Naked England (1969)

Currently only around in an Italian language version with Japanese subtitles, Naked England is an Italian made, Mondo movie look at British customs, sexuality and eccentricities. A subject matter that dictates Naked England has more in common with Arnold Louis Miller documentaries like Primitive London and London in the Raw than the Italian made Mondo Cane. Thus giving you the unusual spectacle of Italian filmmakers imitating British filmmakers who were in turn imitating Italian filmmakers. Naked England opens with a man on a tranquil golf field, his launching of a golf ball then quickly cuts to a ball of the wrecking variety making short work of old tenanent housing. This metaphor of the new demolishing the old is reflected in the ensuing crowd shots, Naked England was made at a time when top hats and bowlers were still a common site on the heads of Londoners, but were beginning to share pavement space with girls in short skirts... young, dandy fellas and the bald heads of Hare Krishnas. The timing of Naked England certainly can't be faulted, this was a period when the rest the world looked to London as a colourful, cultural trendsetter, and the makers of the film sure managed to grab a generous slice of the Swingin' London pie. The film might have been more accurately titled 'Mondo Kings Road'.

Some of the subject matter of Naked England includes women's wrestling, trepanation, and a ''School for Wives' where a professional stripper teaches the average housewife how to act sexy for their husbands. As is the nature of the beast, Naked England is mainly bogus, highly sensationalistic, and must have had the effect of getting red blooded Italians on the next plane to England while being treated with much amusement by a UK audience, where it's fakery would have been more apparent. Particularly questionable are scenes of Jesus freaks holding a public crucifixion and the depiction a Nazi themed restaurant, where customers pay to be brutalised by staff dressed in SS uniforms, then suffer a mock gassing...an experience akin to the 'be black baby' sequence in Brian De Palma's Hi Mum. Saying that the film does specifically identify the restaurant in question- Alexander's club on the Kings road- which does check out as being an authentic location back then, and for libel reasons surely wouldn't have been name checked in the movie had there not been some credibility to this Nazi fetish sequence. 

Another authentic London restaurant, Melita, is similarly portrayed here as a sexuality transgressive hotspot...with a montage of transvestites preening and making out memorably scored to 'Eloise' by Barry Ryan. The use of too theatrical, too red looking, stage blood rules out the crucifixion and trepanation scenes as being real, ditto a scene of the police tangling with criminals, which leaves the latter with faces full of Kensington gore and plays like a warm up for a scene of a blag going down in The Sweeney. On the other hand, scenes of junkies shooting up in the underground toilets of Piccadilly Circus are as grueling and real as anything in Tony Klinger's Extremes.

Distributed by Miracle Films on the lower half of a double-bill with Pete Walker's Man of Violence, Naked England played the Leicester Square Jacey cinema in July 1969, before resurfacing at the Edinburgh Jacey cinema in January 1971, then transferring to the Liverpool Jacey cinema in March 1971. The more titillation orientated Mondo movies were all welcomed in British cinemas, with the likes of Naked England, The Queer....The Erotic, Mondo Sex and Excuse Me, Do You Like Sex, showing up on the Fleapit circuit during the late sixties and early seventies. By the time VHS came along though, the perception seems to have been that these films were then too tame, and too dated to warrant being preserved on the new media. The copy of Naked England that is currently on the film collectors circuit looks to have been recorded off Italian television, and has managed to acquire Japanese subtitles along the way.

Unlike many foreign Mondo movies which turned an eye towards Britain, but faked the location work, Naked England was predominantly shot on British soil, meaning you do get lots of late 1960s London here. From a Brit-Sleaze perspective, there's also footage of an exhibition of Harrison Marks' photographic work, with Marks' friend and straight man Stuart Samuels seen manning the counter and selling prints of Marks work. While a suspect look at Nude psychotherapy, which just seems to be an excuse to fill the screen with naked glamour models, offers a fleeting glimpse of Esme Johns, thus shattering the idea that Groupie Girl was her only movie.