Great British Films Of The 1970s PDF Download

164 pages / adults only / color When it comes to making money, you can forget about Star Wars. Adventures of a Taxi Driver was made for 30,000 pounds and took just under 48,000 pounds in it's opening week in Birmingham alone. The queues went round the block three times. This phenomenon was then duplicated in every major city in the U.K. It then additionally sold around the world, and like many such films of the '70s, ultimately grossed millions. The truly abysmal Come Play With Me is the most profitable British film of all time. They won't tell you that at the BAFTAs. The reason the Great British Sex Film boom of the 1970s has remained a dirty little secret is that almost everybody, from the British film industry, to the audience for them, to many of the people who made them and appeared in them (not all), considers them a colossal embarrassment from the past. And so do I. Many of them were creepy, stupid, and ignorant, and even more so now. But having had no desire to see such lowbrow fare when I was a teenager in the '70s, I now find myself--like the academic apologists at the unis and the British Film Institute--enjoying them with morbid fascination as social documents and film history, the 1970s captured and frozen in time. Now that they belong to the past, they seem less insulting to our intelligence. We can lie to ourselves that the world has changed. Far from being seen as the salvation of the British film industry that they actually were, keeping studios working and actors employed at a time when television ruled supreme and no-one was going to see anything else, the sex-coms were often unfairly portrayed in the media as the cause of the cinema's decline, which is just not true. Using that old prudes' standby, "what about the children?", critics and cultural commentators would imply that these films were somehow bullying more wholesome fare off the screen, whereas family films were not being made because families in 1970s Britain were sitting at home watching On the Buses, The Benny Hill Show, The Two Ronnies, and Morecambe and Wise on their new color televisions. The British male has long been regarded by foreigners as someone who would rather go to bed with a hot water bottle than a warm woman. "No Sex Please, We're British" goes the old joke. So it's perhaps no surprise that sex films aren't our greatest artistic accomplishment. But like a lot of trashy films (inept sci-fi, badly realised horror, pretentious erotica), the British sex-coms are fun to watch for the wrong reasons (or at least, reasons contrary to the intentions of the makers). They may occasionally be genuinely funny, and they may be fascinating (get a load of the high streets, the cars, the clothes, the haircuts, the decor), but however we might sneer, mock, gasp, and cringe, British sex comedies--particularly those co-featuring television sit-com stars of the era--were phenomenally popular with the Great British Bloke and his Missus, so they must have been doing something right. Snowflakes-prepare to run to your safe spaces... there's a history here that may not "fit the narrative"...! Please note: The text in this book previously appeared in the author's earlier 700 page Strange New World: Sex Films of the 1970s, also available on Amazon.