She was also a high-end sex worker who felt no shame in her chosen trade, being an enthusiastic, controversial, advocate of sexual liberation, with all the unwelcome attention from the authorities such a stance attracted, as attributed in her suicide notes. Her appeal can be simply summed up as the girl-next-door, whose beguilingly wholesome looks betrayed her public image as a voracious, insatiable fantasy figure in continental hardcore 8mm quickies such as Miss Bohrloch and in the pages of Whitehouse and Playmates (If there was a US equivalent, consider Marilyn Chambers). If one woman embodied the contradictions at the heart of post-war Britain’s uneasy relationship with sex and smut, it was the diminutive, blonde with the Colgate smile who would become the UK’s first lady of sex. At the peak of the so-called permissive society, us Brits liked our sex cheeky and furtive, our cultural mindset being a semi-puritanical, self-flagellating cocktail of prurience and prudishness hence the popularity of the Confessions films and farces such as Percy and The Love Ban, where no randy deed goes unpunished, and grubby cautionary tales like Cool It Carol, Permissive or Take An Easy Ride.Įnter Mary Millington – or just shake hands with her, if you prefer. This cinematic sexual revolution even pushed the boundaries of what was permissible in ‘respectable’ arthouse cinema, for instance Don’t Look Now, The Night Porter and Last Tango In Paris, while Russ Meyer made a clean breast of Uncle Sam with Supervixens and Up! And, as we have seen when we took a deep dive into Scorpio Films’ ouvre, T&A single-handedly turbo-charged the Netherlands’ cinema industry.īack in dear old Blighty, the nation of saucy seaside postcards, No Sex Please We’re British, ‘nudge nudge wink wink’ innuendo and double-entendres, presided over by self-appointed moral guardians Mary Whitehouse and Lord Longford, never really caught up with the sexual liberation movement that was taking place on either side of the sceptred isle. In the States and on mainland Europe, it was making in-roads into the mainstream with glossy hardcore efforts such as Radley Metzger’s The Opening of Misty Beethoven, Gerard Damiano’s The Devil In Miss Jones and Lasse Braun’s Sensations achieving commercial and critical success and the soft-focus, softcore antics of the likes of Just Jaeckin’s Emmanuelle and David Hamilton’s Bilitis brought erotica into the lifestyle pages of Sunday newspapers. The adult film industry in the 1970s was a funny old, two-backed beast. ❉ We Are Cult comes play with Mary, Mary, quite contrary…
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