The Nudist Story Uncovered

The Nudist Story (1960) 

 

It's gay! It's charming! It's beautiful! It's the picture about altogetherness! 

 

 

I. 

 

One of my favourite Carry On films - and I suspect one of everybody's favourite Carry On films - is Carry On Camping (dir. Gerald Thomas, 1969). 

 

But my favourite scene, however, is not the one in which Dr Soaper leads an outdoor aerobics session, during which Babs's bikini top flies off and he famously instructs Matron to take them away!  

 

No, I think my favourite scene is the opening one set in a local Playhouse cinema where Sid and Bernie have taken their girlfriends, Joan and Anthea, to see a film entitled Nudist Paradise about the joys and benefits of naturism [1]. 

 

And it was this scene that I was reminded of when watching an entertaining British movie directed by Ramsey Harrington and starring Shelley Martin and Brian Cobby, that has been described as the Citizen Kane of nudist films ...    

 

 

II. 

 

The Nudist Story (1960), released in the US with the title Pussycats Paradise (1967) [2], is essentially 85 minutes of naturist propaganda - it was produced by the Danzinger brothers [3] with the co-operation of the British Sun Bathers Association [4] - masquerading as a romantic drama written by Mark Grantham (under the name Norman Armstrong). 

 

The film also gives us two song and dance numbers, as well as more naked breasts and big bottoms bobbling about all over the screen than you can shake a stick at. Despite all one may have seen, nothing quite prepares you for this film; Carry On Camping's Sid Boggle would love every minute; Joan and Anthea less so. 

 

The plot - and there is a plot - involves an uptight businesswoman called Jane Robinson (played by Shelly Martin) who pretty much inherits the entire estate belonging to her very wealthy but somewhat eccentric grandfather, including the Avonmore Sun Camp where naturists like to get their kits off and relax or play sports in the altogether.     

 

Jane does not approve of Avonmore - her prudish attitude to nudism similar to that of Joan Fussey's in Carry On Camping - and so she decides to sell the property in order to raise funds to pay the inheritance tax owing on the estate.   

 

However, persuaded by handsome lawyer and camp director Bob Sutton (Brian Cobby) to at least visit the place and meet some of the sun-bronzed campers, Jane soon falls in love with him, with the place, and, indeed, with the naturist philosophy. Thus, before long, she's as naked and free as nature intended and has changed her mind about selling Avonmore. 

 

However, Miss Robinson is to discover there's a snake in paradise in the form of Gloria (played by Jacqueline D'Orsay); an extremely jealous young woman in love with Bob who does what she can to cause trouble for Jane. 

 

Happily - and I don't really think it necessary to issue a spoiler alert as I'm sure everyone can predict the ending - Gloria's scheme to break up Bob and Jane and see Avonmore sold after all is frustrated thanks to the good work of Jane's Aunt Meg (played by Natalie Lynn) and Bob's sister-in-law Carol (played by Joy Hinton). 

 

Thus, all's well that ends well.    

 

 

III. 

 

I think the reason I like this film is that it has a proto-Lynchian feel to it, by which I mean an almost surreal and unsettling style; nothing too dark or threatening - there are no severed ears to be discovered in the grass - but the normalised and Technicolor nudity in mundane settings leaves one feeling a little disoriented, so that one hardly knows where to look at times.   

 

And, what's more, the unscrupulous and devious character of Gloria illustrates that there remains a powerful sexual element hidden beneath the apparent innocence of life at Avonmore and Tony Crombie's all-too-jaunty somewhat irritating musical score.  

 

Many critics dismiss The Nudist Story as just another film in a genre of moviemaking which, as mentioned, is more about the promotion of a healthy lifestyle (without clothes), rather than the production of great cinematic art [5]. 

 

But I would encourage readers to watch it - unembarrassed and unashamed - so as to make up their own minds: and you can do so by simply clicking here. 

 

But, if watching it au naturel, just be careful you don't drop your ice-lolly in your lap ...    

 

Brian Cobby (as Bob Sutton) & Shelley Martin (as Jane Robinson) 

having decided to see a lot more of each other in The Nudist Story 

 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Carry on Camping can be watched in full and for free on daily Motion: click here. The scene I refer to in the cinema is at 1:40 - 4:51. Readers will note that I borrow some of the lines and phrases spoken here in the post that follows. 

 

[2] The film was later re-released in the UK with the title For Members Only (as seen in the poster reproduced above). 

 

[3] Edward J. Danziger and Harry Lee Danziger were American-born brothers who produced many British films and TV shows in the 1950s and 1960s. And when I say many, I mean many; "their pervasive presence forming a part of virtually every British filmgoer's and television viewer's experience during those years", as Tise Vahimagi writes in his profile of the Danzigers on the BFI Screenonline website: click here. 

 

[4] The BSBA was formed in 1943 and soon became recognised as a national federation of nudist clubs. By 1951, they had over fifty member organisations. 

 

[5] Nudist films first appeared in the early 1930s, often as narrated documentaries rather than dramas. During the 1940s, interest in making and watching such films significantly declined, but then really took off in the '50s and early 1960s, with the arrival of colour and changes in the law governing censorship. Doris Wishman was perhaps the most prolific producer and director in the genre, with eight nudist films to her credit between 1960 and 1964.  

      Despite the best intentions of some filmmakers devoted to the naturist cause, most nudist movies were largely made for titilation and real members of nudist camps were often replaced onscreen with younger and more attractive models. Obviously, the nudity remained strictly non-sexual and whilst there were plenty of bare breasts and backsides on display, genitalia was discreetly concealed by the angle of shot or a strategically placed prop.    

      As for the acting and technical production standards, well, as stated, no one was chasing an Academy Award. Gradually, as explicit sex scenes and nudity became a regular aspect of many major films in the late 1960s and 70s, the market for nudist films dwindled away until production ceased altogether.   

 

 

Readers interested in naturism might like to see earlier posts published on Torpedo the Ark which touch on this subject: click here.  

 

 

A Tale of Two Ears and Notes on Aural Regeneration

This ear? 

Yes, that there.

 

 

I. 

 

For Síomón Solomon, the human ear "is not merely a passive cavity or vacuous opening but a transfigurative chamber of auditory fantasy" [1]. If this makes it for some the most poetic organ, so too does it help to explain why for ear fetishists aural sex is the only game in town.

 

One famous lughole lover is the American filmmaker David Lynch, who not only assigns the severed, decomposing ear crawling with ants discovered in a field at the start of his cult movie Blue Velvet (1986) symbolic importance, but gives it something of a lead role [2]. 

 

For as Solomon goes on to note, Lynch became so fixated with the prosthetic ear, that he and his make-up supervisor Jeff Goodwin referred to it as a character in its own right - 'Mr Ear' - and designed it out of silicone rather than latex, "even embellishing it, in a superbly disquieting fetishistic signature, with locks of Lynch's own scissored hair" [3]. 

 

Lynch's ear serves much the same function for Jeffrey Beaumont as the rabbit hole does for Alice; it is what leads him (and us) into a troubling and dangerous underworld. It is only when he finally comes through his ordeal that he (and we as viewers) exit the ear.

 

Of course, not all detached ears found lying on the ground have such a serious symbolic role to play. In Carry On Screaming! (dir. Gerald Thomas,1966), for example, Oddbod's ear has a strictly comic function, allowing for a couple of predictable (but still amusing) gags. 

 

Whether the ear possesses the same remarkable regenerative capacity as the repulsive-looking finger which Oddbod also loses, wasn't made clear in the film, but the possibility of regrowing lost tissues or organs is an intriguing one worth looking at in a bit more detail ...

 

 

II.

 

Salamanders are well-known for their ability to regenerate complex body parts and this has long fascinated scientists keen to discover if people too may one day be able to regrow lost limbs, etc. 

 

Whether this would involve genetically engineering human-salamander hybrids or simply transplanting blastema tissue from these loveable amphibians, I don't know. But, either way, it would be remarkable if doctors found a way to induce regeneration (and tumor regression) in animals such as ourselves with a limited ability to repair our own bodies and a penchant for the quick-fix of forming scar tissue. 

 

Having said that, it might prove easier simply to 3D print new bits and bobs in the lab, as in the recent case of a young Mexican woman who had her external ear reconstructed using this technique to create a living tissue transplant. 

 

According to press reports [4], the transplant procedure was successfully carried out at a US hospital in March 2022 and such newly developed technology promises to transform the lives of people born with microtia; a rare congenital condition in which one or both outer ears are absent or incompletely formed.

 

The company behind this groundbreaking work  - 3DBio Therapeutics - said the new ear was composed of a 3D-printed collagen hydrogel scaffold using the patient's own cartilage cells. Clinical trials involving several other patients are ongoing, but fingers crossed the organ won't be rejected so that what's ear today won't be gone tomorrow.    

 

 

 

Photos from the Microtia-Congenital Ear Institute 

and 3DBio Therapeutics

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Síomón Solomon, Hölderlin's Poltergeists, (Peter Lang, 2020), p. 101. For further discussion of Solomon's audiopoetics, see the post of 10 May 2021: click here.

 

[2] To watch the scene in Blue Velvet in which Jeffrey Beaumont (played by Kyle MacLachlan) discovers the ear, click here.

 

[3] Síomón Solomon, Hölderlin's Poltergeists, pp. 99-100. 

[4] See for example Roni Caryn Rabin, 'Doctors Transplant Ear of Human Cells, Made by 3-D Printer', The New York Times (2 June 2022), and/or Nicola Davis, 'Woman's ear rebuilt with 3D-printed living tissue implant' The Guardian (2 June 2022).

Carry on Cross Dressing

 

Top: Tony Curtis as Josephine and Jack Lemmon as Daphne in Some Like It Hot (1959)

Bottom: Kenneth Williams as Ethel and Charles Hawtrey as Agatha in Carry on Constable (1960)

 

 

I. 

 

For lovers of film and for lovers of drag, Billy Wilder's romantic comedy Some Like It Hot (1959), starring Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon, is perhaps as good as it gets.

 

And indeed, there's certainly a lot to admire about it, including the performances of Curtis and Lemmon as the two jazz musicians, Joe and Jerry, who go on the run - disguised as women - after witnessing a gangland murder. They could have played the roles of Josephine and Daphne simply for laughs, but instead they invest their acting talent in creating an illusion of womanhood that is convincing as well as comic [1]. 

 

Perhaps that's why although the Curtis and Lemmon characters of Joe and Jerry are portrayed as red-blooded (heterosexual) males, whose decision to wear female clothing is a sign of their desperation rather than perversity, Some Like It Hot was produced without approval from the censor-morons who enforced the Hays Code and feared the slightest hint of queerness. 

 

Or perhaps they just found Marilyn Monroe's character of Sugar Kane too hot to handle ... [2]

 

 

II.

As good as Curtis and Lemmon are in Some Like It Hot - and as loveable as we may find Josephine and Daphne - they are not, in my view, as good (or as loveable) as Ethel and Agatha, as played by Kenneth Williams and Charles Hawtrey in Carry On Constable (1960) ...

Directed by Gerald Thomas, Carry On Constable is the fourth in the series of Carry On films and contains many of my favourite actors, scenes, and lines of dialogue - including the scene in which Charles Hawtrey as Special Constable Timothy Gorse and Kenneth Williams as PC Stanley Benson, decide to go undercover - dressed as women - in order to catch a gang of shoplifters.

The Carry On films would, over a 20-year, 30-film span, often include scenes of drag; one thinks of Peter Butterworth, for example, as DC Slobotham disguised as female bait in Carry On Screaming (1966), or Kenneth Cope, as Cyril, pretending to be a student nurse in Carry On Matron (1972). 

But whilst heterosexual actors playing straight characters dressed as women may be mildly amusing, it lacks the camp frisson and sheer joyfulness of two homosexual actors openly playing queer characters dressed as women. And thus nothing tops the scene with Hawtrey and Williams dragged up in Carry On Constable, which readers can enjoy by clicking here.

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Curtis and Lemon were helped to play Josephine and Daphne by the legendary female impersonator (and trapeze artist) Barbette, who was hired by the studio to coach them in the art of drag. 

      Much admired by Jean Cocteau, Barbette was described by the French poet and playwright as a combination of angel, flower and bird who transforms effortlessly back and forth between man and woman, revealing the performative aspect of gender. In a seminal 1926 essay, Cocteau instructed his fellow artists to learn from Barbette if they wished to understand the nature of artifice. Cocteau also commissioned a series of photographs by Man Ray of Barbette and cast her in his experimental first film Le Sang d'un Poete (1930).

 

[2] Peter Majda makes the important point that it's not just Curtis and Lemmon who are performing exaggerated forms of femininity in Some Like It Hot - that their co-star Marilyn Monroe is also "essaying another aspect of her comedic persona, which is a cis female-form of drag"; one that is, in fact, "more complicated and layered because she's a woman, playing on the expectations of femininity".

      For Monroe's hyper-feminine (and almost cartoonish) character of Sugar Kane is also carefully constructed with clothes and cosmetics and also relies upon a certain ways of walking and talking, etc. As Judith Butler once said: We are all transvestites.

      See Peter Majda's post entitled 'Performative Femininity and the Absurd: Drag and Comedy in "Some Like It Hot"' (17 April 2019), on his excellent blog A Seat in the Aisle: click here. 

 

 

A Fond Farewell to Fenella Fielding

Fenella Fielding as the fiendishly beautiful Valeria

 Carry On Screaming (1966) 

It is again with sadness that I mark the passing of another wonderful comic actress - just days after the death of Liz Fraser - Fenella Fielding, star of my favourite Carry On film, Carry On Screaming (dir. Gerald Thomas, 1966). 

The exotic-looking and exotic-sounding Fenella was born in Hackney, in 1927, to a Romanian mother and a Lithuanian father, with whom she had an unhappy (often physically violent) relationship. Spending much of her childhood in conversation with her dolls, she dreamed of becoming an artist and performer from an early age (much to the horror of her parents who hoped she would become a shorthand typist).

After eventually fleeing her awful home life, Fielding found herself in an amateur production at the LSE playing alongside Ron Moody, who encouraged her in her ambition to become a professional actress. Soon, she began appearing regularly in various reviews and by the end of the 1950s she had made something of a name for herself as a beautiful butterfly of comedy.

Throughout the following decade, Fenella was an established figure in Swinging London: Vidal Sassoon did her hair; Jeffrey Bernard took her clubbing; Francis Bacon and friends were all enchanted. She appeared on TV (in The Avengers, for example) and on film alongside male co-stars including Dirk Bogarde and Tony Curtis.

On stage, meanwhile, she pursued her real passion - drama. An accomplished and versatile actress, Fielding captivated audiences and critics alike with her interpretations of Ibsen, Shakespeare and Euripides. Noel Coward and Fellini both regarded themselves as fans of this highly intelligent and amusing woman who kept a copy of Plato by her bedside.        

Of course, this aspect of her life and work has been fatally overshadowed by her role in Carry On Screaming. It is as smoking-hot Valeria wearing a fitted red velvet dress with plunging neckline, designed by Emma Selby-Walker, that she has entered the popular and pornographic imagination and will forever be remembered.

Serious performers and dramatists may not like it, but classical theatre, it appears, cannot compete with cinematic camp-vamp. And if the role of Valeria provided the kiss of death to Fielding's career, it also guaranteed her cinematic immortality.

I don't know if Fenella will be buried or cremated, but I kind of hope it's the latter, so she may smoke for one last time and the ghost of Orlando Watt might look on and cry: Frying tonight!  

Note: those who are interested might like to click here to watch Fenella in her most famous scene as Valeria in Carry on Screaming, alongside the brilliant Harry H. Corbett as Detective Sgt. Bung.

Why I Love Carry On Cruising

Kenneth Williams as First Officer Marjoribanks

There are many reasons to love Carry On Cruising (dir. Gerald Thomas, 1962), the sixth film in the series and first to be filmed in colour.

Firstly, it retains all the innocence and queer charm of the earlier black and white films and is essentially a finely balanced romantic comedy without too much sentiment or too much vulgarity; it's tender without being soft-centred, saucy without being smutty.   

Secondly, regular cast members - Sid James, Kenneth Williams and Kenneth Connor - all deliver excellent (nicely restrained) performances; and, just as crucially, stand-in cast members Lance Percival and the lovely Dilys Laye also do fine jobs. The former, playing the ship's cook, occupies the part originally meant for Charles Hawtrey, dropped from the cast for demanding he be given top billing and a gold star on his dressing room door. The latter, playing a young woman looking for love whilst cruising the Mediterranean, replaced Joan Sims at short notice after she was unexpectedly taken ill just days before the commencement of filming.

Cruising also co-stars the magnificent Liz Fraser and - as I think we can all agree - any film or TV show with Liz Fraser is instantly improved, even if, sadly, not always worth watching. When she departs the series after Carry On Cabbie (1963), it's a real loss. Seeing her in her black underwear always makes happy (and nostalgic); she has the erotic charisma that Barbara Windsor in the later movies, for all her infectious giggling, completely lacks.                    

Someone else who always makes happy (though for very different reasons) is the diminutive, Australian-born character actress and funny-woman, Esma Cannon, here making her third of four appearances in the Carry On series. British cinema would not be British cinema without her and Miss Madderley is a very welcome passenger on board the Happy Wanderer. Her table tennis scene with Kenneth Williams is particularly pleasing.   

Finally, Cruising also contains a somewhat curious scene in which James and Williams discuss different schools of psychoanalysis. James, as Captain Crowther, declares himself to have always been a Freudian and too old to change; Williams, as First Officer Marjoribanks, quips in response that that's nothing to worry about or apologise for - just so long as one remains Jung at heart. 

It's not the greatest joke ever written. But it's inclusion in a film of this nature is surprising and a welcome relief from the more predictable double entendres, sight gags, and elements of slapstick.