Welcome to the world of another great and unjustly forgotten subgenre
of British cinema's counterculture period - Hippiesploitation!! Regarded
at the time as a slow, bleak, poorly-acted and badly produced attempt
at cashing in on the 'groupie craze' (see Derek Ford's GROUPIE GIRL
or its German counterpart ICH EIN GROUPIE for further reference) from
the director that had already brought us such low-budget sexploitative
horror fare as NIGHT, AFTER NIGHT, AFTER NIGHT (1969) - albeit under
his pseudonym of Lewis J Force - PERMISSIVE is now regarded in certain
circles as a minor cult classic, something which would probably come
as a great shock to all those involved. That is, if they still remember
being in or wish to talk about the movie in the first place.
The plot, such as it is, concerns Suzy (Maggie Stride) an innocent,
waiflike hippie girl from an undisclosed location (the implication
of her innocence is that it's obviously not London) who arrives in
the metropolis to join the ever-growing legion of groupies (including,
in one brief shot, future TWINS OF EVIL Madeleine and Mary Collinson)
and band followers lurking around the rock scene. A scene which, being
the turn of the decade, lurks in that fabulous twilight netherworld
'twixt the hippie flower era and full-on bearded folkdom, but where
the peace and love ideals of two years hence had already been dropped
(that is, had they ever existed) in favour of a harsher, more cynical,
self-preservationist ethic that was to be the prevailing trend of
the ensuing 1970s.
Canadian-born Shonteff (whose later credits would include Bond pastiches/cash-ins
such as NO. 1 OF THE SECRET SERVICE, cheesy actioners like THE BIG
ZAPPER and the set-in-Vietnam-but-actually-filmed-in-Surrey war epic
HOW SLEEP THE BRAVE alongside plenty of sex and horror schlock masterpieces)
was obviously not the only director turning his savage critical lens
on the hitherto celebrated world of Swinging London at this time:
Pete Walker's contemporaneous COOL IT CAROL had already delivered
a punch to people's cosy sensibilities, the aforementioned Derek Ford
was preparing to shock legions of dirty macs with the revelation that
the girl they were watching gyrate onscreen could be their own daughter,
Donovan Winter was revealing that the whole thing was little more
than a butcher boy's fantasy, Stanley Long's gritty 'mondumentaries'
were packing them in in Leicester Square, and Alistair Reid had pushed
the envelope further than before in 1968 with the highly salacious
and dubious morals of BABY LOVE, which made a star out of its 15-year
old leading lady Linda Hayden. "Torn from yesterday's headlines!!"
the tags often read, encouraging whole generations of middle-aged,
ostensibly respectable men (and, if the figures are to be believed,
young men and ladies alike) to flock to cinemas in droves to see their
peculiar outsider's view of the prevailing social problems of the
week. Yes, hard as it may seem to believe, there was a time when the
'dangers' of live rock music were considered to be a social issue,
and even acoustic guitar-strumming, loon-panted gnomes like Forever
More, whose music soundtracks this very film, were reviled by the
self-appointed guardians of the nation's morals.
A little background research on said band reveals the following facts:
Forever More were a real band, signed to RCA (releasing two albums
for said label which fetch immense sums of money in mint condition
on vinyl, and which have to date never been reissued on CD, even by
some of those 'unofficial' labels one reads about in Record Collector),
and were fronted by Alan Gorrie, who was latterly involved with his
fellow Scots the Average White Band and has recently resurfaced again
as the composer of incidental music and themes for such Hollywood
blockbusters as Howard Stern's PRIVATE PARTS. Like Marc Bolan and
the doomed-to-obscurity Christian downer-rockers Plus (whose album
'The Seven Deadly Sins' was an attempt to cover each great human failing
in depth in just 35 minutes), the band were managed and promoted by
the notoriously bisexual and self-aggrandising publicist Simon Napier-Bell:
how their free-spirited prog idealism gelled with his continual quest
for the pound sterling is another matter, as is what the band must
have thought when the idea of appearing in this sleazy underground
movie (underground even by the standards of the late 60s) was proposed
to them. One wonders where the other members are now: I am willing
to wager they have little idea that their albums now change hands
for 'silly money', nor that Circulus frontman Mike Tyack once left
his girlfriend because she found their debut in a second-hand shop
and didn't tell him.
Obviously it didn't do them any major commercial favours, otherwise
I wouldn't be having to explain their history in any depth right now:
nor, it seems, did it turn up trumps for psych-poppers Titus Groan
or seminal acid-folk pioneers Comus, authors of the world's scariest
album 'First Utterance', both of whom also appear in the film at length
and have several songs played. Still, 'tis the obscurity and rarity
of such things that makes them fascinating, and British exploitation
films of the psychedelic era don't come much more obscure than PERMISSIVE,
although it did have a brief run on DVD in the late 1990s thanks to
(surprise surprise) Nigel Wingrove's Jezebel label, before the disc
was deleted and became a collector's item in its' own right. And like
all the best films of that era, it is perhaps best enjoyed when viewed
on some scratchy old third-generation tape with Dutch subtitles, or
screened on "possibly the only 35mm print still in existence"
(as arthouse hucksters the world over would have you believe) in some
down-at-heel community centre in the backstreets of Greater Manchester
in the company of several of your bifter-toking, Nuggets-loving chums.
Although he eschews the 'documentary portmanteau' approach favoured
by sleaze auteurs such as Ford and Long in their concurrent low-grade
masterpieces such as THE WIFE SWAPPERS, SUBURBAN WIVES, NAUGHTY and
ON THE GAME, Shonteff doesn't take a straight narrative approach either:
rather, although there is no attempt made to convince us that this
is in any way a slice of real life, and definitely no cheesy mock-gravitas
narration the feel of the movie is very much that we are following
its principal protagonists around with a camera and that some form
of prehistoric 'docusoap' approach is being employed. Over the course
of 80 minutes, we watch Suzy develop from a shy, makeup-less little
mouse in a sackcloth dress into a booted, hatted, preening backstage
queen who will literally 'take on all comers': initially shown round
and looked after by old school friend Fiona (Gay Singleton), she is
soon abandoned whilst Forever More drift up north touring, and after
an unsuccessful attempt to pal up with the groupies of Titus Groan
(which is swiftly curtailed when one of the band members comes onto
her) realizes she is going to have to fend for herself- or at least
depend on, as Tennessee Williams would have said, te kindness of strangers.
The kindest of these strangers turns out to be Pogo (Robert Daubigny,
one of those people with a very familiar face but for whom several
hours of internet scouring yielded next to no matches) a generous
soul who wanders the streets with his guitar busking, keeps a satchel
full of food in a lockup at Victoria Station (you couldn't remake
THAT in these days of "heightened terrorist awareness")
calls everybody 'maaaan' (even beautiful women) and is kind enough
to share both his food and his meagre lucre with Suzy in her hour
of need. Unfortunately for all concerned he's also a grade A card-carrying
fully-fledged nut-job, with a predilection for wandering uninvited
into churches and launching into random sermons against, like, the
might of the evil fat cat bread-head capitalist conspiracists who
have defiled his father's earth, maaaaaan, until the inevitable happens
and he gets dragged off by the rozzers (insert joke here). On the
way home from said police station, Suzy nips into a shop to get some
change and the hapless minstrel is very suddenly knocked down and
killed by a car: this is even more uncompromising to my mind than
the final scene of EASY RIDER, as the driver in this instance simply
has no regard for whoever walks out in front of him, "hippie
longhair faggot" or otherwise, and presumably sees the death
of a pedestrian as just another inevitable occupational hazard of
London life.
