Au Pair Girls (1973)

What makes it different from others?

It isn't all that great, actually. Really cheesy and very predicable of how certain scenes are gonna turn play out. However, I guess that's the charm of it all, because I would consider this one of my guilty pleasures.

Just intense enough to provide a much-needed diversion, just lightweight enough to make you forget about it soon after it’s over. It’s not exactly “good,” per se, but it does what it sets out to do in terms of putting us on edge, which makes it … successful?

Great movie. Not sure what people expected but I found it highly entertaining.

Reason 1: Boobs. Due to the vintage of this movie, you are seeing all REAL boobs. All other reviews aside, this is a soft core movie. Plot, blah, blah...this is a great boob movie, period. There are many scenes of toplessness and more. Some of the best real, natural boobs ever caught on film. A must have on blu-ray or better for any boob lover.Reason 2: Bush. Again, the date of this movie dictates forested naughty bits. You do see this, many times. Awesome.Reason 3: Aviation history. Watch the opening credits to accurately see how people flew before the 747 and other wide-bodies. There's even a Russian airliner shown. Also shown are old terminals and many bygone airlines.Remember, this is first, foremost and lastly a boob movie. If you love clothed women, watch something else.

I decided to check this movie out on Netflix in spite of the uninspiring description given for it, which made it sound like a typical grade B- exploitation flick, just because I wanted to see Gabrielle Drake in something other than reruns of the 1960's TV series *UFO*. But granting that I'm an American too young to have seen much of this genre of films from this era, I found this movie much more enjoyable than I expected. It was thoroughly professionally produced, with consistent and thoroughly professional acting, editing, photography and comedic effects and timing from one end to the other. The plot -- actually, plots (here there are four of them) work perfectly well for what they are, are not especially predictable, and are light on the clichés, and there is some pretty witty dialog, too. Several times I caught myself laughing out loud. Moreover, the, er, mature parts actually fit the true definition of that word for a change, as it seemed to me that the filmmakers were not the least bit shy about how they handled them, being quite unembarrassedly frank to the point of in-your-face (not to mention actually more believable in certain small details than typical American-made Cinemax 2:00 AM fare) in the way they were handled. It may not be high art, but like, say, *Gilligan's Island*, I thought it was quite good for what it was. I'm not surprised to learn that the director actually seems to have a reputation for doing good stuff in other genres.

So, it's cheesy sexploitation from the 70s, but it is really funny. It's like watching Benny Hill with nudity. The nudity is all part of the comedy.Gabrielle Drake manages to lose her clothes in a barn with the employer's son after they break down in the country. They never do make it home.Astrid Frank is with an older couple. She has no qualms about parading around naked. Even when she is dressed, knickers are optional. She manages to get picked up by a sheik on her first night.Me Me Lai of cannibal fame is with a very wealthy family. The son is a pianist - and a virgin! He gets lucky before everyone else.Nancie Wait is in the hands of a wild daughter her first night. She ends up rocking away her virginity with a rocker.Lots of laughs.

The "saucy" misadventures of four au pairs who arrive in London on the same day in the early 1970s. There's a Swedish girl, a Danish, a German and a Chinese. The story contrives to get the clothes off all of them, involve them in some Carry On-type humour and couple them with various misfits from the British film and TV culture of the time, including Man About the House star Richard O'Sullivan, future Coronation Street rogue Johnny Briggs and horror film stalwart Ferdy Mayne (playing a sheik). There's a pretty risqué amount of female nudity on display, for those who like that kind of thing (but obviously nothing hardcore).Most of the film is pretty thin and inconsequential; the girls are stereotypes, and German Anita especially suffers from some kind of infantalising disorder - she's a moron obsessed with colour TV who acts like a kind of uninhibited child & dresses to deliberately show her private parts; in another more serious film, she would be a psychiatric case. The most interesting section of the film involves the Swedish girl being taken to a club in London where some dodgy types are still trying to swing, being seduced by a middle-aged rocker, losing her virginity and realising that the scene is not for her. These sequences have some energy in them and point to a more intriguing film than we've ended up with, in which promiscuity and the dregs of the music business and upper classes live soulless and seedy lives (there's a fine turn by John Standing as an impotent public school roué). The strangest of the stories has the Chinese girl (future cannibal film veteran Me Me Lay) getting off with her childish piano prodigy employer, falling mutually in love with and then leaving in the middle of the night for no good reason at all, except some orientalist notion that "Chinese birds are inscrutable, ain't they?!" The film is pretty demeaning to its women characters and there's a smattering of homophobia in the dialogue and one of the characterisations. The end is striking, as Mayne's sheik for no earthly reason (except they have to end the film somehow) whisks all of the girls away to his Arab kingdom for what looks to all the world like a future in the white slave trade, which they are all delighted about.Stuff and nonsense for the most part then, but directed with a fair amount of skill by veteran Val Guest, which puts it as a piece of film-making a notch above most of the 70s Brit sexploitation flicks.