NAKED - AS NATURE INTENDED / SECRETS OF A WINDMILL GIRL

CONTAINS SPOILERS AND HISTORICAL PHWOOAR

A double-bill of third-grade grot from the early years of cinematic British smut, this DVD captures for posterity not one but two opportunities to be bludgeoned into a stupefied submission, not just by the thundering uneroticism but a level of technical shoddiness you'd baulk at in someone's home movies. Whatever historical significance they might have had in the battle between the dirty raincoat brigade and the legions of decency, is outweighed very quickly by the suffocating boredom.

There's little doubt that Secrets Of A Windmill Girl is the better of the two: it has some vague semblance of narrative, it has a handful of recognisable faces (Pauline Collins, Martin Jarvis, Howard Marion Crawford), and it has a few bits of background footage of sixties Soho and Berwick Street. Beginning with a fatal car smash, it tells of the dead girl's life as a Windmill Girl, taking part in elaborately choreographed but sexually tame revues, until the theatre closes against competition from crass, soulless strip clubs offering full nudity. Much of this is padded out to feature length with full dance numbers from the Windmill stage (none of which feature the two female stars - Collins and April Wilding run up and down the backstage stairs in the skimpy costumes a lot, but are never seen on the stage), a magic act, and an endless comedy song of the sort Benny Hill used to churn out by the dozen but nowhere near as good: Hill, Jake Thackray, Mitch Benn and Richard Stilgoe can rest very easy.

It's also no fun: more a depressing rags-to-the-gutter saga of the seedy, sordid side of Soho behind the glitz and glamour than an actual entertainment, and the needle barely flickers on the titillation meter (it has a 15 certificate, downgraded from the 1966 cinema X). Were those audiences that starved of phwooar that this dross sufficed and satisfied? Were they that desperate to see a brief glimpse of buttocks or a subliminal flash of nipple that sitting through an hour of miserable stodge was accepted as a price worth paying?

The tit to tat ratio is noticeably higher in Naked - As Nature Intended, made five years earlier yet, despite having much more nudity in it, was only given an A certificate. That was because it's a serious documentary about naturism and nudist camps and in no way is it salacious or pornographic, honest, officer. It barely scrapes in as a feature film at fifty nine and a half minutes, about two thirds of which is nothing but home movie footage from day trips to Stonehenge and Tintagel and the whole thing slathered with British Light Classical from the stock music libraries. Confronted by this deathly combo of tedium and travelogue, few people would surely have felt compelled to strip off and play table tennis, but even fewer would, even more surely, have felt compelled to trek down for the weekend to what's left of King Arthur's alleged castle.

Granted, forty minutes in and you do get some boobs and bums (anything else is covered up by a towel or a carrier bag or the edge of the frame) and that was the abject object of the exercise: so you could look at naked women without being labelled a pervert. Nowadays this is more of a quaint nostalgia item, from the days when this was as racy as filth ever got. Its entertainment quota is absolute nil, its occasional stabs at silent slapstick comedy are merely baffling, and only as a mild curiosity and a brief footnote in film censorship history does it have the slightest scrap of significance.

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