Six Swedish Girls in a Boarding School (4½ Stars)

This is a film that had a profound impact on me the first time I watched it. At the time it was the most erotic, i.e. the most arousing film I'd ever seen. It was made in 1979, but if I remember correctly I saw it at a small cinema in Ludwigsburg, Germany in early 1981. It was a random choice. I wanted to see a film, and it was the only film being shown at the cinema in the town centre. I didn't know what to expect. Two hours later I walked out of the cinema in a daze.

The film was made in Switzerland by the producer/director Erwin C. Dietrich. Officially it's a German film, but ECD (as I like to call him) claims it has no language. I read a long interview before watching the film today, and I'm glad that I read it before, not afterwards, because it pointed out a lot of things I might have missed. All the voices are dubbed, even in the original version. Most of the dialogue is in voiceover. When people are talking to one another in the film they're usually facing away from the camera, so we can't see their lips moving. The actors were recorded when they made the film, but they came from different countries, and they spoke in different languages. That's curious, but I wouldn't have noticed if I hadn't read the interview.

ECD is an amazing director, although he considers that his greatest talents are as a producer. Many film fans only know him for his work with Jess Franco, ECD as producer and Franco as director. In the interview he seems to have a love-hate relationship with Franco. He praises Jess Franco as a brilliant director, but he says it was difficult to work with him because he couldn't be trusted with money. Among other things, Franco liked to exclude the producer from the shooting, and he would film footage for his own films in parallel, at the producer's cost.

There are actually seven girls in the boarding school. The dark-haired girl is Marie from France. The six blonde girls are the Swedes, from left to right Inga, Kerstin, Lil, Selma, Greta and Astrid. None of the actresses are Swedish; they're a mixture of American, German and French actresses. The only well known actress is Brigitte Lahaie as Greta, 24 years old at the time the film was made.

Was she really 24? She doesn't look a day over 16. It's all down to clean living and a good makeup artist.

Considering it's a trashy exploitation film with no aspirations to win any Oscars, the characters are well-developed and distinct in their personalities. As far as the story goes, the main plot concerns Selma. She's the only girl in the boarding school who's still a virgin. She wants a man, but whenever a man comes close she gets nervous and backs away. It's easy to sympathise with her plight.

It isn't a hardcore pornography film, but it's more explicit than the softcore pornography films of the 1970's. It's a level more pornographic than the Schoolgirl Report films. ECD rejects the word pornographic completely, saying that he hates pornography. The question isn't so much what the film is about, it's what the intention is. The plot itself is very slight, but it's not a series of unrelated vignettes like the Schoolgirl Report films. There's no moral lecturing.

Simply put, the film is just an excuse to present female nudity for 90 minutes. Even when the girls are dressed, they're wearing skimpy clothing and look sexually charged. The gratuitous nudity is a purpose in itself. The girls exercise nude, they go on bike rides nude, they run up and down the stairs of the school nude, they play leapfrog nude. Many of the scenes are filmed in slow motion, with closeups of the breasts and the genital areas. It's nudity for the sake of nudity. Without the nudity this film would have nothing.

The girls are the aggressors in their dealings with men. This is made clear in one of the first scenes. There's a peeping tom who spies on the girls when they run naked through the fields. Is that any surprise? He's an older man, too old to mess with the schoolgirls, so he ogles them from a safe distance. But they take revenge. They knock him out with chloroform, strip him naked, then tie a bunch of flowers around his penis. Is that supposed to be a punishment? The only thing I wouldn't like is being unconscious while they adorn me.

There are two plumbers who repair the boarding school showers, then take a shower themselves to test their work. They're terrified when the girls come in. I suppose seven against two is intimidating odds.

There were four films about the six Swedish girls. ECD produced all four of them, but he only directed the first two. The films directed by ECD feature the same six girls, but the other two films have some replacements, though still keeping a total of six. As I remember, the other two films are weaker, but I'd have to watch them again to remind myself.

"Six Swedish Girls in a Boarding School" is either a very good or a very bad film, depending on your expectations. If you want to spend 90 minutes staring at beautiful girls, you won't be disappointed.