No Sex Please, We're British

WHITE CARGO (1973)
LET'S GET LAID! (1977)

Even Countess of Cleavage Imogen Hassall and David Jason as an everyman hero can't save the Walter Mitty-inspired WHITE CARGO.

BESET by funding problems and dwindling audiences, the British film industry of the 1970's also had to combat small screen competition from television and domestic video. Furthermore, Margaret Thatcher's first Conservative government cut state funding on productions. Existing in their own parallel universe, British sex comedies of the 1970's are renowned to be unsexy and unfunny affairs, but here are two chronically inadequate examples. Fanatically popular throughout the decade, this sub-genre existed in Britain's most troublesome cinematic period thanks to two major plot devices that required little budget: the cheapest special effect of all - i.e. female breasts - and slapstick.

Ray Selfe's WHITE CARGO - re-written by David McGillivray after The Goodies rejected the initial treatment scripted especially for them - casts David Jason in his first major screen role. Underachiever Albert Toddey (Jason) visits a Soho strip joint owned by Dudley Fox (Raymond Cross) and meets showgirl Stella (Imogen Hassall). Stella is actually an undercover policewomen, and the club is selling girls into white slavery to an unnamed Arabian oil state. A number of scenes are played out twice - firstly with Albert's tendency to fantasise himself as a heroic, slick government agent (initially to be shot in 3D), and secondly the rather less glamorous real outcome. Making use of several recycled sets from the Peter O'Toole classic THE RULING CLASS, WHITE CARGO at least has an interesting cast; in a part originally intended for Ian Lavender, Jason's enthusiasm about his star turn allegedly diminished rapidly during the shoot, and the underused Hassall is the glue attempting to hold the film together. David Prowse also appears as club heavy Harry, who thinks nothing of trading his girlfriend in to the slave market for cash-in-hand.

The only sexual charge in LET'S GET LAID! is created by Anna Chen - as 'Oriental Girl' - astride Robin Askwith in a car atop Hampstead Heath.

James Kenelm Clarke's LET'S GET LAID! also has an unnecessarily convoluted plot and fantasy sequences. Bringing together the vanguard of British sex talent - Robin Askwith, Fiona Richmond and a bit-part from Linda Hayden - demobbed wallflower Gordon Laid (Askwith) is given the key to a Mayfair apartment owned by a rich cousin. Laid aids actress Maxine Lupercal (Richmond) in a flat across the hall in disposing of the body of a secret agent, and inadvertently pockets the dead man's cigarette lighter which is actually the potentially explosive PJ46 device. Amidst a police hunt, the attentions of international crook Moncrieff Dovecraft (Anthony Steel) and the complication that Laid has a double in thespian Jimsy Deveroo, the fantasy inserts make no attempt to follow the dull narrative, which includes Richmond cavorting as a Nazi Miss Whiplash.

"Wet with Terror"

SECRETS OF SEX (1969)
HORROR HOSPITAL (1973)

"Imagine you are making love to this girl. Imagine you are making love to this boy ..." Also known as BIZARRE and TALES OF THE BIZARRE, SECRETS OF SEX is an omnibus oddity that has it all.

EXPLOITATION film distributor and director Antony Balch started with the moving image by writing subtitles for European movies and making adverts for Camay soap and Kit-E-Kat ("Your cat will stay younger, live longer.") While briefly living in France he befriended William Burroughs, before returning to run two movie theatres in London: The Jacey Piccadilly Circus, and The Times Baker Street. Balch made surrealist shorts in collaboration with the American beat poet, and Burroughs also provided narration for the distributor's 1966 re-packaging of HAXAN as WITCHCRAFT THROUGH THE AGES. With a proposed adaptation of Naked Lunch starring Dennis Hopper falling through, Balch found a more solid partner in producer Richard Gordon, which created cult favourites SECRETS OF SEX and HORROR HOSPITAL. Unfortunately future projects such as THE SEX LIFE OF ADOLF HITLER never materialised, and Balch succumbed to stomach cancer in 1980 at the age of just 42.

SECRETS OF SEX was Balch's feature debut, a dotty collection of tales fusing comedy, horror, spies and softcore using a framing device of a Mummy voiced by Valentine Dyall. There are six segments in total, each illustrating the age-old battle between the sexes: a female photographer asks her male model to straddle a 'Spanish Horse' torture device; an old man yearns for a son after a previous bereavement, only for his young scientist lover to keep a birth defect from him and deliver a monster; a man catches a burglar only to discover "Christ! It's a bird!"; Lindy Leigh is Mayfair's Special Agent 28, whose main talent is to shed her clothes at every convenience; a man beckons an escort in an attempt to have sex with his reptile; and an old women confesses to kidnapping the souls of past lovers and trapping them in her greenhouse. Amazingly, this inoffensive and often banal picture was censored by John Trevelyan to the tune of nine minutes, but the film was still a hit and shown up to seven times a day at the Jacey, often with an accompanying Bugs Bunny cartoon.

Graham Humphrey's DVD/Blu-ray cover for HORROR HOSPITAL, discs released in August 2015.

HORROR HOSPITAL sees songwriter Jason Jones (a pre-CONFESSIONS Robin Askwith) taking a break from London's cutthroat music business by going to "Hairy Holidays", a country spa provided by gay travel agent Pollock (Dennis Price). On the train journey there Jason meets Judy (Vanessa (actually Phoebe) Shaw), who is also travelling to the alleged health farm Brittlehurst Manor to meet her long lost aunt. Actually, the Manor is run by Dr Christian Storm (Lugosiesque Michael Gough), who uses lobotomy to turn wayward youth into zombie slaves ("fresh air, birds, flowers - and storm your way back to health.") The wheelchair-bound scientist is aided by Judy's Aunt Harris (Ellen Pollock), a former Hamburg brothel madam, comic-relief dwarf Frederick (Skip Martin), and two biker thugs; and if anyone escapes, Storm has a Rolls Royce fitted with a scythe to stop any such insubordination ("make a clean job of it Frederick, the car was washed this morning.")

Utilising Knebworth House exteriors and Battersea Town Hall interiors, HORROR HOSPITAL - released as THE COMPUTER KILLERS in America - is a washed-out but endearing pastiche of the mad doctor genre, complete with requisite fiery climax. Guest star Price shines as the lecherous Pollock, ogling Jones' package and as camp as Christmas on his visit to the Manor ("Mirror, mirror on the wall, don't say a word, I know it all") before his bloody demise. Askwith and Gough turn in solid performances in roles specifically written for them - Gough is overtly stern and almost a Bond villain  - and it is only a somnambulant Shaw that lets down the troupe. The influence of this piece of 70's schlock even extends to hip-hop, when in 2003 Norwich-based Stonasaurus recorded a concept album about the release; internally, actual 1960's psychedelic group Tangerine Peel appear at the beginning as 'Mystic', fronted by a cross-dresser who is actually co-writer Alan Watson.

Perils of Linda Hayden

BABY LOVE (1968)
QUEEN KONG (1976)

An excellent kitchen sink drama transported to a wealthy homestead, BABY LOVE portrays damaging and unsatisfied relationships that toil away whatever the background.

BABY LOVE is a complex, underrated sexual pot-boiler, based on the novel by Tina Chad Christian, which sees Luci (Linda Hayden, in a striking debut) live with her promiscuous, hard-drinking mother (an ethereal Diana Dors). Coming home from school she discovers her mother's body in the bathtub, the parent having slit her wrists. Doctor Robert Quayle (Keith Barron), the mother's former lover, receives a letter pleading with him to look after the wayward child. Robert takes Luci to his luxurious home on a trail basis, where she meets his wife Amy (Anne Lynn) and their teenage son Nick (Derek Lamden). Luci holds Robert responsible for her mother's death, and soon her developing sexuality causes friction, manipulating the mechanics of the household by teasing Nick and making advances to Amy.

Hardly a Lolita clone, Luci is a young woman struggling with her feelings of loss at such an informative age, craving the love and intimacy that has been taken away from her; even the attentions of a stranger is better than no attention at all (in one scene, she welcomes a man stroking her legs at a cinema). Hayden - who allegedly lost her virginity during a publicity tour for the film - is amazingly mature in posture and shows, even at this age, that she has no qualms about stripping off for the camera. Indeed, you have to wonder how these scenes - especially when linked with her provocative actions - were ever allowed. Similar to Nastassja Kinski's involvement in TO THE DEVIL A DAUGHTER, at the age of fifteen Hayden is shown naked from behind and also has a few brief topless scenes, blatantly breaking UK obscenity laws and making it extremely unlikely that BABY LOVE could ever get a certificate from the BBFC today. The rare ‘18' rated VHS releases from 1988 and 1994 also seem to show a lack of knowledge by the censorship board.

While BABY LOVE didn’t provide the stardom that producer Michael Klinger had been grooming Hayden for, it did lead to a career in horror and sexploitation, such as this cameo in QUEEN KONG. 

The film explores resentment and tension with ambiguous relish. For example, when Luci grasps Amy's breast in bed (as she sucks her thumb in her sleep) the viewer can either see the sequence as subconscious lesbian flirtation or a child's need for the comfort of a mother's bosom. Thus Amy's growing frustration may be a sexual one, or that the baby girl she has so craved - particularly in an increasingly cold marriage and masculine household - has instead come to her as a young woman. The film has been criticised of taking a more melodramatic slant at the climax, but the shift does illustrate the level of psychological damage Luci has suffered. And the final scene shows Luci's blossoming from the nubile orphan's twisted sexuality to a maturing manipulater who uses allure as her main instrument of communication.

At the other end of the cinematic spectrum, Hayden appeared as The Singing Nun in the atrocious feminist "comedy" QUEEN KONG. Rushed into production on the news that Dino de Laurentiis was remaking the 1933 RKO classic (Dino subsequently issued an injunction against the picture's release), we follow the antics of filmmaker Luce Habit (Rula Lenska), who takes Ray Fay (Robin Askwith) - and her all-girl crew - to Africa on yacht The Liberated Lady. Eventually reaching “Lazanga Where They Do the Konga,” they discover a tribe where men are the servants. The Queen (Valerie Leon) prepares Ray as a sacrifice to the simian goddess, but the gorilla is so taken with the hippie dropout she takes him to her lair. When Luce and her crew rescue Ray, they manage to subdue the beast and return to London. But unlike the original, Queen Kong is saved when Ray rallies the oppressed women of our capital. Playing like a terminal merger between the CONFESSIONS and CARRY ON franchises, the only amusement is playing "spot the extra," which includes VAMPYRES star Marianne Morris and Vicki Michelle.

Carnage and Carnality

THE FLESH AND BLOOD SHOW (1972)

 

"If it wasn't so tragic and horrible, it would almost make a movie script."

THE bluntly independent horror output of Pete Walker often depicted society itself as the monster, a clinically cold England that tries to cast off the shackles of the past, only to be smothered by a tide of permissiveness after generations of repression. Unlike Hammer or Amicus, Walker's monsters are not based in the supernatural, rather symbolically drawn from a bygone age. Scripted by Alfred Shaughnessy, Walker's first venture into horror, THE FLESH AND BLOOD SHOW, tells of a young acting troupe led by Mike (Ray Brooks) residing in an abandoned seaside theatre. The group - which includes Julia (Jenny Hanley), Carol (Luan Peters), Simon (Robin Askwith) and Sarah (Candace Glendenning) - are engaged by a mysterious agent to produce a musical review. When the aspiring thespians are picked off by a hooded prowler, the killer is revealed to be distinguished actor Sir Arnold Gates (Patrick Barr), who previously entombed his wife and her lover alive during a production of Othello.

THE FLESH AND BLOOD SHOW explores the relationship between life and illusion and the connection between acting and promiscuity in a collectively complex dictum. Gates' outburst - "They're all the same, young actors, filthy and degenerate lechers, all of them. And the females, flaunting their bodies, offering their thighs and their breasts. Scum! Excrement!" - subscribes to a world where performance is being eroded away by the use of the body. Sir Arnold's views reflect those of Walker himself, whose contempt for the acting profession is illustrated by him saying "If I could make films without actors, I would rather do it," a standing that has also been noted by many of his scriptwriters, particularly David McGillivray, who quotes the director as describing actors as "egotistical poofs" and actresses "pompous prostitutes." Not content to having his dramatis personae reduced to ciphers and sex-crazed starlets, Walker obliged the scantily-clad performers to suffer for their art by shooting THE FLESH AND BLOOD SHOW in February. 

Best remembered for presenting MAGPIE, Jenny Hanley was briefly a Bond girl in ON HER MAJESTY'S SECRET SERVICE and survived the SCARS OF DRACULA.

Using the concept of Ten Little Indians, THE FLESH AND BLOOD SHOW is a rich British giallo similar to the Britsploitation classic TOWER OF EVIL. Both these features include the staples of the slasher film before this much-maligned sub-genre really existed. It is also interesting to note how the film sows the seeds of Walker's stabs on the establishment that would flow freely in his more famous output. The small town where the picture plays out feels creepy enough on its own even without the aid of the maniac on the loose, but THE FLESH AND BLOOD SHOW's major fault is its incredibly murky photography. Also to the production's detriment is its use of an experimental 3-D process - seen only in a flashback to the wartime Othello production - which appears so late in the proceeding to lose any real shock value.

Virgin of Evil

VIRGIN WITCH (1970)
TOWER OF EVIL (1972)

VIRGIN WITCH's Vicki Michelle would later be best remembered as waitress Yvette in the BBC's WWII catchphrasefest 'ALLO 'ALLO. Unsurprisingly shying away from her schlock past, Vicki can also be glimpsed in QUEEN KONG and THE SENTINEL.

RAY Austin's VIRGIN WITCH sees two sisters - Christine and Betty (played by real life siblings Ann and Vicki Michelle) run away from home with dreams of fame and fortune in London. This being a 1970s British sexploitation flick, they are promptly picked up by a smooth-talker in a sports car (in this case, Johnny (Keith Buckley)), and swept off to a comfortable flat where opportunity waits around every corner. Christine is hired for a photo shoot by Sybil Waite (Patricia Haines), a predatory lesbian who uses her modeling agency as bait to lure attractive, naïve young women to the pagan coven she acts as high priestess; what Sybil doesn't know is that Christine is gifted with supernatural powers of her own. With Christine arriving at the Wychwold manor house for her assignment - and the innocent Betty in tow - it is soon discovered that the voyeuristic owner of the house, Dr Gerald Amberley (Neil Hallett), is a high priest who is (conveniently) holding a Sabbat that very evening.

VIRGIN WITCH was actually shot in 1970, but it took two further years to get it into theatres due to issues with the BBFC. The blend of horror and sex was always a problem for the censor, but viewed today it is difficult to understand why this timid release should be withheld for such a period, particularly as these ingredients were inseparable for British filmmakers at the dawn of the decade. Whereas Hammer's Karnstein Trilogy was old-fashioned horror spiced up with liberal sprinklings of flesh, VIRGIN WITCH is first and foremost a skin flick, with supernatural and horror elements so ineffectual they scarcely warrant a mention. In fact, the most unnerving thing about the film is that producer "Ralph Solomans" was actually a joint pseudonym for wrestling commentator Kent Walton and Hazel Adair, creator of that zenith of daytime soaps, CROSSROADS.

TOWER OF EVIL's Candace Glendenning has a tough time in this proto-slasher.

Jim O' Connolly's TOWER OF EVIL can boast one of the most delirious plots in British film history. John Gurney (George Colouris) and his son Hamp (Jack Watson) make their way by small boat to Snape, a fog-bound island off the South-West coast of England. They discover the mutilated remains of three American teenagers (played with bogus accents by British sex film actors Robin Askwith, John Hamill and Serretta Wilson) before shrieking, naked survivor Penny (Candace Glendenning) knifes John to death and is knocked out by his son. One teen had been killed by a gold Phoenician ceremonial spear, which leads four love tangled archaeologists - Adam (Mark Edward), Rose (Jill Haworth), Dan (Derek Fowlds) and Nora (Anna Palk) - to travel to Snape, together with Brent (Bryant Halliday), a private eye intent on clearing Penny's name. As the archaeologists delve deeper, they are attacked by Hamp's Neanderthal brother Saul (Frederic Abbot) and his son Michael (Mark McBride); it is claimed that the duo have become unhinged after the death of Saul's "calming influence" wife Martha, whose seaweed-covered, crab-chewed corpse is kept in a rocking chair.

Together with Mario Bava's equally convoluted A BAY OF BLOOD released the previous year, TOWER OF EVIL contains a potent blend of nudity and violence that helped set the template for the American slasher craze. Released in the United States as HORROR ON SNAPE ISLAND, then reissued as BEYOND THE FOG, this uproarious film also mixes old world Gothic with a riot of 1970s paraphernalia in its hippie dialogue ("bravery isn't my bag, man"), psychedelia (Penny's very unorthodox interrogation involves regressive hypnosis induced by disco lights) and fashion (the use of skin-tight flared jeans leave little to the imagination – and that's just the men). Ultimately there is something very British in having a dank, foggy island as a hotbed of sexual activity and intrigue, where scrambling crabs over the dead act as a delicious metaphor.

Anarchy in the UK

O LUCKY MAN! (1973) 
BRITANNIA HOSPITAL (1982)

A leading theatre director, Lindsay Anderson was also an eloquent and perceptive critic, editing Sequence - still widely regarded as the most influential film magazine ever published in Britain.

O LUCKY MAN! and BRITANNIA HOSPITAL complete a trilogy of boldly conceived and literate films from director Lindsay Anderson, scriptwriter David Sherwin, and actor Malcolm McDowell as everyman Mick Travis, which began with the schoolboy rebellion allegory if…. Despite the shared name, Travis isn’t the same character in the three, nor do the stories follow-on; they do, however, jointly illustrate through fantasy and satire the sobering reality of how our institutions succeed in dehumanisation. A study of Britain during the first half of the 1970s, O LUCKY MAN! is an energetic piece of work which shows our country retreating from its imperial past but managing to retain some influence in the world by means of corrupt dealings with foreign dictators. Within its lumbering three-hour timeframe, Travis starts off as an ambitious coffee salesman who finds unexpected riches in the North East, narrowly avoids being blown up by the army and killed in the name of science, makes a fortune associating with a dishonest businessman, and finally becomes a movie star. At the end, Mick is lucky not because he is successful, but because he has survived a world where cruelty is random and kindness rare.

Anderson has described O LUCKY MAN! as an "epic in the classical, poetic sense." Travis changes careers frequently and philosophies as many times, enjoying good fortune and enduring injustice and suffering. Because of this, the character bears marked similarities to Perceval, the archetypal quester of medieval romance. The film has aged well because many of the issues - the class divide, corruption of authority, the immorality of international affairs and the ruthlessness of science - are all still relevant. Science comes off especially badly at the Millar (Graham Crowden) research laboratory, where Mick narrowly avoids having his genes spliced with those of an animal – he’s luckier than another who has had his head grafted onto the body of a sheep. Sherwin’s script hits out in all directions, giving the work a disjointed feel of a series of prolonged sketches; apart from McDowell, the only real constant is the score of Alan Price, who provides a commentary for the serendipitous events. His lyrics could act as a warning, but atypically remain unheard.

BRITANNIA HOSPITAL - lost when initially released during the Falklands conflict - is an English political cartoon similar to MONTY PYTHON’S THE MEANING OF LIFE.

With the imminent visit of the Queen Mother, Britannia Hospital couldn’t be any less prepared. In the opening sequence to BRITANNIA HOSPITAL, an elderly patient in an ambulance is blocked for entering by striking workers. The old man is only let through because he is about to die, and even inside the staff decline to attend to him because their shift is over. Also, kitchen workers refuse to prepare food until a union leader (Robin Askwith!) is bought off with promises of O.B.E.’s. Later, in a scene which plays like an anticipation of RE-ANIMATOR, Dr Millar (Crowden, in his recurring role) - a surgeon conducting deranged experiments with public funds - inadvertently rips the head off his Frankenstein creation.

Much more than a scathing satire on British healthcare - and unfairly dismissed as the lesser entry of the trilogy - BRITANNIA HOSPITAL acts as a grotesque sledgehammer to where the world was heading. Anderson presents a society incapable of accepting any responsibility, or communicating in anything other than demand. There are no heroes - here, Travis is reduced to an investigative reporter whose head is used for Millar’s monster, and even the hospital administrator (Leonard Rossiter) fells a striking worker with a shovel. However mad, Millar is the only authority figure who inspires loyalty from his staff, and the only character who cares about the world around him. In his climactic monologue, Millar prophetically announces that a "motion picture entertainer of North America will receive enough money in a month as would feed a starving South American tribe for a hundred years."

An Angel for Satan

THE BLOOD ON SATAN'S CLAW (1971)

EXPOSE (1975)

A charming publicity photograph of Linda Hayden for THE BLOOD ON SATAN’S CLAW…

A graduate of the Aida Foster stage school, Linda Hayden's first role was in BABY LOVE, playing an amoral 15-year old who seduces a man (who may well be her father), his wife and his son. This was a stepping stone to her later roles, as the actress was frequently cast in horror productions - TASTE THE BLOOD OF DRACULA, VAMPIRA, MADHOUSE - or as window dressing for British 1970s softcore (often with then partner Robin Askwith). Her career path belittled her obvious talent: stunningly attractive, and able to absorb the screen through looks and observation, Hayden often mixed a naughty demeanour with a perverse sex appeal - with her eyebrows Satan-sent.

Tigon British was a relatively short-lived company that made a handful of classics amongst quite a bit of rubbish. Piers Haggard’s THE BLOOD ON SATAN’S CLAW is one of Tigon’s best; an eerie gothic which was intended as a successor - in spirit if not in story - to the company’s crowning achievement WITCHFINDER GENERAL. It is an intelligent study of repression set towards the end of the 17th Century, where the children of a small rural community start to play sinister games: pouting leader Angel Blake (Hayden) is in league with a half-glimpsed cowled Behemoth, while the others donate body parts to make the creature complete.

…and Hayden as she appears as Angel Blake, ringleader
of a group of Devil-worshipping children.

Hayden is a revelation as Angel; her false accusation of sexual assault against Reverend Fallowfield (Anthony Ainley) holds a powerful charge, and the moment where Blake stabs Cathy Vespers (Wendy Padbury) to death and languorously smells and licks the blade is preceded by a tour de force unrivalled in British horror: Vespers is lured to a ruined chapel and raped as the crowd of mutilated children (and a toothless old couple) look on in undisguised excitement, as the offscreen demon rasps “give me my skinn-n-n-n.” Not only does THE BLOOD ON SATAN’S CLAW provide a blueprint for the lethal potential of teenagers, children and babies that would wreck havoc in 1970s cinema, it portrays a turn-of-the-decade stench of the Manson Murders and child-strangler Mary Bell.

James Kenelm Clarke’s EXPOSE builds a claustrophobic mood of sweaty summer expectancy in its tale of blood, breasts and rubber gloves. Here Hayden plays a manipulative secretary - Linda - for Paul Martin (Udo Kier), a best-selling author of pulp fiction who can only work in complete silence and seclusion in his rented country cottage. Under pressure to meet the deadline for his second novel Straw Summer, Martin is tormented by nightmarish delusions; a control freak who is only able to make love to his girlfriend Suzanne (Fiona Richmond) while wearing surgical gloves, it transpires that his last book was actually written by Linda’s husband, who was driven to suicide when Paul tricked him out of the manuscript.

“You look really, really good”: Linda Hayden
seduces Fiona Richmond in EXPOSE.

EXPOSE was the only British entry in the Department of Public Prosecutions’ list of banned movies during the video nasties furore of the early 1980s, and it is hard to see why the film deserved such a fate. Linda’s sex game with two gun-toting Essex boys could be interpreted as a rape scene in which the victim starts to enjoy herself - mirroring the controversy of Susan George in STRAW DOGS - but this hardly warrants the branding of a video nasty. Of the performances, Kier is sufficiently deranged and unlikeable, and Richmond is amicable in her first sizeable film role, yet it is Hayden who excels, charting Linda’s progress from seducer to psychopath with consummate skill. Hayden has subsequently disowned the film, claiming that material was inserted after she finished work on it somehow lowered the tone. Given the conspicuous absence of body doubles in her masturbation scenes and seduction of Richmond, Hayden’s attitude is a perplexing one.