Anyway, I only mention this because I had the misfortune to see Long's short film 'Bread' the other day, because it's packaged as an extra on the BFI's Flipside DVD edition of another gloomy slab of miserable Seventies cautionary "erotica", 'Permissive', more of which later. 'Bread' (and everything that could be read positively in this piece I mean negatively) is a comedy about a group of young hippies who try to stage a happening music festival on the grounds of an upper-crust toff. Now, what actually happens is the following: a group of desperate actors who can't get any work other than in the kind of cheap tat made by Stanley Long and his crusty cohorts put on hilarious "hippy" wigs and dismally try to give lively performances on what I can only assume was an extremely tight shooting schedule.
Clearly plot-wise 'Bread' has nothing whatsoever going for it: hippies fall foul of local toff Sir Alastair Tightarse (or something) who drunkenly rages at hapless hippies for camping on his land. Luckily for the hippies, the toff's missus is, phwooaaar, a right goer. She can't keep her hands off the really ugly hippy (see the potential for comedy here?) and enacts a seduction so devoid of emotion or charm that one can only feel depressed watching it (they end up having sex in the Earl of Rumptunnel's bed, while he's sleeping off the booze in the same bed!!!!) Quite simply priceless. Anyway, our acidhead chums haven't got any cash so amongst the hilarious schemes they come up with, they try amateur porn (see the potential for comedy here?), but when all their plans come to nothing (natch) they offer to paint Lord Reginald Buttplug's mansion. Off go the Lord and his, phwooaar, randy wife leaving our freaky pals to stage their wild happening. Enter Juicy Lucy, one of the worst prog-ish bands in the UK's psychedelic music history who agree to put on the show right there. And that's basically it. It's a pile of worthless, charmless, cheap, nasty, and really deeply unpleasant shit. And it's one of those experiences where you can only hope that the actresses who have to take their clothes off at any opportunity were doing it for the love of the craft rather than because they were absolutely desperate.
Much like, but for very different reasons, the actresses in Lindsay Shonteff's 'Permissive', a film so bleak it makes the fact that it's full of women taking their clothes off seem like the most depressing thing imaginable. Here's the story: small-town girl Suzy comes to London to try and hang out in the big smoke's happening music scene.
She falls in with an old acquaintance, Fiona, who has become sort of queen-groupie for a band led by her boyfriend, played by Allen Gorrie (the bloke who looks like Catweazel from the Average White Band - and if you want a clue as to the calibre of 'Permissive', you can find it there. The Average White Band, I mean, Jesus Christ how low can you get).
Suzy finds the constant rank misogyny a bit hard to handle so she heads off into the night with the seemingly more sensitive singer-songwriter Pogo. They busk and sleep rough, and that's pretty much the high point of Suzy's existence, because when Pogo (who turns out to be a total nutcase anyway) gets run over and killed she has to go back to Fiona, whereupon she launches herself into the groupie lifestyle wholeheartedly, sleeping with every member of the band and crew, working her way up to Gorrie himself. The revelation that he is happy to go at it with Suzy is too much for Fiona who slits her wrists in the bath.
The real kicker here is that Suzy finds Fiona bleeding to death and simply watches her die. Do you see what's happened here? Suzy has lost her core sense of self in the soul-destroying world of banging hairy failing musicians. The film plays some interesting games though, occasionally showing us brief glimpses of Fiona's suicide at various points throughout the film, forewarning us of the abject misery to come, and there are other instances of cutting back and forward in time. No amount of interesting camerawork (and there is plenty) or narrative gameplay can make up for the fact that 'Permissive' really isn't up to much as a movie, but I suppose it isn't relevant to even look at it in that light. Best just to see it as a bizarre but suitably downhearted slice of miserabilism, reflecting the depressing state of the 'entertainment' world and Britain in general as the 60's turned into the 70's.
