Cinema
Skin games
Ian Cameron Any interest to be found in the new programme at the Jacey, Charing Cross Road, does not come from the quality of its contents. If its title is accurate, The Best of the New York Erotic Film Festival indicates that the patrons of this event did not have a very thrilling time.
Apart from some introductory material, The Best is made up of eight items, of which the two most enjoyable date from the 1920s and are rude cartoons in the visual style of Felix the Cat. The primitive but nimble drawing is charmingly appropriate to the lavatory wall humour : the more sustained of the pair features a character called Everready who suffers from mobile and independently-minded genitals of remarkable proportions. The adventures into which they lead him—and he is often some distance behind them—aroused considerable hilarity in an audience which did not seem to be there with the main idea of laughing.
The more recent pieces divide into two groups, straight and avant-garde. The straight trio include a faintly humorous sketch in which a girl derives unusual stimulation from the man on her television screen. The other two, the only stretches of the film that were at all erotic, show girls masturbating, a black girl aroused by her own image in a mirror and a white girl who, stimulated by football games on television and baseball practice in the front yard, rummages through a closet full of sporting apparatus, some of which one might have thought would be more efficacious than the football with which she reaches an orgasm. The avant-garde contributions were a sorry repetition of tricks that already looked stale in the ancestors of the New York
underground a quarter of a century or so ago: rapid cutting, accelerated motion, animation drawn freehand on the film, colour distortion and extreme magnification. We are offered a long sequence of huge close-UPS of skin with various unidentified folds and interstices whose intended suggestive qualities are, I suppose, meant to be undercut bY a final zoom out to reveal that the skin belongs to a baby. The big close-up garlic, particularly when combined with funny colour, is strikingly unerotic, as any interest that one can summon is devoted to working out what is on the screen—isn't that a .. • 110' it's a finger ... ah, there's one ... but why is it deep purple . . . One of these sequences does undeniably contain shots of genitals in operation, albeit rendered almost insignificant by the vastness of the close-ups and doing nothing at all to relieve the tedium. Presumably because of these and the masturbating ladies, the British Board of Film Censors has refused a certificate; the compilation is venturing out under a Greater London Council X certificate, the first film to do so since the similarlY equipped More about the Language of Love was struck down in the courts. It is hard to imagine how The Best of the New York Erotic Film Festival couldcorruPt anyone, and the only people to be offended (except by the boredom) will be the select few who are viewing it with that in mind': the rest will be content to keep their E1.3° their pockets and go their way in peace. I 011 see no valid reason, apart from abject cowardice in the face of pressure, why the BBFC -should not have given the thing. 3 straight X certificate, although it is ariPosIte to remember that the Board is in business not to protect the public but to keep the Mg] industry out of trouble. It might not be a thing for the campaign against censorshir a battle were to be fought over something ast totally worthless as The Best; the contes, would then have to be over matters 0, principle unobscured by subjective. a° specific considerations of artistic merit. At the respectable end of the film business, we are offered The Last Hard Men (Carlton' X certificate) which has nothing more till. a double rape and a considerable amount °, violence. This pits psychopathic Jame' Coburn, who has escaped after eleven Years on a chain gang, against Sheriff Charltosn Heston, now retired. It is another variant c).. the changing West theme, with motor ca,i'S: telephones and superannuated heroes hois_t_ ing themselves with difficulty back into lyric saddle. The direction by Andrew McLaglen, who has in the past dissiPateu,, better ideas than this, is so ill-judged that slow-motion pursuit leading up to the raP'es was rightly greeted with laughter. At till
one is more curious about the activities of characters who are off the screen than interested by those in view. Christopher Mitchum, playing the heroine's suitor, a hydroponics expert from the East, seems to have inherited quite a bit of his father' talent as well as a recognisable family likeness.
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