Adventures of a Private Eye Review (1977)

	Adventures of a Private Eye
Year:	1977
Director:	Stanley A. Long
Stars:	Christopher Neil, Suzy Kendall, Ian Lavender, Harry H. Corbett, Fred Emney, Liz Fraser, Jon Pertwee, Adrienne Posta, Irene Handl, William Rushton, Anna Quayle, Angela Scoular
Genre:	Comedy, Sex, Trash
Rating:	2 (from 2 votes)
Review:	Bob West, assistant to a private eye, offers his services to a woman being blackmailed while his boss is away. Can this bumbling detective solve the case, in between attempts to bed any female he comes into contact with. Well this is a bit more like it, this sequel to the resolutely dreary sex comedy Adventures of a Taxi Driver opens with our hero scarpering from someone else's marital bed knocking down milk bottles on his exit as a cheeky sing-along theme kicks in. Sadly it's all downhill from there as this second attempt to repeat the success of the Confessions films misfires at every opportunity, failing to replicate the cheeky charm of the Robin Askwith movies. What you get instead is another limp sex comedy, although things look a bit more polished than last time round and Christopher Neil is slightly more likeable than his predecessor Barry Evans, who declined the role following his success in sitcom Mind Your Language. If he watched this it's hard to imagine him feeling to regretful. Adventures of a Private Eye falls flat during every badly delivered comedy scene and tiresome sexual encounter between the lead and a succession of bored looking women. You can almost hear the hollow silence of cinema audiences unlucky enough to have seen this on the big screen. The only conceivable reason to watch is if you have to see every film performance of such fondly remembered British thespians as Jon Pertwee, Liz Fraser and Irene Handl. if not then stick with the antics of Timmy Lea.
Reviewer:	Jason Cook
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Stanley A. Long (1933 - 2012)

Long got his start taking nude photos, branched out into short films, then embarked on a series of features which lasted a good three decades before he moved into a post-production capacity on many titles up until just before his death. It was those sexploitation flicks which made him a millionaire, capturing the public's interest in increasingly racy subject matter, making his career a textbook example of loosening censorship, from nudist colony movies (Take Off Your Clothes and Live) to mondo documentaries (West End Jungle, Primitive London, London in the Raw), to full on softcore such as Groupie Girl, The Wife Swappers, Naughty, On the Game, his highly lucrative Confessions of rip-offs The Adventures of... series, and his finest film Eskimo Nell, rightly cited as the best, or at least the funniest, of the whole genre. He also penned a revealing autobiography.

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