Antony Balch (1937-1980) ~ British Cinema’s strange young man

Antony Balch (1937-1980) ~ British Cinema’s strange young man


‘They did not ask to be brought into the world, but into the world they came… their code is a law unto themselves’ ~ Freaks (1932)

Antony Balch was born in 1937- his mother Delta was a Cochrane’s review girl, bit-part actress and ‘movie business gossip’. Balch later liked to shock people by claiming his birth had caused his mother to lose her singing voice. An only child, he became interested in cinema earlier on, fantasizing himself as a exhibitor by turning the family living room into a screening room, inviting (and charging) friends to watch old Pathe news footage or home movies. Delta had to playact being an usher and was made to screen programmes at set times even if no one (including Antony) bothered to turn up. Balch’s fixation for horror and exploitation movies began even before his teens, culminating in a school-aged Balch meeting his idol Bela Lugosi in early Fifties Brighton. Lugosi was touring in an ill-fated stage version of ‘Dracula’ and both health and career wise was in bad shape. When Balch came backstage after the performance, describing to Lugosi a horror movie scene with moving walls, the actor’s misinterpreted response was ‘yes, the walls are closing in, yes young man’. Despite Lugosi’s deafness it was to Balch a fabulous experience ‘I was trembling, but he was utterly charming’.
Working his way into the dreary British film industry of the 1950’s Balch directed adverts for Camay Soap, and a 30 second one for Kit-E-Kat (‘your cat will stay younger, live longer, on daily Kit-E-Kat’). ‘That kind of filmmaking was a very good training ground, because you did do everything’. In the early part of the 1960’s he lived briefly in France working as a location scout and subtitler of French films for their British releases. In Paris, Balch became friendly with radical artists like William Burroughs and Kenneth Anger. Burroughs and Balch met at Madame Raschoo’s beat hotel, and the two quickly became collaborators. Balch gets a ‘special thanks’ credit in Burroughs’ book ‘The Ticket That Exploded’ and directed the Burroughs influenced ‘experimental’ film Towers Open Fire. Non-narrative but accessible, Towers Open Fire is a witty collage of anarchic imagery. Old footage of the 1929 Stock Exchange crash symbolises economic chaos. Power hungry corporations are represented by a board of directors played by the odd bunch of Burroughs, Scottish writer Alexander Trocchi and tightwad sex film distributor Bachoo Sen. One by one the members of the board are zapped into thin air~ their papers are blown away down a quiet country road. Burroughs shoots up and is seen in a gas mask. The destruction of family photographs by a ping pong ball gun causes people drop dead in the street leaving only piles of clothes. A tramp (Michael Portman) does an impromptu dance while a music hall type instrumental plays in the distance. When the tramp looks up to the sky we see colours drawn onto film, meant to represent an alien invasion. Though its easy to miss in the actual film, the big talking point for critics are the shots Balch filmed of himself masturbating, inter-cut with incantations (‘curse go back’) being performed on cans of film. In 1963 Balch caught the film ‘Freaks’ at the Cinematheque in Paris and decided to become a distributor in order to open the film in London. Freaks had been banned outright in Britain since 1932 and was still being refused a censor’s certificate way into the 1950’s. Balch was instinctively drawn to material which had incurred the British censors wraith With the help of Kenneth Anger, Balch bought the British rights to the film from Raymond Rohauer~ who would later gain a reputation for being impossible to deal with and for suppressing prints of rare Buster Keaton shorts.
Balch returned to London with Freaks under one hand and Towers Open Fire under the other. In his first attempt at being a distributor he released them as part of a triple-bill headed by Freaks, whose advertising featured good and bad newspaper review quotes; ‘could never be made today’, ‘awful, awful in several ways’. Taking notice was a couple called the Cohens who had inherited an old cinema chain. While most of the Cohens’ cinemas made a profit, they hired Balch to run the two that weren’t- The Jacey in Piccadilly Circus and The Times in Baker Street. Balch did everything from choosing what films played, the front of house displays, to keeping an eye on projectionists and cleaning ladies. Whereas The Times was more rep orientated, The Jacey specialized in playing exploitation films like Nudist Paradise and the Japanese horror/art-house hit Onibaba (a brief view of those two on display at the Jacey can be seen in the 1967 horror film ‘Corruption’). At the same time as running the two cinemas for the Cohens, Balch carried on his career as a distributor eventually releasing everything from The Corpse Grinders to Anger’s Invocation of My Demon Brother, Paul Bowles in Morocco to Russ Meyer’s Supervixens. Balch was one of the first people to embrace art, horror and exploitation films with equal enthusiasm, a view that was hardly shared by many film critics of the time. Throughout the 1960’s and 1970’s his special niche however was releasing foreign sex films. Balch held the curious position of being a homosexual whose professional life lay in marketing heterosexual sex to the masses- and it’s something he did better than many of his heterosexual competitors. Most of the sex films Balch released in the UK had been purchased at the Cannes or Venice film festivals~ with no stars or name directors they cost next to nothing. Balch then added his own personal mojo giving the films tongue-in-cheek English titles and eye catching campaigns like ‘No photographs permitted of this controversial X Film’ (from the ‘When Girls Undress’ poster). Balch worked out of an office in Golden Square, Soho and lived in Dalmeney Court on Duke Street. A plain apartment complex, Dalmeney Court’s other occupants were made up of uptight gentlemen, ‘beat’ people like Burroughs and Brion Gysin plus the occasional celeb passing through like The Animals’ Eric Burdon.
A second Balch/Burroughs collaboration film ‘The Cut-Ups’ opened in London in 1967. This was part of an abandoned project called ‘Guerrilla Conditions’ meant as a documentary on Burroughs and filmed throughout 1961-1965. Inspired by Burroughs technique of cutting up text and rearranging it in random order, Balch had an editing woman cut his footage for the documentary into little pieces and impose no editing control over its reassembly. The result is 20 minutes of rapid-fire editing, with a cut and image change seemingly every other second. The soundtrack consists of voices repeating phases like ‘yes, hello’ and ‘look at this picture’ over and over till they seem to blur into an alien language. The film opened at Oxford Street’s Cinephone cinema- which later played lengthy runs of School for Sex and The Wife Swappers- and had a disturbing reaction. Many audience members claimed the film made them ill, others demanded their money back, while some just stumbled out of the cinema ranting ‘its disgusting’. The Cinephone’s manager Mr Provisor noted the film had a record number of complaints for a ‘U’ certificate film. The Cut-Ups would find a more welcome home at the ‘underground’ venue The UFO club, where it and Towers Open Fire played as moving wallpaper for bands’ back-projection. Nicolas Roeg was also a fan of The Cut-Ups and borrowed its editing technique for an early scene in Performance.
Among the sights in The Cut-Ups are shots of Burroughs acting out scenes from his book The Naked Lunch. The idea of bringing The Naked Lunch to the big-screen was Balch’s dream project. First developed in 1964, a Naked Lunch script was finally completed in the early Seventies. Hardly a ‘straight’ adaptation (as if such a thing were possible anyway) the film was meant to include songs and dances in the style of British music hall. However ‘personal differences’ between Balch and the film’s would be leading man Mick Jagger - caused the project’s collapse. Later Jagger would claim that Balch didn’t have a bankable reputation in the British film industry and was using the project as a front to sexually come on to him. The Cohens- the project’s unenthusiastic financiers- probably breathed a sigh of relief when it was Jagger rather than they who let Balch down.
Balch found a more committed investor for his plans to make feature films in producer Richard Gordon, who Balch had met at Cannes when Gordon was promoting his likeable horror cheapie ‘Devil Doll’. Gordon had a long history in horror cinema, and as it turned out had been partly responsible for the stage version of Dracula that had allowed Balch to meet Lugosi back in the Fifties. The pair became good friends and their plans evolved so quickly that their first film together originally titled ‘Multiplication’ or ‘Eros Exploding’ was shot from a script never fully completed. With Balch using his own money to fund half of the budget what emerged was the deceptively titled Secrets of Sex (1970) ‘the film was masquerading as a sex film but I was really making a horror film’. Balch’s feature debut is in fact a multi-genre anthology film which blends slapstick comedy, spy spoof, bloody horror movie and softcore sex film under the pre-text of being a comment on the battle of the sexes. What is chiefly notable though is its running theme of sexual freaky, the ‘strange young man’ tries to get a prostitute to have sex in front of a lizard, an old woman recalls her youth seducing men and trapping their souls in potted plants and a female scientist gives birth to a monster baby in order to emotionally cripple her sugar-daddy. The film ends with its narrator-an Egyptian mummy- rambling ‘and so it goes on, and on, and on’ over footage of an orgy. Though it’s often shaky, Secrets of Sex, true to its creator is unique and controversial. The British Censor cut nine minutes from the film, while in America the film was impounded by customs then refused a certificate by the American censors, the MPAA. ‘Bizarre’ to give the film’s apt American title was released by a fledgling New Line Cinema but due to its censorship problems had few play-dates. In 1972 an R-rated variant called Tales of the Bizarre was distributed to drive-ins through a subsidiary of American International Pictures. So heavily cut was this version that it played as an incoherent horror picture with little suggestion of sex. However in Britain Secrets of Sex was a sensation, running for six months at the Piccadilly Jacey and still playing in the provinces years later.
Encouraged by the film’s British success, Balch and Gordon set about a second corroboration, a ‘legit’ horror film called Horror Hospital (1973). The story of Dr Storm who with the help of a wise cracking dwarf, an ex-brothel madam and biker heavies, lures hippies to a pseudo-health farm in order to turn them into brain-dead zombies, came about during the Cannes Film Festival. In the classic exploitation film tradition the title was invented before the plot. Balch then spent his time locked in a hotel room with co-writer Alan Watson, ordering meals in and not leaving the room till the script was complete. Watson was the kind of character David Rayner specialised in playing in sex comedies, the outrageously campy homosexual. Balch knew his co-writer from the days when Watson had lived at Dalmeney Court with Ian Sommerville. By all accounts Watson wasn’t the sort of character who was easy to forget. Whilst in London he had worked in the Scotland Yard canteen and danced on the tables to the amusement of bobbies, Watson also liked to wolf whistle at brickies. Amongst other ideas, Watson was responsible the film’s blade equipped Rolls-Royce which Dr Storm uses to decapitate unwanted guests. Horror Hospital plays equally well as an homage to old Lugosi era horror films, a tongue in cheek spoof and a sex and violence fuelled 1970’s exploitation film. The teenage heroes were played by Robin Askwith at the beginning of his crumpet chaser career, pretty model Phoebe ‘Vanessa’ Shaw and Euro-Royalty connected actor Kurt Christian. Horror Hospital also allowed Balch to play-out his fantasy of directing Lugosi by casting Michael ‘horrors of the black museum’ Gough as the very Lugosi-like Dr Storm. When Gough asked Balch what he wanted bringing to the role Balch screened him ‘The Devil Bat’ a Lugosi oldie about a mad scientist masquerading as a perfume inventor. ‘Devil Bat was not a good film, but it was a great Lugosi performance. He was at the top of his mad scientist form’. In keeping with Balch’s previous film’s weird sex theme, Dr Storm is eventually revealed to be a burns victim cum monster who resembles an overdone pudding. The only way for Storm to have sex with women is to lobotomise them, but then the female zombies’ lack of response causes him to turn sex sessions into a murderous S&M assaults. Also worth noting is an early scene where Askwith gets into a punch up with a pop group whose transvestite lead singer-a ‘silly little red faggot swirling about in his own smoke’- is probably an in-joke at the expense of a certain Rolling Stone.
Horror Hospital was the most successful of all of Balch’s films~ it sold worldwide and due to revivals, then video and DVD releases has never really been out of circulation. Yet Balch never made another feature film and in the years that followed concentrated more on his work as a cinema programmer and distributor. Plans certainly existed for further horror films but it appears that by the mid-Seventies Balch’s well known eccentricity had made people wary of him. During a ‘crazy’ meeting to discuss a horror film project, screenwriter Chris Wicking claimed Balch spent most of the time walking across furniture, demonstrating ideas ‘he went into another little world’. Wicking wondered if Balch was on drugs, or whether this was just his way of showing off. A year after his final feature film, Balch released what was to be his final collaboration with Burroughs, a colour short entitled ‘Bill and Tony- Who’s Who’. Five minutes of Balch and Burroughs’ talking heads, their conversation is made up of dialogue from a scientology pamphlet and the opening Carney speech from Freaks. When Bill asks Tony where he is, Tony’s haunting reply is ‘I’m in a 1920 movie’. Tragically during a routine medical in 1978 Balch was diagnosed with terminal stomach cancer, and died on the 6th of April, 1980 aged just 43.
Balch was survived by his mother who played a minor role in preserving his short films in the early Eighties, including the previously unreleased William Buys a Parrott and the outtake assembly Ghosts at No.9 Paris. ‘He was a sad figure in a way’ Chris Wicking later remembered ‘because he was well before his time’.
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Films distributed by Antony Balch;
Date passed by censor~
03 May 1963 ~ Freaks Cert X
12 June 1963 ~Towers Open Fire Cert X
23 April 1964 ~ Do You Like Women? Cert X (real title: Aimez-Vous Les Femmes )
10 December 1964 ~ The Curse and the Coffin Cert A
10 December 1964 ~The Burning Court Cert A
25 June 1965 ~ Noite Vayia rejected (passed X with cuts 4 Nov 1965)
20 August 1965 ~ Secret Paris Cert X (sex travelogue, Balch’s advert for the film makes a cameo in The Cut-Ups)
25 August 1965 ~ Mr Lewis Cert U
04 November 1965 ~ Men and Women Cert X (‘the screen’s first serious study of sexual experience’)
20 December 1965 ~ Flora Cert A (an ‘astonishing’ short, played as a support feature to Men and Women)
26 May 1966 ~ The Kinky Darlings Cert X (real title: Per Una Valigia Piene Di Donne)
31 May 1966 ~ X-Ray of a Killer Cert X (Euro crime thriller featuring espionage plot and a hunt for a strangler)
31 May 1966 ~ The Horrible Profession Cert X
03 June 1966 ~ The Decadent Influence Cert A
03 June 1966 ~ Une Fille Et Des Fusils Cert A
10 June 1966 ~ The Suitcase Cert X
26 July 1966 ~ Les Fetes Galantes Cert U
23 August 1966 ~ Gift Cert X
20 October 1966 ~ The Pornographer rejected
01 December 1966 ~ Lu Cert X
13 January 1967 ~ Massacre For an Orgy Cert X (French, a.k.a Massacre of Pleasure, about gangsters and prostitution possible Bob Cresse/Dick Randall involvement)
22 March 1967 ~ The Shape of the Light Cert X
10 April 1967 ~ Where Once Kings Rode Cert U
14 July 1967 ~ The Pussycats Cert X
26 September 1967 ~ The Comic Strip Hero Cert X (French directed by Alain Jessua)
22 December 1967 ~ The Cut-Ups Cert U
16 January 1968 ~ Mondo Bizarre Cert X
27 February 1968 ~ Skin Skin Cert X (real title: Kapy Selan Alla)
27 March 1968 ~ The Brutes Cert X
01 October 1968 ~ Hercules against the Barbarians Cert U
15 October 1968 ~ Requiem For A Gunfighter Cert U (‘super-Western’)
24 October 1968 ~ Witchcraft Through the Ages Cert X (1922 silent ‘Haxan’ reissued by Balch with Burroughs narration and Jean-Luc Ponty soundtrack)
03 December 1968 ~ Thoughts of Chairman Mao Cert A
23 December 1968 ~ Adventures of Robinson Crusoe Cert U
24 April 1969 ~ Lot in Sodom Cert X
05 August 1969 ~ Run Angel Run Cert X (US biker actioner with William Smith)
05 August 1969 ~ Invocation of My Demon Brother Cert X (Kenneth Anger, soundtrack by Mick Jagger)
05 August 1969 ~ The Dream Girl Cert X (Swedish short)
15 August 1969 ~ The Gay Deceivers Cert X (US comedy, two men camp it up to avoid the draft to Vietnam)
03 April 1970 ~ Freaky Rider rejected
06 April 1970 ~ The Weird Weirdo (Le Grand Ceremonal) Cert X (from a play by Fernando Arrabal. Cavanosa, a man-child plays with blow-up dolls but finds real love in the form of model Syl. His mother tries to break them up by accusing him of being a serial killer.)
27 May 1970 ~ Love 65 Cert X
08 June 1970 ~ The Curious Female Cert X (US softcore, set in 2177 where promiscuity is encouraged but relationships are banned)
03 July 1970 ~ Hetrosexual Cert X (following her expulsion from a convent Juliette (Maria Pia Conte) lives La Dolce Vita in Rome.)
07 August 1970 ~ Secrets of Sex Cert X
24 August 1970 ~ Dementia- Daughter of Horror Cert X
3 March 1971 ~ War Between the Planets Cert U (Italian sci-fi)
11 March 1971 ~ Paul Bowles in Morocco Cert AA
13 July 1971 ~ A Matter of Fat Cert U
28 July 1971 ~ Justine and Juliet Cert X (De Sade adaptation by Jess Franco featuring Romina Power and Jack Palance.)
01 December 1971 ~ Don’t Deliver Us From Evil Cert X (‘the French film banned in France’)
20 December 1971 ~ La Fete A Jo Jo Cert X
17 Feb 1972 ~ The Hippie Girls Cert X
17 Feb 1972 ~ Loving and Laughing Cert X
17 February 1972 ~ The Importance of Being Sexy Cert X
23 August 1972 ~ Moral Love Cert X
8 March 1973 ~ The Corpse Grinders Cert X (all the corpse grinding scenes were cut by the UK censor)
16 April 1973 ~ Horror Hospital Cert X
14 August 1973 ~ Sexy Darlings Cert X (real title: Robinson une seine wilden sklavinnen- Jess Franco comedy about a man whose day dreams come true.)
16 August 1974 ~ Doctor in the Nude Cert X (really ‘traitment de choc’ a highly regarded equation of capitalism and vampirism, Alain Delon gets his prick out on the beach hence Balch’s title)
30 September 1974 ~ Bill and Tony –Who’s Who Cert U
29 October 1974 ~ When Girls Undress Cert X (West German sex comedy originally ‘Matratzen-Tango’ about a dustman trying to give up sex so he can enter a bike race)
28 November 1974 ~ Mama’s Dirty Girls Cert X (US drive-in movie, scheming mama has her daughters use their sex appeal to shakedown dumb men )
03 Feb 1975 ~ Truck Stop Women Cert X (‘double clutchin, gear-jammin’ mamas who like a lot of hijackin by day and a lot of heavy truckin’ by night’.)
21 Feb 1975 ~ The Love Hate Cert X
27 Jan 1975 ~ Machismo Cert X (Californian western financed by softcore entrepreneur Harry Novak)
13 April 1976 ~ L’Aggression Cert X
25 August 1976 ~ Bisexual Cert X (French, ‘the erotic fantasies of a young computer operator’)
12 February 1977 ~ Supervixens Cert X (Russ Meyer, the dynamite between the legs climax was cut by the UK censors)
24 March 1977 ~ Secrets of Sex: Short Version Cert X (edited down version of Balch’s feature debut designed to play as a half hour co-feature)
31 March 1977 ~ Blacksnake/Slaves Cert X (another heavily cut Meyer)
29 September 1977 ~ 18 Year Old Schoolgirls Cert X
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Balch quotes from 1972 interview in ‘Cinema Rising’ magazine and a further 1975 interview that was never published.
Horror Hospital is available on R1 DVD from Elite. Secrets of Sex was once released as Bizarre on the Iver Film Services label in the early Eighties. This tape and grey area copies sometimes under the bootleg title ‘Erotic Tales from the Mummy’s Tomb’ are uncut. ‘Thee Films 1950’s-1960’s’, a compilation video of Balch’s short films including Towers Open Fire, The Cut-Ups and Bill and Tony is available from Visionary Video (e-mail: [email protected]).

Text 2002: Gavcrimson
E-mail: [email protected]