Movies - Mumsy, Nanny, Sonny and Girly

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	Movies - Mumsy, Nanny, Sonny and Girly

Mumsy, Nanny, Sonny, and Girly is the name of a 1969 British horror-comedy cult film. Based on a stage play by Maisie Mosco entitled "Happy Family" (which was later adapted into a novella by screenwriter Brian Comport as "Mumsy, Nanny, Sonny, and Girly"), the film is a dark and playful allegory of the breakdown of the nuclear family of the 1950s as a result of the free love movement of the 1960s.

The film's principle characters are the members of a wealthy British family whose names are synonymous with their roles within the family: Mumsy (the mother) (Ursula Howells), Nanny (the maid) (Pat Heywood), Sonny (the son) (Howard Trevor), and Girly (the daughter) (Vanessa Howard). Despite being in their twenties, Sonny and Girly act like pre-pubescent children, dressing in British school uniforms and sleeping in giant cribs in a room full of toys. The family's lives are built around an elaborate roleplaying fantasy, called "The Game," which is structured around a strict set of rules. Because a rich childhood is incomplete without friends (a notion which seems to correlate to the noticeable absence of a father figure), Sonny and Girly regularly seek out loners, hobos, and hippies to bring back to their house to make play "The Game." When the "new friends" refuse, they are "sent to the angels" (murdered). One day, Girly and Sonny kill a male prostitute's latest client and convince him that he was responsible for her death after a night of drinking. They bring the male prostitute (played by Michael Bryant) back to their house, where he seduces each of the women and turns the family in on itself.

Directed by British horror veteran Freddie Francis, Mumsy, Nanny, Sonny, and Girly is arguably one of the great lost films of British horror cinema. Poorly marketed but received with open arms by critics (including a glowing review in Variety), the film (called Girly during a limited United States release) suffered poor ticket sales, and the distributor didn't see enough promise to try and bring in a larger audience. The result was that hardly anyone knew that the film even existed, preventing even a cult following. The movie vanished from theatres on both sides of the Atlantic, received a VHS release that was even more limited than either of its theatrical releases, and quickly slipped into obscurity; during a 2004 Freddie Francis film festival in England, the organizers struggled to find a VHS copy of the film to screen, but couldn't come up with one, and it was briefly thought to be lost to the public, until copies began to surface on the internet in 2004.

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