Wordless Wednesday: The Great OutDors

Steaming (1985)

Nell Dunn, writer of groundbreaking '60s hits Up The Junction and Poor Cow, become something of a cause celebre in 1981 with her West End play Steaming, which offered a frank and funny expose of female camaraderie often sans clothes - thanks to the play's setting; a crumbling Turkish bathhouse in London.  

If you wanted to know what women were like in private, behind closed doors, reviewers claimed, then Steaming was the eye opening play for you.

But beneath such a determinedly categorising comment lies a play that is authentic, honest, poignant and warmly funny, as we see six strong and varied female characters congregate for their weekly ablutions and pampering, sharing intimate and often sexual stories, their dreams and concerns and, ultimately, offering them the chance to find friendship and shoulders to cry on. It's an easy metaphor, but it is effective - the steam room affords them a naked honesty, releasing them of all facades and inhibitions and allowing them to be themselves, away from society and its prying eyes.

Patricia Losey delivered a screenplay that was extremely faithfully to Dunn's original stageplay, whilst her husband Joseph Losey shows a commitment to the original staging in his direction by refusing to open up the play - a temptation others may have fallen for - in any way shape or form. Tragically, Steaming is notable now for being the final film for both Joseph Losey and for one of its stars, the great Diana Dors, as both died after filming. Dors appears her as the bathhouse's attendant and is very much the surrogate mother for all her clientele. It's a great, notable and fitting role for the legendary blonde bombshell to end on,  a world away from the monstrous matrons she fell into playing in her later years, this role recalls some of her former glamour but fittingly provides her with the opportunity to cut a weary yet dependable, mature and sympathetic figure.  

The clientele are a suitably broad canvas, ranging from middle class to working class ladies. The former is represented by Sarah Miles and Vanessa Redgrave appearing as old friends recently reunited, whilst Patti Love, Brenda Bruce and Felicity Dean appear as the latter. Class is immaterial however when clothes are removed and the communal nature of the setting is integral to the piece. When the bathhouse is faced with the inevitable closure notice, making way for a suitably '80s and therefore deeply impersonal leisure centre, we see just how much of a lifeline this weekly visit is for each woman and palpably so. All of the cast equip themselves well, delivering Dunn's eavesdroppingly authenic dialogue with great gusto and relish, but its Patti Love's character who perhaps remains with you. On the surface, she's the chirpy good time girl who can never say no, even when the relationship she is in proves to be extremely abusive, but its clear, we soon see, that she possesses a soul that her skin has the impossible challenge of trying to cover. 

If you like faithful stage to screen adaptations then Steaming comes warmly recommended, however if you prefer your films to be more filmic then the chances are this particular experience may leave you cold.

See for yourself on YouTube

Tread Softly Stranger (1958)

The definitive whole heap of trouble herself, Diana Dors, melts the screen in this sizzling British noir from 1958.

George Baker stars as Johnny Mansell, a ne'er do well, albeit one who possesses a certain honourable code, with a fondness for the race track. He is forced to flee London in the pre credit title sequence after running up one too many gambling debts. Returning up north to his native Rawborough (in reality Rotherham) he looks up his kid brother Dave (Terence Morgan) who he would have previously considered the sensible one (hey look, he even wears glasses!) but things seem to have changed since Johnny's been away. For one, Dave is living with a drinking club hostess who goes by the name of Calico. No prizes for guessing this is the role inhabited by the delectable Dors, whose pneumatic presence is used to full effect throughout the movie but perhaps none more so than in her opening scene, exercising in the shortest shorts imaginable on the rooftop of Dave's flat. 

Dave's other big news comes in the shape of a guilty secret; he's so enamoured with Calico and desperate to keep her on his arm that he's literally bought her love and affection, thanks to £300 he's embezzled from his employer. With the auditors due in in a few days, Dave has to repay the money before anyone at the firm realises its been taken. Johnny believes that he can win enough money at the races and sets off to do just that, but Calico manipulates Dave into a daring, armed nighttime robbery on his workplace, stealing enough money to cover his previous fraud. Johnny returns too late to halt Dave's plans and the pair soon find themselves caught redhanded by the nightwatchman. Disaster strikes and the rest of the film explores their guilt and how they desperately try to evade suspicion.

Tread Softly Stranger is a typical late 50s noir with its dangerous dame with a past and the men in her life doomed to have no future but, unlike American noir, the British variety would often excel in painting a vivid gritty monochrome picture of the UK landscape of the day, with its smoking chimney stacks, factories and low rent drinking clubs. Tread Softly Stranger is a prime example of this and develops its narrative with an almost symbiotic relationship with its northern industrial location; as the net closes in on the Mansell brothers and Calico, her allegiance shifting from Dave to Johnny, the endless thumping of the steel press in the local foundry begins to reverberate dramatically in the background. There really is no escape  on offer and the closing scene is one so deliciously ironic that it lingers long in the memory.

Whilst George Baker delivers a strong noir hero here as Johnny and Terence Morgan is suitably jittery as his younger brother, Tread Softly Stranger belongs to Diana Dors. The hourglass figured goddess really came into her own in crime drama (look at Yield To The Night, a prime example) and when given such strong material defied critics quick to pass her off as nothing more than the UK's answer to Monroe or Mansfield. If she has to be a British antidote to any Hollywood actress then it is films like this that prove she was more on a par with those who thrived in noir, like Lizbeth Scott. As Calico, she oozes sex appeal combined with a mercenary, amoral and self centred personality. Caught helplessly in her web, Dave and Johnny, pay heavily for her wicked ways.

It's a shame that the film's support isn't as strong. Cast as the doomed nightwatchman's son Paddy is the lantern jawed and likeable Patrick Allen, owner of such an extremely distinctive voice that earned him a lucrative side career in voice overs for everything from Barratt Homes to the shittifying Protect and Survive PIFs, but he totally and hilariously fails to nail the Irish accent expected of him here. 

Almost 60 years on, Tread Softly Stranger remains a strong sweat inducing crime drama and classy British noir.

Cars & Girls

Diana Dors arriving in style in a Cadillac at Pinewood Studios

Specs Appeal

Diana Dors at Cannes, 1956

Tea Up!

Diana Dors

Mirror, Mirror

Diana Dors

Hanging On The Telephone

Diana Dors

Smoking Hot

Diana Dors

Hanging On The Telephone

Diana Dors

Early Dors

Girls With Guns

Diana Dors, Yield To The Night (1956)

Baby Love (1968)

Baby Love is a 1968 exploitation feature that is very much mired in controversy. 

The story is about Luci (Linda Hayden) a young teenage girl in the North of England whose mother, the local prostitute, played as a brief non speaking cameo by Diana Dors, commits suicide rather than die of the cancer she has been diagnosed with. Luci is subsequently 'adopted' by former local boy made good Robert Quayle (Keith Barron) who had previously had a love affair with Dors before he left the town to go to Oxford. A grieving Luci suddenly finds herself in London, in the lap of luxury and a new family, Robert his wife Amy (Ann Lynn) and their son Nick (Derek Lamden) But there's no happy ending; Luci holds some resentment towards Robert for leaving her mother and cheating them of this kind of family life from the start. More, Luci's need to be loved for the first time in her life, coupled with her burgeoning wanton sexuality, starts to blur the lines of the physical or familial, distorting and twisting the lives of everyone around her as one by one she bewitches Nick, Robert and even Amy with her advances and desires.

It's a very interesting premise from the writing/producing and directing team of Guido Coen, Michael Klinger and Alasteir Reid (who adapted from the novel by Tina Chad Christian) in that, like the very best of exploitation cinema, it forces the viewer to consider the darkness, a subject matter that could easily be brushed off as sordid, and realise that it is in fact psychologically interesting. Luci is first seen brazenly walking out of school, a crowd of gawping admirers following her, heading towards a gang of boys where she promptly French kisses the leader. Clearly, Luci has learnt life's lessons far too early witnessing her mother in action. Yet in the next scene, when she stumbles across her mother's dead body in the steam filled bathroom - where we presume she's slit her wrists open - Luci suddenly becomes her age, a fearful frightened and grieving little girl. It's this flux, this precarious nature, with Luci trying on different aspects of herself - the little girl and the sexually awakened female - to gain favour, appeal and love from others, that the film concentrates upon. It's a controversial subject indeed, but it is a valuable insightful subject. However, Reid immediately hampers himself into even further controversy by casting Linda Hayden as Luci, who was just 15 years old at the time. A lot of what may be intellectually interesting to explore in exploitation is lost because there inevitably is a charge of whether the film itself is exploiting a minor, in both its subject matter and required nude scenes which Hayden performs. 

It's an extremely interesting film to watch too from today's stand point, knowing what we now do about the likes of Jimmy Savile. Reid depicts the big city Luci finds herself in as utterly preoccupied with sex and in getting into her knickers specifically. One wonders just how morally loose the swinging 60s actually were when it came to underage sex and just how this didn't seem such an issue as it does now. There's a cameo from TV comic Dick Emery as a friend of Robert's who, despite being married with a family of his own, is clearly very fond of the younger lady and no one bats an eyelid. He's seen before Luci's arrival at a party held in Robert's house chatting up a young blonde girl under his wife's nose. Later when Luci arrives, he's utterly besotted by this Lolita like figure in a genuinely creepy improper and leery way.

We also see Vernon Dobtcheff, in another non speaking cameo as a total stranger at a cinema, all sweaty top lip and leering expression as he gropes a surprisingly calm and complicit Luci's bare leg, much to Nick's disgust and, perhaps importantly, his entrancement.

In another scene, Nick takes her to a nightclub ( with a live band called Katch 22 performing the ostensible theme of the film 'Baby Love') and the moment he goes to the bar, Luci is picked up by a young heavy set black man, again causing Nick further disgust and entrancement. It's a strange scene in which, the black man then invites Luci over to meet his friends, each of whom sit around in stony, sweaty spaced out silence. The meaning is clear; they're on drugs. And if it wasn't clear Katch 22 helpfully throw in some discordant thrashing guitars to suggest tripping. It's a weird scene, because the black man suddenly has no interest sexually in Luci, yet Nick barges in and rescues her regardless, to save her curious mind from taking anything (the black man is later seen again in a fantasy of Luci's back at home complete with jungle sound effects which show up the rather stereotypical immature allusions of both the film maker and possibly of the audience at the time) Perhaps the most interesting thing in this club scene now is to spy a young and uncredited Bruce 'Withnail and I' Robinson, as one of the spaced out clique, who gains a couple of glorious close ups that shows his beauty, but also a rather large pimple on the end of his nose.

Towards the end of the film Luci and Nick are ambushed in a lakeside forest by some leering posho rowers who clearly have a bit of sex and violence in mind for the pair. An almost Peckinpah-esque view of rape/sexual abuse occurs, mercifully slightly out of shot and interrupted before it goes too far. 

Each of the scenes detailed serve to show just how aware Luci is of not just the feelings towards her from each potential partner/abuser, but principally to those of Nick's, and just how much of a manipulative prick tease she is with him. Yet, it's not always so cut and dried; in an earlier scene in which Amy takes Luci shopping (to Roberto Roma) she is so giddily excitable that she wanders from the changing room across the shop floor in just her pants, bra and tights gabbling animatedly about all the fab clothes she wants to try on. Here, she seems completely unaware of the effect her body and her sexuality has. It is here where she seems like a complete child. There's also a scene where she experiments with make up that shows off her immature nature.

Such naivety doesn't last. Luci suffers nightmares in her new home with flashbacks brought on by steamy baths and water depicting both her mother's death and her 'work' which she's had the misfortune to see first hand from an early age. Amy's natural concern for her mental well being is subtly played upon by Luci until the love starved wife (it's made clear Robert pays little care or attention to her needs) now sharing a bed with her succumbs to hitherto closed off lesbian feelings.

It's perhaps Robert who is the hardest to break, chiefly because he sees in Luci exactly what he saw in her mother all those years ago. Luci remarks that Robert was the only man her mother ever truly loved, but one can't help but wonder if the same is true for Robert? It would certainly explain how he views and treats Luci as Kryptonite to keep at arms length given how much she reminds him of her mother, and would explain just why is marriage to Amy is so cold and dead. There's a strange mix of love, dislike and straight up, albeit coldly, paternal feelings in Robert's character that makes for a Keith Barron I've never seen before. When it becomes clear he's considering sending her off to boarding school, Luci panics that she'll be in another loveless situation and figuring any love is better than no love she throws herself at him, nude in the garden. He spurns her advances, which lead to her injuring both him and Nick in a fit of rage. At the film's conclusion, both Robert and Amy are now totally aware of the malign influence the girl has and are determined that she be removed from the house. But Luci has other ideas, and as the pair head off to a party, she invites herself, dressed in fine clothes and looking more and more like a woman. The film ends there leaving the viewer to make their mind up on what potential outcome their may be in the strange set up.

For all its inherent exploitative issues, Baby Love is still an engrossing look at the darker aspects of life and in turn of cinema at the time. Whatever your opinion of this sort of film, what cannot be denied is the amazing central performance from Hayden. She was clearly at that time a star in the making and it's a shame that star only shone for a brief period in numerous exploitation and low budget features, such as Expose (blogged about earlier in the week) and the Confessions series of films, in the following decade. That she was only 15 at the time of this may be controversial, but it's equally stunning that someone of that age could produce such a mature compelling performance that depicts the deep complexities of mind and character on which the film hangs.

So There It Was, Merry Christmas...

...To paraphrase Sir Nodward Of Holder 

Yes Christmas Day has been and gone, but there is still some fun to be had over the festive season and I hope you all enjoy it. So as the young Diana Dors here has it

I hope that Santa was very good to you all yesterday and gave you all that you had on your Christmas list

I hope the day itself went smoothly and that none of you had any Christmas nightmares

Spare a thought though for some sad news, the passing of Jack Klugman (Quincy, The Odd Couple) who passed away at the grand age of 90

And the tragic deaths of three children on the M6 motorway on Christmas morning. My thoughts are with the family right now.

Edited to add: I've just heard that we lost Charles Durning too, aged 89. RIP to all.

Girls With Guns