Sunday, October 18, 2020

Movie review - "Secrets" (1971) **

Philip Saville, who directed this as well as providing the original story, earned his reputation making TV plays and this is like a TV play - serious, a bit pretentious, a series of two handers, a look at infidelity.

It's best remembered for Jacqueline Bisset's nude scene - and it's a dull movie so around twenty minutes in that's what you look forward to because there's not much going on.

It feels dodgy. It's one day in the life of a small family. Bisset and husband Robert Powell have a fight. She gets picked up in the park by a scruffy Scandinavian with a massive car phone. Maybe in real life Per Oscarssn was a stud muffin but to be frank he doesn't seem hot enough to Jackie B. Yet being a total stranger harassing her in the park seems to work - she goes to his place, he tells her about his dead wife, she dresses up as her, and they do it, and she has a topless orgasm, which is hot.

Meanwhile she's left her young daughter at the laundromat. She hangs out with the gardener and plants a kiss on him and he kind of responds then stops.

Robert Powell goes for an interview as a computer programmer and flirts with interviewee Shirley Knight. Or at least she seems to want to bonk him. That subplot was awful. so was the quasi pedophilia. That left Jackie Bi having afternoon sex.

It's meant to be significant. Saville went out with Diana Rigg for a long time - I think he was very good at charming stunningly attractive actresses into doing things.

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