Emmanuelle in Soho

Here is a time capsule of Soho in the early eighties.Not particularly edifying it has to be said.John East was a Max Miller impersonator who I saw on stage.Poor Julie Lee who died a horrific death. The climax of this film is rather limp,much like the rest of this film

Anybody who thinks the British cinema's absolute nadir was the quota quickies of the thirties has never seen one of our seventies sex comedies; which today look far more dated and technically primitive after forty years than films of the thirties do after nearly ninety.

One of the last gasps of the genre just before Soho was in actuality required to clean up it's act; at least 'Emmanuelle in Soho' boasts a fairly sophisticated sounding title. But despite all the nudity and indiscriminate rutting that was by then permitted by the British Board of Film Censors, the culmination of fifty years of progress was as sexy as a week-old blancmange. The drab clothes and hideous hairstyles (and that's just hero Keith Fraser) are absolutely no match for the figure-hugging dresses and sleek bobs worn by the women in the thirties. And even the bored-looking chorus girls in the cabaret looked as if they were wearing dirty macs.

But at 67 minutes at least it was also as short as an old quota quickie.

EMMANUELLE IN SOHO sounds like one of the sleaziest films ever; just the combination of that character and the setting says it all. But this extremely low budget movie has nothing to do with the official Emmanuelle series or indeed the Black Emmanuelle series either. Instead it's a laughably inept slice of British softcore nonsense, in which Emmanuelle is a supporting character in a hugely uninteresting storyline. The tale sees erotic photographer Paul Benson (Kevin Fraser, with the worst haircut in the world) being ripped off by his sleazy boss (writer John M. East, a truly repugnant character) while his wife tries to make ends meet on the stage in a dodgy striptease production.

It's all very silly, padded out with endless softcore sex sequences that are anything but titillating. The actress playing Emmanuelle, Angie Quick, looks and acts no different to your typical Page 3 model. Julie Lee, a half British/half Oriental beauty, looks better, but ruins the illusion whenever she speaks; her Sheffield accent puts paid to that exotic appeal. Lee was to die in a horrific car accident soon after this production, leaving EMMANUELLE IN SOHO an odd epitaph to her non-existent career.

Emmanuelle in Soho was one of the last theatrically released movies of the British sexploitation era. A big hit when it was first released in UK cinemas in 1981, it is now largely forgotten. The film has never been shown on TV and has only recently been widely available on video cassette.

Today it's definitely worth another look. It's a camp classic for fans of low budget British movies. Neither particularly sexy and certainly only unintentionally funny it still proves to be a revelation for anyone watching!

Whilst Mandy Miller enjoys the title role of Emmanuelle, it is half-Oriental actress Julie Lee who proves to be most watchable in the supporting role as Kate. This was Lee's only big starring role (she died after a horrific car crash in 1983) and you can see why. Frankly, she was a really terrible actress. It's obvious Lee was hired primarily for her stunning looks, but her lacklustre acting skills only make her more endearing to watch.

The plot isn't really worth mentioning, Julie Lee auditions for a part in a tacky nude revue at a seedy theatre and her weedy bisexual husband gets mixed up with the insatiable Emmanuelle and an unscrupulous agent (played by the desperately unfunny John M. East).

However, this movie is a MUST SEE! It harks back to a more innocent era of film-making when naughty little films got a big screen release and punters queued around the block to see them. Emmanuelle in Soho is wonderfully awful and very addictive. Go see it!

The original "Emmanuelle" from 1974 gave rise to six official sequels, but it also gave rise to a number of unofficial rip-off copies which had little in common with the original except that they were softcore sex films with a main character named Emmanuelle, although the spelling of the name was sometimes altered, apparently for copyright reasons. (As in "Carry On Emmannuelle", or the "Black Emanuelle" series). "Emmanuelle in Soho" was British film from 1981 that kept the original spelling. The relevance of the title is that in the sixties and seventies Soho, a district of central London, had the reputation of being the centre of the capital's sex industry, although the area was to be cleaned up in the eighties.

The original Emmanuelle was the wife of a French diplomat. Her namesake in this film is a Soho stripper, and presumably British even though "Emmanuelle" is a Christian name hardly ever used on this side of the Channel. The original idea was for the character to be played by Mary Millington, the nearest thing Britain ever produced to a famous softcore actress, but after her untimely death the role went to an obscure actress named Angie Quick, aka Mandy Miller. No, I hadn't heard of her either; she only ever appeared in three films, in one of which she was uncredited. She wasn't particularly attractive, which surprised me as I had always imagined good looks would be essential for the starring role in a film of this nature. The original Emmanuelle, Silvia Kristel, was not a great actress, but she was certainly a beauty.

As you might imagine, there isn't really much plot. Emmanuelle shares a home with a married couple, Kate and Paul, both of whom are her lovers. All three are bisexual, although Paul's bisexuality is something we only learn about through hearsay, as softcore porn could be boy/girl or girl/girl but seldom boy/boy. What story there is involves Kate and Emmanuelle trying to find work in the adult entertainment industry and photographer Paul trying to market his snaps via an unscrupulous theatrical agent. As with most films of this nature, the "plot" is really an excuse for the display of as much bare flesh as possible, coupled with a few sex scenes.

Apart from the epicene, prettier-than-any-girl Kevin Fraser as Paul, the most attractive performer on display is the half-Chinese Julie Lee as Kate; like Millington, Julie was to die tragically young, being killed in a road accident in 1983. Nobody shows any acting talent; even the sex scenes are surprisingly perfunctory. This was one of the last British softcore films to receive a theatrical release before the market was largely killed off by the rise of video, and the love scenes may have been toned down for fear that anything harder might lead to the film being banned by the British Board of Film Censors. The acting, as one might expect, is of an abysmally low standard. Softcore porn was not a genre which demanded great skills in this direction, or indeed any skills beyond a willingness to take one's clothes off.

This film recently turned up on British television, although I can't really think what the market for it might be these days. Perhaps the channel decided to show it to reassure anyone who fears that the country might be in a state of irreversible cultural decline that forty years ago standards were even lower. They must have been if people were prepared to pay good money to watch sleazy trash like this. 1/10.