Between the late 1950s and mid-1970s, British cinema experienced an explosion of X-certificated films. In parallel with an era marked by social, political, and sexual ferment and upheaval, British filmmakers and censors pushed and guarded the permissible limits of violence, horror, revolt, and sexuality on screen. Adult Themes is the first volume entirely devoted to the exploration of British X certificate films across this transformative period, since identified as ‘the long 1960s’. How did the British Board of Film Censors, harried on one side by the censorious and moralistic, and beset on the other by demands for greater artistic freedom, oversee and manage this provocative body of films? How did the freedoms and restrictions of the X certificate hasten, determine, and reshape post-war British cinema into an artistic, exploitational, and unapologetically adult medium?
Contributors to this collection consider these central questions as they take us to swinging parties, on youthful crime sprees, into local council meetings, on police raids of cinemas, and around Soho strip clubs, and introduce us to mass murderers, lesbian vampires, apoplectic protestors, eroticised middle-aged women, and rebellious working-class men. Adult Themes examines both the workings and negotiations of British film censorship, the limits of artistic expression, and a wider culture of X certificate cinema. This is an important volume for students and scholars of British Film History and censorship, Media Studies, the 1960s, and Cultural and Sexuality Studies, while simultaneously an entertaining read for all connoisseurs of British cinema at its most vivid and scandalous.
Acknowledgements
List of illustrations
Introduction: ‘Passed As Only Suitable for Exhibition to Adult Audiences: X’
Anne Etienne (University College Cork, Ireland), Benjamin Halligan (University of Wolverhampton, UK), and Christopher Weedman (Middle Tennessee State University, USA)
1. Green Penguin Films
Kim Newman (Independent Scholar)
2. The Commercial Idealism of Controversial Cinema: Raymond Stross and the Censorship of The Flesh Is Weak
Christopher Weedman (Middle Tennessee State University, USA)
3. Colour, Realism and the X Certificate: Horrors of the Black Museum and Peeping Tom
Sarah Street (University of Bristol, UK)
4. Mediating Desire: Karel Reisz’s Adaptation of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning
Simon Lee (Texas State University, USA)
5. Lolita, Censorship, and Controversy: The Archival Remains of the Dispute Between Canon L. J. Collins and Stanley Kubrick
James Fenwick (Sheffield Hallam University, UK)
6. Paternalism, Bohemianism, and the X Certificate: The Party’s Over and the Pre-Swinging Set
Kevin M. Flanagan (George Mason University, USA)
7. Mediatising Modernity: Femininity in the X-Rated Swinging London Film
Moya Luckett (Texas State University, USA)
8. What Are the X-Rated Secrets of the Windmill Girls?
Adrian Smith (Independent Scholar)
9. The Potent Sexuality of the Middle-Aged Woman: Alice Aisgill, Karen Stone, Zee Blakeley and Ruby
Lucy Bolton (Queen Mary University of London, UK)
10. Censoring Carmilla: Lesbian Vampires in Hammer Horror
Claire Henry (Massey University, Aotearoa New Zealand)
11. ‘The horror film to end all horror films’: 10 Rillington Place and the British Board of Film Censors’ Shifting Policy on True Crime
TimSnelson (University of East Anglia, UK)
12. Class and Classification: The British Board of Film Censors’ Reception of Horror at the Time of the Festival of Light
Benjamin Halligan (University of Wolverhampton, UK)
Contributors
Index
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