This is a unique collection of 8 short erotic, silent black and white films made in Hollywood by Cine Art Productions in the 1920s using studio stages after hours and starring wannabee starlets.
The films are fun and innocent by modern day standards, all about girls disporting themselves without clothes in a selection of situations and stories, on the beach, hiding in caves, dressing up in revue and so on. We were fascinated by the bodies of these beautiful young women from a time with a different body ideal; they look more like real women.
The highlight of the set is Betty’s Bath in which our unfortunate heroine is trapped in the bath by a rat. Rescued by a passing stranger, Betty then has to deal with the man’s unwanted attention- she proves far more adept at ridding her house of this rat!
Jazz Babies tells of how girls in Mrs Scrivens Finishing School playing strip poker, were chastened by the appearance of said Mrs Scrivens declaiming,”Young Ladies, this is a Finishing School and you are all finished!”
The collection was found about 30 years ago next to a hand grenade in an air raid shelter in West Hampstead, the reels of film stored in canisters hidden either from the bombs or from prying eyes.
An original sound track for these intriguing films was commissioned from leading folk musician Jamie Smith with a brief to push the boundaries of silent film accompaniment in an accessible way.
Filmed on Hollywood sets after hours and on the surrounding
canyons and beaches, these vignettes are charmingly of their time- girls frolic
about Pacific grottos as “sirens of the sea” or pose as “desert nymphs” under
the shade of a Joshua tree. Jazz Babies finds a gaggle of finishing
school girls shedding their silk jim-jams as forfeits in a game of chance. The
stand out is The Idol, a beguiling fantasy with nods to European
expressionism, in which a woman is overcome by visions of a pagan fetish coming
to life during a ritual dance.
The eroticism here is mild and playful, but these films are a cut above the grainy knuckle-shuffle flicks of the time. The mis-en-scene is highly professional and the sumptuous period costumes and interiors make this an antiquarian curio of the highest order. The print is in pretty good nick, considering the canisters spent 40 years gathering dust in a West Hampstead air raid shelter. None of these girls become Clara Bow, but at least they have now achieved some small measure of posterity.