Deep End (1970)

[DB7]

To the best of my knowledge this has never been released in the UK on video or dvd and I was wondering would it now suffer under the censors knife (think it was x-rated on release). Particularly the scene in which Jane Asher's swimming instructor boyfriend is coaxing girls into the pool?



Darn good film that deserves a wider audience.



Also, whatever happened to John Moulder-Brown?

[ollie]

DB7:

To the best of my knowledge this has never been released in the UK on video or dvd and I was wondering would it now suffer under the censors knife (think it was x-rated on release). Particularly the scene in which Jane Asher's swimming instructor boyfriend is coaxing girls into the pool?



Darn good film that deserves a wider audience.



Also, whatever happened to John Moulder-Brown?

Hey Db7,

I've been intrigued by this this film for a while now,i have never seen it but would love to :) you dont happen to have a copy (or know how to source one?)do you?.thanks in anticipation.

cheers Ollie.

[DB7]

Try sending Aphra a PM. thumbs_u



It's an engrossing but ultimately unsettling snapshot of Swinging 60s London turned sour and very reminiscent of Polanski. Diana Dors makes a brief but memorable appearance as a customer at the baths where Asher & Moulder Brown work.

[ollie]

Thank's Db7,

will get on it straight away. thumbs_u

cheers Ollie.

[paulsroom]

DB7

Darn good film that deserves a wider audience.



Also, whatever happened to John Moulder-Brown?

It is possible to obtain this film from American sites, but I don't know where the original comes from. The copies could be privately created. This is not to be confused with "The Deep End" which has nothing to with "Deep End".



As well as "Deep End", which was a perfect film for John Moulder-Brown, he made several international films in Spain, Italy, Germany, Mexico and the UK, but stopped making films in 1987. His last appearance (to my knowledge) was in the Joan Hickson tv version of the Miss Marple series in "Sleeping Murder".



But now he has made an appearance in "Alexander the Great From Macedonia" as King Philip, with Sam Heughan as Alexander. Where this film is now being shown, I don't know. He runs an acting school in Brighton and this may be why he stopped making films. A great shame as I feel that he was a very competent actor. I've managed to acquire a dozen of his films and they all have a very interesting storylines.

[Steve Crook]

Originally posted by DB7@Aug 26 2004, 09:43 PM

To the best of my knowledge this has never been released in the UK on video or dvd and I was wondering would it now suffer under the censors knife (think it was x-rated on release). Particularly the scene in which Jane Asher's swimming instructor boyfriend is coaxing girls into the pool?



Darn good film that deserves a wider audience.



Also, whatever happened to John Moulder-Brown?

The BBFC site doesn't list it at all, not even as X-Rated. Was it ever released here?



John Moulder-Brown played Philip, King of Macedonia in a 2005 film about Alexander the Great (not the Oliver Stone one)



Steve

[Wetherby Pond]

It's definitely been released on a UK video label, as that was how I saw it the first time - though I suspect it was a pre-Video Recordings Act release, which would explain its subsequent disappearance and the BBFC website not knowing about it.



I also got the chance to see it on the big screen as part of a Jerzy Skolimowski retrospective at the NFT in the 1980s - but I honestly don't recall any other opportunities to see it since then.



It would certainly have got an X certificate back in 1970 - though I'd guess it would comfortably qualify for a 15 now. (And there wouldn't have been much difference between the two, since the pre-1971 X was effectively 16).

[Wetherby Pond]

Just to update my own post, I can also confirm that it had a UK theatrical release - it was reviewed by the Monthly Film Bulletin, April 1971, page 71, and recorded as having an X certificate (i.e. over-16s only), so the BBFC website is clearly incomplete - though I believe they acknowledge this with regard to older titles.



The review was by Nigel Andrews, who now writes for the Financial Times. and it was a very definite thumbs up ("a study in the growth of obsession that is both funny and frighteningly exact").



The following issue included Deep End as part of its critics' round-up, suggesting that its opening date was around April-May 1971. This is what the panel made of it (the ratings were one to four stars):



John Coleman (New Statesman) - **

Patrick Gibbs (Daily Telegraph) - **

Nina Hibbin (Morning Star) - **

Margaret Hinxman (Sunday Telegraph) - **

Derek Malcolm (Guardian) - **

Richard Mallett (Punch) - ***

John Russell Taylor (Times) - ***



Out of 23 films surveyed that month, Deep End had the second best critical reception after Five Easy Pieces.

[paulsroom]

Originally posted by Wetherby Pond@Mar 27 2005, 10:27 AM

I can also confirm that it had a UK theatrical release

F.Maurice Speed's FILM REVIEW 1971/72 identifies "Deep End" as having a 'floating release' and first shown in March 1970 at The Academy Cinema in Oxford Street, London. I know for a fact that it has also been shown on tv in Brazil! It's possible to get an NTSC video of it from the USA, but I don't know exactly where the source copy comes from.



This was definitely John Moulder-Brown's best film, and the reviews of the time (I have the Films & Filming one) are glowing about his and Jane Asher's performances. It's a real shame that cinemas like The Academy (now closed) are few are far between. Although the NFT opened branches in Brighton and Southampton (where I can get to easily), they soon closed - presumably from lack of subsidies.

[Wetherby Pond]

Originally posted by paulsroom@Mar 31 2005, 09:47 AM

It's a real shame that cinemas like The Academy (now closed) are few are far between. Although the NFT opened branches in Brighton and Southampton (where I can get to easily), they soon closed - presumably from lack of subsidies.

It's a shame, but it was also inevitable - back in the 1970s and 1980s arthouse rep cinemas thrived (= just about broke even) because there was virtually no alternative to what they offered. BBC2 and Channel 4 had more adventurous film programming back then, but that was a drop in the ocean - if you wanted to see anything off the beaten track on a regular basis, your nearest arthouse cinema was literally the only option.



Competition got tougher during the sell-thru video explosion of the late 1980s, and overwhelming when satellite TV was thrown into the mix - with the result that most of the old-fashioned arthouses closed in the 1990s even before the DVD revolution hammered the final nail into their coffin. Economically, they were stuffed - their admission prices were capped by the low price of video alternatives (if you charge a fiver a ticket, two people might as well buy the video to keep), but fewer tickets were being sold while fixed costs - trundling heavy 35mm prints around the country ain't cheap! - certainly weren't falling.



So no subsidy, no cinema - and subsidies are both thin on the ground and come with numerous programming strings attached. For instance, the EU's Europa Cinemas scheme requires a fixed percentage of their opening hours to be devoted to European films. This does include British titles, but the twist is that they have to be new British titles - there's no subsidy available for classic rep of the kind the Academy used to specialise in.

[paulsroom]

Originally posted by Wetherby Pond@Mar 31 2005, 06:47 PM

BBC2 and Channel 4 had more adventurous film programming back then

The BBC claims to be World Cinema aware by showing various foreign films on their digital channel, but this is not as frequent as they imply. FilmFour seems like a fair alternative, but I don't have satellite so that's out for me. Channel 4 occasionally surprises me, but infrequently. My only method is to hunt down the videos - with a modest degree of success.



What we really need a film society type channel that shows British and foreign films. "Deep End" cries out to be given the showing it deserves, and there are many more.

[deconstruction]

John Moulder-Brown is the Principal and Founder of the Academy of Creative Training, a

school of dramatic art in Brighton, England.

www.actedu.org.uk

info@actedu.org.uk

(44) 01273 818 266 Fax: (44) 01273 818 267

8-10 Rock Place, Brighton, England, BN2 1PF

[DB7]

TBH as I mentioned at the top of the thread I'm not sure Deep End would get past the BBFC given the current obsessiveness over children being filmed in a swiming pool environment - and the film does suggest the male instructor has a certain sexual interest in his young female charges. (unless I was reading too much into it)

[paulsroom]

Originally posted by DB7@Jun 6 2005, 01:15 PM

....I'm not sure Deep End would get past the BBFC given the current obsessiveness over children being filmed in a swiming pool environment....

I'm sure you're right but this is really sad as now everyone is looking at the wrong details and not understanding the story any longer. "Friends" is another film that would certainly not pass the censor, since it deals with underage sex. But the story is really about the simple innocence of teenage values. If life operated exactly how we think it should, then we'd all be automatons with no independent thought.

[Wetherby Pond]

Originally posted by DB7@Jun 6 2005, 02:15 PM

TBH as I mentioned at the top of the thread I'm not sure Deep End would get past the BBFC given the current obsessiveness over children being filmed in a swiming pool environment - and the film does suggest the male instructor has a certain sexual interest in his young female charges. (unless I was reading too much into it)

Since current BBFC policy is not to cut films unless there are clear legal problems, this would only be an issue if there was a direct infringement of the 1978 Protection of Children Act. It's ages since I've seen the film, but I can't honestly remember anything that comes even close.



The Act isn't concerned with prudish interpretations of a particular scene - only with whether or not the film captures a physical act of indecency being committed involving a child (so legally it becomes a recording of a crime). That's why Adrian Lyne's Lolita was fine (Lyne made damn sure that the shooting of every single contentious sequence was thoroughly documented on video from multiple angles for precisely this reason) and why I suspect there won't be any problem with Deep End either.



(That said, the Sexual Offences Act of 2003 altered the definition of "a child" in the 1978 Act from someone under sixteen to someone under eighteen - which might conceivably cause retrospective difficulties depending on how it's interpreted. John Moulder-Brown was born in mid-1953, so the chances are he'd have passed his sixteenth birthday when the film was made, but he obviously wasn't yet eighteen. But it all depends on whether he performs an actual indecent act onscreen - if it's merely implied, there isn't a problem).

[paulsroom]

Originally posted by Wetherby Pond@Jun 9 2005, 01:51 PM

John Moulder-Brown was born in mid-1953, so the chances are he'd have passed his sixteenth birthday when the film was made, but he obviously wasn't yet eighteen. But it all depends on whether he performs an actual indecent act onscreen - if it's merely implied, there isn't a problem).

Yes, John Moulder-Brown was seventeen when the film was released. But now I wonder if "Friends" may still fall foul, since the act is certainly implied but only seen in the same way as "Deep End".



What a minefield! Now you don't know what you can watch and what you can't, even though you're watching simply as a filmgoer!

[David Savage]

Originally posted by Wetherby Pond@May 25 2005, 10:36 PM

I can't reveal anything concrete at this stage, and it may come to nothing, but I know of a UK distributor who's actively chasing this title for a possible DVD release.

This would be great - I really hope John Moulder Brown and Jane Asher would be approached to do a commentary track. When interviewed by Scarlet Street magazine some years ago (issue 7), JMB had plenty of memories about the making of the film.





I don't think Deep En d would have any trouble whatsoever getting past the BBFC.

[DB7]

Originally posted by Jonathan Woss@Jun 10 2005, 11:49 AM

Are there two films with the same title? I've just watched Deep End and there were no children in it. The only females being coaxed into the pool were clearly all over 18.

Two or three. At one stage there's about 20 schoolgirls being pushed into the pool.

[DB7]

Originally posted by Wetherby Pond@Jun 9 2005, 02:51 PM

(That said, the Sexual Offences Act of 2003 altered the definition of "a child" in the 1978 Act from someone under sixteen to someone under eighteen - which might conceivably cause retrospective difficulties depending on how it's interpreted. John Moulder-Brown was born in mid-1953, so the chances are he'd have passed his sixteenth birthday when the film was made, but he obviously wasn't yet eighteen. But it all depends on whether he performs an actual indecent act onscreen - if it's merely implied, there isn't a problem).

He doesn't but Diana Dors sure molests him in the 'George Best' scene.



The scene I was more conce rned with was the instructor who spanks the one teenager on the bottom and pulls the swimming costume top of another - with Jane Asher appearing to knowingly look on.



But it's a gem deserving of a wider audience. I particularly like all the red references (blood in the titles, red canoe in the pool, red Triumph Herald and decorator painting the wall red) all leading up to Jane Asher getting hit on the back of the head.

[Wetherby Pond]

Originally posted by DB7@Jun 10 2005, 01:51 PM

He doesn't but Diana Dors sure molests him in the 'George Best' scene.

That's the scene I was thinking of, but I can't recall specific details. Doesn't she just grip his hand and fantasise about George Best, or have I suppressed telling elements?

The scene I was more concerned with was the instructor who spanks the one teenager on the bottom and pulls the swimming costume top of another - with Jane Asher appearing to knowingly look on.

That wouldn't be a problem at all - to be defined as "indecent" from a legal perspective, I think there has to be actual sexual contact of some description (though I know of at least two films - The Tin Drum and Léolo - which have been cut under the 1978 Act for scenes of underage boys fondling naked female nipples, so we're not exactly talking hardcore porn)

But it's a gem deserving of a wider audience. I particularly like all the red references (blood in the titles, red canoe in the pool, red Triumph Herald and decorator painting the wall red) all leading up to Jane Asher getting hit on the back of the head.

I'd love to see it again - I saw Jerzy Skolimowski's Moonlighting again recently for the first time since 1982, and it stood up really well: I assumed it would be horribly dated, but in actual fact there's very little that fixes it to a particular time and place aside from the situation arising from the 1981 military crackdown in Poland. But the story could easily be about Bosnians or Afghans or Iraqis and you'd otherwise hardly need to change a thing.