English figure photographer (1926?1997)
George Harrison Marks
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Born
| George Harrison Marks
6 August 1926
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Died
| 27 June 1997 (aged 70)
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Spouse(s)
| Diana Bugsgang (1951?19??)
"Vivienne Warren" (1963?19??)
Toni Burnet (1973?19??)
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Partner
| Pamela Green
(1953?1961)
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Children
| Josie Harrison Marks
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George Harrison Marks
(6 August 1926 ? 27 June 1997)
[1]
was an English
glamour photographer
and director of nudist, and later,
pornographic films
.
Personal life
[
edit
]
Born in
Tottenham
,
Middlesex
in 1926 to a Jewish family, Marks was 17 when he married his first wife, Diana Bugsgang.
[2]
[3]
He worked as a stand-up comedian in variety halls towards the end of the
music hall
era, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, in a duo called Harrison and Stuart.
[1]
Marks left the act in 1951 to develop his photographic career, taking pictures of music-hall performers and showgirls. The model and actress
Pamela Green
was performing as a dancer in a 1952 revue called
Paris to Piccadilly
, a version of the
Folies Bergere
in London. She became Marks' lover and began working with him as a model. Their relationship ended in 1961.
[1]
During the 1960s Marks had a relationship with another of his models,
June Palmer
,
[4]
and he married his second wife Vivienne Warren in 1964.
While he was filming
The Naked World of Harrison Marks
he began a relationship with Toni Burnett, an actress and model who made a brief appearance in the film. In 1967, the year the film came out, Marks and Burnett had a daughter, Josie Harrison Marks. Marks' and Green's business partnership was dissolved in the same year, and in 1970 Marks was bankrupt.
[2]
In 1971 he was tried at the
Old Bailey
for dealing in pornography by post.
[1]
Marks and Burnett married in September 1973, but they split up around 1978. In 1979 Marks began a relationship with Louise Sinclair, a teenage glamour model.
[2]
Glamour photography
[
edit
]
In the 1950s Marks and Pamela Green opened a photographic studio at 4
Gerrard Street
,
Soho
. Marks provided nude photographs for photographic magazines on a freelance basis as well as selling his own stills directly. With the profits from this work, they launched
Kamera
magazine in 1957.
[2]
Kamera
featured Marks'
glamour photography
of nude women taken in the small studios or Marks' kitchen.
[1]
June Palmer began modelling professionally for Marks in the late 1950s and became one of his most famous models.
[4]
Marks' 1958 publicity materials contained one of the first uses of the word "glamour" as a
euphemism
for nude modelling/photography. The magazine was an immediate success and the business expanded to employ around seventeen staff by the early 1960s, selling a number of other magazine titles such as
Solo
,
[5]
postcards and calendars, and distributing imported French books and glamour magazines. Photographic exhibitions were held at the Gerrard Street studio.
[2]
Marks was also the photographic consultant for the film
Peeping Tom
(1960)
[
citation needed
]
, which featured Green in a
cameo role
. In the 1960s Marks moved his studio to
Saffron Hill
near
King's Cross Station
and began selling photoshoots to the American magazine
Swank
. His
Kamera
and
Solo
magazines ceased publication in 1968, with occasional single-issue magazines appearing subsequently.
[2]
In later years he supplied photographs to the
men's magazines
Men Only
and
Lilliput
,
[1]
and sold photosets to
David Sullivan
's magazines
Ladybirds
and
Whitehouse
.
[2]
Films
[
edit
]
In 1958, as an offshoot of his magazines, Marks began making
short films
of his
models
undressing and posing
topless
, for the
8 mm film
market. These were popularly known as "glamour home movies". His films were available over the counter at camera shops, and also supplied discreetly by mail order
[1]
from the back pages of his
Kamera
magazine.
[6]
One Marks 8mm glamour film was
The Window Dresser
(1961), in which Pamela Green starred as a
cat burglar
who hides from the law by posing as a
display mannequin
in a lingerie shop. Marks appears in the film as the shop's owner; Green performs a
striptease
in the store's
display window
.
Clips
from
The Window Dresser
were used in a 1964 piece on the glamour film scene in the Rediffusion programme
This Week
. These clips showed Pamela Green fully unclothed; the ensuing controversy resulted in Green having to defend the film on the
BBC Light Programme
's
Woman's Hour
.
[7]
After a judge threw out an obscenity charge against
The Window Dresser
, Marks continued to make 8 mm glamour films throughout the 1960s.
One such film,
Witches Brew
(1960) features
Pamela Green
as a
witch
casting
spells
; Marks makes a brief appearance as her
hunchback
assistant. In another,
Model Entry
(1965), a cat burglar breaks into Marks' studio, strips and leaves him her address. In
Danger Girl
, a stripping
secret agent
is put into
bondage
by a
Russian
spy; the agent breaks free, ultimately throwing her captor onto a
circular saw
. Even more macabre is Marks'
Perchance to Scream
(1967) in which a model is transported to a
medieval
torture chamber
. In this film,
Stuart Samuels
plays an evil inquisitor who sentences topless women to be whipped and
beheaded
by a masked
executioner
.
His feature films as a director were
Naked - As Nature Intended
(1961),
The Chimney Sweeps
(his only non-sex feature, 1963),
The Naked World of Harrison Marks
(1967),
[8]
Pattern of Evil
(1967),
The Nine Ages of Nakedness
(1969) and
Come Play With Me
(1977), which featured
Mary Millington
.
[9]
Pattern of Evil
a.k.a.
Fornicon
, a heavy
S&M
film which features scenes of murder and whipping in a torture chamber, was never shown in the UK. Marks implied in several interviews over the years that the film was financed by organised crime.
[10]
[11]
After directing
The Nine Ages of Nakedness
, Marks endured a particularly turbulent time in the early seventies including bankruptcy (1970), an obscenity trial at the Old Bailey in 1971, and alcoholism.
[1]
Ironically, a segment of
The Nine Ages of Nakedness
had ended with Marks' alter-ego "The Great Marko" being brought up before a crooked Judge (
Cardew Robinson
) on obscenity charges. Marks made ends meet during this period by continuing to shoot short films for the 8mm market and releasing them via his Maximus Films company.
Based at Marks'
Farringdon
studio, Maximus was run on a "film club" basis, meaning that clients would have to sign up for membership before purchasing the films, mirroring the way membership-only sex cinemas were run at the time. While his earlier 8mm films largely consisted of nothing more explicit than the models posing topless, late-sixties titles like
Apartment 69
and
The Amorous Masseur
were generally softcore pornography. Marks had been eager to shoot soft porn material ever since the
Window Dresser
case, much to the disdain of Pamela Green, who dissolved their business partnership in 1967. "He was fond of good living and a drink or two, and he wanted to go on to soft porn," Green told
Tit-Bits
magazine in 1995, adding "there was this one film where he was dressed as a dirty old man and he's creeping round Piccadilly Circus, then you see him in bed with this girl".
[12]
One Maximus short
The Ecstasy of Oral Love
adopts a pseudo-documentary format, showing a couple frantically licking each other, ending with some relatively graphic oral sex scenes which are inter-cut with ostensibly socially redeeming title cards issuing advice to "young married couples".
In the mid seventies Marks had begun selling explicit photo sets to adult magazine publisher
David Sullivan
's top-shelf magazines. Evidently Marks had also sold Sullivan the rights to some of his 8mm sex films, as adverts by Kelerfern (a Sullivan mail order company) carried Marks-directed sex shorts like
Hole in One
,
Nymphomania
,
King Muff
and
Doctor Sex
for sale around this period.
[13]
While the Marks films offered in UK porn magazines throughout the 1970s appear to have been softcore, and their pornographic nature greatly exaggerated by the advertisements (a familiar trait of David Sullivan), from the early 1970s onwards Marks had begun experimenting with hardcore production. He made short films for a British hardcore pornographer known only as "Charlie Brown", and began making hardcore versions of his own Maximus short films which were released overseas on the
Color Climax
and Tabu labels. In later years Marks was reluctant to discuss these hardcore short films and claimed "not to remember" their names.
Arabian Knights
(also filmed for Color Climax in 1979) was shot at the Hotel Julius Caesar in Queens Gardens in
Bayswater
and features mainstream actor
Milton Reid
in a non-sex role.
Other works
[
edit
]
A lover of animals, in particular felines, in the early stages of his career Marks had a sideline photographing cats, and provided the photographs for
Compton Mackenzie
's book
Cats's Company
(1960).
"He was an excellent photographer of nudes," producer
Tony Tenser
remarked to John Hamilton in a 1998 interview, "but he also excelled in photographs of cats, that were much more beautiful than some of his nudes".
[15]
Marks' cats remained a fixture of his studio and can be spotted scurrying about in several of the 8mm glamour films of the period, occasionally even appearing in prominent roles.
In the wake of the success of his early "glamour" films Harrison Marks also produced a series of slapstick comedies also sold via the photographic shops and magazines that were the outlet for his adult work. As well as directing these films he also appeared as one of the main actors. Titles like
Uncle's Tea Party
,
Defective Detectives
,
High Diddle Fiddle
,
Dizzy Decorators
and
Musical Maniacs
were founded in the music hall and classic silent comedy traditions. Needless to say, they were less successful than his girlie films and the competition from the real thing (i.e., the Chaplin, Keaton, and Harrold Lloyd classics that he paid homage to), which provided most of the package film releases of the day.
Janus and Kane
[
edit
]
In the late 1970s Marks was hired as a photographer for
Janus
, a
fetish magazine
specialising in spanking and caning imagery. He also produced and directed short erotic corporal punishment films for Janus for the then-emerging home video market. One of these,
Warden's End
(1981), starring glamour model and pornographic actress
Linzi Drew
, shows the exterior and interior of Janus's London storefront office at 40
Old Compton Street
.
In 1982 Marks left the
Janus
stable to set up his own fetish magazine
Kane
which also featured caning and spanking photos.
Kane
described itself as "The CP Journal of Fantasy, Fact and Fiction for Adults."
Corporal punishment would now become Marks' big theme for the final act of his career. According to his official website, Marks' corporal punishment material "kept him in booze and cigarettes and an acceptable degree of comfort for the rest of his life". He created the Kane International Videos division and went on to direct (and sometimes also performed in) a number of full-length corporal punishment videos in the 1980s and 1990s. Some of his videos include:
The Cane and Mr Abel
(1984), also with Linzi Drew,
Bad Girls Don’t Cry
(1989),
The Spanking Academy of Dr. Blunt
,
Stinging Tales
(both 1992),
Naughty Schoolgirls Revenge
(1994), and
Spanker's Paradise
(parts 1 & 2) in 1992 in which he also acted opposite English porn star Vida Garman.
After his death in 1997, his daughter Josie Harrison Marks took over the editing of
Kane
.
[2]
Biography
[
edit
]
In 1967 Franklyn Wood, a former art editor of
The Times
and the first editor in
Fleet Street
to run a diary (in the
Daily Sketch
) under his own name, published a biography of Harrison Marks called
The Naked Truth About Harrison Marks
. It was reprinted in 2017.
See also
[
edit
]
References
[
edit
]
- ^
a
b
c
d
e
f
g
h
Tony Sloman (10 July 1997).
"Obituary: Harrison Marks"
.
The Independent
.
Archived
from the original on 9 May 2022.
- ^
a
b
c
d
e
f
g
h
Whitaker, Gavin (2008).
"The Naked World of Harrison Marks"
.
pamela-green.com
. Retrieved
18 January
2018
.
- ^
The Naked Truth About Harrison Marks
. London: Wolfbait Books. 2017. p. 10.
ISBN
9781999744106
.
- ^
a
b
"June Palmer"
.
The Grierson Archive
. Archived from
the original
on 2 January 2010.
- ^
"Solo 1958-1968"
.
Pamela Green: Never Knowingly Overdressed
. 20 July 2019.
- ^
"Vampire"
. British Film Institute
. Retrieved
9 January
2018
.
- ^
David McGillivray
Doing Rude Things: The History of the British Sex Film 1957?1981
, Sun Tavern Fields Books, 1992
- ^
"The (Naked) World of Harrison Marks"
.
pamela-green.com
. 1 August 2016.
- ^
Upton, Julian (2004).
Fallen Stars: Tragic Lives and Lost Careers
. Headpress/Critical Vision. p. 42.
ISBN
9781900486385
– via Google Books.
- ^
"The Naked World of Harrison Marks",
The Late Show (BBC TV series)
, Issue 8, 1992
- ^
"Harrison Marks",
Psychotronic Video
, Issue 15 1993
- ^
David Flint "Peeping at Pamela",
Tit-Bits
, 1995
- ^
Whitehouse
magazine, No.27, 197?
- ^
John Hamilton "Tigon Tales of Terror" The Darkside issue 78, 1998
Further reading
[
edit
]
External links
[
edit
]
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Legislation
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Regulation
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Book censorship
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Pornography channels
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Television shows
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Pornographic actors
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Film directors
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Awards
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Magazine publishers
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Magazines
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Opposition
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International
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National
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Artists
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