Seventies British Cinema

Robert Shail, Robert Shail

• Publisher: British Film Institute
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781838718053
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Storia e critica del cinema

Seventies British Cinema provides a comprehensive re-evaluation of British film in the 1970s. The decade has long been written off in critical discussions as a 'doldrums' period in British cinema, perhaps because the industry, facing near economic collapse, turned to 'unacceptable' low culture genres such as sexploitation comedies or extreme horror. The contributors to this new collection argue that 1970s cinema is ripe for reappraisal: giving serious critical attention to populist genre films, they also consider the development of a British art cinema in the work of Derek Jarman and Peter Greenaway, and the beginnings of an independent sector fostered by the BFI Production Board and producers like Don Boyd. A host of highly individual directors managed to produce interesting and cinematically innovative work against the odds, from Nicolas Roeg to Ken Russell to Mike Hodges. As well as providing a historical and cinematic context for understanding Seventies cinema, the volume also features chapters addressing Hammer horror, the Carry On films, Bond films of the Roger Moore period, Jubilee and other films that responded to Punk rock; heritage cinema and case studies of key seventies films such as The Wicker Man and Straw Dogs. In all, the book provides the final missing piece in the rediscovery of British cinema's complex and protean history. Contributors: Ruth Barton, James Chapman, Ian Conrich, Wheeler Winston Dixon, Christophe Dupin, Steve Gerrard, Sheldon Hall
I. Q. Hunter, James Leggott, Claire Monk, Paul Newland, Dan North, Robert Shail, Justin Smith and Sarah Street.

Part One: Popular Genres

1Take an Easy Ride: Sexploitation in the 1970s

I. Q. Hunter

When I see a couple of kids

And guess he’s fucking her and she’s

Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm,

I know this is paradise

Everyone old has dreamed of all their lives –

Philip Larkin, High Windows¹

‘From now on it’s going to be fanny, blow jobs, big tits and beer – that’s the kind of lifestyle I want.’

Dave (Johnny Vegas), Sex Lives of the Potato Men (2004)

Low-budget sex comedies, ‘permissive’ dramas, sex education films (known in the trade as ‘white-coaters’) and sexploitation documentaries sustained the British film industry in the 1970s. Unabashedly populist, they explode the assumption that the mainstream of British cinema means only literary adaptations and ‘miserablist’ social dramas. While the fly-by-night productions of leading 1970s sexploitationeers like Stanley Long and Derek Ford are still comparatively unknown, films like Come Play with Me (1976) and Confessions of a Window Cleaner (1974) ran for months or even years at Soho sex clubs and provincial theatres.² The sexploitation industry collapsed in the early 1980s because of the arrival of video, tighter censorship, inflation and the end of the Eady Levy in 1985, but today the films offer valuable insights into the tastes, values and frustrated desires of ordinary filmgoers at a period of rapid social and moral change, when exploitation was one of the few thriving areas of indigenous cinema.

This essay provides a brief overview of the British sex film in the 1970s, a genre whose first historian, David McGillivray, described as having no redeeming features whatsoever.³ Indeed, not so long ago very little critical work existed on sexploitation; perhaps the most overlooked stretch of the ‘lost continent’ of British cinema. Since the late 1990s, however, in addition to McGillivray’s insider account and the BBC 2 documentary adapted from it, there have been a number of useful overviews of British sex films, ranging from Ian Conrich’s synoptic discussion in the Journal of Popular British Cinema, Matthew Sweet’s journalistic account in Shepperton Babylon, Simon Sheridan’s two exhaustive books for FAB Press on Mary Millington and sexploitation, a handful of video reviews and pioneering interpretations of individual sexploitation films such as Queen Kong (1976), and, most impressive of all, Leon Hunt’s definitive British Low Culture.⁴ At the same time, many previously obscure films (Zeta One [1969], Au Pair Girls [1972]) have emerged on DVD labels such as Jezebel and Medusa, while the ironic cult of the political errors and fashionable excesses of the 1970s (see, for example, Life on Mars [2006–2007]) has reclaimed, among others, Robin Askwith, the star of the Confessions films (1974–7), as an icon of unembarrassed Anglo-masculinity.⁵ In short, a field of study once wholly beneath contempt is now not only visible but reasonably well served by both academia and fandom, and rough agreement has emerged about British sexploitation’s role in trickling down the ideology of ‘permissiveness’ from the elite and middle classes to suburbia and the working class.

As McGillivray and Conrich authoritatively demonstrate, the British sexploitation film can be dated from 1957, when the first nudist films were released, to 1981, when production petered out with barrel-scraping efforts such as Emmanuelle in Soho. The term exploitation refers, in the general sense it has accrued since the 1950s, to low-budget films on sensational subjects, tailored to be appetising to specific audiences. But so-called ‘classical exploitation films’ during the studio era in the United States can be more tightly defined, being a distinctive mode of sub-B-movie production of independently made and distributed films on lurid topics banned by the Production Code. Films like Child Bride (1938), Reefer Madness (1936) and Mom and Dad (1947) were a tabloid mixture of voyeurism, mock-exposé and self-righteousness. Their salacious moralism was defined by the ‘square up’, a title crawl at the start of the film that announced the producers’ educational purpose in order to appease censors and legitimate the audience’s curiosity. Classical exploitation’s crudity and emphasis on spectacle over narrative coherence distanced them from the products of the classical Hollywood style. The result, as Eric Schaefer has remarked, is that classical exploitation is more like an alternative mode of film production than simply the ‘bad’ film-making it has come to represent:

The classical exploitation films made between 1920 and 1950 had a unique style that set them apart from movies produced by the major production companies such as MGM and Universal and even those of many of the minor companies such as Republic and Monogram. . . . We can chuckle at the incompetence of classical exploitation films, but it is important to understand these ‘problems’ as the product of a specific mode of production.⁶

Classical exploitation waned in the 1950s and ‘exploitation film’ became an all-purpose label for cheap sensational movies that were intensively promoted, distributed to a sectionalised market and produced in cycles and subgenres such as the nudist film and soft-core sexploitation, which is usually dated from Russ Meyer’s ‘tits and ass’ extravaganza, The Immoral Mr Teas (1959).

British sexploitation, similarly, began with cautious ‘A’-rated nudist films in the 1950s that posed as propaganda for naturism, and then diversified into subgenres that responded to social trends, changing audiences, the vagaries of censorship and the financial success of key films. The key subgenres, with their dates of maximum impact, were these:

•The naturist/nudist film (1958–63)

•Sexploitation documentaries (1963–71, peaking with four films in 1971)

•Sex education films (1969–71)

•Permissive drama (1968–79; twenty-nine were produced in total in the 1970s)

•Erotic horror (1970–6)

•Sex comedies (1967–9, and by far the largest category. They peaked in 1975. Six were made in 1971, seven in 1972, eight in 1973, ten in 1974, twelve in 1975, eight in 1977, five in 1978 and two in 1979).

The development of these subgenres must be understood within the context of British film censorship, which until recently was the most stringent in Europe. Unlike in the United States, films could not be screened without the approval of what was then called the British Board of Film Censors; there was, for example, no equivalent to American classical exploitation’s traditions of ‘four walling’ (renting cinemas for one-off screenings of films made outside the Production Code). British sexploitation was constrained by censors who rigorously distinguished between ‘serious films’ and exploitation, and who disapproved of gratuitously arousing nudity and sex scenes.

The ‘high point’ of the British sex comedy, Eskimo Nell (1974)

Consequently, sexploitation subgenres, such as sex comedies and documentary exposés, flourished in Britain long after the legalisation of hard-core had marginalised them in the USA and continental Europe. British sex films in the 1970s were either mildly titillating soft-core romps or, in the spirit of classical exploitation, disguised as something other than attempted pornography – as social realism, for example, or documentary reports on emerging subcultural trends. It is true that there was some small-scale British hard-core production in the 1970s that, thanks to police corruption and a loophole in the Obscene Publications Act, could be seen in licensed sex cinemas.⁷ But, in regard to domestic consumption, because the BBFC simply banned explicit material, British sexploitation film-makers had to find ways to attract audiences with extremely mild fare.⁸

The most popular solution to this enforced castration was the sex comedy, which combined simulated sex scenes with saucy humour in the tradition of the Carry On films. Titles such as Percy (1971), Confessions of a Sex Maniac (1974), Can You Keep It up for a Week? (1974), Penelope Pulls It Off (1974), I’m Not Feeling Myself Tonight (1975), Adventures of a Taxi Driver (1975) and, generally reckoned the high point of the cycle, Eskimo Nell (1974) have come to define the British contribution to erotic cinema – ‘ghastly British cinematic abominations’, as Julian Petley dubs them, ‘. . . the majority of which were neither sexy nor comic’.⁹ These films were in the music-hall, naughty postcard tradition of farcical low comedy – ‘a harder, cinematic version of Brian Rix losing his trousers at the Whitehall Theatre’, as one of sexploitation’s key producers, Stanley Long, put it.¹⁰ Their unglamorous vulgarity is that of the ever-popular British take on the ‘real wives’ genre of pornography, which offers a proletarian (or, more pretentiously, Bahktinian) focus on the body’s low pleasures. In the sex comedies, as in soft-core magazines like Fiesta, there was, in Feona Attwood’s words,

a particular brand of carnival in which ordinary life becomes a fiesta because of the endless opportunities that can be filched from the routine of life for physical pleasure – for sex and laughs; a utopian and vulgar practice of everyday life.¹¹

The sex comedy played not so much on the audience’s fascination with sex as on its embarrassment about it, and lived up to the national stereotype of the British as a sniggeringly repressed people, who, to paraphrase George Mikes, had hot water bottles instead of sex lives. As Ian Conrich has noted, ‘the British male’s sexual fantasies about the provinces are of the ordinary, recognisable and available woman and her libidinous neighbour’.¹²

Key – indeed now iconic – films such as Confessions of a Window Cleaner record the farcical exploits of a working-class young man taking advantage of the new ‘permissive society’. Leon Hunt has traced how the discourse of ‘permissiveness’, which was articulated in 1970s sex comedies, embodied a consumerist attitu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Cinema in the Era of ‘Trouble and Strife’
• Part One: Popular Genres
• Part Two: Contexts and Styles
• Part Three: Films and Film-makers
• Select Bibliography
• Index
• List of Illustrations
• eCopyright