The South of France was the destination for Tony (Ian Michael), and here he is to introduce to you the delights of what he found there. After meeting four of his female friends at the airport, they headed off to the coast to await the arrival of their other female friends who were driving or hithchhiking from Britain, and while they waited Tony's French pal Pierre (Gino Neenan) introduced them to the boat where they would be spending most of their time, showing the girls how to keep things shipshape and Bristol fashion. Throw in a treaure map, and the scene was set for the best holiday ever!
Either that or the most boring holiday to watch ever, as Take Off Your Clothes and Live was a lot like being subjected to the kind of footage gathered by someone who simply had to film everything that happened to them on vacation but also felt the need to subject everyone they knew to it as well. The crucial thing to sustaining interest in this case was the nudity, for we were back in the territory of that oddest of sexploitation movies, the naturist documentary which naturally were not really documentaries at all and really a way to part the punters from their cash for the promise of seeing a naked lady or two.
This was the third and final of these from veteran British producer Stanley Long and his associate, the director Arnold L. Miller before they branched out into further supplying of screen nudity in their sex comedies and the like throughout the late sixties and seventies, but it was not necessarily the best of their output, in spite of the apparent cheery innocence of the project. Having been set in the South of France the budget was a bit higher and at least they were pretty much guaranteed nice scenery and clement weather, but otherwise there was a punishing amount of padding of a slender narrative, even at the running time of an hour, which would make all but the most eager viewer restless.
Therefore the first fifteen minutes were taken up with the girls reaching their destination, fifteen minutes of nothing in particular that the voiceovers could not make any more exciting. Those voiceovers consisted of about three people, one man and two women, pretending to be more by putting on various accents, including French, Yorkshire and most egregiously Scottish - to hear this character say (as narration) lines like "Quite a contrast to Sauchiehall Street!" was embarrassingly ludicrous when the Scots burr sounded so patently inauthentic. Anyway, our subjects did finally assemble on Pierre's boat and begin to discuss how they were going to spend the next few days as sunworshippers.
The answer to that being painfully tediously, as if it was the nudity you were eagerly awaiting, by the point it showed up half and hour in (basically halfway through the movie) you would have been beaten into submission by seemingly endless travelogue shots. And even then, after the girls strip off at the beach, wearing thongs as per the censorship demands, they immediately put their clothes back on for an insufferable bout of dancing, twisting the night away at wearisome length. Then there was the treasure to contend with as something approaching a plot appeared, only to be thwarted when they visit the island on their map and find a few goblets in the space of five minutes of screen time. No matter how often the narrators tell us what a grand holiday they're having, we can only agree that it must have been lots of fun to make this film, but it isn't half dull to watch, with not even the camp humour that the most endurable of this genre could offer.
