Indicator Delivers the Daily Male Gaze

DIRECTED BY STANLEY LONG/1976, 1977, 1978

BLU-RAY STREET DATE: APRIL 26, 2022/INDICATOR

Here you go mate; what’s all this then?  Oh, my- !  It’s a very thick box full to bursting with slap-facey tripe!  

Following a career that covers both legitimate cinema and nudie stag reels numbering over 150, filmmaker Stanley Long opted to blend the two, thrice.  Observing the success of the lightweight and laddie sex-farce Confessions series (Confessions of a Window Cleaner [1974]; Confessions of a Pop Performer [1975]; Confessions of a Driving Instructor [1976]; and Confessions from a Holiday Camp [1977]), Long went forward with his own such series.  Ever a stan of filming attractive, scantily, and unclad ladies as well as the subsequent blokes falling from ladders and running into things, the formula felt like a match.  Box office receipts validate his efforts; taste and basic standards of comedic execution beg to differ.

The resulting Adventures films- X-certificates back in the day but American Rs by today’s standards- are a triptych of bawdy, bawky comedies of increasing returns that still nonetheless end in a toilet.  Adventures of a Taxi Driver (1976), Adventures of a Private Eye (1977), and Adventures of a Plumber’s Mate (1978)- all included in this gobsmackingly lavish and densely packed limited edition Blu-ray box set from the fine folks at Indicator- are each too pants for pants (or, for that matter, any other garment).  In Stanley Long’s London, the male gaze could settle in for a male graze.  Welcome to working class London, where every day it’s a bit nippley out.  

Essentially, these are generally disconnected tales of insufferable lads always getting up to this n’ that.  In the first film, it’s Barry Evans; in films two and three, it’s Christopher Neil.  While both are plenty game for whatever concocted humiliation filmmaker Stanley Long lobs their way, their drummed-up everyman charm is not remotely enough to win us over.  In fact, no amount of duty-free, connection-free free-and-easy getting on with the ladies offsets their prickliness.  Across the board, these not-so-fine fellows come off as perpetually irritated and myopic chauvinists in their impatience with anyone else.  Not that depth of character (to any degree, really) ought to be an expectation for the contents of this “sex comedy threesome”.  (And a heads-up- don’t go looking for any actual threesome herein, nor great comedy, really.  Nobody, and I mean nobody, is getting that lucky here).  There’s an audience for all this, but even grading on a curve landscaped by Benny Hill himself can’t usher these to any kind of higher ground. 

Yet, here we go, headlong into an all-new impressively sturdy limited edition (only 6,000 copies for the UK and USA, individually numbered) Blu-ray set marking the world premiere of the series on the format.  Despite whatever warnings are issued here, if you’re the type of collector who goes in for such ballyhoo, you’re no doubt tempted by the thing.  Let’s take a look at the individual titles, shall we?

Adventures of a Taxi Driver (1976)

The promised hijinks commence with that most hilarious of things, a terminally troubled and depressed girl.  When she hails our protagonist’s cab for a ride to the London Bridge, his question of which end she’d prefer nets him the answer of “The middle”.  Once on the ledge, intent on ending it all, the intended comic payoff seems to be that he’s so insistent that she pay her fare that he doesn’t recognize that she’s about to do herself in.  “There there, good lady, let me drive you home.”  Naturally, this leads to them falling into bed together.  Whawwh!!

Falling into bed with his attractive female fares simply seems to be part of the job for our unappealing cruisin’ Casanova, cabbie Joe North (a round-headed and ever-leering Barry Evans).  One would never know it, however, based on his happy/stunned direct addresses to the camera every time a purty bird crosses his eyeline.  If such gawky reaction shots are your idea of funny, Adventures of a Taxi Driver will have you in absolute stitches!

The “hilarity” of the attempted bridge suicide is chased closely by a separate “sexy” encounter that punchlines with a stripper being violated (off frame, thankfully) by her pet snake.  Wooooff!!  It’s not enough that this stuff misfires comedically about as much as anything can; it’s also poorly shot.  All three of these films have dull flat lighting and utilitarian-at-best framing.  Suitable enough for the uncomely kitchen-sink aesthetic of the movie, particularly Joe’s apartment with his boisterous mother, played by Diana Dors.

None of those shortcomings stop various Blu-ray contributors from lauding to the contrary.  With this box set in hand, one needn’t look too far for head-scratching accolades about the whole Adventures series, particularly Adventures of a Taxi Driver (the worst of the bunch, really), which did better box office in the U.K. in 1976 than Scorsese’s Taxi Driver.  If only Scorsese had thought to have a fully bare-bummed Robert De Niro caught in the act, and subsequently falling off a bedroom window ladder, and then proceed to desperately run about in the nude, Marty’s film might’ve landed like this one.

Adventures of a Private Eye (1977)

The aesthetic harshness and upfront unpleasantries of its predecessor are largely rubbed out for the following year’s Adventures of a Private Eye.  Shot on 35mm film instead of Adventures of a Taxi Driver‘s 16mm and carrying on with more of a plot as opposed to a collection of related vignettes, this one is said by some to be the peak of all this.  I say it’s not, though in the moment, this critic was braced for it to indeed be the pinnacle.  

Long’s would-be Adventures leading man Barry Evans is switched out for future platinum record producer Christopher Neil, who’s better anyhow.  Much of the lurid frozen-faced re-action shot humor of Taxi Driver is ditched, as is most of the direct-addressing the camera rubbish.  Evans’ Joe North is now Neil’s Bob West, again a bumbler on the outs with life.  West wants more than anything to be a bona fide private eye.  

Jon Pertwee of Doctor Who fame plays Bob’s sophisticated boss who is prominent in all manner of dicking.  (Just ask his secretary!)  He claims that bugging is the key to success in the field. “In time, we’ll make you a successful bugger!”  Well, let’s not hold our breaths.  West is a bumbling blockhead to the end; Long would have it no other way.  Regardless, when it comes to “fake it ‘til you make it”, his protagonists have it down pat.  At this point, one gets the impression that Mr. Long himself knew a thing or two about faking it.  

Private Eye and all its spooky house shenanigans and criminal intrigue and such afford the film the trilogy’s most opportunities for gags.  Some even land well.  For this, Long seems to value it the highest.  It culminates in a fully functional farcical fracas, thanks mostly to the dedicated chops of Adrienne Posta as the dithering Liza Minnelli impersonator, Lisa Moroni.  Posta absolutely steals every bit she’s in and then some.

Hilary Pritchard plays a chirpy bored housewife whose wild whips & leather come-one threaten to get Bob West caught with a corpse he’s unable to get rid of.  And if he gets caught, his nervous client Suzy Kendall won’t inherit the fortune she’s angling for.  Angela Scoular (On Her Majesty’s Secret Service) is yet another bored housewife, mistaking Bob for a plumber.  Soon enough, miss…!

Disc two also offers a Super 8 film version of Adventures of a Private Eye, cut down to sixteen incomprehensible minutes for home presentation.  This cut is scratchy and blotchy but surprisingly well colored and it sounds decent, to boot.  It cuts off just as our protagonist, stranded outdoors in his undershorts, stumbles, and falls face-first into an open grave.   And lookout, here comes the funeral processional!  Blimey, they’ve killed him off!

Adventures of a Plumber’s Mate (1978)

Chop-chop!- These pipes aren’t going to unclog themselves!  Is there a plumber to be had?  No?  Oh dear.  

Gags (such as they’ve been in Taxi Driver and Private Eye), also, slow to a trickle in this third and final original installment in this series. Christopher Neil is back, though this time as the different-in-name-only Sid South (hardly a new direction for him… but I digress…)- not a plumber, but near in proximity to one.  Good enough, yes?  No.  Poor Sid wishes he were a plumber, but the old man who runs the local dilapidated plumbing shack, Mr. B.A. Crapper (Stephen Lewis), won’t give him much of a chance.  One day, fortune favors Sid with a gig, leaving him with an antique toilet seat which he promptly dumps at a secondhand shop.  But wouldn’t you know it, under the paint, the thing is solid gold!  This puts Sid on the wrong side of meany thugs, and in the middle of the second most plot any of the Adventures films have bothered with. (Private Eye has a blackmail plot, because it has to).

Don’t worry, it doesn’t last long.  The whole mess resolves right quickly, ushering the movie into more awkward exposure than either previous outing.  Embarrassment, humiliation, and narrow escapes (usually because a husband is coming home, look out!), dominate the comedy as always, though it more or less withers as it goes.  The opening capper- Nina West suddenly left in the street stark nekkid once the flimsy dress she was wearing tears off with Sid’s motor scooter- is what amounts to an all-time classic Adventures bit.  (The still-helmeted and birthday-suited and stunned West is the dominant image on the poster for the later compilation film, Best of the Adventures).  

The best bit in the movie, and maybe the series, features Prudence Drage, one of Long’s favorites (she’s also in Adventures of a Taxi Driver), as a horny housewife who handcuffs her lingerie-clad self to her bed frame, then handcuffs Sid to her just as hubby notifies her that he’s coming home.  Crickey, she’s lost the key!  But she thinks it’s downstairs.  So, down the narrow staircase they inch, like some sort of kinky Twister challenge with a detached bed frame in the awkward mix.  Drage is featured in a new fourteen-minute interview on disc three, happily regaling us with tales from her long career, as well as no shortage of self-deprecating quips.

Later in the movie, Sid’s plumbing misadventures will stiffly find himself trapped in a girls’ locker room shower stall as one young lady after another file through for a refreshing wash.  Despite the ludicrously closed quarters, he goes unnoticed until Long feels the bit has run its course.  The filmmaker’s opinion of when that is versus this reviewer’s differs greatly, but there’s nothing to be done at this point.  Later still, his comely sensual masseuse clocks out mid-warmup, and is replaced with a massively portly woman.  Surprise, Sid!  Yeesh.  Later even still, he finds himself all wet in the kind of lavish S&M party that is far more in keeping with the hit Joan Collins vehicle, The Stud.  Well.  

Still, as garish as all of that is, is it truly worse than what Taxi Driver has to offer?  As evidenced in the Indicator set’s bonus features, particularly the newly-shot sit-down with Long’s biographer, Simon Sheridan, even the filmmaker considered the first entry the best.  Sheridan’s chat is heartfelt, as he and Long were in fact friends beyond the whole biography aspect.  The piece is an important if smallish component in the fairly vast whole of Indicator’s set.  That said, this reviewer remains in respectful disagreement with Sheridan (and by extension Long) on the vitality of the Adventures series in general, particularly Taxi Driver.

But, let’s face it, Chad- whatever the vigilant insistence of Mr. Long, the laughs are likely no one’s primary draw to these movies.  It’s the ladies who turn heads, and therefore deserve ample credit.  Regardless of the pending Uh-ohh! factor anytime one of them disrobes, it’s the disrobing that sets the ol’ ball a-rolling.  While bouncing boobies and bums are inherently comedic, (and the personal exposures rarely go beyond that), the participants themselves must first be plenty game and ideally demonstrate the timing.  Among the toppers are Judy Geeson, Suzy Kendall, and the aged icon of yesteryear, Diana Dors.

Anyhoo, as previously mentioned, there’s a fourth feature to Wade through, The Best of the Adventures (1981).  “It’s not what it looks like at all!!”  Ah, but it is: this feature-length compilation of Long’s series’ raciest and rudest bits is nothing more than a cobbled-together quickie for the early home videotape market.  Hastily hosted by broadcaster Peter Noble (one gets the impression that he spent less time shooting his interstitials than it takes to watch this nearly ninety-minute collection), this “Best of” shuffles scenes thematically, questionably starting with a montage of non-English-language samples.  Now there’s an immediate momentum killer, I’ll say!  Anyhow, the select content of The Best of the Adventures plays about as well as it does in its original films.  This, though, showcases all of these highlights in VHS-friendly pan and scan.  Oddly enough, such widespread cropping doesn’t read as much of a compromise.  In any case, this curiosity makes for a completist’s-approved extra on the Adventures of a Taxi Driver disc.

Stanley Long himself, despite being quite dead these days, is plenty present on this set.  Indicator has included 2008 audio commentaries on all three films wherein “Britain’s undisputed ‘King of Sexploitation’” gives the whats and wherefores of each outing.  There are gaps here and there, but for the most part Long is a fine guide, if a wee bit caught up in himself.  Sometimes he’s honest to a fault, such as when discussing Private Eye, let it slide, “Anything to get Chris’s clothes off, and get him close with the girl”.  Anything, for sure- Neil definitely puts his time running around the streets of London with all his clothes off.

On second supplementary tracks for each film are portions of archival audio interviews conducted in 1999 by Denis Gifford and Emmanuel Yospa for the British Entertainment History Project.  For all intents and purposes, these are a whole other set of director’s commentary tracks, these covering Long’s whole career.  It gets tedious, buts it’s okay.

Though many mentions are made of the 150-ish stag film reels that Long achieved his initial success in creating, Indicator doesn’t include any of that.  What are included are a couple of other most unusual short-ass films not made by Mr. Long- though he cameos in one of them.  Filmmaker Jan Manthey is clearly someone who A) harbors a big goofy soft spot for cheeky 1970s British sex comedies such as the Adventures, but also B) no budget whatsoever.  The title and spot-on title song of his 2004 labor of love, Can You Keep It Up with This, That and the Other for a Week?  are the blatantly funniest things about the film.  Though clearly, Manthey knew his stuff.  Gawking guys on bikes not only run into things, the bucket they were carrying winds up on their head for the dazed reaction shot, the crashed bike wheel still spinning away.

Manthey’s longer and nine percent more ambitious take of old British sex comedy, The Adventures of a Plumber in Outer Space (2008), goes all-in for Ed Wood-level sci-fi along with the cheesy titillation of Long et al, though sans any nudity of its own.  Which is all well and good, honestly.  Somehow, Manthey’s friends baring all in these basement sets would’ve been a different vibe than Long’s professional actors doing so in real locations back in the day.  In any case, these two shorts wear out their individual welcomes far too quickly.

Peter Sinclair’s Camera (2022) is an interesting chat with the cinematographer of all three films.  Sinclair discusses the earlier portion of his career when he did a lot of work for Long and Long’s good friend, horror legend Pete Walker.  He also shares unrelated stories of his later career in Los Angeles as a go-to maker of 1980s music videos.  He’s got a really choice story of shooting the “Like a Virgin” with Madonna and a lion.  Sinclair’s work on the Adventures may not impress, but he sure makes the on-the-fly low-budget shoots sound like good times.

Each of the three discs rounds out with original theatrical trailers and modest image galleries containing extensive promotional and publicity materials from Stanley Long’s personal archives.  Someone could’ve simply shuffled all this stuff into the rubbish bin, but instead, it’s ended up here.

Purchasers of this limited-edition set get an exclusive eighty-page book packed with goodies.  Per Indicator’s own blurb, here’s details on that: “There’s a new essay by Simon Sheridan, archival interviews with Stanley Long and actor-composer Christopher Neil, a letter from the producers complaining about the Adventures films’ treatment in the British press, newspaper articles on the controversy surrounding the casting of Elaine Paige in Adventures of a Plumber’s Mate while she was starring in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Evita, a look at the three films’ novelizations, an overview of contemporary critical responses, Jan Manthey on his short films, and film credits.”

Happily vulgar, this tittering, teetering trio is enough to leave a fellow right knackered.  Racy but never sexy, the Adventures prove too hot n’ bothered to bother much with being hot or much else.  But then, this sort of wordplay and whatnot was never Long’s bag anyhow.  For the directionless commoners he features, every day is a mufti day that inevitably gives way to a buff-ti day.  Ever naff and knicker-free, upper lips were ever stiff, among other things. So on that note, toodle pip and tinkety tonk, old bean!