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Reviews
Not Tonight, Darling (1971)
"The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there."
In the 1970s the UK pioneered the genre of the Unsexy Sex Film which, despite being full of attractive women taking their clothes off, would struggle to arouse a priapic teenager (the previous year's Permissive is another example). Thanks to the wonderful Talking Pictures TV channel we can now get to see such lost "gems" as Not Tonight Darling in all their beige seventies glory.
The story of an unhappy wife (Luan Peters) and her work-obsessed husband (Jason Twelvetrees) is tackled in fairly serious fashion, while also providing plenty of opportunities for Peters to disrobe, a bit like Ken Loach with tits.
As is the case with many UK exploitation films of this era the men are largely repellent. Peters gives quite a touching performance as the frustrated wife, and audience sympathy is heavily stacked in her favour. The voyeuristic shop assistant and the sales rep who leads her astray are both seedy types, while her husband is a plank of such magnitude that it stretches credibility.
Incidental pleasures include the script being written by a man named Pillock, and a scene where the lovely Luan goes under the covers and attempts to give her husband a blow job. He leaps out of bed angrily accusing her of being dirty and says: "I'm not coming back to bed until you promise never to try to do anything like that again!" He is a very strange man.
Adding to the weirdness, Thunderclap Newman play a couple of numbers in what looks like a rehearsal room while Peters and the sales rep (Vincent Ball) are for some unexplained reason looking on.
An unresolved ending and lack of character development hamper the film, and your enjoyment of it may depend on sharing my love of the time capsule that is UK Poverty Row movie making from the 1970s.
I spent a lot of the film wondering where I'd seen Ball before, then realised it was as the gym teacher in Carry on Cruising. In a quirk of fate, a few hours after I watched this it emerged that Thunderclap Newman keyboard player Andy Newmark had died the same day.
The 39 Steps (2008)
The 39 Painfully PC Steps
This was an hour and a half of my life I'm never going to get back. The first thrill-free version of The 39 Steps. No hanging from Big Ben, no daring escape on the Forth Bridge (give it credit he does dangle from a 12 foot fire escape down a London back alley for a bit), no tense scene with the Memory Man, and no sparkling dialogue. Instead we get something that is so clod-hoppingly right on I'm convinced it must have been written by Harriet Harman under a pseudonym. Hannay switches from resourceful well-intentioned everyman to sexist buffoon to quavering wimp to suit the whims of the scriptwriter as his suffragette sidekick performs all the heroics. A lame rip-off of the crop duster sequence from North By Northwest demonstrates the level of imagination on offer. The scenery was quite nice.