SPOILERS INCLUDED
Intimate Games was produced by Guido Coen, an Italian with an impeccable eye for a British spectacle. In the 1950's Coen had produced numerous cheapies in tandem with Nudist Paradise director Charles Saunders, including the excellent thriller Naked Fury and dime store horror movie The Woman Eater. Solo Coen co-produced Baby Love and The Penthouse, two extremely controversial (and as a result virtually unseen today) late 60's releases, and also moneyed Burke and Hare', a horror film too stagy for early Seventies consumption and as a result desperately enlivened by prurient brothel scenes. Add all this up, and its perhaps apt that Coen's final credits should be sexploitation ones.
Intimate Games opens Wife Swappers style, with snapshots of just-about-still-swinging-London;- a brief view of Piccadilly Circus, street scenes shot from a moving car and close-ups on couples and lone,slightly perverted looking old men. In a throwback to the glamour home movie era, a suit and tie man starts imagining his secretary (an unrecognizable Monika Ringwald) with less and less clothes on. Everyone has their own private, secret thoughts' claims the film's narrator and among these secret thoughts
everyone has their own sexual fantasies'
The voiceover belongs to Gottlieb (George Baker), an Oxford college professor lecturing his students about sexual fantasies and illustrating his talk with a blow-up doll (whose cameo justifies the immortal screen credit lecture room equipment supplied by Item Sex Aids'.) Using his students as guinea pigs, Gottlieb pairs them off together so they can research each others private fantasies. Anna Bergman (daughter of directing legend Ingmar) has a sucking fixation,which much to the disappointment of fellow students begins and ends with sucking thumbs. Felicity Devonshire imagines herself being ravaged by Zulus, but gets distracted when her sparing partner (nicknamed chopper') tells her his problem is having too much of a good thing. And since there aren't enough boys to go around, the film also presents the pairing of Playbird Suzy Mandel and Diversions gal Heather Deeley. Worrying that Gottlieb is trying to imply something by pairing them together (Deeley secretly fancies him), the girls do their best to convince themselves they're not lesbians, but end up in bed together doing a very good impersonation. This isn't lesbian seduction is it'?- The Mandel and Deeley sex scene, shot in slow-motion and wedded to a well chosen, seductive piece of music is Intimate Games' only real stab at eroticism and the rest of the film's jokey sex suffers in comparison.
More skits on the pervy thoughts that lay behind stiff upper lips follow when the students take to the road on Holiday (set to the film's funky, panting signature tune) in search of people who don't seem to have a problem with sharing their innermost fantasies with virtual strangers. Mandel takes a job at a bar and befriends cleaning lady Joyce Blair who dreams herself the object of male affections in a Hollywood style musical number. Very nice'-but as Mandel points out not exactly sexy. The film's obligatory Jack the Lad character hitchhikes his way home, before discovering his father is fancying more than pigeons in his garden shed. Elsewhere a housewife explains how she recovered from a nervous breakdown after being prescribed' bearded hardcore actor Steve Amber, and bald snooker player Ian Hendry (The Avengers, Get Carter) improves his game no end after imagining his maid, and perversely his niece, naked. It's clear by this point, that Gottlieb is also more lecher than lecturer, as regular cutaways see him held up in the college for the holidays and getting all hot under the collar while reading the students findings.
Like in his earlier (pseudonymous) sex film The Love Box', director Tudor Gates again opts for a sitcom-like main setting only to quickly send his cast going in all different and episodic directions. With sexy and comic turns never far way Gates at least keeps Intimate Games moving at a dependable pace despite the opening half suffering from being increasingly set bound and the second half struggling to come up with anything more intimate than reprises of its naked secretary opening. Intimate Games is at its best when its being surreally silly, the sight of a diminutive old man fantasising himself as a jockey and straddling an overweight stripper, is understandably hard to erase from memory. Gates also deserves credit for allowing each of his actresses the chance to shine with Mandel, Deeley, Devonshire and Bergman all top draw sexploitation names at the time the film was made.
Unbilled star to be Mary Millington turns up in a blink-and-you'll-miss-her part as the victim of a bottom-feeler, but today most people's curiously over Intimate Games probably rests on the casting of George Baker, an actor now more readily associated with his role as Inspector Wexford'. In fact Baker has been around for years, having his first taste of leading man status in the mid-Fifties with the carnival midget melodrama The Woman for Joe'. Around the time of Intimate Games, Baker was the star of London Weekend Televisions' Bowler', a very funny but now virtually forgotten sitcom, in which he played a social climbing East End Gangster with a fancy for sophisticated' French phrases. For quite different reasons, he's a laugh here too, although by all accounts the actor doesn't see the funny side of Intimate Games these days. In the film's comedy highpoint, Baker's Professor finally loses his marbles, starts imagining his female students naked, and makes a lustful attempt at pulling off Heather Deeley's clothes. The last shot is of an oversexed Baker being put into an ambulance while foaming at the mouth-quel embarrassment'.
With its Oxford exteriors and raunchy interiors, Intimate Games is the equivalent of a 70's men's magazine hidden inside a dusty, antiqued old hardback. The DVD release also includes film's original come-on trailer, as well as ones for such British Exploitation fare as Can You Keep It Up For a Week, Monique, The Yellow Teddybears and Pete Walker's Cool It Carol and School for Sex.
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