Harrison Marks - Films

Films

In 1958, as an offshoot of his magazines, Marks began making short films for the 8mm market of his models undressing and posing topless, popularly known as “glamour home movies”. An episode of BBC’s Balderdash and Piffle programme attributed the earliest use of the word “glamour” as a euphemism for nude modeling/photography to Marks’ 1958 publicity materials. One of Marks’ most popular 8mm glamour films was The Window Dresser (1961), starring Pamela Green as a catburglar who hides from the law by posing as a lingerie shop dummy. Marks does a character turn as the shop’s exaggeratedly gay owner, but the short’s obvious raison d’être remained Green’s show stopping shop window striptease. Clips from The Window Dresser were used in a 1964 piece on the glamour film scene in the Rediffusion programme This Week. These clips showed Pamela Green fully unclothed, footage possibly broadcast in error, and the ensuing controversy resulted in Green having to defend the 8mm film on the BBC Light Programme's Woman’s Hour. After a judge threw out an obscenity charge against The Window Dresser (according to legend remarking “I’ll buy a copy for my son, case dismissed”), Marks continued to make more 8mm glamour films throughout the 1960s. Marks’ background as a music hall performer is evident in the “little stories” he would devise for his 8mm glamour films, as well as the occasional bit parts he would write for himself and his onetime comedy partner Stuart Samuels (a.k.a. Sam Stuart).

Of the more notable 8mm glamour films, Witches Brew (1960) features Pamela Green as a witch casting spells and a brief appearance by Marks as her hunchback assistant. Model Entry (1965) sees a cat burglar breaking into Marks’ studio, then stripping and leaving him her address. Danger Girl features a stripping secret agent who is put into bondage by a Russian spy, only for her to break free and throw him onto a circular saw in the grisly finale. In an even more macabre vein is Perchance to Scream (1967) in which a Marks model is transported to a medieval torture chamber where Stuart Samuels plays an evil inquisitor who sentences topless women to be whipped and beheaded by a masked executioner.

His feature films as a director were Naked as Nature Intended (1961), The Chimney Sweeps (his only non-sex feature, 1963), The Naked World of Harrison Marks (1965), Pattern of Evil (1967), The Nine Ages of Nakedness (1969) and Come Play With Me (1977), which featured Mary Millington. Pattern of Evil a.k.a. Fornicon, a heavy S&M film which features scenes of murder and whipping in a torture chamber, was never shown in the UK. Marks implied in several interviews over the years that the film was financed by the criminal element. After directing The Nine Ages of Nakedness, Marks endured a particularly turbulent time in the early seventies when he was made bankrupt (in 1970), was the subject of an obscenity trial at the Old Bailey (in 1971) and his drinking increased. Ironically a segment of The Nine Ages of Nakedness had ended with Marks’ alter-ego ‘The Great Marko’ being brought up before a crooked Judge (Cardew Robinson) on obscenity charges. Marks made ends meet during this period by continuing to shoot short films for the 8mm market and releasing them via his Maximus Films company.

Based out of Marks’ Farringdon studio, Maximus was run on a ‘film club’ basis, meaning that punters would have to sign up for membership before purchasing the films, mirroring the way membership only sex cinemas were run at the time. While his earlier 8mm films largely consisted of nothing more explicit than the models posing topless, late sixties titles like Apartment 69 and The Amorous Masseur were generally softcore sex affairs. Marks had been eager to shoot soft porn material ever since the Window Dresser case, much to the disdain of Pamela Green, who dissolved their business partnership in 1967. “He was fond of good living and a drink or two, and he wanted to go on to soft porn” Green told Tit-Bits magazine in 1995 “there was this one film where he was dressed as a dirty old man and he’s creeping round Piccadilly Circus, then you see him in bed with this girl”. One Maximus short The Ecstasy of Oral Love, even adopts a pseudo-sex education front, showing a couple frantically licking each other, ending with some relatively graphic oral sex scenes which are inter-cut with supposedly socially redeeming title cards issuing advice to ‘young married couples’.

In the mid-seventies Marks had begun selling explicit photo sets to adult magazine publisher David Sullivan’s top shelf magazines. Evidently Marks had also sold Sullivan the rights to some of his 8mm sex films as well, as adverts by Kelerfern (a Sullivan mail order company) carried Marks-directed sex shorts like Hole in One, Nymphomania, King Muff and Doctor Sex for sale around this period.

While the Marks films offered in UK porn magazines throughout the 1970s appear to have been softcore, and their pornographic nature greatly exaggerated by the ads (a familiar trait of David Sullivan), since the early 1970s onwards Marks had begun dabbling in more explicit material. He made short films for a British hardcore pornographer known only as 'Charlie Brown', and began making hardcore versions of his own Maximus short films which were released overseas on the Color Climax and Tabu labels. In later years Marks was reluctant to discuss these hardcore short films and claimed ‘not to remember’ their names. Arabian Knights (also filmed for Color Climax in 1979) was shot at the Hotel Julius Caesar in Queens Gardens in Bayswater and features mainstream actor Milton Reid in a non-sex role.