Nick Millard (who often worked under the same Nick Phillips as well as various other pseudonyms) was the son of S.S. Millard (popularly known as Steamship Millard) who was one of the Forty Thieves - the legendary band of exploitation movie producers and distributors of the classic exploitation movie era (from the 1930s to the 1950s).
How I Got My Mink follows the adventures of a brother and sister who decide to make an underground movie. They don’t want to accept any help from their rich father. They just want to do their own thing, man.
There are lots of sexploitation movies about the making of sexploitation movies but a sexploitation movie about the making of an underground movie is a bit different. And what Donna and her brother Philip are making is definitely an underground movie. Although at times (as in the case of some of Millard’s own movies) the dividing line between underground film-making and sexploitation could be a bit blurry.
The movie that the brother and sister is making consists of lots of sex and lots of man-in-the-street interviews that get pretty weird. The interview with the expert in bio-sexual physics for instance. He wants to sterilise everybody and have all reproduction done by cloning.
The movie-within-a-movie is the whole of the plot which means that there pretty much isn’t a plot. Which is part of the fun of 1960s sexploitation. There’s no real plot but while there’s an enormous amount of nudity (very graphic nudity) and sex it’s not just endless sex scenes. There’s plenty of weirdness in between the sex scenes.
The acting is more or less non-existent. None of the players has any notion of what acting is. But then Millard was going for a kind of cinéma vérité feel so it doesn’t really matter.
In fact he’s going for a bit of a Nouvelle Vague feel. Imagine early Godard but with lots of nudity and sex. Millard definitely belonged to the 1960s/70s school that believed that sex could be combined with artiness and an avant-garde sensibility.
There is some character development. Donna and Philip are rebelling against their rich Establishment father. They’re looking for some kind of meaning in life. Philip descends further and further into complete self-absorption. Donna was hoping to find the joy and beauty in life but all she finds is despair and craziness, but she eventually finds an answer of sorts (and we find out where the title of the movie comes from).
Maybe there isn’t any meaning to life, but a mink coat is real.
Millard’s movies were very low-budget, usually (as in this case) without synchronised sound. There is some dialogue in some scenes in this movie but even then the dialogue isn’t synched properly. Which may well be deliberate, or it might not be, but it adds to the strangeness.
The transfer isn’t great but I suspect that this has more to do with the source material than the transfer. This is such a low budget movie that it probably never looked much better than this. The extras include trailers for other weird and wonderful Nick Millard films plus some reasonably worthwhile liner notes.
How I Got My Mink doesn’t have the bleakness and despair of other Millard movies. There is emptiness and despair but to the extent that there’s a message it’s that giving in to despair doesn’t help. Donna ends up accepting life for what it is and what it can offer her.
Nick Millard made a lot of very low budget movies, a surprising number of which have survived and are available on DVD. These include Pleasures of a Woman (1972), the rather bleak Lustful Addiction (1969) and the positively harrowing Roxanna (1970).
Nick Millard hasn’t achieved the cult status that other sexploitation movie-makers like Joe Sarno and Radley Metzger have slowly gained which is perhaps a pity. He had his own unique, if strange, vision. How I Got My Mink is recommended to fans of the weirder and more avant-garde end of the sexploitation spectrum.
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