The Amorous Milkman

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.

Masquerading as a "sex comedy", The Amorous Milkman consistently fails to deliver. A well-past-her-sell-by-date Diana Dors is really embarrassing as a sexually frustrated housewife with a penchant for men in uniforms; and Brendan Price in the title role is too annoying for words. Writer-director Derren Nesbitt is responsible for this piece of 70s trash and even has the front to appear in a Hitchcock-like cameo role (as a milkman, naturally).

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.

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.

Awful sex comedies like this were home to a great many character actors before the soaps' domination of UK television offered them a better alternative. However, Arnold Ridley was old enough to know better. He surely must have amassed enough royalties from his play "The Ghost Train", and had enough exposure from his continuing role in BBC TV's "Dad's Army", to be able to turn down a cough and a spit role as a usher in a porno cinema. Julie Ege does add some class, easily outshining the other women in the cast, which sadly includes Diana Dors giving one of the worst performances of her career. Lead actor Brendan Price does his best, but he's defeated by the script and the direction, both in the incapable hands of of 'b' actor Darren Nesbit. It is a film with nothing to recommend it, even the sex is a turn-off.