Stanley Long
Related: British cinema - British erotica - British exploitation - exploitation film - European exploitation film
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X-RATED COMEDIES
Yes, we know we're dragging Creamguide's respectable name through the mud with this choice of subject, and we're very, very sorry. But, the fact that we can't think of anything else that starts with X aside, there's much worthy of exploration here, as these films provide not only a compendium of British comedy acting talent in its rent-paying dotage, but they also form part of the story of the British film industry's post-'60s decline as a whole. Oh, and it's the richest seam of film titles based around weak puns and ending in exclamation marks we know of, which must count for something, surely?
The story of the sexcom begins with former horror film cinematographer and exploitation entrepreneur extraordinaire Stanley A Long. Long made his name, in the law courts as much as the cinema, with 1961's WEST END JUNGLE ("The sex-film that London banned! Made in the actual places of vice!!") a breathless "exposé" of Soho's sex trade, made in a mock-documentary style that was to provide the blueprint for British sex films for a decade before comedy came into the equation. Various follow-ups appeared in short order, with titles like LONDON IN THE RAW and TAKE OFF YOUR CLOTHES AND LIVE! 1965's PRIMITIVE LONDON is a bizarre bit of salacious moralising indeed, with scenes of beatniks, kids and Billy J Kramer being interviewed about pop music and, of course, "free love", familiar enough from endless '60s documentaries, strangely intercut with gruesome footage of car crashes, operations and battery hens being slaughtered, and appearances from Barry Cryer and Mick MacManus. [...] --http://tv.cream.org/specialassignments/films/filmsx.htm [May 2005]
Naughty! (1971) - Stanley A. Long
When smut-peddlers make a film about smut-peddling, you don't look for a hidden agenda. It's all there in the immortal words of Al Goldstein, editor of Screw Magazine and guest of the world's first porno festival in Amsterdam, where he waxes lyrical about the `inalienable right to jerk off'. It's freedom, baby, according to British pornographer Stanley Long (keep it clean, people) as his team takes us on a part-doco, part-reenacted romp through the history of erotic literature, via Victorian hypocrisy to the new-found Euro-swinger's paradises. Like the greasy little man who makes spank films with his wife in the suburbs says, it's all about kicks, and I'm sure the little girl at the zoo watching a primate spank his monkey will agree. A time capsule of sexual mores, and part of a rash of British imitations on the racier Sex Report films from the Continent. See also: Groupie Girl, Permissive, On The Game, The Wife Swappers, Suburban Wives, Commuter Husbands. --Andrew Leavold (trash@trashvideo.com.au) from Brisbane, Australia via http://university.imdb.com/title/tt0067477/maindetails [May 2006]Naughty, or rather Naughty- a report on pornography and erotica through the ages, to give the film its full title and M.O. holds more documentary worth, its part 360 degree snapshot of the early 70's off Piccadilly sex industry, part re-enactments of the goings on of their Victorian predecessors and part report on the world's first pornographic film festival held at Amsterdam a year earlier. [May 2006]
See also: Wet Dream Film Festival (1970) - Amsterdam - Andrew Leavold - Henry Hayler
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