The Stud

I'd managed to avoid this film for decades but, in the end, my curiosity got the better of me and I thought I'd take a look.

My expectations were set pretty low, which was just as well as it's laughably naff, cheesy and low budget.

I won't go into the plot (such as it is), but it's really a vehicle for Joan Collins to hone her bitchy cougar persona to the hilt - while getting caught up in a predictably doomed love and lust tangle.

Oliver Tobias is suitably sullen as her love-interest, and the sex and orgy scenes (which presumably at the time were very racy and made the film so popular for cinema goers) are now very tame and even a bit silly.

There is of course the late 70s disco soundtrack which adds to the cheese - as well as providing lengthy scenes of disco dancing in a nightclub that just feel like padding in a film that was pretty thin on the ground to start with!

Some of the locations are good (villages in Berks & Bucks, and the indoor swimming pool), but as whole this film is extremely tedious, risible, and very much a bi-product of its time.

Artistically this film probably deserves its average 2-3 out of 10 rating on IMDb, but to watch it for artistic reasons is a mistake. This is a film that simply went out to make as much money as possible and in that respect it was a big (and rare UK) success. So while the much mocked health spa/ swimming pool orgy scene is unarguably pure hokum, its purpose was simply to get film goers talking about all the raunchy scenes, as was the sex in the lift scene. Other great word of mouth devices are using the hugely popular (among men of a certain age) Pans People/ Legs & Co in the dancing scenes and cashing in on the disco craze. Simply as a fan of cinema these devices are of great interest. To top it all there is a surprisingly good film poster for a film supposedly of no artistic merit. After watching it after all these years (too young at the time) I am impressed that the rather pathetic British film industry of this time was capable of making such a venal and direct money spinner.

"The Stud" and its sequel "The B*tch" were based upon novels by Jackie Collins and starred her older sister Joan. (As the third Collins sister, Natasha, remarked, "One of my sisters writes trash, the other acts in it"). Despite being almost universally panned by the critics, both films were huge commercial successes, the most successful British films of the seventies apart from the Bond franchise. There is, however, an explanation for this apparent contradiction. The films are little more than soft-core porn, and in an age when porn, whether hard- or soft-core, was much less easily available than it is today, any film involving nudity and sex scenes was virtually guaranteed to be good box-office.

In "The Stud" Joan plays Fontaine Khaled, the British wife of a wealthy Arab businessman. She was to play the same character, by then a divorcee, again in "The B*tch". Her husband Benjamin is played by Walter Gotell, best remembered as General Gogol in the Bond films. Fontaine owns a London nightclub and is having an affair with the club manager, Tony. The late seventies were the golden age of disco music and the producers hoped that the film could be a British "Saturday Night Fever", a film which had appeared the previous year. Many scenes are set in the club, and we hear a lot of disco songs on the soundtrack.

Although Fontaine makes it clear that Tony owes his position more to his ability to satisfy her sexual demands than to any managerial ability, he loses interest in her and begins a relationship with her young stepdaughter Alexandra, Benjamin's daughter by a previous marriage. This explosive situation becomes yet more so when a videotape emerges of Fontaine and Tony having sex in a lift.

These films may have been successful in their time, but most people today would side with the critics rather than the audiences who flocked to see them. "The Stud" and "The B*tch" helped to revive Joan Collins's career by reinventing her as a middle-aged sex symbol, but (along with "Dynasty" in which her character Alexis Carrington was essentially Fontaine Khaled toned down to meet the more puritanical standards of prime-time television) they also helped fix the idea of her in the public mind as a one-trick pony who could play sultry, promiscuous femmes fatales and little else. That idea would be an injustice, as she had a much wider range than that, but she seems fated to go down in history as a film star best remembered for two of her worst films.

Of the two films, "The Stud" is probably the better. It has something closer to a coherent plot, centred upon (as well as the sexual elements) Tony's attempts to raise the finance to open his own club. Collins makes more of an attempt at acting than she was to do in "The B*tch", where her performance is marked by a total lack of sincerity. Of her supporting actors, Gotell and Oliver Tobias as Tony at least make an effort and seem to know what they are doing, something which cannot always be said of her co-stars in the sequel.

"The Stud" shares with its successor a general sense of incompetence and pretentious tackiness. It may be the better of the two, but the difference is not a great one, and to say that a film is not quite as bad as "The B*tch" is to damn it with the faintest of praise. 3/10

A goof. The glamour model Felicity Buirski, who has a minor role in the film, refers to herself as "Felicity", but according to the cast list the name of her character is "Deborah".

I enjoyed this movie, Joan Collins is the only actress that could pull it off. She has the ability to play these roles without letting it become silly, or needlessly pornographic. She has the charisma of a true golden era movie star, but her roles are daring, unique and push the envelope. She brings an energy that is so youthful to her roles; which is great in these movies and Dynasty where she is at an age where most women are no longer seen at all, never the less sexy and beautiful. She shows that there is life after you are mature, and she makes it look fun. The messages in the film are interesting; both the men and the women have their own angles on each other and what is happening, neither is really a victim. Infidelity and promiscuity are seen in all socioeconomic levels in society. From peasants to kings sex is happening and has happened. There are also consequences for each character but they happen and life goes on. Some people are put off by the sexuality of the film but Fontaine is a jets disco owner in the seventies, it fits the character.

Like most seventies softcore the film that put Joan Collins back on the map contains far more talk than rutting; and like anything thinking it's being really with-it it now looks far more dated than anything made in the fifties; compounded by the constant pounding disco music on the soundtrack.

As it meanders along it's garrulous way you also have plenty of time to marvel at the fact such a sorry collection of fashion disasters got so much more sex than any other generation before or since.