(Cue Alfred Hitchcock Presents music: Good evening. I’m trying something different this time round. In my continuing effort to cement a reputation for myself as the Nigel Slater of film blogs, I present for you today another semi-autobiographical investigation of a chosen cinematic subject, this time British film censorship. As I have no shortage of things to say on this topic, I’m going to be comin’ at ya in three parts. Below is part one, concerning the BBFC in the late 60s and early 70s and my quest for A Clockwork Orange. Stay tuned next week to find out why mad and abundant rumours concerning The Exorcist caused Northern Irish children no end of sleepless nights, and why some films about power tools made the BBFC a bigger deal than it already was. Part three will then appear the week after, natch. Love ya)   

Do you remember when films used to be banned? It’s becoming increasingly hard to imagine a time when literally hundreds of titles were forbidden from being seen on both our big and small screens by the UK’s once ultra-stringent and omnipotent censorship laws, but if we cast our minds back a mere ten years, we find an executive class American studio film as famous as The Exorcist (Best Picture Nominee, 1973 Academy Awards) only just being deemed suitable for British cinema audiences following some 14 years in illicit limbo.

Sometimes I think that the spark that leapt onto my burgeoning interest in films and caused it to explode into a full-blown obsession was the fact that there were apparently some films which just couldn’t be seen. What horrors could these films possibly contain, I queried to myself, because, of course, when you’re very young, there’s nowt much safer than a film, is there? Films were what you were taken to see in the cinema when you were good. They were what you were put down in front of when you were bored at your granny’s house. They weren’t supposed to be threatening or unsettling; they were supposed to be for the whole family. Weren’t they? I really had to find out.

I grew up in the 80s, an age in which the horror film became a bona fide mainstream cultural phenomenon once more, in a way not seen since it had helped to haunt the national psyche of a paranoid Cold War America in the late 1950s. The icons of this revival were the lead bogeymen in a series of successful slasher franchises, chiefly the ubiquitous Freddy Krueger, whose burnt visage leered out from all manner of memorabilia, ranging from t-shirts to mugs (my pal Richard had a Freddy mask as a child. He complains to this day that the interior reeked overwhelmingly of a fishlike stench). Films like A Nightmare on Elm Street were discussed in hushed tones at the back of the school bus, and sounded genuinely terrifying when recounted by classmates who had almost always been slipped a copy to watch by an unprincipled elder sibling (many of these classmates were barefaced liars, I later discovered, who hadn’t seen these films at all. Most notably the one who told me that chief among Freddy’s fiendish powers was his ability to communicate with domestic animals, commanding them to carry out his evil bidding, although that is an idea Wes Craven may want to consider for his proposed Krueger revival). And although these films did have the power to frighten when channelled through the over-active imagination of a gibbering, dim-witted child, when you actually got to see one it was often a different story. The horrors conjured up by your imagination just couldn’t be matched by the mores of what was still essentially mainstream 80s cinema, not to mention the fact that Freddy Krueger always reminded me of an unusually sadistic Kenny Everett, which isn’t a massively frightening thing. Or is it? Most disappointingly of all, of course, was the knowledge that these films were all perfectly legal.

So, where were the forbidden films, the films containing such unspeakable horrors that the powers that be had to keep them under lock and key? That is, of course, a somewhat paradoxical question, but for the fact that apparently there were channels ready to be opened and sources waiting to be tapped in order to procure some of this cinematic contraband. The most notorious banned films of the age were the 75 titles that made up the infamous Video Nasty list, compiled by the Director of Public Prosecutions as a moral defensive against what they perceived as an outrageous offensive on Thatcher’s Britain, launched by an unruly band of unscrupulous, and supposedly immoral, small-time video distributors (it’s such a typical Thatcher-era phrase, “Video Nasty”. I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that Charles Saatchi himself had coined it. See also, “Friendly Fire”). A potted history of the Video Nasty shows us that the majority of these films were borne of Hollywood’s refusal to acknowledge the potential of nascent home video technology just as it began to boom in popularity in the late 70s (much as the major studios had neglected television for years, fearing that their profits would be severely undercut). Stuck for something to watch, and starved of mainstream product, hungry and eager VCR owners found themselves being catered to by the aforementioned, and equally eager, independent distributors, who were either buying up the rights to quick ‘n’ sleazy Eurosploitation (mainly from our old friends Italy), picking up seedy and unlicensed 60s and 70s curios from Britain and America, or conjuring up their own creations of varying taste and quality on minuscule budgets. This kind of output eventually oversaturated the market, and 99% of early video releases are strikingly base, as without the promotional budget of a major studio behind it, a film can be a very hard thing to sell. Add a dash of sex or violence (very often both), however, depicted with daring depravity on the box sleeve and an audience begins to emerge.

The Video Nasties cast a dark, and to many, compelling shadow over the early years of home video. Following the outrage they created, the UK’s chief censorship body, the British Board of Film Censorship (later Classification), turned its attention to home video for the first time in 1984 and systematically tried and banned every film on the DPP’s list. The newly savvy Hollywood studios stepped in to fill the void, and very shortly mainstream fodder was finally finding its way into the home, taking the place of the newly outlawed Nasty. However, although the police could legally seize copies of these prohibited video cassettes, it was impossible to round up every last tape, and many of them would spend the remainder of the decade and beyond circulating between the callous and the curious, growing a little more worn out after each screening. It was one such battered copy that was presented to me by my elder cousin one night in the late 80s. The film was Mario Bava’s Bloodbath (as discussed in Yellow Peril, see below), and I was both excited and repulsed by the appropriately lurid cover. “What’s that?” I asked my cousin, dry-mouthed from horrified intrigue. “It’s banned”, he grunted. “Where did you get it?” queried I. “Off some lad in the chip shop”, he illuminatingly conceded, before barring me from watching it with him in case I told the police and got him “done”. But at least I could say I had been in the presence of an actual banned film, and had seen first-hand evidence that they did still exist and could be relatively easily acquired, it only being a mere matter of striking up an acquaintance with some mysterious and well-connected fellow in a chip shop. Appetite whetted, I spent much of the 1990s defying the all-powerful BBFC by tracking down as many Video Nasties, and other censored shockers besides, as I could find.

(John Trevelyan, centre, with Paul Morrissey and Andy Warhol)

I also developed a learned interest in British censorship history in general, and it’s an engrossing and colourful tale. With thick clouds of class conflict, sexual repression, xenophobia, religious fervour, moral sanctimony, and commercial callousness forever threatening to rain down trouble and turmoil on these isles, it’s no surprise that the BBFC became the largest and most scissor-happy censorship board in Western Europe. It struck early, claiming its first victim in 1903 after banning a short science feature called The Cheese Mites at the behest of the British cheese industry. Later, in and around the time of the Second World War, it would find itself at the elbow of an altogether more powerful agency, when the Government entrusted it with the task of keeping political propaganda under control. Informed by several sources, including Tom Dewe Mathews excellent book Censored and BBC2’s outstanding 1995 documentary Empire of the Censors, I found myself able to list off all the BBFC chiefs in order of ascension, and discuss the key events of their reign, much in the way one might with the Prime Ministers of Britain. With that in mind, then, we’ll journey right up to the modern era and meet the BBFC’s equivalent to Harold Wilson, John Trevelyan, who decided what the Great British Public could and couldn’t see between 1958 and 1971. Like Wilson, Trevelyan presented the exterior of a dapper and genial gent, but underneath could be a shrewd and ruthless networker. Presiding over a successful boom-time in newly liberalised British cinema, Trevelyan cheerily got on with his work, pausing only to trim the odd twenty seconds off a sweaty sex scene in a kitchen sink drama here, or to ward off some unwanted and unwittingly ahead-of-schedule gorefest from America or the continent there (Blood Feast and Bloodbath, respectively, both of which would appear on the Video Nasty list years later). Trevelyan, again like Wilson, had a healthy relationship with industry (or, in Trevelyan’s case, the industry) and garnered much praise for being brave enough to pass a succession of celebrated taboo-busting classics, including Victim (homosexuality), Room at the Top (class inequality) and Yield to the Night (capital punishment). He bowed out happily enough at the end of his reign having caused relatively few grumbles, and history would show that he also possessed impeccable timing among his attributes as the 1970s would bring an awful lot for an awful lot of people to grumble about in terms of film censorship…

A Clockwork Orange (1971) – Alright, alright, alright… I know it was never actually banned, per se. It was instead withdrawn by its legendary director, Stanley Kubrick, for one of several potential reasons that will continue to be debated over for years and years to come (fear of copycat violence, death threats to his family by rabid moral zealots, unwillingness to have it shorn by even a single second by the BBFC, all three). What is clear, however, is that you couldn’t watch the bloody thing in Britain (at least, not legally) for some 27 years, and that’s almost half a lifetime.

Even if John Trevelyan had managed to duck out of the BBFC top job with scarcely a blot on his copybook, he was clearly wise to the fact that the position was about to get a lot tougher. Towards the end of his captaincy the waters had begun to get choppy with a small handful of high-profile and difficult releases threatening to upset the boat, including Arthur Penn’s sublime but occasionally brutal Bonnie and Clyde, and the somewhat muddled, climatically horrific hippie-tinged western Soldier Blue (once notorious, but pretty obscure these days. It’s not very good). But these films were mere trifles compared to what landed on the in-tray of his immediate successor, Stephen Murphy. 1971 alone heralded the release of at least a dozen major releases containing unprecedented levels of screen violence, several of which would remain major bugbears for the BBFC for years to come, including; Straw Dogs, Dirty Harry, The French Connection, The Devils and, of course, A Clockwork Orange.

To continue in earnest with our British Prime Minister analogy, if John Trevelyan is Harold Wilson, then we can view Stephen Murphy as a sort of Ted Heath/Jim Callaghan hybrid character. The 1960s had been a tremendous decade for the film industry all over the world. Sure, the major American studios took a bit of a beating with no shortage of expensive flops throughout the decade (for every successful Mary Poppins there was a flop Hello Dolly to sap precious profits), but who cares when the likes of Italy, France, Britain, and the US indies were churning out era-defining, epoch-making masterpieces under newly relaxed censorship laws. At the turn of the decade the major studios caught up and as the hopeful and permissive 60s bled into the bleak and uncertain 70s, Stephen Murphy, much like his Prime Ministerial counterparts, was found wanting in his ability to quell the outraged cries of the so-called moral majority whilst simultenously establish himself in the ever-changing brave new world. Copycat violence was nothing new by the early 70s, and the BBFC had previously banned Marlon Brando’s moody biker vehicle The Wild One for similar reasons in the 1950s. However, by the time of A Clockwork Orange, with the British press primed for stories of disaffected teens mimicking the anarchic antics of Alex and his Droogs, the debate on screen violence had reached such fever pitch that none other than Reginald Maudling, Home Secretary in the Heath cabinet, demanded a private screening of Kubrick’s film, expressing concern that the seemingly weak-minded Murphy and the BBFC had just passed it uncut. Film censorship was now a front page issue, and its causes and potential effects were troubling even those at the very top.

(I couldn’t find a picture of Stephen Murphy, so here is a nice one of Reginald Maudling instead)

A Clockwork Orange needs no introduction, and I’m sure every one of you has seen this immaculate and incendiary meisterwerk, so I’ll spare you a synopsis. I have seen A Clockwork Orange too, of course, and many times now. But for a very long time I had cause to speculate whether I’d ever actually get to see it or not. I can’t quite remember exactly at what point during my search for information on banned films I stumbled upon A Clockwork Orange, but the moment I did I was immediately intrigued. It was the title that did it. “A Clockwork Orange”, what did that mean? Every forbidden film I had ever heard of came with a salacious and often somewhat predictable title, such as the aforementioned Blood Feast or Bloodbath, but what on earth did “A Clockwork Orange” mean? I had no idea, but I liked the sound of it (I experienced similar bamboozlement over the title of the similarly banned Straw Dogs. What the hell was a “straw dog”?). Further investigation revealed that this was also a very different beast from its banned brethren in that it had enjoyed a major and successful mainstream release in the early 70s. Thus I interrogated my mother on the subject. Had she seen it? No, but she remembered it coming out and being subsequently pulled following the whole copycat hoopla. I was crestfallen she hadn’t seen it (mind you, she would have only been 15 at the time) and felt somehow unfairly deprived of a direct hotline to firsthand information regarding this mysterious film. She attempted to make this up to me by pointing me in the direction of the novel on which it was based (it was based on a novel?!) and the public library was my next port of call. I couldn’t believe the ease with which I found a copy of this apparently inflammatory material (and one with an enticing screenshot of Malcolm McDowell on the cover, to boot) and promptly read it from cover to cover, absolutely gob-smacked. How could they make a film out of that?! And if they could, I would dearly love to see it (and yes, Anthony Burgess fans it was the proper 21 chapter version of the novel, which ends with the older Alex being mocked by his new Droogs after they uncover his burgeoning paternal instincts. Kubrick obviously didn’t film this and the majority of subsequent prints of the book removed the chapter accordingly).

But, of course, I couldn’t see it, and in that dark, pre-internet age it was struggle enough to even get my hands on a screenshot or an old, enlightening magazine article or two. To my eternal shame, an old 70s film journal I also loaned from my library had several colour photographs of scenes from the film (each bizarre image adding a new layer to the mystery) and an A4 print of the famous “A” poster (designed by Kubrick himself, see above), all of which I unscrupulously cut out and stuck to my bedroom wall, before sneakily returning the journal without confessing to its being vandalised (my guilt was later relieved when I heard that no less than Martin Scorsese committed similar crimes in his youth. Great minds, eh?). I was also given a cutting of a newspaper article by my dear old mother, continuing to feed my unhealthy interest, detailing an illegal screening of the film in a London cinema in 1993. That cinema was none other than the Scala in King’s Cross, and before you say “but, that’s a nightclub!” I will say that, yes, it is now. But it was a cinema before an enraged Stanley Kubrick chose to smite it, bankrupting the owners with a heavy lawsuit for daring to show his film. Old Stanley was taking this self-imposed ban very seriously, indeed. I found this article both stimulating and depressing. On the one hand, the fact that A Clockwork Orange HAD been screened somewhere in Britain in the recent past was an exciting proposition. However, not only did I curse my luck for not being in London in 1993 (although, I would only have been 12), but the fact that Kubrick had reacted so aggressively to his ban being broken (even by an esteemed art house cinema) was proof positive that A Clockwork Orange would not be getting a general release any time soon.

On through the years I trudged with my prospects for viewing A Clockwork Orange growing no brighter. My yearning to do so had inadvertently turned me onto some very fine films, however, and I became a committed Kubrick fan, enraptured by his freely available efforts, films so incredibly brilliant that they further fired my imagination as to just how fantastic his rendering of A Clockwork Orange might be (Lolita and Barry Lyndon are my other two favourites). I even watched anything I could find with Malcolm McDowell in it, but the general quality of that particular oeuvre is less high, obviously (I mean, If… is very good, but have you seen Buy & Cell?). I always got a kick from watching anything with anyone from or involved in A Clockwork Orange in or behind it, so you can imagine my surprise when I learnt that Dalziel from Dalziel & Pascoe played one of the Droogs!

Then, in 1995, BBC2 screened its fantastic Empire of the Censors documentary series, part two of which showed entire sequences completely uncut from A Clockwork Orange, I believe for the very first time on British television (I recall an earlier Kubrick documentary on Channel 4, narrated by Jonathan Pryce, showed only grainy black and white stills). This was an incredible development in my quest, and I sat wide-eyed watching Alex in action for the very first time, recording every second on VHS for posterity. I even called a couple of my friends off the street to come and have a look at Alex bludgeoning a victim to death with a giant phallus (that wasn’t in the novel!) which earned me a reputation as being “sick” among my ignorant peers (they did however enjoy the Emmanuelle segment in the same documentary).

Two years on and I was better connected (although not necessarily to better people) and in 1997 I finally reached the end of my quest, returning home one evening with a Portuguese VHS tape of my adolescent Holy Grail, housed in a pale blue box with the “A” poster on the front. I was triumphant, and how I got hold of it was almost ridiculously simple. For some reason, some lads I knew were on friendly terms with a large skinhead metaller-type, who had a collection of knives, a pet snake, and a harebrained obsession with Nazism; you know the type. By complete chance I overheard him mention A Clockwork Orange to one of my friends (I was trying my best to ignore him), upon which cue I suddenly changed tact and bounded into the conversation. “Have you seen it?” I asked. “Yeah, I’ve got it. It’s supposed to be the most violent film ever made, but it’s boring”. And then the magic words… “You can have it, if you want”. I naturally didn’t hesitate to say yes, and hurried home not believing my luck, stopping only to rope in a friend to join in the screening party and share the magic (I remember almost resenting him, he was about to fucking watch A Clockwork Orange, and he just didn’t seem to appreciate the significance, or indeed, his luck).

My mind was completely blown by A Clockwork Orange (still my favourite opening shot of all time, ehanced all the more by Walter/Wendy Carlos’ evocative and sinister score), and to actually be able to sit and watch the thing unfold by itself after trying to imagine what it would really be like for so long was an almost transcendental experience. Unlike the philistine who had put me in possession of my long sought after prize, I had already worked it out that A Clockwork Orange was not even close to being “the most violent film of all time”. I still found watching it a rather strange and frightening experience, however, and Kubrick does weave such a dark and intoxicating spell (albeit with jolts of bawdy humour) with this one that it’s easy to see why it gave the BBFC such a headache.

The final say was always with the director, any road, and he kept A Clockwork Orange heavily under wraps right up until his death in 1999. He had barely departed when Warner Bros., the film’s original distributor, rather overzealously announced their plans to re-release it in the cinema forthwith. I’ve always questioned the tastefulness of their timing, but I had moved to London by the time of its comeback weekend, and was comfortably seated in the back row of the Holloway Road Odeon when the curtain drew back on A Clockwork Orange for the first time in a British cinema (barring the Scala scandal) in 27 years. On the big screen, and with a delicious new print, it obviously looked even better than it had done on a battered video cassette, and with the added bonus of not having Portuguese subtitles, too. When I first caught the Clockwork Orange bug I burnt up with a mad fever to see this illusive and malicious masterpiece, but sitting in the comfort of a mainstream cinema in the company of Alex and the Droogs, I realised that, at last… I was cured, all right!