The Bed Hostesses (3 Stars)

This is Ingrid Steeger's seventh Swiss film, made in 1973. Yes, I know I'm watching them out of order. The last of her Swiss films that I reviewed was the fourth, "The Stewardesses". What's my excuse? It's a blunder. Maybe I'm drinking too much wine lately.

The title makes it sound that this film is about escorts. That's not the case. The title is spurious. There's a lot of sexual activity in the film, but none of it is paid for. Ingrid's role is brief. She appears for less than five minutes, and she is a non-sexual hostess, looking after the well-being of a champion cyclist on his arrival in Zurich. None of the other girls in the film are hostesses. My suspicion is that Erwin C. Dietrich couldn't think up a name for the film, so he just picked something racy at random. The scenes look like they're leftovers from the Blutjunge Verführerinnen series, of which I've only written about the first film. My apologies once more for skipping the last two films. I'll make up for it, I promise.

The film is a series of vignettes, linked by appearances of a young man called Blumsli. In voiceover he says that his school teachers told him that he would never amount to anything, but he's proved them wrong by getting the best job of all: a window cleaner! Every day he looks through windows and sees naked women. One day he's cleaning the windows of Elite Film Studios, the company owned by Erwin C. Dietrich. He sees more than he's ever seen before, because many nude scenes are being filmed. (They're all scenes from Erwin's previously released films).

Blumsli climbs in through the window and visits Erwin in his office to suggest a partnership. He tells Erwin that he can supply beautiful women as actresses for his next films, because nobody sees as many beautiful women as a window cleaner.

Erwin C. Dietrich, playing himself in the film, invites Blumsli to tell him more over a glass of champagne. Blumsli tells his stories, which leads to the aforementioned series of vignettes. Blumsli appears in some of the vignettes, but the others are merely stories that women he knows have told him.

As you can probably tell, the stories are very weakly linked together. The whole film is a muddle of unrelated scenes. Ingrid Steeger is the only hostess in the film, and she assists Blumsli in one of his former jobs as a masseur. She massages better than him, I can assure you. Blumsli also used to rent horse-drawn carriages, so we see two lesbians travelling together. In another scene a woman exercising in the woods becomes the victim of football players who perform a Satanic ritual with her. It's all so ridiculous.

This is a film for completists, i.e. obsessive collectors like me. The rest of you can give the film a miss, unless you want to turn off your brain and enjoy a few naked bodies.