|
An unusual mixture of pop festival documentary and saucy teen comedy, Bread
was exploitation filmmaker Stanley A. Long's second attempt at what he called a
"counter culture gimmick movie". His first, Groupie Girl (1970), produced by
Long, was based upon the real-life exploits of the film's co-writer, Suzanne
Mercer. Her encounters with rock musicians, as salaciously filtered through the
distinctively seedy vision of director Derek Ford, had given Groupie Girl the
grimy ring of truth, and the film made a lot of money. Unfortunately, despite
its title - contemporary slang for cash - the more light-hearted Bread
did not.
Tired of arguments with the censors, Long had curtailed his uneasy filmmaking
partnership with Ford after Groupie Girl. Bread marked his directorial debut.
Suzanne Mercer was back on board as scriptwriter (she was married to the
saxophone player in Juicy Lucy, hence securing their performance for the film),
but the seedy downbeat authenticity of its predecessor was gone. Bread was
released in mid-1971 with a running time of approximately 79 minutes; even
before the year ended prints had been pruned down to a double-bill-friendly 62.
"I'm not entirely sure I knew what the hell I was making," Long later admitted.
"The distributors promoted it as a sex film, which it really wasn't, and my
first attempt at directing took some time to turn a decent profit at the
box-office." In retrospect, it's not hard to see why.
Bread is too strange and erratic an amalgam of different film genres to
really succeed. There's not enough sex to make it a sex film; not enough music
to make it a music film; and none of the sleazy drama that would move it into
Groupie Girl territory. What there is in abundance is mild, cheeky comedy. With
bulging tents, sexy ladies, a humorous, dim-witted bicycle-riding policeman, a
smattering of very literal toilet gags and boxes and boxes of 'BIG-UN' sausage
rolls, Bread emerges from the Carry On tradition, and foreshadows Long's later
Adventures series of saucy comedies. In this early accidental prototype, however, the balance is not right and the humour doesn't quite work. The groovy cast do their best to appear naughty, but it ends up much as Today's Cinema critic Marjorie Bilbow concluded: "far too recognisably a Cliff Richard musical with nudes and swearing". Nonetheless, its cheerfully strange fusion of styles and genres make it entertaining and strangely compelling.
Vic Pratt
|
1. Expensive sandwiches (1:33) 
