An Arabian Adventure on Space Hoppers

Persons of a superstitious mind-set have a tendency to believe that the number ‘13’ has unlucky connotations. Likely to agree wholeheartedly with this thinking is John, after his disastrous stint as a contestant on episode 13 of 321. Frequently looking downwards, squeezed into an uncomfortable shirt a few sizes too short for him, the very definition of the expression ‘a bag of nerves’, everything about John’s body language indicates a man who’d rather be anywhere rather than hopelessly battling his way through the early rounds of 321. Occupation: ‘the licensee of a disco and wine bar’, which, along with the age of the programme might explain John’s Gibb brothers fashioned barnet and beard. Just about every other question causes him a mental freeze, his partner/fellow contestant frantically miming an answer to the task of naming ‘dictionary words ending with the letters …oss’ fails to bring him to a moment of inspiration. Deathly silence from the audience, the sound of the 321 clock ticking away, marking the passing of every vital second that John is wasting. Its surprising the amount of sympathy you’re able to muster for a total stranger on a 36 year old game show. John stares upwards, as if looking up to whatever god John worships for divine inspiration. John’s god must possess a sense of humour, as an answer suddenly comes to John, one that will spare him the embarrassment of being struck dumb on a game show, but not a couple of childish titters as a result. Q: ‘we want dictionary words ending with the letters… oss’; John’s highly anticipated answer: ‘toss’.





A habit of saying the first word that comes into your head and bypassing any thought for self-censorship –perhaps understandable within the panicked context of a TV game show appearance- also affects contestant Martin, who when asked for words ending in ….ape, comes out with ‘rape’ resulting in a lot of male-led laughter from the audience, and possibly for The Gentle Sec’s to make a mental note to keep one extra step away from this particular contestant. Again to reiterate what I previously said about episode 12, we do seem to be witnessing here a show caught in a tug of war between being family friendly in nature and forays into smuttier territory. This episode likely provoking such awkward child to parent questions as “mum, what’s a rape” or “Dad, what’s a Eunuch”.

Series one of 321 can just about lay claim to having had part of its formula later copied by The Kypton Factor. Both shows at different stages in their histories featuring sketches proceeded by observational rounds that relies upon contestants’ ability to recall the minutiae from those sketches (although The Kypton Factor started a year before 321, 321 appears to have been first to use this idea). This round of 321, officially entitled ‘Two Way Test’, is acted out by The Disrepertory Company of resident comedians. Cruelly they look to have saved their worst comedy material for this part of the show. From a viewer perspective it is the section of 321 you find yourself tuning out from the most, whilst sparing a thought for the contestants whose survival on the show depends on paying close attention to these corny antics.

Here the sketch starts, joltingly enough, with live camels being hastily herded off stage, a defective microphone either spares us or deprives us of (depending on your P.O.V) Debbie Arnold’s impression of Mae West. This is followed by a Sultan (Dave Ismay) being offered a series of prospective wives by a camp slave trader, played by Chris Emmett impersonating John Inman’s character in Are You Being Served? Much limp wristed theatrics from Chris of the alarmingly bushy eyebrows ensues, “ooh, he’s a big fellow” says Chris of Dave’s eunuch protector. Plentiful references to other Are You Being Served? characters (“I bet this middle name is peacock”) overstate the fact that Chris Emmett is ‘doing’ Mr. Humphries here, despite this being a decent enough impression of a very well-known sitcom character.

The observational round spun off from this sees contestants alternating between answering questions on the sketch and performing a physical challenge, which in this episode’s case happens to be transporting Ping-Pong balls from A to B using a tube whilst riding on the back of a space hopper (no 1970s kitsch extremist in your life should be without one). For the male contestants this means answering questions about a Eunuch, then due to bouncing about on those space hoppers, living out the few moments of their lives when they probably wished they were Eunuchs too.


 


Episode 13 marks the end of the first series of 321, and fittingly there is an office party type atmosphere of raging libidos, sexual frustrations being aired and people losing their inhibitions. Returning comedian Dave Ismay, wheeling out Dusty Bin at the start, can’t get no satisfaction “every week in this show couples reject him, and every week The Gentle Sec’s reject me” he moans to Ted Rogers. Poor Dave obviously lacks the ability to stir up the animal passion in the opposite sex that Ted so effortlessly possesses. Demonstrated a few moments later when hostess Gail Playfair whisks Ted off his feet in order to suck face with our host. Even Dusty Bin is having better success with the ladies than Dave, acquiring a dustbin girlfriend/wife in this episode, one who sports Gentle Sec’s sized glasses, and in keeping with this episode’s ‘Arabian Adventure’ theme, a harem girl veil.


 


Such is the hallucinatory quality of early 321, that transcribing episodes’ events goes hand in hand with resignation to the fact that anyone unfamiliar with the show is likely to grow increasingly suspicious that you are simply making this gibberish up. Even after you have witnessed these episodes first-hand, lingering doubts and questions follow you as to the show’s existence, a description of these shows feels less like that of a genuine, real life TV show, and more a dream of the variety that you wake up from and immediately vow never to eat cheese that late at night again. A classic example of this, from towards the end of this episode, can be found in a sketch that sees Aladdin (Dave Ismay, again) unleash a genie from a lamp, who appears in the form of Welsh Trade Unionist Clive Jenkins, or rather Chris Emmett impersonating Clive Jenkins. Part genie, part tough talking union leader “rub me the right way you get three wishes, rub me up the wrong way you’ll get three million workers out on strike” Clive grants him the three wishes. So what does our man Ismay wish for? Peace between all nations, incalculable wealth, eternal life, a cure for all known illnesses, …no, no, no this being 321 he wishes to see what Dusty Bin’s girlfriend looks like, for Debbie Arnold to do an impersonation of Frank Spencer, and with one wish that at least holds up to red blooded male logic, to catch another eyeful of The Gentle Sec’s, who all appear dressed as Mother Christmas. The latter wish adding up to nothing other than a crass, but alluring, plug for the show’s upcoming Christmas special. “We’ll be with you over the Yuletide, so you’ll watch us, won’t you” asks Gentle Sec’s member Jenny Leyland aka the 321 hostess most likely to win a Barbara Steele lookalike competition.

The Clive Jenkins bashing in that sketch is the latest in a long running theme of anti-unionist, anti-labour party humour unsubtly at work in 321. Along with my other vintage game show viewings of this week, an episode of Celebrity Squares that followed this on Challenge TV (a tanned, portly 1990s Bob Monkhouse doing anti- Arthur Scargill jokes), and the dusting off of an old Golden Shot episode (a youthful, b/w Bob Monkhouse doing anti-work to rule jokes) it does put forward a case that Britain likes its game show hosts in the same way that America likes its action film heroes, that is veering to the right politically, and not shy of bringing their opinions to the material. Ted Rogers having bigged up Thatcher at the 1979, 1983 and 1987 general elections. Don’t get me wrong this is an aspect of 321 that torments my own leftish leanings, but the past is what it is, and the only way to gain a true understanding of how it worked is to approach it with honesty and without bias. Even if in the process the past insists on telling you a few stories that you feel uncomfortable learning.


In fairness to Ted Rogers he isn’t the first person to go under this site’s microscope to hold such political allegiances. This blog’s very own mascot and frequent sweetheart Mary Millington was –like Ted- a lifelong conservative party voter. A true blue confession she makes on page 75 of her 1979 biography –but hey- never let it be said this blog doesn’t like its subject matter to come complete with a few challenging ‘character flaws’ (the Millington legacy especially haunts the 1987 321 Christmas special, which features a family comedian who guest starred in one of her last films, a TV personality she had an affair with in the late 70s, and a name check reference of one of her famous ‘clients’.)


Overall episode 13 isn’t really tainted with the bad luck so commonly associated with that number. Dusty Bin gets rejected early on, leaving Ted to desperately try and stir up tension with the suggestion that a second dustbin booby prize could be awaiting the contestants. “We might have another Dustbin, Mr and Mrs Bin, they might have reproduced during the show, who can tell”, he speculates, terrorising the contestants with that idea, and planting the unwanted mental image of Dusty Bin humping away at the female dustbin – a la Belial and his girlfriend at the end of Basket Case 2- and siring an offspring as a result. Cheers for that, Ted.

 


Mercifully he is only joking, and series one ends on a high note for just about all concerned, the winning contestants go home with the car, the rejected Dusty Bin gets the girl (bin), the hyped Christmas special points to a show with a bright future, the result of the 1979 general election no doubt put a smile on Ted Rogers’ face, and a male audience’s reward for sitting through 50 minutes of this is the sight of Mireille Allonville de paris and Co. dressed as Mother Christmases and Harem girls. Happy endings all round then, well as long as we forget about the unfortunate known as John.

Living in a Caveman’s Dream

Call me a moth to any old flame if it happens to be highlighting a sign with ‘1970s and British’ written on it, but lately I’ve found myself drawn to weekend repeats of game show 3-2-1 on Challenge TV. The hook being that the current set of repeats takes the show right back to its beginnings in 1978. Providing a welcome break from the final few series of the show-which appear to have been on constant rotation on Challenge TV these last few years- as well as the channel’s seeming reluctance to screen shows dating before the mid-1980s, save for a 2005 screening of a b/w Bob Monkhouse era episode of The Golden Shot (good for working out exactly how you pronounce ‘Yutte Stensgaard’) and a colour Charlie Williams era episode of the same show – an unforgettable experience, me old flower.

Due to my own age, and recent repeats tending to favour the show’s tail end over its early years, the slicker, more polished and professional late 1980s 321 is the incarnation of the show I’m au fait with. So these repeats offer up the chance to peek at the show’s extremely humble beginnings, during which its visibly under-budgeted and looks every bit the summer filler underdog of a show that few could have predicted would catch fire and become the Saturday night TV heavyweight it was during the 1980s. As alluded to in its cartoon opening titles, 321’s origins can be traced back to the Spanish game show “Un, dos, tres... responda otra vez”. A piece of misinformation that has been lodged in my mind for years was the idea that the original show was devised by the spanish actor Narciso Ibáñez Menta. Further research reveals that it was in fact the brainchild of his son Narciso Ibáñez Serrador, whose film directing career includes at least one bona fide horror classic in 1976’s ‘Who Can Kill a Child?’ (released here by Tigon as ‘Death is Child’s Play’) but who clearly hit gameshow gold with Un, dos, tres which ran from 1972 to 2004.


 

Part quiz show, part variety show and part game show, its appeal –not unlike Bollywood cinema- lay in offering various forms of entertainment under the one roof, -comedy, musical numbers, variety turns- and likewise taking up a whole afternoon’s worth of viewing with its 142 minute running time. Yorkshire Television’s remake reduced the running time to a less demanding 50 minutes, and retained its multi-genred format (‘it’s a quiz’, ‘it’s a game’, ‘its fortune and fame’ claim the opening titles), the best-remembered aspects to the British version –loveable mascot/booby prize bogeyman Dusty Bin and host Ted Rogers’ 321 hand gesture- however appear to be home grown additions to Ibáñez Serrador’s formula.

Su Tune of the Robin Askwith blog detects characteristics of her favourite thespian in 321 host Ted Rogers (“he has a Robin-ish way about him, his talking or cadence or something”) high praise indeed. These early shows certainly find Rogers in more blokish form than the shows’ later years, where he was complementary but fairly asexual around hostesses Lynda Lee Lewis and Caroline Munro (“that’s a lovely dress you’ve got on this week Caroline”). Of course at the show’s start Rogers was as spoiled for choice as Askwith when it came to attractive female co-stars. The first episode boasts an indulgent count of six hostesses, who adopt ridiculously oversized glasses and ‘secretary’ roles in the early Q&A rounds of the game. All done in order to signpost this as the ‘intellectual’ part of the show, as well as to justify their collective name “The Gentle Sec’s.” With regards to the hostesses, early 321 is not unlike Val Guest’s Au Pair Girls (1972)… its the world as seen through the eyes of a middle-aged crumpet chaser, one that can only view women in one way, but does at least place women of different nationalities and skin colour on an equal level of attractiveness and desirability, The Gentle Sec’s being a multi-racial, multi-cultural affair.

 


Six quickly became five after the departure of Gentle Sec’s member Tula alias Caroline Cossey. Born Barry Kenneth Cossey and having had a male to female sex change operation in 1974, a tabloid had threatened to run an expose on Tula, forcing her to ask to be let out of her contract in order to avoid a scandal. By episode two Tula has gone, leaving behind the remaining five to preside over various holiday camp flavoured rounds -one such example involving contestants with umbrellas on their heads tossing toy frogs into pans-, fiendishly cryptic clues that hide the identity of star prizes and the ever present danger to contestants of potentially ending up going home with a ceramic dustbin. The world of 321 is, to misquote a famous Kinks song “a mixed up muddled up shook up world except for Tula”. The real reason for Tula’s departure didn’t become public knowledge until 1981 when a bit part in a James Bond film finally resulted in a tabloid making good on the threat to make a sensationalist scoop out of her sex change. Its an aside to 321’s history that is far more interesting than the whitewash of a reason for her absence given by Ted in episode two “unfortunately Tula isn’t with us tonight, but Tula we know you’re looking in and get well soon please”.


Imagine if you transplanted the brain of Francoise Pascal’s character in Mind Your Language into the body of Anna Bergman’s Mind Your Language character, the resulting female creation would probably look and sound a lot like 321 hostess Mireille Allonville. Mireille ticks many of the boxes of what 1970s Englishmen thought foreign women should all be about, blonde, tall, buxom and with an ooh-la-la French accent that brings sexiness to just about everything, even summaries of the mundane lives of 321 contestants. In keeping with the Mind Your Language comparisons, Mireille’s struggle with the English language proves to be a rich vein of comedy in these shows. Resulting in Mireille introducing a chartered surveyor contestant as a “shattered chevalier”, a contestant who works for an occupational therapist as someone who “works as a occupation of the rapist”, and the occupational rapist’s wife, called Moira, as ‘Moron’. The appearance of another contestant who works as a chartered surveyor in a later episode does allow Mireille her moment of Eliza Doolittle-type triumphalism when she finally manages to pronounce it correctly the second time around, bless.

Despite or perhaps because of her penchant for second language english goofs, Mireille has quickly become my favourite of The Gentle Sec’s aka Ted’s Harem of Bespectacled Hostesses, her no bra/see through dress choice of clothing in episode 2 probably also tipping things in her favour. 


Zoning in on obscure starlets whose careers ended abruptly (no known TV or film credits exist for Mireille after her departure from 321 in 1980) does inevitably lead you to the ‘whatever happened to…’ question. A search of the internet for answers reveals I’m following a well-trodden path when it comes to asking this about Mireille, with the discovery of a Mireille Allonville website (https://sites.google.com/site/mireilleallonville/home). Sadly, not the work of the lady herself, but of a fan attempting to discover the current whereabouts of Madame Allonville. A quest that evidently resulted in a flurry of emails during 2011 to the likes of Melvyn Hayes and other showbiz types, alas resulting in only a thumbnail sized amount of information about her and no lead as to her current activities. That website fell silent in its search for Mireille as of 2012. A pity as a combination of dogged determination, perseverance and good luck can occasionally pay off and grant you a small window into what retired sex symbols of yesteryear are up to these days, as I can vouch for, since I do -ahem- now know what happened to Heather Deeley.

Mireille is one of a number of actresses whose careers both touched upon and glued together the worlds of exploitation film and game shows. The aforementioned Yutte Stensgaard is another example, and Me Me Lai, Pat Astley, Suzy Mandel and Sue Longhurst likewise have game shows on their resumes. 321 of course would later be responsible for the best remembered example of this due to Caroline Munro, whose stint on the show coincided with her trashier career choices, thanks to roles in Dick Randall produced horror cheapies.

Mireille is also part of a small band of people who cause me to wonder –with a mixture of perverse amusement and cultural embarrassment- just what somebody from overseas made of Britain based on their sudden exposure to the eccentric side of its culture. What for instance did Bela Lugosi make of Britain after a journey to these here parts ended with him playing opposite to- and the love interest of- Old Mother Riley in ‘Mother Riley Meets the Vampire’, witnessing all of Arthur Lucan’s squawking Irish drag act routine in the process. Ditto German actress Monika Ringwald, whose British career saw her painted green for a scene in Derek Ford’s Sexplorer, naked on an altar and having Kensington gore squirted out of her neck for Norman J Warren in Satan’s Slave, then being photographed with The Kinks for the sleeve of their album ‘Preservation Act 2’, a photo-shoot that captures Ray Davies looking like an Auton version of Max Miller. Mireille definitely had an equally colourful magic carpet ride through late 70s British culture, what with an appearance in a Frankie Howerd TV show, Queen Kong and a full on blast of the madness of King George (Harrison Marks) in the form of Come Play With Me, before getting a hostess gig on a game show centred around a loveable dustbin. An appearance by Bernie Clifton in these early shows means Mireille would have also gotten an eyeful of Clifton’s Ostrich routine too. Strange days indeed, especially for a French bird.


A reason for the uncertain tone of these early 321’s might be down to its original timeslot, from what I can gather the episodes we’re getting at the moment went out on a Friday night, a timeslot that would indicate a ‘pre or post pub’ audience demographic in mind, rather than the family oriented Saturday evening slot it eventually got upgraded to. At this point in its history 321 does seem torn between going in the direction of a family friendly show or more ‘adult’ material –in the form of the flirtatious banter between Ted and the hostesses and stabs at political satire/impersonations- all of which would have surely gone over the heads of kids.




As of 16/03/2014 the Challenge TV repeats have taken us up to episode 12 and on the basis of this detective themed episode it is easy for even amateur sleuths to detect signs of 321’s growing popularity, evidence of a cash injection into the budget can be found in the star prizes and the set- now decorated with plants and a few larger variations of those mysterious ‘O’ shaped symbols that have been menacingly lurking behind the audience- plus the public’s fascination with Ted’s 321 hand gesture is once again proudly acknowledged in his opening banter. We can also deduct that the pudding bowl haircut was all the range when this originally aired, returning contestant Jenny sports one, as does rival contestant Pauline, and a few further examples can be sighted in the audience. Of the contestants, only Lynne is not following the pudding bowl trend, but gets the big laugh of the night, when upon being asked to name breeds of wild cats comes up with the answer ‘Zebra’. Was it nerves, her husbands’ attempt to mime her an answer, or an audience member having a coughing fit, that caused her to come up with that howler of a game show answer? Either way that answer combined with her equally funny backstory about entering a beauty contest-only to fall through the stage- does threaten to steal all the comedy highpoints to this episode from its resident trio of professional comedians.

This trio, collectively known as ‘The Disrepertory Company’ originally consisted of Duggie Brown, Chris Emmett and Debbie Arnold, and whose chief purpose in the show is to dish out cringeworthy jokes as punishment for contestants getting the questions wrong. Emmett and Arnold look to be sticking around but the show is having serious problems keeping hold of a third member of this team. Brown left after six episodes, seduced away by a part in the short lived sitcom ‘Take My Wife’, his replacement ostrichman Bernie Clifton was poached away by Crackerjack, and his successor the comparably non-entity Dave Ismay has now regenerated into Mike Newman, introduced by Ted in episode 11 as “a very funny Irishman”. Newman’s persona, given its best airing so far in this episode’s Sherlock Holmes sketch, is of an out of control loon, clumsily stampeding his way through sketches, bellowing uncontrollably, shooting mad stares, tearing pieces out of a carpet, and inspiring worried looks and confusion from his co-stars, as if he has completely strayed from the script. He is not unlike Tommy Cooper in that respect (making it rather ironic that it is Chris Emmett who is given the job of directly impersonating Cooper in this episode) and as with Cooper, Newman’s is a routine that plays a guessing game with the audience as to whether his outward appearance as a punch-drunk wildman is all secretly controlled and pre-rehearsed, or the real deal.


You suspect that a fair amount of early 321 isn’t going to hold up to scrutiny by today’s politically correct standards –Newman’s self-deprecating ‘Irishman’ jokes being a prime example- but the use of Debbie Arnold in these shows is a reminder that the pre-alternative comedy world wasn’t entirely the domain of men, and in fairness the show does present her as an equal to the male comedians, rather than just their sidekick or foil. The two episodes repeated on Challenge TV last weekend also see her offering competition to the 321 hostesses in terms of -dare we say- sexy 321 moments, doing a Marilyn Monroe impersonation in the Saturday episode, blown up skirt bit included, while this episode sees her dressed up as wonder woman, a ‘one for the dads’ TV moment if ever there was one, and no doubt inspiring much Kenneth Connor-esque ‘phwoaring’ and back of the neck slapping when this originally went out.

Probably the biggest curse laid upon old game shows when viewed today is that the passing of time robs the star prizes of the glamorous appeal and seductive power they once must have had over Dawn of the Dead era consumerists. Yesterday’s high coveted treasures now cannot help looking like today’s car boot sale junk. More fascinating from the perspective of cultural archaeological is 321’s eye for mod-cons that never seem to have really caught on with the public, and would otherwise be long lost to time. Check out this episode’s folded up caravan prize, whose cream and dark orange-bordering on brown colour scheme not only represents the most ‘of the period’ trapping of the entire episode but also colour co-ordinates with Ted’s own checked blazer and bold orange shirt ensemble for this episode. Another curio, wheeled out as a prize in this episode, is one of a trio of different TV sets, the one in question being uniquely shaped like a theatre spotlight and complete with rotatable monitor… again, those never really caught on, did they?

Of the other two tellys, the big money one perfectly illustrates the “yesterday’s treasure is today’s boot sale dust gatherer” theory, the real audience attention grabber here is the pocket sized mini-TV, initially appealing in a sci-fi movie gadget way, but –lets face it- the impracticality of watching TV on a screen the size of a large stamp quickly became apparent.

Given the audience’s show of awe and wonder over that pocket sized TV though, you have to wonder how they’d react to the knowledge that 36 years into the future people would be able to preserve these episodes on shiny, silver discs?


      

I’m Bedabbled

I have a couple of articles in the upcoming issue of Bedabbled!, the fourth issue of this magazine of British horror and cult cinema is based around the theme of 'Strangers in a Strange Land' and includes coverage of Straight on Till Morning, The Yes Girls, Her Private Hell and other films in which young people venture to London…. only for things to not work out so well.  For further details and ordering information check out the magazine’s own blog

http://bedabbled.blogspot.co.uk/2013/12/coming-soon.html

Happy New Year

“Free at last…. Good luck and god bless you”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Acrvg0bfegU

 

Review: The Golden Lady (1979, Jose Larraz)

When is a Jose Larraz film not a Jose Larraz film? When it is The Golden Lady a 1979 offering from the Barcelona born director that resembles just about everything other than one of his own films. At the higher end of its multiple aspirations The Golden Lady muscles in on territory occupied by Charlie’s Angels, The Avengers and the James Bond franchise, deliberately inviting comparisons between the latter two in the ‘special guest star’ casting of Patrick Newell and Desmond Llewelyn, both playing as close to their Bond and Avengers characters as copyright laws would allow. The Golden Lady also has its wicked eye on the decadent, disco loving world of The Stud, inadvertently its Bond influences often make it come across as a humourless Lindsay Shonteff film too, and its storyline about a group of pistol packing, attractive women steps on the feet of Donovan Winter’s The Deadly Females.


Slick in execution, metropolitan in its landscape, and doing its best to pass itself off as a big budget Hollywood affair, The Golden Lady belongs to a different universe entirely to the earlier, atmospheric and predominately rural set series of British horror films that Larraz is better remembered for. It is a Larraz film only in the sense that Dr. Goldfoot and the Girl Bombs was a Mario Bava film, or that Poltergeist was a Tobe Hooper film, yes that is their names adorning the directed by credit, but abandon all hope ye who seek auteur tendencies here. The conclusion that you can’t help reaching is that Larraz was merely a director for hire on this project. By all accounts it wasn’t a happy experience for its director, who’d go on to cite it as one of the worse films he was ever involved in, with the majority of his ire being reserved for the film’s script. While I’m not sure this is Larraz’s absolute nadir –faded but painful memories of his 1980s horror efforts The Edge of the Axe and Rest in Pieces suggest they were more hard going- The Golden Lady is definitely the most faceless of his films. It has the feel, less of the work of a horror auteur, than of a director who occasionally dabbles in the strictly commercial side of cinema in-between a day job of shooting ITC series episodes. In that sense it is the kind of film that would sit more comfortably among the filmographies of Val Guest, Robert Young or Gerry O’Hara, than Larraz.


The Golden Lady of the title, and the film’s female James Bond character is Julia Hemmingway (Christina World) a mercenary by trade, but who leads the kind of jet-set lifestyle more associated with a wealthy socialite. Larraz’s leading lady Miss ‘World’ is none other than Take An Easy Ride’s Ina Skriver, hiding out under a new acting pseudonym invented especially for the purposes of this film. Skriver’s Danish accent and acting ability haven’t improved a great deal in the three years since Take An Easy Ride, but at least she now gets to play a character who owns her own car, helicopter and private jet, rather than having to hitchhike her way into the back of other people’s.


Enter Charlie Whitlock (Newell) a quintessentially English, smoking jacket and monocle wearing businessman who instigates the plot of The Golden Lady by hiring Hemmingway to dig the dirt on three business rivals of his. All of whom represent Whitlock’s main competition in a looming bidding war over the rights to a petroleum contract in the Middle East. Despite the film’s title Hemmingway doesn’t go it alone, and seeks out three other golden ladies to help her out with this assignment, each hired on the basis that their good looks will render Whitlock’s rivals putty in their hands.


My good friend Suzy Mandel was at one point mooted to appear in this film, The Golden Lady even shows up in some versions of her CV, but in fact Suzy had emigrated to the States before filming had begun. The makers of The Golden Lady may have narrowly missed out on having a bona fide Playbird in their cast, but they luckily still managed to round up a trio of striking starlets to play Hemmingway’s assistants, including a pre-‘V’ June Chadwick, the high priestess of all late 1970s British trash culture that is Suzanne Danielle, and Czech model and Confessions of a Window Cleaner bit player Anika Pavel. In the Charlie’s Angels tradition each of the golden ladies has her own distinguishing characteristics and fashionable hairstyle. Chadwick’s character Lucy (aka the short haired one) is the boffin of the group, whose Hi-Tech commuter, nicknamed ‘Corky’, provides onscreen data on the other two golden ladies, spelling out their strengths and weaknesses in a time-saving way of character development. Carol (Pavel) is a redheaded NYC fashion model who when not posing for photo shoots is getting her hands dirty in the world of espionage. Carol’s plus points according to Corky are “no particular political-religious allegiances”, but her failings include “vanity…. nymphomania”. Saying that it is rather unfair of Corky to single Carol out for criticism in that department, especially as vanity and nymphomania are a common failing among both female and male characters in this film. Last but certainly not least is Suzanne Danielle as the statuesque and fearless Dahlia. How tough is Dahlia? the first sight of her in the film sees Dahlia modelling army camouflage and nonchalantly strutting her stuff around a war zone as an unspecified war rages around her, a sequence that culminates with Dahlia in silhouette, gun in hand and the smouldering remnants of a downed plane in the background. Intros to action heroines don’t come much better than that.


Early on in the film Hemmingway stresses to Whitlock that “I’m involved in commercial espionage not murder” but no sooner have Whitlock’s rivals surfaced in London than car chases, kidnap attempts and dead bodies start to pile up around the golden ladies, as greedy unscrupulous businessmen get pitted against each other in a grab for the oil. Whitlock’s rivals in question include Dietmar Schuster, an AC/DC German businessman who is in town with his younger lover Wayne Bentley, a ballet dancer whose prima donna behaviour and bi-sexuality make him a target for seduction by the golden ladies. Then there is Yorgo Praxis (Edward De Souza) a Greek, self-made billionaire and shipping magnate, who in no way, shape or form is meant to remind you of the Greek, self-made billionaire and shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis (taking characters who mirror real-life figures and dropping them into salacious, fictional plots appears to be one of many tricks the makers of The Golden Lady picked up from Jackie Collins.) Technically there is a fifth, unofficial golden lady in the form of Anita (Ava Cadell) an inexpensive prostitute that Hemmingway has hired to distract Praxis whilst the other golden ladies infiltrate and bug his London residence. What a distraction Anita does turn out to be, riding Praxis like a bucking bronco and faking violent orgasms as if her life depended on it, in a scene that gave Ava Cadell the chance to show off her newly enlarged breasts and guarantee The Golden Lady coverage in the T&A stills loving pages of Continental Film Review. Anita is later the subject of a hilarious put down when Praxis tells Hemmingway that Anita is “a good child really, but …..limited”.




Hemmingway puts herself forward for the business of seducing the final man who stands in the way of Whitlock’s bid for the oil. Not surprisingly, as Max Rowlands-a man who seems to have learnt everything he knows about male grooming and fashion from Paul Raymond- also happens to be Hemmingway’s former lover. As the instigator of his labyrinthine plot, Whitlock continues to pop in and out of the narrative, ensuring that the Golden Lady’s makers got their money’s worth out of Patrick Newell. Desmond Llewelyn’s appearance however is of the ‘take the money and run’ school of cameo appearances. Cast as Lucy’s mentor, Llewelyn sticks around long enough to dish out a few Bondian gadgets before he is out the door and in search of a paycheque. “Haven’t I met him somewhere before” enquirers Hemmingway. “I believe he is quite well known in his trade” replies Lucy, in a scene that offers a corny wink to its audience and a brief ray of comedy in a film that often could be accused of taking itself way too seriously.


Paradoxically the closer attention you pay to the plot of The Golden Lady the less sense it starts to make. Schuster is really a KGB agent living under a false identity, Hemmingway’s entire mission is a smokescreen for an assassination attempt on a visiting oil sheik, and Rowlands is secretly in with the CIA and also wants to get back in Hemmingway’s knickers. The Golden Lady never entirely convinces you that its makers were the encyclopaedic knowledge on international espionage that the film would love you to believe. Suspicions linger that we’re witnessing filmmakers trying to bluff their way through this area of expertise with the help of a tangled web of a plot and lots of then topical chit-chat concerning oil barons, the energy crisis, ‘big shots from Israeli’, Swiss bank accounts, et al.


The big diversionary tactic here though is the characters’ wealth and the billionaire lifestyles of the beautiful people. Fur coats, diamonds, champagne and disco music are all worshipped as the new gods here. Ina Shriver alone must have gone through an entire designer wardrobe during the film, her character rarely sporting the same outfit for more than one scene, you’d be amazed at how much of the film consists of characters going back and forth between the lobbies of high-class London hotels and the back seats of limousines, and a Panther Deville –the vehicle to be seen in if you were a female mercenary or porn baron back then- commands enough screen time that it is deserving of its own co-starring credit.

As with the same year’s The Bitch, there is also a helicopter ride opening scene and aerial views of New York City that serve no real purpose other than to flaunt the fact that the money was there to afford such luxuries. As to where the money was coming from… a loan of Lucy’s computer isn’t needed to detect that Philips, the Dutch multinational engineering and electronics conglomerate, are likely to have had money in this film. Their logo turns up in the end credits and as discreet product placement within the film (Corky the computer bearing the mark of Philips itself). A little more ill at ease with The Golden Lady’s all important veneer of top-drawer sophistication is onscreen evidence that its makers took a backhander from the Wall’s Ice Cream Company. Namely a scene towards the end in which the golden ladies commandeer a Wall’s Ice Cream Van and use it as cover to enter an airport, cunningly masquerading as Wall’s Ice Cream representatives.

 


On the rare instances that The Golden Lady contemplates working class Britain it does so in a consistently negative light. A visit to a council block of flats quickly has Hemmingway drawing her gun in anticipation of trouble, and leads her onto a squalid flat and a blood splattered corpse in its bathroom. Elsewhere a sub-plot sends Dahlia and Lucy to an amateur boxing club where they are immediately bothered by uncouth, punch drunk and sexist blokes. A pinch of Dahlia’s bottom from one of them being all it takes to start a brawl. After the dust has settled Lucy and Dahlia are granted an audience with the man they are after, a low-class boxer who matter of factly admits to moonlighting as a hit-man but whose lack of a decent education renders him useless to the golden ladies since he is unable to decide if his all-important mysterious employer spoke with a Greek, Italian or Yugoslavian accent. The underlining message here appears to be that the Britain that lies at the wrong end of the tracks is no place for a golden lady.


Miss Hemmingway is on safer ground in the back of the Panther Deville or at the discothèque she whisks Rowlands off to. A disco isn’t perhaps the most logical of locale to discuss top secret matters and affairs of the heart, and it is not long before their intimate conversation is interrupted by a performance from Blonde on Blonde, alias singing Page 3 girls Jilly Johnson and ‘naughty’ Nina Carter. Costumed in matching Marlene Dietrich/The Blue Angel outfits, the duo take to the dance floor to perform their song ‘Woman is Free’ no doubt winning a few new fans by wiggling their sparkling hot pants as they exit. How does one top the spectacle of singing glamour models in Dietrich apparel and hot pants? An unseen MC provides the answer by introducing “the fabulous Hot Gossip”. Rowlands and Hemmingway might have been able to control themselves during Blonde on Blonde’s routine but the onstage antics of Arlene Phillips’ fetish outfit loving dance troupe forces then to head for the exit in order to find the nearest 5-star hotel room to fuck each other’s brains out in. Hot Gossip’s appearance proving that there is nothing quite like an adult woman dressed as a schoolgirl or a man wearing only leather Y-fronts being lead around by a dog collar to get an estranged couple in the mood, or to momentary distract a cinema audience from a film with a head scratchingly convoluted plot.

Blonde on Blonde Ambition

  


As The Golden Lady drifts away from its Bond/The Avengers model and towards being a “Spawn of The Stud” movie, thanks to the scenes showcasing London’s disco nightlife and Hot Gossip, one thing that occurs to you is how few imitations of The Stud there actually were. Huge success, nay phenomenon that The Stud was, the Collins sisters pretty much had the sexploitation niche that they’d carved out for themselves with that film all to themselves. Either as a duo, in the case of the Stud sequel The Bitch, or solo in the case of the Joan-less, Jackie penned The World is Full of Married Men, or the Jackie-less, Joan vehicle Nutcracker. My pet theory as to the lack of Stud imitations is that the chief ingredients to that film’s success –a name star reinventing herself as a sex symbol in middle age, a glamorous portrayal of well-moneyed hedonism, and known pop hits scattered about the film like confetti- was all just a too prohibitively expensive formula for the British sexploitation industry to attempt to copy. The Golden Lady then stands as one of the few films to take on the Collins sisters at their own game. Whereas The Stud had Joan Collins as its older woman figure, The Golden Lady tries to match it with the similarly mature Ina Skriver, The Stud took Legs & Co (and their friend Floyd) out of the Top of the Pops studio and onto the big screen, so The Golden Lady does likewise by letting the ruder Hot Gossip loose on a cinema audience. The Stud gave nude walk on roles to sexploitation actresses Pat Astley and Susie Silvey, to which The Golden Lady answers by playing the Ava Cadell card. The Stud centred on characters leading lifestyles others only dream about, The Golden Lady centres on characters leading lifestyles others only dream about…and who get to shoot people as well.


Where The Golden Lady begins to lag behind is in the soundtrack department. The Collins films were spoilt rotten when it came to disco and pop hits, The World is Full of Married Men soundtrack album –which yours truly picked up a few years ago at a local branch of Oxfam- is a no expenses spared, double album affair complete with gatefold sleeve and 28 tracks that are a who’s who of the period’s radio friendly pop scene (Sylvester, Heatwave, Billy Ocean, Bonnie Tyler, Sarah Brightman, Tavares, Taste of Honey.) The best the makers of The Golden Lady could come up with is Charles Aznavour and The Three Degrees to sing over the closing and opening credits, and in the obligatory soundtrack LP only Aznavour, The Three Degrees and Blonde on Blonde warrant a mention on the 10 track soundtrack’s cover.


More crucially while Oliver Tobias’ performance as a man running from his working class background and attempting to better himself by swimming in a sea of predatory older women, creeps, hangers on, snobs, brainless revellers and top 40 hits, gave The Stud its unexpected heart and soul, there is no comparative character here- male or female. The Golden Lady is amusingly true to its gender reversal James Bond concept in this respect by making its male character all a tad one-dimensional, only good for one thing and with a tendency to become irritatingly pathetic and love struck soon after. “Look we made love that’s all, but I can’t change my way of life now” Hemmingway tells a crestfallen Rowlands, words that could have come from the mouth of Mr. Bond himself. Rowlands isn’t that easily put off though, and right till the final scene in the film is still trying to win her heart by blowing kisses down the end of the phone to her. At which point Charles Aznavour joins in the Julia Hemmingway love-in by romantically singing her praises over the end credits (“here I am alone, she had wayyyyyssssss, so right for meeeeeeeeee”). ‘Can a Paul Raymond clone ever forget The Golden Lady and find True Happiness’, is the question you’re left pondering over after the end credits, sadly sequels that may have answered that question were not forthcoming.





Unfortunate echoes of Donovan Winter’s The Deadly Females threaten to derail The Golden Lady, the frequent name dropping of real world issues in both films is the classic sign of an uppity exploitation film that wants to con people into thinking that it has hidden social-relevance. Too many cooks also are in danger of spoiling the broth here, with four heroines and various love interests, confidants and enemies pushing the number of main characters into double-figures. Performers who can cut it in action movie terms like Suzanne Danielle, and talented actors like Edward De Souza deserve more screen time but have to share it with an equal amount of deadwood characters and actors. The film also has an annoying habit of investing in minor characters like the bi-sexual ballet dancing toy boy or Ava Cadell’s prostitute character, only for them to be abruptly written out of the film by having them turn up as corpses with bullets in their heads.


Unlike the Donovan Winter film though, The Golden Lady does remember that films about groups of lethal, ass kicking ladies are meant to have a pulse. For a rookie when it came to action cinema and a director who never touched on the genre again, Larraz turns out to be surprisingly gifted at bringing the action set pieces to life. Saving the best till last, The Golden Lady’s climax in which Dahlia forces a helicopter pilot to give chase to an assassin who is fleeing by motorcycle is a genuinely exciting piece of stunt work and filmmaking. One with a sense of for real danger about it as that pursuing helicopter dive bombs the ground in perilously close proximity to nearby trees and the man on the bike, giving the impression that the production was only seconds, if not inches, away from having a Vic Morrow moment. An extra frisson being generated here by the fact that it really does look like Suzanne Danielle was in that helicopter for the duration of the scene.


The Golden Lady is 90 minutes of 24-carat, escapist nonsense, designed with a late 1970’s middle-of-the-road audience in mind, and appropriately pitched halfway between mainstream and exploitation genres. It might simultaneously be both a career low-point for Larraz, and the best film Suzanne Danielle ever appeared in. After watching it you may well feel the need to reacquaint yourself with Vampyres or Symptoms in order to restore your faith in him, but on the other hand it almost convinces you that she should be forgiven for Carry on Emmannuelle and The Boys in Blue.

Monique Deveraux : By Mail Order Only

Dave has unearthed these photos of Monique from his archives, which he thinks he bought through mail order back then. Many thanks to Dave for taking the time to scan these Deveraux rarities and for allowing me to share them.

Review: Aphrodisia (1970, George Harrison Marks)

The early 1970s saw George Harrison Marks down but not quite out. The previous decade had ended on a succession of bum notes for the glamour photographer and filmmaker, bankruptcy loomed, he’d temporarily separated from his partner Toni Burnett and soon after would lose control of his last feature film The Nine Ages of Nakedness. Undefeated, Marks turned his attention solely to the 8mm home viewing market, shooting short sex films that were released by his own Maximus company. A move announced with the fanfare of a series of ads placed in the back pages of Continental Film Review magazine. “Harrison Marks- world famous nude photographer and director of The 9 Ages of Nakedness- now playing at the Cameo Moulin, GT Windmill St, London, W1, is producing a series of 8mm films especially for the new Maximus film club” proclaimed one of them, proving that the bankruptcy had failed to deflate Marks’ high opinion of himself. 

The step-down from helming a feature film like 9 Ages to making 8mm shorts could be viewed by some as the actions of a filmmaker who was slumming it, indeed in the past his entire 8mm film work from this period has been quickly dismissed as thoughtlessly turned out, unimaginative pornography. All a rather rash and unfair judgement, as the rediscovery of his early 1970s Maximus output in recent years shows that while his personal life and finances might have taken a turn for the worse, this was a creativity fruitful time for Marks. Key titles like ‘First You See It’, ‘Unaccustomed As I Am’, ‘The Girl Upstairs’ and ‘Dolly Mixture’ appeased both their maker and his audience, offering enough nudity and sex to satisfy the man in the mac, whilst providing Marks with an outlet for his personality and sense of humour. His 1970s 8mm films also bring new aspects of the man himself to the table, painting Marks as a far more adventurous and sexually open minded filmmaker than the dusty, music hall relic version of him that you meet in Come Play With Me might suggest.

In his short film ‘Touch Tongue’ a doomed relationship between a lonely lesbian and the female prostitute she picks up in a park results in the expected display of lesbian lovemaking served up as a turn on for a male audience, but ends with a poignant denouement that demonstrates genuine compassion for alienated gay female characters, comparing favourably to the often hostility shown towards them in British sex flicks like Virgin Witch and Clinic Xclusive. ‘Colour My World’ saw Marks tackle another social taboo- that of interracial sex- a subject usually given the silent treatment by British sex cinema. Essentially a sex-ed up remake of his very first 8mm glamour film ‘Art for Art’s Sake’, Colour My World depicts an affair between a female artist and her black male model, ripping up the rule book of the Marks’ oeuvre by making the man’s body the focus of attention. Marks offers no reservations about turning his famous camera on the torso of a man –posed in the manner of Rodin’s The Thinker- in the same way he had a hundred or so female nude bodies beforehand. Whereas Marks’ films usually lovingly linger over female breasts and buttocks, in Colour My World all roads lead to black cock. Even further out of Marks’ own box sexually was the hardcore loop ‘Wotzi-Wotzi’ which at first glance seems like just another lesbian short, only for the timid, shy ‘girl’ being given the come-on by her girlfriend to be revealed as a man in drag, whom Marks had attired in a dress he’d borrowed from Toni Burnett’s wardrobe.

One of the earliest titles out of the Maximus starting blocks, Aphrodisia is undoubtedly one of Marks most ambitious 8mm productions, one that left him with more footage in the can than usual, resulting in him having to split the film in two and put it out over two separate 8mm releases. Aphrodisia is Marks’ spin on the James Bond franchise, with a tone that initially suggests a send-up but also incorporates a great deal of played straight outbursts of sex and sadism that go further than the Saltzman-Broccoli films could or would do within the confines of their ‘A’ Certificates.

Marks’ version of Bond centres around the exploits of four wackily-monikered characters: the Bond xerox ‘Captain X’ (Emmett Hennessey) a suave British secret agent tirelessly working to foil the world domination schemes of evil megalomaniac The Baron Von Vanderhorn (James Hamilton). Providing female eye candy are Captain X’s love interest Cherry Doubleday, and Vanderhorn’s lover and second-in-command Marta Apollo (Nicole Yearne). Confusingly a large portion of the narrative has already been played out before Aphrodisia Part 1 has begun, leaving a series of silent movie type intertitles to offer exclamations of ‘episode 1729: final instalment’, ‘the story or far’, ‘meanwhile…’, ‘as everyone knows...’ and allow us to play narrative catch-up. Intertitles inform us that Vanderhorn’s plans to overpopulate the world, bring his political party to power, and trigger world war three have all been thwarted by Captain X. Now seen sulking around a cornflake factory, Vanderhorn’s next plan –explained in further intertitles- is to flood Britain with aphrodisiacs, smuggled into the country through the cornflake factory…and only Captain X can save us. Enemies though they are, both Captain X and Vanderhorn epitomise young, 1960s London cool, Captain X with his neat ‘tache and roll neck jumper, Vanderhorn with his huge, pimptastic, fur coat. Unsurprisingly both are depicted as quite the ladies’ men. In fact only moments into the film we find Captain X romping by the fireplace with Cherry Doubleday, kicking off the Aphrodisia plot properly by using an ink stamp to mark Cherry’s inner thigh with an insignia that holds the secret to the location where Captain X has hidden a fertility capsule that Vanderhorn needs in order to execute his dastardly plan…. Got that?

Captain X: Licensed to Love and Kill

   

Somehow Vanderhorn learns that Captain X has left his mark on a woman but not the lucky lady’s identity, leaving him the strenuous task of going around London seducing dolly birds in the hope of finding that darn insignia on one of his conquests. A very of the period, hypnotising wheel visual effect breaks up our glimpses into Vanderhorn’s sex spree, a quest that brings The Horn satisfaction, but not satisfactory results. Enter Marta Apollo, who Vanderhorn dispatches to seduce and destroy Captain X. Masquerading as a ‘sex research worker conducting an opinion poll’ a PVC cat suit clad Marta lures Captain X back to her place, where she is soon stripping down to her stockings and suspenders, and proving herself to be a hands on kind of sex researcher.

 In the background to all of this is ‘The Stranger’ a dishevelled, elderly vagrant seen wandering around the less picturesque areas of London. Seemingly irrelevant to the story, that assumption is challenged by the Aphrodisia intertitles which hypes The Stranger as “the key to the intrigue”. A second, closer look at The Stranger increases curiosity in this character revealing The Stranger to be a person hidden under impressive but obvious make-up meant to make them appear older than they really are. An appearance that, along with Marks’ choice of name for this character immediately puts you in mind of ‘The Stranger Left No Card’ Wendy Toye’s short film from 1952. Implicating Marks as being one of many to have been impressed by Toye’s short (later remade by Toye herself as an episode of Tales of the Unexpected) in which an eccentrically dressed, heavily made up magician (Alan Badel) brings merriment and mirth to a small village before discreetly slipping out of his make-up and outlandish disguise in order to commit a murder then return to anonymity since “never in a million years would they guess that the little man who left town that day was their bearded, village halfwit… never in a million years.”

Aphrodisia isn’t actually the first evidence of The Stranger Left No Card having had an unlikely influence on Marks. Rewind the Marks story to almost a decade earlier and the 8mm glamour film era gave us 1962’s “I, Spy” in which a bearded, fedora hat wearing tramp loiters about a factory before taking off his clothes and beard and revealing himself to be Paula Page, a Marks’ model whose oversized chest would earn her the nickname ‘Two Guns’ Page. Attributes that no doubt made her a trickier subject to pass off as an old man than Wendy Toye had with Alan Badel.



Anyone au fait with I, Spy will already be clued up to where Marks was going with his Stranger character in Aphrodisia, but the unresolved identity of his character along with the generous amounts of softcore sex seen elsewhere are the cinematic hooks meant to encourage the punters to shell out an extra seven quid for the follow-up: Aphrodisia Part 2. Our second dose of Aphrodisia opens with The Stranger infiltrating the cornflake factory, in the process arousing the attention of Marta Apollo who leaves Captain X in a state of coital-doze, and traps the Stranger in the factory’s cellar. A flick of a lever triggers an explosion that renders The Stranger unconscious, allowing Marta the opportunity to investigate the mysterious intruder further.

Unbuttoning The Stranger’s shirt brings about the shock discovery of a pair of female breasts being hidden under there. The image of the exposed Stranger- young, protruding breasts obviously belonging to a female- bearded, pock-marked face apparently belonging to an old man- is a moment of pure, sideshow voyeurism designed to fuck with the rubes’ heads, a female twist on Wotzi-Wotzi’s full frontal surprise from its transvestite male lead. Only when Marta peels away The Stranger’s face make-up and beard do things become clearer, and the big revelation that The Stranger has really been Cherry Doubleday in disguise all along.

Whereas Aphrodisia Part 1’s bag was straightforward, heterosexual humping, Aphrodisia Part 2 gets down and does its funky thing to a kinkier beat, with all the characters’ S&M inclinations coming to the fore. Now at the mercy of Marta, Cherry wakes up to find herself naked, bound to a pole with ropes and subject to Marta’s lesbian advances. Things go from bad to worse for Cherry when Marta spots that insignia on Cherry’s thigh, then takes to whipping Cherry with a cat o’nine tails in an attempt to extract the location of Captain X’s fertility capsule from her.

At the time he made Aphrodisia Marks had entered into a little-known association with veteran NYC fetish publisher Leonard Burtman and Burtman’s femdom magazine ‘Bizarre Life’. Burtman would go on to marry one of Marks’ models and Bizarre Life’s Anglocentric content had seen Burtman commission several British based photoshoots featuring the likes of Rena Brown and Esme ‘Groupie Girl’ Johns outfitted in kinky boots and leather dresses, shoots heavily influenced by that Emma Peel/The Avengers look that had wetted America’s appetite for the London leather scene in the first place. Marks provided the tenth issue of Bizarre Life with its cover image of Monique Deveraux (sporting the same red PVC catsuit that Nicole Yearne wears in Aphrodisia) and the magazine received the Marks seal of approval when it was used as a prop in his 8mm short ‘Macabre’ one of several shorts from the Maximus period -including The Garden of Love and Aphrodisia itself – that went out of its way to court the fetish crowd.




By all accounts S&M wasn’t to Marks’ own taste, but here he couldn’t be accused of not giving it his best shot. Marta’s lengthy flogging of Cherry is Aphrodisia Part 2’s centrepiece, with full nudity from both actresses and a memorably squalid, damp looking cellar location. One which is believably isolated and far away from the eyes and ears of any good Samaritan who might hear all this racket and come to poor Cherry Doubleday’s aid.

Marks also uses the scene to emphasize the contrasting physicality and personalities of his two female leads- the small breasted, masochistic blonde playing Cherry pitted against Nicole Yearne’s busty, sexually aggressive brunette- there is something and someone to suit all tastes in this scene. Nicole Yearne was one of those actresses who like Maria Frost, Heather Deeley and Jane Cardew- blew into British sexploitation briefly, cast a spell over an audience on account of a large amount of work done in a short amount of time, then disappeared from the scene- but not people’s imaginations. Her career tells a familiar story…a few 8mm films….nude photo shoots for Escort and Parade (with a surname change to the more pun-friendly ‘Yerner’)….the film industry came a calling with nothing special bit parts in Permissive and the Tigon loser The Magnificent 7 Deadly Sins. It’s the Marks film then that provides Yearne with her one true, attention grabbing role from her fleeting time in the spotlight. In Aphrodisia, Yearne embraces and runs with the femdom vamp image it lends her, in the process gleefully demolishing the ‘girl next door’ persona built up for her in the pages of Parade and Escort.

The second part of Aphrodisia sees Marta Apollo step up to not only being the film’s centre of erotic attention but also its chief villain, easily eclipsing Vanderhorn who for the all the intertitle billing of him as ‘the depraved Vanderhorn’ isn’t given the chance to show off his depravity till right the very end of the film. Marta on the other hand gets carte blanche to run amok, not only flogging Cherry but going on to attempt to stab Captain X with a knife. Their subsequent semi-nude wrestle about on the floor is heavily erotised by Marks, with Marta hell-bent on staying on top and pinning a shirtless Captain X to the floor, and the Captain fighting back by digging his fingers into her buttocks and grabbing her breasts to keep her at bay. In the world of Aphrodisia the line between attempted murder and rough sex seems a very blurred one indeed. Just as Marta and Captain X wrestle about onscreen, the scene also finds Marks’ wrestling with playing to the femdom mentality and his own wandering eye which is clearly drawn to Yearne’s bottom, huge close-ups of which visually dominate the scene.




  


The majority of the Maximus shorts that followed were perfectly compact affairs that delivered the goods and say all they want to in their brief running times. Aphrodisia though is a slightly different kettle of fish, perhaps because it is an earlier Maximus release and Marks was yet to ease into the silent, short sex film format. The excessive use of intertitles come across as a sign of filmmaker who was missing live dialogue, and in Aphrodisia Part 1 the constant references to characters’ backstories and previous confrontations often ridiculously complicates what –sans intertitles- would play as a series of vaguely related simulated sex scenes.

It’s as if Marks had bigger plans for Aphrodisia brewing in the back of his mind and viewed a return to feature filmmaking as being just around the corner, not having banked on this being the start of a long excursion into the pornographic wilderness (it would be six years before he’d get the opportunity to make another feature film). Without a doubt, a fleshed out version of Aphrodisia’s storyline could fill a feature film with ease. In fact anyone blindly approaching the two 8mm releases of Aphrodisia could be forgiven for thinking they’d gotten hold of a 8mm abridged version of what had originally been a feature film. One from which an editor had kept in all the sex and kinko scenes but dispensed of large chunks of the plot.

The idea of Aphrodisia as a home movie try out for what could have been a feature film is inadvertently given extra weight by the fact that Marks did actually shoot the film on his own premises. A large part of it was filmed at ‘The Hall’ an apartment complex in St. John’s Wood where Marks lived in one of the ground floor flats (as porn actor Short Jack Gold has pointed out, if you run this address through Google Earth you can still see the bus stop that Sue Bond waits outside of in ‘First You See It’.) Although Marks resided at the flat with Toni Burnett and their daughter, the views we see of it in Aphrodisia still stubbornly retain the appearance of a quintessential 1960s bachelor pad. Copies of Playboy are the coffee table reading of choice, erotic art adorns the walls and where you’d expect to see framed photos of family members, Marks has framed photos of a nude June Palmer, taken by himself. In a cheeky move these mementos of Marks’ career and libido are incorporated into the Aphrodisia plot as props that Marta Apollo has dressed up her apartment with in order to pass herself off to Captain X as a sex researcher. Marks was the biggest sex researcher of them all.



The other main location in the film is Faulkners Alley in Crosscow St, Farringdon where Marks had a studio and ran the mail order side of the Maximus business from. A noticeably unglamorous location compared to Marks’ chic St Johns Wood flat, this alleyway of stone walls, faded door entrances and soot filled windows had somehow escaped the wrecking ball of the 1960s redevelopment of London (as chronicled in Norman Cohen’s 1967 film The London Nobody Knows) to survive as a throwback to the impoverished side of London’s Victorian past. As Aphrodisia actor Emmett Hennessey has remarked it looks like something out of the Jack the Ripper era.

In the film its cast as the site of the disused Cornflake factory, but in reality this was the place Marks called a place of work at the time, and the uninviting alleyway that the sexiest discoveries of the Maximus era- Sue Bond, Clyda Rosen, Angela Duncan- would all have had to walk down on their date with sex film immortality. There really should be a blue plaque in Faulkners Alley to commemorate this.

Unbeknownst to the Aphrodisia cast, the many, many still photographs Marks had taken during filming would enjoy a life outside the film, turning up in a short lived magazine called ‘Impact 70’ which Marks put together for the Roydock Books company. Consisting of stills taken from Maximus productions like First You See It, The Amorous Masseur and Halfway Inn, Impact 70 wedded Marks’ photographs to newly penned erotic stories that bore little relation to the film’s original storylines. Aphrodisia stills turn up to illustrate the story ‘Man of Many Parts’ which recasts Captain X as the soon to be wed ‘George’ a man embarking of one last fling with his wife-to-be’s sister (formally Marta Apollo) as his wedding to Susan (formally Cherry Doubleday) approaches. Its only involving as evidence of Marks’ private life having spilled out onto the pages of Impact 70; Marks’ story likely mirroring his own fears and anxieties about marrying and settling down with Toni after many years as a single raver playing the field.

The ‘Man of Many Parts’ story opens with: “George didn’t know whether to be happy or sad. In one month’s time he would be married…soon his gay single life would be over. No more nights in the West End, no more stripshows followed by a pleasant sojourn in some dolly’s flat. He was now Susan’s. The hundred and twenty pounds engagement ring on her finger proved that”.

 

Autobiographical insights like that aside, Marks’ work in Impact 70 feels compromised to suit a straight-laced, Men’s magazine readership. Gone are the S&M and Bondian elements of Aphrodisia, ditto the supernatural overtones of First You See It. The tired erotic lit and ideas that haunt Impact 70…some bloke has an affair with his missus’ sister…some other bloke visits an elocution teacher and gets laid… Marks in 9 Ages of Nakedness’ romantic poet mode attempting to convey sexual ecstasy through words (“all that existed now was her love for this man who was taking her on a journey through love. They reached journey’s end together”) has the numbing effect of rendering Marks’ naked world a dull and ordinary place to be, something the films those Impact 70 stills come from could never be accused of doing.

 ‘Man of Many Parts’ struggles to hold your attention, but Aphrodisia leaves you wanting more. Drawing as it does on a diverse number of influences- James Bond, the London leather scene, The Stranger Left No Card, yet with Marks’ own directorial hand being visible throughout. For surely only he could conceive of character names like Marta Apollo or The Baron Von Vanderhorn, or a plot to use a cornflake factory to flood the country with aphrodisiacs. Aphrodisia frustrates only in the sense that an all singing, all dancing feature film version of it never existed outside of Marks’ head and the 22 minutes of it that we have are all that he could make a reality in the reduced circumstances that the beginning of the 1970s found him.

In retrospect Impact 70 serves as an eerie premonition of the way Marks’ character would end up tamed and broken down by the demands of porn producers for ever more conventional product. Check out his final porno shorts from 1979, ‘Big N’Busty’, ‘Busty Baller’, ‘Cockpit Cunts’ –all financed by the Color Climax company- and you’ll find a Marks resigned to having to leave his own personality at the door and only there to film people fucking. Busty Baller with its ‘man knocks on the door, woman opens it, they fuck, film ends’ premise, and the casting of the gargoyle faced Gordon Hickman, attempting to hide his beer gut with a T-Shirt pathetically emblazoned with ‘I’m the Champ’ really is a blokish Impact 70 story made flesh. Those films could have been made by anyone, but the early Maximus films –like Marks himself- will always be something a little special, and ‘the Madness of King George’ truly flows fast and free in Aphrodisia.

Thanks to Emmett Hennessey, Sgt Rock, Beutelwolf…and to Bygoneguy for providing us with both parts of this GHM rarity.