Can I Come Too (1979)

 

I'm of the generation that just about remembers the tail end of the fleapit cinema era...the broken down seats, the thick cigarette smoke penetrated only by the light from the projection booth, the usherettes selling ice cream and Kia-Ora in the intervals, the Pearl & Dean adverts. If you want to know what a down on its knees local cinema looked like in the late 1970s, Ray Selfe's 'Can I Come Too' takes you around every nook and every cranny of a fleapit cinema.

In his later years, Selfe was critical of the David Hamilton Grant films he was involved with, due to their avoidance of the three-act structure. Yet, Can I Come Too, the short sex film Selfe made outside of Grant's orbit, is very much cut from the same cloth. It's a shambolic, ensemble piece that barely goes anywhere in terms of narrative, and owes its existence to the fact that a distributor urgently needed a support feature. New Realm put out Can I Come Too as the co-feature to their Jackie Collins adaptation The World is Full of Married Men. A few years later, in the early days of videotape, it formed half of a VHS double bill with James C. Katz's striptease documentary The Rise and Fall of Ivor Dickie (1978).

As with David Hamilton Grant movies like Under the Bed and The Office Party, Can I Come Too is closer in spirit to a sitcom episode than a feature film, but with the kind of nudity and sexual humour that you couldn't get on TV back then. The creation of Can I Come Too appears to have mirrored what little plot there is here, sex film producer Manny Glowpick reaches out to his contacts in the low end of the film industry in order to stage a lavish film premiere at the less than lavish Savoy cinema in Brixton. Selfe likewise looks to have put together his film with similar haste, calling on friends and family members to pose as actors, hiring a few aging entertainers to do their thing and a few dolly birds willing to bare all. The involvement of the latter possibility being a motivation in ensnaring the former. For a near plot less 38 minute film, Can I Come Too sure has allot of characters to contend with. The out of their depth staff making a hash of arranging the premiere includes manager Mr. Royal (Charlie Chester), cleaning lady Laverne (Rita Webb), ticket lady Vera (Sue Longhurst), and a pair of usherettes (Lindy Benson, Maria Harper) who dream of starring in movies like 'King Kong meets Emmanuelle'. Meanwhile projectionist Terry (Graham White) fears that the arrival of a new projectionist called Charlie will cramp his style as the cinema's resident stud. Only for Charlie (Julia Rushford) to turn out to be female, who despite being a womens libber isn't averse to getting her boobs out in the projection booth either. Elsewhere porn star Gloria Overtones (Susan Silvie), the special guest of honour, is more concerned with leaving a good impression on her posh future mother in law, Lady Wickhampton (played by Selfe's wife Jean), who initially mistakes Gloria for a black woman after catching Gloria wearing a mud-pack and hearing she is from Brixton.

Such is the obscurity of Can I Come Too these days that it is likely to only be tracked down and seen by the most dedicated of those with a jones for 1970s British pop culture. The irony is that the film itself in no way, shape or form shares that love for the time period it was made in. For all of the tits and intended giggles here, there is much despair in Can I Come Too at the state of Britain in 1979. In the eyes of Can I Come Too, cinemas have just become places for old people to sleep in and keep warm, the world outside of the Savoy is the dangerous stomping ground of football hooligans and punk rockers, the sex films that British film industry churns out are an embarrassment and it gets teary eyed for the past, with Rita Webb's character lamenting the passing of an age of proper movie stars like Jean Harlow and Mary Pickford. It's a backwards looking, living only for the past film, never likely expecting that its own era of British sex films, football hooligans, fleapit cinemas and punk rockers would one day exert a similar fascination over future generations. Young bare flesh might be the main selling point, but the characters that Can I Come Too really cares about tend to be the middle aged or senior ones. All of whom have an air of wasted, unfulfilled lives about them. George Skinner (Tony Wright) the owner of the restaurant next door to the cinema is estranged from his daughter and is in the doldrums over his business going down the pan. Laverne, played by Rita Webb, is a tragicomic character who wanted to be a glamorous movie star, but makes do with her pathetic connection to the movies, of being a cleaning lady at a fleapit cinema. Unusually for a British sex comedy the running theme here is finding love in later life. Freddy (Mark Jones) the bumbling film publicity man with an extreme stutter that anticipates Michael Palin in A Fish Called Wanda by a few years, becomes besotted by ticket lady Vera, played by Jones' Keep It Up Jack co-star Sue Longhurst. Senior sparks begin to fly between Laverne and Manny, while George Skinner is unexpectedly reunited with his ex-wife.

It is the older hands who largely shine here. Admittedly Chic Murray seems to be phoning it in and doesn't have the same vigor he had in The Ups and Downs of a Handyman, but Charlie Chester is value for money and Rita Webb is the person that Selfe clearly regarded as the real star of his movie.
Murray and Webb were by this point veterans of saucy cinema, but Charlie Chester was more of a coup, the comedian's career having largely been played out on the radio. While his appearance here might have raised the eyebrows of his older fans, Chester was no stranger to sleaze. Turning to a writing career in the 1970s, Chester knocked out sex and violence fuelled books for publisher New English Library that were completely at odds with his family friendly image. Symphony and Psychopath (1975) concerns auto-erotic asphyxiation, Soho prostitution and the murder of a pregnant woman, and also sees Chester boning after schoolgirls in print. In comparison being in close proximity to a few bare boobs in Can I Come Too must have seemed a relatively vanilla experience. Under a pseudonym, Chester even wrote a gay themed serial killer novel called Even the Rainbow's Bent (1977) in which a sexually confused man is encouraged to adopt a female persona by his domineering mother, only to end up killing schoolgirls.

a right pair of charlies

The younger cast members of Can I Come Too are less of a standout bunch, consisting of third tier sex comedy people like Lindy Benson, Maria Harper and Vicki Scott, all of whom arrived too late on the scene to make much of an impact on it. One movie and he's done stud, Graham White, looks like he'd have been better suited to playing Dr. Frank-N-Furter’s creation in The Rocky Horror Show. Given a larger share of the spotlight than usual here is Susan Silvie, who was sort of the poor man's Suzy Mandel, though did later achieve a degree of notoriety by playing a woman who gives birth to a fully grown man in the sci-fi grossfest 'Xtro'. In Can I Come Too, Silvie looks, sounds and dresses so much like Suzy Mandel it is positively uncanny, and she would later add to the illusion by billing herself as Susie Silvie. To add to the confusion, the film Blonde Ambition starring the real Suzy Mandel was released to UK cinemas in 1984 as 'Can I Come Again', making it sound like a sequel to Can I Come Too, starring the Suzy Mandel equivalent of Bruce Le.

Keep your eyes peeled for a 'blink and you'll miss her' appearance by Annette Poussin. Distinguished by her cute, pudding bowl haircut Annette was a regular in blue movies like 'No Morals' and 'Pop Concert'. Her fleeting cameo, and the fact that Selfe himself was no stranger to hardcore pornography, opens up the possibility that a stronger version of Can I Come Too might exist. While a potential 'something blue' aspect to the film is still a question mark, there is plenty of evidence of 'something borrowed' here. The film recycles a joke about a fictional movie called Sore Throat, a pun on Deep Throat, from 1975's Sexplorer, and John Shakespeare's theme tune was a track dusted down from his soundtrack to the 1966 movie 'Death is a Woman'.

Aside from Selfe, whose oeuvre includes the early David Jason vehicle 'White Cargo', a Kenny Ball concert film and 'Mother Goosed', a videotaped adult pantomime, the other auteur of Can I Come Too was Alan Selwyn (1926-2002), it's writer and producer, who also takes a small acting role in the film. A jack of all trades in the British sex film world, Alan Selwyn was very much a man created by Soho. His birth name was Alfred Lopez Salzedo, and his father Solomon who used the professional name of Sidney Brandon had been an entertainer at the Windmill theatre, meaning that Selwyn had been around sex, showbiz and criminality from an early age. He was originally a bit part actor, and shows up in a few early Ken Loach films like Poor Cow and Cathy Come Home. At some point in the sixties Selwyn did prison time, seemingly for defrauding a man in the theatrical world, who Selwyn's sister worked for. The sister, who played no part in the fraud, was so ashamed by her brother's actions that she felt obliged to resign from her job, and as a result rarely spoke to her brother again. Unaware that he had predeceased her, her will made a special proviso that none of her estate should go to her brother Alfred, 'also known as Alan Selwyn'. Which is how his surviving relatives came to know about the Alan Selwyn side of his life and his connection to the movie industry. People's memories of Alan Selwyn tend to be that of a real life Arthur Daley figure, a man from the shady side of the street, who nevertheless wasn't without a moral compass. Suzy Mandel has good memories of Selwyn, and Annette Poussin regarded him as a gentlemanly, father like figure who actually dissuaded her from taking larger, credited roles in sex movies on account of the possible negative consequences it could have on her private life. In the name of honesty and full disclosure though, it should be pointed out that not everyone remembers Alan Selwyn so fondly. He is the subject of a #metoo story in Cosey Fanni Tutti's autobiography, where she claims Selwyn tried to rape her backstage during the making of Secrets of a Superstud. "Once in the dressing room, I fell asleep - and prey to Selwyn's unwanted attentions. He soon got off me when I told him I'd started my period". I will say that story is completely at odds with what other women have told me about Alan Selwyn, but that is what Ms. Fanni Tutti wrote.

There is an end of the line feel about Can I Come Too, remember that last day of school? this is the British sex film equivalent. Everyone here is letting their hair down, not doing much serious work and partying with the people they've got to know well over the last couple of years, in the knowledge that they are never likely to see each other again. Something that is added to by a scene towards the end of the film, where this gathering of British sex film people gets down on the dance floor, with some exceptional dad dancing from Mark Jones that causes Alan Selwyn to crack up. It was the end of an era, but it's not over till the fat lady yells. I do wish that Can I Come Too had been Rita Webb's last film.  The final shot in the film, a freeze frame of Rita throwing her cleaning equipment away and yelling "SOD IT, let them clean the place up themselves" would have been such a Rita Webb way of saying goodbye, and likely reflects Ray Selfe's own attitude to the British sex film biz...sod it, let them clean this mess up themselves.

The real success story of Can I Come Too isn't in fact anyone in front or behind the camera, rather it's the cinema itself. Referred to as The Savoy in the movie, it was in fact the Ritzy Picturehouse in Brixton. Can I Come Too captures this location at the lowest point in its history, and watching the film you'd be forgiven for thinking that it had long since been bulldozed. Following a 1994 renovation though, the Ritzy has bounced back from its inglorious state in the 1970s and is now considered the jewel in the crown of London's surviving cinemas. It's aged better, and more elegantly than those football hooligans, punk rockers or indeed Can I Come Too itself.

Blood Suckers (1969)

Blood Suckers is one of those films that ITV used to play at some ungodly hour, when they presumably thought that everyone was in bed, and those that weren't presumably thought they'd just hallucinated it. Two other notable movies that ITV gave the same treatment to were "No Secrets" also starring Peter Cushing, and "Dracula, Prisoner of Frankenstein". All three are bonded in my mind by this otherworldly quality, whereby whatever the time of day that you watch them, it'll always feel like it's 2am in the morning and that you've fallen asleep during the parts that would help these films make sense. Blood Suckers is a famously botched adaptation of Simon Raven's 1960 book 'Doctors Wear Scarlet' that begun filming in 1969, and ran into production problems that led to director Robert Hartford-Davis taking his name off the film when it was finally released in the UK as Incense for the Damned in 1972.

I recently read the source novel for the first time, which is advisable if you want to make sense of the film as there is so much more characterization, psychological depth and general meat on the bone in the book. In comparison the film is like a jigsaw puzzle where many of the pieces are missing, and those that are present don't actually fit together all that well.

Doctors Wear Scarlet concerns Richard Fountain, a promising young Oxford Don who effectively flees to Greece in order to escape the domineering influence of his provost Walter Goodrich, who is grooming Richard as both his successor and as a fiancé to his daughter Penelope. While in Greece, Richard falls under the influence of a sultry temptress called Chriseis, who draws him into her world of vampirism and the occult. Necessitating that Richard's friends, Piers Clarence, Captain Roddy Longbow and Anthony Seymour travel to Greece in order to extract Richard from the Chriseis situation and avoid a scandal. Vampirism aside, it had clear autobiographical elements for the notoriously caddish Simon Raven, whose career in the military and higher education was marred in controversy, and no doubt had his own run ins with the Walter Goodrichs of this world. Pears Clarence is likely based on Raven's younger companion Bungo Partridge. While the anti-Semitic incident that is in the book, but isn’t ported over to the film, likely relates to Raven's publisher Anthony Blond, who was Jewish and is said to have suffered badly on account of it whilst at Eton. Reflecting Raven's personality and tastes, Doctors Wear Scarlet is all about the allure of scandalous men. Richard's motivation for striking up a friendship with Piers is the trouble that will arise. Similarly Richard himself proves to be source of much male adulation, due to the aura of controversy that surrounds him. Marc Honeydew can't get enough of watching Richard's conflicts with Walter from the sidelines, and Richard first comes to Anthony Seymour's notice by beating up an anti-Semitic school bully. An incident that marks Richard out as the man Anthony wants as his study fag. Boys will be boys, and play with toys, so be strong with your beast.

Judging by the book, I'm guessing that production of the film ran into problems once it left Greece and relocated to the UK. The Greek portions of the film follow the book relatively faithfully. It is the first and third acts of the film set in the UK, where so much has clearly gone unfilmed and what they did get in the can was awkwardly pieced together. About the first 100 pages of the book are compressed into the first couple of minutes of the film. It would really need a TV miniseries to do justice to the story of Richard Fountain. Short of giving you his inside leg measurements, the book goes into every aspect of his life, his military service, his adventures in the Congo, his days as a Study Fag, his antagonistic relationship with Walter Goodrich. I think where the film initially drops the ball is how little of Walter Goodrich there is in it. We never see enough of Walter to understand why Richard hates him so. Whereas in the book, Walter is a manipulative, ruthless control freak with a need to dominate every aspect of Richard’s life. The first time the word ‘vampire’ is mentioned in the book, isn’t in relation to Chriseis, it’s in relation to Walter wanting to drain Richard of his individuality and have Walter’s personality flowing in Richard’s veins instead. Richard escapes to Greece, but he only succeeds in jumping from one unhealthy, domineering relationship to another, replacing Master Walter with Mistress Chriseis. Another shortcoming to the film is how little there is of Marc Honeydew, who in the book is this wonderfully waspish old queen who thrives on other people’s conflicts and gossip, particularly that of a sexual nature. ‘Mother Honeydew’ as he nicknames himself, might well be my favorite character in the book, and one you strongly suspect Simon Raven had much fun in writing. Yet, you see so little of Honeydew in the film that the actor who plays him, William Mervyn, might as well as not bothered to show up on set. Which is frustrating because you sense that Peter Cushing had a Walter Goodrich performance in him. While Mervyn had played a very Honeydew type role in a TV series called ‘Mr. Rose’, so it’s a certain he had a Marc Honeydew performance in him, but either Hartford-Davis didn’t get it on film, or it ended up on the cutting room floor. I will say that the film is well cast, and if you see the film first then read the book, you will have Patrick Mower in your head when you read about Richard Fountain, you will have Peter Cushing in your head when you read about Walter Goodrich, right down to cast members like Imogen Hassall and Edward Woodward, even though they don’t match up to how their characters are described in the book.

A radical departure from the book, which the film makes, is to drop the character of Piers Clarence and replace him with Bob Kirby, an African student of Richard’s. A very early example of race swapping in movies. Although I don’t think this is out of step with the Richard Fountain of the book, who gravitates towards Piers because people think that they’re a pair of gays, which causes problems for Walter who is trying to pair Richard off with his daughter. So, I can buy into the idea of Richard befriending a black man, because it turns heads, because it rattles the cage of the establishment. The Congo section of the book, and the language Raven uses there, does inadvertently illustrate amount the racial prejudice around in the circles that Richard would have travelled in. Since there is so little back-story in the film though, I don’t think you really get the sense that Richard’s relationship with Bob is another way of him striking back at Walter, which is I suspect why Hartford-Davis cast a black actor in the role. Considering that this was an era when racially themed films like 'To Sir, with Love' and 'In the Heat of the Night' were big box-office, something an astute character like Hartford-Davis would have been aware of, very little is made of Bob’s skin colour….unless you speak Greek. From what I’m told the Greek language yelling that the old woman does in the scene where Bob gets beaten up by the Greek thugs is extremely racist, and would never have made it onto British TV, had anyone at ITV understood Greek. That scene is also the subject of one of my all time favorite, unintentionally hilarious front of house stills, which depicts one of the Greek guys charging into Bob’s mid-section and Penelope becoming hysterical in the background. Trouble is that, what with Bob’s facial expression and the Greek guy's head being buried in Bob’s crotch….at the risk of sounding like Marc Honeydew….it does rather look like Bob is getting a blow-job. Which is doubly-unfortunate given that….again at the risk of sounding like Marc Honeydew…someone connected to this film is rumored to have died whilst being fellated. No names from me, but I’ll put everyone’s mind at ease by saying it wasn’t Peter Cushing.

A couple of Hartford-Davis’ other casting decisions have an air of favoritism to them. By having Penelope Goodrich along for the Greek trip, rather than keeping her in the UK as per the book, he was able to increase the screen time of Madeleine Hinde, an actress he was into promoting at the time, and the star of his previous film ‘The Smashing Bird I Used to Know’. This does feel like a betrayal of Simon Raven’s book and its boys only attitude of ‘tally ho chaps; we’re off the Greece to rescue dear Dickie from the clutches of a beastly woman’. You can tell from the book that Raven was the product of a predominately male society, where women were largely excluded or regarded as a nuisance, Raven does have a wicked fondness for comparing Penelope Goodrich to a cow, dumbly grazing at social occasions with her heaving bosom and ‘cow eyes’. Hartford-Davis also always loved to use David Lodge in his movies, so comes up with an entirely new character, Col. Stavros, in order to shoehorn Dave Lodge in there. However Lodge is far less memorably utilized here than in Hartford-Davis’ earlier film Corruption. You’ll leave Corruption never being able to forget Lodge’s character in that, I don’t think you can say the same about Col. Stavros.

Although the passing of time has likely robbed the book of its freshness, in its day Doctors Wear Scarlet must have been a game changing work that freed the subject of vampirism from its Gothic trappings and explored its relationship with sex and sadomasochism. In the book, Richard is drawn to vampirism due to his need to be dominated, due to his inability to have regular sex. The film makes those connections to an extent, but the book also draws comparisons between how victims of vampirism can go onto take on the vampire role themselves, in the way that the victims of sexual abuse can often go on to be abusers themselves. This is made clearer in the book, especially as there are scenes of sexual abuse in it, which would be completely unfilmable. Wild, gratuitous and random as the ‘psychedelic orgy’ scene in the film is, that’s vanilla compared to what its standing in for in the book. In which Chriseis encourages parents to sexually abuse their children, in order that she can then drink the blood of fleshly corrupted children.

After reading the book, you have to wonder how anyone thought there was a film in it, Doctors Wear Scarlet is a stubbornly un-cinematic book. Very leisurely placed, very much a raconteur’s book, mainly related in the form of anecdotes, conversations, personal correspondence and even poems. Even the title doesn’t lend itself well to a film, Doctors Wear Scarlet is the kind of enigmatic, cryptic title that a book can get away with, but film titles generally have to be bolder, and more forthcoming about what they are selling. Very much in the way that ‘Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?’ is a great book title and ‘Blade Runner’ is a great film title, but it wouldn’t work the other way around. I can’t imagine a film called Doctors Wear Scarlet would do much business at the Drive-Ins or the horror section of VHS shops, on the other hand I struggle to imagine Simon Raven using Bloodsuckers as a book title, even Incense for the Damned would likely have sounded too schlocky, and unbecoming to the likes of him.

Maybe Hartford-Davis just fancied a holiday in Greece, and adapted the nearest Greek themed book he had to hand. I’ve often thought that Hartford-Davis had a shooting style that falsely suggests he had a background directing ITC shows. He didn’t, but in his hands Doctors Wear Scarlet does end up looking like an episode of The Saint, The Protectors or if you’ve feeling ungenerous The Adventurer…sunny foreign holiday location work and manly fist fights are the order of the day here. An illusion that’s added to by the casting, which leans towards small screen heroes. Alex Davion was the co-star of Gideon’s Way, William Mervyn was Mr. Rose, Patrick Macnee was John Steed, and Edward Woodward is here taking a break from Callan. Even Patrick Mower was destined to be more of a TV heartthrob than a movie star. In his autobiography, Mower tells of how Imogen Hassall successfully won a £10 bet with several crew members that she could sexually arouse Mower during their love scene. “Method actor though I am, a block of ice I am not. And Richard the prig was becoming Bruce Banner- only it wasn’t the Hulk that was growing larger”. Although the camera operator stiffed Hassall on full payment, remarking “call that a stiffy? I’ve seen more meat in a Potato pie; I’m only paying a fiver”. Mower also recalls being vigorously pursued by a Turkish belly dancer during the making of the film, who ‘gave me one of the best nights of sex in my life’, only for it to emerge that she had mistaken him for Patrick Macnee. “I only make love to the star of the film” she told Mower after whacking him around the head. As much as Bloodsuckers has its fair share of name actors, Hartford-Davis did have a Michael Winner like talent for spotting up and coming talent and putting them in films they’d later come to regret. Maureen Lipman famously hates the Hartford-Davis film she is in, The Smashing Bird I Used to Know. Writing about the same film in his autobiography, Mower recalled him and Dennis Waterman getting shitfaced drunk after seeing The Smashing Bird I Used To Know, on account of it being “such an unmitigated load of old tripe”.

I still have a bit of nostalgia for Blood Suckers, it takes me back to a time when I was discovering then obscure and undocumented movies on late night television. After exposing myself to the source novel, I do now have a greater understanding of what the film was trying to say, but I also have to concede that they did make a pig’s ear of saying it, and it is difficult to forgive the film for its lack of Marc Honeydew.

For a 1960 book, Doctors Wear Scarlet was ahead of its time in many respects, and likely felt more relevant when the film was made in 1969. What with its themes of disillusionment with the older generation, young people dropping out and seeking freedom, only to discover that the counterculture itself had a dark side. Chriseis is a warning that those in Charles Manson’s obit should have taken heed of. Choose your gurus, and study fags, wisely. Not all Greek women are as nice as Nana Mouskouri.

Black Abductor (1972, James Rusk, Jr)

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Joe 8

Another venture into D’Amato-land

Black Uprising (1976, Joseph Nazel)

Another knockout book from Joe Nazel. Black Uprising is a sort of sequel to 1975's Death for Hire, in that it brings back Spider Armstrong. A character who was clearly close to Nazel's heart, and of all of his protagonists is the one that likely offers the greatest insight into Nazel himself. Spider being an overworked, underappreciated black journalist, who driven by a sense of racial injustice, sleeps little and survives on an almost superhuman amount of coffee, cigarettes and alcohol. Mirroring Nazel's own workaholic lifestyle, and relationship with 'black experience' publishers Holloway House.

Whereas Death for Hire was set in the LA ghetto and concerned street level, black criminality, Black Uprising drops Spider into a small, white dominated Alabama town. There relations between blacks and whites reach boiling point when Spider attempts to bring to justice the three white men who murdered his black activist buddy Eddie Myers. Meanwhile two of the killers try to divert attention from themselves by framing a black farmhand for the rape and murder of his employer's wife, who was in fact blackmailing the farmhand into sex by threatening to cry rape.

Where Black Uprising differs from its predecessor is that Spider is front and centre of the action, and placed in jeopardy throughout, as opposed to Death for Hire where he was kept at arm's length from the drama until the very end. Spider is an unusual hero, an introvert, socially awkward, a man of few words, who says little but thinks allot. That's not to say that Spider doesn't have an eye for the ladies, getting inappropriately lustful over Eddie's sister Lula Mae, at Eddie's rain drenched funeral "Spider could not help but stare open mouthed at the protruding nipples of her ample breasts that stained against the wet cotton". The titillation aspects of Black Uprising being otherwise provided by the mixed combo action between the farmhand and the white wife, who gets her kicks thinking of her husband's reaction to the infidelity and the race angle "that's what made each moment she spent with the black brute all the more pleasant". I'd previously thought that female characters were Nazel's weak spot, but Lula Mae is the most notably emancipated woman I've encountered in his work so far. Lula Mae defying expectations, and the older generation, by announcing her attention to take over her brother's newspaper business. Ignoring her relative's complaint "You bes' to be thinking 'bout getting you a husband and havin' you some chillun".

Black Uprising is a book with so much to say about masculine pride, the consequences of heroism, the pros and cons of turning the other cheek, the pros and cons of resorting to violence, the North's meddling in Southern Affairs, the South's hostility towards outsiders. Nazel's writing gets in every character's face, and into their heads. No two characters think alike when it comes to race in this book. In Black Uprising you'll encounter blacks who hate whites, whites who hate blacks. Blacks who disliked 1960s liberals for antagonising southern crackers by bringing an end to segregation. Whites who are irredeemably racist, whites who are fundamentally decent but are afraid to stand up to the rabble-rousers. No voice goes unheard here, Black Uprising offers up an entire smorgasbord of how America felt about race following the civil rights era.

At the risk of exposing my own ignorance, I'd never considered that there were African-Americans who weren't on board with equal rights and integration back in the 1960s. In Black Uprising though, we hear from black characters who resented northern do-gooders coming in and telling them they needed equal rights and racially mixed schools. Then once the civil rights people got there way, irresponsibly left poor southern blacks to face the wrath and retaliation of racist whites. When films and books depict racial integration in southern schools, it's usually the white students who are depicted as the obstructive or resentful ones. Whereas Black Uprising flips that idea on its head, and we learn the initial protagonist Eddie Myers was against attending a mixed school due to his hatred of the white boys and girls he suddenly had to share school space with. "He didn't care about voting rights. He did not care about integration. He was happy in his 'colored' school" reflects Myers.

In a book filled with many important issues, there could have been a tendency to just stand around and soapbox here, but Nazel never lets his foot off the pedal. Black Uprising is fast-paced and tense, a pulpy cocktail of rape, bloodshed and race hate where the violence escalates and truth and justice threatens to be swept aside. Black Uprising has no easy answers to America's racial problems, but it is an incredible book.

The Italian Connection (1971, Gardner F Fox)

 

As his 'Lady from L.U.S.T' series began to wind down, author Gardner F. Fox found himself a new muse in Cherise Dellissio, better known to those who get to experience her on an intimate basis, which is just about everyone, as Cherry Delight. Fox's new muse isn't too removed from his old muse. Like Eve Drum, of the Lady from L.U.S.T novels, Cherry is a sexpot spy and tough girl who works for a government agency with an unfortunately smutty sounding name. Cherry being the lady from N.Y.M.P.H.O, which stands for New York Mafia Prosecution and Harassment Organization. The main difference between Eve Drum and Cherry Delight is that while Eve was a natural blonde, Cherry is a proud redhead. A fact that is quite literally thrust in the reader's face throughout these books. If you like 'em Strawberry all over, then Cherry is the fox you've been waiting for.

The first Cherry Delight outing 'The Italian Connection' shows that Gardner F. Fox sure knew how to grab the reader's attention right from the get go. Cherry is naked, playing dead and being molested in a coffin by a male co-worker. What initially seems like a shocking, necrophilia themed opening turns out to be training for N.Y.M.P.H.O's latest scheme to bring down the mob. In order to hide a shameful sexual secret from his fellow gangsters, Mafia kingpin Joe Turessi is having hookers being brought to him in coffins for sexual liaisons at a mafia owned funeral parlor. Thus Cherry is posing as a hooker and being shipped out to him in his unorthodox manner. If you are familiar with Fox's Lady from L.U.S.T books, you'll be unsurprised to learn that Turessi's sexual secret is a fetish for female underwear "every capo in the outfit would laugh at me if it got out". Such a reoccurring theme in Fox's adult fiction that there can be little doubt this fetish was shared by the author. It's a 24/7 obsession in his books. After she emerges naked from the coffin, Turessi has Cherry dress up in a variety of suspenders, panties and garter belts, much to his voyeuristic delight "the clothes, put them on, you gotta".

The Italian Connection delves a little deeper than most of Fox's work into the roots of underwear fetishism, and if Fox was writing from the heart, it is a rather dark, unsavory rabbit hole we go down here. Turessi admits that he likes seeing women in sexy underwear because it provides him with a nostalgic buzz for when Youngman Turessi used to spy on his mother and sisters "alla time i was growing up. I used to lie there inna dark and peek into the next room an' watch my sisters getting undressed for bed or dressed to go out". Fortunately for Turessi, Cherry don't kink shame, even when he is balling her in a coffin and fantasizing that she is his mother.

Cherry tries to get information out of Turessi, which isn't easy when he is burying his face in her ass. Cherry's aim is to manipulate Joe Turessi into taking her with him to France, where she can further infiltrate the European arm of the Mafia. However Cherry proves to be a little too good at her job, and ends up throwing so much energetic sex in Turessi's direction that the old codger dies from a heart attack. Arrivederci, Joe. Her 'Plan B' involves going to France herself and posing as his mistress, where Cherry finds herself in a middle of a power struggle between warring sections of the Mafia. Naturally Cherry uses her feminine charms to endear herself to a succession of Mafia goons with one track minds. Fox's Mafiosi characters do tend to be one note and interchangeable, yet all share the amusing characteristic of yelling "Marrone!!" in times of crisis.

Just as softcore American movies were at the time giving way to the likes of Deep Throat, so too the Cherry Delight books leaves the Lady from L.U.S.T ones in the dust when it comes to explicitness. Fox's writing was pretty much hardcore porn at this point, and the plots little more than a connecting link between sexual encounters. Life just seems to be one long orgy for Miss Delight, and Fox's extensive sexual vocabulary never fails to entertain. The Italian Connection being awash with references to 'blue veined breastflesh', 'pudendal pincers' and 'backdoor bumfiddling'.

Unfortunately as with the Lady from L.U.S.T books, when there is padding here it really stands out as such. Long descriptions of uneventful plane journeys, detailed accounts of where Cherry dined out at and what she had off the menu. Yawn. Then there are the shopping sprees, and Cherry's name dropping of the fashion brands she happens to be wearing...Givenchy, Estée Lauder, Christian Dior. Admittedly it wouldn't be out of character for a young, hip female character to be obsessed by fashion, but it's baffling why Fox thought a red blooded male audience would share this interest. Their likely reaction to these passages being "Marrone!! just a getta on with the naughty bits, Capiche". I guess having a fetish for female underwear gave Fox a greater insight into female fashion than the average fella.

Fortunately there is plenty of material in The Italian Connection that a red blooded audience would be interested in, it's a remarkably horny read, and Cherry Delight proves to be an even more hyper-sexual creation than Eve Drum. Such is Cherry's dedication to turning on the readership that during a life or death rooftop escape from a villa, Cherry takes time out from dodging the bullets to ogle the woman she is escaping with. "For a second Donna poised with her legs apart, I could see right up between them. She wore no panties just a garter belt, and her hairy nooky nest was something to make a guy or gal drool". Cherry Delight books aren't afraid to play rough either; gang rape and being placed in bondage devices are the frequent downsides to Cherry's line of work. While The Italian Connection favors sex over violence, the sequel novels show Fox wasn't adverse to gore. In the next book 'Tong in Cheek', Cherry gets to blow the top of a man's head off, while another mafioso is agonizingly cut into little pieces by oriental heavies.

I'm in little doubt that this book would have wound up the wrong way readers thinking they were signing up to a crime thriller along the lines of The French Connection, and weren't expecting a sleaze overload. A recent Amazon review of the book dismisses it as 'Trash poorly written for the perverted mind'. There can be little doubt though that Fox was a dedicated, hard worker when it came to satisfying perverted minds, knocking out numerous Cherry Delight novels in a short amount of time and pouring his own obsessions into them. The quick, sometimes careless nature of the work, being evidenced by the fact that in The Italian Connection the agency Cherry works for undergoes a name change from N.Y.M.P.H.O to S.P.E.R.M midway through the book without explanation. My guess is that Fox was originally going to call it S.P.E.R.M, before thinking that N.Y.M.P.H.O was funnier, either that or he couldn't come up with an appropriate acronym for S.P.E.R.M in time, and a proof reader forgot to correct it. In fairness, coming up with a story specific acronym for S.P.E.R.M sure isn't easy...the best I can come up with myself is Spies Protecting Everyone from Randy Mafiosi.

 

The Italian Connection and the entire Cherry Delight series is available to read at the Gardner F Fox website.

https://www.gardnerfrancisfoxlibrary.com/cherry-delight-novels-read-entire-stories-library

 

 

Blow My Mind (1970, Gardner F Fox)

Another so-so Eve Drum novel, in which the spy spends an equal amount of time describing her sexy underwear as she does going about her patriotic duty. In this one the Russians have found a man, Aleksandr Tkachevich, who can astrally project himself outside of his body, and has been using this skill to spy on top secret US documents. A situation which requires Eve Drum to also master astral projection and do battle with him on the astral plane. A task she is helped with by Martin and Marion Rorwick, a husband and wife team of ESP expects who also happen to be a swingers.

Personally, I've found the best Drum novels are the ones that divert from the series' Bond spoof origins. Unfortunately, Blow My Mind isn't one of them, which means we're also stuck with David Anderjanian, Eve's mentor/boyfriend. An absolute non-entity who usually sucks the energy out of Eve Drum novels, and whose only purpose in them seems to be to give Eve a very active sex life. Blow My Mind is also hindered by author Gardner F. Fox's love affair with New York high society, at times feeling as if Fox was tasked with ghost writing a society column for a female socialite. Thus lengthy passages of Blow My Mind are just Eve Drum describing the trendy places she dines out at, and what she had off the menu. "The Perch is the latest thing in New York private clubs. It is swank, posh and with it. Glass doors tinted blue, a uniformed doorman, thick carpeting..." Yadda, Yadda. Yadda.

The raison d'etre of the Eve Drum novels though, was always there underlining fetish and pornographic leanings, which by the time of Blow My Mind weren't so underlining. Fox seems particularly fixated on troilism here, even if he feels obliged to explain what that meant to less sophisticated readers "a feature of sexual lore that has been known even before his two daughters got together with Lot, as told about in the bible....the term comes from the french, deriving from the word trois, meaning three". A threesome between Drum and the Rorwicks being an erotic highlight of the book. According to the rules of Blow My Mind, your astral version can also be an idealised version of yourself. Meaning that the Astral version of Marion Rorwick loses some weight around the hips and has firmer breasts, while Astral Martin Rorwick gains flesh where it matters to women "his manhood was something not quite to be believed in it's rampant state" Eve enthusiastically remarks. Be in no doubt, Blow My Mind is the product of a NYC that was gearing itself for arrival of filmed hardcore. Until then, reading about it was the second best thing to seeing it acted out in the flesh. Fox doesn't forget the Kinkos, or heaven forbid, the sexy underwear fetishists either. Just as Ed Wood was hung up on angora, Fox's thing was undeniably Nylon. An obsession that kicks into overdrive on page 59, when Eve falls prey to Igor, a homosexual Russian agent whose transvestite tendencies dictate that he strips Eve of her clothes "I don't have any nice girly things like you're wearing. These are real nylon stockings, aren't they". This is followed by a blunt, graphic S&M session where Eve has her buttocks whipped, gets water thrown over her and her breasts poked with electric goads, before being forced into an oversized bird cage. As someone recently pointed out, merely describing these books as silly spy spoofs in no way prepares the average reader for the level of kinkiness or played straight violence in them. Eve giveth as much as she taketh in Blow My Mind, no Russian groin is safe from Eve's karate kicks, with the spy also displaying a penchant for eye gouging.

I have a feeling that a movie version of Eve Drum would have been directed by AC Stephens, starred Rene Bond in a blonde wig as Eve, which would have dictated that Anderjanian have been played by Ric Lutze, and maybe the budget would have stretched to an Aldo Ray cameo. The series cried out for a low end of 1970s Hollywood treatment ...cries that unfortunately went unanswered.

For fans of manly, two fisted material, Blow My Mind makes good on the Bondian elements, including a fair amount of location hopping from New York to Madrid to the Carpathians and several action set pieces, including a memorable one set onboard a train. Still I suspect people claimed to read these books for the spy angle, in the same sense that people claimed to read Playboy for the articles. Chances are if you found an original copy of Blow My Mind, it would incriminatingly open at page 59.

Interestingly, the Eve Drum novels were initially distributed in the UK by Ben's Books. A company that -according to Oliver Carter's book 'Under the Counter'- was integral in supplying Soho with pornographic material from the 1950s onwards. Headed by patriarch Ben Holloway, the Holloway family would later find themselves the subject of much negative police attention when they went into business with NYC pornographer Reuben Sturman, effectively becoming the British arm of Sturman's operation. Before being put out of business in 1982, following the imprisonment of his sons Chris and Dennis, Ben Holloway had also been behind the 'Rippledale' mail-order hardcore video label, the first video company to have released 'Deep Throat' on tape in the UK.