There is nothing quite like Secrets of Sex in the British sex film genre, and there is nothing quite like Horror Hospital in the British horror genre. Despite both being commercially successful, the two feature films by Antony Balch are a pair of cinematic oddballs that walk against the crowd, never really fitting in with what was going on at the time, you’ll be unsurprised to learn that Secrets of Sex is the only British sex film to be narrated by a Mummy.
Then again, these films were made by someone who it is fair to say was a true
one-off character. Antony Balch was a unique individual in many ways. He was a
friend and collaborator of William Burroughs, he began as an experimental
filmmaker before transitioning to commercial film, he was a distributor as well
as a filmmaker, he was a gay man with a talent for marketing sexploitation
films to straight men, often allot more successfully than the heterosexual
competition. He was also way ahead of his time, seeing value in, and releasing
films by Russ Meyer, Jess Franco and Ted V. Mikels, years before cults sprang
up around them.
Balch was the only child of Delta Emily Balch, who had been in revues by
theatrical impresario Charles B. Cochran. Although Balch claimed that upon
giving birth to him, Delta lost her singing voice and never sung publically
again, instead becoming a film and TV extra as well as a stand in for Dame
Edith Evans. I get the impression that Balch was from a privileged background,
he was what you’d call a toff, but in terms of the film industry Balch was
someone who’d worked his way up from the bottom. Balch directed TV commercials,
subtitled foreign films for an arthouse distributor called Mondial films and
put together trailers...all the menial jobs.
Balch is far from the only fascinating character from the world of
sexploitation distribution, but in the cold light of day you have to admit that
fellow travelers like Bachoo Sen, EJ Fancey and David Hamilton Grant were
merely hucksters who zoned in on the movie industry as a means to make money. I
think what calls out to film buffs about the Antony Balch story, is the sense
that Balch was one of us, a passionate movie lover who got to live out the
fantasy of being able to bring movies he admired to the public’s attention,
both as a distributor and as the programmer of two London cinemas. In the distributor
realm, Balch was the first person to release Tod Browning’s Freaks, which had
been banned in the UK for decades. Balch also revived the silent movie Haxan,
which he released as ‘Witchcraft Through The Ages’, giving it a hip, 1960s
makeover by having Burroughs narrate the movie and Jean-Luc Ponty provide a
soundtrack. Endearing Balch to critics of the day, and earmarking him as
someone with greater integrity than your typical Soho smut peddler. Balch had
an office in Golden Square, so was just a hop, skip and a jump from the very
heart of Soho.
Somehow in the middle of this Balch managed to find time to direct Secrets of
Sex, which came about due to Balch’s friendship with Richard Gordon, who had produced
many classic horror and sci-fi movies like Fiend Without A Face and Devil Doll.
Balch was a huge Bela Lugosi nut who had dragged his long suffering mother to
various fleapit cinemas to see Lugosi movies during the 1940s and 50s. Even getting to meet Lugosi backstage in
Brighton during Lugosi’s ill-fated 1951 tour of Dracula, which Richard Gordon
had a hand in organizing. So I guess you could say that Bela Lugosi is what
brought Balch and Gordon together. I do think Balch was very fortunate to have
Richard Gordon onboard as a producer. Gordon
seems to have ‘got’ Balch right away, and allowed him free rein to make this
movie, confident that Balch’s marketing brain could make Secrets of Sex a big
success, even though this is far from a conventional movie...understatement of
the century.
Would anyone else have backed a film like this? I have my doubts...because of
its anthology structure and horror elements, Secrets of Sex tends to get compared
to the films that Amicus were making at the time. However that is to overlook the fact that
Amicus were somewhat of the goody two shoes of British horror, never went near
‘sexy’ stuff and weren’t too fond of graphic violence. There was Tigon, who
were a more exploitation oriented company, but they tended to take films away
from directors if things got too out there, or too gay, and draft in hack
filmmakers to shoot more conventional footage. As I believe was the case with
Zeta One and The Haunted House of Horror.
Thanks to Richard Gordon putting up half of the budget, and Balch digging into
his own pockets for the rest, Balch though got to make Secrets of Sex...the
film that educated the dirty mac brigade to the fact that women aren’t just
sexual objects. They can also be sadistic murderers, thieves, spies, mad
scientists, and want to trap men’s souls in plants. Valuable advice for budding
misogynists dished out by a philosophical mummy, who recounts several tales
from ‘the battle of the sexes’. A theme Balch appears to have been quite hung
up on, and also bleeds on over into the films he distributed. In Balch released
movies like Supervixens and Mama’s Dirty Girls, sexual relations between men
and women usually spiral over into violence and death. As a distributor Balch
was also drawn to movies that portrayed women in a particularly wicked and
immoral light. Such is the case with Balch pick-ups like Daughter of Horror,
Freaks, Blacksnake, and of course Don’t Deliver Us From Evil. I rarely throw
around the term genius, but Balch really was that when it came to marketing
exploitation movies, and the hyperbole he employed to sell movies has rightly
become the stuff of legend... “the French Film Banned in France”, “the Film
that Shocked America”, “Amazing Shockophonic Action”, “Alain Delon as the most
evil man in France!”, “Brainbucket Death Sports”, “Tougher than the Dirty
Dozen, rougher than Dirty Harry”. The tag line he dreamt up for Secrets of Sex
was “unisex explodes in the film they tried to stop”, which to the sexually
repressed must have made unisex sound like a new sexual fetish they needed to
know about. Although I wonder if that unisex explodes tag-line wasn’t also a
coded message that there is also allot of naked guys in this movie, and that
Secrets of Sex had elements that would appeal to the type of gentlemen that
Balch was fond of encountering in London’s bath houses and public toilets. By
all accounts, Balch was no stranger to cottaging.
Secrets of Sex begins with the origin story of its mummy narrator, and how a
thousand years ago an Arabian Judge (Richard Schuman, a sex film distributor
with acting aspirations) discovered a locked trunk in his wife’s bedroom, and
convinced that his wife’s lover is hiding in the trunk, has it buried. It’s a
prologue that shares similarities to a short story called La Grande Breteche,
written in 1831 by Honore de Balzac. If you want to see a more faithful
adaptation of that story it was the basis for an episode of Orson Welles’ Great
Mysteries (1973) with Peter Cushing in the role of the wronged husband. Don’t
go expecting to see the lover become a mummy in that though. Saying that,
Secrets of Sex itself doesn’t ever properly explain how a man buried alive in a
trunk emerges from it as a fully bandaged mummy...but Mr. Balch wanted a mummy
in his film, and realism was never one of his big concerns.
Our mummy narrator is voiced by Valentine Dyall, an actor who came to
prominence on radio in the 1940s, playing a character called ‘The Man in
Black’. So I can imagine was probably another childhood icon of Antony Balch.
Due to that distinct, velvet voice that Dyall had, he was frequently employed by
the horror film industry. He narrated a couple of trailers for Hammer, was the
voice of the ‘werewolf break’ in The Beast Must Die, dubbed Mike Raven’s voice
in Lust for a Vampire, but also had a career in comedy, acting as a straight
man to The Goons and Spike Milligan. I guess
you could say Dyall had a face for radio, and a voice for horror films.
The
first proper story in Secrets of Sex combines something Balch was very fond of…shirtless
men in chains… and something Balch was not very fond of...which was being
photographed. Balch had a superstition about having his picture taken, as a
result there are only a handful of photographs of him in existence, and in one
of those he is obscuring his face. A phobia that manifests itself in Secrets of
Sex in the story of a young male model (Antony Rowlands), posing in a mock up
of a medieval torture chamber for a lesbian photographer (Dorothy Grumbar), who
shall we say seems a little too into her work. His nervousness significantly
increases when she orders her assistant Norma, to “go get me the Spanish
horse”. Her cover story being that she has been commissioned to photograph him
on a Spanish horse for an advert- although I do struggle to imagine what
product would require an advertising campaign centered around someone being
tortured on a Spanish horse. Much as I’m sure we’d all love to believe that the
Spanish horse was a fictional invention of this film, this was a genuine
torture device dating from the 1600s that was still in use during the American
civil war, in which the victim is suspended by chains, is forced to straddle a
sawhorse like device equipped with a blade, and has weights attached to their
feet, in order for them to be pulled down onto the blade. This Secrets of Sex
segment is reminiscent of a James Bond film where the villain comes up with an
elaborate, sadistic way to kill Bond off, but rather than stick around and
observe their handiwork, makes their excuses and leave, thus allowing Bond the
opportunity to make a miraculous escape. Only this being Secrets of Sex, rather
than a James Bond movie, the male model isn’t so fortunate, and finds he really
does have to suffer for his art.
In the second story, we meet Mary-Claire (Yvonne Quenet) a female scientist who
has hooked up with an older guy, Sacha Seremona (Kenneth Benda) but quietly
despises him because of his wealth and power. Upon discovering she carries a
defective genre, and that any child she has will likely be born deformed, she
decides to bear Sacha a child, knowing it will be born a monster. Throughout this segment you do feel a torn
allegiance between Mary-Claire and Sasha Seremona. Despite her terrible actions, Mary-Claire is
not entirely unsympathetic, she has a sick mother and even though she is an
intelligent woman and a scientist is being held back because of her gender. As Sasha bluntly puts it he doesn't really
regard women as anything more than a means for men to continue their bloodline.
At the same time Sasha isn't someone you feel universal hostility to either,
he's already lost a son and gives the impression that he does admire Mary-Claire’s
spirit and intelligence. Had this story been done by Amicus I'm sure Sasha
would have been portrayed as a stone cold ruthless monster who you'd be
chomping at the bit to see get his comeuppance.
Whereas here you only hear about the worst side of his character- like turning
poor families out on the street- anecdotally, and the film doesn't quite make
the case for Sasha getting what he deserves.
Secrets of Sex and Horror Hospital do however put forward a better case
that Kenneth Benda should have become a horror film star. As much as Michael Gough
in Horror Hospital seems to have been Balch’s substitute for Bela Lugosi,
Kenneth Benda comes across as his Boris Karloff proxy. Benda does have an older Karloff type quality
to him, however with the exception of a brief role in Scream and Scream Again,
the Balch movies were his only foray into horror, with Benda spending the rest
of his career playing Judges and Lords.
In the credits of Secrets of Sex there are five listed screenwriters,
Balch and Elliot Stein, who were real people and three others who have no further
credits and were likely pseudonyms. Who
they were is one of the secrets of Secrets of Sex. Brion Gysin, another Burroughs associate and
a renaissance man in his own right, once claimed to have written parts of it. Another name linked to writing Secrets of Sex
is Ian Cullen, an actor and writer. This
used to appear on Ian’s CV on the name ‘Multiplication’ which was a working
title for Secrets of Sex. Cullen who
passed away in 2019 was the husband of Yvonne Quenet who plays Mary-Claire, so
I suspect may have written this particular segment. Since it is an acting vehicle for his wife
Yvonne, who by Secrets of Sex standards is a pretty good actress and holds her
own against a veteran like Kenneth Benda. I have to admit I don't recall seeing
her in anything else but she was still acting up until about 2014 and has had a
longer career than any of the other young actresses in this film.
Secrets
of Sex reminds you it’s a sex film with its third segment in which a female
burglar played by Cathy Howard breaks into the house of a guy (Mike Britton) disrupting
him from reading Jean Genet’s Miracle of the Rose, a book about a man's
homosexual experiences in a French penal colony… so your typical light bedtime
reading there. After catching her robbing
his house, she persuade him that there's a better way to pass the time than
calling the fuzz, and the allure of a bad girl in leather proves too great for
him. I'd say that this is the most authentically erotic scene in the movie,
although even here Balch can’t quite leave his sense of humour at the door. Scoring their lovemaking to a radio broadcast
about a flower show with double-entre references to ‘plucking the fruit’ and a
‘decorative bush’. This sequence also contains
lots of in-joke film industry references.
At one point the radio broadcast mentions an Antonia Gordon-Gordon, which
is a reference to this film’s producer Richard Gordon. As well as a young film producer called Peter
Walking, which is a reference to Pete Walker.
According to the radio broadcast ‘Walking’ has become engaged to a post-op
transsexual, a joke that the very heterosexual Pete Walker hopefully saw the
funny side to. Of all the Secrets of Sex
cast members Cathy Howard is the biggest enigma. Most female cast members like Maria Frost,
Sue Bond and Nicola Austin came from a nude modeling background, but I'm not
sure if that is the case with Cathy Howard.
If she did do work for the skin mags back then, no evidence of this has
ever resurfaced. Cathy was in a handful
of movies, all made during a relatively brief amount of time and the quality of
her acting in them varies dramatically.
She's really bad in Pete Walker’s School for Sex, yet Balch coaxes out
of her what is by far her best acting performance. Cathy's co-star Mike Britton is another one
who did few films, although he was also a model in print ads during this period,
including one for Smirnoff. In the film
Mike is playing a married man who is tempted by another woman and he is acting
from experience there. In real life Mike
was married, but had a bit on the side in the form of an actress and model
called Maxine Casson, who appeared in a couple of films of this nature. Mike liked to refer to Maxine as his ‘side-chick’. The last anyone has heard from Mike, and this
was decades ago, he was working as a manager of a sports centre, where the also
had another ‘side-chick’ situation going on.
During his time in sex films, Mike also had a day job as a crew member
on Top of the Pops, where he’d work crowd control and occasionally fill in for
band members during camera run throughs.
Unfortunately Mike and a couple of the other crew members ended up
getting fired from the show, on account of appearing in films like this. What happened is that a new floor manager arrived
at Top of the Pops, straight out of university and he was, by all account a
total snob who took an instant dislike to Mike and a few of the other crew
members, on account of them being from working class backgrounds. Presumably this floor manager also had a
thing about porn, and had either seen Mike and the others in a film or maybe a
magazine with stills from a film. He
then used that as leverage to get them fired for bringing Top of the Pops into
disrepute. Ironically this would have
been the same time as the Top of the Pops people may have been turning a blind
eye to, or even concealing, the activities of the dreaded Jimmy Savile. In Secrets of Sex though you can see Mike engaging
in the kind of things that got you fired from Top of the Pops back then. Although in real life it seems that toffee
nosed floor managers were the ones that you needed to look out for, rather than
female burglars.
The
next Secrets of Sex story is the only one adapted from an outside source, the
Lindy Leigh cartoon strip which ran in ‘Mayfair’ magazine towards the end of
the 1960s, and was the work of a Dutchman, Alfred Mazure, who signed his work Maz. Lindy Leigh is a none too bright spy with a
habit of losing her clothes during the course of her patriotic duty. I managed
to track down the Lindy Leigh story that Balch adapted, ‘The Moranian treaty’ published
by Mayfair in January 1969, and it's surprisingly a very straight adaptation of
that cartoon strip…as well as a rare occurrence when ‘very straight’ and ‘Antony
Balch’ can be included in the same sentence.
In fact the original strip could pass as a storyboard for the film with
most of the dialogue and the images being directly taken from the source cartoon.
I have to admit I found this surprising because I’d always thought that the
dialogue in this scene where Lindy Leigh infiltrates the Moranian embassy and
overhears snippets of conversations about nuclear power and boy scouts sounded
very Burroughs influenced, but… no all of that is from Mazure. The Balch film does contain something that
you don’t get in the original comic strip though, music by the Mancunian
himself… yes Cliff Twemlow has some music on the Secrets of Sex soundtrack. Right at the start of the Lindy Leigh segment,
you get to hear the opening fanfare of ‘This is my City’ from the album ‘Big City
Story’. One of many of Cliff’s
compositions for the DeWolfe company, created by him humming the tune into a
tape recorder, sending it off to his musical partner Peter Taylor, who then transcribed
that into music. As tends to be the case
with DeWolfe tracks ‘This is my City’ bounced around various TV shows and films
for over a decade. It was also used in
episode of the Benny Hill show, and a criminally bad comedy called ‘No Secrets’
starring Oliver Read and Peter Cushing.
Balch’s major contribution to the Lindy Leigh segment is the inclusion of the
silent slapstick comedy parody ‘Bedroom Beauties of 1929’. A film within a film sequence in which Nicola
Austin gets caught up in a fracas between two gay men, is then harassed by a
man who turns out to be a lesbian in male drag, then is further harassed by the
lesbian lover of the lesbian male drag… before being escorted off the premises
by the manager. It is simultaneously the
film's silliest yet also subversive segment.
Amidst all of these slapstick comedy hi-jinks is the fact that the only
harmonious relationships in the entire film are same sex ones with Nicola’s hetero
character being seen as this troubling, disruptive force that temporary results
in all these gays falling out and fighting amongst each other. I do think the sequence is a little unfair on
Nicola’s character though, I mean the initial guy is cheating on his boyfriend
with her, then each of the lesbians assault her for no particular reason… and
yet she is still depicted as the scarlet woman and the villain of the piece. Then again do we really expect a woman to be
given a fair hearing in the kangaroo court of Secrets of Sex? The sequence ends with the caption ‘back to
normal for the bedroom beauties’ a ballsy move considering that homosexuality
was only made legal in 1967, and few would have considered same sex
relationships normal in 1970.
There
was a trend in the early days of the British sex film to cast nude models
rather than professional actresses, as was the case with Nicola Austin and
Maria Frost here. I guess the thinking
there was that if you are mainly casting for nudity then there was a risk that
while a professional actress may give a better performance, she might then get
cold feet about doing nudity. Whereas a
nude model is hardly likely to have issues with nudity and you should be able
to pass them off as an actress as long as you didn’t give them too much
dialogue. Maria Frost who played Lindy Leigh though was apparently mortified
when she read the script for this film and discovered that she had been given a
substantial role. Reportedly she even
complained to Balch that she was a model and could not act, but I think that
because the segment is based on a comic strip, and requires her to do little
more than pose in a series of filmed cartoon panels means that Maria was able
to bluff her way through the role. Fortunately
for Maria, during the rest of her movie career she was never again asked to do
anything demeaning or degrading as acting, they just wanted her to take her
clothes off.
From
sexy spies we then meet the Strange Young Man (Elliott Stein) who rings up for
a call girl, only for it all to go wrong when he whips out his lizard, and
fails to convince her that it would be a groovy thing for them to make love
while his pet lizard watches them. The
best way I can come up with to describe Elliott Stein in Secrets of Sex is
Austin Powers had that role been played by Woody Allen rather than Mike Myers. The strange young man is a neurotic mess who
is trying to pass himself off as a hippest guy in Carnaby Street by dropping
into the conversation lingo like… groovy, swinging, the permissive society…baby. It is a segment that once again appears to be
gay men looking in on, and having a laugh at the expense of heterosexuality. Dialogue here sends up popular straight kinks
like wife swapping and contact magazines by having the Strange Young Man trying
to sell the call girl on the idea of ‘lizard swapping’ being the new wife swapping,
and claiming he’s seen in swinger advert
for a young couple seeking a good natured pangolin. At times it does feel like Balch was put on
this earth to make heterosexuality seem unnatural, he can't seem to bring
himself to shoot straight sex without throwing some odd or ridiculous detail in
there. Whether it's people having sex in
front of pangolins, or in Horror Hospital where Robin Askwith is trying to
seduce the girl in the shower while wearing the helmet of a suit of amour. Elliott Stein does throw himself into the
role with some gusto even though you suspect he was here out of friendship to Balch,
rather than any serious acting ambition… he was mainly a journalist and film
critic. Stein also plays the Mummy in
the film, and I think it's a true sign of friendship if you are prepared to get
wrapped up in bandages for your friend’s movie… and of course get dressed up as
a school boy in a flashback sequence to the strange youth of the Strange Young Man. As tends to be the case with people within Balch’s
inner circle, Stein was a massive horror fan and as a film critic was one of
the early champions of ‘Night of the Living Dead’ which he wrote about in the Village
Voice. In his later years he became a
well-respected critic, film historian and programmer in his native New York. Stein makes a brief, uncredited and memorable
for all the wrong reasons appearance in a documentary called Cinemania (2002) about
the lives of a bunch of obsessed filmgoers in the New York city area and the
rep housing they flock to. The back-story
to his appearance in that documentary, is that Stein had gone out for a big
meal, decided to follow that by going to see a movie at a rep cinema and made himself
more comfortable by loosening his pants and belt. However all they show in the documentary is the
lights coming up at the end of the movie screening, at which point you see
Elliot zipping up his pants and fastening his belt. Something Stein was pissed off about. Understandably so, because the impression you
get is that he'd been jerking off to the movie.
So if that documentary has given you the wrong impression, be reassured
that Elliott Stein wasn't one for beating his meat at places like the Museum of
Modern Art.
Elliot Stein, not masturbating, in Cinemania (2002)
For
the last Secrets of Sex story we have a dotty old lady (Laurelle Streeter) telling
her new valet Jeremy (Bob Raymond) about her youth as a jet setter in Monte
Carlo and lets slip how she imprisoned the souls of her former lovers in the
plants that she attends to in a greenhouse.
In order to prove her claims she magically summons up a naked couple who
start balling in the straw. Balch was
especially keen on his sex scene and claimed “she has this extraordinary smile
like a toothpaste commercial and the boy who lies on top of her has a wonderful
arse”. This segment seems to have been pretty
much written on the fly by Balch, and perhaps because of that is where allot of
the esoteric beliefs that he was into, come into play, particularly William
Burroughs and the church of Scientology.
Among Secrets of Sex’s many claims to uniqueness is that it's the only
British sex film that requires you to do research into Scientology, trust me
that doesn't happen with Confessions of a Window Cleaner. Based on my layman's understanding the claims
made by the old lady in this segment about the soul leaving the body upon death,
travelling around in space for a while before choosing to be reborn in the womb
all come from Scientology. I guess
getting your soul trapped in a plant and being kept in greenhouse conditions
for eternity is a big hang-up of scientologists, and must be what keeps Tom Cruise
awake at night.
When Jeremy
turns on her and calls a ‘filthy alien garbage heap’ that is the influence of Burroughs,
who I believe at the time, was espousing the belief that women were all agents
working for insects from another galaxy.
According to Burroughs’ private correspondence, Balch had been
‘processed’ by the Scientologists in February 1968. Burroughs himself had been around Scientology
from around 1959 but began to publicly denounce it around 1970. So I wonder if team Balch and Burroughs were
already beginning to turn against Scientology when Secrets of Sex was made in
1969. Given that the character who espouses
Scientology beliefs in the film ends up being strangled to death and denounced
as a filthy alien garbage heap.
Secrets
of Sex may well be the best reviewed British sex film of all time, if not the
only British sex film to garner decent critical praise. Its publicity material including glowing
quotes from the Financial Times to Screw magazine, Secrets of Sex really was
the toast of everyone from the highfalutin to the sleazemongers. The British Censor was less keen on it and
cut around 9 minutes from the film. In the
words of Balch himself “Secrets of Sex was completely fucked up by John Trevelyan
and the BBFC”. Cuts included ‘shots of
two naked men and one naked woman together’ a shot of ‘naked boy rolling over
in the hay’, ‘female strippers being pelted with tomatoes’, the entire removal
of the end of the Spanish horse segment, cuts to the Cathy Howard/Mike Britain scene,
and cuts to the couple in the straw. They
really didn't leave Balch an awful lot left to exploit and Balch felt that
people didn't tend to enjoy the film as much after the BBFC had had their way
with it. I imagine it would have been a
frustrating experience given that so much was missing. Paradoxically the cuts seem to have made this
a far more nasty film than it really was.
Since the end of the Spanish horse scene was missing, people were
imagining that the uncut version of film showed the model being cut in half,
and conjured up far more graphic images in their minds and they were being
prevented from seeing by the censor. Given
the censorship problems this film has had over the years and the very different
versions that have been around, we are very fortunate that the version which was
committed to video tape by Iver Film Services in 1981 and the 2005 DVD release
by Synapse films was the full version. So
chances are that if you're watching Secrets of Sex today you are seeing what Balch
intended, which certainly wasn't the case when this film first came out in the
UK.
Secrets
of Sex had a rather turbulent voyage to America; it was seized and impounded by
US customs for a while, then couldn't get a rating from the MPAA. The commonly held belief is that the film was
originally released in the States as ‘Bizarre’ but I found a newspaper clipping
that suggests it was playing on the Pussycat Theatre chain under the ‘Secrets
of Sex’ title in August 1970. So it
looks like it was road tested as Secrets of Sex in the States before reverting
to Bizarre. It was distributed stateside
by a fledging New Line Cinema, who at the time were mostly catering to the counterculture/college
campus audience and putting out movies which reflected that. At the time, New Line were a couple of years
away from enjoying their first big success with early John Waters films, and
many years at away from becoming synonymous with the Nightmare On Elm Street
and Lord of the Rings movies. The film was
then re-edited around 1972 when Richard Gordon became one of the directors of Fanfare
Films, and created a new version of the film called ‘Tales of the Bizarre’
which removed the sexual content from the film and finally received an R rating. Tales of the Bizarre was designed to play on
the bottom half of horror double bills, and played the Drive-Ins under Fanfare
releases like Werewolves on Wheels and Horror on Snape Island.
Curiously
footage from the film also found itself in an American hardcore film, ‘Naked Came
the Stranger’ a Radley Metzger porno- chic movie from 1975. In the opening scene of the Metzger film, Secrets
of Sex is shown playing on TV. Metzger uses
footage from the Spanish horse segment and later on in the scene, audio from
the Lady in the Greenhouse segment. So
it seems Secrets of Sex met with the Metzger seal of approval, since I'm sure Metzger
wouldn’t allow just any old sexploitation film to be referenced in one of his
movies. Metzger did of course work with
Richard Gordon a few years later on an adaptation of ‘The Cat and the Canary’
so I guess those two knew each other and this factors into why footage from Secrets
of Sex ended up in Naked Came the Stranger.
SOS as seen in Naked Came the Stranger
The final re-edit of the film was done by Balch himself, who created a short version of the film in 1977 which was designed to play as a support feature to the skin flicks he was distributing. Presumably that version emphasized the sexual content of the film, although it is meant to omit the Lindy Leigh segment, which probably seemed a little dated and a bit of swinging 1960s artifact by 1977. I'd be curious how Tales of the Bizarre and the short version play out, at the same time we should probably thank our lucky stars that this film's home viewing history is a lot less complicated that it's theatrical one, and it's only been the uncut version that has been in circulation since the VHS era onwards.
Balch’s
own take on Secrets of Sex was that it was a very uneven film, he particularly
liked the Spanish horse, strange young man and lady in the greenhouse segments,
felt the monster baby segment was a ‘bore’ but thought the shot of it at the
end was ‘brilliant’ which I think is a fairly honest assessment of the film. Secrets of Sex does come across very much
like a first feature film by young director who was eager to get all his worldview,
influences and personal mojo up on the screen.
There is, I suspect, a whole hidden layer of obscure references and in-jokes
in the film that only Balch himself would be able to declassify and decipher
for the rest of us. There may even be
references within references in the film, take the first sight you see in the
film, three naked people with a superimposed quote from Paradise Lost. Your automatic assumption is that this is a
tip of the hat to John Milton and Paradise Lost. However not even that is straightforward,
because this is the exact same Paradise Lost quote that Mary Shelley uses at
the start of Frankenstein. So is Balch actually
referencing John Milton or Mary Shelly there?, and if this is a hidden
reference to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein could this also be a jokey admission that
Secrets of Sex is something of a Frankenstein’s monster of a film, stitched
together from Balch’s obsessions and brought to life with a few bolts of
lightning.
Not
everything hangs together, as you might expect from a first time feature film
director Balch was still making rookie mistakes, but all the segments, even the
ones that don't entirely work, still linger in the imagination, due to the
often striking imagery and originality that's behind them. I can't help but think that if Balch had lived
to an old age and made many, many more films we might not attach too much
significance to Secrets of Sex. People
who were around Balch were of the opinion that he’d have gone on to become a
Ken Russell type bombastic, eccentric force of nature who wasn't tied to any
particularly genre. I suppose you could
draw parallels between Balch and Michael Reeves, even though Reeves had an entirely
different personality and was a far more serious filmmaker. If you look at Reeves’
first film The She Beast, it is totally all over the place and even one of its
own actors once described that film to me as a ‘malformation’. However the sad fact that both Reeves and Balch
died young, means that we have to cling on to these early malformations of
theirs, which leave you with a sense that we've been denied seeing the full
extent of their talent.
Of
Balch’s two feature films, Secrets of Sex is the more difficult and divisive, yet
while this film does have a dark side- it is a very pessimistic movie when it
comes to depicting relations between men and women- I think that Balch’s sense
of humor, energy and inventiveness overshadows that and wins you over. Ultimately Balch’s greatest achievement here
was to pull off the trick of making an unusual and offbeat film that could
still stand on its own two feet commercially, a talent that dare I say is eluding
people working in the film industry today.
Much as I admire aspects of ‘Under the Skin’ and ‘Last Night In Soho’,
Under the Skin lost something like 7 million dollars and Last Night in Soho lost
in the region of 20 million dollars at the box office. I saw some dipstick on the internet the other
day say that the British film industry should be making more films like Under
the Skin and Last Night In Soho… well I'm not sure there is going to be a
British film industry for much longer if they keep on making movies like Under
the Skin and Last Night in Soho. I'm
sure Balch would have loved Under the Skin, a woman depicted as an alien
species, sex used to lure straight men to their deaths, full frontal male
nudity.. that would have fit right into Secrets of Sex, and if Balch was still around
and in charge of marketing Last Night In Soho it probably would not be 20
million down. He'd have probably gone with
“See London's vice laid bare… Matt Smith as the most evil man in Soho…wokery
explodes in the film they tried to stop”.
Where are you now Antony Balch when the British film industry needs you
the most?
Ironically
it is Secrets of Sex's dark side and the battle of the sexes theme that still
makes it a timely, relevant film… and how many 50 year old British sex films
can you say that about. Decades on from the
release of this strange little film, gentleman and ladies still seem incapable
of living together in harmony and equality.
Look at the #metoo movement, look at what's happening in Iran right now,
look at the misandry commonly found in mainstream films and TV show, and on the
flip side of that look at the online incels, who refer to women as a whole lot
worse than filthy alien garbage heaps, and probably do prefer the company of
pangolins to women. If Balch was around
today he'd probably have enough material to feed a dozen battle of the sexes themed
movies. As the Mummy says “and so it
goes on and on and on and on”.
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