I like Primitive London better than London In The Raw, which gets a bit sidetracked in its final moments by all of its music-hall stuff. Yet Primitive London is perhaps even more bizarre in its ethnographic bipolar veering from the tackily kitsch to the horrifically mundane! I'll just transcribe the notes I took during my viewing, with apologies for all of the exclamation marks (though it is a film that calls out for them!):
And we're off, into the clouds in an airplane sequence that was obviously meant to evoke that wonderful sequence in L'Eclisse...or perhaps they just had access to a plane for an afternoon and thought it would look good in the title sequence?
A baby is born, with the doctor almost trying to pull its head off as he wrenches it out of the birth canal. Then the doctor and nurse take it in turns to rough him up and slap him about a bit before chucking him absent mindedly onto a towel!
The 'youth of today' sequence shows teenagers even back then had a terrible taste in clothes! One chap actually has a Jean-Paul Belmondo-look going on and even chooses a nicely cut trenchcoat to seeming accentuate the cool look. Only problem is it is eye-searingly gaudy hunting red coloured, which is never a good look especially in combination with tan trousers and trilby!
The beatnik section of singing in a pub (incongruous songs about being a "workin' man wielding a hammer in Louisiana") features one chap doing a very impressive feat of exhaling smoke and inhaling a glass of beer in one smooth movement!
After smugly laughing about the narrator's over-egged description of the mods, rockers and beatniks, I had a horrible moment of terrifying existential self-realisation during the speech about pinball players:
...there are others, belonging to no group, because they are unaware of themselves as members of any society. They dissipate their identity in complete passivity. They become reduced to human adjuncts of a machine, and the machine's flashing lights lends an air of action - of doing something. A sedative to cover an attitude of cynical indifference.
Oh, narrator of Primitive London, sometimes your moralising commentary cuts too deep! Although perhaps the people on display were just wanting a brief game of pinball?
Apparently the best role to fill in society is that of a voiceover announcer, coming complete with a variety of racist accents! (And, wait a minute, is that a very young Barry Cryer in one of the voiceover announcer scenes?!)
Some
terrible cabaret music is on display here, as the girls are schooled by what I can only describe as a 1960s version of
Louis Spence!
Apparently [women] "Capitalise on a pair of good legs and a well built body", while men pump up their bodies for nothing! The film turns into a World of Wrestling special at this point as a pair of chaps throw themselves around a ring to a 'tweety bird' woozy soundtrack! And screeching out of tune violin cutting in as one wrestler violently wedgies another!
Why does the narrator fade out a couple of times only to be replaced by a couple of bickering New York accented gangster toughs moaning about what they are seeing on screen (as in asking why they have to watch lots of overweight guys wandering around and getting massages in the Turkish Bath sequence, and begging the film to "bring on the gals!!")
Here comes a parade of girls in swimsuits in front of judges who all look amazing from the front but on turning around and walking away from the camera unfortunately show a lot of 'excess buttock' bulging out from the sides of their swimsuit! Ironically the film then goes into a sequence of the girls in their dressing room removing their extra judge-pleasing padding from their costumes!
A depressing scene wandering about a car junkyard (the film with this sequence and all the musical numbers is strangely melting together with Nashville in my mind!) about the grim statistics of road deaths seques into an utterly demented scene recreating a prostitute being killed by Jack The Ripper! Are the producers of this film trying to outdo Hammer Films here with a bit of lurid stabbing accompanied by a plinky-plonk piano trill on each stab? They could at least have let the prostitute try to run away rather than sticking the actress on a treadmill! This is all followed by a disturbing montage restaging the discovery of murdered prostitutes in various London locations (Visit London and discover all the dead prostitutes in back alleys!)
Here's
Billy J. Kramer as a new teen idol getting attacked by a group of screaming teenage girls in a record shop in a scene that seems to prefigure Romero's zombie films, as a now ignored past-generation of teen idol (
Terry Dene) looks on with perhaps a tinge of sadness but with an obvious expression of relief!
A sequence about Judo and Kendo, very sniffy about its application to the real world ("only worth learning if you are going to become a samurai") and puritanical about the idea that children are being taught it. Of course this film was very prescient about the wave of Kendo violence that swept across Britain in the later decades as these children, taught violence as youngsters, put their nefarious skills into practice on innocent bystanders!
Tattoos for women showing their mental illness? Perhaps having a breast tattoo done by a chap with a Hitler moustache is better than running around from strip club to strip club doing an eleven hour a day shift!
Aaargggh! Just when I thought I could relax here comes the animal violence section! Battery hens getting processed by being hung, their throats cut and plucked until they reach the slightly bored housewife in the supermarket (another example suggests the narration of London-dwellers denying their essential animality)
Here's a goldfish being given anaesthetic for an operation! Because that happens!
Key parties! God, that looks a depressing soiree ("The Jaguar! Who is it?")! Lots of moralising narration here. Love the strangely inevitable moment of the husband taking his new partner back to his semi-detached bungalow and briefly looking in on his sleeping child! The husband is suggested throughout this sequence to have more of a sense of shame about the whole key party thing, unlike the floozy of a wife! (The film seems to not like women very much, with this sequence and the one with the women going to the hairdressers that inspires the comment that if women went bald scientists would be working on a cure around the clock!) But it still doesn't stop him jumping into bed with his new partner anyway after checking his kid's asleep!
An up-close corn removal scene. Because everyone wanted to see that.
Tut-tutting at the new wave of uncouth comedians. How
dare they make fun of Harold Wilson!
"There is one certainty in all this...the hangover lasts longer than the state of intoxication" - Hey Primitive London, I'm supposed to be doing the commenting on the film here! That must be one of the best semi-self-aware lines of any film though!
Compared to London In The Raw trying to show a variety of different cultural goings on in the capital, this whole film seems a lot more American-influenced than London In The Raw did. From the beatniks singing Deep South working men songs through to the flapper girl final musical number, it has a weird, cut-price trans-Atlantic feel!
...which ties in well with that sequence in the short 'documentary' film Carousella included on the disc, which features what might be one of the most depressing riffs of On The Town ever filmed, as one of the strippers talks about how much she loves Americans and takes a couple of sailor suited chaps on a tour of a grey and dank Cambridge before one of the bleakest and least romantic paddle boat rides I have ever seen! (There is also what I can only imagine to be a homage to The Birds in the final shot too!)