A beautiful young woman is targeted by a mysterious
blackmailer. She turns to a private
detective for help and he finds himself drawn into a web of intrigue, murder
and bare breasts involving a sinister, cursed family and a night club run by
gangsters. It could be the plot of one
of the Italian giallo films Suzy
Kendall starred in during the 70s, but in fact it belongs to a film she made
back home in Britain that’s about as far from a giallo as it’s possible to get.
Other than the bare breasts.
Laura Sutton (Kendall) could be about to lose out on an
inheritance from her octogenarian millionaire fiancé Ashley Grimsdyke when she’s
threatened over some explicit photos of her being unfaithful with Bless This House’s Robin Stewart. The private
eye she seeks out is Judd Blake (Jon Pertwee, associated in the public mind
with mystery as host of TV panel game Whodunnit?). But he’s just gone abroad, so his inept
assistant Bob West takes charge of the case instead. His name’s clearly a riff on that of Joe
North, hero of Stanley Long's previous film Adventures of a Taxi
Driver, but Barry Evans passed up the chance to appear in the follow-up (though he starred in the even further downmarket Under the Doctor the same year) and was
replaced by Christopher Neil, whose sexcom pedigree included roles in The Sex Thief and the Stanley Long-produced Eskimo Nell. Neil also sings
the film’s theme song, which he co-wrote with Paul Nicholas, whose hits “Dancing
with the Captain” and “Grandma’s Party” Neil was also partly to blame for.
As if to compensate for being taken off theme song duty this
time round, Adrienne Posta performs two numbers in her role as Lisa Moroni, an
unsubtle spoof of Liza Minnelli. “Make
my pendulums swing,” she demands in one of them, and sure enough we get to see
her pendulums in full swing in the very next scene. Several other members of Long’s “repertory
company” also return from the first Adventures
film: Ian Lavender gets a bigger role this time around as Bob’s friend Derek,
who does most of the actual detecting alongside Bob’s comically “ugly”
secretary Maud Gubbidge (future Coronation
Street star Veronica Doran) while Bob has various cack-handed encounters
with loose women. One of these is Angela
Scoular, another returnee, once again playing a lustful housewife, this time
with a very unattractive grey perm. Diana
Dors is back too, popping up for one scene only as a charwoman, and sporting the
same vividly floral tabard she wore in Taxi
Driver. Finally, Liz Fraser plays
eccentric vegetarian Violet, one of the dysfunctional Grimsdyke clan who are
the prime blackmail suspects. The other
family members are boggle-eyed lecher Harry H Corbett, bonkers psychic Anna
Quayle and buxom (and seemingly dubbed) Linda Regan. In one of the film’s most memorable scenes,
Neil and Regan have sex in a boat in full view of a rowing team (Neil’s manhood
can be briefly spotted in this sequence).
As you might expect, the mystery plot is a wholly
perfunctory excuse to string together a lot of a comic sketches: the final
denouement, arrived at by Lavender, Doran and seedy reporter Willie Rushton, is
rushed, barely comprehensible, and intercut with vivid images of Neil escaping
from Posta’s mafia boyfriend (head Tomorrow Person Nicholas Young) disguised as
an Arab woman. For reasons too baffling
to recount, he ends up naked in an open grave, at a funeral. Still, it’s one of the most agreeable films
of its type, with a couple of truly wonderful moments. One of these has Fred Emney, in his final
film role, being absolutely hilarious as a sozzled aristocrat trying to get
into the knickers of a dragged-up Christopher Neil. The other sees Neil, on his way to dispose of
a body, waylaid by yet another horny housewife (Hilary Pritchard), whose
voracious consumption of “sex films” has led her to believe that all passing
men are up for it. And it seems
she’s not wrong (“I would have suggested Deep
Throat, but I tried it with the window cleaner last week and nearly choked
myself”). It’s a return to the satire
of the porn industry writer Michael Armstrong had previously given us in Eskimo Nell.
Adventures of a
Private Eye saves its most grimly memorable moment for its final scene: Pertwee
returns from Beirut and tells everybody how bloody obvious everything was all along
while in the nude (he’s getting a massage).
Then a desk fan falls on his crotch after Bob trips over a wire. I imagine there wasn’t a dry eye in any house
where this film played.
Trivia
·
Other familiar faces in the cast include Irene
Handl (doing her posh voice) as a nosy neighbour called Miss Friggin, Rocky Horror Picture Show star Jonathan
Adams as Angela Scoular’s police inspector husband, and Peter Moran (later Grange Hill’s Pogo Patterson) as their
young son (who’s named Willy, purely so his father can exclaim “What a big
Willy I’ve got!”). Richard Caldicot, who
plays the Grimsdykes’ butler, co-starred with Jon Pertwee on radio in The Navy Lark for many years.
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