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Sex and the Other Woman
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| Year: |
1972
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Director: |
Stanley A. Long
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| Stars: |
Richard Wattis, Bartlett Mullins, Peggy Ann Clifford, Maggie Wright, Anthony Bailey, Jane Cardew, Peter Dunn, Gillian Brown, Felicity Devonshire, Raymond Young, Louise Rush, Barbara Meale, Louise Pajo, Max Mason, Stella Tanner, Barbara Wendy
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| Genre: |
Drama, Sex, Trash |
| Rating: |
  4 (from 1 vote) |
| Review: |
Here is Henry, a henpecked fellow who does everything his wife tells him to, and that includes not allowing him to ogle young ladies in the street. Would he ever manage to pluck up the courage for a mistress? It seems that one day he did, and when his wife was out he was in bed with this "other woman", though then the missus returned far earlier than he expected and left him with a dilemma. Fortunately, all he needed to do was to let the air out of his mistress and hide her under the bed, but for other, more adventurous, males, life isn't that simple...
Sex and the Other Woman was one of the earlier examples of the British sex comedy boom, this one from one of its chief exponents Stanley A. Long who would strike box office gold with his Adventures of... series later on in the decade. But there was one difference between those efforts and this, in that it wasn't really supposed to be funny as after that initial send-up of what one can only assume was most of the audience, the laughs, would-be or otherwise, were thin on the ground. It took the form of an anthology of stories on the subject of adultery, and while Robin Askwith could have done wonders with such material, here it was all a bit, well, sombre.
The tone did lighten up by the fourth and final tale, but otherwise the settings were drab, the cast doing their best in reduced circumstances, and the supposedly accessible sexual fantasies were depressingly unimaginative. Still, it was all an excuse to remove the actresses from their garments, and for many of those watching that was good enough for them, so we have the headmaster-like authority of Richard Wattis to introduce each story as he practically winks at the camera in an "eh, fellas?" manner as if what we are being shown was the fulfilment of every man's dream. Maybe some men's dreams, and those men whose attitudes were resolutely stuck in the nineteen-seventies.
Every woman available to the hapless blokes here is a vamp of some stripe or another, starting with Elizabeth (Maggie Wright), a too-thin model who seduces her married tennis partner Reggie (Anthony Bailey) because she thinks he's rich. Pausing to wonder why she dons her underwear to play tennis in typically freezing British weather conditions, you realise quickly that Elizabeth sets the standard for the other main female characters in her "I hope you don't mind, I hate wearing clothes" attitude to staying fully dressed. She initiates Reggie in a near-fatal mile high club stunt in his light aircraft, but when his wife finds out, he's the loser. Not something you could say about the other men under Long's steely glare, as pretty much the rest of them get away with their dalliances.
Again with the wish-fulfilment, which reaches impossible to believe heights before the end. Take Chris (Peter Dunn) who is the target of office flirt Lisa (Jane Cardew), who as with many of the other ladies in this dresses for the beach no matter what the situation; after a few false starts they have an affair, but Chris's wife decides to say nothing because she knows she'll keep her man. Then there's the disctinctly unsavoury sight of the middle-aged Guy (Raymond Young) falling into the arms of his daughter's eighteen-year-old schoolfriend (Felicity Devonshire), which is followed up with what can best be described as a threesome as Ted (Max Mason) finds his wife and mistress wish to live together with him. It's worth watching this for his hilarious suggestion to camera that if you're a man having an affair, you should introduce the mistress to the wife because they might get on, the inference being that you get two women at your beck and call. Oh dear. The music, incidentally, includes heavy jazz flute, the theme from Van Der Valk and something that is almost but not quite Pachelbel's Canon.
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| Reviewer: |
Graeme Clark
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| Stanley A. Long (1933 - 2012)
Long got his start taking nude photos, branched out into short films, then embarked on a series of features which lasted a good three decades before he moved into a post-production capacity on many titles up until just before his death. It was those sexploitation flicks which made him a millionaire, capturing the public's interest in increasingly racy subject matter, making his career a textbook example of loosening censorship, from nudist colony movies (Take Off Your Clothes and Live) to mondo documentaries (West End Jungle, Primitive London, London in the Raw), to full on softcore such as Groupie Girl, The Wife Swappers, Naughty, On the Game, his highly lucrative Confessions of rip-offs The Adventures of... series, and his finest film Eskimo Nell, rightly cited as the best, or at least the funniest, of the whole genre. He also penned a revealing autobiography. |
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