Learning on ScreenHer Private Hell
The producers who engaged the then 25-year-old Warren to make Her Private Hell were Bachoo Sen and Richard Schulman. (The latter would soon turn up in person in some of his own films, notably Antony Balch’s mind-boggling portmanteau Secrets of Sex.) And the result remains fascinating for the sober, even sombre story it tells, for its starkly monochromatic touches of nouvelle vague influence, and above all for its startling absence of sex. The credits play out over a modish montage of hard-to-figure body parts, Modunio is seen topless at one point, Jeanette Wild later dances topless in a seriously funky party sequence (but only in the American cut of the film) … and that’s about it. In January 1968, however, the mere fact that the characters have sex in the course of the story (albeit not on camera) seems to have been enough to ensure a box-office stampede.
The sobriety and seriousness of the story only underlines the film’s importance, because in relation to the tidal wave of movies it inspired Her Private Hell now seems like an anomaly. In just a few years British studios would sire their own sex stars (the classy Fiona Richmond and somewhat more down-to-earth Mary Millington) and become clogged with sniggering-schoolboy erotic comedies that were significantly free of eroticism or indeed comedy. (Though some of the titles remain delightful – Can You Keep It Up for a Week? and I’m Not Feeling Myself Tonight spring to mind.) And at the dodgier end of the market a 1975 film like Sex Express could spawn a hardcore variant, complete with Nazi imagery, called Diversions.
All this uniquely British smut, innocent or otherwise, was triggered by the success of Warren’s modest debut film – and yet none of it is remotely discernible within the film itself. If you want to see Bob Todd in the nude, spanking Olivia Syson in a shower stall (and frankly I can’t imagine why you would), you need to watch The Ups and Downs of a Handyman, not Her Private Hell. And that in itself is a recommendation, of sorts.
As well as an intriguing anomaly, Her Private Hell is also a fascinating artefact, in which Crewdson’s baleful features are as much a period signifier as the assembled Trim Phones, Pop Art canvases, outsize Teddy Bears, and Pearl Catlin’s breathtakingly vertiginous beehive. And the film has been given deluxe treatment by producer Josephine Botting as part of the BFI’s ongoing ‘Flipside’ strand.
Presented in a dual-format edition, the print is missing the odd frame here and there but otherwise looks sumptuous (the cinematographer was Peter Jessop). It also comes with some tasty side-orders. There are screen tests featuring Udo Kier, Warren’s short film Fragment (which alerted Sen and Schulman to his potential in the first place), an even earlier item called Incident (made in tandem with future cinematographer Brian Tufano), and a 1971 Penthouse documentary called The Anatomy of a Pin-Up. Students of the form will be delighted by the appearance here of such starlets of the day as Katya Wyeth, Julie Ege and Françoise Pascal.
All in all, this is another unjustly forgotten nugget of British cinema history unearthed and lovingly polished up by the BFI.
Jonathan Rigby
To read Josephine Botting’s account of the production process behind the making of this DVD, click here.
