Ooo-la-la! The Guardian peeps at a trove of naughty silent films recently discovered in a Paris attic. If they'd only shove over and give the rest of us a turn, here's what you'd see.
In The Good Old Naughty Days, a collection of 12 silent films from the earliest years of the 20th century, nuns, priests, teachers - even a dog - play out sexual dramas in a wide variety of inventive positions, locations and logistical arrangements. And, unlike the stars of today's films for the one-handed viewer, everyone looks like they're enjoying themselves. Even the dog.[snip]
The films have very little in common with conventional pornography and a lot to do with the frank but double-sided attitude towards sexuality in early 20th-century France. The crew of conventional films made the blue movies on their days off: they would borrow some costumes, a camera and a reel of film, find the nearest whorehouse and pay a couple of prostitutes a few francs to star alongside them in comic but extremely explicit sexual farces. The prostitutes' fee made up the entire cost of the movie. One of the films, The Musketeer's Dinner, features a French infantryman who has a meal in an outdoor restaurant before two waitresses decide to make his lunch a highly memorable one. It was made during the filming of a 1920 film, The Three Musketeers, in the Paris suburb of Redon, and its happy star would have been a jobbing electrician or a cameraman taking advantage of his boss's day off.
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The reactions to Reilhac's film say a lot about the sexual mores of the countries it has been shown in. French audiences have been made up of couples and friends who have found the film hilarious, but in Spain it has been predominantly single men who have gone to see it in secret. "The word of mouth publicity that we were relying on didn't happen there," sighs Reilhac. "There was a shame element attached to it, which I think has to do with Spain being a Catholic country. The scenes with the nuns and the priest were a big problem because that was perceived as an attack on the church. I had to take out a sequence where the nuns were having penetration with candles. It is illegal to show a desecration of holy objects in Spain."
In the UK the film will be released with an R-18 certificate, the designation hitherto confined to hardcore porn only available in licensed sex shops. This is the first time for over a decade that this sort of film has been given a mainstream cinema release. But the chief concern at early screenings here was over the welfare of a dog that provides a service to a lady of dubious moral fibre. "We had a screening at the Chelsea Arts Club in London," says Reilhac. "Two women were very upset about the dog, and they kept asking if it was harmed in any way. I told them that as far as I could tell that little dog was very happy. Thank God I took out the scene with the duck." Nothing is done to the dog; it is the dog that does the doing. Is something done to the duck? "Oh yes, most definitely."
The Good Old Naughty Days is available in the United States thanks to the kind offices of Strand Releasing.
