The Amorous Milkman (1975) User Reviews

Very poor, even for the genre

[Leofwine_draca · 2/10 · 2 April 2016]

As some other reviewers have noted, THE AMOROUS MILKMAN must be the nadir of the grubby British craze for sex comedies in the 1970s. Certainly this is poor stuff indeed that makes CONFESSIONS OF A WINDOW CLEANER and its ilk look like polished and professional films in comparison. It's as if somebody decided to make their own version of that kind of storyline but jettisoned everything fun about it.

Instead, what we get is an irritating, gurning guy, played by the poor Brendan Price, who goes around and argues with women very much. For a sex comedy, there's very little sex or indeed comedy, and some of the lines are so duff that it's hard to believe they even made it to the screen. Bizarrely, this was a labour of love for actor Derren Nesbitt, who wrote and directed the thing; you'd wish he'd stuck to the acting with this one.

As ever, one of the main reasons to tune in here is to see the various familiar faces from the British cast. Diana Dors has quite a large role although she does play a horrible character, and there are tiny, blink-and-you'll-miss'em cameos from Sam Kydd, Arnold Ridley, Roy Kinnear, Patrick Holt, and an ultra-creepy Ray Barrett. Hammer starlet Julie Ege (THE LEGEND OF THE 7 GOLDEN VAMPIRES) has a part too, although it's not a very interesting one. In any case, THE AMOROUS MILKMAN is one for masochists alone.

Makes the Confession series look like Citizen Kane

[malcolmgsw · 2/10 · 29 March 2024]

This film gives a good idea as to the parlous state of the British film industry in the 1970s.

The fact that it features so many familiar faces is indicative of how little film work was available to them in this period.

It is good to get a glimpse of such favourites as Bill Fraser,Sam Kydd,Arnold Ridley and Fred Emney. However this cannot be said of Diana Dors who was rapidly becoming a caricature of her former glamorous self.

This farrago was written,produced and directed by my favourite screen villain of the period, Derren Nesbitt. Its a pitty that he couldn't find one funny line in the overlong 90 minutes running time.

Makes the "Confessions" Films look like the godfather trilogy

[puss-2 · 11 October 2002]

I suffered the great misfortune of watching this film on channel 5. I couldn't believe a film could be so bad. I usually quite enjoy these sort of films, they are quite entertaining in a sort of bad way. But this is the pits. Threr is hardly any sex and even less comedy. The ending is rushed and there is even propaganda footage of world war 2 fighter pilots for no apparent reason. Avoid.

No sex, no comedy, no idea.

[augustian · 1/10 · 15 June 2003]

I recorded this film on my VCR when it was shown on British Channel 5. I had to run several parts of the film several times to realise what was going on. The plot, or lack of one, concerns the not very amorous exploits of a not very amorous milkman. He somehow gets involved with a gangster's moll and ends up in court; and this is supposed to be a comedy!

There are goofs galore. Jennifer Westbrook appears in the opening credits but not in the closing. Four different houses are used for Davey's girlfriend's house. I could go on.

The only people who could use a film like this are film schools to show students how not to make a film. Bad, bad, bad.

Are You Getting Enough? I Certainly Had Enough!

[david-879 · 1/10 · 19 January 2004]

As something of a fan of the low-budget British Sex-Com, I feel qualified to say that this is one of the worst of the genre. Derren Nesbit wrote, produced, directed and even made a Hitchcock-style appearance in it, so he must have been pleased with himself. Unfortunately he must also have been the only one. The lead actor, Brendan Price has none of the cheeky chappie charm possessed by Robin (Confessions) Askwith, letting the double entendres drop leadenly into the air. The rest of the cast, including comedy stalwarts like Diana Dors, Bill Fraser and Roy Kinnear look as though they can't wait to get off the set and compose angry letters to their agents for ever getting them involved in this film. But the absolute nadir is reached with the appearance of Alan Lake as a hairy-chested medallion-clad Don Juan figure who invites our hero to an orgy. Just when you think the film cannot go downhill any more, Dors accuses Price of rape, Lake instigates a beating; none of your cartoon violence here, this is the real thing, which does not fit well with the comedy of the rest of the film. The only positive thing one can say about this film is the end. There is one, and it comes none too soon.

Awful British "sex comedy" with a dismal Diana Dors.

[tigon · 1/10 · 5 November 1999]

Masquerading as a "sex comedy", The Amorous Milkman consistently fails to deliver. A well-past-her-sell-by-date Diana Dors is really embarrassing as a sexually frustrated housewife with a penchant for men in uniforms; and Brendan Price in the title role is too annoying for words. Writer-director Derren Nesbitt is responsible for this piece of 70s trash and even has the front to appear in a Hitchcock-like cameo role (as a milkman, naturally).

Dreadful script, disastrous direction, dire Dors

[glyntreharne-1 · 1/10 · 4 October 2003]

Awful sex comedies like this were home to a great many character actors before the soaps' domination of UK television offered them a better alternative. However, Arnold Ridley was old enough to know better. He surely must have amassed enough royalties from his play "The Ghost Train", and had enough exposure from his continuing role in BBC TV's "Dad's Army", to be able to turn down a cough and a spit role as a usher in a porno cinema. Julie Ege does add some class, easily outshining the other women in the cast, which sadly includes Diana Dors giving one of the worst performances of her career. Lead actor Brendan Price does his best, but he's defeated by the script and the direction, both in the incapable hands of of 'b' actor Darren Nesbit. It is a film with nothing to recommend it, even the sex is a turn-off.

Hooray for the Rank Charm School and Emotional Constipation!

[JekyllBoote-1 · 10/10 · 16 October 2008]

I loved Prof_Critic's review! The only trouble is, all the reasons he listed for disliking the film (the references to saucy postcards, British end-of-the-pier culture, Carry-on bawdiness, emotional constipation, the Rank Charm School, etc) are reasons, as I see it, to cherish it.

I'd rather sit through a million films like The Amorous Milkman than be lectured by earnest, humourless cultural Marxists (many of whom mistakenly believe themselves merely to be liberals so subliminal has their brainwashing been), who have a visceral hatred for the indigenous people and culture of England. For this reason alone I must award the film a full ten marks!

The worst film ever made in Britain.

[Chips_Critic · 20 October 2004]

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.