Purporting to lift the lid on the private life and business of glamour photographer George Harrison Marks (1926-1997) The Naked World of Harrison Marks opens with Marks starting the day in a typical fashion, being woken up by his alarm clock and immediately getting on the blower to various topless models to arrange photo shoots. Naked World captures Marks at the height of his success, and he was a man who wasn't afraid to be flash, picking up June Palmer in his Rolls Royce during the opening credits. “It would be wrong to think of Harrison Marks as a man who spends his days focusing on beautiful women” argues Valentine Dyall’s narrator, somewhat unconvincingly given amount of time the film dedicates to Marks snapping away at nude females, both in his studio or on location (until rain stops play). Just to show there is more to Marks than boobs though, we get to see him judging a beauty contest, photographing cats and making a children’s film, starring himself and Stuart Samuels as pirates.
Teri Martine, a model and sometime girlfriend of Marks once told me a funny story about this film "I remember George taking me to see the preview of The Naked World of Harrison Marks we were no sooner in our seats and George fell asleep and was snoring so loud I had to wake him up!!! fond memories of the one and only George.” So I suppose it is forgivable if parts of Naked World have a similar effect on the audience as they did its own director. The segments with Marks imagined as a gangster and Marks imagined as a gay film director prove to be a laugh free zone, and the sight of Stuart Samuels in drag is frankly terrifying. The big surprise is the Toulouse-Lautrec sequence, you'd expect it to be a series of groan inducing disablist jokes, instead it's unexpectedly heartfelt and full of admiration and empathy for Toulouse-Lautrec. Although Marks rejects comparisons between himself and Toulouse-Lautrec in the film, the similarities are impossible to ignore. Both men moved in bohemian circles, produced art that outraged straight society, and both were total alcoholics. There's the sense of a kindred spirit in Naked World's eulogy to Toulouse-Lautrec "Grace for him was in his drawings, his paintings, and these could be of graceless people, prostitues, showgirls, in each he found humanity and tenderness, and through him they will live for all time".
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Living on through this film are Marks’ best remembered models from the era, Pamela Green, Cleo Simmons, Jutka Goz and the aforementioned June Palmer all of whom contribute cameos. Also putting in an appearance in the film was a young actress/model called Toni Burnett, who caught Marks’ eye. By the end of the film Toni and Marks were very much in love “she puts up with my lunatic ways and my day dreams” he wrote “she makes me happy, and I make her happy. Really for the first time in my life I am as happy as an ordinary, average person”. Others saw a far more toxic side to the relationship, a former girlfriend of Marks told me "George had a genius for becoming seriously involved with women who were unsuitable for him. He was very self distructive in his behaviour and Toni fitted his tendency to marry women who treated him badly".
As well as The Naked World of Harrison Marks, Toni had a fleeting role in the 1960s Bond spoof 'Casino Royale', and if Marks is to be believed was a prolific stuntwoman. “She used to crash cars into brick walls at 70 mph until I stopped her” he later remarked “I thought to myself, I‘ve either got to marry her or she‘ll kill herself”. Marks and Toni would go onto have a daughter, Josephine Deborah Harrison Marks born the 15th of November 1967 and Toni would belatedly become the third Mrs. Harrison Marks in September 1973.
Naked World ends on an unexpectedly dark note with Marks suffering a nightmare. One in which he meets a hooded ghoul in a graveyard, sees himself (quite literally) digging his own grave, then finds himself in a dungeon surrounded by damned nude women, whose crime in life was having modelled for him. "I was only trying to give other people pleasure" pleads Marks, to which Dyall's narrator replies "there is no greater sin". This horror movie themed guilt trip then sees Marks being attacked by the contents of a film can, before being put on trial for leading a “worthless life”. Found guilty, he is then dragged away by the nude women to be drowned in a pond. There's no Scrooge type redemption for Marks however, and Naked World ends with Marks waking up from the nightmare and returning to photographing naked women. "It could of taught him a lesson" complains Dyall "but I doubt it, he'll go on telephoning girls when he wakes up....the man's incurable".
Unlike Marks' previous film Naked as Nature Intended, The Naked World of Harrison Marks disposed of the need to justify its nudity by pretending to be nudist propaganda. This was an exercise in showing boobs for the sake of it, and as a result Naked World was initially rejected by the British censor but swiftly passed by numerous local councils. Some of whom rated it as low as an 'A' certificate (the BBFC eventually passed the film with cuts in 1968).
Unfortunately the only version of the film that has ever been available for home viewing is in b&w and runs only 63 minutes (the original running time being 84 minutes). It is a shame we can only currently see The Naked World of Harrison Marks in black and white. Colour stills from the film suggest a bold, modish production that is ill-served by monochrome. This edited b&w version was sold on DVD through the now defunct Harrison Marks website, which went offline on the 31st July 2015, apparently due to poor business and declining sales. A full length, colour print of the film is said to reside at the BFI, back in 2015 my friend Wilson Fraser (1967-2017) had offered to fund a restoration and release of that print, but sadly it wasn't to be.
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