Deep End **** (1970, John Moulder-Brown, Jane Asher, Diana Dors) – Classic Movie Review 2142

Co-writer/director Jerzy Skolimowski’s delicate, charming, haunting 1970 tale of young love is set at a rundown London suburban municipal public swimming pool, though it was mostly filmed in Munich, with only seven days of filming were done in the UK, including some exteriors in London’s Soho. The cast was free to improvise and instructed to remain in character even if a take went wrong.

At the pool, impressionable 16-year-old school leaver Mike (John Moulder-Brown) finds a job as its new baths attendant. Soon he is obsessed with his red-headed co-worker Susan (Jane Asher), an attractive young woman ten years his senior who works there as an attendant.

Working at the pool involves providing sexual services in exchange for a tip. Mike’s older woman client (Diana Dors) is sexually stimulated by pushing his head into her bosom and talking suggestively about football. Susan has a fiancé, Chris (Christopher Sandford), and Mike does his best to sabotage their relationship, stalking both of them.

The amusing and accurately detailed screenplay gives the actors something to get their teeth into, with Moulder-Brown and Asher perfect in the roles. Diana Dors relishes her entertaining cameo as the tubby, sexually rapacious middle-aged baths patron lusting after the young hero. And Skolimowski directs with the surest of touches.

The film features the song ‘Mother Sky’ by the band Can in an extended sequence set in Soho. The song ‘But I Might Die Tonight’ used at the film’s finale is by Cat Stevens, now Yusuf Islam, who was mistakenly arrested by the FBI as ‘on national security grounds’ while flying from London to Washington in September 2004. ‘I have never knowingly supported any terrorist group, past, present or future,’ he said.

Also in the cast are Karl Michael Vogler (swimming instructor), Sean Barry-Weske, Erica Beer, Will Danin, Dieter Eppler, Cheryl Hall, Anne-Marie Kuster, Burt Kwouk (who had one evening’s work), Karl Ludwig Lindt, Anita Lochner, Louise Martini, Peter Martin, Ursula Mellin, Christina Paul, Gerald Rowland, Jerzy Skolimowski (man on Tube), Uli Steigberg, Peter Martin Urtel and Erika Wackernagel. With a mainly German-speaking cast, the pool manager, Mike’s Father, the cinema manager and the street policeman are all dubbed by Robert Rietty.

The digitally restored film was re-released in UK cinemas on 6 May 2011 and was released on Blu-ray Disc and DVD on 18 July 2011 in BFI’s BFI Flipside series. In March 2012 the restored film was first shown on UK TV by Film4.