Made in between his two Beatles films, this is Richard Lester's film adaptation of the hit U.K. play of the day. A sex comedy aimed at the youth audience it's very much a four-hander revolving around country-girl-come-to-the-city Rita Tushingham, gauche young teacher Michael Crawford, his lady-killer tenant Ray Brooks and flighty young Irishman Donal Donnelly.
Crawford's Colin imagines a coterie of beautiful girls hanging around Brooks's Tolen character's room upstairs and longs to be as confident as him around females. Also on their different ways to Colin's run-down flat are Tushingham's mildly rebellious but sexually repressed Nancy and Donnelly's mad painter Tom (literally a painter not an artist, he just wants to paint over anything brown).
To a usually jeering background chorus of the censorious older generation, the four intermingle in ever more absurdist situations. The first of these occurs when Colin, with Tom, tries to take home an old four poster bed collected at a scrap heap (because he thinks having a double bed will solve his problems with the ladies) they pick up Nancy on the way and literally ride it through the streets and even on water back to his flat, where of course they can't manage to get it up the stairs and into his room.
There they encounter the handsome, suited and booted, super-smooth Tolen who immediately starts to put the moves on the mousy Nancy initially for Tom's benefit but when he later tries to lead her upstairs himself, she throws a fit, strips naked, locks herself in the room and then for the last fifteen minutes or so runs out into the street to a public park screaming rape to all and sundry.
It's really all very haphazard and strange, the stranger, at least to me, for being written by a woman. The references to rape I found distasteful and difficult to excuse even allowing for the swinging times in which the film was made and ultimately I couldn't clearly see the point or points it was trying to make. Generation gap, sexual permissiveness, the treatment of women, masculinity mores, well maybe, but with the unnatural dialogue and unfunny slapstick situations depicted I never once caught on to the message, rhythm or attempted humour of the piece.
Crawford frequently exhibits the physical comedy and child-like innocence for which he later became famous on TV in the 70's, Tushingham is Sphinx-like in her passivity, Donnelly is plain eccentric with his disjointed conversation about lions, paint and tea and Brooks projects a glib and self-confident persona until exposed for the fraud he is but all mixed together with Lester's trick-bag of eccentric camera-work with sped-up, backwards-running, subtitled, you-name-it sequences, I was just confused and irritated to the point of willing it to finish.
Perhaps it served as a rallying point for sexual freedom or youthful expression back in the heady days of 1965, but for me, it all looked very staged, awkward and dated.
Crawford's Colin imagines a coterie of beautiful girls hanging around Brooks's Tolen character's room upstairs and longs to be as confident as him around females. Also on their different ways to Colin's run-down flat are Tushingham's mildly rebellious but sexually repressed Nancy and Donnelly's mad painter Tom (literally a painter not an artist, he just wants to paint over anything brown).
To a usually jeering background chorus of the censorious older generation, the four intermingle in ever more absurdist situations. The first of these occurs when Colin, with Tom, tries to take home an old four poster bed collected at a scrap heap (because he thinks having a double bed will solve his problems with the ladies) they pick up Nancy on the way and literally ride it through the streets and even on water back to his flat, where of course they can't manage to get it up the stairs and into his room.
There they encounter the handsome, suited and booted, super-smooth Tolen who immediately starts to put the moves on the mousy Nancy initially for Tom's benefit but when he later tries to lead her upstairs himself, she throws a fit, strips naked, locks herself in the room and then for the last fifteen minutes or so runs out into the street to a public park screaming rape to all and sundry.
It's really all very haphazard and strange, the stranger, at least to me, for being written by a woman. The references to rape I found distasteful and difficult to excuse even allowing for the swinging times in which the film was made and ultimately I couldn't clearly see the point or points it was trying to make. Generation gap, sexual permissiveness, the treatment of women, masculinity mores, well maybe, but with the unnatural dialogue and unfunny slapstick situations depicted I never once caught on to the message, rhythm or attempted humour of the piece.
Crawford frequently exhibits the physical comedy and child-like innocence for which he later became famous on TV in the 70's, Tushingham is Sphinx-like in her passivity, Donnelly is plain eccentric with his disjointed conversation about lions, paint and tea and Brooks projects a glib and self-confident persona until exposed for the fraud he is but all mixed together with Lester's trick-bag of eccentric camera-work with sped-up, backwards-running, subtitled, you-name-it sequences, I was just confused and irritated to the point of willing it to finish.
Perhaps it served as a rallying point for sexual freedom or youthful expression back in the heady days of 1965, but for me, it all looked very staged, awkward and dated.