Loving Feeling

British director Norman J. Warren is known primarily for a string of campy horror films such as Satan's Slave (1976), Alien Prey (1978), and Inseminoid (1981), but his first forays into filmmaking were in a decidedly different vein. In an interview by Steve Genier for Cinema Nocturna, Warren refers to his first film, Her Private Hell (1968), as "the first British 'X' rated sex film to tell a story," and one that "played in London's West End for some 14 months." His second feature, another sexploitation film called Loving Feeling (also 1968) was a success as well, but after that he spurned offers to direct more 'sex' films because he "found them very restricting and unrewarding, and frankly I was starting to run out of ideas as to how to film yet another scene with people taking off their clothes and getting into bed.' Warren has no delusions about his early work, "to see it now you would wonder what all the fuss was about." Salvation, a UK company with various subsidiary fronts, has teamed up with US distributor Image Entertainment to release a handful of its Redemption horror holdings as well as a few of its Jezebel titles, whose dvd's promise "sexy retro from the saucy seventies" (although their website more accurately pegs it as '60's & 70's Erotica'), and this brings us back to Warren's Loving Feeling, a time-capsule for the swinging scene found in the late sixties of London. Simon Brent stars as the wildly popular D.J., Stephen Day (aka: Stevee). Marital problems have his house for sale, and a parade of mini-skirts add to the distractions. Stevee sums up the bulk of the narrative flow rather neatly when he exasperatedly tells a love interest how "Neither of you seem to realize what it is being a disc jockey, you get chased by a lot of birds who think you're some kind of God, you get tired of having to meet people all the time, and pretending to be someone you're not. These things happen." And that's about all that happens, although Warren does his best to spice things up with flashbacks, a dream sequence, and spurts of melodrama. Anyone looking to get their kicks from the promise of an unrated sexploitation film would do well to remember Warren's comments earlier herein and focus attention instead on the promise for "retro" pleasures (if that's the right word to describe an interest in fake eyelashes, turtlenecks, and shirt ruffles). The dvd release lists Loving Feeling as being "presented in its 1.78:1 theatrical aspect ratio," which clearly cuts off side information. Warren may not feel too strongly about the impact his early sexploitation films had on the marketplace, but he did have strong feelings about widescreen compositions, as revealed in an interview by Tony Meadows for Wide Screen Movies Magazine titled "The Making of INSEMINOID": I like 'Scope, not just because it gives the film a "bigger" feel to the production, but because to me it is a more natural image. With our own eyes, we look at the world in CinemaScope, not Academy. We make the effort to look up or down, whereas our normal vision is in 'Scope. I feel very lucky to have made three films in 'Scope. Loving Feeling and Satan's Slave were shot in Techniscope, a wonderful system for low-budget film production, as it doubled your film stock by only using half the frame, and you didn't need to use expensive lenses on the camera. All good points for convincing the producer to shoot in 'Scope. The third film was, of course, Inseminoid, which I really wanted to shoot in 'Scope. For more information about Loving Feeling, visit Image Entertainment. To order Loving Feeling, go to TCM Shopping. by Pablo Kjolseth