Escort Girls

Last updated
Escort Girls
Escort girls.jpg
DVD cover
Directed by Donovan Winter
Written byDonovan Winter
Produced byDonovan Winter
Starring
Cinematography
  • Gus Coma
  • Austin Parkinson
Edited byDonovan Winter
Production
company
Donwin Productions
Distributed byVariety
Release date
  • 1974 (1974)
Running time
95 minutes
CountryUnited Kingdom
LanguageEnglish

Escort Girls is a 1974 sexploitation film written, produced and directed by Donovan Winter and starring Helen Christie, Brian Jackson, David Dixon, Veronica Doran and David Brierly. [1] Its working title was All Lovers Are Strangers. [2]

Contents

Plot

Set in London, the film tells six stories of people seeking companionship in the run-up to Christmas.

In the film's epilogue, the normally shy and reserved Hugh arrives at work and greets his female colleagues by cheerfully slapping one of them on the rear with his morning newspaper.

Cast

Critical response

Gavin Millar of The Listener gave the film one star out of four. Reviews in The Daily Telegraph , the Daily Mail and The Guardian were negative. [3]

Richard Combs of The Monthly Film Bulletin described Escort Girls as a "sexploiter with pretensions" whose acting "is better than might be expected." He added that Winter "profitably pays as much attention to all the background flummery of the social settings ... as he does to the walking clichés who inhabit them." [4]

Duncan Fallowell of The Spectator questioned the choice of title, pointing out that the film features both female and male escorts. He commented: "This may not be a withering triumph of cinematic art, but it is certainly a sight better than most of the films into whose bag it has been put ... The stories do have point – not much, perhaps, but what there is you do get – and it does add up to more than an excuse for titillation. Also I chuckled a lot, if that is any recommendation." [5]

In his introduction to Nucleus Films' 2011 DVD release of Escort Girls, Darius Drewe praised the film as Winter's best demonstration of his "multi-layered", "singular" vision. He suggested that while the film touches on themes of realism and loneliness, certain elements, such as the story of Emma and Wayne, are more about "how sometimes life is neither tragedy nor fairy tale, just matter-of-factly unremarkable." He criticised the pacing, commenting that the plot "seems to amble sexlessly for 60 minutes before remembering what film it's in and suddenly jumping to several consecutive scenes of softcore action." He compared the structure of the film – "a series of vignettes" – to that of the comedy drama Saturday Night Out (1964). [6]

In a review for the website The Spinning Image, Graeme Clark comments: "Until the cast begin taking their clothes off, this is achingly slow, and you're not sure if it's meant to be a comedy or not, but things pick up when the mood turns to sleaze ... [All of the characters except Hugh] ... come across as pretty strange, illustrating the gap between the sophistication it aspired to and the rather sour, seedy reality it ended up as." [7]

Commentator Leon Hunt considers Escort Girls to be one of a number of films that he dubs "suburban report" features: films employing a "multiple narrative" built around a "thematic focus" (in this case, characters' use of escorts) "and/or a narrator, storyteller or 'expert' to guide us through". He suggests that the virginal character David roots the film's impression of "suburban sensibility" in ideas of a "last sexual outpost" or "notion of 'catching up', a sort of sexual democracy." [8]

See also

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References

  1. "Escort Girls". British Film Institute Collections Search. Retrieved 28 October 2023.
  2. "Escort Girls (1974)". bfi.org.uk. London, UK: British Film Institute. Archived from the original on 6 October 2019. Retrieved 6 October 2019.
  3. Combs, Richard, ed. (December 1974). "5 Critics on the Month's Films". The Monthly Film Bulletin . Vol. 41, no. 491. London, UK: British Film Institute. ISSN   0027-0407. OCLC   2594020. Back cover.
  4. Combs, Richard (June 1974). Combs, Richard (ed.). "Escort Girls". The Monthly Film Bulletin. Vol. 41, no. 485. London, UK: British Film Institute. pp. 124–125. ISSN   0027-0407. OCLC   2594020.
  5. Fallowell, Duncan (16 November 1974). "Cinema: Doing It To Death". The Spectator . pp. 636–637. ISSN   0038-6952. OCLC   1766325.
  6. Drewe, Darius (2011). It'll Be Lonely This Christmas: An Exploration of Escort Girls (DVD liner notes). Nucleus Films. NN0009.
  7. Clark, Graeme. "Escort Girls Review (1975)". thespinningimage.co.uk. Archived from the original on 8 November 2018. Retrieved 6 October 2019.
  8. Hunt, Leon (1998). British Low Culture: from Safari Suits to Sexploitation. London, UK; New York City, New York: Routledge. pp. 94, 106. ISBN   9781136189432.