SPOILERS INCLUDED Pete Walker is an enigma. Cool it Carol, Frightmare and House of Whipcord are all excellent movies. Unfortunately Walker was also responsible for misfires like House of the Long Shadows and Home Before Midnight, as well as legitimately terrible films like Tiffany Jones. Long before his sex and horror movies even registered with critics and audiences, however Walker was just another faceless 1960's exploitation director turning out museum piece tease items like 'I Like Birds', and cheapo gangster thrillers like 'Man of Violence' and 'Strip-Poker'. The only film of Walker's early years still in circulation School For Sex gave its 37 year old director his first big success. It's box-office popularity largely being down to its ad-campaign which centred around that old mainstay of pervy cinema-the sexy schoolgirl-and promised 'Derek Aylward and a bevy of gorgeous form mistresses'. Supercad Giles Wingate (Aylward) returns home from a stint in the army to discover he has inherited his parent's large estate and all the monetary trimmings. But soon he blows this good fortune on a succession of wives each more crafty and gold-digging than the last. 'Brazen fortune-seeking wenches'-their numbers include a heavy handed masseuse, a maid who 'took advantage of the young Wingate's democratic, socialist ideals' by jumping into bed with him, and a sex actress authentically played by Nicola Austine. After the dust has settled Giles is left penniless by his wives spending,and nearly sent to jail for embezzling.
Using his own misfortune as example the multiple-divorcee decides that his fellow man's Achilles heel is 'crumpet' and proves his point by taking a friend to a Soho stripclub, where a flash of tits and bums turn well-composed businessmen into bug-eyed knee tremblers with strategically placed hats and coats on their laps. Giles decides to open a 'school for sex' where young women can learn how to separate wealthy men from their wealth. His friend who has contacts in the prison service promises to send him some female cons as his first 'pupils'. To pull the swindle off Giles rounds up all manner of cronies-including a drunken ex-Windmill girl (Rosa Alba) and a sex crazed yokel (eternal heavy Nosher Powell). The girls arrive semi-clad in a transit van, and barely bat a false eyelash when told that instead of going to Holloway Jail they're to become rich man's prostitutes. 'Training' includes Nosher Powell supervised PE lesions in multi-coloured underwear,and trying out seduction techniques on Giles' wrinkly retainer ('wiggle,dear,wiggle'). The pimp in a smoking jacket's plan turns out to be a success,too much of a success. News reaches Downing Street that supposedly imprisoned girls have been wedding and shaking down politicians, Eastern businessmen and 'horror film producer Sidney Mayers'. A nosy slow-witted policeman and an envious Colonel prove themselves party poopers by leading a siege on Wingate's abode. And the film ends with an interminable tussle between vice squad officers and glamour girls. Even by the standards of the day this is a primitive and tame effort, and one that fails to even register as a comedy. The level of humour best illustrated by the fact that Walker had cut his showbiz teeth as a stand-up comic, and didn't get a laugh till the second house. School for Sex also recalls Walker's background directing and distributing 'glamour home movies' for the 8mm market. Essentially short films featuring 60's 'dolly birds' posing in and out of clothes. A more profitable venture- Walker claimed to have shot around 470 of these titles, sold predominately by Newsagents and Mail-Order. Walker constructs School for Sex like an ongoing series of glamour shorts-with sequences featuring Soho striptease, a topless secretary, the girls peeling down to their underwear to harass an old codger in a bowler hat, and a fair recreation of a glamour short with Walker as a rapist who gets tied up by Nicola Austine's bra and knickers. On their own these sequences are occasionally cute and now possess a dated charm, but expanded to feature length and strung together by a flimsy excuse for a narrative School for Sex loses its appeal early on. The film also suffers from a familiar problem faced by directors of early British nudies- in casting pretty models and expecting them to do more than look pretty and model. Maria Frost, a photographic subject of many a bondage and glamour pictorial, was honest enough to constantly remind nudie directors she was a model and couldn't act. However it's frequent co-star Cathy Howard she should have been apologizing for. While Antony Balch managed to coach memorable turns from Frost and Howard for his Secrets of Sex, in Walker's hands the sexploitation duo are disappointingly non-entities. Howard gives a painful performance, visibly struggling to inject life into her dialogue which tellingly includes 'think you can remember your lines OK'. While Frost has a thankless, mute role as a schemer who sticks her breasts in Aylward's face. Suffice to say you're unlikely to remember either girl here, unless in Maria's case you were Derek Aylward. Walker uses Aylward very much in the way Lindsay Shonteff utilized Jack May in his exploitation films- casting the previously 'respectable' actor in a succession of unhealthy middle-aged lecher roles. Aylward is perfect- whether he's getting a massage or upon being confronted by a trio of girls in fetish maid outfits, falling to his knees babbling 'I must have known you when you were all just little.tiny things'. Aylward never looked back and by the end of the Seventies had dropped his trousers for hardcore loops and balling roles in Mary Millington vehicles 'Come Play With Me' and 'The Playbirds'. As if his School for Sex persona had rubbed off on him in real life. Although it no doubt bored audiences to tears, School for Sex enjoyed lengthy playdates at Mr Provisor's Cinephone in Oxford Street and the Cohen families' Jacey cinemas in Charing Cross Road and Piccadilly Circus. As it is, School for Sex is one British sexploitation film best left back in 1969.
Using his own misfortune as example the multiple-divorcee decides that his fellow man's Achilles heel is 'crumpet' and proves his point by taking a friend to a Soho stripclub, where a flash of tits and bums turn well-composed businessmen into bug-eyed knee tremblers with strategically placed hats and coats on their laps. Giles decides to open a 'school for sex' where young women can learn how to separate wealthy men from their wealth. His friend who has contacts in the prison service promises to send him some female cons as his first 'pupils'. To pull the swindle off Giles rounds up all manner of cronies-including a drunken ex-Windmill girl (Rosa Alba) and a sex crazed yokel (eternal heavy Nosher Powell). The girls arrive semi-clad in a transit van, and barely bat a false eyelash when told that instead of going to Holloway Jail they're to become rich man's prostitutes. 'Training' includes Nosher Powell supervised PE lesions in multi-coloured underwear,and trying out seduction techniques on Giles' wrinkly retainer ('wiggle,dear,wiggle'). The pimp in a smoking jacket's plan turns out to be a success,too much of a success. News reaches Downing Street that supposedly imprisoned girls have been wedding and shaking down politicians, Eastern businessmen and 'horror film producer Sidney Mayers'. A nosy slow-witted policeman and an envious Colonel prove themselves party poopers by leading a siege on Wingate's abode. And the film ends with an interminable tussle between vice squad officers and glamour girls. Even by the standards of the day this is a primitive and tame effort, and one that fails to even register as a comedy. The level of humour best illustrated by the fact that Walker had cut his showbiz teeth as a stand-up comic, and didn't get a laugh till the second house. School for Sex also recalls Walker's background directing and distributing 'glamour home movies' for the 8mm market. Essentially short films featuring 60's 'dolly birds' posing in and out of clothes. A more profitable venture- Walker claimed to have shot around 470 of these titles, sold predominately by Newsagents and Mail-Order. Walker constructs School for Sex like an ongoing series of glamour shorts-with sequences featuring Soho striptease, a topless secretary, the girls peeling down to their underwear to harass an old codger in a bowler hat, and a fair recreation of a glamour short with Walker as a rapist who gets tied up by Nicola Austine's bra and knickers. On their own these sequences are occasionally cute and now possess a dated charm, but expanded to feature length and strung together by a flimsy excuse for a narrative School for Sex loses its appeal early on. The film also suffers from a familiar problem faced by directors of early British nudies- in casting pretty models and expecting them to do more than look pretty and model. Maria Frost, a photographic subject of many a bondage and glamour pictorial, was honest enough to constantly remind nudie directors she was a model and couldn't act. However it's frequent co-star Cathy Howard she should have been apologizing for. While Antony Balch managed to coach memorable turns from Frost and Howard for his Secrets of Sex, in Walker's hands the sexploitation duo are disappointingly non-entities. Howard gives a painful performance, visibly struggling to inject life into her dialogue which tellingly includes 'think you can remember your lines OK'. While Frost has a thankless, mute role as a schemer who sticks her breasts in Aylward's face. Suffice to say you're unlikely to remember either girl here, unless in Maria's case you were Derek Aylward. Walker uses Aylward very much in the way Lindsay Shonteff utilized Jack May in his exploitation films- casting the previously 'respectable' actor in a succession of unhealthy middle-aged lecher roles. Aylward is perfect- whether he's getting a massage or upon being confronted by a trio of girls in fetish maid outfits, falling to his knees babbling 'I must have known you when you were all just little.tiny things'. Aylward never looked back and by the end of the Seventies had dropped his trousers for hardcore loops and balling roles in Mary Millington vehicles 'Come Play With Me' and 'The Playbirds'. As if his School for Sex persona had rubbed off on him in real life. Although it no doubt bored audiences to tears, School for Sex enjoyed lengthy playdates at Mr Provisor's Cinephone in Oxford Street and the Cohen families' Jacey cinemas in Charing Cross Road and Piccadilly Circus. As it is, School for Sex is one British sexploitation film best left back in 1969.