Great Film overall

Excellent, smart action film.

The acting is good, and the firecracker script has some excellent ideas.

It really made me laugh, but for some moments I was tearing up because I could relate so much.

ESKIMO NELL is a one-of-a-kind British sex comedy farce looking at the workings of the film industry. It's certainly a rather jumbled production, full of hit and miss humour, in which a group of idealistic young men strive to make a film and come across various unscrupulous characters along the way.There's a wealth of talent involved in this one both in front of and behind the cameras which alone makes it a worthwhile watch. The movie was directed by a youthful Martin Campbell, cutting his teeth decades before he'd direct the likes of big Hollywood blockbusters like CASINO ROYALE. Exploitation king Stanley Long came up with the story, while one-time infant terrible of British cinema Michael Armstrong (MARK OF THE DEVIL) wrote and stars.There are many familiar faces in supporting roles, including a turn for later TV favourite Christopher Timothy playing a shy young virgin writer. Christopher Biggins is here alongside Katy Manning (DR WHO), Anna Quayle, Stephanie Cole, Derek Martin, Mary Millington (in a one-scene striptease) and the delightful Rosalind Knight (CARRY ON NURSE). One of the best of the lot is Roy Kinnear, lapping up his turn as a sleazy producer. The humour is rather broad and lowbrow, and as a sex comedy this doesn't really work despite lots of nudity, but as a send-up of the film industry in general it's quite fun and certainly more inventive than your usual CONFESSIONS sequel or rip-off.

This is a very rare creature indeed--a British sex comedy that is actually funny! This movie, probably inspired by Mel Brook's original version of "The Producers" is about three young men--an aspiring director (played by "Mark of the Devil" director Michael Armstrong), his virginal penguin-obsessed screenwriter, and the screenwriter's lothario flat-mate--who are all trying to break into the British film industry. They meet a sleazy producer (Roy Kinnear) who wants to make a film version of the famous bawdy poem "Eskimo Nell". To raise the money though he gets them to sell three very different versions of the movie to three different backers: a foul-mouthed American ("Big Dick")who wants to make a hardcore porn movie, another guy who wants to make a "kung-fu musical" to showcase the two "talents" of his girlfriend, and an arty dilettante who wants to make a gay Western ("with a lot of bottom smacking") featuring his transvestite boyfriend. It gets worse when the producer runs off with the money, and the director has to find a fourth backer (simply to avoid the lawsuits), and goes to his society girlfriend's mother (no doubt modeled on puritanical British busybody Mary Whitehead)who runs a "decency" society and wants to make a clean family film! Needless to say, the whole thing goes horribly, horribly awry. Reels from the different versions get mixed up, a guy's willie gets caught in a clapboard, and one character delivers the immortal line: "What's my motivation for having an erection?" The movie is quite funny both in its conception and in its execution. It doesn't slather on the naked dolly birds quite as much as a lot of other British sex comedies of the era perhaps, but an almost unrecognizable Mary Millington does show for a 10-second "Benny Hill"-style speeded-up striptease.As far as the sex goes, this probably won't inspire all the hairy-palmed Michaelangelos out there to turn their ceilings into a scummy Sistine Chapel, but it is definitely FUNNY and pretty entertaining, which is a lot more than can be said of the vast majority of these films.

Eskimo Nell has a rather bemusing reputation as the One Good Film in the plethora of bad British sexploitation comedies that were splattered onto UK cinema screens during the 1970s. Disappointingly, Nell isn't much better than the awful Confessions and even worse Adventures films, and the lurking shade of the hopeless Adventures producer Stanley A Long looms over this film, providing his usual trademark missed comic opportunities, poorly handled slapstick and crass humour which ultimately infect the piece.Michael Armstrong, who wrote and directed that masterpiece of 60s exploitation cinema Mark of the Devil, writes and stars here as a film school graduate (apparently based on Michael Winner) who finds himself rejected by the big American studios and forced to work with the sharks and sleazeballs of the British independent scene. He meets con-merchant producer Benny U. Murdoch (an unfunny Roy Kinnear) who persuades him to come in on a scheme to produce a screen version of the famous bawdy ballad Eskimo Nell. The fly in the ointment is that Murdoch has three backers, all of who wish to see their own lovers and penchants on screen in the final product.The twists and turns of the plot are okay, but what comes off the screen is mostly a series of missed opportunities. Too often, the script thinks that simply having someone say "I want to see big tits!" is the epitome of witty satire. The critique is never sophisticated nor incisive. One plus point is that although the portrait of the gay film producer Vernon Peabody and his drag queen toyboy Johnny is stereotypical, it is good to see at least one British 70s sex-pic which acknowledges that not every man in the world is heterosexual.Johnny and the cowboy drag film-within-a-film as well as Christopher Biggins done up in a romper suit for a family version raise the most laughs. There's a clunking car chase near the end (director Martin Campbell has a long way to go to Casino Royale) and some amusement is provided by having the hardcore version shown to the Queen at the royal command performance. But even this isn't exploited as much as it might be - a shot of the Queen staring at (or even getting off on) the on-screen sex would have been genuinely subversive.Ultimately, the film doesn't satirise what is the most glaring assumption in the British film industry, then as now: why chinless public school wonders like Armstrong's character and his mates think it's their god-given right to be filmmakers in the first place; if you are going to satirise the British film industry, begin with class.

The British sex comedies of the 1970s are notorious for failing to be either funny or erotic. For the latter one might blame the censors, but the former is simply a result of innuendo being no longer funny once you pass the nudge-nudge stage. Anyway, this one isn't sexy either, but it does work quite well as a comedy.In fact, Eskimo Nell is a strange kind of self-spoof, not only spoofing the sex film genre as such but even its own making - the kind of self-reference Douglas Hofstadter would appreciate. Viewers may be inclined to think that the "self-spoof" is faked, but there are persistent rumours that many of the scenes which seem outrageous and surreal (e.g. the script discussion) were very closely based on fact.