Playbird superstar: Mary Millington and Come Play With Me (1977) as a national box-office sensation

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article examines the record-breaking box-office performance of pornography mogul David Sullivan’s 1977 film production Come Play with Me in substantial detail. This film was so successful that it remained on release at one London cinema for nearly four years and went on general release at around 1,000 cinemas across the UK. The article also considers the role that Mary Millington had in generating this ongoing box-office success and her associated capacity as a pornography superstar, who was fashioned as such by her patron David Sullivan. It then more briefly examines the box-office performance of the follow-up films made through the Millington-Sullivan combination. Finally, it considers the hypothesized notion of national porn culture by comparing some popular UK (Come Play with Me), US (Deep Throat), and French (Emmanuelle) pornography films from the 1970s, and then some porn/sex star actresses from the 1970s – Millington (British), Linda Lovelace (American) and Sylvia Kristel (Dutch/European) – as part of wider cinema trends and national film cultures.