Sex and the Other Woman (1972)

 

I've always regarded Sex and the Other Woman as one of those second division Stanley Long titles, which like Bread and On the Game, was sandwiched in-between the standout Long productions of Groupie Girl and Eskimo Nell. Revisiting it via Melusine's Stanley Long box set though, I've gotten along allot better with it this time around. Full disclosure, I did have some involvement with that box set so my opinion isn't without bias, but seeing Sex and the Other Woman looking so damned perfect definitely improves things. Previous releases of this film having looked particularly ugly. I think I'm right in saying that this release also marks the first time Long's original version of the film has been seen in America. The Salvation DVD from the 2000s being the American re-edit of the movie, which shuffled the segments around, used an alternative title sequence that chopped down Felicity Devonshire's name to 'Felicity Devon' and replaced most of the DeWolfe music with generic disco tracks.

Sex and the Other Woman comes across like Antony Balch's Secrets of Sex made for more straight-laced punters and by a more straight-laced director. While SOS had an Egyptian mummy telling us tales of woe from the battle of the sexes, in Sex and the Other Woman the rather less scary Richard Wattis is on hand to introduce saucy stories that feel straight out of the Sunday tabloids, as opposed to the horror movie, Burroughs and Scientology influences that fuelled the Balch movie.

I do wonder if Sex and the Other Woman lacks a woman's touch that earlier Long productions had benefited from. The Wife Swappers likely having had input from Derek Ford's wife Valerie, and Groupie Girl having been written by Suzanne Mercer. Sex and the Other Woman feels like male chauvinism has taken over the reins, with female characters here behaving in a way that I'm sure no woman has ever behaved outside of the imagination of sexist men. Exactly how much of Stanley Long's personal life wound up in this movie will likely remain a question mark. I detect some possible autobiographical elements to the first story.  Reggie, the ill fated married man in that segment sharing Long's love of aviation and like Long has his own Penthouse. I assume the light aircraft and the penthouse in the film belonged to Long himself. On the basis that if you were making a low budget film that required an aircraft and a penthouse, why would you pay to use anyone else's if you owned your own. So, it is likely that we're here getting a peek at Long's pad whilst he was living high on the hog, thanks to the proceeds from The Wife Swappers and Groupie Girl.

Speaking of locations, the staircase in the house belonging to Maggie Wright's gold digging character is the same staircase that James Beck makes an appearance on in Groupie Girl. It also pops up in the pad the heroine shares with two other girls in Pete Walker's The Four Dimensions of Greta. Such is the small world of British sex films.
The original soundtrack of the film in this segment also treats us to a couple of blasts of the funky DeWolfe track 'Highway Song' by the marvelously named Herman Bender. Come to think about it, had he not been a real person, Herman Bender would have actually made for a great character name in a British sex comedy. The bewigged photographer in this segment proving that if you're looking for realistic and non-stereotypical portrayals of gay men in 1970s British culture, you might have to look beyond the sex comedies. Those with a keen ear might also detect a brief soundtrack appearance of the DeWolfe track 'Eye Level' at the end of the Felicity Devonshire segment, which soon after would become famous in the UK as the theme tune for the TV series Van Der Valk. Even if you stripped Sex and the Other Woman of the DeWolfe music and replaced it with more modern music, as the American distributor did, on a visual level this film couldn't have come from anywhere other than early 70s Britain. A point emphasized by Melusine's high end transfer, which really does breath unholy new life into those early 70s fashions and interiors.

The leading lady in the first segment, Maggie Wright, wasn't to Long's fancy, and might have been cast at the insistence of co-producer Barry Jacobs, since she'd also featured in his movie The Love Box. The American distributor was evidently in agreement with Long, since the US version switches her segment with the Jane Cardew one. The US version presenting the Jane Cardew segment upfront...as if Jane Cardew wasn't upfront enough. Sex and the Other Woman does see Long and Jacobs offer up something for all straight male tastes. The Cardew segment for men into big bust fetishism, the Wright one for those with a taste for the older woman, while the Felicity Devonshire one is err... possibly for the man who -to quote the song Mr. Iceberg by S. Gainsbourg- "likes his little girls in socks". My history with Sex and the Other Woman began with the Salvation DVD but I do remember reading in an old edition of Elliot's Guide to Films on Video that there had been a UK VHS release of the film in the late 1980s that had suffered 9 minutes and 30 seconds of cuts, which certainly piqued my interest in seeing the film. It could have been a mistake on Elliot's behalf, but odds are that if there was a segment in Sex and the Other Woman that would have provoked such heavy BBFC censorship it would have been the Felicity Devonshire one. Stanley Long at his most 'morally ambiguous' it sees a middle aged man (Raymond Young) fall 'victim' to the sexual desires of his daughter's school friend Sarah, played by Devonshire. The daughter's reaction to discovering about her father's affair with her schoolgirl friend- she basically tells Sarah she can't blame her and admits she'd sleep with him herself if he wasn't her own father- is a prime example of what I was saying about women in this film behaving like no woman ever has outside of the imagination of men. Still it must have done wonders for the ego of actor Raymond Young. While Young was no stranger to British exploitation cinema, he's also in Secrets of a Superstud and The Flesh and Blood Show, he didn't usually get to be the subject of such rock star like adulation.

By the time of Sex and the Other Woman, you're definitely witnessing the bar being raised in terms of the quality of female acting in British sex films, at least compared to the films from just a few years earlier, which mostly had to make do with nude models who could barely get a line out. We're also beginning to see a 'star system' emerging with actresses like Cardew and Devonshire destined to become regulars in these types of film, their fame largely playing out within the genre. Not everyone was happy to be associated with this film though. Actor Paul Greenwood, whose character succumbs to Jane Cardew's seductive charms, goes tellingly uncredited in the film. He returned to British exploitation a few years later to play the boyfriend in the Pete Walker film Frightmare, and allowed them to use his real name on that film...then again he didn't bare his arse in that one.

Sex and the Other Woman ends with the biggest piece of propaganda for triangle relationships you're likely to see outside of Tintorera, as a married couple weather the scandal of moving the husband's mistress in with them. In many ways it feels like a throwback to The Wife Swappers with its swinging themes and largely unknown cast, yet its a reflection of how British sexual mores had moved on that Long got away with a laid back and comedic attitude towards this situation. A far cry from the finger pointing approach he was forced to adopt with the Wife Swappers, where such behavior would no doubt have resulted in blackmail, ruination or a mental breakdown. The ending anticipates where the British sex film was heading with the husband (Max Mason) breaking the fourth wall and giving a blokeish wink to the audience.

Having seen this genre dismissed for years as nostalgia proof and a forgotten embarrassment, it is quite gratifying to see movies like Sex and the Other Woman get the deluxe treatment on disc, as well as the British sex film's unexpected dominance of late night British television at the moment. A phenomenon that began with the relatively obscure TV channel Together TV, who despite apparently being run a hard left collective, hit upon the brainwave of filling their nighttime schedules with 1970s British horror and sex movies till the wee hours. Quite how such movies fit in with their ideology is anyone's guess; I very much doubt their politics align with the politics of Pete Walker and Mary Millington. Still such programming must have done well for them, since other channels have since taken notice and followed suit. Talking Pictures TV has been slipping a few Confessions and Adventures movies into their schedules. More recently, nostalgia channel Rewind TV has also jumped aboard this unlikeliest of bandwagon. 

Just to document the sex mad state of late night TV in Britain in 2026...Rewind TV has recently shown Virgin Witch, Secrets of Sex, For Men Only, Confessions of a Sex Maniac, The Ups and Downs of a Handyman and Sex and the Other Woman. Talking Pictures have shown The Best of the Adventures and Confessions from a Holiday Camp. While Together TV have shown Cruel Passion, Girls Come First, Got in Made, Come Play With Me, Groupie Girl, Confessions from the David Galaxy Affair, On the Game, I'm Not Feeling Myself Tonight and The Playbirds. It's almost as if...y'know...people actually like watching these movies. A turn of events that has left me feeling vindicated for flying the flag for British sexploitation cinema all these years, and smugly ahead of my time...now that the unbelieving scum have come around to my way of thinking.

It would be remiss of me not to also mention Jane Cardew's memorable and highly suggestive usage of a cigar in Sex and the Other Woman. "Sometimes, a cigar is just a cigar" Freud once claimed, but it sure as hell wasn't in this blooming well case.

The Farm (1984, Laurence James)

 

Laurence James is an author who I'm probably guilty of overlooking. Partly because he was best known for hippie era SF, which isn't really my thing, and partly because he used so many pen names. It's easy to forget that 'Mick Norman' who wrote all those Hells Angels novels, is also 'James Darke' of the Witchfinder General inspired 'The Witches' series, as well as 'Jonathan May' of the rival Confessions book series. Whatever name he was using that week and whatever genre he was working in though, I’ve found that you're always in entertaining hands with Laurence James.

Here James steps into the guise of 'Richard Haigh' and gives the likes of Guy N. Smith and James Herbert a run for their money with this prime piece of 1980s paperback horror in which an isolated farmhouse in Wales comes under attack from carnage loving pigs. Not willing to put all his eggs in the one basket, James expands this from being a mere killer pigs vehicle. Since The Farm also trots out lethal dogs, cannibalistic rabbits, malicious goats, cows seeking martyrdom and suicidal geese. All putting aside their differences to gang up against the human race and seek revenge after their water supply was contaminated by dangerous chemicals.

Speaking of Guy N. Smith, I suspect this book was doing a little bit more than encroaching on his literary territory. In fact there seems to be a fascinating, hidden layer of Guy N. Smith references in this book. The main protagonist Paul is a city boy who was made the dramatic lifestyle change of decamping to a farm in rural Wales- as Guy N. Smith had done in real life. Paul's brother Richard works in a bank- an occupation Smith had held prior to becoming a full time writer. Richard's wife is called Jean- which is the name of Guy N. Smith's wife. Jean and Richard have two children, a boy and a girl who are in their early teens- and did the Smiths (technically they actually had a boy and two girls). Paul is also harbouring the secret that he used to write erotic fiction for top shelf magazines- as did Guy N. Smith back in the 1970s. It's way too much to have been a mere coincidence. Smith did lend a front cover quote to James's horror novel Paradise Lost "mind blowing terror from a talented new horror writer". So I assume those two were mates, and these clandestine GNS references should be interpreted as a good natured poke in the ribs.

Although it has never really attained the iconic status of The Rats, Night of the Crabs or Slugs, in many ways The Farm is the absolute embodiment of the 1980s British horror paperback. It's simplistic, relatively short on page count, delivers crowd pleasing scenes of people falling foul of bloodthirsty animals and is shameless in its perversity. If you think Guy N. Smith was often guilty of inserting troubling sexual elements into his horror books, then Laurence James wants you to hold his beer. Come for the killer pigs, stick around to be disturbed by the behavior of an underage Welsh nympho called Gwyneth, who is anyone's for a top up to her pocket money. I dare say that after meeting a girl like Gwyneth, a Welshman need never look longingly at a sheep again. For some reason James chooses the scene in which Gwyneth and another character break the sexual taboo of incest, to go overboard not only in terms of sexual descriptions but also in terms of product placement. I doubt The Mirror newspaper, Robertson's Marmalade or Toyah Willcox were grateful for having their wares plugged in that context.

It could be argued that back in the morally bankrupt 1980s, books like this were being passed around the playgrounds by boys who would have been roughly the same age as Gwyneth, to whom she'd no doubt have been something of a fantasy figure. Still the Gwyneth aspects to the book are pretty sordid even for that era and don't exactly show James's character in the greatest light, for a while there it really does feel like he's writing jerk off material for Jimmy Savile. In another example of this book time stamping itself to the era, it is such a quintessentially British and 1980s thing for the unnatural relationship in this book to get discovered thanks to a trade union dispute (you'll have to read the book yourself to discover how, it's priceless). Perhaps that was another of James's Guy N. Smith in-jokes, trade union activity being one of Smith's bete noires.

Laurence James always comes across as being a little bit more hip and in touch with popular culture than your average paperback writer back then. I seem to recall his Hells Angels books including Michael Moorcock references, name checking Roger Corman and general having a satirical, underground sensibility to them. As we venture into the 1980s, The Farm proves that James still had his finger on the pulse when it came to what the kids were into. James needle drops songs by Madness, Fun Boy Three and Ian Dury into these pages. I especially liked that when it came to Dury, James didn't go for the obvious 'Reasons to be Cheerful' or 'Hit Me with your Rhythm Stick' and instead has a character listening to 'Spasticus Autisticus' on the radio. Which might be another example of Laurence James pulling our leg, since the BBC ban on that song probably meant that Spasticus Autisticus didn't actually receive much radio airplay back then.
We also get a Famous Five reference, which initially seems quite old fashioned in that company, but I suspect James was actually alluding there to the Comic Strip's 'Five Go Mad in Dorset' parody. Especially as he quotes the famous "lashings of ginger beer" line. Which was echoed throughout playgrounds after Five Go Mad in Dorset went out, along with the heavies' blah-blah-blah speeches. I suppose a blah-blah-blah version of The Farm's plot would go ... blah-blah-blah chemical spillage... blah-blah-blah government cover-up... blah-blah-blah Welsh jailbait... blah-blah-blah killer pigs.

James's approach to horror can at times be as unconventional as his choice of Ian Dury songs. He has an eccentric habit of ending chapters on a cliffhanger then jumping forward at the start of the next chapter and only eventually revealing important plot details anecdotally. Something which takes a bit of getting used to. After a literally explosive opening that sees James gleefully reduce schoolchildren, nuns and a chickenhawk photographer to bloody pulp, the book then teases us with a few false starts, slips into darkness with it's jailbait fixation before pulling it's mind out of the gutter and unleashing the swine. Once it gets going through, the book comes out with all guns blazing and The Farm lives up to it's reputation as a better than average example of the paperback equivalent of the Video Nasties. It's the type of book that thrived during the late 70s and early 80s, only for public to grow tired of this sort of horror novel when an influx of below average books flooded the market at the end of the eighties. My suspicion is that had the Video Nasties been left alone they'd have met with a similar fate and the public would eventually have just gotten bored and jaded with an overkill of cheap horror movies on video. However, because the Video Nasties were taken away from us they've achieved legendary status and enjoyed a healthy cult afterlife. Whereas their book equivalents, lacking the allure of forbidden fruit, have tended to fade into obscurity.

Saying that, The Farm was recently republished by Valancourt's Paperbacks from Hell imprint, followed by the news that James's follow up The City (1986) is being republished by a new company called Cardboard Coffin Press. News that is something to squeal about, since buying original copies of those books at the moment seems impossible without remortgaging your house or taking up bank robbing. I can't help but be amused though that in a recent interview one of the Paperbacks from Hell people ruled out republishing Pierce Nace's Eat Them Alive on account that it "veers on the side of bad, bad taste" and is "super duper rapey" (note: that book contains no rape whatsoever) yet they're perfectly happy to republish Welsh incest porn. Kudos to them for putting The Farm back in circulation, but there's some peculiar double standards going on there.

Guts for Garters (2015, Linda Regan)

 

Watching Linda Regan in an old episode of Minder, reminded me I needed to jump back down the rabbit hole that is her later career as a crime writer. Whereas Regan's acting career generally played out in light comedy -she's probably best remembered in that capacity for the sitcom Hi-De-Hi- her writing career walks a different path, one that veers towards heavy duty exploitation. Full of bad language, degrading sex and brutal violence, Guts for Garters is about as removed from Hi-De-Hi as you can get, unless I've missed an episode of Hi-De-Hi that opens with Ted Bovis torturing someone with a machete for selling crack at Maplins.

Guts for Garters sees Regan tackle the subject of girl gangs, although she wasn't the first female author to walk that beat. Back in the heyday of New English Library, Maisie Mosco wrote Gang Girls (1978) but as that book is now rare and commands high prices, Regan here is on hand to provide a more modern and less prohibitively expensive alternative.

Guts for Garters centers around female hard cases 'The Alley Cats' who've decided to take the law into their own hands, after rival gang the SLR (South London Rulers) try to seize control over the Aviary estate. Queen of the Alley Cats, Alysha Achter, ain't standing for that on her patch, and immediately proves herself to be a force to be reckoned with by torturing SLR member Burak Kaya for selling drugs in the community. When Burak is later found murdered, the SLR vow revenge on the Alley Cats, who in turn try to place blame for the killing on in fighting within the SLR. Another killing on the estate -a girl is beaten over the head with a hammer, falls in unfortunately close proximity to some dog shit, then is set on fire- further exacerbates the gang fighting, as well as opening up the possibility that a serial killer is loose on the estate.

Guts for Garters was meant to be the first Regan book to elevate Georgia Johnson to main character status, having previously appeared as a supporting character in Regan's earlier books Brotherhood of Blades (2011) and Street Girls (2012). A black Detective Inspector, Johnson's career in the police force is motivated by her having been raped as a teenager, giving her an affinity with The Alley Cats, whose members have similarly been dealt a bad hand in life. It has to be said though that Johnson doesn't leave much of an impression here, and gets overshadowed by both the antics of the Girl Gang and her sex mad colleague DI Stephanie Green who proudly boasts to having slept with most of the men on the force. Stephanie was so named by her parents in tribute to their cockney background, Stephanie Green being a play on Stepney Green. As an adult, her name has taken on a saucy double meaning, since like Stepney Green Tube Station, Stephanie Green is easily accessible to most Londoners (Regan's joke, not mine). I suspect Regan was trying to subvert gender roles by giving Stephanie the type of characteristics that you'd more associate with the alpha male cops of yesteryear. That is to say, that when Stephanie isn't bedding members of the opposite sex, she's drinking heavily and stuffing her face with junk food.

Guts for Garters is also part of an expanded universe, the Reganverse if you will, and works in two characters from her DCI Banham book series. Namely the aforementioned DCI Paul Banham and his colleague/lover DI Alison Grainger. I must admit that my heart sank when those two were introduced, since they are the dullest elements of their own books, and don't exactly add much here. Banham's most notable characteristic is his habit of vomiting at violent crime scenes, the result of his wife and child being killed by a mad axeman 14 years earlier. It appears that his PTSD issues are catching, since in this book Alison Grainger starts fainting at crime scenes, due to having seen a work colleague being burnt to death. Alison also has trouble unscrewing the tops off bottled water, and manages to trap her hand in her own car door at one point, apart from that she is perfectly competent at her job. What with Banham vomiting all over the place, Alison fainting and Stephanie more concerned with her horizontal pleasures, its no wonder the residents of the Aviary estate have no faith in the police force. Even Georgia comes across as a bit of a mug, paying out cash to Alysha for information that generally turns out to be useless and of course always exonerates The Alley Cats from any wrongdoing.

Guts for Garters has the mentality of a Kray Twins apologist. In the same way that certain people jump to the defense of Ronnie and Reggie, and eulogize them as good lads who loved their mum, did allot for their own community and never hurt their own, Guts for Garters fully subscribes to idea of the noble criminal with a social conscience. Good girls at heart, The Alley Cats care about the old folk on the estate, want to keep kids away from drugs, only sell firearms and machetes outside of South London and have their hearts set on rebuilding the children's playground. This book does have an unfortunate tendency to reiterate the same plot points, if I had a pound for every time I had to read about the Alley Cats' plans for the playground, I'd have enough money to pay to fix the sodding playground myself.

The contractions of The Alley Cats is something to behold. The Alley Cats sell drugs, but only to people who already use drugs, and always encourage them to stop using drugs. Alysha's goal is to open a community centre, a hair and nail salon, and lest we forget rebuild the children's playground. All of which she hopes will keep the kids away from drugs and prostitution, even though she plans to fund these schemes from the proceeds of drugs and prostitution. "I love that we're together an 'ave got plans to make the estate a good place an 'elp the kids to 'ave a chance wiv life" claims one of the Alley Cats, yet when it comes to society's ills, they seem to be spreading the disease in order to come up with the cure. Despite that, The Alley Cats believe that one day people will build statues honouring them, and they'll be as revered as Winston Churchill.

In contrast their male equivalent, the SLR are utterly without conscious, want to get all the kids hooked on crack, mug old ladies and demean their girlfriends by punching them in the face and making them pull a train. They can't be faulted when it comes to inclusivity though. While the hierarchy, like SLR leader Harisha Celik are all young Turks, the rest of the gang includes Pakistanis, mixed race kids, whitey and even the Chinese. Harisha believing that the Chinese are naturally superior to everyone else when it comes to growing cannabis and wielding samurai swords, even though those are actually Japanese weapons. Regan largely avoids race hate elements, although we do get some rather random anti-Chinese racism towards the end. One of the Alley Cats contemplates whether or not to "beat the shit out" of a Chinese rival, and the gang vow to start setting fire to Chinese restaurants in the East End if the Chinese vandalize the Alley Cats' community centre. This presumably is setting up another Johnson and the Alley Cats novel... hopefully the Chinese won’t attack the Children's playground with their Japanese swords.

Make no mistake this is a proper exploitation novel, regardless of its typically uninspired 2010s book cover and the relatively mainstream acting career of its author. Had Regan been a regular in British gangster movies or Pete Walker films -the hammer murder here brings to mind Walker's Schizo- then Guts for Garters would make sense. As it is there is nothing in Regan's career to suggest it was building up to books like this. She's isn't totally unique in this respect. Candy Davis -who also pops up in an early Minder episode - was another actress who reinvented herself as a crime novelist. Maybe there is a case for having appeared in Minder warping the minds of these bubbly blonde comedy actresses, which manifested itself years later by them writing crime books for those with strong stomachs. Regan certainly doesn't shy away from violence against women here. There are graphically described rapes and a gangbang, as well as a rebellious Muslim girl being burnt with an iron for being seen in public without her Hijab. At the same time Regan doesn't let men off the hook, with males depicted as an abusive or creepy bunch within these pages. Even DCI Banham, who is usually sympathetically portrayed in his own books (he did after all lose his wife and child to an axe murderer) gets pulled up a few times for his chauvinism. At one point, Banham makes derogatory comments about women drivers, annoying Stephanie, not of course to the extent that it puts her off wanting to have sex with him 'she watched him aiming his key at his car door and wondered what he would say if she offered him a blowjob'.

As much as Guts for Garters is in many ways the heir apparent to the nasty NEL youthspoitation paperbacks of the 1970s, Regan does self consciously try to make it a product of the 2010s. There is an influx of pop culture references that probably made this book seem hip and topical for a few months in 2015, but aren't aging well. One character is compared to Amy Winehouse, DI Johnson guesses the password on a deceased girl's laptop by typing in the names of One Direction band members and Alysha wonders 'what it was like to be famous, be someone like Rihanna, and have everything you wanted in life'. Winehouse's early death might mean that she still resonates in the public conscious, but many of the other pop culture references here now just provoke a response of 'who' or 'I haven't thought about them in years'. Such is the fickle nature of fame.

I can't fault Regan's choice of name for her head gang girl though. Since I did actually go to school with someone called Alysha, who years later resurfaced in the papers having been sent to prison for running a drugs den, and was last heard of opening a hair and nails salon. So, for an ex school chum of mine at least it seems that life really does imitate Linda Regan novel.