Film: Respectable: The Mary Millington Story

This eye-catching documentary shines a spotlight on Seventies porn star and pioneer Mary Millington. Much like its subject, says Tom Browne, it’s outrageous, funny and a little bit seedy.

Those unfamiliar with the world of Seventies sex comedies and the more explicit side of adult entertainment may not recognise the name Mary Millington, especially in a world where cheap thrills are available to anyone with an internet connection. Yet there was a time when Millington was the focus of tabloid outrage, a poster girl for the permissive society ushered in by the Sixties.

First-time director Simon Sheridan has form on this subject, having already published a biography of Millington and a general study of the saucier end of British cinema. This often-fascinating documentary recognises that our attitudes to sex and its depiction onscreen says a lot about society as a whole. Millington is portrayed here as someone unashamed of her body and her love of sex, a ray of sunlight in a repressed and stuffy land. The persecution she suffered, suggests the film, gives her almost martyr status in the culture wars.

Needless to say, this is a film preaching to the converted. Leaving aside the actual quality of her films (and who nowadays watches Come Play With Me, even though it played in London’s Soho for a record-breaking four years?), it would have been nice to hear a genuine debate about the moral issues surrounding the industry that Millington and her associates did so much to promote. Those with concerns about the sexualisation of society will find few supportive voices among the pornographers, glamour models and sex-shop owners.

Instead, the talking heads largely agree with each other, particularly in their violent condemnation of moral campaigner Mary Whitehouse. Even those with no sympathy for Mrs Whitehouse may be discomforted by the drubbing she gets as a figure of the hated establishment. It’s taken for granted that her views are outdated, stuffy and worthy of contempt (and more than one interviewee suggests that sexual repression, rather than Christian concern, was at the root of her objections).

This fish-in-a-barrel stuff tends to obscure the film’s benefits. Sheridan does a good job of illuminating a period that’s often forgotten, sandwiched as it is between the cultural explosion of the Sixties and the rise of Thatcherism in the Eighties. More intriguingly, Millington is revealed as a complex and increasingly damaged person as the film progresses, and her tragic death aged just 33 is sensitively handled (despite some unconvincing hints about an establishment conspiracy).

The film opens and closes with similar quotes from Millington herself, in which she claims to be a very moral person. Whether you buy that or not is very much down to individual taste, but the explicit stuff on display here—often more quaint and amusing than shocking—is certainly a telling commentary on how British society has changed.

Published on Reader’s Digest online, May 2016.