Mark Jones (1939-2010)

Various Dr Who websites are reporting the death of actor Mark Jones (on account of his role in in the 1976 Tom Baker story The Seeds of Doom), whose career spanned everything from The Royal Shakespeare Company, to Family At War, Hamlet Cigar commercials, even Don’t Open Till Christmas, and who could forget his bewigged, dragged up title role in Derek Ford’s Keep It Up Jack. RIP

 

Early Michael Winner film gets TV Airing

Saturday 30th 7pm Film24:
Murder on the Campus aka Out of the Shadow (1961)

Early Michael Winner film, one of several threadbare thrillers he shot for E.J. Fancey in the early 60s (as well as the nudist film Some Like It Cool). Might be worth a look, can’t be any worse than Winner’s The Cool Mikado can it?.

Update: Well... ‘threadbare’ was definitely the right word for that one, lots of wooden acting (especially from the heroine and the chap playing the antiques dealer), an hilariously cheaply staged car crash, and even a young Pete Walker in a small acting role.

Sex and the Other Woman : A Tale of Two DVDs

Finally had a chance to compare the UK and US Discs of Sex and the Other Woman over Christmas. As already mentioned the US disc is shorter than the UK one (the running time of the US DVD is 1:19:46 compared to the UK running time of 1:23:41), but that is only half the story as the film has been substantially re-edited for its US release.

The first difference between the two versions is that both have different title sequences, the US titles play over stills of Felicity Devonshire (billed as Felicity Devon in the US titles), while the UK titles play over footage of Henry being dragged around shopping by his wife, as a result the US version is missing some footage from the opening scene and only cuts to the scene when Richard Wattis’ narration kicks in. The credits in the US version are also allot less extensive than the UK version, depriving you of a cheap laugh over the name of the film’s production secretary.

The first two episodes have been flipped for the US release, originally the film opens with the Maggie Wright story then the Jane Cardew story, which is the way it plays on the UK disc, but evidentially the US distributor thought that Jane Cardew’s bits should be more erm… upfront, so its her story that appears first in the US version.

Flipping the two initial stories about results in Richard Wattis’ intros being re-edited, and cut short for the US version, but most of the cuts in the US version actually take place during the Maggie Wright story. The US version cuts from her arriving home from playing tennis to her and Reggie, the character she is having an affair with, taking off in the plane, deleting in-between sequences of her plotting to seduce him (whilst miming playing tennis in a mirror), the pair of them driving to the airfield and the plane starting. After the airplane sex scene (“please report your exact position”), the US version deletes part of the following scene at the photo shoot, removing a conversion between Maggie and the other model and the camp photographer issuing orders to the pair of them (“tits out, fannies up, tums in”).
The ending of the story is also cut short in the US version, the US version ends with her telling Reggie she is leaving him, whereas the scene goes on longer in the UK version and sees him trying to stop her from leaving and getting kicked in the balls for his troubles, Wattis’ comment about this “well, I suppose he asked for that” is also absent from the US version.

As well as the Wright story being cut down, the film has been re-scored for the US version as well, with different music and sound effects used for the Wright, Cardew and Felicity Devonshire stories, whoever did the re-scoring must have got bored towards the end though as the music in the final story, is identical in both versions. I can only guess that the US distributor considered the original UK score to comic or early 70s in tone (I don’t think the film was released in the USA till 1980, when this re-editing and re-scoring must have taken place.)

Picture quality on the UK disc is far superior as well (the print used for US disc is very dark), so if you’re interested in seeing the film, the UK DVD is really the way to go.

“Lost” Mary Millington film resurfaces.

An 8mm copy of the ‘lost’ Mary Millington film “Special Assignment” turned up on E-bay, shortly before Christmas. After being tipped off about the auction, my original plan was to have Millington fan ‘RBT Foot’ bid on the film, then for he and I to pay to have the film professionally transferred to DVD, however (as I suspected might happen) bidding went crazy on the film, and our plan didn’t come to pass as The Foot got outbid by a sniper bid at the last minute. So we had to go to Plan B and contact the E-bay seller, and ask him to make and sell us a DVD transfer of Special Assignment before he sent the 8mm film on its merry way. In a perfect world it would have been better to have got hold of the original 8mm film and do our own DVD transfer, as in my opinion it would have been superior to the one done by the Ebay seller, which is somewhat cropped and the transfer speed a little out (everything seems slightly slowed down). Still a “new” Mary Millington film resurfacing isn’t something to be sniffed at, especially as Special Assignment -one of her early John Lindsay hardcore shorts- hasn’t been seen since the early 70s, bar a ‘safe’ clip from the film turning up in the 1980 documentary Mary Millington’s True Blue Confessions, where it was used to represent her early blue film career. The tame bit of Special Assignment, as seen in True Blue Confessions, sees Mary exploring a canal lock and retrieving a hidden package, this is about all they could use from it in True Blue Confessions, since as you might expect from a John Lindsay production things get pretty pornographic soon after when Mary delivers the package to her horny boss and ends up as part of a threesome. Sexually, the film employs Mary in a strictly lesbian capacity, thought she does ‘supervise’ some heterosexual action between her boss and the film’s other female cast member towards the end, and as in Mary’s other porn shorts like “Response” and “Oh Nurse”, the girl on girl moments tend to register far more erotically than the routine straight sex. Its been suggested that Mary’s character in the film is meant to be a spy, which makes sense given the “Special Assignment” title, but as is the norm with John Lindsay films any plotline is strictly throwaway and hardcore sex is really all the film is about.

As a result its a little hard to represent the film in screenshot form here, so I do hope you all like photos of a girl and a canal lock!!!, but DVD editions of the film have started to appear on the collector’s circuit, and hopefully will make there way to Mary’s many fans

Christmas With Suzy Mandel

I was lucky enough to spend Christmas 2009 in the USA with the great British sex comedy legend Suzy Mandel. We’ve actually known each other for a couple of years, and become great friends, but this is the first time we’ve met. What can I say about Suzy, she is simply a divine woman, who greeted me at the airport with flowers, signed one of the pictures I brought her to autograph “from Auntie Suzy”, and we’ve become so close I do genuinely think of her as a family member, and our friendship means so, so much to me. I have some memories of Christmas 2009 that will stay with me forever, including having Christmas dinner with Suzy at the Royal Palms Hotel, the inspirational words she said to me over New Years Lunch, the whole day we spent together going through her incredible collection of clippings, photographs and photo shoot negatives (some of which have never seen the light of day before, and which we hope to put to commercial use at some point in the future.) Not to mention her many tales from the British Sex Film era, and her life in Hollywood in the 1980s, which kept me amazed all over Christmas.

Personal message to Suzy: your friendship continues to enrich my life and makes me feel so special. You can be my Auntie Suzy anytime, Sweetie!!! Lets aim to try and go on vacation again in 2010, say Hello (rather than ‘Hi’) to Kimo for me, and take care,
Big Hugs from Gavin (“adopted nephew and part time teaboy”).
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

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!..........…”