Gwendoline

Gwendoline began life within the pages of John Willie's Bizarre magazine which had a somewhat clandestine existence in the late 40s. The character appeared again in the magazine Wink in 1947 in a serial drawn by Willie and called Sweet Gwendoline. The artist/photographer and his work existed within a twilight world with high heels, bondage, extreme curves the order of the day and a rather shadowy but surprisingly substantial fan base. These days the whole BDSM scene has taken over much of this territory but somewhere the 'schoolboy/boy scout' fantasy element with young ladies bound to trees in the jungle has gone. I guess that old true Brit explorer notion has been replaced with a more high tech version in chrome and shiny black PVC. In any event Just Jaeckin's vague attempt to capture something of the flavour of those old pencil drawn fantasies seems more like cashing in on the name rather than any serious attempt to explore those murky but delightful waters. The script is awful and the early native village, jungle and desert scenes pretty bad and if the later sequences are enlivened by attractive and minimal costumes. John Willie this certainly is not.