The Amorous Milkman

Dingy, sleazy and dispiriting beyond belief: this is what the last days of the traditional post-Carry On film comedy in Britain came to, a film which is, however, indisputably the work of an auteur: writer-producer-director Derren Nesbitt, whose hopes of ever embarking on a long-term film-making career vanished when his wife filed for divorce on grounds of cruelty. The allegations of wife-beating hit the tabloids just as The Amorous Milkman was released, making the film an even more unpalatable proposition than it would have been anyway and pole-axing Nesbitt's acting career in the bargain.

So why am I posting a comment on this film now, about a year after seeing it, rather than any of the wonderful works I saw before it, and have seen since? Perhaps because in its desperate, queasy sexuality; its appallingly dingy photography (which looks as if they shot most of the film using natural light and a 40-watt bulb during a rainstorm); and its cast of once-great veteran actors (Kinnear, Ridley, Kydd) and of never-wases who, despite being in their twenties and early thirties, already seem old, perhaps aged by the hopelessness of their career prospects, in all of these things, we have a distorting "mirror for England" as it could still be, to a certain extent, then. It's morbidly fascinating, in the same way as the (UK) sitcom "Mind Your Language", or cable-TV repeats of old gameshows (featuring elderly contestants who must by now be long dead) are fascinating. It shows us the terrifying natural conclusion of British end-of-the-pier culture: a kind of sickness, of identification with rot, with dissolution. It's the kind of film which Osborne-Richardson-Olivier's Archie Rice would have made if he had been asked to make a picture of his dead soul: it's a picture of the soul of a British popular culture that was, the dying appendix of seaside postcards + Rank Charm School shallowness + Ealing cheeriness + Carry On bawdiness: the natural conclusion of leering + emotional constipation + black humour + "Blitz spirit" + more leering is "jokes" about rape.

Or to put it another way, it's a load of rubbish, and unless you want to get a sociological version of The Fear at two in the morning (which is when they tend to show it on British TV's equivalent of the end of the pier, Channel Five) my advice would be to give it a wide berth.

I recorded this film on my VCR when it was shown on British Channel 5. I had to run several parts of the film several times to realise what was going on. The plot, or lack of one, concerns the not very amorous exploits of a not very amorous milkman. He somehow gets involved with a gangster's moll and ends up in court; and this is supposed to be a comedy!

There are goofs galore. Jennifer Westbrook appears in the opening credits but not in the closing. Four different houses are used for Davey's girlfriend's house. I could go on.

The only people who could use a film like this are film schools to show students how not to make a film. Bad, bad, bad.

As some other reviewers have noted, THE AMOROUS MILKMAN must be the nadir of the grubby British craze for sex comedies in the 1970s. Certainly this is poor stuff indeed that makes CONFESSIONS OF A WINDOW CLEANER and its ilk look like polished and professional films in comparison. It's as if somebody decided to make their own version of that kind of storyline but jettisoned everything fun about it.

Instead, what we get is an irritating, gurning guy, played by the poor Brendan Price, who goes around and argues with women very much. For a sex comedy, there's very little sex or indeed comedy, and some of the lines are so duff that it's hard to believe they even made it to the screen. Bizarrely, this was a labour of love for actor Derren Nesbitt, who wrote and directed the thing; you'd wish he'd stuck to the acting with this one.

As ever, one of the main reasons to tune in here is to see the various familiar faces from the British cast. Diana Dors has quite a large role although she does play a horrible character, and there are tiny, blink-and-you'll-miss'em cameos from Sam Kydd, Arnold Ridley, Roy Kinnear, Patrick Holt, and an ultra-creepy Ray Barrett. Hammer starlet Julie Ege (THE LEGEND OF THE 7 GOLDEN VAMPIRES) has a part too, although it's not a very interesting one. In any case, THE AMOROUS MILKMAN is one for masochists alone.

I suffered the great misfortune of watching this film on channel 5. I couldn't believe a film could be so bad. I usually quite enjoy these sort of films, they are quite entertaining in a sort of bad way. But this is the pits. Threr is hardly any sex and even less comedy. The ending is rushed and there is even propaganda footage of world war 2 fighter pilots for no apparent reason. Avoid.

This film gives a good idea as to the parlous state of the British film industry in the 1970s.

The fact that it features so many familiar faces is indicative of how little film work was available to them in this period.

It is good to get a glimpse of such favourites as Bill Fraser,Sam Kydd,Arnold Ridley and Fred Emney. However this cannot be said of Diana Dors who was rapidly becoming a caricature of her former glamorous self.

This farrago was written,produced and directed by my favourite screen villain of the period, Derren Nesbitt. Its a pitty that he couldn't find one funny line in the overlong 90 minutes running time.