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6 Degrees Entertainment

'The Mary Millington Movie Collection' [Blu-ray]
(Mary Millington, et al / 5-Disc Blu-ray / NR / 2021 / Screenbound Entertainment - MVD Visual)

Overview: This is a Special Collector's Edition (numbered and limited to 3,000) and is the very first 5-Disc Blu-ray release that features: 'Come Play With Me,' 'The Playbirds' and 'Confessions From the David Galaxy Affair.'

The special packaging means these 5-Discs (which also include brand new extras, including short films/docs, audio commentary and more) are bound within a rigid slipcase and there's even an 80-page booklet entitled, "The Mary Millington Collection Book" by Simon Sheridan.

Blu-ray Verdict: Released to commemorate the 40th anniversary of Mary Millington's death(by British label Screenbound Pictures), this special edition Blu-ray box-set opens with 'Come Play with Me' (1977).

For reasons totally unknown to me and to everyone else who has ever reviewed this film down the years, one imagines, 'Come Play With Me' was a MASSIVE box office hit in the UK, breaking records to become the longest running film to ever grace a UK cinema screen (it also ran in cinemas for an incredible four years!)

The plot is as follows - two forgers go on the run from a bunch of crooks and hide out in a health farm. From there the plot expands to include a government official on their trail, along with the crooks, a health farm where there are virtually no staff, and a bunch of young women turning up on a coach to run said health farm.

Lots of familiar faces from the period show up in this film, including Alfie Bass, Ronald Fraser, Henry McGee, Bob Todd, Ken Parry and many others.

For none of these people is the movie their finest hour, but they are all fun to watch and the film is kept moving along nicely. And yes, it was the movie that introduced us to Mary Millington, who, along with 20 other "naughty nurses" brought everything she could to her role!

Next up is 'The Playbirds' (1978) where the cover girls of a famous sex magazine are murdered one-by-one and the easily baffled British police can only think of one solution: To send one of their own in undercover!

I won't name the killer, of course, but I can tell you that the suspects make a rather colorful line-up. Which also provides an excuse for some varied location scenes, ranging from Speakers' Corner through Newmarket racecourse to a forest where some rather extreme witchcraft rituals look like getting out of hand!

Funniest is the moment when the baffled detectives think it's time to send in an undercover female cop to charm the publisher into giving her a centerfold, so they have to start by holding auditions at Scotland Yard.

Millington carries no conviction whatever as a police officer, but she certainly makes one heck of a stripper, and should have exploited the surprisingly common policewoman fetish with plenty of slow peeling-off of the dark blue livery of the law!

Then we get the 'Confessions from the David Galaxy Affair' (1979) where Playboy David Galaxy is a suspect in a robbery case and needs an alibi, and the only credible witness to his innocence won't help. Oh, and he also has to prove his mettle with "the only woman in the world who's never had an orgasm"!

Sadly, I have to report, and even in this new 2K restoration, this movie is a quite dreadful addition to the kitchen sink sexploitation movie genre that Britain was well known for in the '70s.

It's particularly bad due to the central casting of the ultra-sleazy Alan Lake as some kind of super stud who has his way with pretty much every woman in the movie.

Lake is a truly repulsive character here and you wonder just what the casting director was smoking. The film is generally unappealing and unerotic, with an odd sense of humor that doesn't translate well for the viewer.

I mean, who thought the scene of Lake farting in bed was funny? The pseudo-crime storyline is particularly moronic and unending and character actors like Tony Booth and Diana Dors seem faintly desperate by appearing, in truth.

The one thing this film has going for it is a good supply of attractive women, Millington among them, and of course they do disrobe regularly, but it's hardly a proper movie and these actresses deserved better.

Next we get 'Queen of the Blues' (1979) where seedy striptease club in London's West End becomes the target for unpleasant crooks. The club's owners are blackmailed into paying out large wads of cash, but star attraction Mary Millington saves the day with her energetic stripping.

Sadly, 'Queen of Blues' was the last film Millington appeared in before she is reported to have committed suicide, citing worries about going to jail, tax issues and police harassment. She also ran her own sex shop in London where she would also serve her fans and customers personally.

As for the movie's storyline, well, the club has been bought by two brothers, on the proceeds of an unexpectedly generous gift of cash from their uncle, of whose business affairs they know nothing.

But where's there's brass, there's muck, and the brothers soon get the offer they (supposedly) can't refuse from Mr. Nice and Mr. Nasty, played by the laddish Felix Bowness and the murderous Milton Reid.

The brothers are very poorly cast, especially the leader, played by the wimpish John East whose attempts to intimidate the gangsters are pathetically unconvincing.

He is almost as bad trying to impersonate Max Miller during the intervals, actually wearing one of the great man's suits. Incredibly, the two men had been close friends.

The elbow game is looking like a walkover by the mob until the surprise ending, which I won't obviously divulge, but which reveals how the uncle made his fortune and such.

Then we get 'Mary Millington's True Blue Confessions' (1980). For me, the life and early death of Mary Millington remains one of the saddest episodes of British cinema history.

A woman whose sexual honesty and openness was abused by business men who viewed her as little more than a cash cow.

This "tribute" has to be watched with open mouth as producer Sullivan uses it to make a quick killing and preach his own self-serving propaganda over someone else's grave.

Sex, death and politics don't really go side-by-side. We even have Marie Harper pretending to be Millington in her coffin!

Strangely the Millington story is an interesting one with rumors (let us be respectful of the dead) of cocaine running, high ranking prostitution, tax avoidance and hardcore pornography peddling (very illegal in the UK at the time.)

There was even a Channel 4 UK documentary 20 years after her death which used some of the very same footage.

Those wanting a sex film will be disappointed. Those that want to know more about the private life of Millington will be disappointed (they don't even tell us she was married).

Those that enjoy pornographers whining about their experiences and how they are shinning knights who operate at the cutting edge of media freedom will enjoy it though.

Lastly we get 'Respectable: The Mary Millington Story' (2015), an in-depth documentary chronicling her extraordinary life. According to this documentary, in her own sex shop that was aforementioned above, she would also sell under the counter materials which gained her the attention of the police resulting in raids.

However, she was a libertarian and campaigned to make adult materials available at a time when the UK had the most draconian laws in Europe.

Ergo, this eminently watchable documentary (so much more so than the one above) of the late, great Mary Millington, the porn star and glamour model who became a household name in 1970's Britain, is as full, as enriched and, at times, as sad as it needs to be.

The title actually comes from her quote: "I was born respectable, but I soon decided I wasn't going to let that spoil my life".

Through clips of Mary, including brief glimpses of her hard core loops, which seem playful, even innocent today, as well as interviews with family members, lovers, friends and colleagues, a fascinating story emerges.

Though it was to end in tragedy, there's lots of fun along the way, not least when Dudley Sutton amusingly disses and dismisses Mary's arch enemy, self-appointed Filth-Fighter General, Mrs Whitehouse.

Mary married Bob Maxted when she was eighteen, and he remained her husband to the end of her life, though it was an open marriage from early on.

The '60s and '70s were a time when the last vestiges of Victorian morality were breaking down, with their replacement by modern day taboos some way off.

Stories of suburban swinging and the legendary 'wife swapping' parties were rife, TV programs with sex scenes and partial nudity abounded, and for a time, newsagents and corner shops up and down the land were festooned with scores of different soft core sex magazines to an extent unimaginable today.

Indeed, some of these were becoming increasingly explicit, particularly those owned by David Sullivan, and it was these that brought Mary her fame. These are all Brand New 2K Restorations from Full Screen Presentations (1.66:1 - 1.78:1) enhanced for 16x9 TVs and comes with the Special Features of:

NEW! 'The Playbirds' audio commentary by biographer Simon Sheridan and director Willy Roe
NEW! 'Queen of the Blues' audio commentary by biographer Simon Sheridan and actor Allan Warren
NEW! 'Mary Millington's True Blue Confessions' audio commentary by biographer Simon Sheridan and executive producer David Sullivan
NEW! 'Ten Million Dirty Words' - a brand new featurette about Harry Knights, the Nottingham-based porn writer who helped create Mary's image
'Confessions of a Pixie' - an interview with Josie Harrison Marks, the daughter of 'Come Play With Me's director George Harrison Marks
'Mary on Location - Then and Now' travelogue revisiting the main locations in Mary's life and films
Respectable: The Mary Millington Story - audio commentary by director Simon Sheridan and the BFI's Sam Dunn
8mmillington - compilation of the 'tamer' sequences from Mary's hardcore 8mm films
Short Films:
Response - 8mm softcore short film (1974)
Wild Lovers - 8mm softcore short film (1974)
Party Pieces - 8mm softcore short film (1974)
Sex Is My Business - 8mm softcore short film (1975)
Mary Millington's World Striptease Extravaganza (1981)
'Come Play with Me- - original 1977 trailer

www.ScreenBound.co.uk www.MVDshop.com





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