RIP Stanley Long

So it is that we have to mourn the passing of another icon of low-budget British exploitation movies, with the announcement that film maker Stanley Long has died. Long was the man behind such seventies smut classics as Adventures of a Taxi Driver and its sequels, On The Game and the amazing Eskimo Nell. Before turned his hand to directing and/or producing such slices of British filth as these, Long had been cinematographer on two of my favourite barmy 1960s horror films: Blood Beast Terror (which features Sherlock's mum as a giant moth that turns into a woman) and The Sorcerers, both for Tigon. Much of Long's seventies output might have been smut (or 'sex comedies' as their distributors preferred to call them), but at least they had decent casts and reasonable production values. Most of all, they were fun rather than really erotic. Indeed, compared with the sort of poorly produced showcases for porn magazine models, with their threadbare production values and non-existent direction and scripts, which came to dominate the British porn market from the late 1970s, Long's output looks incredibly classy.

Bearing in mind the contribution to British cinema that Long made, (not least, in terms of the amount of money his films made in their day), is it too much to hope that we'll see a season of his movies on TV as a tribute? Damn it, back in the good old days Channel 5 used to show them every Friday night. However, there remains a tremendous snobbery in this country toward some sectors of our film industry. Whilst some genres, most notably Gothic horror and the Carry On series, have been critically rehabilitated in recent years to the extent that it is considered OK to say that you enjoyed Plague of the Zombies in a non-ironic way, the further reaches of exploitation still remain beyond the pale. The fact that, back in the seventies, sex comedies were, to all intents and purposes, the British film industry, providing gainful employment to countless actors and technicians, is now conveniently swept under the carpet. The reality is that these films were mainstream back then, attracting huge paying audiences and the financial backing of major studios like Columbia. But nowadays we have to accept that none of that ever happened - the British film industry in the 1970s was really all about arty, worthy but shite movies that nobody ever watched.