Review: Confessions of a Sex Maniac (1974)

CONFESSIONS OF A SEX MANIAC (1974)
(a.k.a. The Man Who Couldn’t Get Enough, Design for Lust, Design for Love)
Directed by Alan Birkinshaw, with Roger Lloyd Pack, Vicki Hodge, Derek Royle, Ava Cadell.

In 1974 Alan Birkinshaw was a TV cameraman with an eye towards film directing. Like many Birkinshaw decided to enter the film industry through the back door of sex films; on the reasoning that this was just about the only genre in which it was hard to lose money. Before embarking on this venture Birkinshaw studied the sex film form in detail, quickly coming to the conclusion that the most successful British sex films tended to be comedies based around studs being flung into career themed capers. This route appealed not only to audiences, but as Birkinshaw noted the censors who tended to frown less on sex scenes when they were served up with laughs. Any attempt at a ‘serious’ sex film was hardly the norm in mid-Seventies Britain.
That said Birkinshaw’s choice of career theme for Confessions of a Sex Maniac, the wild and swinging world of architecture, is hardly the first occupation that comes to mind as a springboard to either sex or comedy.

Derek Royle stars as Sir Bernard Storm, an architect who comes upon a stumbling block when he discovers an upcoming lecture tour in America means he can’t accept the offer of designing a marina for an Austrian company. Never one to be outdone, Storm decides to set off on the tour anyway, and leaves the designing of the marina to his longhaired assistant Henry Milligan (Roger Lloyd Pack). While Storm recognises Henry has talent, he also knows only too well that Henry is unmotivated and lazy by nature so asks his secretary Hilary (Vicki Hodge) to keep a watchful eye over his prodigy. Working against the clock Henry struggles to come up with any worthwhile ideas, his work being affected by his pining for his ex-girlfriend Susan, who dumps him in the opening scene when the berk refers to her by another girls name in bed. Attempting to get her off his mind Henry has a night time stroll over to a pub and tries to pick up a blonde (a bizarre cameo from ex-dancer and minor nude walk on actress Bobby Sparrow). Bobby puts on a ridiculous ‘farm-girl’ voice and talks about how cows are more trustworthy than men in order to shake off the loser, presumably just telling him to get lost would be too easy. After what appears to be a wasted night, Henry chooses an architecture book and a Men's magazine as bedtime reading and as a result has a surreal dream in which all the great buildings of the world dissolve into a female breasts. With this burst of inspiration he sets out to design a building in the shape of a pair of breasts, much to the astonishment of Hilary. ‘Somewhere in this great city’ he tells her ‘lies the uncrowned bosom of our time’. In the quest for a pair of breasts to inspire his building Henry decides to place an ad in the newspapers only to get the phone universally slammed down on him when he starts proclaiming ‘I need breasts, I need breasts for my work’. It’s only when Henry turns to the pages of Time Out magazine (described as `something trendy, slightly underground...that all sorts of different birds will read') that his ad gets a massive response and soon his office is overcrowded with dolly birds ready to flash their breasts. Among their number are blue movie girl Ava Cadell (‘so you’re the one who wants to see my tits are you’) and Monika Ringwald-The Sexplorer Herself. There is a good argument for the whole movie existing solely for this lengthy scene in which Henry proceeds to examine the girl’s breasts with a magnifying glass, a ruler and a tape measure. Since the film seems to lose all interest in Henry’s search for the perfect breast soon after. The latter half all but abandoning this premise in favour of Henry playing door to door lothario to three women who couldn’t make it to the audition. These encounters are straight to the point Come Back Peter type setups, with Henry barely getting his foot through the door before he’s being offered sex by such stereotypes as two frustrated housewives and the token hippy chick. ‘Three beautiful wows’ remarks Henry ‘but none of ‘em perfection’. Overworked Henry finds a sympathetic shoulder from Hilary the secretary and the two end up in bed together. In a startlingly obvious conclusion, Hilary possesses the exact kind of breasts Henry’s been dreaming about and they manage to head back to the office and finish the design just in time for Sir Bernard’s return. Sadly with the budget clearly having been spent on a helicopter at the beginning of the film, we never get to see Henry’s tit shaped building. Instead Alan Birkinshaw and Confessions of a Sex Maniac end as they always meant to go on- with yet another soft core groping as Henry and Hilary cerebrate his promotion.

While the hero of the piece comes up with all manner of pretentious nonsense (e.g. `you foolish creature the line between madness and genius is but a fragment of shallow minds') to justify spending all day leering at the female form, a paper thin plot is all Alan Birkinshaw needs in order to show off a whole parade of boobs here. As is the case with his later work the film almost makes a virtue out of being nothing but pure exploitation, and its hard not to crack a smile at the sheer assembly line nature in which Birkinshaw trots out the nudes and sex scenes while at the same time pretty much throwing the plot out of the window. Against stiff competition Confessions of a Sex Maniac is perhaps the most basic and cheapest of all the careerist sex comedies. Extremely claustrophobic, most of the narrative unfolds in the same room and as a two hander between Henry and Hodge’s Secretary. You can’t help wondering if Birkinshaw’s sister, The Life and Loves of a She Devil author Fay Weldon didn’t have a hand in the script (as she did with his horror opus Killer’s Moon). The Hodge character seems to act as the mouthpiece of any girl encountering a sex film of this ilk. Looking embarrassed throughout she continually rubbishes the film’s puerile concept and the suggestion of anything ‘meaningful’, guffawing when Henry compares his crude drawing of a breast with the innovations of Edison and Leonardo. Oddly given his observation that the censors were less likely to come down on sex films were they dressed up as comedies, Birkinshaw doesn’t appear to be in any rush to fill his film with gags. There are no moonlighting sitcom favourites in the cast and the sex scenes are played erotically straight as apposed to going the usual careerist sex comedy route of making the sex an extension of the slapstick. Mournful and glum faced, even during the many sex scenes; Roger Lloyd Pack is the most un-Robin Askwith of all the careerist sex comedy heroes. A wonderfully sleazy scene of Lloyd Pack eying women’s breasts at a market in Soho could double as an excerpt from a public information film warning of the dangers of strange men. The film does however have lots of location work to recommend to it, as Lloyd Pack soaks in the atmosphere of Soho looking for inspiration in private cinemas and double-bills of Diary of a Half Virgin and Wife Swapping French Style. In the midst of it all Birkinshaw’s alcoholic cameraman Arthur Lavis accurately captures the look of a grey, rainy and miserable day in Soho.

If nothing else Confessions of a Sex Maniac is of minor interest on account of its two leads. Vicki Hodge was a Baronet’s daughter and fashion model, who presumably took sex film roles for pin money. In fact appearing in the likes of this and 1972’s Layout for 5 Models must have seemed like second nature to Hodge who looking back on wilder times recently claimed ‘if you were a model or your single was in the Top 10, you were one of the shaggables really’. Moving in royalty and showbiz circles, Hodge was the long-time girlfriend of Krays associated ‘tough guy’ actor John ‘Biffo’ Bindon, who essentially played himself in Performance (1970). As a result Vicki spent most of the 1970s being bounced off walls. Making a one off stop in sex films, Roger Lloyd Pack is of course now better known for primetime sit-com roles and as the father of actress Emily Lloyd. Comedy, rather than trouser dropping, proving to be his forte. In a surprising positive nod the exploitation film hating Monthly Film Bulletin actually compared Lloyd Pack’s ‘appealing’ performance to Woody Allen, although modern viewers may be more amused over how Lloyd Pack’s bumbling persona in Confessions of a Sex Maniac would make a far more successful re-appearance in TV’s Only Fools and Horses.

Birkinshaw enjoyed minor success with the film selling it to sex kingpin David Grant. Shot under the title Design for Lust, Grant took a mischievous look at the takings of Columbia’s Confessions series and subjected the film to an 11th hour re-title, releasing the film under its best known title. The Monthly Film Bulletin took Grant to task for the ‘bare-faced ‘borrowing’ from somebody else’s series’, and they weren’t the only ones. In a futile attempt at stemming the tide of ‘Confessions’ rip-offs, Columbia threatened legal action. Still determined to get his money’s worth out of this pick-up the slippery Grant quickly re-issued the film as ‘The Man Who Couldn’t Get Enough’ on a double-bill with a French/Italian import entitled A Virgin for Saint Tropez. The poster for this pairing is a head-scratching wonder to behold, a far cry from your average colourful sex film poster, it featured a black and white line drawing of a menacingly male face glaring down at a terrified woman, imagery that would seem to more fit Birkinshaw’s Killer’s Moon than his first offering. As was the case with many of David Grant’s in-house productions, some foreign prints of Confessions of a Sex Maniac contain hardcore inserts which Birkinshaw denies having anything to do with.

Released on a succession of bargain basement video labels throughout the 80’s the long forgotten Confessions of a Sex Maniac made a surprise return to the public eye in 2001. A sex shop owner had been selling the film and other ancient soft-core titles as hardcore tapes and charging his customers around fifty pounds per video. Obviously betting on his customers being too embarrassed to complain, the owner shot himself in the foot when one of them went to trading standards. Their subsequent investigation into a sex shop selling tapes that weren’t pornographic enough naturally received a fair bit of media attention as a ‘and finally’ quirky news story. Gavcrimson played a small part in getting Confessions of a Sex Maniac a mention when he helped London Weekend Television locate the films owners so clips could be shown in a serious documentary on consumer fraud. The film’s owners turned out to be the Paris based ‘Euro-London’ company who also own all of the Tony Tenser era Tigon films. ‘There shouldn’t be too much of a problem with showing (clips) before the watershed’ a film researcher from London Weekend Television told me ‘and there’s the added bonus of having family favourite Roger Lloyd ‘Trigger’ Pack in the lead role’. I’m sure Roger was over the moon.


As a postscript to this review I once sent a copy of the film to a real-life architect who collects films dealing with his chosen profession. His critique of the film is certainly one of the more unusual I have read:

“Thank you very much for the copy of 'Confessions of a Sex Maniac'. I found it very entertaining indeed. As you remember I collect movies with architects as the main character i.e. Towering Inferno, Fountainhead, Indescent (sic) Proposal etc. I always enjoy how the movie will show the profession. 'Confessions' is interesting in that the centre of the plot is about the architecture, or at least it is one of the main themes throughout. Most movies would simply show tha (sic) architect at the desk for 5 seconds then go into a totally different story.

Also interesting that in the story the man is mostly sincere able his search for the perfect breast and displays signs of respect to them.

So thanks again. If you ever find another porn movie with an architect in it I would be glad to know as thry (sic) are rare”


Text: Gavcrimson 2003
E-mail: [email protected]