Adult Themes

Adult Themes offers a full range of fascinating insights into Britain’s film culture across the long 1960s, specifically the deployment of the X certificate as a means of mapping previously uncharted territory in an increasingly permissive social climate. Taking in such varied films as Peeping Tom, The Party’s Over, Secrets of a Windmill Girl, 10 Rillington Place and Zee and Co, made and released during John Trevelyan’s liberalised leadership of the British Board of Film Censors, the twelve chapters (plus a thoughtful editors’ introduction) provide new perspectives on how films of this era responded to, mediated, and sometimes anticipated attitudinal change - or directly challenged the status quo – by means of the new possibilities granted to them by the ‘X’. Highly recommended reading for those interested in British cultural history, the Sixties, censorship and regulation, and the always contested cinematic terrains of sex and violence, crime and horror. * Melanie Williams, Professor of Film and Television Studies, University of East Anglia, UK *I well remember the British X certificate and how I sneaked into my first one – Circus of Horrors (1960) – in those distant days of yesteryear. These co-editors and their contributors have performed an indispensable job in covering such a wide area and providing information that will form indispensable reading for generations to come. Well-researched, expertly written in clear and concise ways and attuned to significant issues of culture and history, this will become a definitive work in this area for years to come. * Tony Williams, Professor of Film and Literature, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, USA *

Anne Etienne is Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Drama at University College Cork, Ireland, and her research focuses on theatre censorship and Arnold Wesker.

Benjamin Halligan is the Director of the Doctoral College of the University of Wolverhampton, UK, and his research focuses on film history, music and media, and critical theory.

Christopher Weedman is Assistant Professor of English at Middle Tennessee State University, USA, where his research focuses on mid-twentieth century British and American cinema.