Que font ces dames... quand leurs maris bossent

Swinging Wives (1971)

** 1/2 (out of 4)

At times funny German "report" film has a reporter walking around the streets trying to figure out why so many housewives become bored sexually and must seek out men other than their husbands. Throughout the 82-minute running time we see several situations where horny women must look somewhere else while the husband is at work.

Ernst Hofbauer, the king of the "report" genre, directs this entry into the extremely large series that has tackled all sorts of issues. The "housewife" genre had quite a few entries in it, although it never reached the level of the "schoolgirl report" films. For the most part this here is pretty entertaining from start to finish as it certainly delivers on all the nudity and sex that you'd expect but thankfully there are some fairly comical situations on display here to keep you entertained. After all, the nudity can only go so far and you've got to have something else there on display.

There are several funny sequences here but the highlight is probably one of the shortest as a beer delivery man goes to drop off his beer when he walks into a house with four naked women. At first he's angered at what they're doing to him but then he finally gets what lays ahead. Another funny sequence comes towards the end of the picture when a husband refuses to buy an expensive dress for his wife even though he spends his money on prostitutes. The wife comes up with a good plan for revenge. As you can tell, this is the type of humor presented throughout the film. Some of them work very well whereas others are decent at best. However, none of the stories are downright boring or bad.

For the most part this film delivers pretty much what you're expecting it to. The sex crowd will be happy with what's on display and there's no doubt that they hired some extremely good-looking women to take their clothes off. As with other report films, the "interviews" on the street are highly entertaining even if you have to question how legit they actually are.

This is one of the many documentary type sex film made in the 70's. This is also very dull, unfunny and runs very slow. American actor Ron james (THE BOOGEY MAN) is billed on the poster/video box, but there is no one by that name on the acutal film. Maybe he did the dubbing for the film? This is collection of skits told by people when a reporter ask them about what kind of sex they did or had. Lots of nudity, but nothing else. Not recommended.

This is either an "official" or unofficial entry into the German "Hausenfrau-Report" films, a close relative of the somewhat more famous "Schulmadchen-Report" films, except that these are about "hausenfrau" (housewives) rather than "schulmadchen". This one is actually pretty famous in the English-speaking world under the title "Swinging Wives", based on its famous poster.

This is a genuine "report" style film that contains a number of different vignettes interspersed with man-(and woman)-on-the-street interviews. Of course, it's all totally fabricated and completely ridiculous. Pretty much the same bunch of German actresses (Eva Garden, Astrid Frank, etc.)that were too mature-looking to be very convincing as "schulmadchen" are also simple too attractive to be very convincing as frumpy housewives neglected by their husbands. The good thing about these though is that if one story is lame another will be along shortly. Unfortunately, ALL the stories are pretty lame here, and they're all light (but not particularly funny)comedy without the sudden shifts into lurid melodrama that some of these movies have. The most--or really the only--memorable ones involve the girl on the poster stepping out on her husband to attend a swinging party, nearly getting raped, and then encountering. . .her husband. Then a middle-aged woman is interested in a bachelor, but her "teenage" daughter gets to him first (a frequent problem German sex comedies). Then the postman discovers what housewives are REALLY up to while their husbands are away (it apparently involves strip poker and it seems they all must have lost. . .)

While one DVD company has been systematically releasing the "Schulmadchen-reports" at a steady rate, these "Hausenfrau-reports" have been released by different random companies under all kinds of different titles. They are not the kind movies that I would ever recommend to the average person, but if you've found your way to this site in the first place, you probably won't be totally un-entertained by them. . .

This is much better written than the usual German sex films a la report style. As so often, the eroticism is rather flat and relies too much on nudity alone.

However, some of the comedy scenes work amazingly well - for example, the dialogue of the episode with the sales rep for Thomas Mann is very sharp (and highly contemporary, it would not work in 1965 or in 1980), as is the ironic interplay between narrative and pictures in the postman episode. It would be very easy though to completely ruin that sharpness in a dubbed version.