Film review – She’ll Follow You Anywhere

My notes on some 1971 British smut.

The presence of solid TV actors Keith Barron (Stand Up Nigel Barton) and Kenneth Cope (Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased)) in leading roles doesn’t help this agonising 1971 British sex comedy.  Though loaded with snickering jokes, attitudes to sex which were objectionable then and appalling now, and cameos for a clutch of familiar dolly-birds, this skimps on what the raincoats in the audience were craving – though one of the Collinson twins takes her top off and Barron flashes his bare bum, there is otherwise no nudity in the film and all the farcical sex takes place offscreen.  Mike (Cope) and Alan (Barron) commute from Guildford to work for a perfume company in London under the direction of a tyrannical old lech in a bowler hat (Richard Vernon).  Mike accidentally discovers an after-shave that makes any woman see the wearer as the most desirable man in the world and instantly desperate for sex – then wipes the experience from her mind afterward.  Like Stan and Ollie trying to get away from their wives, the ageing likely lads – Cope sports a Fu Manchu tache and a hideous sheepskin jacket – set up an apparently-abandoned army shed as a seduction palace and ‘experiment’ on a succession of lovelies.

Most of the girls see the blokes as celebs – and it’s just about conceivable that George Best and Mick Jagger were distinctly fanciable, though one wonders about the bunny girl who goes for Hugh Hefner or the commuter who craves Englebert Humperdinck, not to mention the lady in the Rolls who desires Ted Heath (she was on to a loser there!), the comedy German dominatrix who still has a yen for Adolf Hitler and the stuck-up secretary who dreams of the Duke of Edinburgh.  Hilary Pritchard, who has a distinctive sexy croak, ought to have become a bigger star than she was – she gets the demeaning role of Alan’s neglected wife, who strips off and does a table-dance for the boss, and is still the best thing in the film.  None of the other women really register, and most scarcely qualify as extras – the cast includes Penny Brahms, Me Me Lay, Andrea Allan, Sandra Bryant, Madeleine and Mary Collinson and Anna Matisse (mostly with unflattering hairdos – this was evidently made in the months when mullets were fashionable for women).  Though Alan and Mike are ultimately depicted as pathetic losers – while trying to recreate their potion, they are overcome with desire for each other just before their wives find them embracing – they never consider that drugging women to have sex with them might be, you know, wrong.

I couldn’t find a trailer – but these images are probably enough to give a flavour …