ABSTRACT
In 1952 the British Board of Film Censors introduced a new ratings system which would have unintended consequences in the 1960s: “U” meant a film was suitable for everyone including children, “A” signified that any child under the age of sixteen had to be accompanied by someone over the age of sixteen into the cinema, and “X” films were suitable for adults aged sixteen and over. This was the first time that any kind of “adults-only” certificate had been introduced. It did not take long for filmmakers and distributors to take advantage of the salacious possibilities the “X” certificate offered. Films were bloodier, sexier and more violent than ever before, and as audiences acclimatized to these new creative freedoms, expectations began to develop as to what an “X” film could offer. Hammer was the first company to exploit the new “X” profitably with such films as The Quatermass Xperiment (1955) and The Curse of Frankenstein (1957), while enterprising distributors such as Miracle Films began importing films from abroad to fill the newly emerging “X” cinemas with adult fare. Companies like Compton, founded in 1960, first screened European nudist films in their own private cinema club before soon producing their own nudist and sex-themed films and growing their own chain of cinemas. This included the six-hundred-seat Scala in Birmingham and a smaller cinema on London’s Oxford Street. They expanded throughout the 1960s while other mainstream exhibitors such as Rank were closing cinemas (Ahmed 2011). The “X” rating became another exploitable commodity in the independent distributor or exhibitor’s arsenal, its prominent position on the marketing material serving to lure audiences just as effectively as the imagery or title of the film itself. Jacey cinemas would thrive in this feverish atmosphere, where any “X”-rated film seemed guaranteed to bring punters in off the streets.
