Don't Just Lie There, Say Something

[glampunk]

Don't Just Lie There, Say Something (1973)

"Even the worst 'Carry Ons' were ten times better than this garbage. An absolute stinker."

Andy from London on the IMDB

Hilarious hi-jinks at the hippies crash pad, dad! Government Minister Sir William Mainwaring-Brown (Leslie Phillips), lecher and thorough scoundrel is having it off with both his secretary Miss Parkyn (Joanna Lumley) and Wendy, the wife of a top reporter, even though he's married to Joan Sims in battle-axe mode! His party - Tories, I'll wager - are in desperate need of sure-fire vote-winner so who better to launch an anti-porn bill? He and his hapless colleague Barry Ovis (Brian Rix) go on telly to launch their clean up campaign .... and attract the unwanted attentions of Johnny (Derek Griffith) and his groovy hippie gang into the bargain.

The hippies are dead set on scuppering the bill as the repercussions for permissiveness would be unthinkable. After much heated discussion among themselves of the "hands off our tits 'n bums!" variety, they hatch up a fiendish plot to discredit the squares! Having already learned that he's about to be married, they waylay simpleton Barry on his way to the church and redirect him to their psychedelic-ish pad where proto-glamster Damina (Katy Manning out of Dr. Who) and the crazy chicks make him very comfortable. Johnny then makes an anonymous call to the police who duly raid the place and the hippies do their best to convince the fuzz that they've been having a free love orgy moment with Ovis a willing participant! But their best laid plans come to nothing as Ovis legs it before the police suss who he is and heads for Mainwaring-Brown's secret love-nest to tell him what's going on. Damina follows him with her snazzy camera and, lucky for her, Sir William is having a busy afternoon entertaining both his mistresses (not at the same time, you understand: he's keeping them secret from each other). Before you can say 'hilarious mix up!', the police, the hippies, Purdy, the other mistress and whoever else is handy are laying siege to the place and hiding under the bed to avoid one another until who should burst in on them when they're all grappling in various states of undress but - Lady Mainwaring-Brown and the respectable old Cabinet Minister next door! Ooh er! Now everyone's for it!

Great cast and delightfully appalling Michael Pertwee script aside, arguably the very best thing about this is the fantastic glam/ hippie fashions which are miles better than anything in Dracula AD 1972. Katy Manning looks so at home in her waist-hugging loon pants it looks like she probably dressed like this all the time. As bedroom farces of the time go, it's barely worthy an AA rating but don't worry about that, it's a true classic of cinema.

[franklinmarsh]

They don't make 'em like that any more! Has Ray Cooney retired? Sounds loads more fun than Cold War romp Not Now, Comrade.

[Johnlprobert]

The last I heard Ray Cooney was being wooed by some big American studio

Not Now Darling & its follow-up Not Now Comrade are seriously awful British comedies. Anyone who's seen them will remember that they were stage farces filmed almost 'verbatim' for the screen, making the whole viewing experience static and dull. Both films were shot pretty much entirely on one set using something called the Multivista process. The details are all in John Hamilton's splendid Tigon book 'Beasts in the Cellar'.

[glampunk]

"Stage-bound", "static" and the uncompromising "shit" are all criticisms I've seen heaped upon Don't Just Lie There ..., and there's doubtless much truth in them as Michael Pertwee adapted it from his own Whitehall farce. I was so busy being distracted by the riot of colourful costumes and the antics of the groovy pseudo-hippies that I never paid it much attention.

Here's the 6 minute clip, What Jo Grant Did Next, from which I obtained the grabs.

[pulphack]

when i was but a lad, we used to live in the same street as this old dear who used to go to the TLR social club (don't ask, i don't know!) and they used to get free tickets for matinee performances. i remember seeing danny larue in panto, and robert morley and julian orchard in ben travers' banana ridge' (which was the introduction to a thrities farceur i still love today). my mum never got tickets for this sort of show, but these old dears at the TLR were experts on british sex comedies, as they saw 'em all. make of that what you will.

apropos of nothing, when me and my mum were crossing a side road by the theatre where we were going to see 'banana ridge' a speeding driver nearly knocked us down. his passenger was an appalled robert morley, whose look of surprise as we nearly went over his head i can recall even now...