young lead of THE HOUSE THAT SCREAMED (1969) and VAMPIRE CIRCUS (1972)—as Mike, a happy-go-lucky British teen who lands his first job at a public bath house near London. There he is coached in his duties by the slightly older Susan (THE MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH’s Jane Asher), whom he soon observes is having an affair, some- times on the premises, with his former middle school coach (Karl Michael Vogler), a married letch who teaches a swimming course to adolescent girls. The humid physicality of Mike’s workday sur- roundings, combined with the semi-dressed cus- tomers’ propensity for flirting with him and drawing him into their erotic fantasies, stand in contrast to the cool, red-haired, sexually-knowing Susan and excite an infatuation. In the course of a story cov- ering only the first week of Mike’s employment, we’re not told much about this likable protago- nist, other than that he still lives with his parents and feels he’s moved on from the rather ordinary, sexually-shy girl (Anita Lochner) he dated steadily at middle school; we’re told still less about Susan but gradually learn, from her actions, that she’s a monstrous tease who harbors contempt for men, other women and animals alike. Mike’s innocence is attracted by Susan’s beauty and her complicity as a co-worker, but he is also rubbed the wrong way by Susan’s airs of sexual experience and jeal- ous of her older suitors. This prompts him to in- terfere with her affair and also to shadow her
weekend date with another man closer to her own age, Chris (Christopher Sandford), that results in an engagement. Mike also does what he can to derail this relationship and, in the course of events, wins the opportunity to tease Susan to the point of getting exactly what he wants from her. How- ever, his victory is short-lived and takes some unexpected turns, to say the least.
Diana Dors is outstanding in a single scene casting her as a voluptuous, middle-aged bath- house customer who involves Mike in a violent but chaste sexual fantasy involving soccer great Georgie Best—soccer being a running motif throughout this story, mirroring how Mike’s own balls are figuratively kicked by the field-playing Susan. Dieter Eppler, familiar not only from nu- merous Edgar Wallace krimis but also THE HEAD (Die Nackte und der Satan, 1959) and the lead role in the Italian-made SLAUGHTER OF THE VAM- PIRES (La strage dei vampiri, 1962), also ap- pears briefly as a boiler room attendant with his own fantasies about Susan. DEEP END can be seen as the innovative cul- mination of a long series of psychological dramas that proliferated throughout the 1960s, a field in which Skolimowski himself had previously dabbled with the screenplay for Roman Polanski’s KNIFE IN THE WATER (1961). Alfred Hitchcock earlier honed the definition of this subgenre by probing the traumatized psyche of Gregory Peck in the
Diana Dors as a bathhouse attendant who ravages Mike (John Moulder-Brown) as part of a sexual fantasy.
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