In the Shower with Leslie Phillips

 

Fig. 1 Leslie Phillips and Shirley Eaton in Carry On Constable (1960)

 Fig. 2 Leslie Phillips and Andrea Allan in Spanish Fly (1976)

 

 

On-screen nudity can either be suggestive or explicit. 

 

But just as a porn film that lacks graphic content has no raison d'être and will fail to arouse its viewers, so too a comedy that moves beyond sexual innuendo and the briefest flash of bare flesh into the full-frontal realm will ultimately cease to amuse its audience. 

 

For it seems that in order to sustain laughter, even a risqué comedy requires bath towels and bed sheets. It must remain rooted, that is to say, in a sexually repressed culture of inhibition and embarrassment; a nudge-nudge, wink-wink culture of drawn curtains and lights out - not a pornified culture of indecent exposure.

 

This is illustrated by two scenes in films starring Leslie Phillips ...

 

The first is in one of my favourite films of the Carry On series - Carry On Constable (dir. Gerald Thomas, 1960). 

 

In his role as PC Tom Potter, Phillips is called to a house to investigate a suspected intruder. But what he discovers is a young woman (played by Shirley Eaton) taking a bath. Whilst viewers are treated to the sight of her naked back, the scene retains its charm, its innocence, and its good humour. 

 

In contrast, however, there's a rather gratuitous shower scene in a film described by Barry Norman [1] as the least funny British comedy ever made, Spanish Fly (dir. Bob Kellett, 1976).

 

Now in his fifties, but still playing the smooth-talking Lothario for which he was famous, Phillips is directing a photo-shoot in Menorca with a group of four models, including an Australian girl known as Bruce (played by Andrea Allan), whom he encounters in a hotel bathroom. 

 

Whilst viewers are afforded plenty of opportunity to ogle her (rather magnificent) breasts and watch as Phillips washes her back, the scene lacks precisely the charm, the innocence, and good humour of the one in Carry On Constable and makes for slightly uncomfortable viewing in an age of #MeToo. 

 

Sadly, as the sauciness of the late-1950s and early-1960s gave way to the soft-core seediness of the 1970s and Phillips et al were obliged to compete against much younger, raunchier actors - such as Robin Askwith, who starred in the Confessions movies (1974-77) - the triumph of latrinalia was complete [2].  

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Barry Norman, for those who don't know, was a British film critic and journalist. He famously presented a film review series on the BBC from 1972 to 1998. 

      I tend to think his assessment of Spanish Fly is a bit harsh. It's not quite as dire as many like to believe and although the script is piss poor (much like Sir Percy's wine), it has a strong cast that not only stars Leslie Phillips and Terry-Thomas, but also features Frank Thornton, Sue Lloyd, and seventies sex bomb Nadiuska. 

      Plus, the film also features a rather catchy song performed by the Irish singer Geraldine, called 'Fly Me' (written by Bill Martin and Phil Coulter and released as single on EMI in July 1975). Infinitely more enjoyable than anything released by recently deceased (and hugely overrated) Sinéad O'Connor, readers are invited to click here.    

[2] Many critics at the time decried this triumph of soft-porn smut, largely blaming it on the sexual infantilism of the viewing public. It should be noted, however, that the British sex comedies of the 1970s were enormously successful at the box office and have since undergone significant critical reappraisal. 

      Ultimately, although I prefer Carry On Constable to Spanish Fly (or Confessions of a Window Cleaner), I would hope that my view isn't simply rooted in a mixture of moralism and snobbery. 

 

 

Bonus 1: Click here for the Carry On Constable trailer. 

 

Bonus 2: Click here for the Spanish Fly trailer (in HD). 

 

Bonus 3: Click here for the VHS trailer for Confessions of a Window Cleaner (dir. Val Guest, 1974).

Chrysopoeia 1: Goldfinger (He's the Man - the Man with the Midas Touch)

Shirley Eaton as Jill Masterson in Goldfinger (dir. Guy Hamilton, 1964)

 

For a golden girl knows when he's kissed her

It's the kiss of death from

Mister Goldfinger [1]

 

 

I. 

 

Although, personally, I prefer to see Shirley Eaton dressed in a nurse's unform (Carry on Nurse, 1959), or wrapped in a large bath towel (Carry on Constable, 1960), it is as (sacrificial) Bond Girl Jill Masterson in Goldfinger (1964), that she has firmly secured her place in the porno-cultural imagination.

 

I'm referring, of course, to the iconic scene of her lying naked on a bed, painted from head to toe with gold, which, according to Bond, was the cause of her death [2].

 

The fact that this scene is still fondly remembered and recreated today - many decades later [3] - would seem to suggest that quite a few share Goldfinger's perverse love of gold and perhaps secretly dream of having his Midas touch, even though this can only lead to tragedy [4].      

 

 

II. 

 

What can we say about the strange character Auric Goldfinger? 

 

Well, as his name suggests [5] and as Shirley Bassey repeatedly informs us in the film's title song, he loves gold - really loves it. Not merely as a commodity or valuable asset, but as a thing in itself: a brightly coloured alien metal that has come to us from beyond the stars [6]. 

 

Goldfinger isn't greedy for gold in the way some are greedy for money; his vice is lust - he desires it in a perverse (and primitive) sense [7]. As he confesses to Bond at one point: 'All my life I’ve been in love with its colour, its brilliance, its divine heaviness.'

 

Not only does Goldfinger sport a perma-tan and dress mostly in golden-coloured clothes, but so too does he drive a gold-plated car and if he does decide to fuck a woman - usually a prostitute - he likes to have them hypnotised and painted gold before sex [8].

If Goldfinger's perversity (and, indeed, Pussy Galore's lesbianism) is more evident in Ian Fleming's 1959 novel [9], than in the 1964 film adaptation, I think the latter still does a good job of indicating that Auric Goldfinger is, to say the very least, a man of unusual tastes.

 

Finally, it is interesting to note that Fleming himself also had something of a gold fetish; not only did he collect Spanish doubloons, but he wrote with a gold-tipped ballpoint pen and possessed a gold-plated typewriter. 

 

German actor Gert Fröbe as Auric Goldfinger 

in Goldfinger (dir. Guy Hamilton, 1964) 

 

Notes

 

[1] Lyrics from the song 'Goldfinger', recorded by Shirley Bassey and used for the opening and closing title sequences to the 1964 James Bond film of that title. The music was composed by John Barry. Lyrics were by Leslie Bricusse and Anthony Newley and are © Sony / ATV Music Publishing LLC. To play, audio only, click here. To play and watch scenes from the movie (showing why it is such a great film - and I say that as someone who isn't really a Bond fan), click here.    

 

[2] Bond informs his superior, M, that skin suffocation is a well-known phenomenon amongst cabaret performers who use body paint to disguise their nakedness. Actually, this is fictitious, even if it is now believed to be factual by many people apparently unaware of the fact we breathe through our noses and mouths and not the surface of our bodies, like frogs. 

      Having said that, it is true that the top layer of our skin - the epidermis - gets its oxygen directly from the atmosphere and not via the blood and that clogging the pores of the skin for an extended period can cause heatstroke, which is potentially life-threatening. So perhaps the director of Goldfinger, Guy Hamilton, wasn't being overly cautious or naively buying into the Fleming myth of death-by-gilding by ensuring that a small patch on Eaton's stomach remained paint free and that a doctor was standing by on set just in case.      

 

[3] See for example the American model and actress Elle Evans recreating the Shirley Eaton / Jill Masterson Goldfinger look for Maxim magazine (Sept 2014) in order to celebrate the movie's 50th anniversary: click here. 

[4] Those unfamiliar with the story of Midas and his golden touch are encouraged to read Ovid's Metamorphoses XI: 85-145: click here.  

      In brief, King Midas is granted his wish by the god Dionysos (or Bacchus, as the Romans knew him) that whatever he touch be instantly transformed into gold. As might be imagined, this soon becomes problematic. 

      Indeed, in the version of the myth told by Nathaniel Hawthorne, it has fatal consequences when, reaching out to comfort his young daughter - who is upset that the roses growing in the palace gardens, having been turned to gold, have lost their magnificent scent - Midas inadvertently turns her into a lump of precious - but lifeless - metal. See A Wonder Book for Girls and Boys (1851): click here.     

[5] Not only is his family name - one of German origin - obviously related to gold, but Auric is also an adjective pertaining to gold. As Jon Burn (of the James Bond blog Not Perfected Yet) reminds us: 

      "Bond makes mention of the queerness of the name Auric Goldfinger, comparing it to a French nail varnish; emasculating Goldfinger by likening him to a feminine product; insinuating femininity in Goldfinger, with the possible implication that Goldfinger sounds like he may be homosexual." 

      See Jon Burn, '"He Loves Only Gold" - sexual 'perversion' in Goldfinger', on the interesting website Licence to Queer: click here. 

 

[6] Gold is thought to have been produced in supernova nucleosynthesis and from the collision of neutron stars and was present in the dust from which the solar system formed. However, because the Earth was originally molten, almost all of the gold present probably sank into the planetary core. Therefore, most of the gold found in the Earth's crust and mantle is believed by some theorists to have been delivered later via asteroid impacts about 4 billion years ago. If this isn't reason to be awe-struck by even the tiniest gold nugget, then I don't know what is. No wonder so many peoples have desired it, worshipped it, and thought it to be of divine origin; the Aztec word for gold - tecuitlatl - literally means excrement of the gods.  

[7] I'm not a theologian, but I assume there is an important difference between greed and lust as cardinal sins, which seems to hinge on the fact that the former is an artificial (or disordered) desire for material goods or things and the latter a desire for sensual pleasures, so at least a striving for natural relationship with one's fellow man made in the image of God. Thus, the latter, whilst usually regarded as less serious, is still deadly; you can still go to hell because of it.  

 

[8] The fact that Goldfinger does, on occasion, choose to penetrate female bodies - even if first painting them gold - is why I would challenge the claim made by Jon Burn that "Goldfinger's perversion is object sexuality, having sexual desire for an inanimate object, specifically to the precious metal gold, and not to a person of any gender, or even any human being." If he was in love, for example, with the Golden Gate Bridge, or with Fort Knox, I would be perfectly happy to accept this argument, but, actually, he loves golden girls, whom he may objectify sexually, but that's not evidence of objectum sexuality. Indeed, one might argue that by denying their humanity "in order to make them into living golden statues", Goldfinger could be characterised as an agalmatophile. 

      See Jon Burn, '"He Loves Only Gold" - sexual 'perversion' in Goldfinger' ... click here. 

 

[9] Goldfinger is the seventh novel in Ian Fleming's James Bond series. Written in 1958, it was published the following year in the UK by Jonathan Cape. It was an immediate best-seller and mostly well received by the critics. The eponymous villain of the work was named after the architect Ernő Goldfinger and, whilst physically very different, there are some similarities between Auric and Ernő Goldfinger. 

      On learning of this, the latter threatened to sue. Whilst the matter was eventually settled out of court, Fleming was still sorely tempted to change the name from Goldfinger to Goldprick, thus anticipating Mike Myer's slightly limper rendition of the name as Goldmember in the 2002 film of that title (dir. Jay Roach).

      (For the record, the character of Auric Goldfinger was probably based on the American gold tycoon Charles W. Engelhard Jr., whom Fleming had met in 1949.) 

 

 

To read the second post in this series - on Ben Jonson's figure of Volpone - click here. 

 

This post is for Torpedo the Ark's very own Bond Girl, Katharina Braun. 

Golden Girls (with Reference to the Case of Jill Masterson)

Shirley Eaton as Jill Masterson in Goldfinger (1964) 

looking burnished and beautiful 

For many skin fetishists, epidermal eroticisation involves marking the surface of the body; with a tattoo needle, for example. Others look to impose more serious abrasions, lesions, or lacerations and delight in scabs and scar tissue. But there are also those individuals who hate any blemish or disfigurement and dream of a perfectly smooth, gleaming skin designed to produce a reassuring fantasy of impenetrability and becoming-inorganic.

Sometimes the latter achieve this fascinating look with latex or tight leather clothing. But it's perhaps best accomplished with the use of metallic body paint that displays the flesh in the manner of a precious object whilst, at the same time, immaterialising it by reducing the physical body "to the spill and shimmer of light across a surface". 

This is illustrated in the 1964 James Bond film Goldfinger (dir. Guy Hamilton), in which the character Jill Masterson, played by Shirley Eaton, is given the kiss of death by Mr Goldfinger, the man with the Midas touch. Seeing her, lying naked on a bed and gilded from head to toe, is one of cinema's most astonishing (and kinkiest) moments.

Amusingly, Bond pseudo-scientifically explains to his superiors that Miss Masterson died of skin suffocation and that this has been known to happen to cabaret dancers with a penchant for performing nude apart from a coat of paint: 'It's alright so long as you leave a small bare patch at the base of the spine to allow the skin to breathe.'

Even more amusing is the fact that the filmmakers seemed to believe their own claptrap and decided to be better safe than sorry by leaving a patch of Miss Eaton's abdomen ungilded. Today, there are still many people who genuinely believe that she risked (or even lost) her life filming this scene. It's an urban legend which, according to Steven Connor, testifies "to a willingness to believe in the skin's capacity to drown or suffocate in its own waste products, to which gold, the radiance of the body, can always revert".

For Connor is convinced that the secret pleasure of fetishistically painting a woman in metallic gold or silver paint is a scatological one rooted in the "extreme ambivalence of images than conjoin the radiance of a skin that is all aura and effulgence with the suggestion of faecal daubing, thus either lifting faeces into the condition of light or lowering light into shit".

Personally, I'm not entirely convinced by this (psychoanalytic) line of argument. I think that the thrill of becoming-mineral and hardening into pure objectivity and brilliant exteriority is far beyond this Freudian game of Gold und Scheiße.


See: Steven Connor, The Book of Skin, (Cornell University Press, 2004), pp. 53, 176-77. 

Margaret Nolan: Artist, Actress, Object

Margaret Nolan (IMDB)
Photo © 2011 Silver Screen Collection 
Courtesy of gettyimages.com 

The case of Margaret Nolan, the London-born glamour model turned actress become artist, interests for a number of reasons, not least of all because she is a woman who has struggled to take control of her own image and personally confront the issue of sexual objectification.

Miss Nolan started her career - as many aspiring young actresses do - by stripping for the camera and she soon became a popular pin-up within the amorous imagination of the early 1960s, often featuring in magazines under the name of Vicky Kennedy (her pseudonym serving to disguise her identity, preserve her modesty, and distance her from the industry in which she worked; she wasn't a nude model per se, but merely playing the part of such).

Gradually, her more legitimate acting roles increased in number and importance and she appeared in many theatre productions, films, and television shows, under her real name. This famously included playing a masseuse called Dink in the James Bond movie Goldfinger (1964).*

For some of us, however, Miss Nolan is most fondly remembered for her roles in several of the Carry On films, including Carry on Girls (1973), in which she (predictably) plays the buxom beauty Dawn Brakes and is involved in a rather convincing - and at the time controversial - catfight with the Barbara Windsor character, Hope Springs.

But of course, such scenes are now long behind her. Today, Miss Nolan works as a visual artist, producing interesting (sometimes vaguely disturbing) images assembled from cut-up publicity pictures; a somewhat naive attempt to deconstruct the socio-sexual stereotype she embodied and challenge the male gaze to which she was made subject throughout her modelling and acting career. Naive, but something for which she should nevertheless be applauded.

Margaret Nolan: My Divided Self 

This and other works can be found on her official site: 

margaretnolan.co.uk 

* It might also be noted that it was Miss Nolan - and not Shirley Eaton - who appeared in the film's title-sequence by Robert Brownjohn, wearing a bikini and painted gold. This image immediately became iconic within popular culture, but, unlike some (mostly male) art critics and film theorists, Miss Nolan denies there was - or is - anything liberated or liberating about it. The fact that it served simply to secure her a shoot for Playboy would seem to confirm her view.