British films of the 1970s

Paul Newland

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780719082252
• eBook ISBN: 9781526102300
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

British films of the 1970s offers highly detailed and insightful critical analysis of a range of individual films of the period. This analysis draws upon an innovative range of critical methodologies which place the film texts within a rich variety of historical contexts. The book sets out to examine British films of the 1970s in order to get a clearer understanding of two things – the fragmentary state of the filmmaking culture of the period, and the fragmentary nature of the nation that these films represent. It argues that there is no singular narrative to be drawn about British filmmaking in the 1970s, other than the fact that these films offer evidence of a Britain (and ideas of Britishness) characterised by vicissitudes. While this was a period of struggle and instability, it was also a period of openings, of experiment, and of new ideas. Newland looks at many films, including Carry On Girls, O Lucky Man!, That'll be the Day, The Shout, and The Long Good Friday.

1

Equality or bust:

sexual politics

Everyone’s raving about sex – Twice nightly!

Advertisement on the side of a red double-decker bus,
Carry On Loving (Gerald Thomas, 1970)

Big Dick and B.U.M. Productions: Eskimo Nell

Eskimo Nell (Martin Campbell, 1974) is a ribald British sex comedy. But it is also a film about film-making in 1970s Britain. Michael Armstrong (who wrote the script and had written and directed the 1969 Tigon horror film The Haunted House of Horror, aka Horror House) plays a young director, Dennis, just out of film school. We see him descend the grand steps of a neo-classical building which houses the Film Academy. This is a fictional establishment which nevertheless speaks of real developments taking place in the industry. During the early part of the decade it was possible to train as a film-maker within a ‘school’-type environment in Britain for the first time. The National Film School was set up in 1971 at the old Beaconsfield Studios in Buckinghamshire (a facility previously used by the Crown Film Unit and the British Lion Film Corporation). Colin Young was the School’s first Director, and its twenty-five initial students included Bill Forsyth (Local Hero), Ben Lewin (Ally McBeal), and Mike Radford (Il Postino).¹

During the post-credits sequence of Eskimo Nell, as the lyrics of an incongruous country-and-western-style song tell the back story in a jaunty way, we see Dennis enter the London offices of major US film companies United Artists and Columbia-Warner in an attempt to secure work. The film was shot entirely on location in London (both exteriors and interiors), and there is the palpable sense of a grubby city living through an economic and cultural crisis. Initially, Dennis is not successful in obtaining work, but as he wanders, disheartened, around Wardour Street, Soho, he spots a small sign by a modest doorway and enters. Here he finds the offices of the sleazy B.U.M. Productions, a small, independent production company run by Benny U. Murdoch (Roy Kinnear), which evidently specialises in seedy sex films.

Eskimo Nell was directed by Martin Campbell, who had just directed The Sex Thief (1973), and eventually went on to make the BBC television drama series Edge of Darkness (1985), and other notable films such as the blockbuster The Mask of Zorro (1998), and the James Bond films GoldenEye (1995) and Casino Royale (2006). He was also one of the producers of Black Joy (Anthony Simmons, 1977), an early film about black British culture (discussed in Chapter 4), and an associate producer on Scum (Alan Clarke, 1979). Eskimo Nell was produced by the infamous Stanley Long, who was, according to Simon Sheridan, the ‘godfather of British cinema sex’.² During his early career, Long worked as a photographer, before moving on to produce ‘glamour’ home movies for the 8mm market. In addition to later making a name for himself as the producer of films such as Eskimo Nell, Long directed three sex comedy films in the 1970s: Adventures of a Taxi Driver (1975), Adventures of a Private Eye (1977), and Adventures of a Plumber’s Mate (1978).

Eskimo Nell features well-respected British actors such as Roy Kinnear and Christopher Timothy, and another future household name, Christopher Biggins. Kinnear was a versatile British actor who worked throughout the 1970s. Like many British actors of his generation, Kinnear’s career began in the theatre. He joined Joan Littlewood’s influential Theatre Workshop at the Theatre Royal, Stratford East in London in 1959. And he later secured roles in a number of films directed by his good friend Richard Lester, including A Hard Day’s Night (1964); Help! (1965); A Funny Thing Happened On the Way to the Forum (1966); How I Won the War (1967); The Bed-Sitting Room (1969); Juggernaut (1974); Royal Flash (1975); and the Musketeer series of films of the 1970s and 1980s. Overall, Kinnear’s wide-ranging work of the period also speaks of the vicissitudes of 1970s British film production. For example, he appears in the Hammer horror film Taste the Blood of Dracula (Peter Sasdy, 1970) alongside Christopher Lee; in the Dickensian musical drama Scrooge (Ronald Neame, 1970); in the Children’s Film Foundation films Egghead’s Robot (Milo Lewis, 1970) and Raising the Roof (Michael Forlong, 1972); and in the David Puttnam-produced drama Melody (aka S.W.A.L.K.) (Waris Hussein, 1971). He features in The Alf Garnett Saga (Bob Kellett, 1972), a big-screen version of the popular television sitcom, Till Death Us Do Part (Norman Cohen, 1969); in the British thriller Madame Sin (David Greene, 1972) alongside US stars Bette Davis and Robert Wagner; and in the saucy comedy The Amorous Milkman (Derren Nesbitt, 1974). Kinnear also voices Pipkin in the animated feature Watership Down (Martin Rosen, 1978), and appears in The Princess and the Pea (1979), directed by Don Boyd – who attended the London Film School in 1968 and subsequently produced and directed a range of films during the period.³ But Kinnear also worked transnationally. He plays Veruca Salt’s father in Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (Mel Stuart, 1971), a US musical produced by Warner Bros., based on a novel by Roald Dahl (Welsh born, of Norwegian parents), and shot in Bavaria, Germany. And he appears in the Australian comedy Barry McKenzie Holds His Own (Bruce Beresford, 1974). In addition to this, Kinnear also became a well-known face on British television, appearing in episodes of That Was the Week That Was (BBC, 1962–63), Doctor at Large (LWT, 1971), Man About the House (Thames, 1973–76), The Avengers (ABC/Thames, 1961–69), George and Mildred (Thames, 1976–79), The Dick Emery Show (BBC, 1963–81) and The Goodies (BBC/LWT, 1970–82).⁴

In Eskimo Nell, Kinnear’s Benny U. Murdoch is a breast-obsessed sleaze-ball who proudly displays a poster of Doris Wishman’s Deadly Weapons on his office wall. Dennis’s friend and screenwriter Harris Tweedle (Christopher Timothy) is a naive, virginal innocent with a penchant for penguins. Harris has a girlfriend, Hermione (Katy Manning), whose mother is Lady Longhorn (Rosalind Knight), an upper-class family values campaigner and the chairwoman of the Society for Moral Reform. She tells Harris and Dennis, ‘I represent a vast minority of people in this country’ who want to see ‘a total ban on anything other than nice, wholesome stories’. To raise finance, Murdoch must woo three backers, each of whom has a very different vision for the film. Exploitation supremo Big Dick (Gordon Tanner) wants a hardcore porn film; homosexual accountant Vernon Peabody (Jeremy Hawke) wants a cross-dressing musical starring his drag queen toy-boy, Johnny (Raynor Burton); and the philanthropic Ambrose Cream (Richard Caldicott) wants a kung-fu musical starring his latest find, Millicent Bindle (Prudence Drage). Interestingly, all three initial backers for the film insist on their own ‘star’ playing the lead role in return for the funds that they promise to provide. When the funding arrives, Benny takes the cash and flees, leaving Dennis and Harris having to make three films to satisfy all three backers, but also having to find more funding to be able to do this. They find some way of pulling this off, obtaining financial assistance from Lady Longhorn for their ‘wholesome film’. But as the date of the premiere arrives, the film cans get mixed up, and the porn film is subsequently screened for Lady Longhorn and an upper-class audience which includes the Queen.

Though Eskimo Nell is primarily a sex comedy, issues of good taste and low morals are immediately placed at the heart of the narrative in a knowing way. The film opens with a short pre-credits sequence in which the camera pans well-stacked library shelves. On the soundtrack, backed by swelling strings, a well-spoken narrator speaks of how, across the years, cinema has adapted ‘classics from the annals of world literature’. As the camera pans along bound copies of novels – Little Women, Rebecca, Jane Eyre – a suspicious, tatty-looking copy of Eskimo Nell is pulled from the shelves. At a later cocktail party held by Lady Longhorn, the members of the Society for Moral Reform discuss how to stop seedy films reaching British screens. Eskimo Nell certainly seems to suggest that ‘filth’ is very much bound up with low culture, and, as such, with the world of the working class. Lady Longhorn haughtily opines that an adaptation of the nineteenth-century epic poem ‘Eskimo Nell’ might be ‘Just what the public needs – something nice and wholesome’, where the public is taken to be the masses; in other words, the uneducated lower classes. But, in a sequence cross-cut with this one – in which the planned film and its potential audience are characterised in very different ways – sex-film producer Benny Murdoch tells Harris that the film should open with ‘bleeding great tits’, thus marking himself out as lower class, vulgar, and cynical about attempts to make a film that might appear to be artistic in any way. Back in the drawing room with Lady Longhorn, Dennis tries to market the project, eulogising about its potentially high-cultural value and the ways in which it might appeal to good taste; pointing out that he has visions of Eskimos wandering through a frozen white landscape. Indeed, throughout Eskimo Nell, Dennis and Harris – who are clearly sensitive, educated, middle-class young men – obviously display artistic ambitions. But these ambitions are in danger of getting out of control. At the film shoot, for example, Dennis behaves like a pretentious art house director, offering Jeremy (Christopher Biggins) direction, by telling him ‘You symbolise the dialectical collection of opposites coming to a listless distance from reality.’ At one point, Harris admits to not going to the pictures much, but that he did see Nanook of the North (Robert Flaherty, 1922); a confession that demonstrates a playful awareness of British film history. Having said this, Harris says Nanook wasn’t very good because it ‘didn’t have any penguins in it’.

In its evocation of working-class, end-of-pier sauciness and its employment of crude double entendres, Eskimo Nell distinctly echoes some aspects of the mid-to-late period (late 1960s and early 1970s) ‘Carry On’ series of films. For example, at the celebratory dinner after the first screening of the ‘wholesome’ version of the film, Lord Coltwind (Jonathan Adams) tells Lady Longhorn and the assembled diners that the film is ‘Something you can take the whole family to without being worried in any way. Pure escapism, that’s what going to the cinema is all about. Not all this pornography and sex distorting young minds. I know, I’ve studied pornography over the years and I know what effect it can have on you.’ This dialogue is delivered in a performance punctuated by facial tics and lusting eyes which clearly suggests repressed sexuality. As such, Adams’ performance is reminiscent of the work of ‘Carry On’ actors Peter Butterworth and Kenneth Connor in the famous film cycle. Lord Coltwind’s behaviour here is certainly similar to that of Mayor Frederick Bumble (Kenneth Connor) in Carry On Girls (discussed later in this chapter), who also appears to suggest, on the surface at least (to retain a sense of decorum) that he is disgusted by open displays of permissiveness. But at the same time, it is clear that he is secretly turned on by lascivious sexual activity. The figure of Lord Coltwind in Eskimo Nell unambiguously recalls the real-life campaigner Lord Longford, a deeply religious aristocrat (whose name is also, of course, echoed in that of Lady Longhorn) who conducted a crusade in an attempt to outlaw pornography in Britain during the 1970s (the Longford Report was published in 1972). But Longford was accused of being a hypocrite for touring the very Soho sex clubs that he sought to close down.⁵

Eskimo Nell is a farce. The narrative derives most of its comedy from improbable and unlikely situations; mistakes made that might cause embarrassment; physical humour and absurdity. Thus, Eskimo Nell can be read in terms of a long history of British farces which stretches back through the well-known work of Noël Coward and Oscar Wilde to Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors and Chaucer’s fourteenth-century The Canterbury Tales. Like many farces, Es...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Equality or bust: sexual politics
• 2 On the road: British journeys
• 3 The songs remain the same: pop, rock and war children
• 4 Immigrant songs: racial politics
• 5 In memoriam: the past in the present/the present in the past
• 6 Rural rides: the countryside and modernity
• 7 Close to the edge: peripheral Britain
• 8 Old cities, new towns: criminality and cruelty
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index