BFI's 'The Joy of Sex Education' (R2 DVD set)

[julian_craster]

Desmond Carrington enjoys tea and cake in 1949....A still from The Joy of Sex. Photo: BFI

Sex education films: they don't make them like they used toIn our oversexed age, sex education films from earlier decades still have the power to shock and awe with their freedom and frankness

The Guardian

Sex education films: they don't make them like they used to | Film | guardian.co.uk

There can't be many new DVD releases of short film anthologies which are unstintingly riveting all the way through. But here's one. For the past couple of days, I have been glued to the BFI's incredible collection The Joy of Sex Education, which is a compendium of sex education films from 1917 to 1973. They have a weird similarity to old-fashioned stag films, not merely because of explicit content, but because they are designed to be watched in a semi-clandestine world: created not for cinemas or television but for a private clientele in church halls and classrooms and family planning clinics.

Some of these films are genuinely horrifying. The brutally entitled Don't Be Like Brenda (1973) is an eight-minute lecture to young women, telling them not to be sexually promiscuous like the film's hapless heroine – although heaven knows, the promiscuity hinted at here is tragically modest. Poor Brenda goes all the way with a boy who does not marry her. The film is stunningly without any useful educational content on contraception and makes it entirely clear that the woman, not the man, is to blame. The film even makes her poor unwanted child suffer from a heart defect, so that no one wants to adopt the poor little thing – just to hammer the point home. Katy McGahan's excellent programme note on this film (in the DVD's accompanying booklet) doesn't mention it, but the caddish male in the film is played by Richard Morant: many of the film's target audience would have seen him, two years previously, playing the evil Flashman in the BBC's teatime adaptation of Tom Brown's Schooldays.

The New York-set movie Her Name Was Ellie; His Name Was Kyle (1967) is a film about syphilis, starring John Pleshette as Bruce, a troubled teen who can't bring himself to confess to his parents or his steady girlfriend that he has caught syphilis from casual sex with a waitress called Ellie (who was infected by a swinging sexual predator called Kyle, whose scabby hands are glimpsed in the film's final frames). When Bruce finally attends a health clinic, the doctor wants to track down his sexual contacts and demands "names". This struck me as having a weirdly McCarthyite ring. But perhaps it is precisely the other way round: these tough, unsentimental inquisitions, a secret part of many an American male's personal history in the services and after the war, may well have influenced the style of Joe McCarthy's committee. Could it be that Her Name Was Ellie; His Name Is Kyle is a film which offers a sensational insight into American political history?

Jez Stewart's programme note suggests that the movie's gritty look makes it look like Cassavetes – yes, and it also has a little something of Woody Allen. John Pleshette's scrawny teenage boy, who is actually really good at basketball, reminds me of Woody Allen's repeated protestations that despite his wimpy-looking frame, he was a real sportsman in his youth. Remarkably, Bruce's steady girl Laura is played by Amy Taubin, who was to become the legendary film critic for the Village Voice, and who is still a prominent and much respected attender of the Cannes film festival.

The People At No 19 (1949) by JB Holmes is a 17-minute black-and-white British film from the government's postwar Central Office of Information (COI) about a young married couple, still living cheek-by-jowl with the bride's parents. The young wife Joan (Tilsa Page) comes back from the doctor's with what everyone hopes is wonderful news of a pregnancy – instead she has to tell her husband Ken (Desmond Carrington) that she has syphilis, caught while Ken was overseas during the war, from a male acquaintance of a woman friend who was no better than she ought to be, and came to an unspecified "bad end". The passing resemblance to Noël Coward movies such as Brief Encounter or This Happy Breed make the word "syphilis" genuinely shocking and there is some stage business with a bread knife that made me think of early Hitchcock. Here, as in other films, it is the woman who is stigmatised as the bearer of syphilis – perhaps as a way of scaring men into using condoms, although there is no explicit information about these.

The undoubted masterpiece of this double-DVD set is Martin Cole's 23-minute Growing Up from 1971. Now, this begins with some pretty ripe statements about the differences between the sexes, with some blather about how the softer female sex stays home nesting and the questing males are "usually more inventive and creative". But the film boldly shows film of real people – not coy line drawings – in a concerted attempt to show the realities of where (gasp!) babies come from. Remarkably, it even shows film of real people – a man and then a young woman – masturbating. This clear, frank and in fact rather dignified film got Cole tonnes of hate mail, encouraged by the tabloid press.

As with many of these films, you start watching with a knowing, ironic chuckle. Ho, ho, ho, you think, as a fraightfully refained female announcer talks about "gels' bodies changing", while we see healthy gels playing hockey. Hee, hee, hee, you giggle, while another film shows stock footage of Cliff Richard-style youth clubs and coffee bars in an agonisingly earnest attempt to get its message across to young people.

But then something strange happens. The laughter dies away and you find yourself watching, rapt at the sheer novelty of what is happening: films which are, according to their lights, trying to talk as frankly as they can about sex. We think that in 2009 we live in a super-sexy media age, with everything densely saturated with sex: mobile phones are sexy, reality TV shows are sexy, everything is sexy. But weirdly, I think, the sexiess has always to be semi-veiled to be commercially alluring, and media and culture are actually as prim as a Victorian governess about the nasty plumbing and circuitry of sex. These silly, schoolteacher-y films from the 50s and 60s are much freer and more honest about sex than the regular run of postwatershed TV.

My only worry is: where are the modern sex education films? The latest one here is from 1973. Do we make them any more? Or are we all overwhelmed with irony and self-consciousness the way previous generations were overwhelmed with embarrassment and shame? I don't know. But I think I might have to keep hold of Martin Cole's controversial Growing Up to show my own son when the time comes. Which will be sooner than I think.

[Hackett]

After seeing Desmond Carrington in a film like that I don't think I could listen to "TWO WAY FAMILEY FAVOURITES" again in the same light.

[bobsterkent]

Mine is on order!

[julian_craster]

More on this BFI release, including a complete listing of films on the DVDs:



School Gate - Times Online - WBLG: The joy of sex - sex education through the years!





BBC NEWS | Magazine | The joy of sex education

They're happy because they waited till they were married

(still : BFI)

Cautionary note: the clips on the Times and BBC site are not suitable for those of a sensitive disposition, or those under the age of 60

[ollie]

"The man and the woman lie together in a special way" how we laughed .

[CaptainWaggett]

Don't be like Brenda is quite possibly the most sexist film ever made

[Steve Crook]

name='CaptainWaggett']Don't be like Brenda is quite possibly the most sexist film ever made

I blame Gary's mother - although Brenda does drop a few aitches in her monologue so maybe she's not "a nice girl" after all.



Steve

[bobsterkent]

The male assistant in the chemist in 'ave you got a male assistant' is quite possiby the hairiest man ever!

[penfold]

name='CaptainWaggett']Don't be like Brenda is quite possibly the most sexist film ever made

Good cast though. I think that's Richard Morant, and Brenda is very familiar - Deborah someone??

[batman]

name='penfold']Good cast though. I think that's Richard Morant, and Brenda is very familiar - Deborah someone??

She looks like Deborah Grant of Bouquet of Barbed Wire fame.

[penfold]

name='batman']She looks like Deborah Grant of Bouquet of Barbed Wire fame.

That's her, though I remembered her as being Mrs Bergerac, nee Hungerford....

[batman]

name='penfold']That's her, though I remembered her as being Mrs Bergerac, nee Hungerford....

I'd forgotten she was in that.

[Steve Crook]

name='batman']I'd forgotten she was in that.

Do they know what she got up to when she was younger?



Steve