French Dressing

French Dressing (1964)

The Film With a Lot of Body!

A deck-chair attendant at a British resort promotes a film festival featuring a French sexpot.

Date of release
1964-04-10
TMDB
5.5 / 10 (14)
Runtime
1h 26m
Genres
Comedy
Director
Ken Russell

Casting

Interesting facts

French Dressing is a 1964 British comedy film directed by Ken Russell and starring James Booth, Marisa Mell and Roy Kinnear. It was written by Peter Myers, Ronald Cass, and Peter Brett, with contributions by Johnny Speight.

Production

In the early 1960s. Ken Russell established a strong reputation in television, particularly with Elgar (1962). Producer Kenneth Harper later said he "was tremendously impressed with his [Russell's] work on television and thought he would make a first class director." Harper offered him the job of directing the Cliff Richard musical Summer Holiday (1963), but Russell turned it down.

Harper then asked Russell to direct French Dressing and promised it would not be a musical. Harper said he wanted Russell to make a Jacques Tati style comedy set at a "seedy English seaside resort." Russell was keen to move out of the BBC and said the treatment (by Summer Holiday writers Cass and Myers) "was promising" and agreed to direct. Associated British agreed to finance a script by Cass and Myers.

Harper wanted to shoot the film in Herne Bay, best known at the time for having the second longest pier in the country. Russell called it "a miserable resort on the Thames Estuary."

He went there with the writers "to soak up the atmosphere and inspiration" but Russell found the resulting script "uninspired". He later called it "a script of such monumental unfunniness as to make the Crucifixion seem like a Mack Sennett farce. It was in the style of the old Ealing comedies... but even more forced and artificial."

Russell requested work be done on it by an actor friend of his, Peter Brett, who had been in Elgar. This was done but Russell says "the script remained uninspired. We shot it all the same. I learned a lot." He later said the final script "had not one funny line in it and hardly any comic scenes, because he wasn't a very jokey writer and most of my scenes were forlorn rather than funny."

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