| Ooh… You Are Awful | |
|---|---|
Theatrical release poster
| |
| Directed by | Cliff Owen |
| Written by | John Warren John Singer |
| Produced by | E.M. Smedley-Aston Sidney Gilliat Frank Launder |
| Starring | Dick Emery Derren Nesbitt Ronald Fraser Cheryl Kennedy |
| Cinematography | Ernest Steward |
| Edited by | Bill Blunden |
| Music by | Christopher Gunning |
Production | |
| Distributed by | British Lion Films |
Release date |
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Running time | 97 minutes |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Budget | £201,443[1] |
| Box office | £267,173[1] |
Ooh... You Are Awful (U.S. title: Get Charlie Tully[2]) is a 1972 British comedy film directed by Cliff Owen and starring Dick Emery, Derren Nesbitt, Ronald Fraser and Cheryl Kennedy.[3] It is a feature-length adaptation of The Dick Emery Show (BBC TV, 1963–1981) It was Emery's sole starring film.[4]
Conmen Charlie Tully and Reggie Peek have successfully conned a couple of Italian men, and are making an easy escape with £500,000. Flushed with success, Tully is unable to resist running a "quick and easy" con on a passing American tourist, but Tully is arrested. While Tully is imprisoned, Peek manages to escape and deposits the £500,000 in a Swiss bank account. Peek meets Tully on his release, intending to give him the bank account number. But Peek has been having an affair with the sister of London crime lord Sid Sabbath, and his reunion with Tully is cut short when Peek is murdered, on the orders of Sabbath.
Peek has left a record of the bank account number, tattooed on the bottoms of four young women. Tully adopts a range of disguises to track down each woman in turn to see her naked bottom.
Throughout, Tully is confronted by members of Sid Sabbath's gang, with orders to kill as only for them to mysteriously die themselves. Tully thinks he is "lucky", while Sabbath thinks Tully is a one-man army. Neither realise Tully is being secretly guarded by Italian gangsters.
The National Film Finance Corporation invested £62,000 in the film. It was the first NFFC investment following the ending of their Government funding, with new finance obtained from a consortium of merchant banks. The NFFC decided to only make "safe" films, and Ooh... You Are Awful was the first of these.[5]
The film made a profit.[6]
The Monthly Film Bulletin wrote: "Often wasted on television, Dick Emery's considerable talent for comic impersonations is here woven into an entertaining plot which finds plausible excuses for him to don an assortment of disguises and appear in drag (as a bereaved mother, a blowsy woman police officer), as a diplomat, or as the familiar butler figure, Lampwick. Authors John Warren and John Singer have avoided the danger of fragmenting their story into a series of unrelated sketches; and though they don't invariably resist clichés (of character and situation), there is still much to enjoy. Cliff Owen's direction is imaginative; there is an engaging, if mild, element of black comedy (at one point Charlie nonchalantly flicks his cigarette ash into the urn containing Reggie's cremated remains); and although the film is essentially Emery's vehicle, there are some amusing cameos – most notably, Brian Oulton's consolatory funeral director and Stefan Gryff's Mafia boss"[7]
The Observer called it "the best British comedy in many years."[8]
Leslie Halliwell wrote: "Amusing star vehicle with plenty of room for impersonations and outrageous jokes."[9]
The Radio Times Guide to Films gave the film 2/5 stars, writing: "This is a McGill seaside postcard come to boozy nudge-nudge wink-wink life and if that’s to your taste then it belts along like a runaway Blackpool train."[10]
