To release an R18 film into cinemas is thus unprecedented, and can only lead one to surmise that the distributors, Tartan Films, are trying to make a point. They are not home and dry yet. Exhibiting the film will require turning the public space of the cinema into a limited private space, for one night only perhaps. Cinemas hoping to show this film will presumably have to apply for a licence to take on the ‘private club' identity for the duration of the movie. This may turn out to be a useful national gauge of audience interest in hardcore. The Good Old Naughty Days is certainly attractive bait, though it demonstrates there's nothing new under the sun. The material is largely identical to swathes of today's heterosexual hardcore – varying doses of male and female bodies do oral and genital things to each other in an explicit combination of penetration, visible money shots, and inventive three- or four-way action. But such content in this format – the 1920s one-reeler rather than VHS or the web – somehow makes The Good Old Naughty Days seem both charmingly anachronistic and right on the button. One might be tempted to call this soft in comparison to nastier ‘extra-hard' forms of contemporary hardcore – there's no extreme psycho-sex, no sense of threat, little sexual paraphernalia. What looks like fetish gear to us (period stocking tops, corsets and ample frothy knickers) is everyday wear to these performers. Everyone seems to be having a jolly good time, and orgies develop from the premise of people taking tea on a sunny terrace (in ‘Tea Time' they return to tea-drinking, naked, afterwards too) or meeting on seaside promenades. It also lacks the obsessively anal focus of some of today's hardcore, but the partner-swapping does allow for man-on-man action, rare in today's heterosexual porn (though lesbian titillation for men has remained a genre staple). That these are, generally speaking, ‘everyday' bedroom practices (with the exception, perhaps, of the dog, the nuns and the excited man in ‘La Fessée à l'école') belies the shock value of seeing them paraded on-screen, one after another, for audiences (like the mainstream British public) who may not be used to ‘this kind of thing'.

Which begs the question of repetition. According to the pressnotes, these shorts were destined to be visual aphrodisiacs, projected in men's brothels as an aperitif to the real action, or to educate naive young men in how to deal with the wiles of the female body. Viewing them in a long sequence, in a context where active sex is discouraged (one imagines Tartan will not expect frigging in the Other Cinema, their London venue, unconfirmed at the time of going to press), necessarily produces a different view.

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