Young Love (1961)

A couple of days ago I came across a set of FOH stills (front of house) for a Finnish film distributed in 1961 by Bargate, a particularly obscure distributor that I currently know nothing about. The rear of the pictures are stamped "Girosign Ltd" with the address 88 Wardour St, W1 given.

The Film was originally titled Poika eli kesäänsä and was made in 1955. The literal translation is "The Boy of Summer", but Young Love has much more potential for exploitation, as did the X certificate it received. Films often took a few years to be picked up in the UK, particularly around this period, so it is no surprise that it took six years to be released here. The plot is described in the December 1961 issue of Monthly Film Bulletin as follows:

"Schoolboy Elias returns home for the summer holidays to his village and his devoted childhood sweetheart Lilli. She willingly allows herself to be seduced by him on midsummer night, but is so upset by the experience that she turns from Elias, who makes up for lost time with Olga, the flirtatious daughter of the village squire. Olga then marries the man of her father's choice. Under the impression that Lilli is pregnant, Elias proposes to her, but she turns him down and he returns to school."

So fairly standard sexploitation morality tale then, spiced up for the UK audiences who associated Scandinavian film with sex. The reviewer references a mild striptease and a couple of strenuous love scenes, which coupled with the adolescent angle was surely gold for Bargate. Perhaps audiences were not ready for that sort of behaviour in 1955.   

I am not sure whether this film is available anywhere. It doesn't seem to be, and is another example of an international film which has been lost down the cracks of time.

Update 13th october 2013

I have just visited the BBFC to search in their archives for Gala film titles (a blog post on that will be coming soon). Whilst I was browsing their Minutes of Exceptions for 1961 I came across the exceptions for Young Love:

Remove the close or medium close shot of Lili nude at the lake, i.e. when she is sitting on the landing-stage.

Remove all shots of men having a sauna bath.

Remove the lines "The brides go and get scrubbed for the wedding" and "You'll need it" and all the shots of the women in the sauna bath.

Remove also the girl's line in which she suggests that Olga will need clean sheets for her marriage bed.

Being a Finnish film I guess it should be no surprise that there would be scantily-clad sauna scenes.

Sexploitation and Norman J. Warren

My research interests have always lain in the 1960s. I'm not entirely sure why, but that decade holds endless fascination for me. Before I started looking at international cinema, I spent a long time writing about British film in that decade. In 2010 I gave my first ever paper at a conference, and it was on Norman J. Warren's then unknown early sexploitation films. Since then, and I like to think partly thanks to my work, the BFI put Her Private Hell out on blu ray and DVD as part of their Flipside range. I was invited to contribute to the booklet for that release and attended the cast and crew screening, which was very exciting.

I have now uploaded that paper plus the imagery on my Academia.edu profile, so you can now read it, should you be so inclined. You can find it here.

(still from Loving Feeling (1968))