The Marburger list: BDSM in film and television, pre-1975

My most intriguing find in the Kinsey Archives was a 51-page mimeograph of a typewritten document from 1975, Bondage Fantasies in Popular Entertainment, attributed to “G. Allen Marburger.” It’s an idiosyncratic list of bondage scenes in mainstream film and television, possibly an unpublished magazine article, as there are references to kink-media company HOM (House of Milan).

(The only other reference I can find to a “G. Allen Marburger” is in a 1974 radio interview, mentioned in an article about Appalachian music in Southwest Pennsylvania. No idea if this is the same person.)

Marburger’s reviews follow his personal tastes: a scene isn’t worth considering unless the woman bound is also gagged. The relative realism of the bondage is less important than the actress’ performance while being bound.

He includes a taxonomy of bondage scenes, defined by the attitude of the women being bound:

• The Serial Heroine (“…probably the least interesting bondage captive. […] She … has a tendency to stare with grim determination.”)
• The Damsel in Distress (“She is quite helpless and her role in the plot is passive.”)
• The Innocent Victim (“Here there is more complex characterization, but of the captor, not the victim.”)
• The Vamp (“She is dangerous only so long as she is free to practice her feminine wiles and feline deceits.”)
• The Little Fool (“… tied and gagged ‘for her own good.’ […] She has only herself to blame for being impossible and selfish.”)

TV and movies at the time followed the implicit rules of light adventure fiction, which dictate that nothing really bad would happen in these situations. The experience itself is uncomfortable or embarrassing for the woman, but not harmful or traumatizing. Deliberate sadism by the captor would spoil the scene, in Marburger’s opinion. He describes a bondage scene in an episode of Sir Lancelot as “brief and marred by its aspect of cruelty.”[Pg.44]

In Marburger’s view, women get tied up because they get in the way of men doing their business, whether they are heroes or villains. The good guys treat this as necessary to accomplish their goals, but include mild apologies and incidental flirting. For example, the star of It Takes a Thief plays a cat-and-mouse game with a female enemy agent posing as his secretary. She even wears a harem girl costume. The hero captures her and says “Are you going to make it easy or do I get all the fun?” as he ties and gags her. Later, “she can do nothing but look up with smouldering eyes as he bends intimately over her and says, ‘I detect a deterioration in our relationship.’ He […] deep kisses so hard the couch springs are depressed and quickly replaces the gag before she can make a sound.”[Pg.30-31]

In an episode of Maverick, the hero needs to get into the basement of a shop. The woman who runs the shop is accosted by criminals who also want into the basement. The hero saves her, but apologetically ties and gags her anyway so she won’t interfere with his work. [Pg.43]

Even comedies had this kind of dynamic. The sitcom Make Room for Daddy (AKA The Danny Thomas Show) had “an outstanding bondage tableau” in season 11. The wives of the two lead characters try to stop them from overworking by making the men think they are hallucinating. The men retaliate by tying up and gagging the two women, side by side, so they can get back to work.

Marburger describes this seconds-long scene in great detail, lingers on how the women are dressed and styled, and indulges his own fantasies of how this scene could play out. “Perhaps later they will become frantic and have to be silenced with a firm hand on a shoulder and a few sweet nothings.” [Pg.32-33]

Proper masculinity, in this view, includes being able to control women, gently but firmly. (Actual cruelty to women is for heavies, brutes and creeps.) Proper femininity is to understand and respect this arrangement, and to be aroused by it. As Marburger says of “The Vamp” archetype: “She can’t respect a man until he has taken her in conquest. Then, in her vanity, she relishes the adventure of being taken as a prize.” (Pg.6)

This may be why Marburger doesn’t care for the serial heroine archetype, as bondage situations are an obstacle in her story, as the protagonist.

Marburger’s article is a kind of service journalism, created to help a presumed reader who is a hetero man interested in seeing women (only) bound and gagged in mainstream film and television. In the days before home video, much less video on demand, and presuming the reader can’t or won’t go to an adult theatre, the main way to find this kind of material was to scan TV listings of syndicated series and rerun films, and hope to get lucky. This article would ease the process by listing films and television episodes with such scenes.

Nowadays, there are image boards and video compilations dedicated to this kind of imagery, all over the Internet. Technology has enabled greater and easier access.