Joined in 2023 
82 
63 About this deal
In The Playbirds, Millington plays an undercover policewoman investigating the murders of models from David Sullivan's magazine Playbirds. Imagine, if you will, The Sweeney as directed by Pete Walker or Derek Ford, with just a tang of giallo as detective Gavin Campbell (Yes, that’s right – one of ‘Esther’s boys’ from That’s Life) races in hot pursuit of the mystery assailant, not to mention the film’s downbeat ending.
They were more than happy to appear in a saucy X-rated movie alongside somebody like Mary Millington. Beset by personal problems like kleptomania and massive debt, Mary Millington’s rough lifestyle finally caught up with her in an overdose. To draw out the killer, Holbourne and Morgan decide to send in an undercover policewoman posing as an up-and-coming Playbirds model. In London, an unidentified serial killer targets female models, strangling each woman and marking the forehead with the number of the victim. The movie is flimsy nonsense that understands its supporting cast of beautiful actresses is what the audience wants.She’s comfortable enough on camera but the international sex symbol is used more as marketing bait than featured performer.
cultural context to it all, and the actual Millington films he has assembled are often unexpectedly winning in their own weird ways. Never the world’s greatest actress, Mary is perfectly cast as the prim and proper policewoman who goes at it with both barrels when chosen to go undercover as a newbie model as part of a police investigation into a series of murders of glamour models, with the prime suspect being self-styled stud and hardman Harry Dougan, played by Alan Lake. Come Play With Me opens this box set, and it’s a curio inasmuch as although it’s the film whose title is associated with Millington in the public mindset, thanks to Sullivan’s publicity blitzkrieg – the sex thimble barely appears in the film compared to the screen time devoted to her pulchritudinous co-stars such as Sue Longhurst, Suzy Mandel, Nicola Austine, Suzette Sangalo Bond and the striking Sonia Svenburger. As a new Blu-ray box set collating her films is released, its curator and her biographer, Simon Sheridan, explains all about Mary Millington, a pioneering personality of the 1970s. What Linda Lovelace was to American adult films in the Seventies, Mary Millington was the British equivalent.You don't really hear the word much 'sexploitation' anymore, but it's just a by-product of 'exploitation' - films predominantly made in the 1960s and 1970s that exploited a certain element of storytelling to engage the cinemagoers' attention. Providing a candid look back at her life and career in films is the 2015 documentary from her biographer Simon Sheridan – Respectable: The Mary Millington Story. NEW Mary Millington’s True Blue Confessions – audio commentary by biographer Simon Sheridan and executive producer David Sullivan.
I've also written a new 80-page book about the movies, which features previously unpublished artwork and photos. Confessions of a Pixie – an interview with Josie Harrison Marks, the daughter of Come Play With Me’s director George Harrison Marks.Things take a dramatic upswing quality-wise in the second film in this collection, 1978’s The Playbirds, which sees Millington receiving a larger slice of the action here. The Blu Ray was released by Screenbound Pictures and has audio commentary by Simon Sheridan and Willy Roe.
Great Deal 
New Comment