Last night the Cinematheque began a series of films by Peter Whitehead, and they kicked it off with Tonite Let’s All Make Love in London (1967), an intriguing time capsule from the heyday of “Swinging London”. And one of the most fascinating things about the film is how it actually subverts the high esteem with which “Swinging London” was, and still is, regarded.
For example, in one interview, a young Michael Caine deplores the “class-conscious” laws that compel regular pubs to close at 11pm (so that the factory workers will get home and sleep and rise ready for work early the next morning), while allowing the swankier and more expensive nightclubs to stay open later. David Hockney echoes this in a later interview, where he complains about the cost of beer in the swankier clubs, and he says he much prefers the “democratic” ambience of American pubs, which also happen to stay open until 2am. There is an awareness here that some of the elements which made London so “swinging” at that time might have been open or accessible only to a privileged minority.
It’s also interesting to watch the so-called “dolly girls” go on and on about how modern women can now do whatever they like, though one of them does say it’s a shame that women will tend to fall in love and try to stay with a guy for at least three months, whereas guys have no problem with “shacking up” for just one evening. You wonder exactly how truly independent these fashion-conscious women could have been, and you wonder where they are today, and what they think of the sexual mores of that era now. And then we see Playboy bunnies arriving in London to herald the opening of Playboy’s first European nightclub. This is liberation, eh?
Interestingly, Caine, who made a name for himself the year before as the misogynist ladies’ man of Alfie (1966; my review of the 2004 remake), seems to take issue with the moral implications of the mini-skirt, though he insists he’s not a moralist himself. Lee Marvin, on the other hand, seems to like the skirts just fine.
Other interviewees include Julie Christie, Alan Aldridge and Mick Jagger, who opines that political protests are on the rise because young people are now more well-off materially (“When you’re hungry, you don’t care about morals”), before going off on an absurd tangent about how machines are increasingly doing all the work now and people will need something more than movies and TV after they’re finished their four-hour working days.
The timing of this screening was oddly fitting, given that the film features early footage of Syd Barrett, who died last week. There was a Q&A; afterwards with a guy who was at that Pink Floyd concert in 1967 and is now making a documentary about those days. And I found it rather weird to think that I’m in my mid-30s and these guys are stoking their nostalgia for an event and an era that took place a few years before I was even conceived.
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