‘Confessions of a Window Cleaner’ or — Looking Positively Rosie?

There were only two scenes in ‘Confessions of a Window Cleaner’ (1974) where my two big fears about the film (Fear 1/ — will this movie contain out-dated sexual attitudes? Fear 2/ — will this movie be unfunny?) manifested. The first was when randy (well, less randy and more sexually incompetent but brazenly opportunistic) window cleaner Timmy Lea (Robin Askwith) takes his girlfriend to the cinema and gets a bit overly tactile with her, something which had me ‘MMMM’-ing with disapproval like an unimpressed Marge Simpson and wanting me to take the movie into schools and to show it to the pupils as an example of how NOT to treat women. The second was a scene involving naked yoga which felt contrived, strained and needlessly drawn-out.

But these two brief examples aside ‘Confessions of a Window Cleaner’ is a surprisingly entertaining, funny (at times VERY funny) and endlessly fascinating movie that won’t have you declaring it a work of art but maybe grudgingly accepting why this was one of the most popular, and financially successful, British films of the 1970’s.

Timmy Lea is a sexually immature window cleaner who just so happens to live in 1970’s Britain meaning every single woman living in the county (apart from his sister and mum, that is) is either A/ — a nymphomaniac dollybird, or B/ — a sexually frustrated suburban middle-class milf. His boss, and brother-in-law, Sidney Noggett (Tony Booth), sees servicing these customers as good for business as it’s a form of advertising, the only problem being Timmy is so sexually inept he can barely manage to keep his ladder up.

What follows is a series of sexual misadventures tied together by the loosest of plots, but the good news is scriptwriter Christopher Wood was a genuinely witty writer (he did, after all, pen what’s possibly James Bond’s most entertaining movie — 1979’s ‘Moonraker’) who manages to keep all his characters on just the right side of likeable despite, or possibly because of, how appallingly they might behave.

A good example is Tony Booth’s Sid, an objectively odious man but whose exclamations of increasing exasperation at his brother-in-law’s clumsiness become incredibly amusing. This means we never fully lose sympathy for any of these characters (how can we hate people who entertain us so?), although that could also be because they never had a shred of it in the first place.

Although the film’s real secret weapon is Shelia White as Timmy’s sister, Rosie, who completely steals the show from under everyone else. It’s not just that she has the occasional humourous line but that EVERYTHING she says or does is so deliciously hilarious she had me thanking god almighty I’d actually spent money buying this stupid movie on blu ray. There’s a wonderful moment when her husband says something obnoxious as they’re leaving the door to which she turns round and tells him “You’re so uncouth!” It’s an almost nothing line but White delivers it with such rich character it reduced me to hysterics.

And “rich character” is another part of this film’s appeal with Wood, the cast (and it’s a great cast) and director Val Guest nailing the precise energy needed to bring these people and naughty situations to life.

But it’s not just sex that’s the film’s concern but also class and even though it plays up to certain stereotypes — the working class are dodgy but genuine whereas the middle class are well-to-do but hypocritical — there’s always a sense of affection so the mocking never comes close to being disdainfully patronising, something which can still be an issue in comedy today (only last year BBC Scotland broadcast a sitcom featuring a female character who was written as so aggressively uneducated and ignorant and viewed with such condescending contempt she was explicitly illiterate, so compared to that this film feels positively enlightened).

Val Guest’s direction is un-showy but effective (he doesn’t quite indulge in the vérité approach Stanley Long brought to his ‘Adventures of a Taxi Driver’ series), composer Sam Sklair provides a infectiously groovy score and, best of all, the pacing is tight so it might all be dated as hell but it’s also daft, silly, foamy, dirty and will leave you giggling like an idiot as a succession of bare arses are constantly shoved in your face.

So exactly like sex itself then, I guess.