Not Tonight Darling [DVD]

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It is a little known fact that I do occasionally watch films that have been made in the last thirty years, however true to form I saw out New Years Eve 2017 by watching a 54 year old Val Guest film called The Beauty Jungle, and Not Tonight Darling, a piece of old skool grot from the 1970s. Two films bonded by their ambiguous yet largely downbeat endings, and the fact that they were both being given an airing by Talking Pictures TV. A channel that shows old British films, of all shapes and sizes 24/7…and probably doesn’t need much of an introduction to anyone reading this…but for me personally it is a channel that has been the sole saving grace of broadcast TV during 2017, and one which will hopefully go from strength to strength in 2018.

The one thing that I learn from watching this is that body painting had left the London sex scene as of 1971 and that heavy blue mascara could be worn all day long. Even in bed. Love the last sightings of the those wooden finished cars too. In the 1970s the UK pioneered the genre of the Unsexy Sex Film which, despite being full of attractive women taking their clothes off, would struggle to arouse a priapic teenager (the previous year's Permissive is another example). Thanks to the wonderful Talking Pictures TV channel we can now get to see such lost "gems" as Not Tonight Darling in all their beige seventies glory. Thunderclap Newman come on -- and don't (repeat don't) perform their only hit "Something in the Air."No One Can Take Your Place"/"You Beat Me To The Punch" (Fontana TF517 December 1964) (as Karol Keyes) I liked the gym club sequence near the end where Ms Peters is in virginal white-verily the covered body stimulates more the imagination! Apart from some location photography, Luan Peters is the only redeemable feature. She actually brings a degree of believability and emotion to her performance. Sadly, she's let down by the overall tepidness around her; I often wondered, given her popularity throughout the decade, she never reached the same cult status as Ingrid Pitt, Madeleine Smith or Caroline Munro when it was possiblly within her wherewithal; the moral here, maybe, is that favours can rebound. I watched this film in the early hours on a VERY obscure Sky channel called 'Movies for Men' ( That says just about everything ) The ONLY reason I watched it was the hope of seeing the lovely Luan Peters with her clothes off . By any standard she is lovely . I had a real thing for her in the 70's and if any of you are 'Fawlty Towers ' fans , she was the Aussie in the yellow T shirt who Basil manhandles with oily hands . I’d love to know the story of how Thunderclap Newman came to be in this film, it feels like someone involved with the production knew them and got their performance crow-barred into the film. I was watching this film with one of those people who loves to Google or Wikipedia the names of the people who are onscreen, to see what happened to them or what they are up to now…a rather depressing task when it comes to Thunderclap Newman. Although their musical numbers are intended as a rare upbeat moment in the film, when you’ve got someone to the left of you reading from Wikipedia about how the guitarist died at age 26 from a heroin induced cardiac arrest, and how the singer suffered from arthritis for several years before succumbing to heart failure…it does kind of bring the scene down to the level of the rest of the film.

The original screenplay, working title 'The Loving Game', was an intelligently written 3 hander about a, impossible to live with love affair. Alright, it was not exactly 'Casablanca' but not bad for its genre.That he succeeds hardly seems credible as once again this is a one- dimensional character and there's little exploration of why Karen would be drawn to such a sleazy character, although she does laugh at his lame jokes as though he's the world's greatest wit. He drags her off to watch Thunderclap Newman rehearse at a nearby venue, giving the film an unusual dose of historical cultural interest, and then takes her into what looks like a hotel room (but apparently isn't) and talks her into getting down to business whilst traffic noisily rumbles past outside. The fact that they close the curtains somehow fails to prevent a photographer from a neighbouring building capturing the moment for posterity. And so, the drama unfolds... This small distributor specialised in a more racy film style and the 'quid pro quo' for putting up the cash was a total rewrite. Lots of sex, nudity and a leading lady chosen more for her relationship with a big-wig with responsibility for circuit booking of films than for any special acting skills. What she doesn't realise however is that moustachioed shop-assistant Eddie (Sean Barry-Weske) is a peeping tom, and hovers outside her bathroom window at night in the hope of seeing her apply some moisturiser to her arms. Whenever she does appear his binoculars struggle to maintain focus, much like the audience at this point one imagines.