| Permissive | |
| Director: | Lindsay Shonteff |
| Producer: | Jack Shulton |
| Starring: | Maggie Stride Gay Singleton Gilbert Wynne Forever More |
| Narrators: | --> |
| Music: | Forever More Comus |
| Cinematography: | John C. Taylor |
| Editing: | Jackson Bowdell |
| Production Companies: | --> Shonteff Films |
| Distributor: | Tigon Films |
| Runtime: | 90 minutes |
| Country: | United Kingdom |
| Language: | English |
Permissive is a 1970 British exploitation drama film directed by Lindsay Shonteff and starring Maggie Stride, Gay Singleton and Gilbert Wynne.[1] It was written by Jeremy Craig Dryden, and depicts a young girl's progress through the rock music groupie subculture of the time.
Suzy arrives in London with nowhere to stay. She meets a friend, Fiona, a groupie who has settled into a relationship with Lee, bass player and singer with the band Forever More. At first Suzy is just one of many girls who follow the groups and make themselves sexually available to musicians and their hangers-on (a type represented by Forever More's road manager Jimmy). When the band go on tour she is left behind. For some time she lives on the streets with Pogo, a gentle hippie drifter who is eventually killed in a road accident.
After the accident Suzy meets Fiona again. She becomes accepted as part of Forever More's entourage, and develops the glamorous style and hard attitude of an experienced groupie. She makes a play for Lee and ousts Fiona from her status as his 'old lady.' In the final scene, the band are about to leave their hotel when Suzy finds Fiona in the bathroom with her wrists slashed, barely alive. They lock eyes before Suzy walks out, abandoning her former friend.
Forever More were a genuine performing band, although the band members play characters other than themselves in the film. Songs from the soundtrack appear on their 1970 album Yours – Forever More. Alan Gorrie went on to commercial success as a member of the Average White Band.
The cult folk band Comus provided the film's opening title theme and other incidental music and songs.
In a contemporary review The Monthly Film Bulletin wrote: "This curiously elliptical account of a groupie's life involves a dispirited road manager, a singularly uninspiring group, an endless succession of anaemic groupies, and a drop-out who announces that "the world is my scene, man" before being arbitrarily knocked down by a truck. The actors do what they can with a thin script, while director Lindsay Shonteff resorts to a frantic series of flashbacks and flashes forward – one shot is repeated at least six times. But his pyrotechnics merely succeed in emphasising the inordinate foolishness of the whole enterprise."[2]
Permissive was released on DVD and Blu-ray in the UK as part of the BFI's Flipside series on 25 January 2010.[3] The disc also includes the feature film Bread (Stanley Long, 1971) and the short 'Ave You Got a Male Assistant Please Miss? (Graham Jones, Jon Astley, 1973).