The Christine Keeler Story

The Christine Keeler Story, also known as The Keeler Affair and The Christine Keeler Affair, is a 1963 film about the Profumo affair.^[1]

Cast

Yvonne Buckingham as Christine Keeler^[2]
John Drew Barrymore as Dr. Stephen Ward
Alicia Brandet as Mandy Rice-Davies
Mel Welles as Yevgeni Ivanovich
Peter Prowse as Domaren
Mimi Heinrich as Marianne
Christine Keeler as herself
Mandy Rice-Davies as herself

Production

The film was shot in Denmark over six weeks.^[3]

Photo

To promote the film, photographer Lewis Morley took a photo of Keeler sitting on a chair on the first floor of Peter Cook's Establishment Club, with implied nudity. Though the film was never released, the photo was published in the Sunday Mirror and has since become very famous.^[4]

Release

The film was twice rejected by the British Board of Film Censors (BBFC) in 1963 and 1969, and the second time was also rejected by the Greater London Council. It was never released in the UK, banned in New Zealand, and shown in Australia only after being edited. These factors, combined with the BBFC rejection, substantially limited its exposure and profitability.^[3]^[5]

The Blackpool Tribune, reviewing the film in Boston, called it "a filmic equivalent to a sex comic."^[6]

In 1971, the film was screened in London at the New Cinema Club by Derek Hill as an act of defiance against the censor. Derek Malcolm of The Guardian said "it was scarcely worth seeing even as a curiosity, a fact that Mr Hill openly admits".^[7]

References

^ "The Keeler Affair (1963)". British Board of Film Classification. Retrieved 19 June 2017.
^ "Alicia Brandet as Mandy Rice-Davies and Yvonne Buckingham as Christine Keeler in 'The Christine Keeler Affair'". National Portrait Gallery. Retrieved 8 January 2022.
^ ^a ^b Farmer, Richard (3 July 2017). "The Profumo affair in popular culture: The Keeler Affair (1963) and 'the commercial exploitation of a public scandal'". Contemporary British History. 31 (3): 452–470. doi:10.1080/13619462.2016.1261698.
^ "Christine Keeler Photograph: A Modern Icon". Victoria and Albert Museum. Retrieved 2 February 2014.
^ Farmer, Richard (2018). "An almost continuous picture of sordid vice: The Keeler Affair, the Profumo Scandal and 'Political' Film Censorship in the 1960s" (PDF). Journal of British Cinema and Television. 15 (2). Edinburgh University Press: 228–251. doi:10.3366/jbctv.2018.0416. ISSN 1743-4521.
^ "The story of my life" Haworth, J D S. Tribune; Blackpool Vol. 28, Iss. 34, (Aug 21, 1964): 15.
^ Come back, Stan and Ollie: DEREK MALCOM on films not at all for maiden aunts The Guardian 4 Feb 1971: 8.