Oh, those kids today with their potty-mouthed comedians,
tattoo parlors, licentious pop stars, key parties, and bowling. What of
Victorian values? What of the days when women didn’t merely remove their
clothes in degenerate strip clubs but did so while sharing the stage with good,
clean vaudevillians telling corny jokes and crooning cornier songs? What of the
Empire?
Alas, the sixties put an end to the England of old, the one
The Kinks lamented, often with tongue-in-cheek, on Village Green Preservation Society and Arthur: The Decline and Fall of the British Empire. Primitive London laments similarly,
though its long, lascivious tongue is never out of its cheeky cheek for a
second.
Arnold Louis Miller released his movie in 1965 when the
mores of old were being swung aside by Swinging London’s new libertine ways but
films still had to pay tisking lip service to traditional “morality” in order
to stay out of the porno theaters. Three years earlier, filmmakers Paolo
Cavara, Franco Prosperi, and Gualtiero Jacopetti assembled stock footage of
animals mutated by the Bikini Atoll nuclear tests, cross-dressing Gurkha
soldiers, Reeperbahn drunks, bikini girls, and other verboten delights into Mondo Cane, creating a box office
sensation and pioneering the shockumentary form that would be Miller’s cup of
tea. He’d already been making nudist camp pictures with titles such as Nudist Memories, Nudes of All Nations, and Take
Off Your Clothes and Live since 1961. With 1965’s Primitive London, Arthur L. Miller expanded his interests to
include sports, music, business, and youth culture, though sights of skin are
never far away.
The first is the decidedly unsexy image of a woman graphically
giving birth to a smurf-blue baby, the attending obstetrician’s “most difficult
delivery ever” if you are to believe narrator David Gell’s voice over, and it’s
probably best to never trust anything you see or hear in Primitive London. Nevertheless, that baby does not look healthy and
it is hard to believe that the kid we see at the end of the film contentedly
tugging on its milk bottle is the same one. Getting hung up on such issues, or
expecting the unfiltered look at life and death our narrator indicates Primitive London will be, is to miss the
point and the fun. Arthur L. Miller is hip to this and his libertine leer
always undermines the rote conservatism of his screenplay, which waves its
finger at the “true delinquents” with their “incapacity to postpone present
excitement in the hope of future happiness” attending a wife-swapping key party
one moment while fixing its gaze on the pastie-festooned glamour girls of an
old-fashioned burlesque club tellingly called Churchill’s the next.
While Primitive London
apparently wants us to find all the radical new developments of Swinging London
to be shocking, it slyly and regularly reminds us of the city’s sordid past
with Churchill’s, a recreation of the Jack the Ripper murders, and the Turkish
baths where quite a bit of “misbehaving” once took place, but apparently no
longer does. A visit to a chicken processing plant where conservative looking
folks look bored while slitting the throats of and de-feathering birds in
gruesome detail makes us long to spend more time with those crazy long-haired
kids and their immoral ways.
Primitive London’s
cluelessly reductive portrayal of youth culture is one of the more delightful
aspects of this shock doc, as Miller divides kids into three
categories—beatniks, mods, and some very sweet-faced rockers—that, naturally,
the kids reject. Their crazy pop music is represented by the always
old-fashioned and already-past-his-prime Billy J. Kramer and the groovier beat
combo The Zephyrs. Quite unexpectedly, “Can’t Buy Me Love” makes an appearance
on the soundtrack; unexpected both because it’s surprising Miller got the
rights to use a Beatles song in his movie (assuming he bothered with such legal
formalities) and because he implies that this is the kind of music rockers
fancy.
Elsewhere we get a breathless freak show of London life, in
which weightlifting, bowling, the advertising industry, and millinery are all
made to seem as bizarre as a goldfish undergoing surgery for a fungoid growth. Every
six minutes or so, the raincoat crowd that was Primitive London’s chief audience were rewarded with strippers,
fan-dancers, beauty pageant contestants removing padding from their underwear, mod
girls sharing a bathtub to shrink their Levis to fit, and nude dudes in Turkish
baths. Miller’s sense of humor could be a real boner-killer though, as he overlays
a striptease with the dancer’s own narration about the exhaustiveness of her
work and cutting straight from her gripe about the toll stripping plays on her
tootsies to a pair of exceptionally ugly feet having corns removed. Not great
for titillation but terrific for titters, and 45 years removed from the
Swinging London era it parodied and preserved, Primitive London holds up best as a work of surprisingly smart,
often self-aware comedy.
