YOUNG HANDYMEN ON THE JOB

John Martin remembers Stanley Long’s sex comedy Adventures, a decidedly non-PC 1970s UK film trilogy made to rival the hit Confessions films starring Robin Askwith…

Opposite: Jane Hayden, Ian Lavender and Barry Evans in Confessions of a Taxi Driver

Stanley Alfred Long (26/11/33- 10/09/12) was a proper East End kid made good, a polymath producer/writer/director/DP/ distributor who lit (uncredited) a goodly chunk of Polanski’s Repulsion (1965) and championed the early works of up-and-comers like John Landis and David Cronenberg, winning an Industry award for his innovative promotion of the latter’s The Brood (1979). Wider acknowledgment of his many and diverse cinematic achievements was muted by sniffy attitudes towards the smut milieu in which so many of them were racked up, The Sun newspaper dubbing Long “The King of Sexploitation”.

Having concluded his National Service in the early ’50s, Stan the man honed his photographic skills on the kind of “art studies” that are kept under the counter of the corner shop in Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom (1960), then the innumerable 8mm “glamour films” (a term which he is believed to have originated) churned out by his Stag set up. It was but a short, unshod stop to Mondo and Naturist efforts (including 1962’s Take Off Your Clothes and Live, narrated by Blue Peter’s Valerie Singleton!) After photographing the doomed Michael Reeves’ astonishing The Sorcerers (1967), Long shot (and made his first million producing) Derek Ford’s The Wife Swappers (1969), a hypocritical piece of moralising dreck which convinced our Stan that he might as well have a go at this directing lark himself. The fruits of this conviction included Bread (1971, a soppy saga of free love amid the psychedelic generation), the same year’s Naughty! (a historical survey of pornography), On The Game (1973, a similar study of the oldest profession) and 1975’s It Could Happen to You aka Intimate TV Secrets, a salutary quasi-documentary warning its viewers about the perils of copping a dose…