Exposé / The House on Straw Hill / Trauma

Having secured a £500,000 advance for his best-selling debut novel, Paul Martin (Udo Kier) is feeling under severe pressure as he attempts to pen its follow-up. After a move to an isolated farmhouse fails to help Paul overcome his writer’s block, his increasingly desperate agent suggests that he might hire a live-in secretary and dictate the work to her. Linda (Linda Hayden) duly arrives, but soon proves to have ulterior motives of her own...

Known as Exposé and The House on Straw Hill in the UK and as Trauma in the US, this 1975 thriller is notable for being one of the few home-grown entries on the list of once-banned “video nasties”. Yet it’s also of a piece with the over-represented Italian and Spanish entries in being that fateful combination of independently made, low-budget exploitation film. (Looking back at the video nasties affair, one of their unanticipated consequences was facilitating the major studios in taking the same kind of control over what played on small screens as they had long enjoyed over the large one.)

As with many of the video nasties, much of the reason for Expose’s banning can be attributed to being in the wrong place at the wrong time: True, it features an awkward, ambiguously presented rape scene, that recalls one of its more obvious influences, namely Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs. True, it’s got a fair bit of nudity and kinkiness, with Paul fetishistically donning rubber gloves before having sex and Linda being prone to masturbating wherever, whenever the mood takes her. True, there’s a fair bit of violence and gore.


No glove, no love

But in all this there’s nothing that could really be considered obscene nor likely to deprave and corrupt, with this fact all the more evident when you consider that the film had been in circulation since 1976 without attracting much unwanted attention. (As distinct from wanted, given the opportunistic casting of mid-1970s glamour queen Fiona Richmond as Paul’s girlfriend.)

It’s not a bad little film of its type, with writer-director James Kenelm-Clarke displaying a decent understanding of the mechanics of suspense and shock and making good use of his chosen (and necessarily limited) set of interior and exterior locations to convey his character’s isolation and claustrophobia.

The denouement may be a bit predictable for some. But rather than seeing this as a weakness, I’d be inclined to take it as something that follows logically and consistently from Kenelm-Clarke’s approach.

Basically the film’s unwritten rule seems to be that if something is mentioned or not mentioned there is a underlying reason for this that will eventually be explained. Paul’s telling one interviewer that his first novel took him three months to write and another that it took six months actually matters, as does Linda’s failure to discuss her ex-husband after intimating that she is no longer married.

It’s something that further shows Kenelm-Clarke was out to make a ‘proper’ film, rather than just relying on Richmond’s presence to bring undemanding punters in, as unfortunately would would be the case on their later collaboration, Hardcore.

It also helps here that Richmond isn’t required to carry the film, as unfortunately was also the case with Hardcore. It’s not that she lacks presence, even compared to co-stars Kier (who was dubbed, though this doesn’t detract particularly from his performance) and Hayden (who soon after disowned the film, although curiously she makes an appearance in the current remake). Rather it’s just that she has the wrong type of presence.


Classic Hayden


Classic Kier


Classic (?!) Richmond

British TV comedy and advertising regular Karl Howman appears as a local youth. His “I am a Vampyre” T-shirt references Larraz’s film Vampyres, on which the multi-talented Kenelm-Clarke had worked as composer. (Oddly Kenelm-Clarke doesn't provide the music here.)


yo soy vampyre

Giallo fans may want to compare Exposé to Sergio Amadeo’s Amuck, with which it has some distinct similarities, co-incidental or otherwise.

Hardcore

Though not to be confused with Paul Schrader’s 1979 film of the same name, this 1977 British oddity is worth comparing to its US counterpart for the way doing so highlights the differences in attitude and approach between the films and the two countries here.

As a Hollywood studio production, Schrader’s film avoids showing actual hardcore pornographic footage. But it is at least discussed within its narrative, just as reaction shots make it clear what George C. Scott’s puritan protagonist feels about hardcore and its demi-monde, the one his daughter has unexpectedly entered into. Indeed, were it not for the need to maintain the distinction between the X (non-Hollywood, or porn) and the R (Hollywood, or not porn) ratings, one could imagine Schrader as having incorporated X-certificate material into his film.


What's the title, again?

In 1970s Britain, meanwhile, there was no real stigma attached to the X certificate – Schrader’s Hardcore was released as an X – but an almost absolute proscription on the production and distribution of hardcore material.

This puts James Kenelm Clarke’s vehicle for Fiona Richmond, one of the pre-eminent British sex stars of the time, in a curious position: It could use the title Hardcore, but not present Richmond or anyone else in anything beyond softcore footage.

Indeed, it’s approximately 23 minutes in before we get any full frontal (female) nudity, in a scene which also allows for the incorporation of some obligatory pseudo-lesbian frolics.


The idea of the 'production number' normally has different meanings in the musical and the porn film

If this non-hardcore approach implies a bait and switch it is one that the filmmakers seem to have anticipated. Within the film within the film Richmond is repeatedly asked by a documentary filmmaker to explain, to define, what hardcore is. She never does so, thus neatly sidestepping any truth-in-advertising issues. Must be some other hardcore you, the desperate, lonely, dirty-Mac wearing cliché, were thinking of and looking for. (Doubtless, however, many in this target audience also knew just where to get ‘the real thing’ denied them here.)

While today Britain is more liberal in some ways, in others things have moved in the other direction. I doubt that if the film were to be made today it would include a family album type shot of a pre-pubescent topless Richmond for fear of attracting the paedophile demographic. An episode in which a supposedly teenage Richmond has sex with her teacher would likewise likely be unacceptable for similar reasons; certainly it could not be played for laughs.


A 31 or 32 year old plays a schoolgirl

The past, as they say, is a different country.

Yet, to trot out another cliché, the more things change the more they stay the same.

Witness another episode in which Richmond appears on a television programme to debate the subjects of sex and censorship with the obligatory Mary Whitehouse stand-in, here named Norma Blackhurst.

Richmond – or her scriptwriters – first draw a comparison between appetites for sex and food, thus attempting to naturalise what the puritanical Blackhurst denies as unnatural.

They then manage to draw Blackhurst into using the kind of ‘foul’ language that she had asserted never to use, leading to dialogue that is as much bleeps as actual words.


Blackhurst

The impartial presenter – whom Richmond later has sex with, alongside less well-known, actual hardcore starlet Heather Deeley – contributes to the debate by attacking that familiar chink in the pro-censorship campaigner’s armour, their knowing something is wrong without actually reading, looking at or listening to it: “How can you pass fair comment if you’ve only glanced at it?”

Today the denial of the Whitehouse types – take a bow the renamed National Viewers and Listeners Assocation, Mediawatch – remains the same, even if the TV station would no longer bother bleeping the words, instead just prefacing the program with a strong language warning. But this kind of thing inevitably doesn’t satisfy the Mediawatch bluenoses. (I refrain from linking to Mediawatch for the obvious reason. Why link to an enemy?)

If the filmmakers critique here was to be expected, what was perhaps less predictable were the way in which the film deals with the softcore magazine for which Richmond worked and which was published by her partner, Paul Raymond. (Raymond was, by most accounts, also a silent partner on this film.)


Raymond Towers? (Phallic double entendre intentional, given much of the film's dialogue)

Men Only’s editor is presented in less than flattering terms, while the other staffer we see as a lecherous Dick Randall alike who is always groping the models’ breasts. When Richmond, who works for the magazine both here and in real life, suggests the possibility of a feature that would involve her screwing in a balloon over the Alps, the idea goes down like a lead zeppelin: “Have you thought of the cost?!”

Of course such self-critique remains at a base level: You admit that what you are doing is shit, but keep on doing it as long as someone is willing to pay for this selfsame shit.

There’s not much to be said about James Kenelm Clarke’s direction, other than that is better than might be expected: Functional and efficient, it’s not shit.

His music is another matter entirely. The man, who worked as James Clarke in the Library Music scene of the time, proves to have some serious grooves going on. (Hardcore’s music has been released on CD, along with that for Expose and Let’s Get Laid, both also starring Richmond.)