Can I Come Too (1979)

 

I'm of the generation that just about remembers the tail end of the fleapit cinema era...the broken down seats, the thick cigarette smoke penetrated only by the light from the projection booth, the usherettes selling ice cream and Kia-Ora in the intervals, the Pearl & Dean adverts. If you want to know what a down on its knees local cinema looked like in the late 1970s, Ray Selfe's 'Can I Come Too' takes you around every nook and every cranny of a fleapit cinema.

In his later years, Selfe was critical of the David Hamilton Grant films he was involved with, due to their avoidance of the three-act structure. Yet, Can I Come Too, the short sex film Selfe made outside of Grant's orbit, is very much cut from the same cloth. It's a shambolic, ensemble piece that barely goes anywhere in terms of narrative, and owes its existence to the fact that a distributor urgently needed a support feature. New Realm put out Can I Come Too as the co-feature to their Jackie Collins adaptation The World is Full of Married Men. A few years later, in the early days of videotape, it formed half of a VHS double bill with James C. Katz's striptease documentary The Rise and Fall of Ivor Dickie (1978).

As with David Hamilton Grant movies like Under the Bed and The Office Party, Can I Come Too is closer in spirit to a sitcom episode than a feature film, but with the kind of nudity and sexual humour that you couldn't get on TV back then. The creation of Can I Come Too appears to have mirrored what little plot there is here, sex film producer Manny Glowpick reaches out to his contacts in the low end of the film industry in order to stage a lavish film premiere at the less than lavish Savoy cinema in Brixton. Selfe likewise looks to have put together his film with similar haste, calling on friends and family members to pose as actors, hiring a few aging entertainers to do their thing and a few dolly birds willing to bare all. The involvement of the latter possibility being a motivation in ensnaring the former. For a near plot less 38 minute film, Can I Come Too sure has allot of characters to contend with. The out of their depth staff making a hash of arranging the premiere includes manager Mr. Royal (Charlie Chester), cleaning lady Laverne (Rita Webb), ticket lady Vera (Sue Longhurst), and a pair of usherettes (Lindy Benson, Maria Harper) who dream of starring in movies like 'King Kong meets Emmanuelle'. Meanwhile projectionist Terry (Graham White) fears that the arrival of a new projectionist called Charlie will cramp his style as the cinema's resident stud. Only for Charlie (Julia Rushford) to turn out to be female, who despite being a womens libber isn't averse to getting her boobs out in the projection booth either. Elsewhere porn star Gloria Overtones (Susan Silvie), the special guest of honour, is more concerned with leaving a good impression on her posh future mother in law, Lady Wickhampton (played by Selfe's wife Jean), who initially mistakes Gloria for a black woman after catching Gloria wearing a mud-pack and hearing she is from Brixton.

Such is the obscurity of Can I Come Too these days that it is likely to only be tracked down and seen by the most dedicated of those with a jones for 1970s British pop culture. The irony is that the film itself in no way, shape or form shares that love for the time period it was made in. For all of the tits and intended giggles here, there is much despair in Can I Come Too at the state of Britain in 1979. In the eyes of Can I Come Too, cinemas have just become places for old people to sleep in and keep warm, the world outside of the Savoy is the dangerous stomping ground of football hooligans and punk rockers, the sex films that British film industry churns out are an embarrassment and it gets teary eyed for the past, with Rita Webb's character lamenting the passing of an age of proper movie stars like Jean Harlow and Mary Pickford. It's a backwards looking, living only for the past film, never likely expecting that its own era of British sex films, football hooligans, fleapit cinemas and punk rockers would one day exert a similar fascination over future generations. Young bare flesh might be the main selling point, but the characters that Can I Come Too really cares about tend to be the middle aged or senior ones. All of whom have an air of wasted, unfulfilled lives about them. George Skinner (Tony Wright) the owner of the restaurant next door to the cinema is estranged from his daughter and is in the doldrums over his business going down the pan. Laverne, played by Rita Webb, is a tragicomic character who wanted to be a glamorous movie star, but makes do with her pathetic connection to the movies, of being a cleaning lady at a fleapit cinema. Unusually for a British sex comedy the running theme here is finding love in later life. Freddy (Mark Jones) the bumbling film publicity man with an extreme stutter that anticipates Michael Palin in A Fish Called Wanda by a few years, becomes besotted by ticket lady Vera, played by Jones' Keep It Up Jack co-star Sue Longhurst. Senior sparks begin to fly between Laverne and Manny, while George Skinner is unexpectedly reunited with his ex-wife.

It is the older hands who largely shine here. Admittedly Chic Murray seems to be phoning it in and doesn't have the same vigor he had in The Ups and Downs of a Handyman, but Charlie Chester is value for money and Rita Webb is the person that Selfe clearly regarded as the real star of his movie.
Murray and Webb were by this point veterans of saucy cinema, but Charlie Chester was more of a coup, the comedian's career having largely been played out on the radio. While his appearance here might have raised the eyebrows of his older fans, Chester was no stranger to sleaze. Turning to a writing career in the 1970s, Chester knocked out sex and violence fuelled books for publisher New English Library that were completely at odds with his family friendly image. Symphony and Psychopath (1975) concerns auto-erotic asphyxiation, Soho prostitution and the murder of a pregnant woman, and also sees Chester boning after schoolgirls in print. In comparison being in close proximity to a few bare boobs in Can I Come Too must have seemed a relatively vanilla experience. Under a pseudonym, Chester even wrote a gay themed serial killer novel called Even the Rainbow's Bent (1977) in which a sexually confused man is encouraged to adopt a female persona by his domineering mother, only to end up killing schoolgirls.

a right pair of charlies

The younger cast members of Can I Come Too are less of a standout bunch, consisting of third tier sex comedy people like Lindy Benson, Maria Harper and Vicki Scott, all of whom arrived too late on the scene to make much of an impact on it. One movie and he's done stud, Graham White, looks like he'd have been better suited to playing Dr. Frank-N-Furter’s creation in The Rocky Horror Show. Given a larger share of the spotlight than usual here is Susan Silvie, who was sort of the poor man's Suzy Mandel, though did later achieve a degree of notoriety by playing a woman who gives birth to a fully grown man in the sci-fi grossfest 'Xtro'. In Can I Come Too, Silvie looks, sounds and dresses so much like Suzy Mandel it is positively uncanny, and she would later add to the illusion by billing herself as Susie Silvie. To add to the confusion, the film Blonde Ambition starring the real Suzy Mandel was released to UK cinemas in 1984 as 'Can I Come Again', making it sound like a sequel to Can I Come Too, starring the Suzy Mandel equivalent of Bruce Le.

Keep your eyes peeled for a 'blink and you'll miss her' appearance by Annette Poussin. Distinguished by her cute, pudding bowl haircut Annette was a regular in blue movies like 'No Morals' and 'Pop Concert'. Her fleeting cameo, and the fact that Selfe himself was no stranger to hardcore pornography, opens up the possibility that a stronger version of Can I Come Too might exist. While a potential 'something blue' aspect to the film is still a question mark, there is plenty of evidence of 'something borrowed' here. The film recycles a joke about a fictional movie called Sore Throat, a pun on Deep Throat, from 1975's Sexplorer, and John Shakespeare's theme tune was a track dusted down from his soundtrack to the 1966 movie 'Death is a Woman'.

Aside from Selfe, whose oeuvre includes the early David Jason vehicle 'White Cargo', a Kenny Ball concert film and 'Mother Goosed', a videotaped adult pantomime, the other auteur of Can I Come Too was Alan Selwyn (1926-2002), it's writer and producer, who also takes a small acting role in the film. A jack of all trades in the British sex film world, Alan Selwyn was very much a man created by Soho. His birth name was Alfred Lopez Salzedo, and his father Solomon who used the professional name of Sidney Brandon had been an entertainer at the Windmill theatre, meaning that Selwyn had been around sex, showbiz and criminality from an early age. He was originally a bit part actor, and shows up in a few early Ken Loach films like Poor Cow and Cathy Come Home. At some point in the sixties Selwyn did prison time, seemingly for defrauding a man in the theatrical world, who Selwyn's sister worked for. The sister, who played no part in the fraud, was so ashamed by her brother's actions that she felt obliged to resign from her job, and as a result rarely spoke to her brother again. Unaware that he had predeceased her, her will made a special proviso that none of her estate should go to her brother Alfred, 'also known as Alan Selwyn'. Which is how his surviving relatives came to know about the Alan Selwyn side of his life and his connection to the movie industry. People's memories of Alan Selwyn tend to be that of a real life Arthur Daley figure, a man from the shady side of the street, who nevertheless wasn't without a moral compass. Suzy Mandel has good memories of Selwyn, and Annette Poussin regarded him as a gentlemanly, father like figure who actually dissuaded her from taking larger, credited roles in sex movies on account of the possible negative consequences it could have on her private life. In the name of honesty and full disclosure though, it should be pointed out that not everyone remembers Alan Selwyn so fondly. He is the subject of a #metoo story in Cosey Fanni Tutti's autobiography, where she claims Selwyn tried to rape her backstage during the making of Secrets of a Superstud. "Once in the dressing room, I fell asleep - and prey to Selwyn's unwanted attentions. He soon got off me when I told him I'd started my period". I will say that story is completely at odds with what other women have told me about Alan Selwyn, but that is what Ms. Fanni Tutti wrote.

There is an end of the line feel about Can I Come Too, remember that last day of school? this is the British sex film equivalent. Everyone here is letting their hair down, not doing much serious work and partying with the people they've got to know well over the last couple of years, in the knowledge that they are never likely to see each other again. Something that is added to by a scene towards the end of the film, where this gathering of British sex film people gets down on the dance floor, with some exceptional dad dancing from Mark Jones that causes Alan Selwyn to crack up. It was the end of an era, but it's not over till the fat lady yells. I do wish that Can I Come Too had been Rita Webb's last film.  The final shot in the film, a freeze frame of Rita throwing her cleaning equipment away and yelling "SOD IT, let them clean the place up themselves" would have been such a Rita Webb way of saying goodbye, and likely reflects Ray Selfe's own attitude to the British sex film biz...sod it, let them clean this mess up themselves.

The real success story of Can I Come Too isn't in fact anyone in front or behind the camera, rather it's the cinema itself. Referred to as The Savoy in the movie, it was in fact the Ritzy Picturehouse in Brixton. Can I Come Too captures this location at the lowest point in its history, and watching the film you'd be forgiven for thinking that it had long since been bulldozed. Following a 1994 renovation though, the Ritzy has bounced back from its inglorious state in the 1970s and is now considered the jewel in the crown of London's surviving cinemas. It's aged better, and more elegantly than those football hooligans, punk rockers or indeed Can I Come Too itself.