Sex and the Other Woman (1972)

 

I've always regarded Sex and the Other Woman as one of those second division Stanley Long titles, which like Bread and On the Game, was sandwiched in-between the standout Long productions of Groupie Girl and Eskimo Nell. Revisiting it via Melusine's Stanley Long box set though, I've gotten along allot better with it this time around. Full disclosure, I did have some involvement with that box set so my opinion isn't without bias, but seeing Sex and the Other Woman looking so damned perfect definitely improves things. Previous releases of this film having looked particularly ugly. I think I'm right in saying that this release also marks the first time Long's original version of the film has been seen in America. The Salvation DVD from the 2000s being the American re-edit of the movie, which shuffled the segments around, used an alternative title sequence that chopped down Felicity Devonshire's name to 'Felicity Devon' and replaced most of the DeWolfe music with generic disco tracks.

Sex and the Other Woman comes across like Antony Balch's Secrets of Sex made for more straight-laced punters and by a more straight-laced director. While SOS had an Egyptian mummy telling us tales of woe from the battle of the sexes, in Sex and the Other Woman the rather less scary Richard Wattis is on hand to introduce saucy stories that feel straight out of the Sunday tabloids, as opposed to the horror movie, Burroughs and Scientology influences that fuelled the Balch movie.

I do wonder if Sex and the Other Woman lacks a woman's touch that earlier Long productions had benefited from. The Wife Swappers likely having had input from Derek Ford's wife Valerie, and Groupie Girl having been written by Suzanne Mercer. Sex and the Other Woman feels like male chauvinism has taken over the reins, with female characters here behaving in a way that I'm sure no woman has ever behaved outside of the imagination of sexist men. Exactly how much of Stanley Long's personal life wound up in this movie will likely remain a question mark. I detect some possible autobiographical elements to the first story.  Reggie, the ill fated married man in that segment sharing Long's love of aviation and like Long has his own Penthouse. I assume the light aircraft and the penthouse in the film belonged to Long himself. On the basis that if you were making a low budget film that required an aircraft and a penthouse, why would you pay to use anyone else's if you owned your own. So, it is likely that we're here getting a peek at Long's pad whilst he was living high on the hog, thanks to the proceeds from The Wife Swappers and Groupie Girl.

Speaking of locations, the staircase in the house belonging to Maggie Wright's gold digging character is the same staircase that James Beck makes an appearance on in Groupie Girl. It also pops up in the pad the heroine shares with two other girls in Pete Walker's The Four Dimensions of Greta. Such is the small world of British sex films.
The original soundtrack of the film in this segment also treats us to a couple of blasts of the funky DeWolfe track 'Highway Song' by the marvelously named Herman Bender. Come to think about it, had he not been a real person, Herman Bender would have actually made for a great character name in a British sex comedy. The bewigged photographer in this segment proving that if you're looking for realistic and non-stereotypical portrayals of gay men in 1970s British culture, you might have to look beyond the sex comedies. Those with a keen ear might also detect a brief soundtrack appearance of the DeWolfe track 'Eye Level' at the end of the Felicity Devonshire segment, which soon after would become famous in the UK as the theme tune for the TV series Van Der Valk. Even if you stripped Sex and the Other Woman of the DeWolfe music and replaced it with more modern music, as the American distributor did, on a visual level this film couldn't have come from anywhere other than early 70s Britain. A point emphasized by Melusine's high end transfer, which really does breath unholy new life into those early 70s fashions and interiors.

The leading lady in the first segment, Maggie Wright, wasn't to Long's fancy, and might have been cast at the insistence of co-producer Barry Jacobs, since she'd also featured in his movie The Love Box. The American distributor was evidently in agreement with Long, since the US version switches her segment with the Jane Cardew one. The US version presenting the Jane Cardew segment upfront...as if Jane Cardew wasn't upfront enough. Sex and the Other Woman does see Long and Jacobs offer up something for all straight male tastes. The Cardew segment for men into big bust fetishism, the Wright one for those with a taste for the older woman, while the Felicity Devonshire one is err... possibly for the man who -to quote the song Mr. Iceberg by S. Gainsbourg- "likes his little girls in socks". My history with Sex and the Other Woman began with the Salvation DVD but I do remember reading in an old edition of Elliot's Guide to Films on Video that there had been a UK VHS release of the film in the late 1980s that had suffered 9 minutes and 30 seconds of cuts, which certainly piqued my interest in seeing the film. It could have been a mistake on Elliot's behalf, but odds are that if there was a segment in Sex and the Other Woman that would have provoked such heavy BBFC censorship it would have been the Felicity Devonshire one. Stanley Long at his most 'morally ambiguous' it sees a middle aged man (Raymond Young) fall 'victim' to the sexual desires of his daughter's school friend Sarah, played by Devonshire. The daughter's reaction to discovering about her father's affair with her schoolgirl friend- she basically tells Sarah she can't blame her and admits she'd sleep with him herself if he wasn't her own father- is a prime example of what I was saying about women in this film behaving like no woman ever has outside of the imagination of men. Still it must have done wonders for the ego of actor Raymond Young. While Young was no stranger to British exploitation cinema, he's also in Secrets of a Superstud and The Flesh and Blood Show, he didn't usually get to be the subject of such rock star like adulation.

By the time of Sex and the Other Woman, you're definitely witnessing the bar being raised in terms of the quality of female acting in British sex films, at least compared to the films from just a few years earlier, which mostly had to make do with nude models who could barely get a line out. We're also beginning to see a 'star system' emerging with actresses like Cardew and Devonshire destined to become regulars in these types of film, their fame largely playing out within the genre. Not everyone was happy to be associated with this film though. Actor Paul Greenwood, whose character succumbs to Jane Cardew's seductive charms, goes tellingly uncredited in the film. He returned to British exploitation a few years later to play the boyfriend in the Pete Walker film Frightmare, and allowed them to use his real name on that film...then again he didn't bare his arse in that one.

Sex and the Other Woman ends with the biggest piece of propaganda for triangle relationships you're likely to see outside of Tintorera, as a married couple weather the scandal of moving the husband's mistress in with them. In many ways it feels like a throwback to The Wife Swappers with its swinging themes and largely unknown cast, yet its a reflection of how British sexual mores had moved on that Long got away with a laid back and comedic attitude towards this situation. A far cry from the finger pointing approach he was forced to adopt with the Wife Swappers, where such behavior would no doubt have resulted in blackmail, ruination or a mental breakdown. The ending anticipates where the British sex film was heading with the husband (Max Mason) breaking the fourth wall and giving a blokeish wink to the audience.

Having seen this genre dismissed for years as nostalgia proof and a forgotten embarrassment, it is quite gratifying to see movies like Sex and the Other Woman get the deluxe treatment on disc, as well as the British sex film's unexpected dominance of late night British television at the moment. A phenomenon that began with the relatively obscure TV channel Together TV, who despite apparently being run a hard left collective, hit upon the brainwave of filling their nighttime schedules with 1970s British horror and sex movies till the wee hours. Quite how such movies fit in with their ideology is anyone's guess; I very much doubt their politics align with the politics of Pete Walker and Mary Millington. Still such programming must have done well for them, since other channels have since taken notice and followed suit. Talking Pictures TV has been slipping a few Confessions and Adventures movies into their schedules. More recently, nostalgia channel Rewind TV has also jumped aboard this unlikeliest of bandwagon. 

Just to document the sex mad state of late night TV in Britain in 2026...Rewind TV has recently shown Virgin Witch, Secrets of Sex, For Men Only, Confessions of a Sex Maniac, The Ups and Downs of a Handyman and Sex and the Other Woman. Talking Pictures have shown The Best of the Adventures and Confessions from a Holiday Camp. While Together TV have shown Cruel Passion, Girls Come First, Got in Made, Come Play With Me, Groupie Girl, Confessions from the David Galaxy Affair, On the Game, I'm Not Feeling Myself Tonight and The Playbirds. It's almost as if...y'know...people actually like watching these movies. A turn of events that has left me feeling vindicated for flying the flag for British sexploitation cinema all these years, and smugly ahead of my time...now that the unbelieving scum have come around to my way of thinking.

It would be remiss of me not to also mention Jane Cardew's memorable and highly suggestive usage of a cigar in Sex and the Other Woman. "Sometimes, a cigar is just a cigar" Freud once claimed, but it sure as hell wasn't in this blooming well case.