Today, would have been the 80th birthday of the long-forgotten actress named Mary Millington. Blonde, petite and delicately beautiful, she was the undisputed queen of an equally forgotten genre of cinema – the 1970s British sex comedy. There’s even a blue plaque in Soho celebrating Mary and her most successful film, Come Play With Me.
Seamy cinemas in Soho were the natural home for Millington’s films but they were also shown in ABCs and Odeons all over the country. When I was at school, I worked at my local Odeon, which had three screens. Upstairs in screen one, you could see the big new release. Downstairs in screen two, last week’s big new release. And, hidden away in screen three, British sex comedies.
Cheaply made and fairly harmless, they weren’t hardcore porn – just saucy, oddly innocent British comedies
Cheaply made and fairly harmless, they weren’t hardcore porn – just saucy, oddly innocent British comedies. Sex was always on the table – sometimes literally – but Keeping it Up Downstairs or Confessions of a Window Cleaner were about the limit of their depravity.
The occasional offering, especially if Mary Millington was in it, might be a bit hornier and pornier but otherwise, despite their X certificates, they were hardly more shocking than a Carry On film.
Shy and shifty regulars would shuffle in and mumble ‘Numfree, please,’ seemingly too ashamed to name the films they’d come to see. Given that their titles included Erotic Inferno and Snow White and the Seven Perverts, you can understand why.
The audience themselves weren’t perverts, just disconsolate members of the public – always alone – whose sex lives were either over or never likely to begin. Those who watched these films may have been ashamed of doing so but those who appeared in them certainly weren’t. Even though I was underage, I saw a fair number of familiar TV favourites caught with their pants down. Even Robert Lindsay, he of the Royal Shakespeare Company, turns up in Adventures of a Taxi Driver.
The only screen three favourite I clearly remember was called The Office Party in which a party is thrown for a secretary who’s about to get married. It quickly descends into a bawdy shagfest (‘Ooh, I can see why you’re the best man!’) and featured Johnny Briggs as a very keen participant. Poor Johnny was mortally embarrassed because the film was released just as he became Mike Baldwin in Coronation Street.
Come Play with Me was also a big hit and so Mary Millington was, briefly, a big star. The cinema manager – a sleazy veteran of Soho sex cinemas – knew her well. He brought her along for an unofficial premiere of her next film, the snappily titled Confessions from the David Galaxy Affair and that was when I met her.
Despite her fame and beauty, there was a timid and forlorn fragility about her. A few months later, aged just 33, she died by her own hand.
Rather poignantly, the British sex comedy died with her. The advent of video tapes meant sex films could be made and distributed far more cheaply, and those who wanted to see them no longer had to visit a cinema.
Lewd and inappropriate as those films would seem now, they were unremarkable in what were very different times. This was an era when strippers were a regular feature of pubs and working men’s clubs – a time when The Sun was Britain’s best selling newspaper and on its third page every morning was a topless model. None of these things were nearly as explicit as the online porn which anyone now has instant access to. Time has made Playboy and Page 3 girls now seem almost quaint.
Given the sad fate suffered by Mary Millington, perhaps Page 3 and the good old British sex romps weren’t quite as much fun as they appeared. So on what would have been her birthday, maybe it’s best to look back and be thankful for the demise of the kind of films that made her famous. Until we consider what’s replaced them.
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