The Wife Swappers: missing footage resurfaces

Is the world ready for ten, previously unseen, minutes of The Wife Swappers? A question I didn’t think I’d be contemplating in 2023.  Derek Ford’s 1970 film is an unlikely candidate for ‘lost’ footage resurfacing.  Late last year however a 16mm can of film marked ‘Wife Swappers Salon Productions 1970’ came to the attention of my pal Soundtrack68, who caved in to curiosity and paid to have the 16mm reel transferred to disc.  It was a gamble that fortunately paid off, leaving us with ten minutes of group sex, lesbianism, people’s feet, whips and ice cubes, which never made it into any UK release version.

Exciting a find as this is, I doubt this particular kind of cinematic excavation is ever going to show up on Talking Pictures TV’s ‘Footage Detectives’ programme, even though it is a darn sight more interesting than anything Mike Read and Noel Cronin will ever preside over on a Sunday evening.

Here is a breakdown of what was on the 16mm reel:

1 minute, 24 seconds of Paul (James Donnelly) having sex with Jean (Joan Hayward) on a couch.  In the context of the film this happens after Paul and Jean have been playing a variation of strip poker with Paul’s wife Ellen (Valerie St John) and Jean’s husband Leonard (Larry Taylor).  In the UK release version only quick, near subliminal, flashes of Paul and Jean’s lovemaking are shown as Ellen and Leonard watch on, but you see allot more couch sex in this extra footage.

42 seconds of Ellen being initiated into the wife swapping club by taking her first lover and having sex with him as the other members of the club, and Ellen’s husband Paul watch on.  All that is shown of this in the UK version is reaction shots of the club members, and the sight of Ellen making love being reflected in Paul’s sunglasses.  While in this additional footage there are shots of a distressed Ellen, and a not so distressed guy, having sex on the floor... causing members of the club to get turned on and begin an orgy.

2 minutes, 7 seconds of additional footage to the scene set on a house boat.  In the UK version the owner of the boat sexually assaults the female half of the couple he has invited onboard.  Additional footage though steers this sequence into murkier waters as the wife comes round to his way of thinking and the pair end up having consensual sex.  This is intercut with the wife of the boat owner seducing the other woman’s husband, which is more graphically shown than in the UK version, with implied off-screen fellatio.

1 minute, 15 seconds to the scene where submissive Marion (Fiona Fraser) takes to her bed after receiving an obscene phone call.  In the UK version, this quickly jumps to the next scene after Marion produces a Cat O’Nine Tails from under the bed sheets, but in the additional material the tormented woman thrashes herself with it, rubs the whip between her breasts before fellating it.  The poor dear.

4 minute, 34 second of a foursome scene, featuring the young couple who end up being blackmailed after their sexploits are recorded on CCTV.  All that is shown of this in the UK version is brief, near subliminal ‘flashbacks’ to it, when the couple discover they are being blackmailed.  This additional footage does throw a light on how Derek Ford must have been into feet, a fetish I don’t usually associate with him, and one that doesn’t show up in any of his other movies.  Although with Derek Ford it is always a case of ‘what wasn’t he into?’  Foot fetishism is noticeable in the earlier scene between Paul and Jean, and the initiation of Ellen, but Ford really goes into overdrive with this foursome scene.  One which finds the blackmailing husband caressing the feet of the other man’s wife (Sue Carstairs) which reduces her to jelly whilst she fondles the heels of his feet.  The standout of this additional footage though is the seduction of Carstairs by the other wife (Jan Grey), achieved by rubbing ice cubes over her breasts.  This would have probably been considered the film’s erotic highlight in 1970, had anyone have actually seen this sequence back then.  Incidentally both Carstairs and Grey declined to be credited onscreen in the film.

This ten minutes of footage does through up all manner of questions that –what with director Ford and producer Stanley Long now being dead- we’ll probably never get answers to.  Was this material that the BBFC insisted on being cut from the film? Was it shot with the idea of going into a ‘continental’ version of the film? Or was it something that Ford and Long decided to discard in post-production, in the knowledge that it would never pass the censor?  One of the words written on the leader of the 16mm film looks to be ‘continental’ (a few of the letters appear to have been lost to time) which would push you in the direction of thinking that Ford and Long were shooting stronger material for overseas, as early as 1970.

It has been a while since anything has been done with this film, its last UK release was on DVD back in 2007, but in the unlikely event that any of the boutique labels plan on putting The Wife Swappers out again, they should definitely consider trying to work this material back into the movie.  One of the common criticisms of British sexploitation is that it lagged behind films from America and Europe in terms of screen explicitness.  In the case of Ford, Long and The Wife Swappers this is clearly not the case, it’s just that it has taken 53 years for the exonerating material to surface.