British Low Culture by Hunt Leon

Author:Hunt, Leon
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-136-18943-2
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)

Pornography/permissiveness/repression: Naughty!

Living two lives must have been a bit of a strain. All that moral indignity on the one hand, and all this naughty behaviour on the other.

Narrator, Naughty!

The central characters in Eskimo Nell (Martin Campbell, 1974) endeavour to film three versions of the famous dirty poem to satisfy different backers – a hardcore version, a kung fu musical and a gay Western. When shifty producer Roy Kinnear absconds with the money, they turn to a fourth backer, the Society for Moral Reform led by Lady Longhorne – ‘I represent a vast minority of people in this country who are clamouring for a total ban on anything but nice, wholesome stories.’ They endeavour to make a fourth, ‘wholesome’ version in order to fund the other three secretly. The ‘Festival of Light’ version is selected for a Royal Gala Performance, but, inevitably, the hardcore version is accidentally shown instead. These are the two versions which really matter, the film’s two comic Others. On the one hand, there’s the thinly veiled hypocrisy of moral reformers – ‘I’ve studied pornography over the years, and I know what effect it can have on you,’ proclaims Lord Coltwind, twitching like a vision of Bob Todd depravity. Equally untenable, though, is the pornucopia demanded by their American backer ‘Big Dick’ – ‘I want to see girls being whipped, plenty of flagellation, bondage, rubber appliances, leatherwear, chains, lesbianism, kinky gadgets, and you can throw in a bit of bestiality at the same time. Then, in the second scene …’

This interrelationship between repression and uninhibited abandon informs Naughty! ‘A Report on Pornography and Erotica’. As its title suggests, the film is most comfortable with a saucy, by implication nationally specific, middle ground. The film is a mixture of historical recreation, vox-pop interviews of questionable veracity, found footage and a kind of docu-drama. But it really breaks down into a contrast between Victorian repression and early 1970s Britain about to be engulfed by commercial sex. Early in the film, we are introduced to Horace, ‘an ordinary kind of fellow … Mr Average, you might say, or is he?’We see him, in London for the day, stray from Piccadilly Circus to Soho, a pre-Indecent-Displays-Control-Act Soho with windows full of magazines and marital aids and cinemas offering Swedish Language of Love and Anatomy of Love. Horace is located between two polar opposites – his nagging, sexually uninterested wife whom we hear in a sound flashback (‘I don’t know what’s the matter with you … It’s all those books you’ve been reading’) and the cinema club doorman who lures him in to see ‘the same old stuff’ – ‘He’s not going to see anything new – it’s still not legal here.’ Sex is ‘somewhere else’ – ‘In Sweden, it is legal’, muses Horace, ‘and I bet the girls throw themselves at you.’ Horace functions as a kind of cultural gauge for what follows.

It’s worth speculating on the influence of Stephen Marcus’s The Other Victorians on the film’s Victorian sections. Marcus’s book had been available in paperback since 1969 and highlighted as an important book by Nova.

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