L'hôtesse de Copenhague

The US title of this, "Swedish Fly Girls", is pretty geographically inaccurate since this is actually a Danish film with a Danish cast and set mostly in Copenhagen (which, as all Americans know, is the capital of Sweden). It's also a little inaccurate in that it tends to connect this movie to short-lived early 70's stewardess-ploitation movies like "The Stewardesses", "The Swinging Stewardesses", and "Fly Me". True the protagonist "Christa" (Birte Tove) is a micro-miniskirted airline stewardess, and the most vivid fantasy sequences aren't any of the sex scenes, but the scenes showing "Christa" at work on her airline where the passengers all look relaxed and comfortable as they're waited on by pretty stewardesses (rather than crammed in like sardines and being "served" by beastly, ill-tempered "flight attendants").

Still, this is really more the story of a free-spirited young woman who is separated from her husband and has a small child, but carries on various affairs with an Italian businessman, a counter-culture artist, etc. Like a lot of movies of this period in both America and Europe this movie has a groovy counter-cultural vibe, some great music by Manfred Mann, and lots of travelogue footage (in a short period of time the character goes from a nude beach to some town in upper Scandinavia where it's dark 18 hours a day). The film kind of reminded me of "Higher and Higher" (aka "I,a Groupie"), but where that film had a lot of entertaining melodrama, this movie is kind of meandering and boring. The protagonist's Italian lover at one point complains that these free-love Danish girls take all the guilt and all the mystery out of sex. I tend to think the same think personally about a lot of Danish erotica like this. The casual sex and nudity ultimately becomes pretty boring.

Birte Tove is certainly pretty and would go on to a fairly long career in these kind of films. The director I believe was an American. Strangely, the audio of the print I saw kept switching from English to Danish, so I probably missed a few plot points. This movie is very visually pretty, but dramatically rather empty with only the great Manfred Mann soundtrack bring any real passion to the proceedings. It's worth seeing though I guess.

Despite the "Swedish" in the retitling for the American market, this film is set entirely in Denmark. Birte Tove, one of Denmark's two "first ladies" of mainstream erotic cinema of the 1970s, stars in her first feature as Christa, a miniskirted air hostess who takes men she meets on flights to bed in her Copenhagen apartment (shared with other girls) in a search for Mr Right. The story is filled out by her having split with her husband and father of her child, who isn't too happy about it. We get to see Christa, a petite pretty blonde, in various stages of undress, including nude on the beach (but pubic areas are discretely hidden). Apart from Copenhagen we get to see a bit of the countryside with a fast sports car and Denmark's tourist attractions of the Himmelbjerg "mountain", the white Møns Klint cliffs plus of course a porn shop. It is all fairly tame but presents the zeitgeist of the time quite well.