The Touchables

All my life I've been mad about 60's mod films. I just love movies from the 60's with loads of cool clothes and style. I thought I knew about most of them until I just recently found out about "The Touchables", which is just all mod style. So much so, that there's almost no plot at all. The clothes and the visuals are fantastic but it all just seems to be a bunch advertisements strung together, one after the other.

After a while I almost lost interest since it was almost too much style. The girls are very pretty but, apart from the dark one, all of them are very uninteresting (and quite bad actors to boot!). The prettyboy pop star is almost better than them combined!

The real star of the film is the absolutely AMAZING gigantic bubble house they reside in. That knocked me out and makes this film worth watching again! The set design should have won awards!!!!

How come this film is so unknown? I gather that this film was not a hit at the time but to be so forgotten is strange... Does anyone know?

Anyone can make a movie, it's enough to have a camera and a few actors. It doesn't matter if they are good or bad. The script doesn't really matter, does it? It can goes even without one, especially if you have a few pairs of panties on some sexy asses, plus a few locations, some cars, a motorboat, a transparent dome in Frensham Ponds... Not bad, right? We gonna have a movie! I came across this and said to myself, English, 1968, a title that takes me to the American series "The Untouchables... It's got to be something of it, let's check! Now, I would like to say something good about this movie but it's rather difficult, I can not, my dignity does not let me... OK OK, let's give it a chance and think that it's a surrealist artwork... No, it doesn't work, it's too... moronic. Oh, maybe it's the pure British replica of Antonioni's "Blow-up" and "Zabriskie Point" in only one film... Who wouldn't like to be kidnapped by four young beautiful girls, taken to a hiding place somewhere and gently softly raped? No, I'm afraid it's just an hour and a half of pure boredom!

I have had my FOH film still of this that showed what looked like a roundabout but inside a large bed and a guy almost naked but tied spreadeagled and with four girls in short skirts and the outside that looked like a large bubble. I had never seen the film and never thought about it but then the other day when I was reading Mick Brown's book, Performance and it mentions Donald Cammell having helped the story of The Touchables after taking some idea from the 1971 Jagger film. Looking around on my shelves I found a copy of this 1967 film and decided to watch it. Of course, it turns out that is very strange but rather splendid. It doesn't make much sense but rather lovely and psychedelic with some decent music of Nirvana, Ferris Wheel and some of it from Pink Floyd. There is not much of a story but there is some wrestling and a kidnap of a mannikin of a film star and of a pop star really, but not really one and there is some gangsters and the director worked with the Beatles. Did I mention that this was very much of the sixties and very much of 1968.

In 1978, I was living in Lincoln, NE where the cable system there would play B rated movies scheduling them to play twice a day for a week. I watched The Touchables six times that week. It hardly made any sense at all, though I did like the Pink Floyd Interstellar Overdrive during the boat on the lake scene. I still remember how cool it was to see everybody pile out of the car that had the front door on the entire front of the car. The movie was actually quite awful as they were holding the boxer hostage at the glass dome house. I was lost during that part of the movie. I kept watching the movie for a glimpse of something that never materialized. Yet, I still want to watch it today to see if I had missed anything.

It is true to say that this movie is not good, to say the least. But it does capture some of the craziness of the time.1968 was a very good time to be young & living in London, as I was. I also worked on the dubbing of this movie at Shepperton Film Studios. It still brings back good memories of the time & I wouldn't be without a copy, which took me a long time to find. The girls in the movie were quite well known at the time, one of them became the late Peter Cook's second wife, & all of them were attractive. David Anthony The mail lead was also an icon of the time, with many girls pinning his picture to their bedroom wall. The Dome in the film was built at Frencham Ponds in Surrey & there is nothing of it left.

In many ways the movie depicts the beginnings of women asserting themselves & being seen to be in control of their lives in a much more controlled way than the previous generation. The plot is simple; four girls capture a pop star & have their wicked way with him. There are other influences in the movie with gangsters & a well known wrestler of the time. What is immediately striking is that all the girls speak good English with educated accents, something that is sadly lacking in English movies of this type today. This movie is not an icon, as in "Wonderwall" for example, but it does have something.