see crap? And who’s to say it’s crap if people like it, want it, choose it? People flock to reality TV, The Da Vinci Code, Jeffrey Archer, Barbara Cartland, Fifty Shades, even though “everyone” agrees it’s crap.

Having said that, the popular culture that endures isn’t always what is popular at the time. The classic pop music that has survived is not made up of all the trashy long-forgotten number one records. A lot of great tracks we revere never made it to the top ten. But the good stuff endures, the flash in the pan burns out. That’s not just true of music, it’s true of films, TV, books, comics, everything. I find that immensely encouraging. It’s nothing new, either. Look at the Impressionists. They were reviled. People wanted cows in fields, portraits of fat men and plain women. But quality will out.

Popular culture, music, TV, film, whatever, is defined by what we want. Then we re-evaluate it over the years and decide what we want to keep. There are basically two forms of ‘word of mouth’. One is advertising and media, which generates interest and makes people feel they ought to see, hear, or read something, and which dies when the hype ends. Look at Avatar, it broke box office records. Who cares now? The other is friends telling friends, relatives telling relatives, dads and mums telling their kids, where interest is generated and perpetuated because something is good. That’s the stuff that’s timeless. Kids watching The Flintstones, Batman, Star Trek, or The Simpsons with their dads. The media says hey, look in the bucket, everyone else is… but eventually we look up and see the horse, not the horse’s ass…

EIN: What is your view on the Colonel’s role in Elvis’ film career? I ask this question in the context that in The Elvis Films you quote Memphis Mafia member Lamar Fike who said “This isn’t a popular view but the Colonel’s formula was correct. The serious stuff—the movies that didn’t have many songs in them—flopped”.

JA: It’s like Frasier and Bebe, his agent. The Colonel was a dreadful, awful man, but he protected him, kept him alive for twenty years. It was a strange relationship, they both needed each other equally, but it worked. He was the father figure. Imagine Vernon in charge. And I quoted Lamar in the summing up because he’s so right. Everyone says the films are awful, but everyone went to see them. If the films had died, if the fans had rejected them, Elvis would have been straight back in the recording studio. But in the ‘60s, they went to see Everything. Everything. So this is either the riddle of the ages, or the paradox to end them all, or somebody’s lyin’. My book addresses this at length. People say, oh the fans would have watched him in anything, they just wanted to see Elvis so they tolerated the films. Really? 31 of them? For fifteen years? Could the market sustain 31 bad Bond films in a row, 31 bad Disney/Pixar, 31 bad John Wayne films? Rubbish. Fool me once with Blue Hawaii, and shame on you… but fool me repeatedly with Spinout, Speedway, Clambake…?  What would, or should, Elvis have been doing? The answer appears to be, exactly what he was doing. Box office doesn’t lie, but people do. If people came out of the cinemas griping, it was probably the quality of the songs that disappointed. Everyone agrees they were one third good, two thirds poor.

EIN: And what about the role of Elvis in his own career? You note in The Elvis Films that there is no known record of him choosing scripts, rewriting lines, changing dialogue on the set or wanting to direct. If Elvis hadn’t been acquiescent could his film career have been materially different?

 JA: But should it have been? At the height of his success, when he was making these supposedly awful films, they were making three a year! They couldn’t churn them out fast enough! He was working for three or four studios at a time. Some people paint him as this rock and roll rebel, but you know, the truth is—he wasn’t. He loved his family, the church, and the flag, and ironically, he hated the drugs culture. I covered this in the introduction and the early films segment. The fact is, his teen audience grew up alongside him. They settled down, had kids, went to the family films, dreamed of holidays in Hawaii, bought the MOR stuff in the ‘70s. There’s a few frazzled old rockers out there who can’t accept that. What we do know, and I said this in the book, is that Elvis hated some of the songs he was given. But that’s the one place where he could have put his foot down, and he didn’t. You have to ask why, and none of the answers are pretty.

EIN: Will Elvis’ body of film work simply be an artefact of 20th century teen culture or can it survive as an area of interest for future generations?

 JA: Who knows? He has a wonderful voice, that’s the bottom line. It’s recorded, on film and on disc, and it’s out there. At three o’clock in the afternoon, or three o’clock in the morning, it can melt you.

In the ‘80s a new generation of kids found Bilko, Thunderbirds, The Munsters, Lost in Space… and took from them different things than the original audience. They watched them in a different way. Thunderbirds and Lost in Space weren’t futuristic and forward-looking any more, they were kitsch, camp, and retro. Sky’s original MD, who came over from Australia, told me that when they re-ran The Munsters over there, the kids thought it was a new show. They thought it was in black and white to emulate the source material. The BBC have kept piles of stuff which they flagged as important and that no-one wants to see, and wiped forever recordings that we’re now desperate to retrieve—Hancock, Dr. Who, Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, all gone. We have to preserve everything, because nobody, but nobody, knows, including me. If you had told me in the 1980s that in the 21st century I would have Charlie’s Angels on DVD, but wouldn’t be bothered about Lou Grant, I’d have thought you were insane. But Charlie’s Angels, which insulted my intelligence at the time, now looks kitsch and quaint and campy, while Lou Grant, despite its undeniable craft and quality, now seems irrelevant, preachy, heavy-handed, and dated.

The Adam West Batman is rightly revered and frequently revived, but nobody cares about UNCLE, only the die-hard fans. That breaks my heart. But if Tarantino had made his UNCLE film, who knows? My daughter frequently goes to see films based on old TV shows and doesn’t even realise it.

21st century cinema bores me to tears, but they seem to be giving the public what they want. And “the public” is the under-forties, and I’m now in my fifties, so no mystery there. But I don’t get Star Wars, which came out when I was in my early twenties. So banal and derivative next to absolutely everything else in pop culture from Buck Rogers onwards, yet it’s bigger than anything. From 1936 to 1976, what wasn’t superior to Star Wars? But then I was born in 1956, so I grew up with Lee and Kirby Marvel Comics, Weisinger’s Superman family, Gerry Anderson, Irwin Allen, Doctor Who and the Daleks, the original Star Trek, UNCLE, Batman, The Outer Limits, The Twilight Zone, The Invaders, all the 1950s pulp sci-fi films… If I’d been born ten years later, in 1966, I’d have grown up in a sci-fi drought. To those kids, raised on Tom Baker and the bionic man, Star Wars obviously blew them away. To my eyes, it was a cynical, inferior, one-dimensional rip-off of a dozen things that were better. To other people, it’s the meaning of life.

So whether something is wonderful or rubbish can be based purely on personal perspective. I was ten years late to Elvis, so I like the movies. A wise man once said “the golden age of anything is when you’re twelve years old”. Still, the ongoing adulation for Star Wars reminds me of that wonderful Jerry Seinfeld joke about Chinese food—they’ve seen the knife and fork, but they’re sticking with the chopsticks!

I write about this stuff because I want to keep it alive. I love it, and I want other people to find it and love it. I’m very fond of pointing out at the moment that old TV is everywhere except on TV (in Britain, at least). Collectors’ fairs, t-shirts, mugs, posters, books, comics, coasters, DVDs, retro this and that, all over the internet, Amazon, You Tube, e-bay, Google Images, you name it, but not on TV. Even the Elvis films aren’t on TV any more (here in the U.K.). Bond, the Carry Ons, John Wayne, the tiniest handful of often ill-chosen off-peak re-runs, and that’s it. Sixty years of television, but the people in charge can’t remember anything earlier than The Simpsons. They don’t know the history of their own industry, they watched The A-Team when they were toddlers. That’s when I started writing professionally. They don’t know Hill Street Blues, let alone UNCLE. I don’t know of any industry so ignorant of its own history as television.

But… the kids don’t actually watch TV on TV any more. Marshall McLuhan, the guy who predicted the global village, said back in 1952… 1952!… that’s before Adventures of Superman aired… that one day television would be considered an art form, but it would no longer be on TV. How right he was.

I’m running on, but here’s a couple of anecdotes if you’ve got the space or the inclination to use them. I carry my office around with me on my computer in a bag with Top Cat on it. All the time I get warm comments, at least once a week, and it’s always “why isn’t it on TV any more?”. And I laugh and say treat yourselves to the DVDs, look on the net. When my Apple guy was helping me with Cool TV of the 1960s, my follow-up book after Elvis, he asked me about The Man from UNCLE and I was telling him how big it was in its day… As we spoke, he leaned over to his keyboard, and called up every episode onscreen, legally available, and sampled the first few minutes of the pilot to see what I was on about. So there’s the future. You’ve just got to do what I’ve been doing since 1983, and spread the word. By the way, my wife is five years younger than me, so she completely missed the UNCLE phenomenon. When I was nine in 1965, she was four. When she first saw a still from UNCLE in the early ‘80s, she said “That’s The Invisible Man!”. A completely forgotten half-season run in 1975, plus repeats, and that was her reference point. Five years difference.

About ten years ago, pre-internet (for me), I went into HMV, a high street DVD shop currently in dire straits, and asked if they had The Man from UNCLE on DVD. The guy said maybe, but you’ll have to tell me who he is! No, I said, that’s the title! So we’ve got our work cut out for us. In fact, it was when Tickle Me came out on DVD that I discovered Amazon.

HMV said they weren’t going to stock it, but they could order it for me, ten days, come in and get it. Not stock an Elvis film! I knew my daughter used Amazon, so I asked her to look for it for me. She said give me your wants list dad, and within half an hour I’d ordered forty films I’d been desperate for, gladly spent a hundred quid. So after that there was no looking back, and it was goodbye HMV, goodbye high street, goodbye region two only. All because they weren’t going to stock Tickle Me! So there’s the future. It’s up for grabs.

EIN: After watching and re-watching Elvis films have you formed a view on which directors got the best out of Elvis?

 JA: Well Siegel didn’t want Elvis, and Elvis certainly didn’t need him. Elvis was always polite and professional and prepared, we know that. But all he needed was traffic cop directors, no shame in that. But only Wallis got the formula right. When they copied him, they got it right. Those were the money makers, so those were the ones that worked.

EIN: Jon, what are your favourite Elvis films and why?

JA: I hate to keep saying it’s in the book, it’s in the book, but it’s in the book! From Blue Hawaii to Speedway and Clambake. All the fun stuff. Viva Las Vegas is probably my favourite non-sf film. Jonathan Harris of Lost in Space, one of my TV idols, said that the audience expects you to do the same thing every week, and woe betide you if you forget it. He didn’t mean it quite so literally, but I know what he meant, and he’s right. People go to see an Elvis film, or a John Wayne, or a Doris Day, or a Dirty Harry, or a Die Hard, and you had bloody well better give ‘em what they came for. Disappoint them at your peril.

EIN: And what do you regard as the worst Elvis film or films and why?

JA: Sorry, Nigel, you know the answer to that one! I’m afraid I won’t be changing my mind. The very worst has got be Change of Habit though… That one stinks on so many levels…

EIN: Elvis films as “guilty pleasures”. Why is it OK to enjoy watching an Elvis movie?

JA: We call them “guilty pleasures”, and I’m “guilty” of using that term too, usually when I’m sitting in front of a Godzilla film, or something smutty, but you know there’s no prizes for sitting in front of a 24 hour news channel and getting depressed, and a good game show is “better” than a bad documentary. I love Italian opera, but it’s better experienced through earphones or seen on a stage than on TV, especially as the BBC pander to the snob element. If everybody who said “Oh, my husband likes the sport, and I only watch the wildlife documentaries and the news” was telling the truth, why is the TV top thirty here in the U.K. dominated by twenty-five episodes of soaps and freak shows for morons?

But I don’t think people are so snobby as they used to be. We don’t defend ourselves so much these days, we just indulge. People openly discuss the dumbest reality shows round the water cooler. My personal criteria for non-fiction, because obviously this doesn’t apply to Bond villains or Basil Fawlty, is that I don’t want to watch anybody on TV who I wouldn’t have in my house… so I’ll watch QI and all the similar panel shows, anything with David Mitchell or Jimmy Carr, but not car crash TV, Jeremy Kyle, or the Kardashians. But these days you’re more likely to be mocked for saying you don’t watch the Saturday night crap. But I really don’t. On the other hand, I’m a grown man watching Space Ghost or Fireball XL-5. So it’s all relative. Each to his own.

A better question would be why is it not okay to watch an Elvis movie? Why is it okay to have sex? Why is it okay to eat a splendid meal? Put it like that and you realise what a strange question that is.

Part B: 1960-70s Pop Culture

EIN: Jon, let’s move on now to something which is a real passion for you—pop culture. Your books on 1960s and 1970s film and television have been critically acclaimed for their insight and great detail. What is it about pop culture that interests you so much—why is pop culture important?

JA: Because more than anything else it tells the truth about us at any given time, any chosen decade. Elvis, Playboy, Cosmopolitan, John Wayne, James Bond, Carry On, MASH, Happy Days, Rambo, Schwarzenegger, The X-Files, Jerry Springer, Big Brother, the stuff we choose, the charts, the ratings, the box office, the sales figures, they don’t lie. The media, although part of the popular culture, the BBC, Fox News, the tabloids, academia, the pressure groups, the special interests, the axe-grinders, the advertisers, they all lie because they have an agenda, they’re politically motivated, they’re social engineers. But their lies also tell the truth about us.

As I say in my book on sex films, I’m a guy, I like to look at naked girls. There, I said it. But to watch TV or read the papers, with their censors, “regulators”, “standards”, and earnest, finger-wagging, furrow-browed pundits, you’d think that it was just me. I make this point, one way or another, in every book I’ve written, it’s in there somewhere. I am basically a good, decent, kind, honest man, if I say so myself. I just happen to like violent movies, sex films, trashy pulp TV, dirty jokes, childish cartoons… but I’m not some solitary weirdo, living in a pure and pristine world of superior beings, these are commercial mass market entertainments enjoyed worldwide, so it’s not just me. Other people lap up questionable or lowbrow things I don’t—celebrity scandal sheets, tabloid TV, disaster porn, serial killer films, banal pop music, genteel murder mysteries, money-grabbing game shows… What we really read, watch, look at, and listen to while we lie to ourselves and others is what we actually seek out, pay for. That’s popular culture. 

Until all of us, men and women, can be honest about what we want and like, we’re doomed to live lives of misery and frustration… and we only get one life. Pop takes no prisoners, it lays us bare. Did you laugh at that joke, or didn’t you? Why are you playing war games on your computer? Why are you lusting after that good-looking man or woman and not the fat ugly one? Why is afternoon television full of fictional murders? Suddenly all that political correctness, the phoney sexual politics, the posing and posturing, the complaining and tutting, the petitions and filling in forms, the indignant letters, the pious disapproval, it all looks pretty damn stupid.

We’re back to guilty pleasures. I’m not saying lap up any old rubbish and ignore the arts. I’m not saying dismiss morality, spirituality, or conscience. I’m not saying we should all behave like Henry Miller. I’m just saying be honest about who you are and what you like. Stop all this raging hypocrisy. I’m a middle-aged man, but if I want to watch Yogi Bear, or a man in a Godzilla suit trampling cardboard buildings, or Flying Disc Man from Mars, or Maria Forsa having an orgasm, well, that’s me sorted. I’m off to my wall of DVDs and the bores and dullards can watch mainstream TV. Sucks to be the rest of you!

Okay, I’ve finished! You did ask!

EIN: Your book, Irwin Allen Productions 1964-1970: A Critical History, is an engrossing examination of four of television's most exciting and enduring science-fiction series: Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, Lost in Space, The Time Tunnel and Land of the Giants. One element that many readers appreciated was your impressive episode by episode evaluations for each show (my copy of the book is very dog eared!)  This must have been a labour of love!  How long did it take you to research, watch and write this release, and what revelations did you discover as part of the process?

JA: I can’t say I learned much, it was more about passing on what I already knew and wanted to say to likeminded people. I learned very early on in life, because I thankfully came from a time and was raised with a family that didn’t spare your feelings, and there was a lot of laughter and joy at other people’s expense, that nobody else I knew was remotely interested in all my useless trivia! So I wrote to get it out of my system, and sent it to magazines where people shared my interests. Even today, only a handful of my friends and acquaintances in “the real world” have even the vaguest idea of what I do, and I only tell them if I’m asked. That means that when I’m “off duty” I’m truly relaxing. Then I go back to my own little world. But I won’t deny I enjoy those rare moments when someone says “oh my God, you’re Jon Abbott!”. But mostly they don’t, and I can tell you for a stone cold fact that none of my family have read barely a word I’ve written! My daughter walked in the room once, took one look at the rubber monster stomping around the Seaview, and said “My God, Dad, you do watch some crap”, then walked out again. I was laughing for days. Days. No, they couldn’t care less.

I say I didn’t learn anything from writing the Irwin Allen book, that sounds a bit arrogant, but I do know most of the Allen shows back to front. UNCLE and Batman were a joy, because I got to rediscover the shows. I’d cherry-picked a few Batman off-air, and been seeing the UNCLE movies fairly regularly, but I’d just bought UNCLE on DVD, hadn’t seen it for a while. The Cannell book was a voyage of discovery, the Elvis book was a breeze but I had to do a lot of reading, and the book on time travel movies and TV I’ve got lined up was absolutely fascinating to research. Firstly, I had to look up all the history, which is never dull. And then when I started I thought there were maybe two or three dozen movies? There’s hundreds.

It’s difficult to say how long any book takes, because I’m always working on several projects at once, and the commissioned work comes first. With the Irwin Allen book, I was always watching one series or another, sometimes watching an episode specifically to write about it, sometimes just for pleasure and noticing something. Eventually, of course, I got to the point where I had to start filling in the blanks. I take notes in longhand initially, then type it up while I can still interpret my scrawl, then rethink, revise, rewrite, re-read. At least half my work-time is spent re-reading and re-writing, and although that sounds like a slog, it’s the part of the process I most enjoy. The blank page is a terror. It sounds silly, but if I freeze I just start by “talking” to the page, as if it’s asked me a question. I answer very bluntly and simply, and then slowly the clever stuff appears.

EIN: Stephen J. Cannell created, wrote, story edited or produced some of the most recognisable TV series of the 1970s to 1990s including The Rockford Files, Greatest American Hero, Baa Baa Black Sheep, Hunter and Hardcastle and McCormick. Your 2009 book, Stephen J. Cannell Television Productions: A History of All Series and Pilots, is a comprehensive coverage of Cannell’s series. Many of Cannell’s series had somewhat flawed or reluctant protagonists. You note that Cannell changed the face of the action-adventure genre.  Please tell us about this.

 JA: It’s all in the book, but very bluntly, he put the humor into a rather absurd genre that took itself far too seriously. The chapter on The Rockford Files says it better than I can here (“His gun is deadly, mine’s in the cookie jar!” is a great line!), and the sections on Greatest American Hero, Riptide, and The A-Team are among the best things I’ve ever written. All the other shows then followed his lead, Magnum and Moonlighting for example, but it was the movies that did for him, because franchises like Lethal Weapon and Die Hard, and one-offs like Blind Fury and Cliffhanger, basically did what Cannell was doing, but on the big screen, with huge budgets. Of course Cannell himself was influenced by his predecessors, the Republic serials and early buddy shows like UNCLE and I Spy, as well as contemporaries like Eastwood and Altman, but his personal legacy is enormous, massive. I started the project back in the very late ‘80s, when he was still working, because all the attention was going to Bochco and MTM, attention they deserved, but no-one seemed to be noticing Cannell except a handful of TV buffs. He was getting lumped in with his old muckers Glen Larson and Donald Bellisario and all that grey-haired Silverman/Hargrove crap, and that just wasn’t right. I wanted the book to give him contemporary recognition for what he’d accomplished and was doing then, but it ended up a history. I’m glad he saw it and liked it though. His people asked McFarland for a contact address, and I okayed it, but a few months later he was gone. Damn shame.

EIN: You have a number of other books released in 2015, Cool TV of the 1960s: Three Shows That Changed The World and Strange New World: Sex Films of the 1970s.  Please tell us about them.

 JA: Can I just be real lazy and direct everyone to my Author’s Page on Amazon? It’s all there, exactly as I want to say it, and Cool TV is already out, with Strange New World due in July. It’s late because when I got the proof, what looked fine on the computer screen didn’t quite cut it on the page, so I’ve completely reformatted it, and that meant another couple of weeks re-doing the index! But it’ll be worth it when it’s ready. I’m super-pleased with both of them.

EIN: Do you recall a little known single season (1961) British thriller, The Mask of the Clown? I ask as someone who fondly remembers this program (apparently tapes still exist of all episodes) and who discovered that the legendary Brian Clemens was the script writer (Clemens aka Tony O’Grady is notable as the writer of episodes of classic programs including The Avengers, Danger Man, The Professionals and Bugs).

JA: Sorry, no. If it’s out there, I’m surprised no-one’s released it on DVD. Network do that sort of stuff.

EIN: Jon, I have to ask, as a child of the 60s which TV show trading cards did you collect?

JA: Literally anything with a TV connection. If it wasn’t related to a TV show, I just wasn’t interested. If it was, I wanted it. And that wasn’t just cards, it was toys, comics, mugs, models, you name it. The most exciting time of the year was Christmas, because that was when the Annuals came out… and they were good-looking books in the ‘60s, thick and on good paper, with some thought and effort behind them, less so as the ‘70s wore on, and rip-offs today. Now it’s basically one comic, in hardback. The Tom and Jerry annuals for 1971 and 1972 could almost be subtitled “The Best of Harvey Eisenberg”, and Leo Baxendale used to illustrate his own characters for the Odhams books, he didn’t farm ‘em out to other artists. As a child, every year I asked Santa for the TV Comic annual! I had to have it!

I still collect cards now, got books of ‘em. My memories are Hanna-Barbera sweet cigarette (!) cards, now called candy sticks but without the cards, and when I was about fourteen, me and my two school mates collecting Star Trek (“What Are Little Girls Made Of?” with the blue borders) and Land of the Giants. I had the full set of Star Trek, and a few years ago I obtained the one card I was missing from Land of the Giants! I also remember everyone collecting the monochrome Beatles and UNCLE cards with the fake autographs. How weird was that? Love cards. I’m a total trading cards nerd.

EIN: Patrick McGoohan’s seminal series The Prisoner. As a teenager I was transfixed by this obtuse, complex show and one which, at the time, I struggled to understand. How did this series impact you?

JA: When it was first on, I was eleven years old, raised on Bond, UNCLE, and The Avengers, and took it all at face value, quite literally. It was repeated when I was about fourteen, and then I got it. I saw it again when I was in my early twenties and was greatly amused at the thought of grown adults puzzling over “the meaning” of what was obviously a satirical microcosm of British society, free but not free, free as long as you fit in and conform. The Tally-Ho was obviously the Mail/Express, the cheery loudspeaker you couldn’t get away from was the BBC, Number Two was faceless officialdom, the bubbles were the police, the heavy mob. How could you not get it? It was the subject of the first full-length article I ever had published, in Starburst magazine. There was a fan club that was filmed for a Channel Four documentary dressed in all the gear, running around the London locations, acting out scenes from the episodes. I casually and I thought harmlessly referred to them in the piece as “a weird little fan club” and one of ‘em wrote to the mag saying they weren’t weird, and that the meaning of the show was still open to debate. My god, in the last episode of the show everything is labelled! So that was the beginning of my controversial writing career. Embrace your weirdness, that’s what I say. Otherwise you just come across as really weird...

EIN: McGoohan’s themes of individualism (retaining one’s identity), conformity, state control, rebellion, etc are as relevant, arguably even more relevant today, as they were in the swinging 60s. Do you agree?

 JA: Absolutely. Timeless, even today, with everyone so much more tolerant generally, but super-intolerant of certain opposing views. In those days, non-conformity was all about the counter-culture, being wacky and offbeat, not wanting to join the rat race, and so on. Today, it’s more about everybody thinking and feeling the same about “issues”, no dissenting from the approved view, and facts, feelings and opinions be damned. You’re assumed to be on message, and so is everyone else. “We” have decided what is “okay” and “not okay”, and even more sinister, what is “true”.

It’s extraordinary the absolute nonsense people will just take on board without an iota of evidence or common sense. It used to be about empirical proof, now it’s about what we choose to believe, then force the facts to fit. If you can’t buy the scientists, bury them. As a free-thinking individual, all you need to do is just think, think for thirty seconds, can this be true? Can it? How can it?

When I was a kid, the two words you heard all the time in the playground were “prove it”. Someone was quoted in the press just a few days ago, complaining without a hint of irony or shame, that no-one would take his opinions on board because the scientific community was demanding double-blind proof with placebo testing, but he felt it was “too important” to wait for the results! And the newspaper just printed this as a valid opinion! He hasn’t got time to wait for the evidence! It’s terrifying, beyond satire.

Having said that, South Park’s done some wonderful stuff on “accepted wisdom”—the day after The Day After Tomorrow, and the smoker being beaten up outside the Museum of Tolerance and all that… But when university professors are telling their students “there’s no such thing as a fact” you know we’re beyond hope.

What did they say in The Prisoner? “Questions are a burden to others”. I’d like to boot them out of a top floor window and prove gravity to them.

EIN: I found the 2009 remake of The Prisoner starring Jim Caviezel and Sir Ian McKellen interesting but ultimately disappointing. What are your feelings about it?

JA: It might sound odd, but I’ve never seen it. I used to reluctantly watch these reboots and revamps because I thought I ought to, but they’re all so bloody awful and just such an obvious bad idea that I mean to, just to have an opinion, but often just don’t get round to it. I used to say to my wife, I’ve got to watch this, people will ask me about it. Now I just think, you know what? Life’s too short. I figure if it’s a surprise success, like Doctor Who was, I’ll hear about it. It’s tough enough watching the ‘return of’s…’ with the original cast, only older. I still haven’t seen The Avengers with Fiennes and Thurman, Wild Wild West, I Spy, or Get Smart, just off the top of my head. I’ve only seen about twenty minutes of Lost in Space, introducing the characters, and a bit from the end. The only ones I liked were My Favourite Martian with Christopher Lloyd (but then I had no nostalgia for the original), and oddly, The Green Hornet, which I thought was both fun and respectful. There was a moment when I expected a blast of the original theme, but they didn’t! But I know I’m in the minority with both. I’m also in the minority with the Top Cat movie. Yes, the story and the bad guy sucked, but there was a lot of fanboy stuff in there that I loved. It was a brave try. Such a shame they screwed it up. But they did.

I suppose the best way to do a 21st century version of The Prisoner would be to tackle things like political correctness, eco-twaddle that defies scientific fact, an “obesity epidemic” that completely misunderstands the words ‘obesity’ and ‘epidemic’, and the anti-smoking fascists, who have undone forty years of steady anti-smoking progress with their draconian bullying. There’s no shortage of subjects. The reactionaries hate everybody, of course, always have, always will, but the liberals are weird. There’s always a couple of groups it’s okay to persecute with the full force of smug self-righteousness, and another couple of segments of society that are golden, immune to being criticised or questioned about anything.

EIN: Sadly, another of the icons of popular culture television, Patrick Macnee, passed away recently. He shared an interesting trait with the late Patrick McGoohan in that they both would not act using guns (McGoohan refusing that his Danger Man character, John Drake, use a gun and Macnee suggesting a classy umbrella instead of a gun for his John Steed character in The Avengers). How do you rate The Avengers and The New Avengers in the pop culture television hierarchy and what is your view of Patrick Macnee (the dapper and cool John Steed) as a pop culture icon?

 JA: Very sad, but at least he had a good run and went peacefully. Guns in action films are like swearing in dialogue, if you can’t use ‘em it makes the writers work harder. Taxi’s Louie de Palma, for example, was much wittier than Eddie Murphy in Beverly Hills Cop because he had to be. That said, swearwords are hilarious when used sparingly, and I love a good shoot out Chow Yun Fat style! Let’s face it, Danger Man was a snore-fest, and UNCLE was never more exciting than when they pulled their guns out! Calling Doctor Freud…!

I think the Emma Peel era of The Avengers and The Sweeney are equally placed at number one for the Greatest British TV series of all time, and are likely to stay there! I would place John Steed, with Emma Peel, as the number one TV icons, most of the others are probably sit-com figures. The New Avengers was a very troubled series, as we know, and like most revivals was probably best not attempted. I realise it’s difficult to leave these things alone given the profit potential and the lack of good ideas, but they rarely work out. The biggest problem The New Avengers had was that the 1960s was the epitome of creativity and style, and the 1970s was the exact opposite. I’ve always said I wouldn’t have wanted to see a 1970s UNCLE, and I feel the same about The Avengers. The New Avengers proves me right. Both series closed just in time in my opinion.

EIN: Please tell us about some of your favourite TV shows from the 1960s?

JA: It’s quicker to list the ones that disappointed me when I finally got to see them again either via VCR or cable and satellite. All of them were as good, or even better than I remembered, particularly as I was seeing many in color for the first time, with the exception of My Favourite Martian and Green Acres, both of which I was dismayed to discover were staggeringly unfunny through adult eyes. The Beverly Hillbillies and I Dream of Jeannie stood up wonderfully. Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea was much better than I remembered when they ran a few after a ten year gap in the early ‘80s. I didn’t see the other Irwin Allen shows in colour until the late ‘80s, because my family didn’t have colour TV in the early ‘70s, when they had last been on, and I thought the rough edges would show, but they were superb, looked great. Everyone used to say oh Jon, they won’t be as good as you remember them, but in almost every case they’ve been as good, or better.

EIN: Jon, I know you are a big fan of The Man From UNCLE. What are your thoughts on the (long overdue) upcoming film version starring Henry Cavill as Naploeon Solo and Armie Hammer as Illya Kuryakin? The film trailers so far released suggest it will be a fun outing with liberal doses of action and humour. And unlike the classic television series which reflected a strong friendship between the two leads, the new film features a neat (and quite amusing) 21st century sensibility (read: tension) between the two leads. What do you think of this change in narrative and also Cavill and Hammer as the leads?

JA: I’m dreading UNCLE. I’d have liked to have seen the Tarantino one that was aborted, because if anyone had half a chance it’s the Kill Bill guy, but nothing could live up to my hopes. The one they’ve made has been on the shelf for so long it looks like a dead duck. The best I hope for with these things is that they’ll revive interest in the original. I hate it when they disrespect the original, or fail to understand it. First do no harm! But I’m genuinely just not interested. I cannot think of a single instance where they brought something back and improved on the original.

EIN: Considering the original TV series, was it Napoleon or Illya for you?

JA: Sharyn Hillyer, mate. No, seriously, the great thing about UNCLE was the teamwork, the interplay between Solo and Kuryakin. The first buddy films? I think so. Anyhow, whenever they separated them for too long, the show suffered slightly. But you needed to split them up occasionally so that you could enjoy them getting together again. Same with Steed and Emma, Doug and Tony, and Kirk and Spock. The friendship between the characters, the chemistry between the actors, is crucial. I love the look on Emma Peel’s face when Steed turns up at the end of “The House That Jack Built”. And Kirk’s, when Spock turns up in “Wink of an Eye”. Blink and you miss it.

EIN: The ‘60s was also a key time of comic books, particularly the DC and Marvel super heroes. What is your view on the near glut of superhero films released in recent years?

JA: Glut is the right word. It was way too soon to do Spider-Man again, and as flawed as Fantastic Four was, it was okay when it stuck to the comics. This latest one looks horrendous. It’s all too much too soon. I’ve only just seen Thor 2, and still haven’t got round to Captain America 2 yet. It’s like children drawing a picture in pencil and then creasing up the paper as they furiously rub an eraser over it all and start again. And then doing it worse. I thought the first two Toby McGuire Spider-Man were okay, and like everyone, thought Iron Man was wonderful. The Avengers was great when it got going, but a bit slow to start for the kids. The second Hulk was an improvement, great battle, but when will they work out that the kids want to see the Hulk, not Bruce Banner. And am I the only person who’s noticed that the CGI on the recent Spider-Man films is vastly inferior to the 2001 movie? Shouldn’t this stuff be getting better? I also hate the way the actors’ egos mean that the heroes are constantly tearing off their masks. But the thing that really grinds my gears is all these silly white boys shouting racist every time someone dares complain about Nick Fury or Johnny Storm or whoever suddenly being reinvented as black. Imagine the outcry from exactly the same people if John Shaft or Foxy Brown was recast as white? Surely the racist act is to turn an established white character black just to tick a demographic box? What could be more patronising or condescending than that? And I loved the multi-cultural Asgard, that was hilarious. Apparently it’s okay to be “racist” to the Scandinavians. But it’s great to see the comics I read as a kid turned into contemporary entertainment. No-one had heard of Marvel Comics when I was reading them!

EIN: Of all the books you have written what is your favourite?

JA: This is so corny, and it’s not even original, but it’s so true. Your books are like your kids, you love them all for different reasons. The Irwin Allen book is special because it was the first, and is still selling, but the Cannell book just lays there and I thought it would sell better because the shows are more recent. I thought it was by chance perfectly timed to catch the nostalgia market, but no. And yet I’m as proud of that book as any, and it’s some of the best stuff I’ve written. The Elvis Films was my first self-published, so that’s warm and fuzzy, and as I said earlier I couldn’t be more happy with Cool TV and Strange New World, they’ve turned out just as I’d hoped. I’m livin’ the dream. I just hope it doesn’t all go tits up somehow.

EIN: Are you working on, or do you have specific subjects for any other books?

JA: I have a list of about a dozen subjects I would like to tackle if I live to be one hundred and fifty. Next is the Irwin Allen/Cool TV treatment for Desilu, a quick dust-off and revise for a Time Travel Movies project that pre-dates the Irwin Allen book would you believe, and a third I want to keep under wraps in case somebody nips in and does it first (there’s already another time travel book been announced, not a swipe, just bad luck). I have no idea which of these will be ready first. Also, I’m thinking Cool TV 2…!? I just hope I live long enough to finish them!

 EIN: Jon, before we roll the final credits is there anything else you would like to say to EIN readers?

 JA: Only that I hope this has been interesting to other people, and not just a massive ego-stroke for me. I’ve enjoyed it, anyway…!

also available from the same author

The Elvis Films

When a man single-handedly changes the course of popular music with one of the most pure and passionate original sounds of the 20th century, it’s tough to care about his sideline occupations. But Elvis Presley wanted to be an actor as much, if not more, as he wanted to be a singer. Many Elvis fans didn’t like his movies, and neither did Elvis, very much. And yet, the vast majority of them were box office smashes, sure-fire money making hits. Someone was buying tickets. In the 1960s, it seemed everyone was buying tickets.

This book considers Elvis Presley’s films not as an unwelcome intrusion into the insular Presley universe, even though this is how Presley and his associates usually viewed them, but as a significant part of the late 1950s and primarily 1960s pop culture they represented. Elvis Presley, after all, loved film and TV. The Elvis Films puts these guilty pleasures into context with not only Presley’s life and circumstances at the time, but looks at how they related—or in some cases did not relate to—the other popular culture of the period.

Jon Abbott has been writing about popular culture for over thirty years in a variety of specialist and trade publications, and his kaleidoscopic knowledge of his subject leaves no stone unturned in this provocative and fact-filled analysis of the Elvis movies and the arts and media environment that surrounded them. He is the author of Irwin Allen Television Productions 1964-1970, and Stephen J. Cannell Productions: A History of All Series and Pilots.