Already a star TV director in England for his documentaries about artists and musicians, young Ken Russell was in a good position to join the ranks of feature talent. As explained by Indicator’s essayist Melanie Williams, Russell had sprung from the same TV root as director John Schlesinger, and producer Kenneth Harper had already helped launch aspiring directors Peter Yates and Sidney J. Furie.
Russell’s luck didn’t land him with a sure-fire project. For his official feature debut French Dressing, producer Harper proposed a knockabout comedy about a sleepy English beach town that tries to float a major film festival, securing a French Brigitte Bardot-type sex bomb to anchor the publicity. BB was of course unavailable, and Roger Vadim and his ‘next’ BB clone Annette Stroyberg dropped out two days before filming was to commence. Enter an even better substitute, the Austrian borne beauty Marisa Mell, three years before her signature role in Mario Bava’s Diabolik.
Russell already had an ideal pair of male leads. James Booth was enjoying some career traction with a featured part in Cy Endfield’s epic Zulu. It was the part-comic part of a malingering soldier who fights the Battle of Rorke’s Drift from a cot in sick bay. Favorite Roy Kinnear was chosen as Booth’s goofy sidekick. The future fixture of Richard Lester farces already had a devoted audience on TV. The problem with French Dressing seems to have been the screenplay. The producer claimed that Russell ignored it in favor of his own ideas, whereas the director found is so insubstantial that he had to improvise to ‘keep the kettle boiling.’
The result is a rather charming not-particularly-strong experiment in style. The beach setting is melancholy. The characterizations range from British New Wave substance to cartoon people too thin for a Benny Hill routine. Russell opts to enlist every kind of nonverbal comedy he can invent, from silent movie nonsense to borderline-disturbing stunts.
Gormleigh-on-Sea is underbooked despite having a broad pier for tourists. The silly-twit mayor (Brian Pringle) wants to fire his two employees, publicist Henry Liggott (Roy Kinnear) and deck-chair mover Jim Stephens (James Booth). To maintain the delusion that he’s a man going places — and to keep his girlfriend Judy (Alita Naughton) — Jim proposes that Gormleigh host a film festival. The mayor lets the plan proceed with the idea of being surrounded by young French actresses.
The plan works. Jim and Henry’s day trip to France just happen to connect them with ‘FF’: the flighty, gorgeous starlet Françoise Fayol. Infuriated by her agent-boyfriend Vladek (Sandor Elès), Françoise accompanies the boys back to Gormleigh. Her presence launches the festival in style. FF fends off the mayor’s lecherous designs with ease, soaking up the publicity in good spirits. Jim organizes a constant parade of eccentric photo opportunities. There is the problem of Judy, who sees through all the baloney and isn’t amused by Jim’s constant cavorting with the narcissistic Mlle Fayol. Judy is a cub reporter. She writes up FF’s new movie as a terrible flop, which puts all of Jim and Henry’s plans at risk.
French Dressing was a conspicuous flop from the get-go, one of those movies that critics feel safe to hate in print. Ken Russell was convinced that his directing debut would also be his swan song. It is indeed a failed comedy, with a quartet of fairly adorable leads doing their utmost to be charming, in a script devoid of laughs. The English made a lot of mid- to low-brow comedies that didn’t translate to American tastes; Peter Sellers and even Alec Guinness made a couple. In Dressing the jokes simply aren’t there. Ken Russell always had a knack for the outrageous, but his films are seldom ha-ha funny. This is a very basic comedy, yet Russell dotes on erratic visual schemes, like men in tuxedos forming a surreal conga line.
Russell blocks the cartoonish action well for CinemaScope, taking advantage of the visual opportunities in the long pier complex in Herne Bay, Kent. Many interiors were shot on location, creating a sunnier, more artificial version of seaside pictures like Michael Winner’s The System. Booth, Kinnear and Naughton pitch their characters somewhere between a natural stance, and variety show jokesters.
With several scenes filmed in France, including a spoof of a ‘naughty’ French movie, French Dressing was not a pinchpenny production. In sunny seaside Le Touquet, our boys find Françoise Fayrol by following an endless line of publicity balloons in her image, scattered by the hundreds on the sidewalks.
The extroverts Jim and Henry work overtime to energize the sleepy, casual ambience. Russell’s visual inventions concentrate on Jim’s publicity antics, especially the choreographed photo op sessions, with town officials in funny costumes. The satirical content is paper-thin, mocking the fake pomp and celebrity posing. Judy patiently waits for the hoo-haw to settle down.
Poised and self-aware, Marisa Mell’s Françoise Fayol is unfazed by the silly antics. She obviously trusts Ken Russell and is a good sport for everything he thinks up. We see the same inventiveness that will later energize Ken Russell’s best work, like The Boy Friend. The film’s most outrageous scene replicates the old Laurel & Hardy gag where a lady, stepping through mud puddles, sinks into a mud hole. ↑ Mell goes through with it for real, like a trouper, with a big smile. Our reaction is not laughter, but surprised puzzlement.
The whole movie goes like that. It’s an undemanding fun-in-the-sun Brit comedy that mocks the genre in an almost uncomfortable way. The lecherous mayor? Not particularly funny. Making a bonfire of FF balloons? Kind of pointless. Few if any real conflicts emerge.
We do like our leading players. Marisa Mell’s Françoise Fayol is flighty but not obnoxious. Alone in England, she elevates the film festival junket with a sincere spirit of positive self-promotion, handling most situations with finesse.
Ken Russell makes us like everybody in this show. Roy Kinnear carries the bulk of the silly-ass humor with jolly good spirits and bumbling reactions. He waves a paper Union Jack with the best of them. Richard Lester would give Kinnear his most endearing role as a cruise ship’s activities counselor for the thriller Juggernaut. James Booth is a smiling go-getter with a good idea; he plays fair with Françoise Fayol and is only slightly neglectful of his pleasant girlfriend Judy.
The show opts for a sweet romantic-lite finale, with no surprises — except for the pleasant presence of Alita Naughton. Russell sees to it that Judy comes off as the perfect girlfriend, critical when needed but too steady to revolt when all the attention goes to the flamboyant FF. The last act has Mlle Fayol abandoning the festival right before the heavily attended inauguration of Gormleigh’s new Nudist Beach. The comedy I’m All Right Jack had already used a line of bare bottoms for a finale, but Russell brings the scene off well. With Françoise gone and Jim facing a publicity catastrophe, Judy dons FF’s blonde wig and does the nude swim for her. Such proof of love doesn’t go unrewarded. The silly movie has a nicely-buttoned finale, all things considered.
