Six Swedish Girls at a Petrol Station (4 Stars)

This film, made in 1980, is a direct sequel to "Six Swedish Girls in a Boarding School", made a year earlier. It features the same six Swedish girls that we saw in school: Greta, Kerstin, Lil, Inga, Astrid and Selma. There are new actresses playing Astrid and Lil, but the other four are played by the same actresses, in particular Brigitte Lahaie as Greta. The girls have finished school, and they're running a petrol station which one of them has inherited.

Maybe it's an exaggeration calling it a petrol station (American: gas station), because it's just a café with a single petrol pump standing outside.

The petrol station is located in a picturesque little Swiss town. I don't know where it was filmed, but I'd love to know the name of this town. Can anyone help me? The only clue is that the writing on the petrol station's name is in Italian, which would place the town in the South-East.

The red shop sign on the butcher's shop is bilingual, Macelleria (Italian) and Metzgerei (German). In German-speaking Switzerland no sign would ever be translated into Italian, so it has to be an Italian sign translated into German. This really is a beautiful town.

What's remarkable is that the girls still wear their school uniforms, including the blue tops with their names printed on them.

The film has a simple plot. The girls are making money by having sex with their male customers. They insert the fuel nozzle into the car, then take the man upstairs for sex while the pump is running.

There's no auto-stop valve, so petrol worth hundreds of Swiss Francs overflows and runs into the drain. The man has to pay the bill, including spillage. It's not prostitution, because he's paying for the petrol, not the sex. I need a lawyer's opinion on that fine distinction.

The mayor's wife wants her husband to expel the Swedish girls from the town. She says it's because she doesn't like the immorality, but it's really because she doesn't like the competition. She has sex with almost everyone in the town, except for her husband. Poor man.

The mayor doesn't want to expel the Swedish girls, so he finds a good excuse. The town's brass band needs a new place to practise, and the petrol station's café is the only room big enough.

Between you and me, the cafe looks too cramped for band practice, but it's a good enough excuse to let the Swedish girls stay in the town.

Here are the lobby cards for the film. If you know what a lobby card is, you're too damn old! In the days before multiplex cinemas, when only one film at a time was shown in a cinema, there was a set of framed photos hanging either in the foyer or on display in the window. Today, lobby cards are collectors items, especially for the big blockbusters of the pre-multiplex era.

There's one curious thing about this film. In the previous film, Selma, played by Elsa Maroussia, was the main character. In this film she's the only one of the six girls who has a non-speaking role. She doesn't have a solo scene, and in the group scenes she's always sitting silently while the others chatter. When the girls go out for a run she's always last, but that was also the case in the previous film. However, look at the last two lobby cards. In both photos, she's hidden from sight, with only her legs visible behind the petrol pump or the other girls.

To compensate for her relative absence from the film, I've decided to show more of her in this post than any of the other girls. This is Selma running through the woods. Last, of course.

This film isn't as good as the previous Swedish girls film, but it's still an enjoyable voyeuristic spectacle. If you want to see pretty naked girls, this is the film for you.