A collection of seamstresses are working away in a room when suddenly a mouse scurries in and they all scream, jumping onto the table and lifting their skirts. Once the mouse has gone, they take one of their number, lift up her dress to expose her bottom and spank it, then after that she starts feeling hot and itchy, so is escorted by her friend into an adjacent room to divest herself of her garments. Soon they are excited by this and start kissing, then indulging in oral sex with each other, whereupon their boss enters the room and is shocked at what he sees, but the young ladies are so turned on they grab him and make sure he takes part in their games, ending up in a threesome...
If that sounds like pornography, then your instincts are correct, it was, but it was not a modern day example, it was one from the nineteen-twenties. That's what The Good Old Naughty Days presented, a selection of one reel porn movies from a time that few expected such things to be in existence, so if nothing else this proved a preoccupation with the lustful side of life was in no way a new idea, although there was no way you could have watched these back then without visiting a brothel. These were French films found in an attic and assembled by Michel Reilhac, a producer of European art movies, including some by Lars von Trier, and offered up with very little embellishment save for explanatory intertitles.
Not that those captions told you very much, but then again there wasn't much to tell as while these shorts had been preserved, almost all from the twenties but one from around 1905 as well, information on them was scant. We will never know the names of the participants as either they valued their anonymity or nobody was interested in keeping a record of them, so we watch these unknown people, most of them prostitutes and their clients, getting up to the sort of thing that has never really gone out of fashion, no matter how much it has been rejected by or influenced pop culture in the following years. This offers a haunting quality to much of what we see if you allow it, knowing that you will never be aware of anything about these folk aside from what we see here.
What would they have thought of generations to come viewing their endeavours all those decades later? The Good Old Naughty Days even secured a cinema release in some countries, though in Britain the censors rejected it for home video: you have to imagine the performers' minds would be well and truly boggled by the thought of a whole theatre of customers equally boggled at what they were getting up to. You could regard this as a historical document which was what it was, a curio for those wishing a more enlightening view of the sexual fantasies their ancestors would have liked, although even then there were elements you would never get in the pornography of the twenty-first century, mostly thanks to changing tastes rather than an antique nature of the material.
That said, there were aspects showing some things never change: if you thought this would be all French maids and oh la la then you would be surprised to see just how explicit things got, and the bizarre sight of the sort of people who would not look out of place in a Charlie Chaplin movie suddenly dropping their clothes and going at it held an undeniable novelty. It seems the twenties were keen on threesomes, as often the action will end up with a trio of participants, one man and two women, in various uncomfortable-looking positions, though not only were there lesbian practices and plenty of them, but in some shorts male homosexuality was included, something that would never happen now in straight videos. Something else that would never happen was the clip where a dog participates in the activity, licking away at intimate areas in queasy to current eyes results, although in the main it was normal coupling that went on. As light relief to finish, Reilhac unearthed a porno cartoon featuring a little man with a huge, detachable penis - it's as if Felix the Cat had turned randy.
