As this was being filmed, Mary Millington was sliding into drugs, debt and suicide - quite impossible to believe, watching the confident blonde stripper performing at her peak in the last days of her life.
The story is just an ordinary floor-show in a Soho club. Basement bar-room, piped music, dirty old men, a gaggle of hard-bitten hookers exchanging cynical humour behind a flimsy curtain, and the heavy mob never out of sight for long. If you wanted to be generous, you could call it 'cinema verité'. Others might just call it fly-on-the-wall.
The club has been bought by two brothers, on the proceeds of an unexpectedly generous gift of cash from their uncle, of whose business affairs they know nothing. But where's there's brass, there's muck, and the brothers soon get the offer they (supposedly) can't refuse from Mr. Nice and Mr. Nasty, played by the laddish Felix Bowness and the murderous Milton Reid. The brothers are very poorly cast, especially the leader, played by the wimpish John East whose attempts to intimidate the gangsters are pathetically unconvincing. He is almost as bad trying to impersonate Max Miller during the intervals, actually wearing one of the great man's suits. (Incredibly, the two men had been close friends.) The elbow-game is looking like a walkover by the mob until the surprise-ending, which we can't divulge, but which reveals how the uncle made his fortune.
Try counting how many times Felix Bowness says "Cor, I'd like to get a load of that", and you'll gather that neither the plot nor the dialogue are exactly rich with subtlety. The opening theme is obviously a cut-price imitation of 'The Stripper', and the various acts are accompanied by the usual cod-oriental snake-charmer music. And while you expect a strip-club receptionist to have seen it all, the mysterious Geraldine Hooper manages to look shocked every time.
