Come Play with Me

Here's another of these bawdy, saucy, naughty, eye candy flicks, that the English do so well. Set on a sex health farm, with hotties and open nudity, a plus, we have two money forgers hiding out. They're quiet and demure amongst the much other younger guests, and with good reason, but really these two aren't the sociable type. With an intrusion of half clad hotties waking them up, they hardly even react. This verging cult hit has some great songs, one music choreographed number, done by some of the actors I couldn't get, out of my head. As in other sex farces too, some recognizable faces, you wouldn't expect to see in this, pop up. This movie too, gives a whole new meaning to irrigation, I don't want to go into. Come Play With Me is actually a saucy little entertainer with way enough nudity, to get your hormones rising, humor, and some likable forgers. A very naughty, raunchy comedy, London Style.

A diminutive, baby-faced pornographer by the name of David Sullivan had become one of Britain's youngest millionaires by the mid-seventies as the publisher of a handful of top-shelf magazines which were as strong as the censorious values of the day would allow (one of which was called Whitehouse, simply to annoy the self-appointed media watchdog Mary Whitehouse, which should give you some idea of where Sullivan was shooting from) and the owner of a nationwide chain of sex shops. One of his star discoveries was Mary Millington, a bisexual blonde butcher's wife from Dorking whose enthusiastic performances in underground hardcore porn loops made her the closest thing Britain had to its very own Linda Lovelace, who had become an unlikely global star after the success of the notorious Deep Throat. Understandably, Sullivan was casting around for fresh arenas to conquer, and cinema seemed the next logical step - after all, even though they were uniformly dire, the Confessions... and Adventures... series of modest low-budget sex comedies had all turned a healthy profit. With the right vehicle for his protégé, Sullivan could make a fortune.

Enter George Harrison Marks, a nude photographer and purveyor of 8mm pornographic reels with a beatnik beard, a lively imagination and a taste for booze that would eventually cost him his life. Marks was no stranger to the cinema, either, having scored an unlikely hit with 1970's Nine Ages of Nakedness, and had written Come Play With Me as a prospective sequel - but his fondness for the bottle, an obscenity trial and bankruptcy meant it had to be abandoned. Meantime, Marks found steady work providing photo sets for Sullivan's magazines, and he took the opportunity to pitch his screenplay to his new employer. Never one to let the grass grow under his feet, Sullivan rushed the film into production and cooked up a series of extravagantly dishonest advertising campaigns which hoodwinked the public into thinking Come Play With Me would make Deep Throat look like kids' stuff.

As it turned out, however, Come Play With Me was a simple musical comedy with its roots in music hall, end-of-the-pier farce, seedy strip club revue and naughty seaside postcards, an over-extended Benny Hill sketch bereft of Hill's trademark inventive wordplay, visual flourishes and any last remnant of comic timing. With a few judicious trims here and there, there's no reason why it shouldn't be shown on BBC1 on a Sunday afternoon - unless, of course, being absolutely terrible counts as a reason. Don't allow the number of familiar faces and old favourites in the cast to lead you to think you'll be able to salvage anything worthwhile from this paltry shambles - as director and co- star, Marks repeatedly failed to get the best out of his motley crew of old troupers (witness former Dad's Army and Survivors star Talfryn Thomas visibly laughing in the middle of a take, for example) and Irene Handl was left to idly improvise most of her lines. Dear old Alfie Bass later told horror stories about Marks being drunk most of the time, and fans of Mary Millington were left disappointed by her skimpy amount of screen time, most of which finds her indulging in a hammy approximation of intercourse with a middle-aged client and a brief lesbian tryst with Penny Chisholm. (Millington's army of admirers would be much better served by Sullivan's next film, 1978's the Playbirds.) Still, Come Play With Me - surely one of the most unsavoury contributions to Royal Jubilee year - was an enormous hit, running constantly in one West End cinema for a whopping four years and spawning a stage revue which featured Bob Grant from TV's On the Buses as well as several unofficial sequels. Seen today, one wonders what all the fuss was about, of course, but then we'll probably be saying the same thing about Mrs Brown's Boys forty years from now.

As a child of the seventies I grew up with the Myth that this movie was a great porn classic. I first managed to see "Behing the Green door" first and was both as excited and impressed as a young teen could be. I then soon saw this steaming pile of dog excrement and I think it almost put me off sex for a decade. There is nothing that isn't terrible about this movie, (except for Mary Millington who was lovely to look at but was to acting what Dom Deluise is to gymnastics.) I once met the Great Alfie Bass and after enquiring about "The Fearless Vampire Killer" and working with The Goodies I bravely mentioned this. He shook his head in shame and told stories of George Harrison Marks being so drunk he directed most of the movie asleep or vomiting.It shows. The songs are so awful I think I would chose a slow death than ever hear them again. A movie to avoid at all costs.

Given that this film ran for years in certain London cinemas, I'm intrigued as to what spectators were expecting (and I can only assume that many were mightily disappointed). While the US's Deep Throat constructed a skeletal plot on which to hang its extreme sexual action, Come Play with Me does the reverse: it is plot heavy on its focus on two forgers on the run (and how the government attempts to counter the flood of their fake notes into the UK), pursued by London gangsters to a failing Scottish Spa, run by Irene Handel. Like many 1970s sex films, this one features many veteran British actors (Alfie Bass, Henry McGee, Bob Todd, and Ronald Fraser), but it also boasts (fairly lengthy) musical numbers and general farce-like scenarios (and an awful recurring song on the soundtrack). However, such nonsense is punctuated by the periodic appearances of scantily-clad or disrobed 'nurses,' all of whom are (for some reason - it is not that clear why they go along with it) charged with revitalising the spa. In this regard, there are sex scenes, but nothing that much beyond the likes of the Confessions films (bar one or two scenes), and compared to its American counterparts, Come Play with Me is pretty tame (which again fails to explain its four-year run in one London cinema - clearly the hype machine was well operated). The writing is weak (and features a strange subplot focused on the government official, Podsnap, that goes nowhere as he tries (in disguise) to track down the forgers). In terms of performances, they are hammy (such as actor/director George Harrison Marks in a bizarre wig and fake teeth), or just on an amateur level (although Alfie Bass is good, but he always was), and if the draw of Mary Millington is the magnet to seek out this film, prepare to be disappointed, as she is not in many scenes. So, a curio from a curious cinematic British age, but its reputation far exceeds its delivery.

This movie - which amazingly was a box office smash in the UK in the late 70s and early 80s (it ran non-stop between 1977 and 1981 in London's West End) - embodies everything that was bad about British so-called `sex films' of the era - namely a lame and tedious plot, a second-rate cast of comedy has-beens and never-were's, poor acting and very little actual sex and nudity. A version of the film containing very steamy and explicit sex scenes was actually shot, but in the puritanical climate of late-70s Britain with its notoriously restrictive anti-porn legislation sometimes known as the `Limp Dick Laws' (and sadly things haven't really changed much in the intervening 20-odd years), this was deemed unacceptable for screening to UK cinema audiences and never saw the light of day (no sex please – we're British!!). Instead, the only version of this movie that has ever been released is this sorry excuse for a film, which concentrates more on the pathetic, supposedly `funny' antics of a group of elderly crooks and the septugenarian matron at a health spa, being brightened up only occasionally by stocking-clad beauties portraying nurses. These girls are the film's only redeeming feature and indeed they should have been what the movie was all about. Instead, the few (I think there are about 4) short `sex' scenes have been so brutally edited that they come to a sudden, grinding halt just as things are getting warmed up, and we're back to the silly goings-on involving the `comedy' characters. And silly they truly are. It's almost painful to watch sometimes, encapsulting stupid, slapstick `mucky postcard'-style antics in the very worst traditions of the equally lamentable `Confessions' and `Carry On' movie series of the same era. The publicity blurb surrounding the movie at the time of its release claimed that it was `entertainingly funny and blushingly saucy', `fantastically erotic', `the sexiest sex comedy screened' and `of a highly explicit nature'. The makers should have been hauled before the courts on charges of multiple violations of the Trade Descriptions Act, because it is nothing of the sort. According to a recently published book about one of the film's more glamorous stars, the late and sadly missed Mary Millington, only one print of the uncut and unseen version is known to still exist, which is a pity. It's perhaps being a little optimistic to hope that this will one day appear on DVD as a more fitting testimony to the Mary Millington legacy.