School For Sex, 1969.
Directed by Pete Walker.
Starring Derek Aylward, Rose Alba, Bob Andrews, Edgar K. Bruce, Vic Wise, Hugh Latimer, Nosher Powell, Cathy Howard.
SYNOPSIS:
A crooked aristocrat opens a finishing school to teach girls how to extort money from rich men.
School For Sex followed For Men Only in director Pete Walker’s output and is a considerable improvement over that short film, mainly because it actually had a plot you could follow and it pushed the nudity a little more. It also pointed the way for the director in laying down some of the themes he would go on to employ in his later exploitation/horror work, most notably in the criminally underrated House of Whipcord in 1974, which saw Walker hit his stride and fully develop his style.
But before that School For Sex sketched out those basic themes of an institution being something else behind closed doors and the old guard disapproving of the looser morals of the baby boom generation in a broader, more comedic way in a story that, if it were made today, could be an extended sketch from The Fast Show, such is the exaggerated way in which the characters are presented. It’s not hard to picture Paul Whitehouse as Giles Wingate, an upper class cad on trial for fraud whilst trying to pay for his five (or is it six?) gold-digging ex-wives (Lord Wingate… on trial… with his reputation?); instead, Wingate is played by Derek Aylward (For Men Only) and must surely have been in Whitehouse’s mind when creating the 13th Duke of Wybourne character. Given a suspended sentence, Wingate returns to his family estate and turns his mansion into a finishing school for beautiful young girls whom he wishes to train into conning rich old businessmen out of their wealth and then taking a cut for himself. Helping him in this scheme is his faithful old butler Fred (Edgar K. Bruce), the nervous Mr. Clapp (Vic Wise) the heavy drinking Countess of Burwash (Rose Alba – Thunderball) and randy PT instructor Hector (Nosher Powell – Willow), but it isn’t too long before the local villagers start poking their noses in and Wingate’s plan may not go the way he wants it to.
As an overall comment, School For Sex isn’t a very good film – a sentiment echoed by the director himself these days – but there are elements of it that work; the aforementioned Giles Wingate character is a lovable rogue, clichéd by today’s standards but at the time the sort of character that audiences (British ones at least) used to latch onto. Pete Walker’s direction is vastly improved from For Men Only, using the location setting to create an old-fashioned English village with characters that we instantly know and like/dislike accordingly. And of course there’s the nudity, which may seem a little tame now but likely caused a bit of a stir in mainstream cinemas in 1969. If you check the special features on the DVD there are some ‘X-Rated’ alternate cuts of some scenes that aren’t actually that explicit but show a few more boobs than what you see in the final version.
However, School For Sex doesn’t really have anything else going for it other than those things. The acting, on the whole, is laughably bad and feels like a rehearsal that Walker happened to be filming, the pacing is terrible – a 77-minute sex comedy should whizz by – and once Wingate opens his school the film has about 30 minutes to go but just seems to stop and meander to a finish. There is also a comedy copper that pops up every now and then, and, apart from an amusing dream sequence that could have come straight out of a Les Dawson sketch, his presence and interactions with the nosy neighbours just get annoying and are only there for padding. If you’re a Pete Walker fan/completest then you’ll probably get a little enjoyment out of this, if only to trace a line from the director’s 8mm glamour shorts (included as extras on the disc) through his early sex comedies and into his horror/thriller/exploitation career. The seeds are there for you to see but otherwise this is a very dated and forgettable sex comedy that doesn’t really have enough of either element to make it worth watching more than once.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★/ Movie: ★ ★
Chris Ward
https://youtu.be/yIuEu1m0p2M?list=PL18yMRIfoszEaHYNDTy5C-cH9Oa2gN5ng
Originally published June 22, 2015. Updated April 15, 2018.
