At this international beauty contest held at the seaside, there was a mood of high spirits and innocent enjoyment - until the announcement of the winner. She was Miss England, Carol Wilson (Vivienne Raimon), and the bone of contention was her all over tan: just how could she have managed that? The other contestants thought that she must have got it out of a bottle and Carol had won under false pretences, but once she explained about her love of sunbathing in the nude, the girls were intrigued, realising she was on the level, and might have hit upon an great idea...
The British sexploitaiton team of Stanley A. Long and Arnold L. Miller were the ones behind the punningly-titled Nudes of the World (you know, like News of the World? Geddit?), which took as its jumping off point the idea that if you'd ever watched a beauty contest, what you really wanted to see was not the ladies parading in their bathing suits, nope, you wanted to see them parading in their birthday suits, and this film was only too happy to provide that privilege for you. Except of course not, this was a serious documentary drama about the benefits of nudism, and in no way a form of softcore porn for a society not ready for anything stronger.
Nudist films were the gateway into nudity in mainstream movies which were soon to follow, but their determinedly healthy outlook and attitude that there was absolutely nothing wrong with wandering around starkers with strangers, why would anyone think there was anything strange about that? was pretty odd to modern eyes. By the stage this had been released, the genre had been around since the fifties, so audiences wishing to seek them out would have been used to such smuggling in of naked bodies onto cinema screens, but even then they must have looked fairly ridiculous, assuming anyone was concentrating on the plot and demented details which often arose.
In this case Carol takes her new cosmopolitan friends first to her back garden where they lounge around in bikinis until her on leave from the Navy brother shows up with his pal, and they start discussing where the girls could let it all hang out and be themselves as nature intended. The answer is a stately home run by some Lord or other, and what a dump it looks when they arrive, but they're not staying in the building, they're camping in the grounds. So after twenty minutes of padding out an already flimsy storyline, the audience got what they came for, if you'll pardon the expression, and the beauty contestants got their kits off. Well, sort of, as all the nudists were not entirely comfortable within the censorship laws of the day for doing so, so every one of them wears a thong, men and women.
This meant unfettered bosoms galore, but the women looking more like they'd been bussed in from a strip club, so to make things appear more wholesome, Carol puts an ad in some magazines and invites a bunch of families down to the area to whip off their clothes as if there's nothing highly dodgy about that whatsoever. Perhaps Long and Miller thought that if there was a wider age range, from pensioners down to children, cavorting around in the buff it would render their production far more family friendly, but this simply makes the target audience aimed at confused, when surely they would have been perfectly happy if the nudes of the world had been left to their own devices. There were enough of them, after all, but the filmmakers went further and introduced an absurdly earnest plot about the local villagers complaining about the naturists, leading them to be won over by an act of charity before the end credits rolled. Credits which revealed the narrator to be children's TV show Blue Peter stalwart Valerie Singleton, not that she ever admitted it, but it's obviously her voice, contributing to the oddity.
