Black and White and Blue: Adult Cinema From the Victorian Age to the VCR

339 Pages·2007·2.33 MB·English

by  Dave Thompson

BLACK and WHITE and BLUE
Adult Cinema from the Victorian Age to the VCR
Dave Thompson
ECW Press
Copyright © Dave Thompson, 2007
Published by ecw press
2120Queen Street East, Suite 200,Toronto, Ontario, Canada m4e 1e2
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted in any form by any process—electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording, or otherwise—without the prior written permission of the
copyright owners and ecw press.
library and archives canada cataloguing in publication
Thompson, Dave, 1960January 3–
Black and white and blue: adult cinema from the Victorian age to
the vcr/Dave Thompson.
Includes index.
isbn978-1-55022-791-8
1.Erotic films — History. 2.Sex in motion pictures — History. I.Title.
PN1995.9.S45T56 2007 791.43’6538 C2007-902588-9
Developing editor: Jennifer Hale
Cover design: David Gee
Text design: Tania Craan
Typesetting: Gail Nina
Printed by Webcom
distribution
canada:Jaguar Book Group, 100Armstrong Avenue, Georgetown, on, l7g 5s4
united states:Independent Publishers Group, 814North Franklin Street,
Chicago, Illinois 60610
printed and bound in canada
Table of Contents
FOREWORD— In Praise of the Dirty Picture House vii
INTRODUCTION xiii
CHAPTER ONE — The Flesh That Flickers 1
CHAPTER TWO— Dance the Coochee Coochee 13
CHAPTER THREE— The Lure of the Secret Cinema 25
CHAPTER FOUR— In Praise of Unnatural Acts 37
CHAPTER FIVE— Lewdness and the Law 51
CHAPTER SIX— Rudeness, Raunch and Revolution 59
CHAPTER SEVEN— Weird Scenes Inside the Cat House 71
CHAPTER EIGHT— The Sweet Smell of Vinegar 87
CHAPTER NINE— Eureka! Mastophallation! 99
CHAPTER TEN— The Melty Man and Other Non-myths 117
CHAPTER ELEVEN— Don’t You Know There’s a War On? 127
CHAPTER TWELVE— Love on the Home Front 139
CHAPTER THIRTEEN— Damned Dirty Stuff! 149
CHAPTER FOURTEEN— Celebrity Skin 161
CHAPTER FIFTEEN— Read It in Books 179
CHAPTER SIXTEEN— That’s Not Porn, It’s Psychology 191
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN— Man Meets Machine 199
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN— The English Disease 217
CHAPTER NINETEEN— I Am Curious — Red, White and Blue 233
CHAPTER TWENTY— Deep Thoughts 249
EPILOGUE 257
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 261
ENDNOTES 263
FILMOGRAPHY 273
iv
To Ella.
Miss you, Princess.
And Snarkeyyowl,
the cat who got the beans.

Foreword
In Praise of The Dirty Picture House
By Chrissie Bentley
It is said that a stereotype is only truly offensive (and stereotypical)
if it is true. In which case, memories of a certain Adults Only thea-
ter, in a medium-sized East Coast city in the early 1970s, are very
offensive indeed.
Even from the outside, the building stood out like a dirty nail on
a manicured hand, an off-white pile that was erected in the thirties
as the latest in contemporary architecture and had neither been
painted nor refurbished since then. Once it had been a proud and
beautiful theater, but the mainstream movies had long ago stopped
playing there.
Instead, a proprietor, who looked as seedy as his establishment,
specialized in what the low-key marquee insisted were Continental
and Scandinavian features, all of which starred the same blowsily
made-up cartoon blonde, scantily clad and long since defaced
beneath precisely the kind of graffiti you’d expect to find in such a
place — ink-scrawled cocks and balls that assailed her from every
direction, ribald commentaries that blossomed in speech bubbles
and enough jets of Magic Markered semen to sink a battleship.
vii
The place never closed. Early morning, late into the evening, and
at any hour in between, one of two or three bored-looking youths
would be seated in the ticket booth, and occasionally you’d see an
actual customer shuffling in or out of the main door, and he’d be as
clichéd as the establishment itself. He really would look furtive, he
really would be wearing a raincoat and, nine times out of ten, he
really would be wearing a flat cap, which he’d pull down over his
eyes the moment he saw someone else on the street outside.
But there was one aspect of the experience that was not a stereo-
type. It was, in fact, so bizarre that even those of us who were aware
of it were scarcely able to voice it out loud, for fear that the very act
of open discussion might end the enchantment there and then.
Every Thursday afternoon (but only Thursday afternoons), some-
time before we turned out of class, the emergency exit at the back of
the building would be mysteriously unbolted and would remain
that way all evening.
The first few weeks after we discovered this magical portal, we
four girls simply stood by the opening, squinting into the darkness
on the other side, listening to the soundtrack that crackled off the
screen: groans, gasps, cries and crescendos, all set to a kind of
pulsing neo-rock music, played exclusively, it seemed, through a
wah-wah pedal.
Occasionally a snatch of dialogue would emerge amid the
grunting; occasionally the actual meaning of the words might be
comprehended by one or other of us. So, when one of our number
— I think it was Wanda — suggested we actually pass through the
door and watch, instead of merely listening to the movies, it wasn’t
a difficult decision.
We were no strangers to sneaking into the movies for free. Every
movie house in town had its weak point, be it a back door, a bath-
room window or simply a turn-a-blind-eye commissioner, through
which a stealthy form could slip and thrill to those quaintly X-rated
flicks that no one at that time would ever have dreamed an impres-
sionable teen should witness: Straw Dogs, Soldier Blue, The Night
Porter, The Exorcist. If the marquee mandated patrons be twenty-
one and over, we were in there, and it was astonishing just how dis-
viii