Taking a Trip Through The Beauty Jungle

Press ad for The Beauty Jungle (1964)

The most colourful and exciting film of the year

The good people at Talking Pictures TV have found another absolute gem of a movie: The Beauty Jungle (dir. Val Guest, 1964), starring (60s and 70s stalwart) Ian Hendry as local journalist Don MacKenzie and (lovely Lancashire lass) Janette Scott as the typist-turned-beauty contestant Shirley Freeman.

Also putting in appearances are Tommy Trinder, Sid James, and a 21-year-old Maggie Nolan as just one of the mulitude of leggy-lovelies gracing the screen, so obviously a film with instant appeal for viewers like me (although it's interesting to note that promotion for the film was aimed primarily at a female audience in the belief that it was the sort of film women will want to see; the sort of picture women will want to talk about).   

Essentially a moral tale - or, rather, a sexploitation movie masquerading as a moral tale - it purports to expose the sordid and corrupt world of beauty pageants. MacKenzie, acting as a manager and image consultant to Shirley, is desperate to also become her lover. Unfortunately for him, having left her home, her job, and her boyfriend and transformed from a happy young brunette into a glamorous and ambitious blonde, greedy for ever-greater fame and success, she isn't interested and spurns his advances.         

Of far more interest to Shirley are playboy filmstar Rex Carrick (played by Edmund Purdom) and sauve international beauty pageant promoter Armand (played by the French actor Jean Claudio). She tries to seduce the former, only to discover he's either gay or asexual; and she (mistakenly) agrees to sleep with the latter in the (vain) hope of becoming Miss Globe (a title that goes to Miss Peru, played by a former Miss Israel, Aliza Gur). 

Having failed to make it to the top, Shirley is reduced to working as a celebrity judge back on the local beauty contest circuit - until, that is, she sees her younger sister paraded before her (and under the management of MacKenzie). This forces her to walk away from the industry for good and presumably back into a life of obscurity and nine-to-five normality; just another victim of the beauty jungle and its brutal, primitive law (though one who was happy to be complicit so long as she was winning). 

What feminist critics or members of the #MeToo generation would make of such a film heaven only knows; one imagines they'd be triggered (perhaps rightly) by the unabashed sexual objectification and abuse of young women by powerful and unscrupulous older men.

But the film has such quirky British charm - not only, as I said earlier, do Tommy Trinder and Sid James appear, but Lionel (Give Us a Clue) Blair and cheeky chappie Joe Brown also pop up on screen - that such sleazy behaviour is normalised, humanised, and made entertaining. Maybe that's the thing with vice and immorality - we find it so damn seductive (and excusable) if it's carried out by people with a twinkle in their eye!

And, what's more, I fully appreciate why girls like Shirley Freeman set out on the path to fame and riches, prepared to do whatever it takes in order to escape being little Miss No One from nowhere - for who wants to peel potatoes and scrub floors when you can drink champagne and travel the world in style?


Notes

To watch a trailer for The Beauty Jungle (dir. Val Guest, 1964): click here.

To see the astonishing press kit released to help promote the film visit the William K. Everson Archive (NYU): click here.

The Four Drakes: Part 2: Nick and Gabrielle

Drake is an Old English surname, derived from the Anglo-Saxon term for serpent, draca, and thus etymologically related to dragon (and not to the word for a male duck). There have been a number of illustrious individuals by the name of Drake, including Sir Francis Drake and the comic entertainer Charlie Drake, both of whom we discussed in part one of this post: click here. 

Below, I wish to discuss a famous pair of siblings by the name of Drake, beginning with the younger brother ... 

Nick Drake (1948 - 1974): First the Day after Tomorrow Must Dawn for Me

Posh singer-songwriter and musician, Nick Drake, is a fine example of what Nietzsche terms a posthumous individual - i.e., one who only comes into their own and finds fame once they're dead.   

The prodigiously talented Drake signed to Island Records whilst studying English literature at Cambridge, releasing his debut album - Five Leaves Left - in 1969. By 1972, he had recorded two more albums - Bryter Layter and Pink Moon - neither of which sold more than 5000 copies on initial release.

The fact that he was extremely reluctant to promote the material by playing live and giving interviews to the music press, obviously didn't help matters. But one suspects that such reticence was more due to the chronic shyness and depression from which he suffered than any desire to create a mystique about his own person. 

After the failure of his third album, Drake retreated to his parents home and, aged 26, he took an overdose of amitriptyline pills, a prescribed anti-depressant. A verdict of suicide was given and although this has been challenged by some who knew him, his sister Gabrielle prefers to believe he made a conscious decision to end his life, rather than consider his death the result of a tragic mistake.

Five years later, the release of a retrospective album entitled Fruit Tree (1979) triggered a critical reappraisal of his work and by the mid-1980s artists including Robert Smith and David Sylvian were naming Drake as an important influence. Thirty years later, and he's now sold over two-and-a-half million records in the UK and US markets.

Gabrielle Drake (1944 - ): Serious Glamour 

To be honest, Nick Drake is no more my cup of tea than Charlie Drake; though again, that's in no way to deny or denigrate his obvious talent and intelligence. He's just too much of an introspective hippie for my tastes (Nick - not Charlie).

But his older sister on the other hand, Gabrielle - now there's someone I have always loved to see on screen; be it as the purple-wigged Moonbase commander Lt. Gay Ellis in UFO (1970-71), or as motel boss Nicola Freeman in Crossroads (1985-87). Her appearance in a 1967 episode of The Avengers as Angora and, a decade later, as Penny the schoolteacher in an episode of The New Avengers, is also worthy of note and something for which I'm grateful.

I'm grateful too for the fact that, unlike some actresses, Gabrielle was always happy when young to get her kit off and not above appearing in a number of seventies sexploitation films, including Au Pair Girls (dir. Val Guest, 1972), in which she has a leading role as Randi Lindstrom (that's right, ha-ha! she's Danish).

Perhaps of more interest to my more literary-minded readers will be the fact that she also appeared as a passenger (sacrifice) in a short film entitled Crash! (dir. Harley Cokeliss) and based on a story in J. G. Ballard's The Atrocity Exhibition. The movie also featured the author talking about ideas that he would later develop into one of the great twentieth-century novels. As one critic rightly noted, the presence of Miss Drake brought serious glamour to urban alienation.

Finally, it needs to be said that Gabrielle has worked tirelessly to ensure her brother's name and music live on and it's clear that, rather touchingly, she remains his biggest fan. In 2014, she published a memoir of her brother and in 2018 she collected a Hall of Fame Folk Award on his behalf.

I wish she were my sister ...

Notes

The Avengers episode mentioned above was from Season 5 and entitled 'The Hidden Tiger' (first shown in the UK on 3 March 1967); The New Avengers episode was 'Dead Men are Dangerous' (first shown in the UK on 8 Sept 1977). 

To visit the official website of the estate of Nick Drake, please click here.

To visit the Gabrielle Drake fansite on Facebook, click here.