The Amorous Milkman (1975)

Director:

Derren Nesbitt

Writer:

Derren Nesbitt (writer)

Release Date:

January 1975 (UK)

Genre:

Comedy

Tagline:

He gave 'em much more than a pinta!

Plot:

Randy Milkman Davey bites off more than he can chew when he starts to deliver more than pints of milk to some of the bored housewives on his route...

Plot Keywords:

Milkman | Hippie | Sex | Beautiful Woman

Cast

Julie Ege	...	Diana
Diana Dors	...	Rita
Brendan Price	...	Davey
Donna Reading	...	Janice
Nancie Wait	...	Margo
Alan Lake	...	Sandy
Bill Fraser	...	Gerald
Fred Emney	...	Magistrate
Patrick Holt	...	Tom
Roy Kinnear	...	Sergeant
Ray Barrett	...	John
Anthony Sharp	...	Counsel
Megs Jenkins	...	Iris
Arnold Ridley	...	Cinema Attendant
Sam Kydd	...	Wilf

Runtime:

USA:86 min

Country:

UK

Language:

English

Color:

Color

Sound Mix:

Mono

Certification:

UK:18 (video re-rating) | UK:X

Filming Locations:

Twickenham Film Studios, St Margarets, Twickenham, Middlesex, England, UK

Trivia:

The last cinema film of Megs Jenkins

Movie Connections:

References Ultimo tango a Parigi (1972)

The worst film ever made in Britain.

Dingy, sleazy and dispiriting beyond belief: this is what the last days of the traditional post-Carry On film comedy in Britain came to, a film which is, however, indisputably the work of an auteur: writer-producer-director Derren Nesbitt, whose hopes of ever embarking on a long-term film-making career vanished when his wife filed for divorce on grounds of cruelty. The allegations of wife-beating hit the tabloids just as The Amorous Milkman was released, making the film an even more unpalatable proposition than it would have been anyway and pole-axing Nesbitt's acting career in the bargain.

So why am I posting a comment on this film now, about a year after seeing it, rather than any of the wonderful works I saw before it, and have seen since? Perhaps because in its desperate, queasy sexuality; its appallingly dingy photography (which looks as if they shot most of the film using natural light and a 40-watt bulb during a rainstorm); and its cast of once-great veteran actors (Kinnear, Ridley, Kydd) and of never-wases who, despite being in their twenties and early thirties, already seem old, perhaps aged by the hopelessness of their career prospects, in all of these things, we have a distorting "mirror for England" as it could still be, to a certain extent, then. It's morbidly fascinating, in the same way as the (UK) sitcom "Mind Your Language", or cable-TV repeats of old gameshows (featuring elderly contestants who must by now be long dead) are fascinating. It shows us the terrifying natural conclusion of British end-of-the-pier culture: a kind of sickness, of identification with rot, with dissolution. It's the kind of film which Osborne-Richardson-Olivier's Archie Rice would have made if he had been asked to make a picture of his dead soul: it's a picture of the soul of a British popular culture that was, the dying appendix of seaside postcards + Rank Charm School shallowness + Ealing cheeriness + Carry On bawdiness: the natural conclusion of leering + emotional constipation + black humour + "Blitz spirit" + more leering is "jokes" about rape.

Or to put it another way, it's a load of rubbish, and unless you want to get a sociological version of The Fear at two in the morning (which is when they tend to show it on British TV's equivalent of the end of the pier, Channel Five) my advice would be to give it a wide berth.