Keep It Up Jack (1974)

They say nothing signifies the end of an era quite like nostalgia for its beginning, something that's certainly true of Keep It Up Jack, a British sex comedy that harkens back to the days of the music hall, while sadly acknowledging its demise. It's hero, Jack James (Mark Jones) being a quick change artist whose dated act is dying a death in front of a bored audience of old women and young kids. "Let the act rest, its dead any road, a long time ago, it's the end of an era, Jack" his gruff, Northern boss tells him. By the 1970s the British music hall had largely bitten the dust, but it's memory clearly lived on in the target audience of Keep It Up Jack. In that sense the film is a part of a cultural mourning for the music hall era that was also reflected in the BBC's The Good Old Days programme, or low budget documentaries about music hall history that were doing the rounds on the lower half of double bills like A Little of What You Fancy (1968) and Top of the Bill (1971) by Arnold Louis Miller. 

Derek Ford, the director of Keep It Up Jack is an unexpected figure to have been bitten by the music hall nostalgia bug. Ford not having come from a theatrical background and being middle class, the music hall being a predominantly working class phenomenon. Therefore I wonder if the idea for the film didn't emanate more from Ford's co-writer Alan Selwyn, who unlike Ford was both working class and had a direct connection to showbiz. Selwyn's father Solomon Salzedo having been a comedy performer at the Windmill Theatre during the 1940s, under the anglicised name of Sidney Brandon. As well as co-writer of Keep It Up Jack, Selwyn also served as a bit part actor in the movie, an associate producer and procurer of female talent. The Ford/Selwyn script offers Jack a lucky break when an Aunt of his dies in a car crash leaving him her expensive home...in reality Ford's own home 'Beeleigh Falls House' in Maldon, Essex. To Jack's horror, he also discovers that his Auntie was a famous madam and that he's inherited a fully functional brothel. For reasons that Ford and Selwyn's script never satisfactorily explains, Jack decides to continue running the brothel and begins cross dressing as his Auntie. Initially his motivation for this seems to be out of sympathy and possible attraction to Virginia (Sue Longhurst), a lesbian prostitute who has shown up at the house expecting employment, and who gives Jack the cold shoulder until he starts masquerading as an older woman with a strap on. All of which makes it seem like Keep It Up Jack is going in the direction of being unorthodox rom-com about a guy trying to woo a lesbian by masquerading as a woman himself. 

However the film doesn't really pan out like that, and if anything Virginia becomes something of the villain of the piece, when ambition causes her to try and make a power grab for the business. One which also sees her employ more prostitutes, each of whom bring their own distinct mojo to Chez Auntie. Caroline (Jenny Westbrook) is the dominatrix of the bunch, Gloria (Linda Regan) is the one with the baby fetish, while Francine, played by Veronica Peters is a woman of Russ Meyer proportions, or as Peters' IMDB page puts it 'trademark: large breasts'. Based on her role in Keep It Up Jack, Peters doesn't seem to have been that bad an actress, but when it came to ebony beauties in British sexploitation, appears to have been sidelined in favour of Minah Bird and Lucienne Camille. The remainder of Peters' acting career consisting of bit parts in Sexplorer, Eskimo Nell and the Harrison Marks short Tailor Maid.

Since romance with Virginia is off the cards, Jack's reasons for passing himself off as his Auntie seem obscure at best. Apart from being a way of getting some laughs out of seeing a man in drag. I wonder if Keep It Up Jack might seem like a more sexually subversive film in the eyes of an American audience, who would be unaware of the long standing mainstream tradition of drag humour in British culture, whereas in America, drag is more synonymous with the gay liberation movement of the 1960s. One culture's idea of a sexually revolutionary act is another culture's source of belly laughs for all the family. I remember an American woman, who used to be on Twitter/X, writing a review of Tiffany Jones (1973) and praising a scene- where a male character is forced to drag up only to then get hit on by confused straight men- as being wonderfully progressive for its time and evidence that it's director Pete Walker was an early trans ally. A theory that doesn't hold up to much scrutiny, if you've ever read an interview Walker, you'll know he is a very conservative minded person. Jack James himself is also a man on a morals kick, and once the brothel gets swinging again becomes all uptight and disgusted by the Essex bacchanal he himself has created. Jack then sees it as his mission to rescue Fleur (Maggi Burton), a young naive prostitute, from those who would seek to exploit her. Essentially Fleur becomes the Iris to Jack's Travis Bickle, but instead of shaving his head into a mohawk and shooting up Beeleigh Falls with bullets, Jack instead infiltrates his own brothel by posing as a host of foreign stereotypes including an Arab and a Japanese man. An idea that I suspect might have come from Alan Selwyn, since there's a similar phoney Arab scene in Selwyn's movie Secrets of a Superstud, with Selwyn himself donning the boot polish on that occasion.

This is my first time viewing of the hardcore version of Keep It Up Jack, and while the hardcore is very brief compared to what Ford got up to in Diversions, it is jarring to see scenes of people having real sex in such close proximity to scenes involving well known, respectable comedy actors like Frank Thornton, Queenie Watts and Paul Whitsun-Jones. The latter making his final film appearance here before his premature death in early 1974, meaning that Ford would have shot Keep It Up Jack at some point in 1973. Until the hardcore version was rediscovered, the general consensus about the additional footage, quoted on the IMDb and Wikipedia was that "the film also exists in a version with hardcore inserts, but there is no suggestion that any of the credited cast participated in it." This hasn't turned out to be entirely true. While none of the name cast partisapate in real sex here, they are not entirely excluded from material that is unique to the stronger version. A scene where Jenny Westbrook and Veronica Peters' characters seduce Fleur into a lesbian threesome is much more explicit in this version, culminating in all three women masturbating themselves with champagne bottles. It's not hardcore per se, but its only a few shades away from it. There's also a startling scene, only included in the stronger version, involving Linda Regan's character decorating Jack's hard-on with whipped cream and a cherry on top, before chowing down. A scene achieved with an obvious prosthetic penis, presumably due to Regan and Mark Jones' unwillingness to do hardcore. Again, at risk of sounding like a Derek Ford apologist, I suspect this was another script idea from Alan Selwyn, since there is a near identical scene of food fellatio in Secrets of a Superstud. One wonders what Regan, who went on to have a career in mainstream British comedy like Hi-De-Hi, and has more recently reinvented herself as a crime novelist, must make of this unearthed footage. As she recently appeared to be a little flustered by her appearance in Carry on England being mentioned on Twitter/X, it'll take a braver man than me to bring up the subject of Keep It Up Jack with her.

The actual hardcore footage involves no name specialty actresses being put through their paces by the game-for-anything actor Tony Kenyon, whose mustache twirling antics once again recalls his stag movie forefathers. These scenes illustrate Ford's strong inclinations towards S&M, with bondage and sadism taking president over regular sex. Ford had attempted to get a film version of 'The Story of O' off the ground in the late sixties, and these sequences give an idea of what we'd have been in for, had fortune favoured Ford over Just Jaeckin. As well as offering flashes of the serious, erotic filmmaker that Ford could have been, had he not been so shackled to the comedic demands of British sexploitation.

Funnily enough, I can never think of Keep It Up Jack without also thinking of the actor David Warbeck, even though Warbeck isn't actually in the film. This being due to two, of many, stories I've heard about the Wild, Wild World of David Warbeck over the years. During the 1990s, when Warbeck was doing horror movie conventions, he would frequently shock fans by claiming that he was breaking his curfew by attending these shows and that he'd recently been put under house arrest for running a brothel. This, I'm assured was actually a wind up on Warbeck's behalf and an example of his mischievous sense of humour. Another genuine, Warbeck story though, dates from his time in Italy making westerns and thrillers there, where he would always cause the crews to crack up by turning up on the first day of shooting in full drag... breaking with his macho screen image. So, I can't help thinking he would have been more suited to playing a cross dressing, brothel owner in Keep It Up Jack than a horny jewel thief in The Sex Thief, Warbeck's only actual foray into British sexploitation. Not that there's anything wrong with Mark Jones here, Jones was a very versatile actor who brought a bit of class to British sex comedies and Don't Open Till Christmas, another fine mess that Derek Ford got him into, and apparently a huge source of embarrassment for the actor. Jones goes beyond the call of duty in Keep It Up Jack, shaving his chest, concealing his dick between his legs and donning a female wig on top of his regular male wig. Jones seems to have had a Sean Connery attitude to toupee wearing in movies, willing to slap one on if the role required it, but equally happy to play roles without a wig and made no secret of being bald in real life. Incidentally if you want to put a face to our master of ceremonies, Derek Ford himself shows up right at the end of the movie playing, of all things, a vicar. In fairness, Father Derek of the Maldon Essex Parish, is slightly more credible as a man of the cloth than Mark Jones is as a Japanese chappie.