User Reviews

"Adventures of a private eye" is the old version of the several sex-flicks that you can watch nowadays. It brings us the story of a dumbly assistant of a private investigator, that tries to solve a case while his boss is away on vacation. What follows is a lot of chaos and sex sells.

While some see this movie very critically, I was all in all relatively entertained by it. Of course some of the jokes and punchlines turn out rather simple and there is no doubt that it was of high interest for the producers to add some nudity, but if you accept this as given, there are actually quite a few funny moments in the film. The story of someone failing his job badly is of course not very creative in itself, but the way this is used to create a plot with some humorous potential is at least solid.

This is something to turn our head off and relax. Don't watch it for the plot or any message. Under this condition, you can actually have some fun with it.

During the permissive seventies there was a marked relaxation of censorship in the British cinema, and films which would have been taboo during even the supposedly swinging sixties suddenly became acceptable for public viewing. One result of this increase in permissiveness was that mildly suggestive smutty comedies like the "Carry On" series, with their "seaside postcard" style of humour, suddenly went out of favour and were replaced by more explicit sex comedies like the "Confessions" and "Adventures" series.

"Adventures of a Private Eye" is a fairly typical example of this new breed. There is not a great deal to say about the plot; it revolves around the efforts of Bob West, a hapless young private investigator, to find out who has been blackmailing his client Laura Sutton, the young widow of an elderly millionaire. (The answer, in case anyone's interested, is that Laura appears to have been blackmailing herself. No, I couldn't work that one out either). Most of the film, however, is taken up with scenes in which Bob has to fight off, generally unsuccessfully, the sexual advances of various women. (Most of these women, as one might expect from a seventies sex comedy, are lonely, frustrated housewives. When Bob isn't in bed with them he is leaping out the window to avoid being discovered by their husbands).

The film features a surprising number of well-known actors including Diana Dors, Harry H Corbett and former Doctor Who Jon Pertwee. They must have been desperately short of money, as I can't think of anything else which might have induced them to appear in a production as dire as this one. Dors, admittedly, was none too fussy in the latter part of her career about the sort of films she appeared in- indeed, she seemed to make unfunny sex comedies her stock-in-trade. A sad decline for someone who was once a beautiful and gifted young actress. Corbett is today best remembered for his part in the highly successful sit-com "Steptoe and Son", but its very success was a mixed blessing for Corbett who forever afterwards was so closely associated with comedy in the public mind that found it difficult to secure parts in the sort of serious dramas he preferred. As for Pertwee, he seems to have fallen victim of a "curse of Doctor Who"; few of the classic Doctors, with the exception of Peter Davison, are much remembered for anything they did after leaving the show.

One could not, however, call the leading man Christopher Neil a well- known actor; I had never heard of him before. Apparently Barry Evans of "Mind Your Language" fame (or should that be infamy?) was originally slated to play Bob, but when he had to pull out Neil took his place. I can only think that he was cast on the basis of his physical resemblance to Evans, which is considerable, rather than on the basis of his charisma or his talents, which are virtually non-existent. Evans himself was never a great actor, but at least he would have been better than this. Neil was only to make one more film after this, another one of the "Adventures" series, and I can't say I'm surprised.

I refer to Adventures of a Private Eye" as a "sex comedy", which is how films of this type were generally known at the time, but in fact they were not particularly erotic even when compared to fairly softcore offerings like the "Emmanuelle" franchise. As for comedy, well most of them were not particularly comic either. A "comedy", after all, is supposedly a film marked by wit and humour, and these are characteristics in which most so-called "sex comedies", this one included, are singularly lacking. The only people likely to find it funny are those who find the idea of a man being seduced by an endless succession of frustrated housewives to be a capital joke in its own right. There may have been a few cinema-goers of this type about in the seventies, but today they will be a lot thinner on the ground. Even in 1977 the film's main selling-point was probably not its attempts at humour but the prospect of a few brief glimpses of nudity. Today, when nudity has become commonplace even in mainstream movies, it would seem to have no selling-points at all. Why the obscure cable TV network London Live thought it was worth broadcasting recently is beyond me. It only avoids the minimum 1/10 mark because I generally reserve that for films that are so bad they're funny. This one is so bad it's unfunny. 2/10.

A very bizarre farce dealing with the oversexed Christopher Neil who discovers that the best way to find more sex is to pretend that you're a private detective and pop in and out of places, sometimes as an intruder because you never know when you're going to find a lonely housewife. Neil pretends to be the head of an agency when client Suzy Kendall shows up and he ends up in several bizarre situations, ultimately in drag (with a female Liza impersonator no less!) and in a seance with weird Madame Medea (Anna Quayle) and other assorted weirdos.

This is indeed too weird to be completely horrible, but it's also too weird to describe. Outside of the Liza shtick, there is a funny incident including a naked man and a mouse trap and a scene on a row boat with Neil making love to Diana Dors as the boat sails down the river and a crew team sails by as the coach (on a bicycle) screams over and over "In, out!" But for the most part, it's rather lame, mostly very unfunny. I have to say that the Liza impersonator is probably the highlight because it's one of the rare times when you see one and it's actually a woman!