Permissive

A cautionary tale of Young women following a decidedly average rock band and giving themselves away whenever they can.. I mean lets start with the rock band, these guys are no Jim Morrison or Marc Bolan types, there are more Worzel Gummage lookers with their nicotine stained fingers, who probably smell like a mixture of sweaty socks and rotting sprouts.. they were incredibly plain dull and nauseating, off stage all they seemed to do was walk around in slow motion or sit staring into space and occasionally get it on with one of the young waifs who are strangely queuing up to be with them, goodness knows how they manage to get it up so to speak as they all seem so lifeless and dreary...

The girls don't really seem to know what they want, clearly the band are not that successful in terms of the films story, hence there is no glamour for them to ride on, just a life of long dark motorways, rusty transit vans, being groped by dirty nicotine stained hands and being used then cast aside... as for the busker/preacher character who was shoe horned into the story, the one who lives 'under the stars maaaaan' god that guy was terrible but luckily the segment with him in is only 15 mins or so and of course it goes without saying for a film about groupie girls there is also a very brief lesbian scene tacked into the film before its downbeat climax... I

I wouldn't say this film was truly abysmal, it was after all made in that late 60s / early 70s period with its styles, fashions and morals so was maybe quite shocking and meant to be a gritty piece of realism but now some 50 years on it all seems rather contrived and an opportunity wasted and traded just to show some skin... here we are now in 2020 so I dare say any of the surviving band members are probably sat in some old peoples home, bald and covered head to toe in nicotine patches staring into space as usual... whilst any of the girls are probably all about size 20 with 4 or 5 broken marriages behind them and lecturing their grand daughters about the perils of sleeping around...

Also bearing in mind its 2020, Netflix, amazon prime, even you tube have pretty much killed off home video / dvd... meaning your choices with this film are to try and track it down online or pay £14.99 or whatever the price is for a BFI blu-ray edition... is it worth it? Probably not, the extras might sway it for some people out there but this isn't worth wasting your money on.. that said if you see it cheap somewhere on your travels there are worse things you could buy!

5/10

In the development stage the title for this truly dispiriting film was Suzy Superscrew. Better had it been kept for at least it gives you an idea of where the action is heading. Suzy is a duffle-coated runaway, arriving in London to join the groupie scene. Unable to score with the band her groupie friend introduces her to, she hooks up with Pogo an itinerant musician and mad preacher. "Where do you live?' she enquires of him. "Under the stars, the world is my scene, man", he responds. Unfortunately the world isn't listening as he gets mown down by a car shortly afterwards. The subsequent narrative is reduced to what band member or groupie Suzy will wake up with next.

The film, shot in a quasi documentary style and was partly intended as a promotional vehicle for heavy rock band Forever More, which accounts for their music being way up in the mix and sometimes drowning out the dialogue. This same logic explains footage of the band performing being inserted whenever the director runs out of ideas, which is often. On the plus side the relentlessly downbeat tone does provides a telling snapshot of the fag-end of the sixties and a particular sub-culture, while at the same time maintaining a grim synergy: hairy men and ugly women having bad sex together in cheap hotels to a Forever More soundtrack. Just desserts are sometimes delicious.

These early 70's groupie films were one of the most uber-depressing cycle of films I've ever seen, and really make you wonder why ANY girl at any time would ever want to be a groupie since it inevitably leads to heartbreak, squalor, venereal disease, and a tragic end--the only apparent upside being getting to sexually service talentless hair-ball rock musicians like the real-life band Forever More. The bleak ending of this is SO bleak, it makes you lose sympathy even for the protagonist herself, which is one reason why I think the similar UK film "Groupie Girl" is definitely superior to this one (the girl in that is also serving as a sperm dumpster to slightly more talented musicians).

My personal favorite film in this cycle though is the German film "I, a Groupie", which features the incredibly sexy Ingrid Steeger and at least provides a lot of eroticism along with the downbeat degradation. The girl in this, Maggie Stride, is not unattractive, but definitely pretty ordinary-looking compared to the smoking-hot Steeger. And speaking of smoking-hot, apparently the famous Collinson twins, stars of Hammer's "Twins of Evil" have a small part in this film, but I'm not sure where exactly (they also appear, much more prominently, in "Groupie Girl").

Lindsay Shontieff is an interesting director, mostly for his rather black-hearted view of humanity--even his outright sex comedies like "The Big Zapper" contain some memorably nasty, misanthropic turns. He does use some interesting devices here like flash-forwards that give glimpses at the ultimate fates of many doomed characters. The band Forever More meanwhile comes off like such a collection of untalented and unlikeable douchebags,you have to wonder why they agreed to be in this (or why they didn't subsequently sue Shontieff). Still, while this movie is definitely inferior to "Groupie Girl" and "I, a Groupie", it isn't totally bad (like the aptly-named American groupie flick "Bummer!"). But definitely don't expect to be uplifted here.

Made in 1972 and relatively forgotten about since the BFI recently restored it onto Blu-Ray and DVD, Permissive follows the fortunes of a young girl who enters the world of the rock star groupie, back when Britannia was cool and was at the forefront of fashion and music. Suzy (Maggie Stride) arrives in London and meets up with her friend Fiona (the unfortunately named Gay Singleton), who is in a relationship with the hairy-faced Lee (Alan Gorrie), bass player and lead singer of rock band Forever More. She adopts the lifestyle and offers herself for sex to the bands various sleazy members before she is left behind as the group go on tour. On their return, she is eventually accepted and begins to fall into a moral downward spiral.

Perhaps quite shocking in its day, showing plenty of full frontal nudity, drug abuse and generally questionable behaviour, the film now seems extremely mild and somewhat tedious. The acting is especially dubious, mainly from the band members of real-life group Forever More, who although not given much to do, look noticeably uncomfortable delivering their lines. It isn't without good points however – Suzy's decline from wide-eyed innocent into full-blown slut who seems to have no goal other than to have sex with as many people as possible without a second thought of the effect it will have on her friends, is very interesting, and is performed reasonably well by Stride.

Interesting to view as a time-capsule of a time when extreme facial hair was cool and free-love was frowned upon, but as a piece of filmmaking it cannot hide from its low-budget limitations, and the years have had its effect on the film's power.

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PERMISSIVE is a surprisingly grim and unworkable film that marks an early milestone in the career of cult director Lindsay Shonteff. The story follows the fortunes of a couple of groupies as they hang around with the dregs of society in the form of a rock band, looking for fame, fortune and love and finding only seediness and squalor instead. It's a grubby little production that seems to go nowhere for its entire running time, instead dawdling around with a presentation of completely unlikeable characters who garner too much screen time. Shonteff shoehorns in some gratuitous nudity, but it's not enough to retain the viewer's interest.