British Trash Cinema by Ian Hunter

Author:Ian Hunter
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2013-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

The perils of hitch-hiking exposed in Kenneth Rowles’s Take an Easy Ride

In retrospect, films like Naughty! or Take an Easy Ride or even the attempted softcore of Erotic Inferno sum up all the problems of the British sexploitation film in the 1970s, quite apart from their low budgets, impoverished acting and disorientating editing, which to fans of paracinema scarcely count as flaws at all. Although the producers, with the exception of David Sullivan and Derek Ford, appear not to have been anxious to move into hardcore production, the films were pathetic substitutes for the unavailable real thing: ‘The Brit sex comedy is a celluloid prick-teaser. It says “yes”, and then changes its mind and says “no”.’ 42 Doomed to euphemism, British sex films offered mild comic thrills and redundant instruction to punters eager for altogether juicier meat. It was not till 2000, when hardcore finally became legal, that they would get it.

HARDCORE

British hardcore porn did exist in the 1960s and 1970s, though it was illicit and not strictly ‘cinema’, most of it being for home consumption (as in the opening scene of Get Carter in which a bunch of gangsters watch homemade silent black-and-white stag reels). British stags have been dated back to 1910, but it was only after World War II that a Soho-based industry emerged.43 Legal 8mm films of nude models and strippers (of the sort made by Mark Lewis in Peeping Tom) were produced by companies such as Stag Films (run by arch-exploitationeers Stanley Long and Arnold Louis Miller) and Pete Walker’s Heritage Films.44 According to Walker, he made from 1962–3 some ‘470 16mm girlie films, the Heritage range, all terrible, all shot within half-an-hour. They were duped to eight and packaged in lovely coloured boxes’.45 The kind of ‘short striptease movies you could buy in Dixons – 39 shillings for 50 ft’ was, as Long recalls, ‘very tame. They were self-censored.’46 But illicit hardcore loops (‘rollers’) were also made in the 1960s. The best-known producers were Evan ‘Big Jeff’ Phillips, who made films from 1965 till his suicide in 1975 after an eighteen-month prison term; Mike Freeman; and Ivor Cooke, whose stags for his Climax Films included Pussy Galore (1965) and Satan’s Children (1975), which have been lauded as ‘some of most exquisitely realized British stags ever made’.47 Freeman made 8mm films in the early 1960s and, after a period in prison for obscenity offences, upgraded to a 16mm Bolex camera and Eastmancolor before returning to prison in 1969 for murder.48 Harrison Marks dabbled in hardcore too. By the 1970s, the leading figure was John Lindsay and, thanks to police corruption and a loophole in the Obscene Publications Act, his films could be bought in Soho sex shops and seen in licensed sex cinemas, such as Lindsay’s own Taboo Clubs and David Waterfield’s Exxon Club in Islington.49 Harrison Marks recalled the popularity of the Exxon Club when it opened in 1973–4: ‘My God, you couldn’t cram enough of them in. They were almost hanging from the ceiling.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.