I Start Counting (1970, David Greene, UK/ USA: Triumvirate Productions)

Wynne Kinch (Jenny Agutter) was adopted. She had been raised Catholic by her mother, but at some stage prior to seven, still old enough to know about what was happening, she was put up for adoption and taken into a loving family with two older brothers. Considerably older. Of the brothers, George (Bryan Marshall) is her favourite. And now, at the age of fourteen, Wynne's familial love is turning into a sexually driven lust and obsession. Denying that it is incest because she was adopted, Wynne feels completely justified in having sexual urges towards her thirty-two year old brother. This leads to frustration that he does not see her in that way, but merely as his younger sister.

Wynne (Jenny Agutter) wants George (Bryan Marshall) to see her as a woman

Wynne and her adoptive family live in a new high rise block in Bracknell, Berkshire. Everything around her is either white or concrete, and all of it new, yet she still yearns to spend time in their old home: a large, crumbling farmhouse on the other side of the park. It is condemned and marked for demolition, like all of the other Victorian property we see in the area. Anything not brand new, it seems, is unwanted. Wynne's mother (Madge Ryan) exclaims to her father (Billy Russell), who also lives with them, "This place is a palace compared to where we used to live." "Oh yes?" he replies, "and you name me a palace where the doorknobs keep falling off." There is something rotten at the heart of this new brutalist utopia.

This crumbling facade not only represents the forbidden love at the centre of the family, but the possibility that George may be a killer of young women. Bodies have been found in the park near their old home, and the police are seemingly without a lead. When Wynne spots scratch marks on George's back, and finds his jumper covered in blood, she begins to suspect that maybe he is the culprit. Far from putting her off, this causes her love for him to grow stronger, feeling a need to protect him. Only she truly understands him and can help him. She fantasises about George kissing her, or walking in on her in the bath. Wynne confesses her sinful thoughts to a priest during the day, and caresses herself in bed at night.

Throughout the film she becomes an amateur detective, following him around and searching for clues in his bedroom. The occasional red herring is also thrown in, such as the interest her other brother, the pill-popping Len (Gregory Phillips), shows in the grisly details as reported in the press: "You'd think if he was going to kill all these people, he'd at least rape them. It seems such a waste." He even keeps a scrapbook of press cuttings, a sure sign of any serial killer. There is also the occasional appearance of a potentially sleazy bus conductor (Simon Ward), who grabs Wynne by the wrist and tells her "Your skirt's too short." Ultimately Wynne does solve the crime, and in the process is forced to grow up and learn a few unpleasant things about life.

I Start Counting begins with a long panning shot around Wynne's bedroom, and the opening credits then roll over her morning routine. We see her open curtains, eat breakfast and get dressed. Continuing her routine, and in full close-up, Wynne pulls on her underwear, puts on a bra and gets into her school uniform, of which the skirt is short. This is one of those films which belongs in the same category as Baby Love (1968, Alastair Reid, UK: Avton Films), All The Right Noises (1971, Gerry O'Hara, UK: Trigon Productions) or Twinky (1970, Richard Donner, UK/ Italy: World Film Services), where schoolgirls are objects of sexual awakening and desire. Twinky's tagline (on the US poster, where it had been renamed Lola) was the astonishing "She's almost 16, he's almost 40." Pop music also contributed to this concept, whether it was Neil Sedaka singing in 1961 "Happy birthday sweet sixteen, Tonight's the night I've waited for, Because you're not a baby anymore," or the Rolling Stones cheerfully proclaiming "There'll be a feast if you just come upstairs, But it's no hanging matter, It's no capital crime, I can see that you're fifteen years old, No I don't want your I.D." in 1968. 

Jenny Agutter may have been seventeen, but the schoolgirl she was portraying was fourteen.
The creepy rabbit to the left plays a small part in the plot.

Wynne Kinch may have been fourteen in I Start Counting but Jenny Agutter was seventeen, eighteen by the time the film was released. This may serve as some sort of justification in shooting her dressing in such a voyeuristic fashion, or in the way the camera often looks up the miniskirt of her friend Corinne (Claire Sutcliffe), whose colourful knickers are flashed throughout the film, despite her also being fourteen. Agutter also posed for a series of blatantly sexual photos to promote the film, perhaps demonstrating just how much of a woman Wynne has become despite her young age. 1960s and 1970s culture was preoccupied with the first flowerings of sexual desire in teenage girls (and underage girls). Sadly the events of the last few years, and Operation Yewtree in particular, have taught us the dark truth behind this cultural acceptability.

According to the 1970 edition of The British Film & Television Year Book, if you had wanted to reach Jenny Agutter she could be contacted care of Denys Becher, 9A Marylebone High Street, London, W.1.

The film is adapted from Audrey Erskine Lindop's novel from 1966, and the plot feels similar to the popular, although far more graphic, schoolgirl-based Italian crime films of Massimo Dallamano: What Have You Done to Solange? (Cosa avette fatto a Solange? 1972, Italy/ West Germany: Clodio Cinematografica) and What Have They Done to Your Daughters? (La polizia chiede aiuto, 1974, Italy: Primex Italia). Perhaps Dallamano was familiar with this film, or perhaps it is coincidence, but What Have You Done to Solange? is also set in Britain, and features the murder of a schoolgirl in a park. There are also similarities to the British thriller Assault (1971, Sidney Hayers, UK: George H. Brown Productions), which again features schoolgirls being murdered in parks. This was clearly a theme which needed exploring in the early 1970s.

The Pan Books tie-in edition of The Ravine by Kendal Young, now known as Assault.

I Start Counting was directed by David Greene, who had previously directed, amongst others, The Shuttered Room (1967, UK: Seven Arts) and The Strange Affair (1968, UK: Paramount Pictures), the latter also featuring an underage relationship, this time between a schoolgirl and a policeman. David Greene had angered many people when he burned down a real historic building in Norfolk at the climax of The Shuttered Room, the full story of which can be read here. I Start Counting also features the destruction of real property, and was perhaps something Greene looked for in his films as a way of enhancing production value. He had a varied and fascinating career, working in both film and TV between Hollywood and the UK. Monthly Film Bulletin praised his direction of this film, stating it was "a coherent and accomplished piece of filmmaking."

Sadly I Start Counting was only seen in Britain in the cinema in 1970, where it played with an AA certificate from the BBFC, and then again once on TV in the 1990s, as far as I can tell. It is a compelling and well-constructed film which was also hugely significant in the career of Jenny Agutter, coming out just a month before The Railway Children (1970, Lionel Jeffries, UK: EMI Film Productions). Monthly Film Bulletin describes her performance here as "Something of a remarkable balance, poised between naïveté and delicacy to suggest a perfectly natural innocent." If you want to see this performance the only way to currently view I Start Counting is on Youtube, where it appears to have been taken from a VHS copy. It is thankfully in its correct aspect ratio, which suggests the film was released on video in the U.S. in a widescreen version, unless it was shown on TV in widescreen and this is an off air recording. Perhaps eventually this will see a restored release as part of Network's ongoing British Collection. If you have any interest in British cinema of the period, I Start Counting is well worth your attention. And just what is it she is counting? Watch the film and see if you can work it out for yourself.

"Grossly Obscene and Primarily Erotic!" Swedish Sex Education in 1970s Britain

Last weekend I gave a paper on the censorship and legal problems around two Swedish sex education films which were released here in the mid-1970s. I came across this story as it involved Jacey cinemas and the Fancey family, both of whom I had been researching.

The paper was part of the Sex and the Cinema conference at the University of Kent. It was an excellent conference and I met some interesting people. I also had very positive feedback, which is always nice. It's also reassuring to see other people's papers and realise that the areas in which I'm researching are also of interest to other academics, and that I'm not misjudging this whole thing.

You can read the paper on my Academia.edu profile here.

Terrahawks - A blast from the past

Considering how often it was reported that Gerry Anderson supposedly hated working with puppets, he worked with them an awful lot. Having made his name in the 1960s with shows such as Fireball XL5, Stingray and Thunderbirds, creating a new art form along the way, he made a successful move into live action science fiction with the classic television series UFO and Space: 1999. Somehow he was persuaded to go back to puppets to produce a brand-new children’s television show in 1983: Terrahawks. It ran for three series and was very popular, enabling a new generation of children (this writer included) to discover Gerry Anderson’s incredible work for the first time.

Terrahawks tells the story of an elite force defending 21^st century Earth from a host of alien invaders, most notoriously the android clone Zelda, who with her idiotic son Yung-star is constantly attempting to either take over or destroy the planet. Thankfully amongst the Terrahawks crew are Tiger Ninestein, Mary Falconer, former pop star Kate Kestrel, Lt. Hawkeye and many spherical robots known as the Zeroids. It was a situation which ensured that every week some sort of world-threatening plot would require heroic deeds from Ninestein and his crew, accompanied by some spectacular special effects from Gerry Anderson’s team. Zelda was an odd choice for a principle villain in a children’s television series, as she is essentially a cackling old woman who looked like a cross between Tina Turner and Great Expectations’ Miss Haversham. The Zeroids were often a source of comedy in the show, particularly as their leader, Sergeant Major Zero, was voiced by Windsor Davies, whose distinctive booming Welsh tone was familiar to British audiences from popular sitcom It Ain’t Half Hot Mum.

Network are releasing Terrahawks on DVD and, for the first time, on blu ray. They do not appear to have had access to original negatives, the picture quality on the blu ray looking more like a TV broadcast than their incredibly well remastered blu ray releases of Space: 1999. Despite this it is still a fun show to see again, and one that children will still enjoy discovering. Network are putting this out in volumes of thirteen episodes each. Volume 1 was released in July, and Volume 2 is out now. The blu ray and DVD editions feature a selection of bonus features, looking at the special effects, the music and some of the early computer graphics used on the show. The documentary Terrahawks: Making the Unexpected, features behind the scenes footage shot at the legendary Bray Studios, which had once been home to Hammer Films.

Gerry Anderson was such an important figure in both television and film, and the legacy he left behind is still being enjoyed by fans. With episodes of the new show Thunderbirds Are Go bringing yet another generation of fans to his work, these new releases of Terrahawks will enable both young and old to enjoy yet more of Gerry Anderson’s intricate and entertaining creations.

You can find more details, and even buy yourself copies, here.

Cannibal Holocaust podcast

Alan Yates (Carl Yorke) and Faye Daniels (Francesca Ciardi) in the green inferno

I was recently invited to participate in The Bloody Pit podcast with Rod Barnett. The subject of our discussion was Cannibal Holocaust. I feel a bit of a personal connection with this film because I interviewed the director, Ruggero Deodato, at Cine Excess in 2011 when he received a lifetime achievement award. This interview went well and was published in the magazine Diabolique. As I explain in the podcast, that was the first time I had ever seen the film, and it made a very strong impression on me.

Ruggero Deodato (right) with Italian actor
Giovano Lombardo Radice, who was providing translation.

This photo was used (without my permission) on the back of a Shameless Entertainment box set of Ruggero Deodato films. They sent me some free stuff by way of apology, so we're all cool now.

In the summer of 2015 I attended a film conference in Rome and was lucky enough to meet up with Deodato again, where he was pleased that I was asking to sign a DVD of his personal favourite, Live Like a Cop, Die Like a Man.

Also, when I was a fresh-faced innocent at Cine Excess 2010 I had the opportunity to meet Cannibal Holocaust star Francesca Ciardi, the ill-fated Faye Daniels.

So as I said, I feel like I know Cannibal Holocaust and it's participants personally. I'm even friends with Carl Yorke on Facebook, who played Alan Yates. I wished him happy birthday last week.

If you would like to hear our in-depth discussion, where we cover the highs and lows of this powerful and provocative film, you can find it on iTunes or click below to visit the Bloody Pit blog.

Secrets of a Windmill Girl (1966, Arnold Louis Miller)

It does not seem to matter how many times I say I'm going to move away from studying sexploitation films, I still seem to end up back here. I was approached a few months ago and asked to contribute a chapter proposal for a journal, or book (I'm not sure) on "X" rated 1960s British cinema, which is of course right up my street. I quickly wrote something, submitted it and promptly forgot all about it, to the point where three months later when I was contacted to say my proposal had been accepted I had no memory whatsoever of submitting one.

So here I am now, attempting to gather my thoughts on Secrets of a Windmill Girl, another "classic" of the 1960s sexploitation scene. Luckily the film has been released on DVD by Screenbound, formerly Odeon Entertainment, on a double-bill with Naked as Nature Intended (1961, George Harrison Marks), a film I have absolutely no intention of writing about (beyond the brief mention it already has in my thesis). It was made for Compton Films by the directing team of Arnold Louis Miller and Stanley Long. Long was the cinematographer on all their projects, and together they had already made the "Mondo" films London in the Raw (1964) and  Primitive London (1965) for Compton. It was when shooting sequences for the latter that Stanley Long attended rehearsals for the final revue at the Windmill Theatre. This footage was not used in Primitive London, but would go on to become central to Secrets of a Windmill Girl. 

Since the death of producer Vivian Van Damme in 1960, who had been putting on Follies Bergère -style shows since the 1930s, the Windmill had been in decline and closed its doors in 1964. Under the watchful eye of the Lord Chamberlain, theatre censorship meant that nudity was allowed on a public stage, as long as there was no movement, the logic being that we had naked statues in public and they were fine. The Windmill, being a theatre rather than a strip club, had to follow these rules very strictly, but the 1960s saw the rise of the striptease show, as well as "stag" films on 8mm film, which meant that the Windmill's 'Revuedeville' was becoming increasingly old-fashioned in modern-day Soho. The theatre was sold to the men behind Compton, Michael Klinger and Tony Tenser, who converted it into a cinema, which it had originally been until Mrs Henderson turned it into a theatre in 1931. The Windmill had gone full circle.

Klinger and Tenser decided to immortalise the theatre and the Windmill girls and commissioned Miller and Long to make what was in effect their first full-length feature film (they had made the nudist odyssey Take Off Your Clothes and Live three years earlier, but that was basically an hour-length travelogue with no sync sound). It is an odd, cheap-looking film in which the inexperience of the director is matched only by the inexperience of the cast.

A then-unknown Pauline Collins plays Pat, who with her childhood friend Linda (April Wilding, daughter of Lord Harry Pilkington) audition successfully for the Windmill, having ambitions to make it big in the West End. Stage manager Mike (played by Martin Jarvis!) has a soft spot for Linda, who is portrayed as the sensible, shy one, whereas Pat is gregarious and up for anything, which ultimately leads to affairs, psychedelic parties and gang rape. This goes by without a second glance, as her ultimate fate is to become a stripper performing in clubs and stag parties in front of horribly sleazy men who should be at home with their wives. The film actually starts with Pat getting into a sports car carrying balloons with an unknown man, both of whom are clearly drunk. They race around town before crashing headlong into a wall, killing them instantly. Linda, who is now a successful singer, is visited by Inspector Thomas (veteran film and TV actor Derek Bond) in her dressing room, where he breaks the news and asks her to identify the body.

The next day he visits her at home and she begins to tell him the whole sorry story about Pat. The bulk of the film is then made up of scenes from their lives with Linda's well-spoken voiceover. If she is really supposed to be telling all this to the Inspector, she is giving him detail which is totally irrelevant to his investigation. Indeed it is never made clear exactly why he needs to know the story of Pat's life, when surely he needs to spend more time working out why the driver was drunk and how they crashed. Nevertheless we are supposed to believe that he is sitting in Linda's flat listening to her entire life story. This is the source of much unintentional hilarity, such as when we see them as young schoolgirls and Pat, always trouble, encourages Linda to skip school. It is some of the funniest child acting I have seen in a long time, and the little girl playing Pat actually looks towards the camera at the end of her lines as if seeking approval from the director before she walks away. Later in the film Linda seems to think it is necessary to tell Inspector Thomas all about the other Windmill Girls, beginning with how they get up in the morning and travel to work. She even at one point says "Some travelled long distances every day, like Eileen here, who lived way out in Rochester, Kent." That use of the word "here" makes it sound as if she is sitting with the Inspector in her flat showing him all this on her home projector. Or perhaps Arnold Louis Miller is deliberately creating some Brechtian alienation, drawing attention to the artificial construction of the film, mirroring the artificiality of the Windmill shows themselves. Perhaps. 

The bulk of the film is made up of dance and cabaret performances on the Windmill stage itself. What is odd is that we frequently see Pat and Linda in the dressing room, getting ready to go on, or standing in the wings, but they never come out on to the stage itself. They never once perform in any of the dances, and often the costumes they are getting into are totally different to those the actual women are wearing once we see the dance sequences. This is because Stanley Long had shot those sequences more than a year earlier, but no attempt is made to match them together, and surely it would not have been too difficult to shoot some extra dance scenes. There are also several scenes featuring the several of the girls going through a new dance routine with their male choreographer, but this dance is never performed on stage in the film. The Windmill is famous for its comedians as well as the girls. Many well-known comics such as Tony Hancock and Peter Sellers got their first breaks by telling jokes between dance routines, but the comedy acts that Stanley Long shot for this are dreary. It is no wonder that when looking back on their time there comedians often comment that the men in the audience would just look at their newspapers instead of listening to the jokes. 

The first time we finally see Pat on stage is when she has given up on her West End dreams and become a stripper. She stands in front of a baying crowd who eventually start booing and slow-clapping because she loses her nerve and begins telling them that she's really an actress. In her final scene she is standing on top of a table in a pub in her underwear, and she berates the men, asking them if they would like it if it was their wives up there, before finally screaming and collapsing to her knees as if having a breakdown. And suddenly the closing credits roll, over footage of the fan dance, which by this point we have seen about six times.

So there are many threads and plot points that are left unfulfilled at the end. One would reasonably expect the film to end where it began, with the crash, except this time we would know how Pat ended up in that car. After all, wasn't that why Inspector Thomas had sat through this extended trip down memory lane? But no, we do not even return to the flat at the end for Linda or the Inspector to get a final moralistic word about the dangers of drugs, partying and stripping. And did Linda ever get together with Mike, who has spent most of the film staring at her longingly? We will never know. The film just ends, like they ran out of film or money, either of which is possible I suppose.

Secrets of a Windmill Girl, DVD frame, Screenbound 2011

Another drawn-out sequence of the film discusses the extra activities that were required of the Windmill girls, who were by this point world famous. They would often be used for promotional stunts such as this one above, where they are dressed as sexy cowboys as they ride atop a stagecoach through suburban London. This is just the kind of promotional stunt that could have been cooked up by Klinger and Tenser themselves, who would often use dancing girls at their film premieres or to drum up free publicity.

Secrets of a Windmill Girl, DVD frame, Screenbound 2011

A particularly low point for Pat comes when she visits an agent to get work as as a dancer. He tells her that what he really needs are strippers and encourages her to take her clothes off so he can "check your figure." She's a little on the thin side but he approves nonetheless and gets her work. Whilst this is going on his wife bursts in, straight from a Carry On film. This is one of the few deliberate moments of comedy in Secrets of a Windmill Girl, but is somewhat jarring given that we are supposed to be sympathising with Pat's declining fortunes. As an aside here, I am convinced that they dressed this set with photos from the Compton office. I think that the girl on the wall on the top right of this image is actually Annette Whitely, who had starred in The Yellow Teddybears and The Black Torment for Compton by this point, and who I'm sure would have been mortified to know that she was used in this scene. I can't be sure, but it is an interesting detail if it's true.

Press cutting, Scottish Daily Express, 18 March 1966

When Pat arrives at her first stripping job she finds she is sharing a dressing room with a former rival from The Windmill. This soon descends into a full-on catfight, images of which were used to promote the film. When I purchased most of what remained of the Compton office archive a few years ago amongst the ephemera were a collection of press clippings collected by General Press Cutting Association Ltd of Chancery Lane. It was this collection that prompted me to offer a chapter on the film, and I intend to write at length on the use of clippings by film distributors, and the insight it gives now on the promotion of the film.

Press cutting, Daily Express, 13 April 1966

This image features former Windmill girl Deirdre O'Dea alongside Rey Anton on a platform high up at the top of the theatre. Deirdre had appeared in the film, and Rey wrote and performs the song "Hold It, Babe" with his band The Pro Form during a party scene in a venue that looks like a cave. Given the fickle nature of the pop world, and according to the clipping, Rey is also a scaffolder and he is working on the conversion currently underway.

Press cutting, Evening Standard, 21 Dec 1965

This image was advance publicity for Secrets of a Windmill Girl, and features (left to right): Janet Hall, Wendy Cotellee, Jill Rose, Frances Pidgeon, Aimi MacDonald and Nita Howard, who are described as actresses who will be playing Windmill Girls in a new film titled "The Windmill Girls Story."

I have the feeling that even by the time it came out, Secrets of a Windmill Girl must have seemed dated. It feels like it would have been more contemporary with films like Beat Girl (1959, Edmond T. Greville, UK: Renown Pictures), Expresso Bongo (1960, Val Guest, UK: Val Guest Productions) or even Compton's other 'fallen woman' film That Kind of Girl (1963, Gerry O'Hara, UK: Tekli Film Productions). The 1960s was changing rapidly, and it was only one year away from the 'Summer of Love.' Secrets of a Windmill Girl, brief flashes of nudity aside, is naive and quaint, depicting the lives of young people in the mid-sixties as filtered through the contradictory viewpoint of middle-aged men, who both gaze with desire at these sexualised women whilst simultaneously comdemning them for choosing that lifestyle.

The Windmill has had mixed fortunes over the fifty years since this film was released. Currently covered in scaffolding, it can be seen here in images I took a month ago on a visit to Soho. It is now a "gentlemen's club" with table dancing, a far cry from the classier entertainment depicted in Secrets of a Windmill Girl, where audiences of both men and women enjoyed the highly stylised and choreographed performances of the "Revuedeville," even if they were not aware of the secrets those Windmill girls kept hidden.

Finally, I recently made a video about what Soho looked like around ten years later. It features a couple of shots of The Windmill, by then a sex cinema. See if you can spot it.