Misrepresenting itself cheerfully, The Pleasure Girls is an early arrival at the Swinging Sixties party that’s only partly what the poptastic theme song and energetic trailer claim it to be. Youth! Girls! Fun! Sex! Yes, but…
For a while the story sticks close to Swinging expectations – young, pretty Sally (Francesca Annis) arrives in London from the fusty provinces to become a model, takes up with a David Bailey-esque photographer called Keith (Ian McShane) and together they have a fun time, going to parties and hanging out with all the other beautiful people of mid-Sixties London.
So far, so groovy. But writer/director Gerry O’Hara has other stories to tell. For one thing his heroine, Sally, isn’t quite the liberated young woman you usually find in these things. Keith is a healthy young man with sex on the brain and he wants to sleep with Sally. “I must go to bed with you,” he says urgently at one point, in case she hadn’t realised. “ Why must we rush things,” says Sally, as primly as Francesca Annis can manage.
Meanwhile, in the stories of Sally’s two equally-well-spoken bedsitter pals, Marion (Rosemary Nicols) and Dee (Suzanna Leigh), we are given examples of where all that free love can get you. Marion is pregnant with the baby of Prinny (Mark Eden), a shyster of the first order, and Dee is hanging out with Nikko Stalmar (Klaus Kinski), a machiavellian landlord also up to no good. Girls of easy virtue wind up with bad guys and are exploited.
The Sally and Keith love story sells the movie. Pretty Sally who wants a career and handsome Keith who wears a university scarf the entire time. The aspirational couple who do all the right things in the right order. Sex, yes, but only once marrriage has arrived as a proposition, at least.
But Marion and Dee’s stories are where the action is – or would be in an ideal world. Marion, scrabbling for the money to get a backstreet abortion, and Dee, dragged backwards into the underworld dealings of the distinctly unsavoury Stalmar (a character based on notorious West London landlord Peter Rachman).
O’Hara borrowed from his own experience. He knew Peter Rachman and also hung out with Mandy Rice-Davies, the call girl at the centre of the Profumo scandal. His film has a whiff of the authentic to it that’s lacking in many another Swinging Sixties movie. Hence the appearance of gay characters and, it’s said, the first screen kiss between gay men.
Cinematographer Michael Reed catches it all in moody kitchen-sink black and white, but the social-issue stuff is left to roil away beneath the surface while up top it’s mini-skirts, Mini cars and mews houses, frilly negligees at bedtime and enough of a suggestion of nudity just around the corner to keep the attention.
It’s clearly a movie Edgar Wright watched before making Last Night in Soho. He chose it as one of the 17 films in his 2021 London After Dark season at the British Film Institute, along with the likes of The Small World of Sammy Lee, Beat Girl, Darling and Passport to Shame.
Wright also wrote programme notes and for this film’s BFI showing he described The Pleasure Girls as “entertaining…” and “more wholesome and affectionate than its racy title and poster suggests.” Fair assessments. He also made the point that The Pleasure Girls captures Swinging London just as the Swinging is about to start.
This is one of the main reasons for watching it now, along with a chance to see a youthful McShane and Annis at the moment where their careers were about to explode, as was Kinski’s. He did nine out of the total of 20 days Gerry O’Hara had to shoot this movie, then headed off to Doctor Zhivago with David Lean. Catch all the stars here as they are about to go pop.
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© Steve Morrissey 2024
