Betrayed Revisited

Incredibly someone (not me) has managed to trace the location used for the exterior scenes of the early MM film ‘Betrayed’. Goodness knows how, given that you see it only fleetingly in the film and the location has changed quite a bit since then. It is in Amsterdam, and when John Lindsay made the film was obviously some kind of a pub or bistro (as in the context of the film it is where the men go to down a few pints) but is now ‘San Jovany’ an Italian restaurant. Although all these years later they still have a sign plugging Heineken beer outside!! It you want to look it up on Google earth the street address is “San Jovany, Westermarkt 23, Amsterdam, Nederland”.

Ad-break card from ‘Sex and Fame’

Ad-break card from the 1996 C4 documentary

Mary visits the set of Alien

The nostromo model gets an extra lick of paint on the set of ‘Alien’
http://i.imgur.com/lkmNW.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/YSiTP.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/ukIlr.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/o37h8.jpg

these photos recently resurfaced at www.prometheusforum.net courtesy of Alien crew member Dennis Lowe, who posted

“Mary Millington came to do a photoshoot at Bray Studios one day, she did the shoot in the studio car park and when she heard of the sci fi film she couldn't resist on doing a piece for it. You can imagine the disruption this had on all those young innocents, they had to force themselves to stay in the very same space as that temptress...........anyhow here she is helping us out with the wiggeting....and that's not anything to do with sex....”

The Mary Millington/Cliff Twemlow connection

This is the DeWolfe track heard in the party scene in Mary Millington’s True Blue Confessions (1980), while they only used the instrumental part of it in the film, here you can hear the vocals as well. Composer ‘Peter Reno’ is actually the late Cliff Twemlow, a real working class renaissance man whose career encompassed everything from stints as a nightclub bouncer, a library music composer, a horror paperback writer and actor- he’s probably best known for the semi-autobiographical film GBH (1983). Even before I’d discovered the track’s identity I’d always considered it a little out of date sounding for a 1980 film, so it is no real surprise to discover that Cliff actually knocked this one out for the DeWolfe library music company in 1969, in collaboration with someone by the name of Hermann Bender of whom I know nothing other than the fact that he had a name more befitting of a stereotypical gay character in a 1970s sex comedy than an actual person. This ditty does though provide a slight, but amusing connection between the legends that are ‘Cliff from Manchester’ and ‘Mary from Dorking’.

Frivol No. 40 – extras

As well as the Bohrloch photo-story from Frivol number 40, two further stills from the film have been discovered in that magazine’s contents page. (credit and thanks to ‘mogli63’ for these scans)

Not to be confused with Stephanie Cole

I wonder if veteran actress Stephanie Cole (Tenko, Waiting for God, Doc Martin etc) is aware that she once appeared in a film with Mary in which both of them were uncredited, played traffic wardens and –from the looks of it- shared the same costume – here is the pair of them in Eskimo Nell.

Foxy Lady

This photo dates from around the release of ‘The Playbirds’ in 1978, and photos from the same set were used to promote that film in the likes of Continental Film Review. Oddly then, this photo was published again in the 1990s in a magazine called Fox (Vol.1 No.2) in the process giving Mary a new, years after the fact alias of ‘Little Babs from British Columbia’. Credit to ‘Paddyo’, for this scan.