Berghahn Books
Published May 2022
336 pages
26 illustrations
Hardback
ISBN 978-1-80073-486-9
RRP: £107.00
Review by Adrian Smith
1972 was a busy year
for the vice squad of the Metropolitan Police. Having only seized 140,000
obscene items from London’s sex shops the previous year, this time they managed
to grab over one million items, raiding sex shops, private cinemas and the
occasional warehouse. Obscenity generally meant pornography, and this could
take the guise of magazines, photos and films. This was the year when America
saw the release of Deep Throat
(Gerard Damiano), but there was no such porno
chic revolution in the UK. Hardcore pornography was illegal and produced secretly
on low budgets by daring, enterprising filmmakers whose work could land them in
jail, much like the American stag film producers of the 1930s and 1940s.
Britain had always been years behind, not only the States but Europe as well.
The early 1970s saw a boom in the production of pornography across the Western
world, with censorship laws either being relaxed or abolished in many
countries, something which the lawmakers and moral guardians of the UK watched
with great unease.
Despite its illegal
status there was still money to be made, and in this new book from academic
Benjamin Halligan we get some fascinating insight into the history of British
pornography and its connection to politics and the campaigning against it of
groups such as the Festival of Light. One filmmaker who seemed to have little
regard for the laws was the Scottish entrepreneur John Lindsay, who was known
for producing films frequently depicting schoolgirls or nuns. The films were
made for European distribution, but also found British customers through mail
order as well as being screened secretly in the sex cinemas of Soho.
As Halligan points
out in this fascinating study, as with many aspects of British culture, the
pornography of this time was often about class, with fantasies being played out
from sophisticated erotica in country houses and gentlemen’s clubs to
frustrated housewives and chambermaids encountering guests in their hotel rooms.
Individual filmmakers developed an almost auteur status in the industry and
became celebrities themselves, publishing autobiographies and documentaries on
the sex film industry. It wasn’t all just hardcore of course, with Britain’s
most famous sex film star Mary Millington moving away from hardcore to appear
in softcore sex comedies such as Come
Play With Me (George Harrison Marks, 1977), whose director was a true
pioneer in British glamour film and photography, producing dozens of books, 8mm
loops and feature films from the late 1950s.
Halligan has
uncovered a new canon of British filmmakers who for the most part have been
ignored in previous histories, who played an important role in this secretive,
frequently controversial world. He has watched hundreds of these “joyless
erotic films” which blurred into “one underlit and dingy tale of sexual
frustration… across housing estates, rainy holiday resorts and chintzy hotels”
as part of the research (being a historian is a tough job sometimes!) and as
such is able to give us a great overview of the films, their directors and
producers (generally those in front of the camera are uncredited and anonymous
so it is very difficult to identify who they might be). He explores the
difficulty the British government had in defining precisely what obscenity and
pornography were, which helped to create the grey areas that allowed those
involved to flourish despite the risks.
The book is divided
into three sections, exploring the notion of “The Permissive Society” and the
campaigners both for and against pornography and immoral behaviour, the
hardcore films of John Lindsay, George Harrison Marks and Russell Gay, and the
softcore (and therefore more commercially acceptable) worlds of Derek Ford and
David Hamilton Grant. As a coda, he explores the post-Thatcherite notions of
hardcore pornography, focusing on films set on council estates, which again
brings us back to class. In British film, as pointed out in the introduction
here, everything is really about class.
For anyone interested
in this occasionally murky aspect of British film industry, this is an
essential addition to a library which should also include the work of Simon Sheridan
and David McGillivray. As has been pointed out before, don’t let that high
price for the hardback put you off: this is an academic publication, which
means that a more affordable paperback should be along soon. If you can’t wait
that long, simply request a copy of Hotbeds
of Licentiousness from your local library. Perhaps they can supply it in a
plain brown wrapper.
You can order a copy from
the publisher here: https://www.berghahnbooks.com/title/HalliganHotbeds