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Larry Kent may well be Canada's greatest movie secret. "We're a country that doesn't really believe in ourselves," he says, sitting down to discuss his work. It may sound a wee bit jaded but Kent, now 64, has probably earned the right to assume this attitude. If there's one thing this Canadian film pioneer has been called, it is "consistently and unjustly underrated," as Take One's own Essential Guide to Canadian Film entry on Kent succinctly puts it.
In the 1960s, Kent produced, directed and wrote four fresh, unusual and sexually frank features that pushed boundaries, upset critics and had the censors tied up in knots. Born in South Africa in 1937, Kent immigrated to Canada via England in 1956 and studied theatre and philosophy at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. He wrote The Afrikaner, an anti-apartheid play, which was performed by the theatre department, but he found the faculty far too conformist. His reaction to the university's conservative aura would manifest itself in an anti-authoritarian streak that would run throughout his films.
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He began work on The Bitter Ash in 1963 with the help of friends from the theatre department. The film opens with a barely clothed couple awakening in bed, something that may not sound too risque today but clearly was at the time. The woman fears she may be pregnant, and the couple exchange barbs about the prospect of marriage and what it means to them. The Bitter Ash has become notorious in Canada's film history annals for a number of reasons: it's thought to be the first feature to include a shot of a woman's exposed breast [editor's note: discounting, of course, Nell Shipman's innocent naked romp in Back to God's Country in 1919]; and it was the first Canadian feature to tour the university circuit, drawing large numbers of student viewers before a circuit of this kind even existed. The film sold out in advance when it screened at McGill in Montreal. Male students were so eager to see the naked breast and graphic sex scenes, they broke down the locked doors and stormed the cinema.
Kent quickly followed with a second feature in 1964, Sweet Substitute, another film in which marriage...