Description
Seamy or at least black and white expose of 1950’s London’s sex trade in all its guises. Using actors and clearly of the period, this reveals and condemns all the tricks of the trade, from call girls to clip joints and high massage parlours to low class walk ups. It’s hard to know which are less appealing: the deluded and self-deluded and desperate punters or the calculating and equally desperate working girls. The film condemns them equally, while revealing in details the titillation and barely legal disrobing designed to arouse man’s baser desires. With a voice-over straight from the Department of Public Morals, and fascinating glimpses of a period long ago, this has something for everyone. Huge potential for unintentional humour and entirely convincing as to the facts of the case.
West End Jungle is a 1961 British film directed by Arnold Louis Miller and starring Andria Lawrence and Vicki Woolf. It focuses on the issue of prostitution.
Context
West End Jungle examined the consequences of the introduction of the Street Offences Act 1959. Until then, as many as 10,000 prostitutes lined the streets and alleys of Soho, facing a deterrent of only a small fine. The film explains what happened when the streets were cleaned up, and it looks at what became of the so-called oldest profession as it continued to operate in Britain.
The film claims that: “The streets of London have been swept, apparently, clean, but the dirt still remains out of sight. It's still there in the West End Jungle”; Labour peer Lord Morrison, in his position as president of the British Board of Film Censors, had West End Jungle banned, declaring that the film would bring London into disrepute.
Content
The scenarios and narration of West End Jungle are sensational, evoking the lurid pulp fiction of the time. The film warns, for example: “by getting in that car she is taking the irrevocable step to degradation and eventual self-disgust”. But the casualties are more often men. Either senior ones taken in by young women who secretly regard them with contempt, or gullible businessmen lured into clubs where hostesses working on commission cajole them into paying for overpriced drinks.
