Another fun thing that half the world seems to have started during lockdown is a podcast. Not to miss out on the action, Dr Laura Mayne and myself have started a podcast, which can be found on Acast, iTunes, Stitcher and Spotify, with other platforms on the way. Why not check us out!
I wrote my first PhD proposal in 2011. It was about live TV drama of the 1950s and 1960s. I didn't get anywhere with that one, and I started to look at my collection of Bonditis ephemera and wonder what I was going to do with it. Some time in 2012 I visited the Cinema Museum for the first time, and looking around at all the fantastic posters and collectibles I began to think that maybe there was a PhD in all of that. Having spoken at Cine Excess a couple of times, and given a guest lecture on British cult film in 2011 at Brunel, I applied for their fee waiver with a proposal that looked at film promotion in the 1960s. it was very vague, but knowing some of the academics there through Cine Excess, I got in.
I started with Brunel in September 2012, and my supervisor was the brilliant Leon Hunt. He helped me begin to shape my idea into something which might actually work. his own passion for Italian cult cinema in particular began to interest me. My own historical interests were very Brit-focused, and he helped me to see that there was a whole continent of fascinating European film that might be worth exploring. Coupled with my collection of Bonditis material, a 1960s spy film from Germany distributed by Compton, a British company, ideas began to coalesce. The notion that one could study the distribution of European cult film in the UK in the 1960s took hold, and that was it. I loved studying, and the fee waiver was a massive help, but I still had to work as a college lecturer for three days a week. This was a real struggle, and after a year I knew that I was never going to get anywhere without more financial backing.
Jobs.ac.uk told me that Sussex were offering full scholarships through the AHRC-sponsored CHASE programme. This was worth a shot, and I applied. This was late 2013, and the fact that by this point I had already written a literature review and knew what I wanted my project to be really helped shape a decent application. I was offered a place, but after a long wait I was turned down for the scholarship. This was a massive disappointment, particularly as 2014 was already shaping up to be quite a difficult year, and I was so desperate to get out of my current employment. About two months after that, as I was still working slowly on my research, I received an email out of the blue from the head of Music, Film and Media at Sussex to tell me that the department wanted to offer me a scholarship anyway. My application had been the strongest film one they had and they were very keen to have me. That was the single greatest email I have ever received, even better than the time Barbara Steele asked to friend me on Linkedin. I should probably frame it. From that point on my life took an upward turn, and my Doctorate would live after all!
Three years and four months later I have just submitted my finished thesis, all 85,000 words (plus a 50,000 word appendix) and am now waiting for a viva. My supervisors have been brilliant, particularly comedy legend Andy Medhurst, who for the last year has shepherded me through more or less single-handedly. This research has opened up so many great opportunities for me, and I hope that it will lead to an actual career. A decent full-time job somewhere would be a good start at least. There have also been exciting media moments along the way, such as my appearance on The One Show a couple of years ago, and yesterday I spoke down the line to Patrick Cox, a BBC journalist based in Boston, about the development of the 'X' certificate in the UK and the US. He contacted me having found my chapter in the Routledge British Cinema History book which was published a year or so ago. I consider myself very lucky!
I'm not sure how much more I will use this blog now that my research has finished, at least for the time being. I'm sure eventually I will be encouraged to turn my thesis into a book. I'm considering a book just on the Fancey family at least. However, as well as catching up on some of my other writing commitments for magazines, I really need to get on and finish my Norman J. Warren book which has been in the background for about nine years now. He's been very patient, but it has to be done this year! Still, this is the life I have created for myself, and I'm happy with it.
After losing a chapter I was halfway through writing, I lost all enthusiasm for the peplum film. It has taken me about five weeks to rewrite and finish the new version. It was really hard at first. I had absolutely no passion for the work or the films, and it pained me to have to begin again. Once I hit about 5000 words though I was into the swing of things and enjoyed finishing it, at around 10500 words. I have written about several sword-and-sandal films and feel that I know more about the genre and the industrial conditions that brought it about. I am now trying to make a video essay using clips, music and text, to illustrate some of my findings and archival material. I have the aim of showing it as part of my presentation in Canada, but I'm beginning to wonder if that is not really the done thing. My thesis word count so far stands at around 75,000, so I really do feel that the end is finally in sight. I'm thinking about proofreading and editing, all the pictures I still need to put in, formatting, all that sort of stuff. I've made a list of things I still need to do, and it's long, and if I'm honest, pretty boring. But I'm so desperate to get my thesis completed by mid-July I'm just going to have to suck it up and do it. I started writing and researching my PhD in the late summer of 2012, so five years of my life has been spent thinking, working and worrying. It will be really good to get it over with!
Of all the peplum films I watched from beginning to end, which admittedly was only five, the best was Samson (Sansone, 1961, Gianfranco Parolini,
Italy: Cineproduzioni Associate (Rome)), starring Brad Harris "The strongest athlete in the world." The acting is better than the others, including Hercules and Hercules Unchained, and the production values are pretty good. The weirdest of all of them was Goliath and the Vampires, a truly odd film with a plot too complicated and convoluted to summarise. It was also one of the only peplum films to be rated 'X' by the BBFC, and that was after some cuts to the gorier moments. About four years ago I picked up some original press books for peplum films at the Westminster film fair. Thanks to a general lack of interest in the genre I got them remarkably cheaply, and they have been sitting waiting patiently for me to use them since. It is a fun genre, and it means that my thesis now has chapters on films for kids, films for teens and films for adults, which seems like a good balance.
If you want to see Sansom it is available on a great Italian DVD with both the Italian and English language tracks. If you speak Italian you can find a poor quality version on YouTube. Here is the trailer. Look carefully and you'll spot none other than Serge Gainsbourg as the villainous Warkalla.
It's been far too long since I last wrote in this blog. As 2017 hit, so did the realisation that I need to finish my PhD this year and find a full-time job, given that my scholarship runs out this summer. So it is fair to say that a certain amount of panic has gripped me for the past four months. I have applied for several jobs so far both around the UK and abroad, currently to no avail. It's difficult not to feel a certain amount of despondency, but I am still remaining optimistic. There is a Film Studies lecturer job out there somewhere with my name on the office door.
Whilst applying for jobs I am also attempting to finish my PhD. I totalled up my word count so far and realised that what I really needed was another chapter. I have gone against the advice of my supervisors, who when I first suggested the idea shot it down, and decided to write about the peplum. Amongst other factors, the knowledge that Hercules Unchained was the most popular film in Britain in 1960 (according to box-office receipts) was one of the pieces of information that piqued my interest in the distribution of international popular cinema in Britain in the first place.
I have been collecting promotional material to do with the peplum film since I started this research, given that people like Compton handled many of these Italian sword-and-sandal films in the early 1960s. It seemed like a shame not to use them, so armed with a handful of original press books and a collection of downloads from rarelust.com and YouTube I began writing a new chapter. I have also picked up a few books including a recent title from Robert Rushing so had plenty of information and research to draw on. It was the easiest, quickest piece of writing I had ever done. In five days I had written 5000 words, which for me is highly productive.
At the end of another successful day of writing I was also trying to multi-task. I have been making DVDs of my Dad's old home videos, and one of them needed compiling and exporting into a new file before I could burn it to DVD. I assembled it on a Premiere Pro timeline and hit export, thinking my Mac could handle working on this in the background whilst I continued writing. When I went to return to my Word file it would not open. It had disappeared. My heart raced and I panicked. What quickly transpired was that Premiere was trying to export this video to the folder I had selected, but as bonus was also writing it to the folder with this chapter in (which was on the same external hard drive) and was writing video metadata information over my chapter. I stopped Premiere exporting, but it was too late. I spent the next two hours trying every type of file recovery possible, including an hour's pointless chat with a Microsoft helpdesk, all to no avail: The file wasn't deleted. It could not be recovered. It had been written over. My chapter so far was gone.
Maciste, aka Goliath (Gordon Scott) in Goliath and the Vampires
I felt like Goliath here, only instead of an uprooted tree I wanted to hurl my Mac out of the window. I had enjoyed a week of unbridled productivity, and it was lost. I had not backed it up anywhere, or emailed a copy to my wife to show off. I learned a painful lesson, scribbled as much down on a piece of paper that I could remember, and immediately backed up all my other writing on Dropbox, where I now save everything.
Goliath's fiance Guja (Leonora Ruffo) in Goliath and the Vampires
I have started again, but I am not enjoying it half as much this time. What I have written is possibly better, but I will never know. Occasionally I remember that something I am trying to write now was worded in a much better way last time, but I don't know what it was. It's frustrating. However, I've had other ideas as I'm writing that I had not put in last time, so overall it will probably be okay. I had a good research trip to London just the day after I lost it all, where I visited the Cinema Museum and the BBFC archives, so I have tons of material. What I have struggled with since is finding the time to sit and write. It has just been the Easter holidays and I also have lots of coursework to mark, so that perfect week where I could just write and write and write has been hard to replicate. However, now the teaching and marking are almost done it will get better. It has to! My goal is to submit a first completed draft of the thesis by the beginning of June. So learn the lesson from me and make sure your work is backed up. Please!
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."
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.
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.
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.
By the end of the 1960s the Age of Aquarius, once filled with the optimism of a hundred thousand hippies, was going sour. The Manson murders, the Altamont Rolling Stones debacle (not forgetting Sympathy for the Devil) and the rise of Anton LaVey as a celebrity Satanist, hanging out with rock stars and Hollywood A-listers, put the Devil at the forefront of alternative culture. Hack authors like Dennis Wheatley suddenly found themselves back in print with lurid covers usually depicting goat-headed men pawing at naked women, and the idea of witchcraft for many became inextricably linked to sexual freedom. By the early 1970s, if movies and The News of the World were to be believed, the only people getting any sex were wife-swappers and devil worshippers.
Alexander Sanders and his young wife Maxine
Into this rather heady atmosphere, in a typically seedy British manner, stepped Alexander Sanders, who dubbed himself "King of the Witches". He was a Wiccan high priest and talented self-promoter and soon found himself a minor celebrity in the UK. He claimed to have used black magic for most of his life, having been taught by his grandmother, but following the disintegration of his first marriage and family problems which he credited to an abuse of his powers, he decided to use his powers for good. He became a Wiccan in the 1960s, which was well timed for the upsurge in popularity of anything to do with witches and Satanism a few years later.
In 1970 Border Films produced Legend of the Witches, a documentary directed by Malcolm Leigh, who just a year later would direct Lady Chatterley versus Fanny Hill, aka Games That Lovers Play, also for Border. The film, shot in black and white, begins with the night-time initiation rituals of a group of witches. They are all naked with the exception of the priest who wears robes, and they dance in circles around a fire. They also place a blindfold on one man and lead him through the forest, stumbling and falling until he arrives back in the circle. A voiceover, which sounds a bit like Valentine Dyall but most likely is not (sadly there is no credit to suggest who it was), intones throughout the meaning of the rituals whilst also explaining the history of witchcraft, with its pre-christian origins.
The film is an odd mix of naked witches performing rites, including Alexander and his beautiful blonde wife Maxine, alongside images of old English churches and countryside. Monthly Film Bulletin comically described the film as featuring "a good deal of rather goose-pimply nudity." We even get a tour around the witchcraft museum in Cornwall (which sadly got flooded out several years ago). It is artfully shot for the most part, which may explain how the film got past the BBFC despite the copious full-frontal nudity from both sexes. This would have been one of the last films to be viewed by John Trevelyan, coming in just at the point when the X certificate was changed to mean suitable for over-eighteens only. The BBFC were always more lenient on films which they felt had artistic merit, although it does appear that some cuts were made at the time. Despite the nudity the film is not leering or exploitative, which is possibly surprising given its origins as a Border film. Olive Negus-Fancey is credited as producer, with Malcolm Fancey as an assistant director and his half-sister Judith Smith as editor. This was made by Border around the same time they were producing films like Not Tonight, Darling or distributing European movies such as I Am a Nymphomaniac (1971, France, Max Pecas).
One can only imagine how well this film would have been received by punters at the time. Whilst it could have been viewed in all seriousness as an in-depth documentary on a fascinating subject, it was most likely viewed by men in raincoats in basement cinemas around Soho. These posters I have found online would suggest as much.
The film can now be found in its entirety on YouTube, although rumours persist that there is a much longer cut of the film somewhere. The longest commercially available version is seventy-two minutes, which is the same as this one. If there was a longer version it must be languishing in a vault somewhere, or in Malcolm Leigh's shed. It's well worth having a look at, for a number of reasons. Like many films of this ilk, it's a glimpse into the world of our parents and grandparents that they would rather be left behind. The 1970s was a time in British cinema history when a documentary about naked witches could be found in cinemas around the country, and audiences were willing to sit through the boring bits in order to get to the naked bits. Renown Films appear to have inherited the back catalogue and original elements to many Fancey-produced movies. Their new TV channel Talking Pictures TV has screened Legend of the Witches several times, as well as dozens of other long-forgotten rarities from the Fancey vaults. I am still hoping to be able to visit and take a look in those vaults some time.
In the meantime my research into the Fancey family continues. I have finally made contact with a member of the family who may be willing to talk about the business with me. I am optimistic that he will.
I am currently writing about Agent 077, aka Dick Malloy (Ken Clark), an American spy who spends most of his time in Europe either punching bad guys or seducing exotic women. I named this blog after the second of three Agent 077 films, having found lobby cards and this original quad for dirt cheap in a local memorabilia store. Now, thanks to Dorado Films in the U.S. I finally have the out-of-print DVD box set of all three films and am working my way through. As is to be expected, they are entertaining but not amazing. Most of the sixties eurospy films I have seen can be a bit of a slog to get through. Trying to match the thrills and romance of Bond on a quarter of the budget was always going to show on screen, and they often come across as travelogues with the occasional pedestrian car chase and raven-haired beauty wrapped in a towel.
Despite their shortcomings I personally find the whole genre fascinating, and I now have to justify this by writing a chapter of my thesis on them. Ideally I need to turn in the first draft of this, a mere 10,000 words, some time next week.
So, the Agent 077 films are:
Mission Bloody Mary (1965)
From the Orient With Fury (1965, originally titled Fury on the Bosphorus)
Special Mission Lady Chaplin (1967)
All three were directed by Sergio Grieco, under the name Terence Hathaway (a common practice at the time, in order to fool Italian audiences that the film they were watching was American) who clearly had a good relationship with Ken Clark. He made two other eurospy films with him, Tiffany Memorandum (1967) and The Fuller Report (1968). Neither of which are on DVD but are available on YouTube, thanks again to Dorado Films who own videotape versions of these films. They are not good enough quality to release on DVD but they are watchable. I intend to watch all five, as although my focus is specifically on Agent 077, I feel that the other two are relevant to the set. Hopefully they will not be too disappointing.
The eurospy film was massively popular in the 1960s with the majority coming out of Italy, and yet it is very underserved when it comes to legitimate DVD releases. There are probably hundreds that are currently commercially unavailable. This is probably because there is not a lot of mainstream interest in them, which is a pity. Like all popular genres, they tell us a lot about national identity and the times in which they were produced. The costumes, haircuts, cars, etc. are often a far more authentic depiction of their era than the big-budgeted Bond films, which have for the most part achieved a kind of timeless quality.
I have written a large article for a future issue of Cinema Retro on another eurospy film, Bonditis (1968), a one-off spy spoof from Switzerland, which I have probably mentioned on here before. I will also be writing about that for this PhD chapter, depending on how close I get to 10,000 with Agent 077.
I often get asked why I spend so much time with films that no one else (i.e. in the mainstream) has ever seen or heard of. Even I have to admit that watching obscure cinema is something of a crapshoot, but for every five bad or boring films (I saw Sharknado 3 last week, and that was terrible), you find a gem. Maybe.
One can only imagine how well this film would have been received by punters at the time. Whilst it could have been viewed in all seriousness as an in-depth documentary on a fascinating subject, it was most likely viewed by men in raincoats in basement cinemas around Soho. These posters I have found online would suggest as much.
The film can now be found in its entirety on YouTube, although rumours persist that there is a much longer cut of the film somewhere. The longest commercially available version is seventy-two minutes, which is the same as this one. If there was a longer version it must be languishing in a vault somewhere, or in Malcolm Leigh's shed. It's well worth having a look at, for a number of reasons. Like many films of this ilk, it's a glimpse into the world of our parents and grandparents that they would rather be left behind. The 1970s was a time in British cinema history when a documentary about naked witches could be found in cinemas around the country, and audiences were willing to sit through the boring bits in order to get to the naked bits. Renown Films appear to have inherited the back catalogue and original elements to many Fancey-produced movies. Their new TV channel Talking Pictures TV has screened Legend of the Witches several times, as well as dozens of other long-forgotten rarities from the Fancey vaults. I am still hoping to be able to visit and take a look in those vaults some time. 
