Confessions of a Window Cleaner (1974) - film review

When Timothy Lea joined his brother-in-law’s window cleaning business he had pretty unsophisticated ideas over what constituted customer satisfaction.  It turns out that wiping windows clean is the least of his duties.  The most important service he must provide is to satisfy the needs of his sexually voracious female clientele.   Eager to please, Timothy applies himself body and soul to the task in hand.  But then he has to spoil it all by falling in love, with a police inspector’s daughter...

Confessions of a Window Cleaner is the best known and most commercially successful of the British sex comedies that were made in the 1970s.  It was the first of a series of Confessions films which provided a welcome boost to the British film industry, which was then on its knees and already scraping the bottom for all it was worth.  Although mild by today’s standards, this saucy mix of erotica and bedroom farce was awarded an X-rating on account of its overt sexual references and raunchy sex scenes (all of which are played for laughs).  

The film made a star of Robin Askwith, whose enthusiastic handling of the comedy nude scenes make up for his limited talent in both the acting and comedy department.  Once considered highly risqué, the film now appears quite innocent and is no more offensive than a Benny Hill sketch.  The storyline is virtually non-existent but the torrent of doubles entendres and porn-flavoured comic situations keep the audience amused and titilated.  Like the contemporaneous Carry On films, the Confessions films illustrate the sorry state of British cinema in the 1970s, a dismal era when the only thing that could be relied upon to lure audiences away from TV screens were tacky sex comedies like this.

© Alex Sullivan 2010

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