It’s
hard to imagine a film more grounded in the time that it was made
than this movie adaptation of Ray Cooney’s famous stage
farce. In fact, should you ever want to send a Guardian
columnist apoplectic with righteous outrage (admittedly, not a
difficult task), then showing them this film should do the trick.
After all, here is a movie about the womanising boss of an exclusive
fur salon, who is happy to spend £4500 – and that’s
1972 pounds – on a Mink coat for his would-be mistress just
to get his leg over. Oh, and cast members Julie Ege and Barbara
Windsor spend much of the film almost naked. Short of a comedy
homosexual and some casual racism, it’s hard to imagine
how this could be more offensive to your modern socially aware
viewer.
But Strange Things readers, being made of sterner
stuff, should be able to accept this on face value, and while
it’s not exactly sophisticated humour, the film is fairly
entertaining on its own level. Leslie Phillips – of course
– plays the philandering Gilbert Bodley, keen to get into
the knickers of sexpot Julie Ege –
and who can blame him? Through a series of contrivances, he has
to buy her a mink coat, but to avoid her husband (Derren Nesbitt)
becoming suspicious, will sell it to him for the suspiciously
cheap price of £500, covering the rest himself. Still with
me? Things get increasingly complicated as Barbara Windsor turns
up as the hubbie’s mistress and is given the coat instead,
Bodley’s wife turns up unexpectedly, and Julie Ege’s
clothes are thrown out of the window onto the roof of a passing
bus, leaving her literally in fur coat and no knickers.
Like
all Cooney’s farces, this replies on so many unlikely events
and reactions that it becomes impossible to make much sense of
what is going on, but the whole thing moves at such a furious
pace that you hardly have time to think about how nonsensical
it is. If you’ve seen similarly hysterical farces like No
Sex Please, We’re British, you’ll recognise
the frantic series of misunderstandings and the mockery of British
sexual attitudes (I was genuinely surprised that a vicar didn’t
turn up at some point), and the cast of familiar faces are all
old hands at this sort of thing – the exceptions being Ege,
who doesn’t have to do much apart from look sexy (which
she does rather well) and writer Cooney, who has a major role
as Bodley’s long-suffering employee. He’s unfortunately
too prone to wild mugging to really match the rest of the cast.
Director David Croft tries to expand the story, but the theatrical
origins are all too obvious, with most of the action taking place
in one location.
With some Carry On style flashes on nudity from
Ege – brief enough not to challenge the PG rating –
and some typical-of-the-time double entendres (Barbara Windsor
offering to show people her tits – caged birds, obviously),
this is very much in the British tradition of being both rude
and innocent. Viewers may well marvel at the skill involved in
having three cast members (including Trudi Van Doorn, aka Geraldine
Gardner) almost naked for a large part of the film without actually
showing anything, and it’s fascinating to see how the themes
of the British sex comedy could span, almost unchanged, from pseudo-family
entertainment like this through to the X-rated antics of the Confessions
films throughout the 1970s. There’s something quite nice
about that, and fans of the genre will find much to enjoy in this
film.
It’s
hard to imagine a film more grounded in the time that it was made
than this movie adaptation of Ray Cooney’s famous stage
farce. In fact, should you ever want to send a Guardian
columnist apoplectic with righteous outrage (admittedly, not a
difficult task), then showing them this film should do the trick.
After all, here is a movie about the womanising boss of an exclusive
fur salon, who is happy to spend £4500 – and that’s
1972 pounds – on a Mink coat for his would-be mistress just
to get his leg over. Oh, and cast members Julie Ege and Barbara
Windsor spend much of the film almost naked. Short of a comedy
homosexual and some casual racism, it’s hard to imagine
how this could be more offensive to your modern socially aware
viewer.
Like
all Cooney’s farces, this replies on so many unlikely events
and reactions that it becomes impossible to make much sense of
what is going on, but the whole thing moves at such a furious
pace that you hardly have time to think about how nonsensical
it is. If you’ve seen similarly hysterical farces like No
Sex Please, We’re British, you’ll recognise
the frantic series of misunderstandings and the mockery of British
sexual attitudes (I was genuinely surprised that a vicar didn’t
turn up at some point), and the cast of familiar faces are all
old hands at this sort of thing – the exceptions being Ege,
who doesn’t have to do much apart from look sexy (which
she does rather well) and writer Cooney, who has a major role
as Bodley’s long-suffering employee. He’s unfortunately
too prone to wild mugging to really match the rest of the cast.
Director David Croft tries to expand the story, but the theatrical
origins are all too obvious, with most of the action taking place
in one location.
