The Amorous Milkman (1974)

One of the most widely reviled films in cinema history, and certainly one which most of its (now sadly deceased) participants would most likely have rather forgotten about, the Amorous Milkman - written and directed by Derren Nesbitt, who had made a bit of a name for himself playing villains, heavies and Gestapo officers, before an unsavoury domestic incident (see below) pole-axed his career - is a singularly depressing piece of work. Imagine if a low-brow, old-school, blue-collar comedian, whose regular gigs on the holiday camp / working men's club / end of the pier circuit had long since dried up, was asked to take a snapshot of his tortured, moribund soul, every last shred of human decency and sensitivity cruelly decimated by years of reducing all human experience to the level of a bawdy joke. My guess is that you'd get something very similar to this woeful offering.

The Amorous Milkman was very much a labour of love for Nesbitt, who sold his yacht to finance its production. Even more surprisingly, the screenplay was adapted from the novel of the same name, though I can't find any proof anywhere that the novel was actually published. The nearest I can find is this self-explanatory entry in the long-running Confessions series of paperbacks...

Amazingly, that was published a full two years after Nesbitt's film crept into Britain's fleapits. In the interim, there was a notably unsuccessful pilot episode for a projected television series, Milk-o!, which starred Bob Grant as the titular cheeky milkman with an eye for the ladies. When that series crashed on the runway, Grant apparently threw a hissy fit, vowing never to work in television again - and, outside of a handful of chat show appearances, he never did. This didn't stop London Weekend Television from making one last valiant attempt at reviving the randy milkman trope for their shatteringly awful 1984 sitcom Bottle Boys, which really was as awful as its dire reputation suggests.

From the moment the Amorous Milkman gets underway - with a shot of a novelty alarm clock which takes the shape of a little figure wanking under the covers of a doll-sized bed - you know exactly what you're in for. Subtle it isn't. Then the camera pulls back to reveal something at which the British sex comedy truly excelled, intentionally or not - capturing good old mid-seventies dinge and squalor. Our hero (Brendan Price) lives in a pokey bedsit straight out of an episode of Rising Damp, with a poster of the Incredible Hulk on the door. Even Marwood and Withnail would have drawn the line at spending a night in this hovel. You can practically smell the crinkly tissues stuffed under the bed. The outside world doesn't fare much better, either - all the exteriors seem to have been shot over the same wet, foggy and freezing week in January. This is one British film unlikely to cause ex-pats sunning themselves in the Costa Del Sol to feel even remotely homesick.

Another thing that places this film firmly in the seventies - Roger Webb's awful 'comedy' score, which seems to have wandered in from any one of hundreds of generic sitcoms. Not really surprising, because Webb's most famous (or perhaps notorious) achievement was changing the original George and Mildred title music by Johnny Hawksworth to a bland confection which sounded like a lounge take on 10cc's Art for Art's Sake, right down to the percussive woodblocks.

There's really not much plot to bother ourselves with, suffice to say that Price is the kind of bumbling 'hero' who makes Frank Spencer look like Charles Bronson. The usual complications with dewy-eyed, lovesick fuck-bunnies and screeching suburban harridans ensue, there's a visit to a 'swinging London' nightclub and an orgy which takes place in the inventively-named Stilorgan Road ('I've heard that on a cold night you can't find it') and results in Price, smashed on the host's potent punch, alternating wildly between shagging his balls off and rushing to the toilet to throw up. It's as charmless as it sounds, but what really drags the pedestrian vulgarity up to another level is Nesbitt's decision to intercut the puking and screwing with clips of atomic bombs exploding, members of the Viet Cong deploying flamethrowers and even a brief glimpse of a Nazi rally. Something else that's weird - all this archive footage, as well as the occasional flashbacks, are seen through a variety of primary-coloured filters. At moments like these, the Amorous Milkman is heavily redolent of the kind of film Dr Brodsky in a Clockwork Orange would have showed Malcolm McDowell to break his mind.

This is pretty much how I felt watching the Amorous Milkman.

There's half an hour left to run, and the film has already played all its 'sex comedy' cards, so events take a drastic detour and Price's character is accused of rape after being caught in a clumsily-orchestrated compromising position with Diana Dors' frustrated housewife. Worse yet, the threatening gangster boyfriend of a character we've already forgotten about (despite her being played by the lovely Julie Ege) orders two of his heavies to give Price a revenge kicking for rumping his bit of Norwegian skirt. This they do, and dump him in the middle of nowhere. On his release from hospital, Price is chased around the hospital grounds in a special needs class re-enactment of a bit of standard Goodies slapstick by his clingy fiancee and the end credits roll. Either the money ran out, or the film's makers simply got bored with it, called bullshit and left the viewer to fend for himself.

By this stage, it pretty well goes without saying that the Amorous Milkman is an absolute mess. If Nesbitt picked up any behind-the-camera expertise whatsoever during his extensive career at this point, it certainly doesn't show. I've no complaints about films that are unpretentious, but films that are unambitious deserve everything they get, and this is one of those films that aims as low as it's possible to aim yet still misses its modest targets by a mile. Everything from the performances to the technical credits simply reek of apathy, and it's a terrible shame to see the likes of Bill Fraser, Diana Dors, Arnold Ridley, Roy Kinnear, Anthony Sharp and Fred Emney reduced to appearing in this kind of rubbish just to pay the bills. One last trivial note - according to the British Board of Film Classification's website, this thing had to be cut in order to secure an X certificate back in 1974. I'm not exactly curious to see the outtakes, but something tells me they involved fucking or spewing.