Naked as Nature Intended (1961)

 

Is Naked as Nature Intended really about lesbians? British censor John Trevelyan seemed to think so.  Justifying removing a whole scene -involving Pam (Pamela Green) emerging from the shower, grabbing a towel and chatting with scantily clad roommate Petrina (Petrina Forsyth)- by claiming “there could be a connotation that they’re lesbians”.  Upon watching the offending scene, your initial reaction is to dismiss Trevelyan as a doddery old fool, who was reading way too much into an innocuous scene in what is now a rather innocuous movie.  What if Trevelyan had a point though? his lesbian theory isn’t entirely without basis as it first sounds.  None of the female characters in the film, who holiday in Cornwall and end up becoming members of a nudist camp, appear to have boyfriends.  In fact on their journey from clothed civilians to fully fledged nudists they rarely display any interest in the opposite sex at all.  On the other hand they show no qualms about undressing in front of each other (both in and out of a nudist camp context).  The aforementioned Pam and Petrina live together and go on holiday together.  While another couple, played by Bridget Leonard and Angela Jones, also go on holiday together and work together, as petrol pump attendants.  Oh, and Pam and Petrina’s friend Jackie “loves to play tennis”...is your gaydar going off yet?

I don’t want to get too tabloidish, possibly spread bad information and start outing people, but there have always been rumours that at least one NANI cast member was gay in real life.  Irregardless of whether that was true or not, if rumours like that were floating about in the Sixties, and reached John Trevelyan’s ears, it may explain why Trevelyan was extra vigilant about routing out, and censoring, any lesbian leanings to the film.

Is NANI a closeted lesbian road movie?  Even if you don’t buy into the idea of a gay subtext, the fact that this is a British road movie, centred around female characters, and was made in the early 1960s, is in itself quite remarkable and something that Harrison Marks and Pamela Green rarely get credit for.  The number of films that match the criteria of being a female led, British road movie has to be pretty low, even these days.  For the female characters in NANI, the trip to Cornwall and Devon represents an escape from the shackles of an early 1960s, patriarchal society.  For Jackie it is a chance to be free of the watchful eyes of her parents.  For Petrina its time away from taking dictation for her dullard boss, and being eyed up by a creepy male co-worker.  For Pam, who works as an exotic dancer, it is a break from having to turn guys on for a living.  After they hit the road in an American Buick (in real life owned by director Marks) a succession of killjoy, authority figures (all played by Marks’ pal Stuart Samuels) prove an ineffectual opponent for girls who just wanna have fun, and play badminton in the nude. 

NANI playing at the Cameo Moulin Cinema

Of all of Harrison Marks films, NANI is –let’s face it- a bit of a chore to get through.  Like very early Russ Meyer, you can see flashes of the director’s personality that would come to dominate their later work, at this point though it’s mostly buried by a need to confirm to the uptight mores of the period.  What with Cornwall travelogue rather than nudity taking precedent for the first 40 minutes, two thirds of NANI is the cinematic equivalent of someone boring you with their old holiday photos.  While Marks’ corny one liners and tired slapstick routines make it easy to see why he would never achieve fame on the basis of his comedic chops alone.

Up until a few years ago the general consensus was that the material cut from the film by John Trevelyan in 1961 was gone for good, and that the ‘shower’ scene only survived in still form.  Personally, I wasn’t so sure, especially when screengrabs of the shower scene, clearly taken from a VHS source, began to surface on the internet.  A then associate, who was involved in a DVD release of NANI, was having none of it, insisting that no other version of the film existed outside of the British theatrical cut.  The fact that the DVD release in question ended up using a particularly washed out looking print of NANI –which aside from the nudity only really has picturesque views of Cornwall going for it- rendered that particular DVD release an even more pointless exercise.  A longer, alternative version of NANI eventually resurfaced in the States, thanks to Seattle’s Something Weird Video who committed the American release version to VHS.  Released Stateside in 1963, by Crown International, the American version drops the N word from the title, simply calling it ‘As Nature Intended’.  Naked might be absent from the title, but there is considerable more nudity here than was ever seen in Britain, including the shower scene with all its lesbian connotations intact.  NANI actually seems to have been an early example of a British sexploitation film also having an ‘export version’, with stronger takes appearing in the version seen overseas.  In the UK, Petrina’s dull secretarial work might have entirely been depicted in long shot, but US audiences were treated to an additional close up of her thighs as she takes dictation.  In the UK version, Bridget and Angela begin to strip off in a field at which point the camera pans to the ground, not so the US version which lingers a little longer on the sight of a topless Bridget.  For the payoff in the scene where Jackie falls overboard and has to be fished out of the sea, the UK version concludes with Pam and Petrina drying her off while Jackie still has her clothes on.  In the US version however, Jackie is topless and Pam and Petrina dry her off by rubbing her breasts (more of those lesbian connotations).  The US version also includes additional nudity from Petrina on the beach, and an extended version of Pam’s nude ride on a swing.  The new American narration tagged on to this version does strike a bit of a sour note though.  The original British narration might be guilty of being boring, but it doesn’t have the chauvinistic chip on its shoulder that flares up in the American narration.  Any lesbian connotations to the shower scene appear to have gone over the head of the (uncredited) American narrator who instead uses it to wisecrack “they decided it might be best to look at some maps...as if they could read them”.  I suppose a ‘director’s cut’ of the film would port over the additional footage from the US cut, but stick with the original British narration, not that I’m holding my breath for such a version to appear.

The nudist camp film is a genre that the British public have fallen in and out of love with over the decades.  Considered a hot ticket in the early 1960s, when there was no other way of seeing nudity on the big screen, but rendered obsolete by softcore movies at the decade’s end.  Thereafter the genre became a long standing source of parody- everyone from the Carry On team to Benny Hill took their shots- before achieving a degree of kitsch, campy affection by the 1990s,where they were viewed as harmless relics of more innocent times.  It is a genre that has fallen into obscurity, if not disrepute in recent years, mainly due to the use of children in these films.  Now, not for a moment do I believe that red blooded filmmakers like Harrison Marks, Stanley Long or Arnold Louis Miller were here for anything other than the boobs and buttocks of adult women, and regarded filming anyone else in the nude as a chore.  However, in order to stress that the nudist camps (and by association the films that documented them) were entirely wholesome, family friendly places, they tend to have naked people of all ages wandering about the periphery.  Heaven forbid anyone got the impression that films like NANI solely existed to ogle the bodies of well known glamour models like Pamela Green and Bridget Leonard.  What was once intended to give these films a layer of respectability is now ironically their most problematic aspect.  In 2003, a UK DVD release of Doris Wishman’s American nudist film Nude on the Moon (1961) was censored by the BBFC due to the use of children in its cast.  While Strike Force Entertainment backed out of releasing Arnold Louis Miller’s Nudes of the World (1961) presumably for fear of controversy and BBFC problems (the Miller film was eventually released by a rival DVD label without incurring BBFC cuts or controversy).

the aborted DVD release of Nudes of the World

One form of praise that tends to be bestowed on NANI these days is that it is now a time capsule of a long ago Cornwall.  While you’d logically expect a sixty year old movie to serve that purpose, I’m not sure that NANI really is the window into a bygone Britain that people tend to eulogize it as.  Cornwall has always been deeply into preserving its past, and its refusal to adapt to the modern world remains a big draw for tourists, or ‘emmets’ to use locals’ derogatory term for outsiders.  I’ve holidayed in Cornwall and Devon a number of times over the years, and have ventured into a few of the NANI shooting locations.  Not intentionally I should add, I wasn’t on a pilgrimage or anything.  I’ve been to Clovelly, Land’s End, Tintagel, and the Minack theatre.  Any thoughts of doing ‘then and now’ photos, comparing how they looked in NANI’s days to how they look now, quickly went out of the window.  Simply because none of these places have in all honestly changed that much in the past sixty years.

What you do gain from visiting NANI locations is a newfound respect for the film crew.  More than a few of those locations are an exhaustive trek to get to when you are travelling light, let alone when you had some no doubt bulky, 1960s filmmaking equipment in tow.  It must have been a Fitzcarraldo type achievement to get that equipment up to the top of Tintagel, in order to film Bridget and Angela exploring Tintagel castle.  Don’t even get me started on Clovelly and it’s inaccessible to cars “half mile hill that constitutes the main street”.  Thanks to the magic of the movies, NANI makes it look like a quick hop, skip and a jump down that hill to the harbour, and in no way prepares you for the torture session that cobbled, half mile street will inflict on your feet and ankles.  As for the girls’ mode of transport, only a true emmet like Harrison Marks would have chosen a big, American car like a Buick to drive around Cornwall in.  I shudder to imagine the headaches Marks and Co must have encountered by navigating it around Cornwall’s notoriously narrow back roads...roads never designed with cars in mind, especially not Buicks.  For the public, nudist films might have been fun to watch in the early 1960s, but in this case walking a few miles in the filmmaker’s shoes soon dispels any notion that they were as much fun to make.  Sexploitation filmmakers rush in, where your average emmet feared to tread.