Birds,a minivan,an old codger in a bowler,its School for Sex (1968).
SCHOOL FOR SEX (1968)
Directed by Pete Walker, with Derek Aylward, Rose Alba, Hugh Latimer, Francoise Pascal, Nosher Powell, Cathy Howard, Maria Frost.
‘You realise you have do exactly as I say, all the gear off when I ask for it and no aggravation’- Pete Walker directing nudie actresses.
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 thrillers like ‘Man of Violence’ and ‘Strip-Poker’ which anticipate the late 1990’s obsession with Krays-era gangsters. 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 title and ad-campaign which had connotations with that old mainstay of pervy cinema- the sexy schoolgirl. ‘That was a great title. You could just see them reaching for their raincoats’ enthused the director in retrospect.
Supercad Giles Wingate (Derek 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’- Giles’ wives include a heavy handed masseuse who literally beats our hero into submission, 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 nude walk on ubiquity Nicola Austine on the outset of her long career. After the dust has settled Giles is left penniless by his wives spending, and nearly sent to jail when he turns to embezzling.
Using his own misfortune as example the screwed over, 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 tit and bum from a dolly bird turn well-composed businessmen into bug-eyed knee tremblers with strategically placed hats and coats on their laps to disguise un-gentlemanly erections. Giles decides to open a ‘School for Sex’ where young women can learn how to use their feminine ways to separate wealthy men from their wealth, in exchange for Giles taking a percentage of their earnings. 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 (on/off-screen hardman Nosher Powell, best remembered for 1987’s Eat the Rich). The girls arrive semi-clad in a minivan, and barely bat a false eyelash when told that instead of going to Holloway Jail they’re essentially to become Giles’ prostitutes. Subsequent ‘training’ includes Nosher Powell supervised PE lessons (‘put your tummy right in, hold your backside in’) and trying out seduction techniques on Fred, Giles’ wrinkly retainer, who thinks he’s died and gone to heaven when he gets to playact being a rich businessman treated to an impromptu striptease.
Giles’ plan turns out to be a success- too much of a success. News reaches Downing Street that supposedly imprisoned girls have been wedding and then 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 whorehouse abode. The film ends with an interminable tussle between vice squad officers and glamour girls, no doubt meant to trigger audience’s memories back to the Profumo affair.
School for Sex is one British sexploitation film probably best left back in the Swinging Sixties. With scenes of the girls stretching in multi-coloured underwear that look as if its about to snap off at any moment and comedy skits featuring a voyeur policeman its all too clear Walker was trying to muscle in on ‘Carry On’ territory. Trouble is this would be ‘Carry On Pimping’ 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-humiliatingly-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 these were Peeping Tom/George Harrison Marks era short films whose sexuality rarely went beyond depicting simple stripteases. Nevertheless they brought hours of pleasure to, in the words of critic Julian Upton, “discreet gentlemen who liked to jerk off to pasty-faced, fat-assed English girls in unerotic poses ”. A more profitable venture, Walker claimed to have shot around 470 of these titles (with names like Planned Seduction, Flat Mates and Soho Striptease) and sold them predominately by Newsagents and Mail-Order. Walker was well-moneyed and led the Mayfair lifestyle, casting his own country house and Rolls-Royce in School for Sex to disguise the pitiful budget. He constructs School for Sex like an ongoing series of glamour shorts- with loop length depictions of a Soho stripper, a topless secretary, the girls peeling down to their underwear to harass an old codger in a bowler hat, as well as a fair recreation of a glamour short with the auteur himself playing a gangster rapist who gets tied up by Nicola Austine’s bra and knickers. On their own these sequences are occasionally cute, possessing the charm of tease from a bygone age, but expanded to feature length and strung together by a flimsy excuse for a narrative School for Sex struggles to keep its appeal.
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. The girls of School for Sex tend to come across as department store mannequins posed in naughty underwear. Glamorous Maria Frost, a well liked nude model and cover girl of five shilling sex manuals like ‘Sex Manners for Advanced Lovers’, was honest enough to constantly remind nudie directors ‘I’m a model, I can’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 Bizarre/Secrets of Sex (1969), 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 ‘Pretty Polly’ a schemer who sticks her boobs in Derek 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 Canadian director Lindsay Shonteff was utilizing Jack May in his exploitation films- casting the previously respectable actor in a succession of middle-aged lecher roles. Aylward is perfect here- 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 returned to the Walker fold for an identical role in Cool It Carol made a year later. By the end of the Seventies Aylward had upped the anti and despite being way into his half century dropped his trousers for hardcore loops and balling roles in the Mary Millington blockbusters ‘Come Play With Me’ (1977) and ‘The Playbirds’ (1978), a career path that suggests playing an Old Fox like Giles Wingate had irreparably rubbed off on him in real life. There’s more than a touch of Aylward’s old School for Sex persona in Come Play With Me, where in a filmed as hardcore but cut-down to softcore scene he plays prominent politician ‘Sir Geoffrey’ out on a dirty date with the always underage looking Lisa Taylor.
Although it no doubt bored audiences to tears, School for Sex enjoyed lengthy play-dates at Mr Provisor’s Cinephone cinema in Oxford Street and the Cohen families’ Jacey cinemas in Charing Cross Road and Piccadilly Circus. The film was successful overseas as well, albeit only after Walker had shot some alternative scenes with his female cast rendered knickerless. School for Sex’s chief claim to fame is that its 1971 opening on Times Square was immortalised in the credits of big-budget MGM black action movie ‘Shaft’. Laughs aplenty must have been had by New York audiences at the film’s depiction of a pimp as a man who dresses up in a smoking jacket, lives in a country house and takes afternoon tea.
Text: Gavcrimson 2002
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