UK: Come Play With Me from Odeon

Long overdue dvd for those wanting it.

Will this release have any scenes put back in or was that just a myth to sell the film ?

 

Good to see Sex Is My Buisness as an extra, not seen True Blue Confessions though. Also any Mary fans who havent seen it, go and get Miss Bohrloch...you wont regret it!!

 

A tawdry tribute to Britain's number one sex symbol of the 1970's - Mary Millington.

The film (made only a year after her tragic suicide) is a mixture of archive footage, interviews and new sex scenes this "tribute" has to be watched with open mouth as producer Sullivan uses it to make a quick killing and preach his own self-serving propaganda over someone else's grave. Sex, death and politics don't really go side-by-side. We even have Marie Harper pretending to be Millington in her coffin!

AVOID!!

 

I don't condone Sullivan's antics anymore than I would those of Osama Bin Laden, but I am amused, as a one-time Hammer myself, to find out that he is the new owner of the club!! One can only hope he doesn't do for them what he did for Birmingham City. But enough football already, back to the film.

I'm very pleased to see Odeon get hold of this title, as they'll treat it with respect- despite all the negative things I've heard said about it, it remains a very amusing curio from a time we'll (sadly) never see the like of again, and one I revisit periodically. So, once I've moved back "dahn to Lahndahn" later this year, who's for joining me for a screening featuring a mass singalong? Altogether now, "pretty girls, pretty girls, ooo ooo, yeah yeah yeah"? You know you want to. Nota bene though: anyone caught having a sly one off the wrist will be ejected form the premises.

Funnily enough, I was only watching THE PLAYBIRDS the other day and thinking about Mary. I guess there is synchronicity in the world after all.

 

I wasn't actually going to make any formal announcement about Come Play with Me on DVD until March. Not all the 'extras' have been confirmed - we are still working on them. I will post more news on 'extras' next month.

 

I've been waiting for this to have a proper release. Now if only someone could recover the hardcore version from that dusty vault on the South Coast...... that would be a real find (!!!!)

 

I believe that could be a total myth and never existed,more than likely promoted as such in the magazines but never intended for the film itself.

Come Play with Me is a sex comedy without any sex in it or real comedy really.

 

The hardcore version of Come Play with Me was definitely shot, on location in Oxfordshire and Croydon in November 1976. There were four additional hardcore sequences - three heterosexual and one lesbian.

The hardcore version of the film was screened only once - by mistake - in London in 1977. It has never resurfaced since, either here or overseas. (These sex scenes are rumoured to still exist in the hands of a private collector who lives in Westcliff-on-Sea, Essex.)

The Odeon DVD release of Come Play with Me does not include any additional explicit scenes. We didn't recover any further hardcore footage from David Sullivan's film archive in Barking when we sourced the original negetives last year. However, hardcore versions of other Sullivan films were discovered.

Having seen the remastered '18' certificate version of the film I can say that it looks absolutely stunning. Picture quality and colour is as good, if not better, than its original April 1977 release. This DVD release is going to be a huge treat...

 

No doubt the collector does not wish to sell I bet if he/she can be found.

 

Where in Barking were these found ?

 

The original film stock of Come Play with Me was sourced from David Sullivan's official film archive in Barking. I'm not going to be giving out an address...

Just enjoy the remastered DVD when it comes out in April.

 

I am not asking for the full address just roughly where in Barking or PM it to me ?

 

Central Barking. And I think I'll bring this thread to a close now...

 

Ahhhhhhhhh I know where you mean now, as there are a few warehouses (amongst other things ) there.

 

I bought a Come Play With Me vintage magazine special a while back published late 70s and it included lots of stills of the hardcore scenes from the movie as well as loads of the soft ones, so the xxx scenes do exist, unless this is con artistry on a major scale! Sometimes the best way to find out about the films of the period, especially the sexploitation showing on screens and on video/ 8mm releases in London at the time, is from vintage smut mags! I still love my 'tackiest cover in the world' VHS release of Come Play With Me, that has no label or date of release listed, but is very battered and official looking, maybe a pre-cert, I've no idea. That period of cinematic sleaze has so many layers to be discovered!!! Anyway, I can't wait for the DVD. I wandered around Mary Millington's home town not so long back, and it's still a place that's very 'her'! Slightly randy local stores, hidden snippets of woods to play in, and pubs where the elderly go to play board games and eye up the pretty local girls in short skirts, while nearby lace curtains twitch, and well-to-do ladies have their hair done along a lonely street lined with salons to choose from, and gossip about who is doing what to who and how! And best of all, a rather smart dress shop for ladies of a certain age, amongst all that tweed, a lacey number in sheer black perhaps hinting at what lies below the surface of all those suburban standards that must be upheld at all times (but also unheld too from time to time)... Or is that just me? )

dt

 

Publicity shots to promote the movie I reckon and nothing more than that unless someone can prove the footage exits then it does not EXIST!!

Some info below.

Sullivan saw Come Play With Me as a chance to turn his then-girlfriend and magazine cover girl Mary Millington into a film star, as well as an opportunity for some cross-media marketing. Sullivan's magazines like Playbirds and Whitehouse are seen/referenced throughout the film, but it was with promoting the film through his magazines that Sullivan really came into his own. Months before the film's release Sullivan’s readers were promised Come Play with Me would be 'the British Deep Throat’ and would ‘make Linda Lovelace look like Noddy'. To add credibility to these claims, photo shoots that were only a few shades away from hardcore were published in Sullivan’s magazines and claimed to be stills from the upcoming film, whereas in fact they bore little resemblance to anything in Come Play With Me. A fixture in these photo shoots was hardcore actor Timothy Blackstone, sometimes billed in the articles as “Randy Buck, Esquire”. In spite of this exposure Blackstone does not appear in the actual film.

The hype for Come Play with Me also spread to the letter pages of Sullivan’s magazine, a fan letter of dubious authenticity (as it refers to scenes that don’t appear in the film) from “Bert U” to Mary Millington in Whitehouse, no.27 claims “Dear Mary, I must congratulate you on your film Come Play with Me, I found it screamingly funny and very sexy as well…I loved every randy moment… everyone was so natural, and Henry McGhee (sic) as the PM was superb.” The letter also goes on to falsely claim that the actor Roy Kinnear appears in the film and that “(Roy) looked like a Roman Emperor in the swimming pool scene. I‘ll bet it took him all his time to keep his towel on during rehearsals for the film… it looked to me, Mary, as though you were f****d rigid during the film”.

 

I used to go to a fetish/swinger/sex club in what appears to be the same venue in Croydon where several of the scenes were shot, in an industrial estate off Purley Way. By that time it was called Club L'Amour, and I don't think Sullivan still had anything to do with it, but the interiors hadn't changed in two decades....

And people wonder why I do what I do for a living.

 

I am not a reader of the Sport newspaper.
Not because I am prudish,it seems to have become more and more irrelevant.
Its just the sun with more page 3's in it.
No silly stories anymore as such.

A couple or more years ago there was a promo of Come Play With Me/True Blue with the paper that had to be sent off for.
A bad VHS quality DVD,so I will be buying the Odeon one.
True Blue Confessions is a crappy piece of work.

 

Fantastic news, here's hoping this generates enough interest to enable further releases. Sounds like the only thing stopping this from being blissful perfection is the omission of the hardcore version (as an additional viewing option) which is a shame, I have some of Mary's old adult loops and damn they still get the blood boiling!