Penelope Pulls It Off

This movie is a mid-70s soft-core sex comedy, reviewed here as I've recently obtained it on DVD. It is a joint Anglo/German production, the scenes are set in Germany but the dialogue is entirely English and one of the lead actors drives an archetypal British sports car - a Triumph Spitfire. The movie marks the first appearance for the Swedish starlet Anna Bergman who many of us in the U.K. know best from the Mind Your Language TV series. She plays Penelope Charterley, daughter of the widowed aristocrat Lady Charterley (played by the versatile Linda 'Harriet Zapper' Marlowe). She inherited a large house and a collection of paintings from her late husband but is now running short of money to keep her in the style to which she and her daughter have become accustomed. So she assigns some artists to produce forgeries for her - which she then needs to get verified as genuine by art experts before selling them at auction. The story line centres around how the 2 Charterleys seduce the art experts into signing the verification forms. Two artists are assigned to produce the fakes: a Welshman - the temperamental Owen (George Murcell); and a German - Benno (Quentin Roberts) who invariably paints surrounded by a bevy of naked women! One of the art-expert verifiers Jeremiah (Nicholas Day) falls for Penelope and a relationship begins between them.

This movie is, in my opinion, lifted above the standard of many of its contemporaries of the time for two reasons. The larger-than-normal film budget - which stretches to the hiring of speedboats, mansions with several swimming pools and superb sets/scenery/costumes. And the acting abilities of newbie Anna Bergman and especially Linda Marlowe. I'm not quite sure what persuaded Linda to star in a sex comedy but she gives it her all. She only fails to convince on one scene - where she mimes terribly whilst allegedly 'playing' a saxophone. In particular, the scene mid-film where she introduces a selection of exotic foods at a mock Roman banquet around an indoor swimming pool is superb. And she does of course have several topless/nude scenes in this film. She was aged 35 when she made this film but even acting right next to the often-naked but much younger Anna Bergman she still looks good!

So in summary: if you get a chance to view or obtain this movie - take it. It won't be nominated for any Oscars and the acting of many of the German supporting cast is wooden but it's a decent 90 minutes of entertainment. And of course it includes numerous nude scenes from many actresses, many of them unknown, but Anna and Linda naked are a treat for the eyes!

I thought that PENELOPE PULLS IT OFF was a dreadful attempt at a sex comedy. Made as a collaboration between the UK and West Germany, it lacks the raucous, anything-goes humour of a German sex comedy and the slightly wittier, class-focused aspects of a British sex comedy. What you're left with is a film that has no idea of what it wants to be.

As is usual with these productions, PENELOPE PULLS IT OFF offers endless nudity from the main starlets and not a great deal else. The main characters seem to spend their time either in bed or lazing around at the poolside, either in or out of bikinis. Ostensibly the story is about a mother/daughter team who decide to turn to art forgery in order to make ends meet. The plot just sort of drifts along aimlessly from there.

The film was shot at a German castle with a German supporting cast and suffers from bad dubbing and a lack of expertise in the direction. The actress playing the daughter, Anna Bergman, is the real-life daughter of famed director Ingmar, which is a bit of a surprise. In any case, PENELOPE PULLS IT OFF is a big waste of time, even for somebody who considers himself a fan of the genre.

An English noblewoman "Lady Chartlerly" (Linda Marlowe) is going broke and decides to earn some money by forging art masterpieces. She uses two expert forgers--a drunken ill-tempered Scot and a hedonistic German, who spends all his time cavorting with his three nude female models and (in a strange bit of interracial bisexuality) his half-naked black manservant "Othello". But "Lady Chartlerly" is then faced with the task of getting various art experts to authenticate the forgeries as true masters. For that she resorts to her own sexual wiles and those of her nubile daughter "Penelope" (Anna Bergman).

This UK-German co-production is rather unusual as far as British sex comedies in that actually has a genuine plot (well, sort of). Also, it doesn't rely on the unfunny antics of washed-up British comedians and popular TV stars of the day to make viewers more comfortable about watching a sex film, but instead wallows unabashedly in the (strictly softcore) sex. Marlowe and Bergman make for a pretty unconvincing mother and daughter as the latter was actually about twenty five while the former doesn't look much older than thirty. Still, this is no doubt for the best since the idea of a "mother" using her "teenage" daughter to sexually ply men would be pretty disturbing if the casting were any less ridiculous. (At one point, for instance, the elder Chartlerly is trying to seduce a fat, grotesque art dealer, who sheepishly confesses that he likes "little girls", so naturally she sends in Penelope in her school uniform).

The actresses do fit their parts in the sense that Marlowe is quite voluptuous while Bergman is quite slender. Marlowe gives a pretty decent performance (even though all the dialogue here seems to have been post-synced). Bergman, who is the daughter of the famous Swedish director Ingemar Bergman, is less effective as an actress in her debut role, but given that she spends the entirety of the movie either naked or very scantily clad in bikinis or glute-baring micro-miniskirts, I doubt anybody in the target audience then or now is really going to notice.

This isn't nearly as good as the best films in this genre like "Eskimo Nell", "The Sex Thief", or the "Confessions of" series, but it's better than the likes of "The Amorous Milkman" and even some of the "classics" of the genre like the overrated "Come Play with Me". If you're one of the sex-mad and/or brain-damaged reprobates that like these kind of movies in general, then you'll probably want to check out this one.