Like the legendary peplum heroes of old, I bravely embarked on a noble six-year quest to become a Doctor in Film History. Some scoffed at the thought. Some said it couldn't be done. Some said that I should do something more useful with my time. Actually, I'm not sure if anyone did any of those things. Generally people have been quite supportive. Anyway, to continue... I battled my way through libraries, archives, film fairs, seminars, conferences, and above all my own laziness, to eventually submit a completed thesis, which following a viva last week, has netted me a Doctorate. I was given an unconditional pass, which came as something of a shock after the two hours of suggested changes. It turned out the feedback was so that I could turn it into a book to submit to the BFI. They thought it was a major piece of scholarship which makes an important contribution to film history. Which is nice. I am trying to celebrate this week by relaxing and catching up with TV shows on the Sky box, but I also have 50 essays waiting to be marked, so there's that to bring me back down to Earth. So there you have it. You too could be a doctor in just six years. Easy.
Pit of Darkness opens on a bomb site somewhere in London, still a common thing in the early 1960s. A young boy spots what appears to be a body down amongst the rubble, but when he investigates he discovers the man is still alive. Richard Logan (William Franklyn) slowly comes round and realises that he has been "coshed" by some ruffians. He thanks the boy for his help and makes his way home. When he walks in his wife Julie (Moira Redmond) is shocked: Richard thinks he is only three hours late, but he has actually been missing for three weeks. He has no memory of his whereabouts and spends the next eighty minutes piecing together the mystery: the fact that he works for a company who specialise in making burglar-proof safes might have something to do with it.
Pit of Darkness came late in the career of Lance Comfort, a solid British director who specialised in supporting features, more commonly known as 'B' films. To Hammer fans he will be best known as the director of the now lost comedy The Ugly Duckling (1959) with Bernard Bresslaw, or at least if it is not lost it is a film which no one wants to let out of the Hammer vault. Pit of Darkness forms part of a sort of "Darkness" trilogy in Comfort's career, which was most likely unintentional. He previously directed Daughter of Darkness (1948), as well as the horror classic Devils of Darkness (1965) shortly before he died. Darkness is a good, go-to word to use in a film title, as it can mean different things depending on the theme of the film. In this particular case the pit of darkness in question is purely metaphorical. Admittedly Logan does wake up in a bomb site, a pit of darkness of a sort, but it is the darkness of amnesia which is he trying to claw out.
The film was released with a 'U' certificate from the British Board of Film Censors following some brief cuts. It seems to have been well received. In the December 1961 issue of Monthly Film BulletinPit of Darkness was summarised as having a "Complex, fanciful plot made plausible by effective writing and direction. The pace is brisk, there are some spirited fisticuffs, and there is the personality of William Franklyn - unbeatable in suggesting solid virtues behind a rakish, smooth exterior." In the excellent The British 'B' Film by Steve Chibnall and Brian McFarlane Pit of Darkness is compared to other Lance Comfort films, who despite the low budgets and quick turnaround generally managed to raise them above being merely formulaic: "All Comfort's films are persuasive narratives, marked by absence of sentimentality and the whiff of human reality, by a feeling for melodramatic tension and for thematic contrasts underlined by a visual style which can move into the expressive and the metaphoric." (p. 142-143)
Butcher's Film Distributors were the typical independent distribution company. It appears they were in business as distributors and occasional producers from the early 1930s, mainly with factual short films such as Strictly Vegetarian (1932, unknown) and the occasional western or thriller like Gorilla Ship (1932, Frank Strayer, US: International Film Studios).
They were still submitting films for classification in the late 1970s, mostly of the Hot Dreams (Amore libero, 1974, Pier Ludovigo Pavoni, Italy: Aquila Cinematografica) or French Nympho (Candice Candy, 1978, Renau Pieri, France: Les Films de l'Epeé) variety. According to my 1970 copy of the The British Film and Television Year Book Butcher's were by then based on Wardour Street in Soho and the managing director was the London-born John I. Philips, of whom I'm ashamed to say I know nothing. Butcher's made around twenty feature films, mostly in the 1950s and early 1960s, perhaps the best known being the proto-slasher Cover Girl Killer (1959, Terry Bishop, UK: Butcher's Film Distributors) starring a pre-Steptoe Harry H. Corbett.
A vital point in the plot pivots on Logan's recollection of the song "My Heart is the Lover," which we hear over and over throughout the film, so it is interesting to see that the song was released in sheet music form. This is most likely the only product tie-in for Pit of Darkness. It is an enjoyable thriller featuring safe-cracking, explosions and a blonde femme fatale, played by Jacqueline Jones. When she first appeared on screen I was convinced it was Caron Gardner. The film also features performances from Anthony Booth, later to be Robin Askwith's best mate and Tony Blair's father-in-law, and a young and very beautiful Nanette Newman.
I saw this when it was broadcast by Talking Pictures TV, the freeview channel which is connected to distributor Renown Pictures. If you are a fan of obscure British 'B' movies this is one of the best channels out there. They don't always have the best picture quality, or even the correct aspect ratio, but it is the only place you are likely to see this sort of stuff.
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.
In
1970s Britain hardcore pornography was illegal, so it is perhaps surprising to
discover that back in the 1970s we had our very own porn superstar who became a
household name. Mary Millington was one of the most desirable women in the
country, rumoured to have even spent the night with the then serving Prime
Minister. She starred in hardcore films shot in Germany in the early 1970s
before moving into more respectable territory back home, becoming the face of
David Sullivan’s pornographic magazine empire. From there she moved into
legitimate motion pictures, from bit parts in sex comedies like Eskimo Nell (1975, Martin Campbell) through
to starring in the box office smash Come
Play With Me (1977, George Harrison Marks). She even opened and operated
her own sex shop where fans could come and meet her in the flesh and leave with
a brown paper bag full of magazines, some of them imported illegally from Denmark
or Holland.
Seemingly
the girl who had it all, that girl-next-door appeal, winning smile and perfect tiny
frame masked an increasingly chaotic life. An only child, Mary Millington was
desperately unhappy when her mother died after a long illness, and a friendship
with notorious party animal and former pinup Diana Dors lead to drug dependency
and addiction. Constant harassment from the police over her sex shop and a
growing kleptomania problem, combined with her increasing reliance on pills and
cocaine and worries about her body beginning to show signs of age contributed
to the tragic decision to take her own life, when she was still only
thirty-three.
Simon
Sheridan has made a name for himself as a British sex film historian and wrote
the definitive biography of Mary Millington several years ago, so is perfectly
equipped to create this documentary which tells the full story of Mary’s life,
warts and all. He has interviewed everyone that knew her, even members of her
family (although her husband Bob declined to be involved), and the film creates
a vivid picture not only of her life but of the commercial exploitation of sex
in the 1970s. Featuring archival imagery and interviews with Mary means she
also has a contribution to make, and it is fascinating to hear her story
unfolding in her own words. If you remember Mary Millington, have any interest
in the history of British cinema, or at least bought “dirty mags” in the 1970s,
this documentary is for you.
Respectable: The Mary Millington Story is available now for
streaming on Netflix in the UK and many other countries, and has been released on
DVD and blu ray.
I have once again been invited to contribute to a blu ray release from those great people at Arrow Video. As I have been discovering the world of Mario Bava over the last two or three years it is perfect timing. I have been able to draw on the research I conducted for my paper on the Fancey family back in May AND my giallo paper in Italy in June. Also over the summer I wrote a chapter for Routledge on the Jacey cinema chain, which turned out to be directly relevant to my PhD after all. Part of that research involved interviewing the last surviving member of the Jacey family, John N. Cohen, who had personal dealings with the Fancey family, so this has all neatly dovetailed together.
I am trying where possible to use things I am writing towards my PhD, which as far as I can tell is fine, but it does mean that by the time the thing is finished most of it will already have been published elsewhere, and I can kiss that offer of publishing it as a book goodbye. Still, I can't worry about that now. I just need a finished PhD, and then I can write books about anything I want.
Speaking of which, I am still working on Norman J. Warren's book. He is now shooting a new movie, which is exciting but does give me another chapter to write. I have interviewed several more people for it in the last couple of months, so I really hope I can get it finished within the next twelve months. It's driving me slightly insane.
Anyway, to be involved with Arrow is exciting again. I have written an essay on the Fancey family who were behind the distribution of Five Dolls For an August Moon. They also attempted, fairly unsuccessfully, to distribute Bay of Blood too. There is some overlap here with my essay for the Mark of the Devil blu ray, as that was also handled unsuccessfully by the Fanceys. As far as I can tell, despite Five Dolls For an August Moon receiving an X-certificate, with no cuts required, it looks like they just let it sit on a shelf. Seeing that the Fancey family archive appears to have gone up in smoke, it's likely that I will never know.
The new Arrow blu ray is due out on the 1st February 2016, and marks the third time now that I have been involved with them, and it is the fifth time I have contributed to a blu ray release (the other two being the BFI and Shameless). I hope there will be plenty more in the future...
A few weeks ago I was invited to write a guest blog post for an AHRC-funded project over at the universities of York and East Anglia entitled "Transformation and Tradition in Sixties British Cinema". Obviously I jumped at the chance to be part of a bigger project that ties in so well with my own research interests. Also I am a shameless whore when it comes to the chance to self-publicise. So if you head over to here you can read the post which came out of my MA research into the link between distribution and censorship.
I have just found a new lecturing post at the University of Chichester teaching a video games module on a media studies degree, so some of my reading over the next couple of months is going to be in a totally different field to that which I am currently used to. Should be fun.
The conference in Lincoln went really well. It was good to present some new research, but even better to meet other academics in the same field. One particular stroke of luck was meeting Emma Petts who presented on some research she has been doing into British cinema audiences. This is exactly the kind of research I have been looking for, and hopefully when her own project is finished I may be able to use some of it.
However, another week, another conference. This week I have been writing about the UK reception and marketing of the giallo, ready to fly off to Rome in a few days. I'm very excited to be going to my first overseas conference.
The organisation behind this conference looks amazing. There will be 35mm film screenings, plenty of directors and cast members available for panels, plus two full days of papers being presented by far more knowledgable people than myself. I'm hoping my relative lack of experience in the giallo does not become too noticeable. I'm not writing about the genre or its most famous stars as such, so I ought to get away with it. I'm on the much safer territory of discussing who was distributing these films in the UK and what happened with the BBFC. I'm a little worried that I'm becoming a one-trick pony with all this distribution and censorship stuff. I will probably take a year off conferences after this, so next time I will be have some different (to a point) stuff to present.
This was the first UK release of Mario Bava's Bay of Blood in 1980, eleven years after it was first released in Italy. It is one of the examples I will be discussing in this paper. It was distributed by my old friends New Realm.
Dario Argento's seminal The Bird With the Crystal Plumage on the other hand got away with no BBFC-imposed cuts at all in 1970, but did suffer from this somewhat lacklustre new title. I will no doubt come back from Rome with an even bigger enthusiasm for all things Italian. Before I first started my PhD back in 2012 I knew or cared very little for Italian horror, and even less for the giallo. It was all about Hammer and Roger Corman as far as I was concerned. Regular meetings with Dr. Leon Hunt changed all that for me, as I began to realise just how significant the Italian film industry was when considering the presence of international film in British cinemas. Even though I am no longer at Brunel University, I am continuing to expand my Italian film experience, enjoying giallos, gothic horrors and Eurospy thrillers. I finally appreciate the great work of Mario Bava, Antonio Marghereti, Lucio Fulci and Dario Argento, and I'm even listening to Goblin.
A colleague of mine has let me borrow his personal collection of 1960s Monthly Film Bulletin issues. As the only other place I have found these is in the BFI library, having access to them at home is quite an advantage. However, when I'm handling them I feel very nervous. At some point, probably around fifty years ago, he decided to tape each year together to make them into annual volumes. This means that when I'm trying to scan reviews I have all these fragile, yellowing pages flapping around desperately trying to tear themselves away from each other.
I have managed to scan several original reviews for some of the movies I have come across in the course of my research, and thought I would post a couple of them here. Dolls of Vice was a German prostitution drama, a surprisingly popular topic back then. This was probably for the exploitation potential, as highlighted here; "Beauty contests, striptease and undressing scenes." More intriguing is the mention of a "sympathetic dwarf". And yes, several "climaxes" were censored. I have seen the original BBFC documentation, which included:
Reel
2: Remove all shots of girls wrestling
Reel
3: In strip-tease act remove shots of girls stroking their breasts
I have also come across Mario Bava's Blood and Black Lace, an early giallo that established Bava's style and influenced a whole rash of Italian and German crime movies, all seemingly obsessed with killers in black gloves and rain coats.
Blood and Black Lace is given a fairly complimentary review for a dubbed Italian horror film, with particular attention paid to the look of the film. Hardly surprising for Bava, although the reviewer is critical of other elements, describing the film as "derivative, for the most part poorly acted and written, and risible in its several descents into pathos." I must confess that I haven't seen this film yet, despite its classic status. I keep hoping that Arrow Video will eventually pick it up, as they have done such brilliant work with many other Bava titles. (edit - within a month of my writing this, Arrow did indeed announce a blu ray release of Blood and Black Lace)
I intend to continue my way carefully through these copies of Monthly Film Bulletin. Ideally I would love to talk to people who remember going to the flicks and saw some of these films, but I have come to realise that is an almost impossible task. The opinions of reviewers like those in MFB at least give me some idea of the contemporary reception of most of the movies my research is digging up.
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.
