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Confessions from the David Galaxy Affair
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| Year: |
1979
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Director: |
Willy Roe
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| Stars: |
Alan Lake, Glynn Edwards, Anthony Booth, Diana Dors, John Moulder-Brown, Milton Reid, Bernie Winters, Kenny Lynch, Mary Millington, Sally Faulkner, Rosemary England, Queenie Watts, Cindy Truman, Vicki Scott, Alec Mango, Maria Parkinson, Ballard Berkeley
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| Genre: |
Comedy, Drama, Sex, Trash |
| Rating: |
  3 (from 1 vote) |
| Review: |
David Galaxy (Alan Lake) is an astrologer who also has a sideline in arranging things for his shady contacts, as tonight when he sets up a local councillor with the winner of a topless beauty contest, Sandra (Rosemary England). To add to the fun, David gets to take her home at the end of the evening, though he lives to regret his night of passion after having to take a trip to the V.D. clinic soon afterwards. However, such things will be the least of his worries when the police knock on his door: Chief Inspector Evans (Glynn Edwards) has some questions to ask him... something about a robbery...
Of all the films that British porn publishing baron David Sullivan made which featured Mary Millington, not one is an example of the best of the softcore sex films that were released in the heyday of such things, the nineteen-seventies. You'd be hard pressed to find anyone with anything much good to say about them, and Confessions from the David Galaxy Affair, not to be confused with the Confessions movies which starred Robin Askwith, was not much fun. Lasting ninety minutes and even then never getting its plot into gear, it saw Millington in a supporting role as almost always; she played one of David's conquests in a sequence which sees them making love in his bedroom while the place is bugged.
It's bugged because Galaxy's associates have taken a bet on whether he can make his latest partner enjoy an orgasm or not, and although one of those associates is played by Anthony Booth, it's not the type of thing you'd see in his Confessions movies, being oddly meanspirited considering the situation is meant to have you laughing. But then, for a comedy there's not one decent joke in this, and after a while you begin to wonder if this is actually a drama instead. There are parts which might come across as lighthearted in intention, such as when David contrives to invite a traffic warden back to his flat, whereupon within seconds she's naked except for her stockings and suspenders and right on top of him, but that air of desperation never leaves.
It did not alleviate the overall listless tone of the film when you know that both Lake and Millington would have committed suicide within five years of each other, Mary because her drugs dependency and feeling that her career was slipping away had made her depressed, and Alan because his wife Diana Dors had recently died, and as if that wasn't bad enough he was suffering from a brain tumour. Dors not only appears in this, as Galaxy's landlady, but trills the theme song as well, but did herself no justice in what looked like a favour to her hubby now he had secured a starring role. Lake's best film was probably the Slade movie, Flame, where his slightly seedy charm was ideal; here it may be appropriate, but he doesn't have the material to back him up.
Add to that the fact that to indicate his character's jovial nature he saw fit to put on a range of comedy voices in which to deliver his lines, including that old favourite the humorous Indian and the highly suspect Louis Armstrong, and Galaxy is a hard man to warm to, not least understand how he gets all these women at his beck and call. Every so often the plot, such as it was, stops for a sequence of sex and/or nudity, but even the raincoat brigade watching this in a Soho cinema must have felt shortchanged by the lack of anything truly titillating, as most of these parts last a minute at most, and are so badly lit that they must have developed eyestrain trying to make anything out. In support are a collection of celebs looking to get some easy money for a couple of days' work, but none of them amuse, and the manner in which it all turns serious by the end suggests that nobody here knew quite how to go about this sex comedy lark. Music by David Whitaker.
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| Reviewer: |
Graeme Clark
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