Naked As Nature Intended: The Cheeky British Film That Played In London Continuously For Two Years.
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In November 1961, something unusual happened outside a small cinema on Great Windmill Street in London's West End. People were queueing. Not for a Hollywood epic, not for a new Hitchcock, but for a sixty-minute British film about five young women on a road trip to Cornwall who eventually took their clothes off at a nudist camp. The police were called to manage the crowds. The film ran continuously in London for two years.
Naked As Nature Intended was directed by glamour photographer George Harrison Marks on a budget of around £3,000, starred his partner Pamela Green, and became one of the most profitable British films of its era relative to cost. It also lit the fuse on a decade of British exploitation cinema that would eventually produce some of the most surprising names in film history. The same production company that bankrolled this modest naturist travelogue went on to finance Roman Polanski's first two English language films.
This is the story of how a former stand-up comedian with a camera, a woman who started modelling to pay her art school fees, and two men running London's first sex cinema managed to crack the British censorship system wide open and accidentally change the course of British film.
The Man Behind the Camera
George Harrison Marks was born in Tottenham in 1926 into a Jewish family. He married for the first time at seventeen, spent the late 1940s working as a stand-up comedian in the dying embers of the music hall era as part of a double act called Harrison and Stuart, and abandoned the stage in 1951 after a notably failed performance in Hull. He taught himself photography.
By the early 1950s he was shooting showgirls and performers, supplementing his income by selling nude photographs to specialist magazines on a freelance basis from a small studio at 4 Gerrard Street in Soho. He also had an unlikely sideline photographing cats, which he pursued with as much seriousness as his glamour work. In 1960 he provided the photographs for Compton Mackenzie's book Cats' Company, and anyone who watches his 8mm glamour films carefully enough will spot them wandering through the background of the studio shots, apparently indifferent to the proceedings. It was during a 1952 photography contract for the London revue Paris to Piccadilly, a British version of the Folies Bergère performed at the Prince of Wales Theatre, that he met the woman who would transform his career.
Pamela Green was a dancer and artist's model from Kingston upon Thames who had attended Saint Martin's School of Art. She'd started figure modelling to pay her tuition fees and moved into photographic modelling when she discovered it paid considerably more. By the mid-1950s she was selling her own postcard sets of glamour photographs to the bookshops and newsagents of Soho.
When Marks met her she was performing in the revue. She became his lover and business partner.
In 1957 the two of them launched Kamera, a pocket-sized glamour magazine featuring Marks' photographs of nude women taken in his studio and occasionally his kitchen. The BBC programme Balderdash and Piffle later attributed one of the earliest uses of the word "glamour" as a euphemism for nude modelling to Marks' own 1958 publicity materials. The first issue of Kamera sold out in two days. Within a few years the business employed seventeen staff and had spawned a series of related titles, postcards, calendars, and imported French magazines.
Neither Marks nor Green has ever been formally credited with shaping the British top-shelf industry, but they definitely helped to start it.
The Peeping Tom Connection
Before Naked As Nature Intended arrived, Pamela Green had already made a significant mark on British cinema through the back door.
In 1960, director Michael Powell, then one of the most celebrated filmmakers in British history, was completing his most controversial film: Peeping Tom, a disturbing psychological thriller about a serial killer who films his victims as he murders them. Powell cast Green as Milly, a model photographed in lingerie by the killer. The scene in which she poses naked on a bed, with a single brief exposure of her breast, is now considered by film historians to be the first female nude scene in a postwar English language mainstream feature film.
The BBFC cut the scene for the British theatrical release. It survived in the American version.
Peeping Tom received reviews so savage that they effectively ended Michael Powell's directing career in Britain. Critics called it disgusting, depraved, and unfit for public exhibition. Powell subsequently left for Australia and never returned to mainstream British filmmaking. The film is now considered a masterpiece and appears on the BFI's list of the greatest British films ever made. Marks had served as the film's photographic consultant throughout the production.
The same year, Green and Marks were planning something of their own.
The Loophole in the Law
The BBFC in 1961 had one significant weak spot in its censorship of nudity: it had already approved the American naturist film Garden of Eden in 1954 by accepting the argument that nudity within a genuine naturist context was educational rather than obscene, and had granted it a U certificate. British distributors had noticed. The market for imported naturist documentaries was already thriving by the early 1960s, with titles such as Nudist Stories, Nudist Memories, and Nudist Paradise passing through the Compton Cinema Club, a private members establishment in Soho operated by two entrepreneurs named Tony Tenser and Michael Klinger.
Tenser was a former RAF technician turned cinema publicist who had coined the phrase "sex kitten" to describe Brigitte Bardot during a British release campaign for one of her films. Klinger was a former strip club owner. Together they had opened the Compton Club in 1960, initially to show imported exploitation films and uncut versions of controversial American pictures including The Wild One. The BBFC chief censor, John Trevelyan, was, according to some accounts, among the founding members of the club.
When Tenser and Klinger decided they wanted to produce their own naturist film rather than simply distribute other people's, they approached Marks. Marks went to see Trevelyan directly, before a single frame had been shot and before a script had even been written, and obtained an informal sanction for the project provided it genuinely engaged with the naturist movement rather than merely using naturism as a fig leaf. The founder of the British Naturism Movement, Charles Macaskie, who owned the Spielplatz Sun Camp in Hertfordshire, gave his approval and agreed to allow filming at the club. His name appears in the credits. Tenser and Klinger pulled together a budget of £3,000, packed Marks off to Cornwall, and the production got underway in September 1961, then working under the working title Cornish Holiday.
The Film Itself
The premise of the film is as follows, three young women, Pamela (Green), Petrina (Forsyth), and Jacky (Salt), hire a 1960 Buick Invicta and set off on a motoring holiday through the English countryside. They pick up two other women, Bridget (Leonard) and Angela (Jones), who are already committed nudists and members of the Sun Club. The five of them tour Stonehenge, the medieval fishing village of Clovelly in Devon, the Minack Open Air Theatre, Bedruthan Steps, and Land's End before eventually arriving at a Cornish nudist camp where the non-nudist members of the party are persuaded to shed their inhibitions along with everything else.
A single actor, Stuart Samuels, plays multiple supporting roles throughout: clerk, pianist, waiter, fisherman, and boatman. Guy Kingsley Poynter provides the entire dialogue as a cheeseball voiceover narrator, informing the audience about the places visited and the philosophy of naturism in the sort of manner usually reserved for public information films about the correct way to store root vegetables. Marks himself makes a cameo appearance.
The nudity arrives only in the final twenty minutes of the film. The two thirds that precede it function essentially as a pleasant, unhurried English travelogue. Critics in 1961 were not impressed by this ratio and said so at some length.
One scene that caused the BBFC particular anxiety was a shared shower scene between two of the women at the start of the film. Censor secretary John Trevelyan concluded that audiences would infer a lesbian relationship and ordered the scene cut from all British prints. It remained intact in the American release, in which an uncredited narrator, believed by some researchers to be Daws Butler, the voice behind Yogi Bear and numerous other Hanna-Barbera characters, provided additional commentary that included observations about women's inability to read road maps. The American version was released under the title As Nature Intended, because the word Naked was considered too provocative for the American market, which is a sentence that requires a moment to fully absorb.
Opening Night and the Crowds
The film opened on 30 November 1961 at the Cameo Moulin cinema in Great Windmill Street, London. The reviews were poor. The audiences came anyway, and kept coming. Queues formed around the block on opening weekend and the police were called to manage the crowds. Marks and Green's names were on the marketing materials billing him as the King of the Camera and her as the Queen of the Pin-Ups, and both names drew audiences who already knew their work from Kamera magazine.
The BBFC had granted an A certificate, restricting the film to adults or children accompanied by a guardian. Some local councils around the country, operating under their own independent authority to override BBFC decisions, refused to show it at all. This proved spectacularly counterproductive. In several cases, audiences unable to see the film in their own town simply caught a bus to the nearest town that was showing it. Tenser and Klinger marketed the film simultaneously as a serious document of naturist culture and as the film the censor hadn't wanted audiences to see, which was not strictly accurate but was commercially very effective.
The film ran in London cinemas for two full years. By the winter of 1962 to 1963 it was still in continuous theatrical release in the West End. The modest £3,000 investment returned many times its cost.
The Compton Company and What Came Next
The success of Naked As Nature Intended transformed Compton Cameo Films. Tenser and Klinger rapidly commissioned two follow-up naturist pictures, The Nude Ones and My Bare Lady, but they were already thinking bigger. The company's trajectory from 1961 onward is one of the more startling sequences in British film history.
Within four years, the same production company that had dispatched Marks to Cornwall to film women at a Sun Camp was financing Roman Polanski's Repulsion, the 1965 psychological horror film starring Catherine Deneuve, shot on a budget of £45,000. Cul-de-Sac followed in 1966. Both were Polanski's first English-language productions. The connection between a £3,000 naturist travelogue in Cornwall and two landmark European art films runs directly through the same two men and the profits generated by the same nudist audiences.
Klinger later produced Get Carter in 1971, starring Michael Caine, and was executive producer on the Confessions series of sex comedies. Tenser, after leaving Compton in 1967, founded Tigon British Film Productions, which produced Michael Reeves' Witchfinder General the following year. The nudist film as a commercially viable form was effectively finished by the late 1960s, killed partly by the gradual liberalisation of censorship that made explicit content elsewhere seem less remarkable. The market that Naked As Nature Intended had exploited so efficiently ceased to exist once the laws it had been quietly circumventing were relaxed.
Pamela Green After the Film
The personal and professional relationship between Marks and Green ended in 1961, the same year the film was released, though they continued working together as business partners until 1967. Marks wanted to move into softcore pornography. Green didn't. "He was fond of good living and a drink or two, and he wanted to go on to soft porn," she told Tit-Bits magazine in 1995. She walked away from the partnership when that direction became clear.
Marks continued making films of progressively more explicit content throughout the 1960s and 1970s, eventually producing hardcore material for European labels including Color Climax and Tabu under circumstances he later declined to discuss in detail, claiming not to remember the titles. In the 1980s and 1990s he pivoted sharply to spanking-themed video productions, turning out roughly eighty titles before his death from bone cancer in 1997.
Green took a very different path. She continued modelling, eventually becoming camera stills assistant to the photographer Douglas Webb, a former RAF veteran of the Dambusters raid, with whom she lived until his death in 1996. She worked as a stills assistant for major film productions in London for decades. In 2013, three years after her own death in 2010, a book she had been preparing about the making of Naked As Nature Intended was published, with photographs taken during production by Webb: Naked As Nature Intended: The Epic Tale of a Nudist Picture, illustrated with stills that had never been publicly seen.
She had written the foreword to David McGillivray's history of British sex cinema, Doing Rude Things, in 1992, and had been quietly insistent throughout her later life that the film's significance was consistently undervalued. She was right.
Why It Still Matters
Naked As Nature Intended is rarely discussed in histories of British cinema. It's too cheerful and wholesome to interest horror scholars, too modest in its actual content to attract serious attention from researchers of exploitation film, and too firmly associated with the pre-permissive era to fit comfortably into accounts of the sexual revolution. But it occupies a genuinely pivotal position.
It was the first feature-length production from a company that would go on to shape British film in the 1960s in ways that had nothing to do with nudism. It demonstrated, conclusively, that British audiences in 1961 were perfectly willing to pay to see the human body on screen, and that the legal mechanisms for preventing them from doing so were porous enough that a photographer with a hire car and a cooperative nudist camp founder could drive straight through them. It was the bridge, as the book about it later noted, between the puritanical fifties and the swinging sixties.
And it was shot, at the end of the day, by a man who had previously specialised in photographing cats.
Sources
The Big Screen Biograph: "Tony Tenser As Nature Intended" (https://the-big-screen-biograph.captivate.fm/episode/tony-tenser-part-1-straight-outta-compton)
IMDB: George Harrison Marks biography (https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0548833/bio/)
BFI Player: Xcitement! with Pamela Green (https://player.bfi.org.uk/node/4306)
Letterboxd: As Nature Intended reviews and credits (https://letterboxd.com/film/as-nature-intended/)
Reelstreets: Naked as Nature Intended filming locations (https://www.reelstreets.com/films/naked-as-nature-intended/)
Cinebeats: Reassessing Peeping Tom 1960 (https://cinebeats.wordpress.com/2018/01/18/reassessing-the-critical-response-to-peeping-tom-1960/)
Movie Database Wiki: Naked as Nature Intended (https://moviedatabase.fandom.com/wiki/Naked_as_Nature_Intended)
Kepler's Books: Naked as Nature Intended book listing (https://www.keplers.com/book/9780954598594)
