Tigon British Film Productions were best-known as rivals of Hammer as makers of horror films, but their "Au Pair Girls" is an example of that other mainstay of the British cinema during the seventies, the softcore sex comedy. The reason why these two types of film should have been mainstays of the British cinema was that, at least during the earlier part of the decade, the British Board of Film Censors was considerably less censorious than the management of the country's television networks, so the cinema could cater for those with an interest in those subjects, primarily sex and horror, which were banned from the airwaves. (By the end of the decade the TV industry had started to catch up with the cinema in permissiveness).
During this period the figure of the au pair girl was something of a recognised sex symbol; every blue comedian's joke book contained at least one crack about lecherous husbands unable to keep their hands off the au pair, so making a sex film about their misadventures must have seemed an obvious step. Four au pairs- Anita (Swedish), Randi (Danish), Christa (German) and Nan (Chinese)- arrive at Heathrow Airport in order to take up their positions. Although nearly all au pairs in Britain at this period were European, Nan seems to have been added to the mix to make the film seem more exotic. Or possibly because an Anglo-Burmese actress just happened to be available. "Randi" is not a common baptismal name in Denmark, but was presumably used here to give the scriptwriter a chance to make some obvious puns.
The film then follows the "adventures" (euphemism for sexual couplings) of each of the four girls. There isn't a lot of plot beyond what is necessary to get from one sex scene to the next. Anita ends up as the lover of an Arab sheikh and eventually a member of his harem. Randi beds Stephen, the son of the family with whom she is staying, much to the disgust of his father. Christa starts off as a shy, innocent virgin, but is quickly converted to the cause of promiscuity by Carol, the daughter of her family, and both end up in bed with a hirsute rock star. The weirdest plot line is the one involving Nan. Like Randi, she seduces the son of her hosts, but whereas Stephen is a fairly normal young man, Nan's lover, Rupert, is a brilliant but immature concert pianist who behaves like a spoilt child. (Rupert's family home is Oakley Court in Berkshire, a stately home used in other films of the period such as "And Now the Screaming Starts!")
Plot, however, is not what sold films like this in the seventies. What the target audience of young men wanted to see was female flesh, and plenty of it, and they would not have been disappointed. Although all the couplings involved are heterosexual- it would be a number of years before it became obligatory for soft core sex comedies to include a token lesbian scene- director Val Guest somehow manages to get away without showing much male flesh, something in which his target audience would have had little interest.
"Au Pair Girls", however, has very little to interest modern viewers, even those interested in erotica, as like most seventies softcore it is very tame by today's standards. Seen as comedy it is feeble in the extreme, even though it features cameo appearances by mainstream comedy actors such as John ("Dad's Army") Le Mesurier and Richard ("Man about the House") O'Sullivan. (Those puns on Randi's name are about as close as it ever gets to anything resembling a joke). Gabrielle Drake, who plays Randi, was to go on to become a respected mainstream actress herself on British television and doubtless regarded this as one of the more embarrassing entries on her CV.
The film recently turned up on the specialist British film channel "Talking Pictures", but I cannot think why they showed it, except perhaps as an exercise in nostalgia for the now-ageing roués who would have flocked to it in the 1970s. 2/10
During this period the figure of the au pair girl was something of a recognised sex symbol; every blue comedian's joke book contained at least one crack about lecherous husbands unable to keep their hands off the au pair, so making a sex film about their misadventures must have seemed an obvious step. Four au pairs- Anita (Swedish), Randi (Danish), Christa (German) and Nan (Chinese)- arrive at Heathrow Airport in order to take up their positions. Although nearly all au pairs in Britain at this period were European, Nan seems to have been added to the mix to make the film seem more exotic. Or possibly because an Anglo-Burmese actress just happened to be available. "Randi" is not a common baptismal name in Denmark, but was presumably used here to give the scriptwriter a chance to make some obvious puns.
The film then follows the "adventures" (euphemism for sexual couplings) of each of the four girls. There isn't a lot of plot beyond what is necessary to get from one sex scene to the next. Anita ends up as the lover of an Arab sheikh and eventually a member of his harem. Randi beds Stephen, the son of the family with whom she is staying, much to the disgust of his father. Christa starts off as a shy, innocent virgin, but is quickly converted to the cause of promiscuity by Carol, the daughter of her family, and both end up in bed with a hirsute rock star. The weirdest plot line is the one involving Nan. Like Randi, she seduces the son of her hosts, but whereas Stephen is a fairly normal young man, Nan's lover, Rupert, is a brilliant but immature concert pianist who behaves like a spoilt child. (Rupert's family home is Oakley Court in Berkshire, a stately home used in other films of the period such as "And Now the Screaming Starts!")
Plot, however, is not what sold films like this in the seventies. What the target audience of young men wanted to see was female flesh, and plenty of it, and they would not have been disappointed. Although all the couplings involved are heterosexual- it would be a number of years before it became obligatory for soft core sex comedies to include a token lesbian scene- director Val Guest somehow manages to get away without showing much male flesh, something in which his target audience would have had little interest.
"Au Pair Girls", however, has very little to interest modern viewers, even those interested in erotica, as like most seventies softcore it is very tame by today's standards. Seen as comedy it is feeble in the extreme, even though it features cameo appearances by mainstream comedy actors such as John ("Dad's Army") Le Mesurier and Richard ("Man about the House") O'Sullivan. (Those puns on Randi's name are about as close as it ever gets to anything resembling a joke). Gabrielle Drake, who plays Randi, was to go on to become a respected mainstream actress herself on British television and doubtless regarded this as one of the more embarrassing entries on her CV.
The film recently turned up on the specialist British film channel "Talking Pictures", but I cannot think why they showed it, except perhaps as an exercise in nostalgia for the now-ageing roués who would have flocked to it in the 1970s. 2/10