Games That Lovers Play

GAMES THAT LOVERS PLAY is a tawdry entry in the '70s world of British sex cinema, where on-screen copulation and copious nudity were often the order of the day. This one's actually a tame movie notably only for featuring a couple of fictional characters (Lady Chatterley and Fanny Hill) teaming up and for an early appearance from Joanna Lumley who does disrobe briefly for the part.

The plot is some piece of trivial nonsense involving the two main characters taking on bets over who can seduce the most unlikely of targets. Thus we see the attractive young women going around trying to get priests and old men and the like. The comedy, if it's here, is unnoticeable, and the acting is poor indeed, aside from Lumley who shows promise even at this stage of her career. Writer/director Malcolm Leigh also helmed the documentary feature LEGEND OF THE WITCHES.

I saw this listed on Talking Pictures UK, one of my favourite TV movie channels, and thought it sounded interesting. A British period sex comedy about two rival brothels, unfortunately it is neither very funny or sexy, the latter being very tame. Set in the 1920's the sets, costumes and the dance music were good though a few of the props looked too new. Actress Joanna Lumley is a British institution, I remember seeing her in "Sapphire and Steel" on TV at an early age, here she plays a prostitute called Fanny Hill (cue boyish sniggering) and is seen topless several times, the only real memorable thing about this disappointing film. Oh, there is a short scene set in a cellar that looks just like the one used in Hammer's "Curse of the Werewolf" (1961)

I couldn't easily decide whether the low-Wattis 'Games That Lover's Play' was the truly bad film my initial impressions suggested it might be! This ultimately proved to be a singularly strange, not infrequently tepid ribald comedy about boorish bordello brinkmanship, as two ceaselessly conniving madams, fiesty Fanny Hill (Joanna Lumley), and the languorously lissome Lady Chatterley (Penny Brahms) brashly undertake a hi-jinks-inspiring wager over whose brothel is the very breast, low-brow bosh while fitfully bemusing, with an expressly bizarro sequence with Richard Wattis being given the 'full Monty' tour of bodacious Ms. Hills garishly adorned boudoir making for a rather grim impression! But kudos for the ubiquitous Mr. Wattis for gamely playing against type here, but, sadly, any 'comedy' film that boisterously climaxes with the remarkably zesty threesome of Lumley, Brahms, and Wattis that still fails to rise to the occasion is, quite frankly, in desperate trouble, all that being said, to be entirely fair, the jaunty music by is a pretty spiffy affair, an on reflection, however misguided, the inherent narrative kookiness of 'Games That Lover's Play' perhaps, lends Malcolm Leigh's clumsy celluloid oddity some hokey bad movie charm! And it goes without saying that both the luxuriously leggy Joanna Lumley, and persistently perky Penny Brahms are more than easy on the eye!

Games That Lovers Play is an awful lightweight sex comedy. It is only better known for the now Dame Joanna Lumley showing her knockers.

You know this is bad when the climax has camp actor Richard Wattis (better known as the interfering neighbour in Sykes) getting seduced by two women.

The plot is essentially two hoary brothel madams in the 1920s. With a lusty eye for young ladies. Engage in a bet where their respective top girls.

Fanny Hill and Constance Chatterley can seduce impossible men. One has to be photographed having sex with a Catholic bishop. The other a gay transvestite.

Eventually they arrange a tiebreaker.

It is not titillating or funny or entertaining.

In this movie John Cleland's 18th century heroine "Fanny Hill" squares off against D.H. Lawrence's 19th century erotic heroine "Lady Chattlerly" (in the Roaring 1920's, no less). They are both prostitutes (never mind that only "Fanny Hill" was actually ever a prostitute) whose madams (and aunts) have wagered them against each other. They first have to each try to seduce the "un-seducable"--a drag queen and a priest (both of who presumably are as queer a three dollar bill). When that ends in a "draw", they then compete to seduce the same man, an elderly nebbish wine merchant. I won't give away the ending, but suffice it to say it ends very well for the wine merchant.

There are two ways to look at British sex films like this one. On one hand, you can see the Brits as censorship-happy and so uncomfortable with human sexuality that they always had to turn their sex flicks into silly "respectable" affairs full of painfully unfunny "comedy", and they therefore never achieved the more "sophisticated" eroticism of continental European films like "Emmanuelle" and "The Story of O". On the other hand, however, the fact that they were such a censorious society ironically also prevented British sex films from hitting the bottom nearly as quickly as they did in more liberal countries in terms of production values (i.e. acting, cinematography, plot, or anything else of interest besides the sex). Ironically, it was not censorship so much as competition from dirt-cheap hardcore shot-on-video smut that really did in the interesting sexploitation films of yore. The same night I saw this I watched ten minutes (that was more than enough)of one of those wall-to-wall shag-fests they show on late-night cable called "Shameless Coe-eds" (they were definitely shameless, but I'm not sure if people this stupid are really believable as "co-eds"). Anyway, there is NO DOUBT which was the far more entertaining flick (at least for someone who enjoys movies more than masturbation).

The leads in this are Joanna Lumley (as "Fanny Hill") and Penny Brahms as ("Lady Chatterly"). Brahms was a very pretty blonde actress who had bit parts in movies like "2001 a Space Odyssey", but this is easily her best LEADING role. Lumley, on the hand, later starred in Hammer films and a lot of stuff on BBC television stuff like "The Avengers" and "Absolutely Fabulous" and she is reportedly quite embarrassed by this early movie. She needn't be. Aside from showing off her incredible body, there is nothing particularly embarrassing here. It's not a great, but it's still a hell of a lot better the something like "Shameless Co-eds"!