Dir: Clive Donner | Cast: Barry Evans, Judy Geeson, Angela Scoular, Adrienne Poster, Vanessa Howard | UK Drama
On the way to school back in the seventies I used every morning to go through Sheffield Botanical Gardens and pass a genuine Mulberry Bush planted in 1968 by Judy Geeson to promote this film (it now resembles a small tree rather than a bush).
Four years earlier Clive Donner had depicted in ‘Nothing But the Best’ the upwardly mobile career of a Jack the Lad played by Alan Bates. This time it’s the turn of Barry Evans (later best known on TV for ‘Doctor in the House’ and ‘Mind Your Language’), who like the delightful Angela Scoular met an untimely and tragic end.
Both films have in common the wonderful Denholm Elliot representing the establishment, while it’s a measure of the film’s dubious sexual politics that the great height of Sally Avery as Cathy is bizarrely assumed to denote plainness, even down to perceptibly dubbing her voice to make her seem even coarser. @RichardChatten