Le ragazze del piacere

A young woman aspiring to be a model (Francesca Annis) shares digs with other girls and meets up (almost immediately) with a man on the make (Ian McShane). What will happen?

As hard as it is to believe, two of the actors (Mark Eden, Klaus Kinski) appeared in another feature that year, "Doctor Zhivago."

Low key and definitely low budget. Black and white (which doesn't disturb me).

What drives the movie down is a lack of focus. It starts with Annis but as she meets the other girls and their siblings and boyfriends it tries dipping into their stories, too. That's a lot to cover in an hour and a half.

If you want a swinging London film that's focused and funny yet bulging with the ethos of that time, try Richard Lester's "The Knack . . . And How To Get It" which came out the same year. It also presents the joy of youth, especially in the bed scene (which isn't what you'd think). The girls and boys in "The Pleasure Girls" smoke a lot and dance to really bad 1960s music and sleep around and try to better themselves but no one seems to be deriving much joy out of the proceedings. Or pleasure, and that's in the title. It's all pretty squalid.

Distinct from the British New Wave is the 'swinging London film cycle' which really kicked off in 1965 and contains some fine films.

This is a weekend in the lives of a bunch of big-haired Kensington girls, yah, when it was apparently possible to live in Kensington and be penniless. It could easily be the story of the young Patsy from Absolutely Fabulous.

Francesca Annis is the new arrival, quickly getting hit on by Ian McShane. The scenarios are predictable enough: all night parties, stumbling home at dawn, discovering someone is gay, feckless boyfriends, even one of those "there's something I have to tell you, Vic" scenes.

It's basically domestic - with tea-making detail and shouting to the milkman out of the window - but vibrant enough, and with a lot of smart repartee. To add a bit of maturity there's a quaint sub-gangland subplot with Klaus Kinski (sounding like Peter Lorre) as their hard-but-not-all-bad landlord getting his comeuppance.

It's melancholy in places but never dour and it works well as the story of a mildly wild weekend in swinging London - and the sight of Ian McShane's dancing technique may never leave you.

There is not particularly much happening here but it is clearly of that mid sixties British film period where a certain photographic look has taken hold and there is something going on with the young that has not yet turned into the 'swinging sixties'. There is the usual question as to whether a girl should and then if she does what happens regarding the dreaded abortion question. There are clever chatting guys, late night parties, a peripheral use of drugs, girls down from the north, in search of 'pleasure' and a definite widening of the 'generation gap'. It does all rather seem to be restricted to kids from well off families at this stage, however cheap the rental payments required now seem to us. There is also the obvious presence of rogue landlords and London mobsters. The crisp photography and sharp fast moving action is good and Francesca Annis does very well as does Ian McShane in an early and important film for him. Nice to see Klaus Kinski and if he is playing the wicked landlord he seems to have a 'heart of gold' and nowhere near as bad as we get used to seeing him later. He also gets a rather vicious beating here, in an underground car park, of course, and this together with some bare backs and a couple of side breasts was enough to get this an 'X' certificate in the day and cause much controversy during its West End run.

Gerry O-Hara's follow-up to the similarly teasing (and unjustified) title That Kind OF Girl. The story then was of an Austrian au pair arriving in London, this time it's Sally (Fransesca Annis) from East Grinstead, a would-be model moving into a Kensington flat-share with three other girls. The action, if that's the right term, centres around the girls and their boyfriends amongst whom are Klaus Kinski playing a shady landlord, and Ian McShane as Keith, a photographer who takes a shine to Sally. This is unfortunate as all the characters are totally vacuous and any dramatic tension is limited to Keith's pitiful attempts to persuade Sally to go 'all the way'. There's a bit of gambling, an unwanted pregnancy and the inevitable parties - social realism minus the kitchen sink.

At least there's none of the confused moralising that marred O'Hara's earlier work, though one of the DVD extras does contain a tell-tale sign of the times. I checked the clips marked 'Scenes For Export Only' and the only difference I was able to discern from the UK release was the addition of a pair of breasts and a profile of a nipple which, of course, only foreigners possessed in 1965.

Set in 1960's 'Swinging' London, The Pleasure Girls follows a group of free-spirited bohemian-type girls who share a flat. Sally (Francesca Annis) is a new arrival, and soon hooks up with bad-boy Keith (Ian McShane) and the two begin to fall in love. One girl has to put with her gambling-addicted husband who pawns a brooch heirloom for a poker game and ends up losing the money amongst other things. And another girl dates the successful and rich flat landlord Nikko (Klaus Kinski) who gets himself into trouble with a gang of thugs. And that's pretty much it really.

Released as part of BFI's 'Flipside' collection that has recently come to DVD and Blu-Ray, the collection is there to show an alternative side to British filmmaking. Alternative they most certainly are; good they are generally not. I watched The Pleasure Girls a couple of days ago and can barely remember a scene. The film certainly serves as an interesting time-capsule, and it's nice to see a more innocent and forward-thinking time where style dominated the youth and sexual liberation was in its early stages. It also has two promising young actors in McShane and the incomparable Kinski. But overall, the characters are annoying, the plot plodding and uninteresting, and a title that was a titillating disguise for a rather desperately dull film.

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