Sue Bond: On the Buses

Whatever else can be said about Sue Bond, it does take good acting to convincingly look like you want to suck face with Jack from On the Buses!!!

Harrison Marks’ “Bistro Bordello (1972)” resurfaces

Hot on the heels of Dolly Mixture, another of George Harrison Marks’ shorts from the early seventies, Bistro Bordello, has resurfaced from the pornographic wilderness in its German version “Zum Knutschkeller”. As with Dolly Mixture and many other of Marks’ Maximus era titles, Bistro Bordello was shot in a soft core version for the UK, then an explicit hardcore version to satisfy the overseas market, its the latter, dirtier second helping of Bistro Bordello that has turned up via the internet, and whose German title roughly translates into English as “Into the Kissing Cellar”, though personally I think Bistro Bordello is the more catchier title.

Shot in early 1972, Bistro Bordello concerns an innocuous British couple dining out at a French Bistro, and somehow remaining oblivious to the fact that the other customers are indulging in an orgy around them, which isn’t an easy task given that the other people going at it on the tables. As you might expect from an early 1970s Marks production there are some familiar faces among the naked bistro ravers, Howard “Vanderhorn” Nelson plays one half of the British couple, while Marks himself turns up as the Bistro’s head waiter, sporting the same buck teeth and wig disguise that also got an airing in The 9 Ages of Nakedness and later Come Play With Me. In what was clearly one of his favourite guises (one he was still donning for Kane photoshoots in the 1990s), Marks resembles a baggy pants, Victorian music hall act who has inadvertently traveled through time and ended up on the set of a 1970s blue movie. Also in the cast is a young Ava Cadell, now a world famous sexologist and life style guru, captured here at the outset of her acting/modeling career. As Ava is also a black belt in karate and is married to a lawyer, its worth emphasizing, quite heavily, that despite her appearing in the overseas version of Bistro Bordello there is no actual evidence of her performing hardcore in the film, and the film only utilizes her in a softcore capacity, which is presumably why she is given less screen time than the other couples, and Marks mostly keeps her in the background.

Amidst all the sexual gymnastics and hardcore close-ups Marks did however find the time to indulge in his usual penchant for mixing pornography with old time comedy, not just with the silent movie type mugging he gets up to in his cameo, but with sight gags like Vanderhorn leaving the bistro without his trousers on, and a table collapsing while two people screw on it, which is rewound and repeated in the film several times over for comedic effect.


Marks thought highly of Bistro Bordello, and a year later was proclaiming it the best thing he’d ever done on film, as well as citing an unlikely influence. “Going back a long way, I had seen some films made by that great French director Rene Clair, and in one of his films the lead actor had owned a Bistro” he told Verve magazine in 1973 “when I saw the rushes I knew that I had unconsciously created this Bistro with its 1930 atmosphere.” While its unclear which Rene Clair film Marks was trying to recreate here, and its unlikely that Clair’s original version had an orgy in it, Marks’ set designer Tony Roberts did do a fantastic job of transforming Marks’ Farringdon studio into a 1930s French Bistro. Only the longhaired, early 70s look of the male actors, and the German oomph pah-pah music the foreign distributor dubbed on, work against Marks’ beyond the call of duty attempts at evoking a saucy, French oh-la-la atmosphere. Tony Roberts’ eye for detail even went as far as importing several crates of wine to the set, which predictably started to disappear once the camera started rolling. “God knows how much booze they (the cast and crew) drank” Marks later complained, though going by his own unorthodox appearance in the film, it doesn’t seem unfair to suggest that The Great Marko polished off a few of the bottles himself.

Bistro Bordello also marked the start of the porn career of actor “Short Jack Gold”, who’d go on to appear in many of Marks’ 8mm productions throughout the seventies. For Mr. Gold, Bistro Bordello was sometime of a baptism of fire into the drunken, pornographic world of Harrison Marks. “I had seen pictures of him in some of the Kamera magazines I had squirreled away in my teenage home, so I knew exactly who he was” the porn actor recalled earlier this year “what I had not counted on was the fact that there was so much hanging around, waiting for different scenes to be shot, or delays as George changed the film in the camera. But most of all, what I had not anticipated, nor remotely thought about, was that when George yelled "Action" the male model, working with one or two gorgeous lingerie draped female partners, was expected to achieve an instant erection, and proceed to coitus pretty dammed promptly. Sounds easy doesn’t it! Mark my words. It isn’t. There were two or three other guys on the shoot. Some of them "veterans" of the embryonic London porn scene, but not up to it, if you pardon the pun. A situation of such unnatural eroticism, coupled with the hanging around and delays, made grown men droop. Not helped by the copious amounts of wine available on the set, which George and his crew took full advantage of. It was chaos!..........…”

Vampyres/Wildcats of St.Trinans CD release

Following on from their CD release of James Kenelm Clarke’s scores for his Fiona Richmond films, Vocalion are set to release a CD of Clarke’s scores for Jose Larraz’s horror classic Vampyres (1974) and Frank Launder’s rather less well regarded The Wildcats of St. Trinian’s (1980). Bringing together -on CD at least- the exploits of blood sucking bi-sexual vampires and overaged naughty schoolgirls

Publicity Blurb:

This Vocalion release contains the first ever commercial issue of James Clarke’s scores for the films ‘The Wildcats of St. Trinian’s’ (1980) and ‘Vampyres’ (1974). Both soundtracks blend funk and jazz with orchestral scoring and feature the talents of many of Britain’s leading session musicians of the 1970s, including Alan Parker (guitar), Les Hurdle and Frank Clarke (bass guitar), Harold Fisher and Chris Karan (drums), John Taylor and Alan Hawkshaw (keyboards) plus the musical direction of Frank Barber (‘Wildcats’) and Syd Dale (‘Vampyres’). Highlights from the ‘Wildcats’ score include the sophisticated, Fender Rhodes led disco-funk of Girls’ Disco, the easy listening grooves of Swimming Sequence, the cheeky charm of Harry’s Strut (Flash Harry) and Work Apace, the latter an absolutely gorgeous reworking of Malcolm Arnold’s St. Trinian’s School Song. 1974’s ‘Vampyres’ is probably best described as ‘erotic horror’, a torrid tale of two modern-day bisexual female vampires whose bloodlust is matched only by their voracious sexual appetite. James Clarke’s score evokes an atmosphere of unease, menace and dark, sexual tension, perfectly in keeping with the film itself. These qualities are particularly in evidence in Main Titles, blending driving rhythms with Alan Parker’s horrific ‘fuzz’ guitar, and The Legend of the House and The Big Woodland, each of which feature, in parts, intimate harmonies tinged with a sense of foreboding. Stalking is in the best tradition of horror movie music, opening with a ‘stab’ chord and punctuated throughout by the razor-sharp sound of Alan Parker’s ‘fuzz’ guitar, ominous timpani rolls and creepy, tremulando strings. Bisexual female vampires and their prey have never been better depicted in music! The accompanying booklet contains insightful liner notes written by James Clarke and Oliver Lomax, plus rare film stills and original film poster artwork. Remastered from the original analogue stereo tapes. First time on CD.


http://www.duttonvocalion.co.uk/proddetail.asp?prod=CDSML8464

Suzy Mandel’s 1977 Spotlight Entry.

Suzy’s 1977 entry in Spotlight. Obviously don’t bother ringing the number now though, its 32 years out of date!!!

West End Jungle repeat

Just a quick heads up that there is a repeat airing of West End Jungle, this Friday Night/Saturday Morning on BBC4 (2:00am-2:50am)

Cliff Twemlow Book Write-Up

Received my copy of the Cliff Twemlow book last Thursday (not even a postal strike it seems can stop Cliff), so I’d imagine pre-orders are being sent out this week.
The authors have done a tremendous job of locating Cliff’s key collaborators for the book, as well as all of Cliff’s films, ranging from the ones that had Pre-Cert video releases (GBH, Tuxedo Warrior) to rarer, seeming unreleased ones like Target Eve Island and The Ibiza Connection, to near impossible to locate items such as 1986’s Harrising Moments, an aborted TV comedy vehicle for GBH supporting player Jerry Harris, which sounds like the Twemlow equivalent of Andy Milligan’s Red Rooster and features Twemlow regular Steve Powell in drag, and Cliff himself in a nappy. More intriguing is mention of 1988’s Moonstalker a.k.a. Predator, which I’d only heard of by title before, but here is given the full synopsis/write up treatment which reveals it to be Cliff’s take on “Beast of Exmoor” story, seemingly mixed in with elements of An American Werewolf in London.

The book argues a good case for Twemlow being an unacknowledged low-budget maverick, who against considerable odds, such as the fact that the British film industry was going down the pan at the time, managed to set up his own B-movie universe in 1980s Manchester, channeling all his creative and physical energy into making film after film that would see him and his collaborators shoot in locations as diverse as politically shaky 1980s Grenada to an off-season scout camp in Worsley. The book’s revelation that Twemlow saw little profits from his later films, in fact he seems to have lost money on a few of them, makes his dedication even more impressive, and its a testament to his character that his reparatory company came back for film after film, despite some of them having moved on to bigger things. Not to mention the fact that -judging by what the book has to say- a few cuts and bruises were guaranteed on a Cliff Twemlow set. The casting of a panther for The Eye of Satan, predictably resulted in some chaos on set, while the unfortunate actor playing the alien in Firestar: First Contact was the subject of a (literally) ball-busting accident.














(Japanese VHS release of Firestar:First Contact)

Access to Twemlow’s brother and son also allows the authors to expand on Cliff’s own 1980 autobiography The Tuxedo Warrior, as well as contradict it, a peculiar discovery made during the writing of the book is that while most celebrities choose to take a year or two off their age, Twemlow actually added five years to his life for his autobiography, a secret he kept up in his personal life, to the degree that even his gravestone bears an incorrect date of birth. Previously thought to have been in this late fifties/early sixties at the time of his death, the book reveals Twemlow was only 55 when he died. His early death, while seemingly unavoidable due to his lifestyle, seems even more tragic given several quotes suggest him to have been something of a visionary, accurately predicting back in the 1990s that films would be watched on and made for computers in the future, how sad then that his early death prevented him from bringing his particular brand of filmmaking into the internet age.

The book isn’t able to clear up the mystery over the murky release history of the Twemlow films, with hard to confirm or deny rumours that the films were the subject of overseas video releases and TV broadcasts, but still manages to bring some new nuggets of information to the table. I’d never heard before for instance, of the different versions of Twemlow’s final film, the rape/revenge shocker Bad Weekend, nor the three alternative versions of Tuxedo Warrior released on UK video in the 1980s.

With many of the films discussed still obscure and tricky to track down (hence the “Lost World of”) its particularly satisfying to see Cliff and his films getting the full length book treatment, unpretentious, entertaining and clearly a labour of love, the book is certainly in the spirit of Cliff’s films, and despite revealing his real age, something you suspect the great man would heartily approve of.

Cliff Twemlow - book launch and film screening

To tie-in with the publication of “The Lost World of Cliff Twemlow”, there will be a special launch party for the book this November as part of the Salford Film Festival, as well as a screening of one of Cliff’s films (details TBC.)

The Launch/screening takes place at 2pm on Sunday 22nd of November, at The King’s Arms on Bloom Street in Salford. The launch is open to all and reservations to attend can be made by emailing: tickets@hotunpress.com

See this site http://www.hotunpress.com/booklaunch.html for more information about the book launch, and here for details about the book http://www.hotunpress.com/
They also have some Cliff badges for sale!!!