ABSTRACT
Film studies has not, to say the least, concerned itself very much with what John Walker calls ‘the cinema of J. Arthur Wank’ (1985: 67). David McGillivray’s groundbreaking Doing Rude Things first indicated the extent of this ‘lost continent’, and it remains a valuable account of British sexploitation’s development and its prime movers. But one of the book’s greatest strengths is also a limitation – McGillivray was part of this narrative, writing horror and sex films during the 1970s. He offers little analysis beyond some familiar comments on the undying inhibitions of the British, and never gets to grips with his own ambiguous investment in the films. His own involvement helps to smooth over this evasiveness, but there is a sense of the films being both an important part of cultural history and of no importance whatsoever. Their status as something like an epoch-defining genre suggests more of the former than the latter, but McGillivray wants to make it clear that he knows what ‘quality’ is. ‘Other countries may have produced classics of movie erotica; Britain hasn’t,’ he insists. But ‘as pointers to the obsessions and hypocrisies of an age which influenced many of the film-makers at work today, these films have at last acquired true value … what made the British public flock to see such rubbish?’ (1992: 19). A gap opens up here – ‘we’, ironic and amused, look not only at a body of films beyond/beneath discussion but at the low ‘they’ who went to see them. One of the aims of this chapter is to narrow that gap.
