Joe and Carol are two barely legal adults who decide to leave their home in the sticks and head for the capitol, where like every clichéd kid before them, they think the streets will be paved with gold. Carol especially has reason to believe that she will do well, as she recently won first prize in a beauty pageant. Once they hit town, they soon find themselves broke and without much chance of a proper career. So wouldn't you know it , Joe puts Carol on the game, and she's a hit. Pretty soon they're rolling in money. Made as little more than a lurid sexploitation film, Cool it Carol deals with the seamy underside of swinging sixties London, and is probably a bit more honest about what life was actually like than Darling or Smashing Time; it's every bit as fetid as Poor Cow or Performance, but doesn't dress itself in their realist airs or arty graces. Cool it Carol simply soaks its audience in the new possibilities that the sexual revolution, an new era which allowed young and old alike to indulge in promiscuous sex for kicks and cash, and allowed filmmakers to exploit the unwashed masses' prurient interest in such things for a good deal of financial gain. Never mind free love, Cool it Carol tells us that what the 60s really stood for was cash for loveless copulation. Perhaps Cool it Carol is the most honest film of its time.
The heroine is prophetically named Carol Thatcher, and like the later admirers her real life namesake's mother she find her social success amongst people who believe that, as one character cynically observes, money can buy them anything. In some ways, Cool it Carol is an anti-morality tale it shows that if you are young, talentless and attractive, you can get the high life by whoring yourself to the rich and powerful. Sadly, the film doesn't go the whole distance and show Joe and Carol enjoying their ill-gotten wealth and celebrity (as people do on our TV screens every day nowadays
) but realise it hasn't bought them happiness and so they go back home to the sticks. The film would have hit harder if Carol had accepted her role as a high class whore like Bernard Shaw's Mrs Warren. Perhaps the still vigilant British censor, and the hypocritical audiences, would have rejected the film (a considerable hit at the time) if it had done so
Yet despite the tacked on Puritanism of the ending, for the most part Cool it Carol wallows in its own degradation to an admirable degree. On leaving smallville for the first time, Carol and Joe bonk on the train, Joe surprised that Carol gets turned on showing herself off. Carol's sexuality is fairly complex and highly politically incorrect - she enjoys sex freely, likes exhibitionism and gets off on the idea of being sold to strangers, although when she's used by manky old man after skanky old cur, she finds the reality a bit less appealing than the fantasy. Cool it Carol shows the world of fashion models, low tarts, high class hookers and hardcore film shoots to be all piled on top of each other, and the best sequence of the film shows a group of salacious old men drooling as Joe and Carol get it on for their 8mm lens. Their attitude as dirty old leering dogs in this section mirrors no doubt the viewership experience of many of Cool it Carol's original audience, and there's a thrilling moment when an old suit throws off his clothes and tries to join in with the youngster's performance of sex for the camera. A cry goes up "oh, you've spoilt it now" and the dream of uninhibited sex for all comes crashing down. Earlier, at the film's outset, we were show a butcher cleaving meat; he then cuts his own finger off, and human beings are ready for the grinder. For it's visionary moments like this, Cool it Carol is truly a British cinema classic to be cherished.
