The Cherry Picker

This movie is a total mess consisting of chunks of cameos we seem to be shoved together for no reason at all. I believe the film itself has been lost which is the best thing to do with it. A pity because it contains Lulu's performance which shows her off as a talented actress. But her talents deserve far better than this nonsense, which include getting spanked in the rain by her boorish new husband and then disappearing before mysteriously reappearing at the end of the movie. Hopeless!

This film is very hard to make sense of! It seems like a badly edited cross between a 1960s story of a hippy forced into conformity and a 1970s British sex comedy but without any overt sex. The protagonist is duped into marrying Lulu's character, but she then vanishes from the film for the mid-section only to return at the end to bring the plot full circle. It looks suspiciously like Lulu (sensibly!) left it part-way through but was lured back in the end (looking completely different, to the extent that one of the other characters is prompted apropos of nothing to warn her husband that she has a new hairdo) and in the meantime, the script was rewritten to have the protagonist move in with his father's mistress who then becomes his de facto wife until Lulu returns. A selection of ageing British comedy greats (Terry Thomas, Jack Hulbert, Wilfred Hyde-White, Spike Milligan, Patrick Cargill) are wheeled out for cameo appearances, and Lulu looks bright-eyed and bubbly (and bizarrely appears to marry the protagonist wearing the same outfit she wore when she really married Maurice Gibb five years earlier; other than 'To Sir With Love' and a brief cameo in its sequel, I do not believe Lulu made any other films, and it is a shame that this one is such a poor vehicle for her talents. To be frank, the entire film is just a confusing and weird mess. It is worth watching to see how bad a film can be!

American V.I.P James burn II finds his son James Burn III (Bob Sherman) leading a giant "sleep-in" that has taken over Windsor Castle. He hires Nancy (Lulu) to get him out of the castle and into work. With the help of her crazy eccentric father, (Wilfred Hyde-White) who believes in working day and night and producing nothing and uses a fantastic astro-telescope for casual bird watching, she does just that ! But James junior believes in "Desire not Fire"..."Sex not Slavery" and soon opts out. From then on, it's a battle: she to get him back to work and the marriage bed... he to avoid work and find as many other beds as possible. These include his father's mistress (fiona Curzon), the aptly named Mrs Truelove (Priscilla Morgan) who gives him bed and board at the local pub, and a nymph's-maniac who can't stop talking (Julia Sutton).

Staring:

Lulu, Bob Sherman, Terry Thomas, Wilfred Hyde-White, Spike Milligan, Patrick Cargill, Jack Hulbert, Fiona Curzon.

I only got my hands on this for the Spike Milligan connection and the only version I could get my hands on is a transfer from a Betamax tape (remember those ?!?) onto DVD, so the quality isn't brilliant. This is just one of the many British comedy movies that flooded the cinema in the early '70's and really of any real value if you happen to be a Lulu fan or like me, trying to complete that Spike Milligan movie list. It's not a bad movie, but nothing special so don't expect a DVD reissue anytime soon...