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Reviews
The Cherry Picker (1974)
Just plain weird!
This film is very hard to make sense of! It seems like a badly edited cross between a 1960s story of a hippy forced into conformity and a 1970s British sex comedy but without any overt sex. The protagonist is duped into marrying Lulu's character, but she then vanishes from the film for the mid-section only to return at the end to bring the plot full circle. It looks suspiciously like Lulu (sensibly!) left it part-way through but was lured back in the end (looking completely different, to the extent that one of the other characters is prompted apropos of nothing to warn her husband that she has a new hairdo) and in the meantime, the script was rewritten to have the protagonist move in with his father's mistress who then becomes his de facto wife until Lulu returns. A selection of ageing British comedy greats (Terry Thomas, Jack Hulbert, Wilfred Hyde-White, Spike Milligan, Patrick Cargill) are wheeled out for cameo appearances, and Lulu looks bright-eyed and bubbly (and bizarrely appears to marry the protagonist wearing the same outfit she wore when she really married Maurice Gibb five years earlier; other than 'To Sir With Love' and a brief cameo in its sequel, I do not believe Lulu made any other films, and it is a shame that this one is such a poor vehicle for her talents. To be frank, the entire film is just a confusing and weird mess. It is worth watching to see how bad a film can be!