A Brief Trawl Through British Smut 1970-79

Christ, the British film industry of the 1970s got itself into a rum old state. Funding dried up, production fell, and the flicks that found daylight were often big-screen versions of sitcoms or sex comedies. Not that the public was complaining because both types became tremendously popular. Many generated sequels while 1976’s Adventures of a Taxi Driver far outperformed Scorsese’s similarly titled, slightly darker effort at the British box office. Clearly, the famed director misread the signposts. He should have portrayed Travis Bickle making ribald quips and dropping his trousers in some housewife’s bedroom instead of sending him on a dreary mission to rescue a child prostitute…

These days the British sex comedy genre is one that nobody’s too proud of, partly because such creaking efforts are not only full of dated attitudes and behaviour, but they’re neither funny nor sexy. Maybe they never were. However, they do possess a certain grotty charm, especially if you want to see a cuckolded hubby trying to stab Robin Askwith with a javelin or a middle-aged Joan Collins depicting the ‘best-known cradle snatcher this side of the Atlantic.’

Here come the staples: Au Pair Girls

This 1972 London-set romp is a good representative of British smut in that barely one man or woman behaves plausibly. The men, in particular, are relentlessly immature whatever their age, the sort that lose all rational ability after spotting a bare thigh. Casual sexual assault isn’t unknown. Even those who aren’t sex-obsessed perves end up reduced to jelly by the flash of knickers.

I guess British filmmakers have never been too comfortable about sex and prefer sprinkling such naughty activity with embarrassment, laughs, ineptitude and outright improbability. Anything but taking the bloody thing seriously. And so Au Pair Girls offers an infantile upper-class twit who likes to play hide and seek in the vast grounds of his country manor; a shapely Danish lass walking fully naked around a stranger’s house upon arrival; and an English girl that immediately plots to offer a virginal German au pair to her pop star wannabe boyfriend. Or as she puts it to him: “A Deutschland dolly where the hand of man has never set foot.” The virgin, of course, is happy to oblige despite her imminent lover being a gangly, bearded, talentless tool in a tasselled waistcoat who pretends onstage that the microphone is his penis.

Au Pair Girls is overwhelmingly harmless, speckled with established actors slumming it and newcomers that went onto much greater TV success in shows like Man About the House and Coronation Street. There’s an inane title song, the odd funny one-liner and dreadfully unkempt hairdo, saucy vignettes instead of a plot, very few laughs, a parade of full-frontal nudity and the occasional hint of unpleasantness. The bubbly girls are extremely attractive, especially Gabrielle Drake as a wobbly-accented au pair whose magnificent breasts surely won some sort of award. My favourite bit shows a girl in a nightclub getting up to go to the ladies, aware she’s leaving a newly arrived au pair next to a known older sleazeball. “No ear nibbling, no neck biting and no touching her up,” she warns. Frowning, he spits back: “Christ, she’ll think I’m a poof!”

You could do worse on a rainy day than eighty minutes of such nonsense.

Britain’s sexed-up version of The Producers: Eskimo Nell

Well, maybe I’m stretching a bit, but this does feel like they’ve taken Mel Brooks’ classic comedy about a deliberately awful theatre production and spun off in a slightly different direction. Here we get an aspiring director just out of film school who (along with a virginal, penguin-obsessed screenwriting chum) wants to make his mark. Unfortunately, United Artists and another major studio give them the brush-off, leaving little option but to try the independent but slightly downmarket B.U.M. Productions.

This is a one-man operation run by Roy Kinnear, a seedy businessman who has already produced films such as Dirty Knickers. He’s a fast-talking shyster who wants to make an adult version of the bawdy poem Eskimo Nell as soon as possible. Not that he hasn’t got a firm grasp of the magic of moviemaking. “Doesn’t matter whether it’s England, America, Italy, Japan,” he tells his newly hired creative team. “You get a bird up there pulling her knickers down and it’s something they all understand. It’s logical, isn’t it? I mean, what would you rather see? An arty-crafty film or a bloody great pair of tits?” He tells the team they can have creative control, but weak titles, appendix scars and saggy tits are all out.

The bald, badly out of shape Kinnear is ideally cast as a lascivious ‘real man’ pitching the planned picture to an incompatible bunch of backers. One wants a gay British Western, hoping for ‘lots of pretty boys all having their botties smacked’. Two others want a family flick and a kung-fu musical while the remainder is a crass Yank porn king by the name of Big Dick demanding lesbianism, chains and a ‘bit of bestiality’ in the first scene alone.

Our wannabe filmmakers are sincere, idealistic and naive twits, bemused at the prospect of having to put together an ‘all-British, pornographic, kung-fu musical western.’ Kinnear, however, is dismissive of their complaints about the conflicting demands. “You’re just an artist,” he tells the director, who had hoped to make something along the lines of Dr Zhivago. “You don’t understand these things.”

Eskimo Nell is an enjoyable eighty-five minutes with lots of silly scenes that poke fun at pretentious artists, hypocrisy, the burgeoning British sex comedy industry, anyone that gets uptight about sex, and moral campaigners of the day, such as Mary Whitehouse and Lord Longford. Surprisingly clever in places, it’s a mash-up of Benny Hill-style-chasing, a more explicit Carry On, cross-dressing, double-entendres, and gay lechers. Oh, and a former Doctor Who companion. I enjoyed Nell’s satirical slant while any movie in which a penis gets snapped between a clapperboard’s jaws would surely make Mel Brooks proud.

Well, I had to pay tribute to this cheeky chappie: Confessions of a Window Cleaner & Confessions of a Pop Performer

No coverage of British smut would be complete without at least a few lines outlining the contribution of one Robin Askwith. He had a bonkers career that took in significant flicks (Lindsay Anderson’s If…), a boring early sex comedy-drama (Cool It Carol!), sitcom success (Please Sir!, Bless This House), a trio of poor horror movies (the best of which was the sporadically amusing Horror Hospital), and camp shite (the barely believable King Kong parody, Queen Kong, in which he was chased across London by a love-struck giant female gorilla). All in all, you imagine he’d have some great stories to entertain you down the pub with.

Askwith is arguably best-known for a run of sex comedies that began with the plotless Window Cleaner, the top-grossing British film of 1974. He plays Timothy Lea, an upbeat, accident-prone working-class lad who somehow makes his way through a bevy of horny housewives and the odd middle-class WPC. Now I’m not an expert on male beauty, but the gormless Askwith with his ramshackle haircut and downturned mouth doesn’t strike me as being in the same league as Richard Gere or Paul Newman. He’s like a cross between a cut-rate Mick Jagger and a personable chimp.

Then again, perhaps that was the secret of Confessions’ box-office appeal, a series of four movies that ended in 1977. Ordinary blokes could watch and think: Well, if that guy can be a hit with the ladies, so can I. The title song immediately captures this aspect as he cycles down the high street in double denim carrying a ladder and bucket while some barely in tune woman sings: “This is your life, Timmy Lea/It may not always turn out how you want it to be/But you’ll get by, Timmy Lea/Coz you’re really not a loser/You just find it hard to win.” What’s more, Timmy is initially a virgin and inept with the opposite sex. Once he manages to stop being a “walking answer to contraception”, he worries that other blokes are better at it and getting more. Many times he’s convinced he’s gonna enjoy some female action when circumstances conspire against him. It’s not hard to see how the man in the street could relate.

There’s nothing threatening, satirical or subversive about the unpretentious Window Cleaner. There’s nothing much good, either. The guilt-free couplings are played for laughs with little attempt at eroticism or even trying to create the illusion that sex is occurring. In fact, everything plays like a parody in which absurd situations are strung together without one nod towards plausibility. Rampant promiscuity and adultery is left unjudged. Condoms and the possibility of STDs are ignored. There are no consequences to behaviour, even if you happen to catch your brother-in-law trying to shag your intended bride on your wedding day. Window Cleaner is also defiantly anti-intellectual, typified by the slogan emblazoned on the side of the company van We Rub It Better For You. Or how about one of Timmy’s insights into sex: “Birds are funny things. One minute they give you the no, no, you mustn’t bit, then suddenly it’s you certainly must, you randy bugger!” Thanks, mate, I made sure I wrote that one down.

Pop Performer followed a year later and sticks to the formula so precisely that it even begins with Timmy cycling down the street to another sub-standard song. He remains the plaything of confident, sexually assertive women while husbands invariably come home early to interrupt his passion. Pretty much everyone is cheating on everyone. Ninety-eight per cent of the attempts at humour are generated by clumsiness.

It’s tricky to say whether Pop Performer is better or worse than its predecessor because the only thing that changes is Timmy’s occupation. Whereas beforehand he was plausibly working as a window cleaner, he now makes the jump to joining and co-managing a band. I have to say I was quite amused by watching the memorably named Kipper perform their debut gig while indulging in a Who-like level of destruction, an event that immediately leads to favourable publicity, a recording session and an eponymous single: “The name is Kipper/Mean as Jack the Ripper/Hang onto your hats/We’ll knock you all dead tonight.”

It was no surprise that the sniffy critics of the day hated the Confessions movies. Yes, they’re devoid of intelligence, and I probably don’t need to see Askwith’s bobbing bare butt ever again, but they’re clearly designed to be nothing more than bawdy, goofy fun. Perhaps that’s what gloomy ol’ Britain needed in the mid-70s given it was caught up in economic recession, rising crime, IRA bombings, power cuts and a shit load of strikes.

Sheer bloody dreariness: Adventures of a Taxi Driver

A box-office hit usually inspires knock-offs and Confessions birthed the Adventures franchise, a trio of movies that began in 1976 and ended in 78. Whereas Confessions had a light touch and Askwith enthusiastically inhabited the lead role with dog-eared charisma, Taxi Driver (despite possessing a fair degree of British comic talent) is a bloody slog.

It centres on working-class cabbie Joe North (an uncomfortable-looking Barry Evans) who… well, I’m sure you can guess what. Instead of Timmy’s voice-overs, he gives us his thoughts straight to camera Alfie-style as he drives around leering and drooling. His first pickup is a girl he talks out of suicide while a later tryst with a horny waitress is interrupted by a spot of unintentional bestiality. It’s all a bit coarser than the Confessions stuff, you know?

Saddled with a terrible theme song Cruisin’ Casanova, the leaden Taxi Driver has a plethora of pain-inducing scenes, especially Joe’s delayed inability to realise he’s snagged a tranny, even though the guy towers over him (“Wonder if I could have him under the Trade Descriptions Act.”) The best bit is the opening (presented as a public information film) in which we’re told taxi drivers are “adored by the public for their whimsical charm and delightful disposition… without a doubt we, the public, owe much to these gallant knights of the road.” It’s all downhill from that sarcastic intro, the sludge momentarily dispersed by our hero inadvertently getting his cock out in front of an elderly nun. Actors like Diana Dors, Robert Lindsay and Porridge’s Brian Wilde are wasted. Amazingly, the cast also features the naked daughter of legendary director Ingmar Bergman playing a stripper. Hmm, not exactly walking in daddy’s footsteps, girl.

Exquisite girls from days gone by: The Vampire Lovers & Lust for a Vampire

By the end of the sixties, Hammer was getting, er, hammered. Cinemagoers had grown tired of the studio’s tame, stale formula in light of full-on American stuff like The Wild Bunch and Rosemary’s Baby so it was time to try something different. Or at least ramp up what it had long hinted at: sex. And so in place of straining bodices and heaving cleavage came actual bare boobies. Oh yeah, and writhing lezzers.

Count me in.

The female-centric Vampire Lovers follows the blood-sucking exploits of Marcilla Karnstein (Ingrid Pitt) in late eighteenth-century Austria as she wangles her way into various upper-class households. She’ll attack a bloke if necessary, but her primary interest is the nubile array of rosy-cheeked virgins on hand. With her sexy European accent, low voice and aloof demeanour, Pitt puts her best breast forward and makes an effective, if slightly older predator. In the best scene, she lies in a bathtub inviting Emma (the wide-eyed, pink-nippled doll Madeline Smith) to try on one of her lovely dresses. She steps naked out of the tub and sits in front of the dressing table mirror to brush her long hair. Not long afterward, they chase each other squealing around the bedroom before falling onto the bed and staring into each other’s eyes, a heartbeat away from a pillow fight. Oh, how girly!

Lovers is an atmospheric, nicely scored example of Gothic horror, filled with misty, nocturnal graveyards, silky nightgowns, and lingering looks. It’s languidly paced, but builds without difficulty and the director knows what he’s doing. Smut-wise, it’s a lot classier than the other films here, and I’d label it an honest attempt at erotic horror.

Set forty years later, the groovily titled Lust for a Vampire takes place at an all-girl boarding school that’s sprung up under the shadow of the Karnstein castle. Every student is drop-dead gorgeous which, of course, is how it should be. Hammer had a lot of faults, but no one could dispute its pronounced talent for putting babes in front of the camera. Plus, you can keep your mini-skirts and boob tubes. When it comes to sexy fashion, nothing beats the 19th-century yen for long-flowing dresses. The innocent girls on display here are all wonderfully feminine, especially when they start indulging in gentle dancing, play biting, shoulder massages and nudey midnight swims.

Ingrid Pitt refused to return for the sequel so our chief vampire is played by former Carry On girl Yutte Stensgaard. This Danish hottie is sensational, looking like the sexy sister of that blonde ABBA chick. Battling her evil ways is vampire sceptic and famed writer Richard LeStrange (Michael Johnson), who makes a bit of a boo-boo by immediately falling in love. Can’t say I blame him.

Lust threatens to be an enjoyably silly romp but it does flag in its final third. It chucks in abducted village girls, a sinister coachman, virgin sacrifice, a cheesy Christopher Lee doppelganger, black magic, a fondness for what it seems to think are fiendishly clever anagrams and, most memorably, a bit of cross-eyed, nipple-sucking ecstasy in a graveyard set to a woozy pop song. Sometimes it feels like a bloody, sexed-up forerunner of Picnic at Hanging Rock, but nothing can really disguise its pedestrian nature.

Hammer continued to stagger down this more explicit avenue, eventually offering (to no financial avail) a fully nude Nastassja Kinski in its weak, penultimate 1976 effort, To the Devil a Daughter.

The Joan Collins Factor: The Stud & The Bitch

By the late Seventies, Joan’s film career was getting embarrassing, having starred in a series of clunkers like Empire of the Ants and the amusingly bonkers I Don’t Want to be Born. Sister Jackie came to the rescue by turning one of her trashy novels into a screenplay, the resultant low-budget flick also embarrassing, yet making a ton of money at the British box office. A sequel (much to the critics’ chagrin) was inevitable and arrived a mere sixteen months later. Joan had relaunched herself as a cougar and the worldwide success of Dynasty was on the giddy horizon.

1978’s The Stud is not good, but it’s enjoyable junk with a surprisingly effective closing sequence. It paints a faintly horrifying picture of London life in which warmth and sincerity are at a premium. Into the mix go upper-class twits, working-class lads made good, the prim and proper, Tony Manero wannabes, catty bitches, boring old farts, shysters, Arab millionaires, polite chauffeurs, full-body massages, adultery, and pretty virgins up for a bit of rough. There’s no plot. Instead it’s loads of mingling, dancing and the odd orgy.

Former waiter Tony (Oliver Tobias) is our titular character, introduced with great economy as the camera pans around his bedroom to show the walls adorned with signed photos of past conquests. He, of course, is in bed with his latest bit of crumpet. As she dresses and walks half-naked out the door, he asks: “What’s your name?” His mates are just as sex mad, especially Sammy (Doug Fisher), who specialises in schoolgirls. When asked where he finds them, Sammy replies: “There’s nothing to it. I just follow the school bus around in the Roller and wait till they climb in… You don’t have to twist their arm these days, you know. Down on the old bone before you can blink. I blame the lowering of moral standards on the TV meself.”

Tony now manages a nightclub, although this appears to involve little more than making the odd phone call while putting the rest of his energy into picking up birds. Oh, and satisfying Fontaine (Collins), the married lady who happens to own the place. A borderline nympho, she treats him like an on-call fuck toy. Or as she confides to a fellow cougar: “He’s my masterpiece. I own him. I have turned a comic waiter into one of the most fancied young men in London more or less with my bare hands. I totally redid him. Clothes, hair… even sex. When I first met him, Tony thought 69 was a bottle of Scotch.” At one point she turns up at his place, walks in and drops her skirt. “I’ve got fifteen minutes, Tony,” she curtly informs him. “I’m late for the hairdressers.” “Christ,” he grumbles. “I’m not a machine, you know.”

And this is the crux of the paper-thin story. Poor Tony is getting bored of his hedonistic lifestyle at the beck and call of Fontaine, fearing he might actually be a ‘cheap little gigolo in a little nightclub’ and a ‘working class bum in Gucci shoes’. His slightly unwise response is to start fucking Fontaine’s teenage stepdaughter while trying a bout of sincerity.

The pre-AIDS Stud pads its ninety-odd minutes with a near-relentless onslaught of well-known disco hits, as well as specially composed tunes of shattering significance like Let’s Go Disco and an amusing title track that comprises a bunch of breathy women chanting: “What’s his name? What’s his game? Stud!” At one point we’re treated to an energetic, combined display of disco and line dancing that must go on for five minutes, no doubt because the editor fell asleep.

But does The Stud deliver on the nudey, panty stuff? Well, to a certain degree. The sexes might be depicted as adversarial, but they’ve got no hang-ups. The men are permanently on the pull but the cynical gals are just as self-assertive. This is no place for impotence, body issues, sincerity, romance or premature ejaculation. Sex is of the constant, string-free type, as if the characters can feel Death’s clammy breath on their necks. In The Stud’s semi-famous orgy, a sequence in which a drugged-up Tony battles discordant music, an aggressive macaw parrot and a touch of unwanted homosexuality in a fabulous indoor swimming pool, it’s clear this is the lifestyle that liberated adults are supposed to aim for.

As for the 45-year-old Ms. Collins, she puts in a terrific shift in a role that fits her like a glove. Yes, there’s some wince-inducing dialogue, such as the time she grabs Tony’s crotch on the packed dance floor before asking: “Doesn’t that give you a hard-on?” Most of the time, however, her catty one-liners are good value, especially when she summarises the physical side of things with her wealthy, much older hubby: “He gets his cock sucked once a month in the dark.” Plus, look at the scene where Tony is ordered to Paris and wearily clambers into the back seat of her chauffeur-driven Rolls to find her draped in a very expensive fur coat. “Is it new?” he asks. “This…?” she replies. “No. I’ve had it for hours.” She then opens the mink to reveal a see-through bra and panties as Tony glumly realises his services are once again required.

Like most sequels, The Bitch is several steps down. It sticks to the formula of disco hits and new songs accompanying lengthy bursts of comical dancing (at one point Fontaine is dressed in white with one arm in the air apparently imitating Travolta). The requisite unsexy trysts are also present and correct. In The Stud she fucked in an elevator; here she does it in the shower. Instead of exploiting working-class Tony, she starts banging her lowly cockney chauffeur. There’s another swimming pool orgy. And Sammy, of course, is still pulling schoolgirls. The main difference is Fontaine’s poodly perm and the absence of any enjoyably snide dialogue.

Story-wise, Fontaine is now divorced and feeling the pinch, partly because her nightclub is failing. Things grow more complicated when an Italian gambler Nico (Michael Coby) in debt to the mafia uses her as a mule on a transatlantic flight to get a diamond ring through customs. Nico is no substitute for the quite interesting Tony and by the halfway point I was quite bored with this stale effort. The title is also a misnomer: Ms. Collins was a lot bitchier in Dynasty because all she does here is get taken advantage of and be condescending to her driver. Then again, I guess a more accurate but less punchy title (such as The Rich, Shallow Woman) wouldn’t have done so well at the box office. In short, there’s precious little to enjoy apart from a bearded, pre-Cheers John Ratzenberger letting it all hang out on the dance floor and a hoarse, terribly aged Ian Hendry playing the improbably named Thrush Feather, a gangster who likes to relax by watching slideshows of soft-core porn.

You won’t believe the premise for this one: Percy

The amusing British phrase pointing Percy at the porcelain is a euphemism for urination, although for a long time I had no idea why a penis was called ‘Percy’. I finally twigged after watching this whacked-out 1971 comedy.

Antiques dealer Edwin Anthony (Hywel Bennett) is walking along the street carrying a chandelier when a naked man (who’s just been screwing some bloke’s wife) falls out of a high-rise apartment window onto him. You probably want to read that sentence again. Anyhow, this understandably results in a dead naked man, although Edwin survives unscathed – except he’s got a mortally injured cock. You probably want to re-read that sentence as well.

Luckily, Dr. Emmanuel Whitbread (Denholm Elliott) is on hand with a suitable organ that he’s christened ‘Percy’. He’s a smarmy, egotistical surgeon more than happy to use his skill to not only carry out the world’s first penis transplant but bask in the resultant fame. “You and I have made history…” he tells the recuperating Edwin. “You’re the first, the only man on this planet, to have someone else’s.”

Blimey, I can only imagine what that Christian harpy Mary Whitehouse made of this provocative set-up.

Dr. Whitbread is not a mad scientist, but he is unorthodox. Hence, he quickly hires a stripper to test his pioneering work. “Call me vain,” he remarks to a colleague, “but when I construct a Maserati I like to think of it leaving the garage from time to time.”

Things grow complicated when the tabloids get wind of the story and start asking: ‘Who has Percy?’ A humiliated, increasingly glum Edwin discharges himself only to find he can’t even go to the pub without overhearing two slappers discuss whether they’d do it with such a modified man. “You never know where it’s been,” one complains. “What’s it matter?” comes the reply. “As long as you know where it’s going.”

The flatly directed Percy is a strange, schizophrenic beast mixing comedy, topless nudity, coyness, fantasy inserts, Britt Ekland, some amusing puns and sight gags, a decent Kinks soundtrack, restraint and a meditative flavour. It’s uncertain, unpredictable, intelligent, daft, inspired, repetitive, way overlong and just plain odd. In short, a sex comedy that feels like anything but. Somehow I’m glad I’ve acquired knowledge of it, although I couldn’t help wondering what Robin Askwith would have done with such intriguing material.

Playing catch-up: Carry On England

Like Hammer, the Carry On franchise went into an irreversible tailspin during the seventies. And like Hammer, it was decided to up the sex quotient. After all, the much racier Confessions movies were raking in a tidy profit. What could go wrong? And so the bawdiness and double entendres gave way to cruder humour while glimpses of boobs turned into brazen group toplessness.

Unfortunately for this WW2-set comedy, most of Carry On’s established members stayed away, had been fired or decided a fatal heart attack was a better career move. The attempt to replace them with a younger, untested lot was a mistake, especially as the newcomers were working with a piss-poor script. England, which harks back to the boot camp shenanigans of the 1958 original Sergeant, can do little but cough up tired jokes about defecation, ball squeezing, spotted dicks, helmets and friction-burned buttocks as well as offering lots of trouser-dropping. Windsor Davies bellows, Jack Douglas twitches, Kenneth Connor mugs, Joan Sims looks far too old to be a private, and Patrick Mower deserves a firing squad. Not only is it wearisome, but the nudity comes across as an afterthought, failing to arrive until two-thirds of the way through.

The repetitive England is overwhelmingly dismissed by fans of the series, but it’s not quite as diabolical as the later Emmannuelle and Columbus. Perhaps the most telling condemnation I can make of England is that its best joke is non-sexual. “Are you a ventriloquist?” an officer asks a particularly thick soldier. “No, sir,” he replies. “Church of England.”

And I thought Morons from Outer Space was bad: Spaced Out aka Outer Touch

Is it possible for a sex comedy to be a tease? Or indulge in foreplay? Whatever the case, after more than half an hour of this sci-fi guff my only reward was a solitary pair of boobs.
And they were of the A-cup variety.

Frankly, I’ve come to expect a lot more skin in my British sex comedies. Then again, this 1979 pile of pants was directed by Norman J. Warren, a man who’d already made me suffer through some terrible British horror movies like the meandering lesbo nonsense of Prey and the 1981 Alien knockoff, Inseminoid.

Spaced Out was his first (and only) go at an undiluted sex comedy. It centres on a bunch of sex-ignorant alien females that crash-land in an English park. Sitting in a nearby car is a frustrated, intellectual middle-class twit with an uptight fiancée. She’s more interested in talking about curtains for their future home rather than a bit of how’s your father on the back seat. Not far away is a confident, slightly boorish dog walker who’s so sex-starved that he routinely pictures any passing women in their underwear. Rounding things off is a bespectacled Robin Askwith lookalike enjoying an alfresco bit of sauciness with a porno mag called Bouncers, no doubt practising for a future audition with Todd Solondz. This quartet of losers wanders onto the spacecraft and is promptly abducted. Physical examinations follow, although we don’t get any anal probes until the hour mark.

Arriving at the end of the lucrative sex comedy cycle, Spaced Out’s budget is so low that it feels more like a pantomime than a movie. The ship’s AI-powered analyst is a Wurlitzer jukebox while one of its computers looks suspiciously like a lathe. To add to the lackadaisical approach, one alien smokes cigars while another gets around on roller skates. Laughs are very few and far between, although I was amused by an alien patting down the Askwith clone and grabbing him between the legs. “What’s that?” she barks. “Have you got a weapon down there?” Pause. “It’s changing shape!”

Cripes, I think I need to get out more.

Mary with no drawers on: Come Play with Me & The Playbirds

I first heard of Mary Millington when I was about thirteen. My older brother had bought me Demon’s 1983 album, The Plague, and it contained a song mentioning Mary having ‘no drawers on’. Well, as I never tired of that excellent LP, I kept hearing her name and I eventually learned she was a soft-core British porn star of the seventies. Like so many of her ilk, things didn’t end happily and she was dead by suicide at 33 after slipping into a downward spiral of drugs, depression and kleptomania. Just like my dear old ma.

Anyway, despite a vague familiarity with her tragically short life, I never saw her onscreen until she popped up as a stripping traffic warden in Eskimo Nell. Pretty girl, but her ten-second cameo was far too brief to tell if she could act. In 1977’s hugely successful Come Play with Me, however, she gets a bigger role. Problem is I couldn’t tell which dolly bird she was. Neither did I care.

This one is some desperate piffle about a pair of ageing counterfeiters on the run from their London-based gangster boss. They hide out at a failing health farm in Scotland just as it’s being turned into a brothel. Come Play with Me is full of sub-par performances, including painfully unfunny turns by old hands like Irene Handl and Alfie Bass (bafflingly dressed as Oliver Hardy). Its direction is of the point ‘n’ shoot variety, the dialogue is long-winded and awkward, there are no laughs, and the attempts at eroticism include a stripper licking her own nipples and a grubby bunch of gurning, obese men who look like they haven’t had sex in at least a decade. Terrible tunes abound, including a lifeless song and dance routine combining vaudeville and bush.

Vaguely dispirited by this cheap, grotty load of incoherent bollocks, I baled after fifty minutes.
The following year’s The Playbirds is more satisfying in that I did manage to identify Mary as a female copper. Well, she is the charisma-free lead. Except, er, she isn’t. Somehow she gets top billing yet only manages to wander in and out of the first fifty-five minutes as a mildly disgruntled, irrelevant WPC. Anyhow, someone is knocking off the models that pose for (the real-life) Playbirds porno mag and Mary is sort of on the case delivering her immaterial lines as if recovering from Dutch elm disease. Things pick up when the plodding cops decide they need a decoy to catch their man.

Detective Chief Superintendent Jack Holbourne (Glynn Edwards) has his doubts, though, perhaps because Playbirds was being made when the Yorkshire Ripper was still running around. “First, we have to find a policewoman who looks good without her clothes on,” he explains to a computer-obsessed, equally hopeless subordinate. “Second, we have to find a policewoman who will take them off and pose for photographs… She’ll have to get on that centrespread on her own merits.”

Ooh! Ooh! I think Mary’s part is about to enjoy greater exposure.

First, however, Chief Supt Holbourne has to audition hot WPCs in his office, a sighing, eyes-averting, frown-inducing process that involves half-watching them mechanically removing their clothes. I have to say Edwards, who popped up as a beleaguered corporal in Zulu, looked more comfortable facing 4,000 angry natives at Rorke’s Drift than he does here. Indeed, this cringeworthy sequence captures the strange, quarter-compelling flatness of the cack-handed Playbirds. It’s a weird, sub-giallo effort that mixes abundant full-frontal nudity, a smidgen of witchcraft, horse racing, anti-porn campaigners, nascent computer use, seven murders and a host of embarrassed-looking British character actors obviously lured in by the runaway success of Come Play. You’d think such juicy elements would be enough to make it a rollicking good watch, but there’s no wit, sauciness or style in this badly directed mess. “Come on, folks,” a photographer snapping a porno shoot urges at one point. “Put some life into it!”

Hear, hear.

And yet I kept watching, vaguely intrigued by its scenes of sheer awfulness e.g. a naked chick clinging to the underside of a rocking horse, Dudley Sutton wandering the porn-packed Soho streets on the ‘path of righteousness’ mumbling about the stench of sulphur, and a staged black magic ritual involving a caped, knife-wielding Satanist in a joke werewolf mask with his cock out.
Hmm, just like Come Play, I doubt Criterion will be hoovering this one up any time soon. Yeah well, Mary, I know who you are now, but I think I’ll pass on your next effort, 1979’s Confessions from the David Galaxy Affair, and continue listening to Demon instead.

Ah, British smut. You’ve gotta laugh. A tiny bit.

Now I’m not sure whether the internet has been a net loss or gain for humanity, but one thing in its favour is the way it’s wiped out any need for the raincoat brigade to creep out in public and hand over cash to sit alongside other pathetic men in darkened cinemas before slyly knocking out hand shandies to crap like Adventures of a Taxi Driver. Much more dignified to do that sort of thing in the privacy of your own bedroom.

DAVE FRANKLIN

Dave Franklin is the author of the six-part Ice Dog Movie Guide.

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