The Touchables (film)

The Touchables is a 1968 British crime drama film directed by Robert Freeman and starring Judy Huxtable, Esther Anderson and James Villiers. It was written by Ian La Frenais from a story by Donald Cammell.

Donald Cammell, who shares screenplay credit, would later rework its themes in Performance (1970).

Plot
In Swinging London, four girls decide to kidnap their pop idol and hold him hostage in a giant plastic dome in the countryside. His manager tries desperately to find him, as does a wrestler and an upper-class London gangster. However, it becomes clear that the young man does not want to be freed from his glamorous captors.

Cast

 * Judy Huxtable as Sadie
 * Esther Anderson as Melanie
 * Marilyn Rickard as Busbee
 * Kathy Simmonds as Samson
 * David Anthony as Christian
 * James Villiers as Twyning
 * John Ronane as Kasher
 * Ricki Starr as Ricki
 * Harry Baird as Lillywhite
 * Michael Chow as Denzil
 * Joan Bakewell as herself
 * Peter Gordeno as Jimmy
 * Simon Williams as Nigel

Production
It was the first of only two films directed by Robert Freeman, the photographer responsible for a number of Beatles album covers. A mannequin of Diana Dors which appears in the film was the same model as was used in the cover montage of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.

Releases
Largely ignored on its release and since, owing to the scarcity of prints, it has recently acquired cult status of its type, in part due to a DVD release.

Box Office
According to Fox records, the film required $2,600,000 in rentals to break even and by 11 December 1970 had made $825,000 so made a loss to the studio.

Critical reception
The Monthly Film Bulletin wrote: "'Just a temporary solution to the leisure problem, our flavour of the month', is how one of the Touchables characterises the abduction of the pop singer they have whisked off to their polythene pleasure dome. A remark that aptly sums up the spirit of the piece – a world of disposable daydreams, a mise en scéne that drips with the highly lacquered kinkiness of a glossy advertising lay-out. The difficulty is that the film would often like to dig deeper than its consistently bright surface, but once it gets down to celebrating a kind of liberation of the senses, all the crass, 'inflatable' fantasy is unable to make these cavortings seem any more or less real, beautiful or liberated than what has gone before. In fact, the content and method of The Touchables is little different from Robert Freeman's shorter film fantasy The World of Fashion [1968]. Here, however, the colour supplement imagination has extended itself into a feature length film, shakily bolstered by Ian La Frenais' script and drawing what little energy it has from the energetic performances of its quartet of kidnappers. Otherwise, for all the artful combinations of colour and op, pop and non-art bric-a-brac, entertainment in this form will hardly provide even a temporary solution to anyone's leisure problem."Renata Adler, writing in The New York Times, described the film as "A sort of fidgety mod pornography, which uses the advertising convention for eroticism –cutting abruptly from teasing sex scenes to gadgetry, in this case pinball machines, trampolines and odd items of furniture and clothing. Robert Freeman, who directs (his first feature film) is a former fashion photographer ... There is no question of acting, since the range of expressions runs from seductive to sinister to mod vacuous."