Bedtime with Rosie (1975)

Not a British sex comedy, despite its title, the director’s previous film being Secrets of a Door to Door Salesman, the presence of Diana Dors, or the fact that the lead actor has the rather rude sounding name of Ivor Burgoyne...I’m sure he had.  Bedtime with Rosie has the feel of a passion project for Burgoyne (1926-2002), a little known Welsh actor whose career was otherwise restricted to television bit-parts and Northern theatre.  Not only does Burgoyne play the male lead here, for the first and only time in his career, but he also came up with film’s story and script.  Although it isn’t credited as such Bedtime with Rosie bears all the traces of being a filmed play.  It’s extremely set bound, largely confined to just the one location and pretty much a three hander between Burgoyne, Diana Dors and Una Stubbs.  The titular Rosie, played by Stubbs, is a heavily pregnant Scouse bird, who has made it down to London to stay at the seedy guest house run by her Aunt Annie (Dors).

Full of tall tales and a vivid imagination, Rosie claims the baby’s father is a Mr Perfect type and that she’ll soon be off to a bright future in Amsterdam.  Trouble is that Aunt Annie already has a lodger, Harry (Burgoyne) an uptight, sexually repressed Southerner...who is surely going to object to living under the same roof as an unwed mother to be.  Comical misunderstandings and verbal boxing matches between all three ensue, as does lots of jibber jabber about the permissive society... the North/South divide... free love... the generation gap... sex before marriage... etc, etc.  Characters laugh, cry, fall out, fall in love and fall out again...all during the space of just one night.  It’s very much a stage piece, occasionally opened up with ‘wacky’ fantasy scenes.  Rosie imagines her dream man (played by Stubbs’ real life husband, Nicky Henson) in various disguises...a biker, a hippie, a movie star.  Harry has a dream/nightmare in which he wanders around a building site, wearing a cardboard box and being chased by a man in drag.  Rosie flashes on the idea of Harry being a vampire who prowls around graveyards at night....far out, man!!

Bedtime with Rosie might have been a big deal and an after dinner conversation piece had it been made in the mid-Sixties, what with its once daring dialogue (“having it off”, “bloody”, “fairy”) but by 1974 the shock value of this type of kitchen sink realism must surely have seemed a little out of time.  Dors and Stubbs are both terrific, and given allot more to do here than their usual big screen appearances of the period.  Burgoyne, who often appears to be channelling Harold Steptoe in the role, doesn’t disgrace himself in the company of bigger names either.  Initially grumpy and condescending, Harry gradually becomes an understanding, shoulder to cry on as the film progresses, especially when Rosie’s facade begins to crumble.  She eventually admits that both she and her brother were molested as children, and that her pregnancy is the result of rape by her abusive boyfriend...rather than the happy union she’d have people believe.  Harry himself isn’t the middle aged virgin who has never slept with anything other than a hot water bottle, that he makes out to be either.

For a film that takes place on an obvious set, the sense of characters living on the low down in mid-1970s London is strongly evoked.  In that respect Bedtime with Rosie does have a slight ‘ships passing in the night’ kinship with director Wolf Rilla’s previous film Secrets of a Door to Door Salesman, another tale of a fish out of water trying to make it in the big smoke.  Sets and props here are a meticulous study in period detail, Tretchikoff paintings, out of the packet steak and kidney pies, HP Sauce bottles, wresting paraphernalia, a stash of dirty pics, a TV set blasting out static after shutdown. Then of course there is the 1970s Diana Dors, cutting both a sexual and grotesque figure as a middle aged man-eater...hoppling around with a walking stick and one leg in plaster, yet still shamelessly flaunting herself in a baby doll nightie. 

 

Ultimately though Bedtime with Rosie is a film about finding an unlikely friend and huddling up close to them in a big, bad world.  Rare excursions outside of the guest house paint London as a dirty, unfriendly place to be.  Rosie gets hassled by a drunk at an underground station whilst en route to her Aunt’s, and Harry visits a late night greasy spoon cafe where eternal jack-the-lad Johnny Briggs threatens to give him a “knuckle sandwich” for looking at Briggs’ girlfriend...sorry, ‘Bird’.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m glad Bedtime with Rosie exists, but I’d be hard pressed to figure out who the intended audience for this film was.  It amounts to 70 minutes of life losers yelling, bickering, airing their worse moments and generally not getting along.  Surely the exact thing that working class audiences went to the cinema to escape from back then, rather than be confronted with.  Equal parts bedroom farce and miserablist drama, without fully committing to either, it is no real surprise that Bedtime with Rosie didn’t exactly trouble the box-office or find an audience back then.  Briefly on video in the early 1980s, the releasing company, Iver Film Services, took to sexing up the title to Bedtime with Rosie (the theatrical and onscreen title is simply ‘Rosie’) a move that has more than a touch of desperation to it.  Chalk it up as another unloved and forgotten British film from the 1970s.

It is unlikely Diana Dors herself ever shed a tear over Bedtime with Rosie’s lack of success, especially as the film resulted in much legal drama and bad blood between herself and its director Wolf Rilla. The behind the scenes stuff about Bedtime with Rosie is a fascinating story in itself.  During the making of the film Dors and Rilla became close, socialising on set and at a health farm where Rilla extensively interviewed Dors about her private life and career and recorded their conversations on audio tapes.  Recordings that later became the subject of a legal battle between the two, after Dors tried to prevent Rilla transcribing the tapes and using them as the basis for a biography of her ‘Dors and Diana’.  It remains a question mark whether Dors was successful in shutting down Rilla’s biography of her.  The British Library doesn’t hold a copy of said book, and is of the opinion that it went unreleased.  Boston University, to which Wolf Rilla willed his personal effects, owns his original manuscript for ‘Dors and Diana’ but also records it as an unpublished work.  However, a Dors collector has recently come forward with claims to own a second hand copy of the book, even posting photos of it on Facebook in 2017, indicating that a few copies of Dors and Diana did indeed make it into the hands of the general public. It’s likely that the immediate threat of Rilla’s biography was a motivating factor in Dors writing the first of her own autobiographies, ‘For Adults Only’ which came out in 1978.

Aside from being the catalyst for this legal fallout and ensuing mystery, Bedtime with Rosie also offers up the sight of Nicky Henson in full biker regalia, blowing raspberries and breaking the forth wall by sticking two fingers up to the audience, as well as some (brief and presumably accidental) nudity from Una Stubbs.  So if you want to cross ‘watching Nicky Henson play a biker in a film that isn’t called Psychomania’ and ‘seeing Aunt Sally’s tit’ off the bucket list, then Bedtime with Rosie is the film you have to track down.      

 

Special thanks to ‘Soundtrack68!’ for help researching ‘Dors and Diana’