Eskimo Nell

From Nell

Eskimo Nell
UK 1975
Directed by Martin Campbell
88 Films Blu Ray Zone B
From the director of Goldeneye, The Mask of Zorro and Casino Royale comes... oh dearie me. Another, quite atrocious, British sex comedy.

And, yes... it’s that Martin Campbell.

I was given Eskimo Nell for Christmas by the wife of a friend (who is also a friend, obviously). I don’t know why people take a look at a Blu Ray, see that it’s got Mary Millington’s name prominently displayed and then think of me but... well, I guess I just evoke ‘quality film’ when they bring me to mind. ;-)

To be fair, I’d been curious about this movie for a long time, mostly for the Millington connection but, in regard to Mary’s appearance in this, all I can is that for someone who gets prominent billing in the casting on the box when she’s in the film for, maybe, less than 10 seconds with her footage played at high speed as she does a strip as part of an ‘audition’ montage... is that it’s nice she’s still so well remembered. She appeared in this a couple of years before she made the first of her two breakout hits, Come Play With Me (reviewed here) and The Playbirds (reviewed here) and there really isn’t much to see here if you’re a fan of the actress. Although there is a more Mary-centric short movie included on the extras. The product description mentions her turn here as an “eye popping cameo” but its more of a “don’t blink or you’ll miss it” kind of affair, I have to say.

What’s more interesting is that, although it’s a bit of an ensemble piece, the lead actor who plays the main character, as I see it, isn’t even listed on the front of the box at all. So one has to wonder what that actor must have thought of appearing in this that he’s somehow managed to have his name ommitted from the main cast list on the packaging. Oh yes... I’m looking at you Christopher Timothy, aka James Herriot in the hit TV show All Creatures Great and Small.

The film starts off with a voice-over song giving singing narration about a young graduate fresh out of film school, who we see tripping around all the usual places in London, trying to get a job as a director. There are some nice visual and audio references to places like the Hammer film company on Wardour Street and the like and, as this song continues, said young man is kicked out of various studios until he starts looking at the rock bottom places working straight from Soho, landing a job from producer Benny U. Murdoch as played by Roy Kinnear. You can tell exactly the kinds of films Murdoch and his backers make from the posters adorning the walls of various offices... The Sexorcist, King Dong, Vampire Vomit and Motor Bike Orgy. There’s even a poster for the Doris Wishman directed movie, Deadly Weapons, starring Chesty Morgan in Murdoch’s office (which I reviewed here). It becomes clear that he specialises in making ‘sexy’ sequels to ‘real’ movies such as his sequel to Son Of Cochise... Keep It Up Hiawatha.

This is not the kind of role I would equate with Kinnear, the national treasure who was often on TV in the 1970s and 80s, not to mention his work in some prestige film roles such as The Three Musketeers (and its two sequels). Here he plays a ‘tits obsessed’ producer who measures anything of quality in terms of how it can be boiled down to sex (when he’s not getting undressed and trying to demonstrate his prowess in this particular area) and he clearly wants a porn film made by the new graduate. So the new guy says yes and enlists his friend, the penguin obsessed writer Harris Tweedle, as played by the aforementioned Christopher Timothy, to write a script.

The rest of the film comprises the exploits of the director, his agent and the writer as they accompany the producer securing backing money from various people and then find their script requests (not to mention leading lady requests) getting more contradictory and impossible as the quest for production goes on and they interact with a cast list for this movie that... yeah... you really wouldn’t associate with this kind of endeavour. There’s Christopher Biggins... as the son of a ‘Mary Whitehouse’ character... and his sister who is dating the director and who happens to be played by the great Katy Manning, who played my favourite Doctor Who companion Jo Grant in the early seventies. Her inclusion here alone makes the acquisition of this film a necessity in my book although, it has to be said, she’s totally wasted in this.

So, anyway, when Kinnear’s character absconds with all the money and our three heroes are left responsible for it, it’s up to them to write and direct four different versions of the movie for each of the backers, including Katy Manning’s character’s mum, who is all about purity and censorship in cinema. So, yeah, they have to do a Christian parable, an out and out porn version, a gay S&M version and, my favourite, the world's first Kung Fu musical... which in this case also involves a lot of nuns and is somewhat based on The Sound of Music... but with added kung fu action.

Now, even though this is a truly terrible film and might test the film stamina of a certain type of audience, there are some nice ideas in the mix, to be sure. Although I found most of it to be pretty unfunny, there were a few things that made me chuckle. Such as a line from one of the backers explaining what he wants in the movie. “Hardcore, plenty of flagellation, rubber appliances, throw in some bestiality as well... then in the second scene...” and so on.

There’s also a long montage sequence showing the lads on set as each of the four versions of the movie are directed which is where, for me, the most laughs come from. The sequence where one of the Eskimo Nells and her leading, Asian actor are singing a line of verse before kung fu-ing one of a series of nuns in repeat mode did make me smile somewhat. However, all that being said, it’s generally a bit dull and less than witty, for the most part. Like a downmarket version of a Carry On film but with added anatomical detail.

It’s funny... back in Germany in 1962 some young directors got together at a film festival and drafted a document called the Oberhausen Manifesto because they were worried about the direction of German cinema, much of which had devolved into soft core sex comedies as their chief product. Ten years later many of these directors were pushing at these boundaries and producing interesting movies and are now more well known as starting the New German Cinema... or what was the New German Cinema. Meanwhile, in the UK, despite all our kitchen sink and cinéma-vérité stuff which was getting critical acclaim at the time, there were still a lot of sex comedies being produced and one wonders whether a similar protest to the backdrop of this kind of product was going on behind the scenes, so to speak, in Great Britain at the time. It seems to me we were somewhat lagging in these kinds of areas (and no, I don’t hate sex films, just making a comparison to the creative climate in different countries, is all).

And that’s about it in terms of my take away from Eskimo Nell except for... just one more thing. I’ve mentioned on this blog before that I was a professional child model in the very late sixties to mid 1970s and it’s always good to see various London locations like Wardour Street, Piccadilly Circus, Leicester Square and the surrounding areas used in a movie like this. It’s a London which can only exist on film now and it is always nice to see and remember various landscapes which are still there, mostly, but populated with different shops etc. Seeing things like the old Athena shop on Leicester Square (a regular haunt) with a Wimpy Bar right next to it brings back a fond rush of nostalgia for days gone by. So, you know, even if Eskimo Nell isn’t your kind of thing... if you’re as old as me, you might want to take a look just for the unexpected trip down memory lane, as our intrepid film school heroes run through the streets of London trying to put right the consequences of their actions. It was kinda fun, I guess.

Respectable

Maxted Headroom

Respectable - The Mary Millington Story
UK 2016 Directed by Simon Sheridan
Odeon Films DVD Region 2

When I read on Twitter that Simon Sheridan, the writer responsible for the excellent book about Mary Maxted (aka Mary Millington), Come Play With Me - The Life And Films Of Mary Millington (reviewed by me here) had written, produced and directed a new documentary film about her, I was expecting something like a more seductive, pop culture approach to the lady’s life which would be a kind of abridged version of the book... but in no way a substitute for it. As it turns out, Respectable - The Mary Millington Story is both less and more informative than the tome in question. Which is a bit of a bonus, as far as I’m concerned.

The film starts off with the sound of film... proper film, none of that digital rubbish... running through a projector and, as you can hear the stock threading through on the soundtrack, the screen is dark and we hear the first of many recorded sound bites from Mary herself. We then get a quick rundown of the trajectory of her tragic life as a kind of précis of the film to come, in quick inserts from the various ‘talking head’ interviews which, as always in a film of this nature, fill up the majority of the running time. Which is what you would expect when the writer has obviously gone to the trouble of getting so many interviews with people who either knew her, encountered her or could bear expert witness due to their being in a similar profession (and it was really great seeing Linzi Drew again, to be honest). Anything else and the audience would feel somewhat short changed, to be sure.

Now, if you have read the aforementioned book on Mary’s shenanigans then you might feel that her early life story is somewhat glossed over here, perhaps. What you have to remember though is that you can’t throw all that detail in about a person from a book and expect the documentary, which is not that much shy of two hours anyway, to be either interesting or pacey. I think certain things are said which hit the key points and, if not all the facts and issues which may have gone into the lady’s psychological make up are highlighted here, they are emphasised enough that one can glean the main issues which led to certain behaviour later on in her life, perhaps. Either way, it doesn’t matter because anyone interested in reading more about the subject matter can purchase the aforementioned book and find out for themselves.

That being said, there is also a lot of stuff in this movie which I hadn’t actually heard before, to be honest and, unless I was sleep reading before, wasn’t included in the volume in question. It’s also quite possible that some of the stories and anecdotes which come to light here were either not available or actually not allowed to be printed at the time that the book was first published for various reasons. The first printing was released, after all, about 17 years ago. So, for example, I never realised... or at least it never hit home in my brain before... that Mary’s notorious short porn film Miss Borloch was actually one of the prize winners of what was the first ever porn film awards, The Wet Dreams Festival, at Amsterdam in 1970. Everybody who went to the event had to go naked and the judges included famous feminist writer Germain Greer in their number. Mary Millington was an even bigger star in Europe, it seems, than she was initially as an illegal, ‘under the counter’ star in the United Kingdom, at the time.

Another story new to me involved her, sometimes official, prostitution antics (for want of a better word), where it is alleged that Coleman’s Mustard once hired Mary to sleep with the head of Tesco so they could get their brand of product into the supermarket chain. Which is a bit of an eye opener, if this is true.

Other stories, like a more softened down version of her encounter with prime minister Harold Wilson are also present (if you want more details, buy the book) and her meteoric downfall involving the tax men, a corrupt police force (it would seem... who Mary paid protection money to but still managed to have them constantly raiding her sex shops), her increasing but completely unnecessary kleptomania and various other factors which culminated in her early suicide are all thrown into the mix. There’s also some things that don’t, necessarily, add up when it comes to taking a closer look at that suicide. It’s often noted that, in light of another brush with the law where they threatened her with a prison sentence, she retired to her room without her husband (who slept elsewhere in the house that night and who she was in the process of divorcing), wrote some goodbye notes and then ended her life by taking a large amount of pills washed down with vodka. And that’s indeed the story that the autopsy confirms. However, there is a big question mark in the involvement of certain other people, or a specific person, which is quite pointed in terms of the remembrances of some of the guests on this documentary and it’s interesting that several of them mention that Mary would never drink alcohol. Just being around the smell of beer made her feel sick. So... yeah... interesting stuff, I would say.

The way the film itself is shot and presented is very pacey and the whole thing never flags as the director balances the various interview footage of people such as members of Mary’s friend and family (which are heartbreaking in some cases), various lovers and major celebrities such as François Pascal and actor Dudley Sutton (who worked with her in the film The Playbirds - reviewed here) with excerpts from Mary’s films, recordings of Mary herself and the occasional bit of documentary footage of London in the 1970s... which I personally found most nostalgic since I was a child model at the time, working in my school holidays in various locations around London. Sheridan also adds the nice touch of coming back to new footage of the source of some of the on screen audio and visual excerpts... so he might precede an excerpt of a film with a shot of a projector showing it or go into a sound bite of Mary while showing a tape recorder playing the sample. He doesn’t do this a lot but he does it enough to make an impression and I kinda liked this way of handling it, all of which adds to an interesting watch.

Above all, from the various testimonials caught here, I got the impression that Mary Millington was much more about living a life of moral justice, far above the issues of the legality or illegality of what she was doing at any given time. So, for instance, she would stock illegal, ‘under the counter’ items in her sex shops because she believed it was the right thing to do and shouldn’t be against the law at all. There’s a lovely line from one of the interviewees in the film which, for me, summed up Mary’s brand of enlightened naivety very smartly. It's mentioned that she was a lady who carried "the spirit of the 1960s Summer of Love well into the seventies with her." I kinda like that idea and it’s maybe something we should all think about doing more of, methinks.

So there you have it. Respectable - The Mary Millington Story is a truly great little documentary that’s written, produced and directed by someone who has had an interest in Mary’s life for a very long time and can be considered something of an expert in this field, I suspect. In other words, a truly informative, sometimes thought provoking but always entertaining look at a tragic but very influential, in some ways, lady who also happened to be Great Britain’s first, bona fide porn star. The disc comes with the usual amount of interesting extras that are the normal expectation of an Odeon DVD release of one of Mary Millington’s films and this one gets a big recommendation from me. And if you do take a look at this movie and like it... then you can always go buy the book, too.

The Playbirds

Softcore Giallography

The Playbirds
UK 1978 Directed by Willy Roe
Odeon Region 2 DVD

Warning: Yeah, this is going to have spoilers for those
of you who care about such things in these kinds of films.

Okay. So you may remember I reviewed the Mary Millington sex comedy Come Play With Me on here a little while ago (click here for my review). I remember being rather surprised by the lack of actual soft core pornography in it and amazed about the general tone of it which is, pretty much, the same as a Carry On movie. So... populated by loads of British character actors of the time but with sex and nudity inserted into the story. If you can call it a story.

Well, I thought that experience would have at least prepared me a little bit for watching Mary’s second big breakthrough movie, The Playbirds, which takes its name from The Playbirds magazines which were one of the cornerstones of producer David Sullivan’s porn empire, and which featured Mary as the regular figurehead/mascot. However, although the movie does have some sex and nudity scattered at intervals throughout the picture, this one is a complete sea change from the previous picture and it’s a much more sombre affair. In fact, given the small part that nudity and sex play in the finished product and it’s preoccupation with a police procedural plot as a serial killer murders centre spread girls from the magazine, I’m going to go right ahead and call it right here...

The Playbirds is, pretty much, the British equivalent of a giallo movie.

It really isn’t about sex... although that is the currency which it uses to forward the story. Instead, it follows a police investigation which becomes a giallo style whodunnit in exactly the same way that the Italian movies would fix it so it’s almost impossible to guess the identity of the killer... implausible jumps in logic included. Like The Playbirds, though, it stars a wealth of British characters who you wouldn’t expect to see playing in a movie of this... um... calibre.

The film follows the exploits of Chief Superintendent Holborne and his partner, Inspector Harry Morgan. Holborne is played by Glynn Edwards and, if that name is not familiar with you, he played the pub landlord on the TV show Minder for many years, as well as starring as one of the title roles in Burke and Hare (reviewed here) along with Derren Nesbitt (who also has a small role in this movie as one of the pornographers responsible for printing the titular magazine). And if you think that piece of casting is extraordinary, his partner Morgan in this is played by none other than Gavin Campbell and, for anyone who used to watch the TV show That’s Life with Esther Rantzen... oh yeah, that Gavin!

The two go around trying to patiently solve the murder of various girls who have all been strangled (mostly with no clothes on... it’s a Mary Millington movie, after all) by a man in a Sherlock Holmes style Deerstalker... and then numbered with lipstick on their foreheads by someone who presumably doesn’t like their involvement with The Playbirds magazine. The magazine, of course, is highlighted constantly in the movie and I’m sure Mary Millington can be seen in some posters in the background of the printworks in some shots, even though the character she is playing is not in any way associated with the magazine until the end of the movie. I’m not sure how early metatextual references like this started appearing in what are considered, technically, British softcore movies but I’m guessing this was one of the first.

So who is Mary actually playing in this movie? Well, the film starts off with a model in a naked photo shoot and then, after a brief scene highlighting a racehorse which Holborne keeps betting against and which serves absolutely no purpose as a subplot of any relevance at all, although its referred to all the way through the movie, we first meet Mary walking the beat on the streets of London as Sgt. Lucy Sheridan. Yep, she’s a copper although, given her attitude and opinion of her majesty’s constabulary in real life, it seems a bit of an ironic role for her to have taken on. She’s also accompanied by a truly terrible theme song which is a shame since the movie was scored by David Whittaker, who worked on a couple of Hammer films and who also provided a pretty good score for The Sword And The Sorcerer. Mary keeps cropping up throughout the movie and even has an attempt at a foot chase at one point in the film but, for the first three quarters of the movie, she has more of a peripheral role until her unique talents are required to further the plot, such as it is, by the end of the movie.

And what we have is a movie set on the streets of 1970s London (which is always lovely to see, as I best remember it, back in the day) with character actors like the aforementioned cropping up. Also on the police force are Kenny Lynch (remember him?) and Holborne’s boss is played by none other than Windsor Davies (who you may remember as the Sergeant in the TV show It Ain’t Half Hot Mum). We also have Dudley Sutton in here, looking exactly the same age as he has for decades, playing some kind of bizarre and religious fanatic.

In between the police procedural scenes we have various Playbirds photo shoots going on as, presumably, an essential part of the plot. For instance, an occult theme is brought into the spreads and a shoot based, quite loosely I suspect, on shenanigans at The Hellfire Club is shown as one big orgy including a lady having sex with the underside of a rocking horse... surprised the BBFC let that through, actually. There’s also a witch being burned at the cross naked in a photo shoot scene too, which goes horribly wrong when the killer somehow manages to turn it into a real burning... although the way the special effects, such as they are, have been shot here may well mean you take a while to realise that this is actually what’s happened, it has to be said.

And we also have another nice tie in to the Italian giallo movies of the late 1960s and early 1970s in that one of the victims is found, by Gavin, in a room lit with both red and green lights. The effect of this, of course, is like a poor man’s Mario Bava has been on set so, yeah, I’m still sticking with this giallo parallel because it makes me wonder what kind of movies the director and cinematographer had been watching at the time. It does kind of compliment that style of shooting very well, especially in this scene.

And then we have Mary herself. The police get the idea to plant a girl working for Playbirds who will start at the massage parlours and then work her way into being the cover girl of the month so she can be bait for the killer. What this means for the audience, of course, is that we have Holborne and Morgan ‘interviewing’ hitherto unseen lady members of the police force by having them do a sexy strip routine so they can give the job to the most likeliest person to succeed. It’s almost like the film suddenly stops for a while so the director can showcase various ladies stripping for the audience... well... um... yeah. And, of course, Mary’s character wins hands down and it’s not long before she’s the magazine owners girlfriend... which I understand she more or less was in real life for a while, despite being married to someone else.

The really hilarious thing about this movie, bearing in mind the age of the film, is the police relying constantly on getting their leads by punching in information to be analysed in the ‘computer room’. And, yes, it’s a room full of cheap computers where nobody really looks like they know what they’re doing and with a printer which gives our heroes leads when the correct information is, somehow, or other, fed in. Let me tell you, though, those computers back in those days must have been absolutely miraculous. The police learn the identity of the killer thusly: They see a head looking out of a window on a photo and they get the computer to enhance and blow this up (not that you see any of this, of course). Once the shape is blown up they get the computer to take ‘x-rays’ of the face on the photo so they will reveal the bone structure of the person and then they compare it to the bone structures of x-rays of suspects in their computer records. What the f***? Quick, someone alert Microsoft and Apple now that someone has managed to figure out a way to take ‘x rays’ of a person from a still photograph. They need to get that patented fast.

The ending of the movie is almost as equally astonishing and certainly way more downbeat than you would expect from this kind of sub-genre. The killer is unmasked by the police and taken into custody. In the last scene of the movie we see Mary Millington answer a phone call from her police colleagues and receive the news that he’s just been locked up. How then, can he suddenly crash into her apartment and strangle her in a really downbeat ending, leaving her naked body floating in the bath. Does he have some kind of supernatural powers that we’ve previously not been made aware of over the course of the film? Seriously, this is just the kind of twisted, deranged anti-logic that lets a lot of gialli down and, sadly, this film does exactly the same thing. I have no idea how this ending can even work within the context of everything else we’ve been told but... well, there you have it.

So, yeah, the movie is mostly a load of old cobblers, to be honest, but it’s certainly also entertaining to be watching all these distinguished character actors prop up a soft core porn film which, in itself, seems to be less about porn and more about being a thriller. Certainly a curio in both cinema in general and also, I suspect, in the soft porn genre. As such, I would kind of tentatively recommend it to film goers who have seen just about every kind of movie and want to see something just a little bit different to what they would comfortably expect a producer and director to be able to get away with. Certainly, it’s not a rerun, by any means, of Come Play With Me... the two are like chalk and cheese. So whatever you say about The Playbirds, it certainly isn’t cashing in on the success of the former film.  One to... possibly... look out for.

Come Play With Me

Carry On Up The Millington

Come Play With Me
UK 1977 Directed by George Harrison Marks
Odeon DVD Region 2

Oh dear.

Come Play With Me is one of those almost legendary films which people my age kinda grew up with in the background without ever actually having seen them at the time. I remember walking past the posters to this and other British soft porn movies such as The Playbirds and Rosie Dixon, Night Nurse when I used to go to school, passing by the cinema as I went my merry way. I also read a fair amount recently about this production in the excellent book Come Play With Me: The Life And Films Of Mary Millington by Simon Sheridan, who also does the liner notes on this sparkly Odeon restoration of the movie (Sheridan’s excellent book is reviewed by me here).

However, it has to be said that, although I knew a little bit about the nature of the movie... British softcore, comedy, a few small appearances by Mary Millington, some famous names etc... nothing could prepare me for the absolute joy/horror of watching this thing. It’s unbelievable and, I suspect, very hard to attempt to describe here. It’s hard to believe that this highly successful film still holds the record for the longest non-stop engagement ever in British cinema history... although I can see a little of its appeal, to be sure, and there were other factors playing a part in that final statistic.

The film starts off with an absolutely terrible title song that, in itself, would probably want to make most people switch off whatever device they are playing this thing on and run for the hills... and I say that being an absolute lover of terrible songs in movies. However, as soon as the credits song is done with, the film does something very interesting which immediately caught my attention. That is to say, one of the most unusual pair of establishing shots I’ve seen presented on film. Two simple shots of London are shown in rapid succession, one cutting straight into another but... they’re both at dutch angles (maybe as much as 45 degree angles) and both the opposite orientation of each other. Doesn’t really do it any favours as a lead in to the next scene but it’s certainly eye catching, that’s for sure.

Then, after that, we get a scene where we get the Deputy Prime Minister, played by TV stalwart Henry McGee, briefing his people on a mission in search of a load of forged £20 bank notes. The government are not the only ones looking for the printers of these bank notes, however. So are the local mob, who the two main protagonists of this movie, the note forgers Cornelius Clapworthy and Maurice Kelly, were working for... until they decided to run off with the plates. The mob is headed by Ronald Fraser, who makes his home in a Soho night club. So of course the very next scene is a lovely lady doing a reverse strip on stage and it’s pretty much the closest thing this film comes to eroticism in its entire running time... that is to say, the only time any sexual content is taken with the remotest bit of seriousness. His left hand man, played by Tommy Godfrey (yeah, you’d know him, for sure, if you saw him) reports back that the pair have ‘scarpered’ and he’s ordered to pursue.

Our two heroes, who are in so much trouble with both their own people and with ‘the law’, are played by the director, George Harrison Marks (as Clapworthy) and comedian Alfie Bass (as Kelly). They decide to lay low in a ‘down on its luck’ Health Farm for a couple of weeks while they print enough money to get them someplace else. The Health Farm is run by Irene Handle, who plays Lady Bovington, and her assistant McIvar, played by Cardew Robinson (who I was convinced throughout the whole movie was being played by Rod Hull... he’s a dead spit for him in this in both looks and action).

Meanwhile, a government official meets with a low life contact who is trying to get a handle on where the two are and it’s a sign of the changing times when, at a cafe, the contact buys two cups of tea and a big iced bun and it costs him... 17 pence. Oh yes. I remember the 1970s. The days when we weren’t being completely ripped off left, right and centre. I wish I was still back there. This sub plot of the government official is picked up again later in the story, although it has absolutely no purpose within the plot at all other than to pad out the running time of the movie... it never catches up to the rest of the main cast and I suspect that’s because it was maybe shot later and thrown in after. The two agree to meet later and they meet, of course, at the same ‘Burlesque’ night club owned  by Ronald Fraser’s character... well, I guess you’ve got to keep finding ways to get the naked girlies in somehow.

Talking about girls... it’s not long before we meet a bus load of strippers, including Mary Millington, brought home by the rich, playboy son of the owner of the Health Farm. They are introduced by a song ‘Pretty Girls’ on the soundtrack and... well... just when you thought you’d heard possibly the worst song ever written for a movie on the credits sequence, here comes this song to prove you wrong. When the son hears the sad state of affairs at his mother’s Health Farm, he comes up with the bright and successful idea of employing the young ladies to be sexy Health Farm attendants and... the plot pretty much finishes there and the rest of the film descends into a kind of English farce.

It’s a movie filled with absolutely gazillions of well known comedians and character actors of the time... people who were not normally expected to be in this type of movie... or at least the perception of what this type of movie is from members of the British public who hadn’t actually seen it. The sex scenes are softcore and really not up to much. Mary Millington’s ‘massage and irrigation’ scene is quite funny but that’s mostly due to the absolutely outrageous exclamations from her male victim... err.. patient. She does have an exuberance about her that’s hard to pin down and I’m kinda glad I’ve got her next feature, The Playbirds, to watch sometime soon.

The film is full of silly sped up romps with naked ladies and gentleman who are either naked themselves or in good old, British style, stripy pyjamas. The closest thing I can liken it to would be a Carry On film (not a series of movies I like, to be honest) but with loads of nudity added into the mix. The director, George Harrison Marks, is even more of a British eccentric playing Clapworthy than many of his co-stars here, with his big eyebrows and wig (at least... I really hope that was a wig) and one of the absolute ‘OMG’ highlights of the film is where he and Alfie Bass are trying to escape the less than tender ministrations of the girls and suddenly break out into a musical song and dance routine, with the sexy nurses of the Health Farm providing some inappropriate smiles and trying their best to keep up with the choreography.

There are some real curiosities about the movie, above and beyond all the other unbelievable shenanigans that are worth mentioning here. For instance, some of the scenes contain some bizarre rapid cuts in the middle of conversations and one wonders if these are because somebody just flubbed their lines in certain scenes and the editor is less than successfully trying to cut around it. And another thing which I can only assume is another post-production error is when the government agent is looking at a man singing on Brighton pier accompanied by a pianist. Although the piano player is plonking away heavily at the keys, all you can hear on the soundtrack is the sound of the guy singing. What? I can only presume the pianist was playing a deliberately silent piano and that some accompanying music was supposed to have been dubbed on at a later date... but they just never got around to it and used the ‘wild sound’ instead.

Come Play With Me is, it has to be said, a pretty terrible movie... but it’s also an immensely enjoyable one. It does, for me, fall into the ‘so bad it’s good’ category and in addition to the ‘how did this thing ever get released’ vibe to it, it’s also nice to see the famous Mary Millington in action. Also nice to see the streets of Soho more or less as I remember them as a kid, when I was a child model working in London back in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It’s not a film I could say is particularly a masterpiece of cinema but... well, look. I watched three movies the day I saw this and this one was head and shoulders above the more serious stuff I saw in terms of entertainment value. I am going to show this one to most of my friends at some point because it’s almost impossible to describe and needs to be seen to be believed. And that’s about as good a recommendation as this one’s going to get from me I think. An enjoyable romp which probably shouldn’t be as much fun as it actually is. Looking forward to The Playbirds, now, for sure.

Come Play With Me: The Life and Films of Mary Millington

Bird Of Play

Come Play With Me: The Life and Films of Mary Millington
by Simon Sheridan
Fab Press 
ISBN: 978-0952926078 

You know... I’m not exactly familiar with the work of model, porn star, sex entrepeuner, prostitute and Playbirds mascot Mary Millington... other than from her almost hushed but legendary stories from around the time I was growing up in the 1970s. I’ve never seen any of her movies, asides from a few minutes of some of her ‘early’ artistic (aka hardcore) work which can be found randomly streamed on sites of a dubious but easy nature... although I acquired two of her commercial features earlier in the year to watch at some point for a review on this site. I did remember two things though, which brought me to the point of considering reading this book.

One was the amount of British Sex movie posters I’d seen her featured in or mentioned on when I was a young lad of about 10 years of age. Posters for a lot of British sexploitation films such as Come Play With Me and The Playbirds, along with tonnes of non-Millington movies (usually sex comedies) were regular fixtures outside my local cinema as I used to admire the prominently painted assets of a number of talented young ladies on my journeys to and from various destinations. Also, there were many raunchy and related adverts pushing the same movies in the pages of Film Review magazine (anyone remember that?) and Time Out. Thus my awareness of the fairer sex, albeit a relatively skewed view, grew in leaps and bounds as the memories of the imagery haunted me in my sleep, taking up residence in my libido next to the likes of Caroline Munro, Valerie Perrine and Carrie Fisher.

The other thing which made me want to read up on her was the memory of a TV Documentary about her shown maybe 15 or more years ago, in which her general naivete and her fondness for checking up how much money she’d made in her sex shop at the end of the day... “Cashing up is better than sex.”... made an impression on me. So I was pretty happy when I found a copy of Simon Sheridan’s cool book, Come Play With Me: The Life and Films of Mary Millington, on sale at the Camden Film Fair earlier in the year with a cracking £5 price tag. This was money well spent.

As is expected, the book tells a tale of tragedy and naivete about a young lady who loved her mother, loved her lifestyle and who ultimately committed suicide at the age of 33 due to threats from both the police and the Inland Revenue. It also tells the story of how, through her love of sex and the free giving of it to friends and strangers at the drop of a hat, she became a staunch supporter, as should we all, of free speech and anti-censorship. This in an era of British history where we really did need to have both eyes open at the ludicrous and daily liberties taken by those in some small position of power from our personal rights and freedoms. Of course, as I write this, the irony that this country has flip flopped back again from a brief period of enlightenment to an even more draconian, intrusive, illogical and ultimately sinister brand of abusive censorship is not lost on me.

Sheridan portrays Mary, for the most part, as someone who was an innocent, just caught up in life. He touches on the fact that some of her business partners could perhaps be seen as exploitative of her talent and enthusiasm in the sexual arena but it also points out that she was always absolutely aware of just what it was she was getting into, embracing it fully and certainly, it seems, she never really let herself be exploited in any way... other than in the ways she most wanted to be. Her accumulation of wealth and the acquaintances she made are quite eye opening and, although a severe dent is put in her character towards the end of the book when a trait akin to a compulsive form of kleptomania is highlighted... ultimately she seems to have been a joyous and engaging young lady who cared very much about people and animals and who, perhaps, did not best express herself when she needed help in certain areas of her life... those which took her to her untimely death in 1979.

The book is both frank and playfully cautious in equal measure. For example, Mary’s sexual encounters with prime minister Harold Wilson, actress Diana Dors and several other celebrities are included in the pages of the book. Other people who played a part in her life have been left out or alluded to without actually being named and I’m guessing the potential publication of certain information in the book which is passed over or referred to more enigmatically... such as a ‘leading comedy personality’ who used to visit Mary for sex in disguise so he wouldn’t be recognised... might still be damaging or, at the very least, seen as defamatory, if they were revealed at the time of the publication of this book. Sometimes, if you piece certain information together from other parts of the book, you can kind of guess who some of these ‘friends’ of Mary’s were but, other times, it’s a little more difficult.

The book is really nicely written and it’s an excellent portrayal of Mary’s life. It also has a second, very large section of reviews discussing all of Mary’s non-hardcore feature film appearances. This section has some fascinating anecdotes and stories from the productions of these films, some of which were shot by prominent directors at the time (one of the main Bond film directors springs to mind in this context). It also touches upon films made after her death and which traded on her name and reputation. Come Play With Me was and still is, I believe, Britain’s longest running film showing at the cinema... running non-stop for years and making a tidy profit in the process. So you can understand why some of Mary’s past business partners may have wanted to capitalise on that after her death but, of course, this really is the part of the book where one can justifiably say that Millington, after her tragic suicide, really was being exploited.

This book was an absolute joy to read. Very sad, obviously, but ultimately a celebration of the life of its subject and, from what I can gather, a much more factually correct account than the TV documentary I mentioned above and certain other ‘biopic’ type films which were even farther from the truth. A really great read and a big thumbs up to the writer and to Fab Press for putting this one out. Not just thumbs up... but possibly other parts of the anatomy up too, as it’s fully illustrated throughout with shots of Mary and her colleagues. Certainly a recommended read if you want to find out the fascinating things which were happening in the early 1970s porn trade and how the participants in these things got their start. Really happy I stumbled across this one in my travels and, if you have any interest in the subject, it’s definitely one to pick up while it’s still out there, I would say.