Filth For Frankenstein in ‘Dolly Mixture (1973)’

Dolly Mixture (1973)
Directed by George Harrison Marks, with Clyda Rosen.


Anonymously directed by none other than Harrison Marks, Dolly Mixture was shot at his studio in Farringdon in 1973. It comes from that rarely spoken about ‘Long Weekend’ period in Marks’ life, in-between The Nine Ages of Nakedness and Come Play With Me, when bankrupt and drinking heavily he made lots of short sex films for the 8mm market often producing two versions of the same film, a soft black and white version for the UK market and a full colour hardcore ‘blue movie’ version released overseas on the Color Climax label.

Dolly Mixture, which got the two version treatment, is pretty much a continuation of the silly little stories he would devise for his 1960’s 8mm striptease films as well as his flirtations with horror in striptease shorts like Witch’s Brew and Vampire. Quizzed about his 70’s hardcore films in later years Marks would admit to their existence but would claim not to remember their titles and chances are the full extent of his involvement in hard pornography will never be known. Dolly Mixture and another one from the period called Bistro Bordello (starring the good Dr Ava Cadell) are only really known about on account of some posts, left on an internet message board a few years ago now, from a former porn actor who appeared in the soft b/w version of Dolly Mixture. While that British version is still MIA, a bit of detective work managed to turn up a brief clip, hardcore, in colour and dubbed into German that sounded as if it could be from the Color Climax version of Dolly Mixture. Matching as it did the plot description in one of his posts which claimed the short centered around a mad, Frankenstein-like Professor attempting to bring to life his female creation, played by Marks’ top heavy Israeli discovery Clyda Rosen, who was about as far removed from Elsa Lanchester as you can get. This clip offered up a choppy rendition of Clyda and an archetypical 1970’s stud (initially seen sporting red Y-fronts) acting like rabbits on a laboratory floor, all inter-cut with stereotypical mad doctor imagery (skulls, bubbling test tubes, etc, etc…) and scored to equally stereotypical horror film music (at least in the German version). Unfortunately just about anything that wasn’t blue was edited from the clip, making it hard to positively ID and leaving only fleeting glimpses of such horror themed weirdness as a hunchback peeking through the door and a ranting old codger with a false beard barking dubbed German orders at Clyda. Thankfully a bit more searching paid off and the full 20 minute version of Dolly Mixture surfaced on a DVD that complies some Clyda Rosen shorts. This version, transferred from 8mm, lacks a soundtrack, although chances are it was shot without sound and then only ever dubbed into German, so isn’t a great loss.

Dolly Mixture begins with the professors’ assistant creeping around the prof’s lab and contemplating his collection of dolls, had this character been given a name you suspect it would probably be ‘Igor’. A hunchback, he sports ghost face make-up, glue on facial scars and long hair, and looks not unlike a zombified Ginger Baker. The lab is also home to a reanimated severed hand which is trapped inside a glass jar (its that old hand from under the table gag) as well as the Professors’ lifeless female creation (Clyda) who is stark naked on a slab. The Professor walks in on the hunchback playing around with her, so shoos him away. It transpires the Prof also has a huge doll fetish, and is rarely seen without a doll made up as a bride who he confides in and kisses. Enter a young insurance clerk, who turns up to provide the professor with an assessment and gets a guided tour of the professors’ house which looks similar to the one used in the physiatrist sequences in The Nine Ages of Nakedness. Strangely the clerk doesn’t seem phased by all the dolls, including a huge doll house in the professors’ front room, or the nude, large breasted Israeli woman in his lab. While the clerk goes about ‘assessing’ Clyda the professor creeps over to some electronic device, turns a switch which brings Clyda to life, pretty soon she’s bouncing all over the bewildered clerk. It seems that the Professor has some kind of mental hold over both Clyda and the Clerk via the dolls, at least thats what you can gather by the shots of wind-up dolls whose sexual actions match their human counterparts. Its all hot stuff, with Clyda and the Clerk going through a karma sutra amount of positions on the professors orders with even the hunchback joining in at one point. At the end, directing all this good sex proves too much for the Professor who accidentally blows himself up in a puff of smoke and Clyda and the Clerk run away. The intriguing final shot reveals the dead professor has turned into a doll, complete with clown’s make-up, while his beloved bride doll takes on human characteristics before vanishing. Quite what this means, only Marks knew for sure.

Dolly Mixture more than lives up to expectations as a amalgamation of British horror and blue movie. The big surprise here is, given Marks’ music hall comedy background, that we’re not just talking sub-Carry on Screaming comedy horror here, but attempts at a genuinely unsettling atmosphere with the final doll/professor twist and some of the creepiest use of stuffed toys since The Sinful Dwarf. The fairly elaborate plot and cheap but imaginative mad professor set (possibly banged together by Marks’ muscleman friend Howard Nelson) are also unusual touches for a blue movie. Incidentally the German title is “Vor Geilheit Kochen”, which would appear to loosely translate as ‘cooking up randy’ or something to that effect.

Its not hard to see why male co-stars would have very fond memories of Clyda Rosen, all big boobs, long flowing hair and exotic looks, and enthusiastically doing hardcore Clyda was a 4’10” sexual dynamo. Making it all the more of a mystery why no one ever thought to use her in legit soft core British sex comedies, or even walk ons in horror films or TV programs (given her height she’d have been perfect in “The Adventurer” -heh heh),as happened with many other pornographic actresses of the period, maybe blue filmmakers wanted her all to themselves. Some of her other ‘under the counter’ works include, Die Llolas with its John Cleese lookalike, Femmes Chercent Bon-Bris***s, whose blunt title (it translates as ‘women seek good ****ers spoofs its own stereotypical ‘man knocks on door, woman answers door, they have sex’ blue movie narrative and Autograph Hunter, a pornographic spin on Derek Ford’s Groupie Girl in which Clyda and a blonde friend break into the house of a famous rock star, making out with him for the promise of his John Hancock. You can practically hear the celluloid sizzle whenever she appears onscreen.

Apart from Clyda, Dolly Mixture also boasts an unexpected appearance from another diminutive, much loved furry character in the shape of Paddington Bear who makes his unlikely blue movie debut as part of the hunchback’s doll collection!

Text: Gavcrimson 2006
E-mail: [email protected]