Striptease Extravaganza / Mary Millington's Striptease Extravaganza

Or the uses and abuses of montage...

One of the key divisions in film theory is between proponents of the long take and proponents of montage. The use of the long take is usually associated with realism, and entails the presentation of blocks of space and time where the relationships between images emerge 'naturally'. Montage, by contrast, is associated with formalism, and entails the construction of relationships between otherwise disconnected images, perhaps in the service of another (higher) reality.

I mention this because Striptease Extravaganza / Mary Millington's Striptease Extravaganza is an exercise in the latter, albeit one which few montage theorists would likely want to take as an illustration of their idea(l)s.

First of all, there are those titles: Millington friend / exploiter / enabler John M. East introduces the film, proclaiming that Millington was a great striptease artist who made a profound impression on the form. As evidence he presents some scenes from Queen of the Blues, the last film that she made before her 1979 suicide.

But, if you don't care about Millington, or don't find dead women sexually attractive, it's then on to the main attractions of the other, sans Millington, title: Comedian Bernie Winters and 16 women supposedly competing for the stripper of the year title, £1000 and a movie contract.

Then there is the complete dissociation between what is happening on stage and the reaction shots of the audience. The latter, you see, have also been taken from Queen of the Blues, although unlike the introduction this is not stated. If you look carefully there are never any establishing shots which show the performers and the audience together, nor any pans or tracks from one to the other.

Then we have the complete dissociation between the pianist and drummer on stage and the music we hear, reinforced for those familiar with other David Sullivan product of the time by the re-use of cues from Emmanuelle in Soho. (Some of the cues do have a pleasing Nico Fidenco type vibe to them, though, and wouldn't be out of place in a Laura Gemser vehicle)

Turning to Emmanuelle in Soho, we also have its two female leads, Mandy Miller / Quick and Julie Lee, amongst the 16 strippers. The former is introduced as Vicky from Sweden, the latter as Julie from Hong Kong. Neither wins through to the semi-finals, though Winters does announce Julie as one of the semi-finalists even if she isn't actually present on stage.

Nor does either speak. In Lee's case this is presumably because her Yorkshire accent would have demolished the lie that she was from Hong Kong.

Not, however, that any of those we do hear speak make any attempt to present themselves as being from Turkey, France or wherever else 'exotic'.

A reason why they wouldn't is that not being white British often means being subjected to racist 'humour': Vicky from Turkey is a 'Chapati' while Maxine “from Botswana” can be distinguished from Cathy “from South England” by being “the darker one”.

In fairness, however, Winters also does some self-deprecating/hating Jewish jokes.

Then we have the incogruity of some of the strippers doing paired routines despite this supposedly being a competition.

Then there is the sudden injection of some cynical realism when one of them, Cathy, proclaims in a voice-off that she had better win since she had given the main judge a blow-job. This leads to further re-use of outtakes from Emmanuelle in Soho.

Cathy does, however, win the competition.

Art imitating Life?

The losers, meanwhile, must also include anyone who ever went to see the film on its original release, for entertainment...

Emmanuelle in Soho

Young couple Paul and Kate (Julie Lee) and their bisexual flatmate Emanuelle (Angie Quick, billed as Mandy Miller) are short of money. Paul and Emmanuelle try their hand at glamour photography, while Kate gets a job as a stripper at a nude review, Hang About Sebastian. Paul takes his photos to Bill (John M. East), who tells Paul that they are not really what the punters are after and kindly offers to take them off his hands for £50, then sells them for several times this. After Bill has worked this scam several times, Paul realises he is being conned and schemes his revenge. He invites Bill and his secretary cum mistress Sheila to a party, also attended by the cast and artistic crew of Hang About Sebastian. Inevitably, several of the guests pair off, including Bill. Paul secretly films Bill, then blackmails him...

Released to cinemas thirty years ago this month, Emmanuelle in Soho pretty much marked the death of the British sex film as a theatrical form.


The once proud Tigon tiger-lion...




British Cinema: From Blow-Up to this in the span of 15 or so years...


Blackstone and Hooper should be familiar names to students of the genre, with the latter also having some surprise Italian connections...

The film was bankrolled by porn baron David Sullivan as a vehicle for Julie Lee. She was a half-Chinese model who was being groomed as the successor to Mary Millington, who had committed suicide two years earlier and whose legacy it was becoming harder for Sullivan to exploit.


Keep it on!

Lee was originally cast as the Emmanuelle character. This could have suggested more of a connection, however tenuous, to the unofficial Emanuelle cycle from Italy insofar as these had similarly stressed the exotic appeal of 'Black' Emanuelle and 'Yellow' Emanuelle. Any sense of Oriental(ist) fantasy is however immediately dispelled when Lee opens her mouth and reveals her broad Yorkshire accent; had it been an Italian film, shot silent and post-synchronised, this could of course have been avoided.


East and some publicity for other Sullivan product


Lee and Miller swapped roles when it became apparent that she really could not act. Think about that: One model in a sex film being replaced by another because the quality of her performance was not up to scratch!

It is not, however, that the rest of the cast are much better. The actor playing Paul -- I use the term loosely -- performs primarily through raising his eyebrows, while producer and co-writer East reprises his Max Miller comedy routine from the Millington cash-in Queen of the Blues, firing off gag after gag, mostly unfunny.

The direction from first and only timer David Hughes is perfunctory. There is however the odd moment, such as the rack focus from Paul and Emmanuelle in a potentially compromising situation to Kate as she enters the room positioned in the back of the frame, in between them, which suggests someone making an effort.

The version under review ran barely an hour, with much of the running time padded out by the various performance and softcore numbers -- or, depending on your point of view, there is not enough of these and too much of plot stuff.


Signs of the times

Internationally it was also released with a documentary type introduction to Soho and with hardcore inserts. For the present day viewer, meanwhile, its interest is more as a classic piece of trash and for the incidental historical, social and cultural details, ranging from dialogue indicating a pre-AIDS fashionability of bisexuality (though other lines predictably suggest this was exclusively for women); to the giant top-loading VHS machine that was killing off this kind of cinema; to the size of flat the three supposedly impoverished friends have; to Paul's massive bouffant cum mullet.

Lee tragically died less than two years later after crashing her car and suffering massive burns. She was on her way home from a beauty contest in which, as the Monopoly card has it, she won second place...

Queen of the Blues

Even by the low standards of the 1970s British sex film this is a bottom of the barrel production. Bankrolled by porn magnate David Sullivan as a star vehicle for Mary Millington, who plays the title role, it was produced and directed by Willy Roe.

It's a sixty-minute piece that’s too long to work as a short, yet is too short to be a feature.

Rather than presenting a narrative punctuated with strip and comedy routines, it's more strip and comedy routines punctuated by a narrative, one that doesn’t really develop before abruptly ending with a deus ex machina.

Basically gangster Roscoe sends two of his heavies (one played by the inimitable Milton Reid, the other by future Hi-De-Hi fixture Felix Bowness) to extort protection money from the Blues club, not realising that it is owned by another gangster (Fawlty Towers' Ballard Berkeley) who duly makes this known.


Reid and Bowness

Another subplot, invoking a ghost haunting the place, is even less developed.

We get eight or so minutes of backstage chatter and strip routines before the first couple of minutes of plot. Then we get another couple of minutes of stripping, followed by John M. East doing a Max Miller impersonation as the club’s compere, followed by Millington doing her first number, admittedly intercut with the first proper exchange between the compere and the would-be extortionists, followed by some more routines.


Can't act, can't dance, can't sing about sums it up

25 minutes have elapsed by this point and the total story content is probably about four minutes tops.

There are some points of interest nonetheless: The strip routines make the connection to the cinema of attractions clear, as do the constant cutaways to the diegetic audience (curiously the same despite the action supposedly taking place on different nights) and the Music Hall nature of East's routines (see also Come Play with Me).


East does Max Miller

The strippers' remarks backstage are also oddly at odds with the illusion of glamour: “What’s the fascination? Surely when you’ve seen one set of tits you’ve seen them all?!”

Argento fans may also care to note that Geraldine Hooper, who plays Massimo Ricci in Deep Red, is credited as the club’s receptionist.

The pressbook for the film, distributed by Tigon, describes scenes that are not actually present and, one suspects, were never filmed either.

The Playbirds

London, the late 1970s. Someone is killing the models of porn magazine Playbirds. With no real leads to go on, the police decide to send one of their own undercover / uncovered in a bid to make the maniac reveal himself from amongst the suspects already identified / proposed. They are:

• The Playbirds photographer with a history of violence.
• The politician who preaches virtue in public and practices his vices in private.
• The Christian prophet of doom.
• The Playbirds owner who finds that his sales increase with each new murder.

Now, when you consider that the film is the product of the real life Playbirds owner David Sullivan, you can immediately strike two of these four suspects off the list, namely the men making their livelihoods off the porn industry. Concomitantly the likelihood of either of the anti-porn types being the killer is doubled.


Alan Lake as / is David Sullivan

Not that the film really open up space for discussing pornography anyway, other than to mock the anti-porn types of the time – as Sullivan did by naming another of his magazines, Whitehouse, after the religious puritan campaigner of the same surname. Still, the way in which his own alter-ego is presented seems somewhat curious. For he is crass, lacking in taste, obsessed with his horse racing (“use the whip!”) and generally someone you would very much like to see get his comeuppance.

We also get some footage of the mechanics of porn business, with copy upon copy of Playbirds being printed and stapled, rolling off the presses and being bundled up and into boxes for distribution: Fascinating from a documentary point of view, but distinctly anti-erotic.




The work of porn in the age of mechanical reproduction

Much the same can be said of the glamour shoots: Although the intention is clearly to make things seem sexy and exciting, the very fact that we're aware of this intentionality, or a lack of spontaneity and authenticity serves to distance us.

This emergent auto-critique also applies to the funniest and sleaziest moment in the entire film, in which Inspectors Porno and Bribeasy – er, Holbourne and Morgan – interview volunteers for going undercover and uncovered as a model in a bid to root out the maniac. Bump and grind music plays on the soundtrack as a succession of unsuccessful candidates strip off, the camera retaining a detached, observational eye throughout. Then, when glamour star Mary Millington steps into the breach, the camera becomes an active participant, moving around her and going in for close-ups as her routine continues.


Cue obligatory pseudo-lesbian scene

As with the giallo-inspired murder set-pieces, it's a moment of spectacle that makes us all the more aware of the banality of the bulk of the film, be it the detectives at work or 'Sullivan' at the racetrack.

Willy Roe is also the kind of point-and-shoot director whose attempts at visual style, such as a hand-held mirror based sex scene, don't really come off anyway.

Like other Sullivan productions most of the cast divides into two camps: Besides the models and porn types who cannot act but are happy providing the nudity and simulated sex, we also have various slumming thespians happy for just about the only work available them at the time.


Suzy Mandel

Somewhere in between, in uncredited roles, there are also some interesting other figures: unlikely 50-something porn performer Derek Aylward as a client in a massage parlour, candidly / knowingly acknowledged as the front for a brothel that the police are fully aware of, and performance artist / musician Cosey Fanni Tutti as a model; while her work within the British porn industry was also part of her wider art project – she posed for Sullivan's magazines and mounted an exhibition called Pornography – the film does not address this subject.

Playbirds goes off the rails a bit towards the end and finishes with one of those shock endings commonly found in weaker thrillers.

Yet if it leaves you dissatisfied and feeling cheated, this is perhaps apropos given the film's milieu, of a product which promises more than it can ever deliver and leaves you wanting more. (Not that such charges can only be levelled against porn...)

Insofar as the film is essentially 1959's The Cover Girl Murders revamped for a more permissive age and filtered through contemporary exploitation trends, intertexts are not difficult to find: The politician recalls the judge in Night after Night; the use of computer profiling in an attempt to narrow down the list of suspects The Bird with the Crystal Plumage; the glamour/model/sleaze setting Strip Nude for Your Killer, Delirium: Photos of Gioa and so on; the Playbirds of reality/Playbirds of fiction element the diegetic and non-diegetic Tenebres; the cod occultism Virgin Witch or Satanic Rites of Dracula; and fetishistic shots of black gloves around women's necks and a clue concealed in the photographic blow-up countless gialli.


The hands of doom


The white heat of the Scotland Yard computer system

The film also features plenty of jaw-droppingly funny / bad and just plain distasteful dialogue (“O goody, I'm going to be raped, I've never been raped before”) and some nice location shots of Soho for good measure.

[See also: http://www.beardyfreak.com/rvbirds.php
http://www.hysteria-lives.co.uk/hysterialives/Hysteria/the_playbird_murders.html ]

Confessions from the David Galaxy Affair / The David Galaxy Affair / Sex Star

During the 1970s the bottom pretty much fell out of the British film industry. One of the few genres to remain profitable was the sex film. Because of the strictness of British censorship laws hardcore porn, never became the dominant form as in the US and in continental Europe. Instead, a particularly British kind of softcore sex film continued to dominate, much as it had done in the previous decade.

At the same time new players entered the game. Some were established filmmakers struggling to find work in even more marginally respectable genres such as horror – take a bow Val Guest, for instance. Others were part of the emergent pornocracy. Of these the most important was arguably David Sullivan, the UK’s answer to Penthouse’s Bob Guccione. Unlike Guccione, however, Sullivan had no pretensions to art: The idea of producing a Caligula, of making a serious and would-be respectable X film, would never have crossed his mind. Gore Vidal, John Gielgud and so on cost real money.

Rather, Sullivan was a master of bait and switch, promising the dirty mac brigade more than his films ever delivered and taking them for a ride. There was no benefit, after all, in either telling the truth or endeavouring to actually offer punters the hardcore they wanted, as demonstrated by the fates of John Lindsay – sent to jail for openly selling hardcore – and Mary Millington– hounded to suicide for believing in sexual liberation as a freedom issue and practicing what she preached.

Instead, it was always about reaching a comfortable and profitable arrangement with the established order rather than really challenging it.


The mark of quality - not!

But Sullivan was also like Guccione in another way: An early master of media synergy, he promoted the films he produced via his porn magazines and vice versa. Though Confessions from the David Galaxy Affair doesn’t go as far as The Playbirds – a nasty, giallified remake of The Cover Girl Murders with a title derived from one of Sullivan’s magazines and Millington’s policewoman going undercover as a model – it nevertheless again features Millington alongside other models from his stable such as Vicky Scott.

In truth, however, this is the first con aspect of Confessions from the David Galaxy Affair, insofar as the roles played by Sullivan’s models are relatively minor.

Or perhaps it isn’t a con, in that the title at least foregrounds Galaxy himself, even as it alludes to the Confessions of series that it has nothing whatsoever to really do with, alongside throwing in a general purpose Affair for good measure.

This only leads to a larger problem, however, inasmuch as Galaxy, as played by Alan Lake is really a pretty repulsive individual that its difficult for anyone to feel much for; indeed in the course of the narrative he telephones his mother, who tells him in no uncertain terms to fuck right off.

He’s a sexist, racist, homophobic unreconstructed example of 1970s machismo with a profitable sideline in fortune telling. He may also be guilty of involvement in a bank robbery some five years ago, a robbery in which a guard died.

This last aspect is the thing that amounts to a narrative drive, although it doesn’t exactly propel the story along at pace. Rather, we have subplots involving Galaxy’s new potential landlady, played by Lake’s real life wife Diana Dors – she also contributes vocals to the truly awful theme song – and his attempt to raise some cash by being the man who can give the woman who’s had 1000 lovers what she’s never had, namely an orgasm. (Hence the opportunistic “Mary Millington meets Super-Stud!!” tagline.)

Somewhat incongrously, we also have a trip to a VD clinic – a strange interjection of reality, albeit a strangely comforting one from a time when everything could be cured by a quick course of penicillin – and a visit to the racetrack.

Dors, the British Marilyn Monroe (or Jane Mansfield) was actually a pretty good actress, as demonstrated by her work in Yield to the Night. Unfortunately by this point in time – four years before her death from cancer and Lake’s suicide soon after – her talent was very much in decline.

Much the same might be said for Lake, though it’s questionable how much talent he had in the first place. Had it not been a David Sullivan production one could almost imagine his intention in playing Galaxy as being to alienate the audience, to set them against the character or make them begin to question their own assumptions and attitudes.


Alan Lake - sex god or Mr Self Destruct?

But Sullivan certainly didn’t do irony; as we’ve said, gold was all he was interested in.

As such, the hints of self-hatred that may be detected in Lake’s performance must be ascribed a darker, more personal motive. One moment that encapsulates this, as Lake’s own De Niro/La Motta moment, comes at the end of the film when he’s in a cell, Lake having himself been imprisoned for his part in a pub brawl. Revenge will be his...

As is often the case in this kind of production the supporting cast, the kind simply grateful for the chance of some work, provide less troubling relief. Euro-horror fans will note John Moulder-Brown of The House that Screamed and Vampire Circus, the most fantastique of Hammer’s vampire outings. Followers of British TV of the time will surely recognise Glynn “Dave” Edwards; in a possible in-joke the apartments where Galaxy lives are called Winchester, just like the club ran by Edward’s character in the long-running series Minder.

Willy Roe’s direction is functional and efficient, certainly more than this was too much to ask for, but perhaps thankfully he at least doesn't give us any less.

In the final analysis, Confessions from the David Galaxy Affair can be recommended to scholars of British sleaze and low culture, if no one else.

Hellcats: Mud Wrestling

Or, from Konga to Queen Kong

Not the 1976 Frank Agrama entry but the American female wrestler, Dee Booher, of the same name and a film that makes even Agrama's monstrosity look accomplished by comparison.

For what we have here, as the title indicates, is a short on the subject of mud wrestling, a sports entertainment that sees scantily clad women rolling around in mud for the pleasure of a mostly male and plebian audience .

The drama is provided by the US versus UK angle and its provision of the necessary villain and hero role functions, all played with appropriate excess (cf Roland Barthes' famous essay in Mythologies).

The main points of interest are sociological and historical rather than aesthetic - unless, of course, seeing women rolling around in mud gives you a particular thrill.

And that, I suppose, that was what the film-makers were banking upon.

For bankrolling Hellcats: Mud Wrestiling was none other than David Sullivan, one of the UK's biggest porn barons. He was the man who specialised in the bait and switch, of promising the punters one thing - usually then-illegal hardcore material - and giving them another - the same old softcore as last time and, if they hadn't wised up yet, the time before that.

With a plethora of magazines to uncritically hype his wares it was a winning strategy.

One of the few occasions on which Sullivan himself was taken for a ride was by veteran nude photographer Harrison Marks on Come Play with Me, a bizarre combination of 70s softcore sex comedy and old-style music hall that looked all but unsaleable.

But thanks to his magazines' ceaseless promotion of the film and its nominal star, Mary Millington, along with keeping it in one of his cinemas for four years solid, Sullivan still managed to somehow make the film profitable. (Among the posters for other films featured within Hellcats, even the not so sharp eyed can spot one for Come Play with Me.)

It was around this time that Sullivan met John M. East, the disreputable member of a respectable theatrical family. Their association outlived Millington's suicide, with East going on to appear in other productions by Sullivan's Roldvale company, within which the porn mogul also sought to find a replacement for his most profitable but now dead asset.

East is the writer on Hellcats: Mud Wrestling and conducts the on-screen interviews - with an admirably straight face, it must be said, given the preposterousness of his subjects - while the film might be read as a vehicle both for its 'sport' and for another porn performer, Vicky Scott.

Incredible though it may seem, Hellcats: Mud Wrestling may not even represent the nadir of the British sexploitation film. Its companion pieces Queen Kong: The Amazonian Woman and Foxy Female Boxers would also have to be considered contenders...