A Promise of Bed

This was produced by Stanley Long,self proclaimed king of the sex films.Most of his films are entertaining but not this one.Only the first story was worth watching.The second was bizarre,the third was plain silly.The raucous. pop music backgrond was a real annoyance.

Before the 1970s rolled in and the likes of ' Val guest', and his contemporises ruled the roost with their own brand of ribald sex comedies. Stanley Long was the soft core porn king of south London with his own franchise.

This that and the other, released in cinemas in 1969 is an anthology film featuring three stories about working class blokes in love.

Story no.1 a foreign actress played by vanda Hudson is Informed by the producer of the film she is about to star in that she is getting a bit long in the tooth to be playing the heroines in his films and decides she needs to reinvent herself as a performer, he hires a photographer to take some publicity stills for her latest upcoming film.

A very young Dennis waterman plays the photographer who turns up at her lavish apartment located in the swinging sixties abode in London, their relationship starts off very innocuously before it begins to get rowdy and they fall into bed with predictable results. There is a twist at the end of the tale which I won't spoil but it's well placed.

Story no.2 concerns a loner played by the late Victor spineti who is about to commit suicide, when a mysterious young woman turns up at his apartment unexpectedly and asks: '' does Claudia live here'', before a barrage of party guests move in on the scene. The night is full of twists and turns from then on out.

Story no.3 is about a taxi driver played by the late comic John Bird who works as a taxi driver one evening whilst on call he picks up a fare coming out of a cinema in the soho area of London which shows blue movies, he drives his passenger home and is involved in a collision from then on out the night gets weirder and complex.

I can appreciate Stanley long wanted to make a sex comedy which was above average in terms of direction the film is splendid to look at as far as art and production design go. The acting is wooden and awful as you might anticipate from a film of this genre. The performers I mentioned above perform well it's the female characters in the film who aren't given anything remotely worthwhile to say or do other than to strip off.

Overall: This that and the other is an Interesting time capsule hybrid as far as the quality goes the film is well made and visually appealing compared to a lot of it's offspring's but it poorly scripted and the acting is awful apart from the male players who act well considering how poor the material they have to work with is.

This-That-and the Other' aka 'A Promise of Bed'. (1969) Derek Ford.

Prolific low-budget smut-slinger Derek Ford's mostly amiable farce might prove to be a wee bit meagre in the rampant nookie department for the more actively degenerated Sinophile. Ford's film-making aesthetic is often crude, luridly garlanded with an occasionally giddy swathe of ersatz psychedelia to add some much-needed visual pizazz. Cast performances prove exuberant, rather than nuanced, while Ford's text is unforgivably flaccid, the consistently lively score remains engagingly buoyant throughout. For all the narrative inanities, Derek Ford's tremulously titillating triptych is fabulously festooned with top tier totty like tantalizing telly temptress Alexandra Bastedo, gamine crumpet Vanessa Howard, and voluptuously vulpine vamp Yutte Stensgaard. The stridently 70s grooviness is absurdly contrived, happily making 'This-That-and the Other' aka 'A Promise of Bed' all the more Kitschy delicious! Recidivist Tadger Tuggers, wanton wang whackers, jaded Jizz lizards, salacious slap n' ticklers, craven knob Jockies and spunky monkeys aught to give it at least 10cc's of their boggle-eyed attention.

Not a particularly good film but, as a glimpse of London in the last gasp of the swinging sixties, it serves as an interesting historical record.

This is another late 60's British time capsule recently dug up and released on legitimate DVD. Some may prefer that it had stayed buried, but I thought it was OK. It is a portmanteau sex comedy featuring three stories--one that is mostly sex, one that is mostly comedy,and a third that is just plain weird. It is another collaboration between British exploitation filmmakers Stanley Long and Derek Ford. It's not as good as the pair's previous effort "Groupie Girl", but it's better than their debut film "Wife Swappers" (as well as pretty much any of Derek Ford's subsequent work).

The stories all involve working-class male slobs getting lucky as the result of a case of mistaken identity. The first story involves a lowly camera assistant (Dennis Waterman) who is seduced by a man-eating actress (Vonda Hudson) after the latter mistakes him for the teenage son of a producer she's trying to get a part from (normally actresses just sleep with the producer himself, but, oh well). The second story involves a pathetic slob who's about to commit suicide when a pretty girl (Vanessa Howard)and a bunch of her swinging friends (including Valerie Leon and Alexandra Bastedo) mistakenly show up at his apartment looking for a party, and think this particular party has a "suicide" theme. The last story has a taxi driver taking a sexy female fare (Yutte Stensgaarde) to a remote location, and after she stiffs him (in more ways than one), he follows her to a strange house (actually filmed in France!)where all kinds of indescribable weirdness is happening.

The voluptuous Vonda Hudson has about 90 percent of the nude scenes here, but she can't really act otherwise. Vanessa Howard, as always, is very cute and adorable--and genuinely talented as an actress--but her character is both underdeveloped and overdressed. Danish pastry Yutte Stensgaarde would become famous a couple years later for "Lust for a Vampire", but she doesn't have much of a role here (except she does swim topless with two girlfriends and lies naked on the floor covered in fruit in a scene that appears to be partly cut). Perhaps, the most memorable scene in the last story (and the whole movie) though might a VERY STRANGE striptease scene involving a woman whose body is covered only with "pasties" in the shape of black hands, which she slowly peels off and then puts them over a two-way mirror through which the poor protagonist is trying to watch her. The music, like with "Groupie Girl", is third-rate British Invasion stuff and consists of only two songs, but it's pretty good actually. I kind of liked this overall.