Baby Love

Surprisingly good and whilst not a major work, a most interesting and involving film from that sunny 1968 with appropriately colourful and short skirts and dresses. Basically exploitation this is not, however, without thought but now is it steeped in moralising as the British film of the time tended to be. Indeed, although the plot here concerns the dropping of a highly sexed and vulnerable 15 year old into a well off family situation where the father once went out with the girl's mother it is dealt with in a refreshingly reasonable manner. Nevertheless there are various hints and incidents of rape and incest along the way as this goes from bad to bad but always with a smile. Not much smiling from Keith Barron who seems to not be enjoying his part here at all. For the rest it is a different story and Linda Hayden excels as the British Lolita with more than an eye for the men, and women. It is an impressive and nuanced performance and no wonder at all that she went on to further movies. It is also a credit to all involved that it was possible to get such a performance out of the youngster. Dick Emery just about controls himself in a small but exuberant role and overall this is a most watchable film very much of the moment that certainly could not be made today.

Luci, she is a slutty 15 year old English schoolgirl who comes home one day from school to find her Mum as dead as a door knob in the tub. You see her Mum has cut her wrists. Fortunately for Luci, her Mum's childhood friend is now a very successful upper-middle class doctor who has decided to take Luci home to his family (on a trial basis). And the seduction begins.

It's a very slow and boring movie, but apparently some reviewers really get off on seeing an underage girl involved in these shenanigans. -- including stripping. I don't.

I watched this mostly because I wanted to see Diana Dors who oddly is in the film for 2 seconds and has no lines!

The underage girl went on to doing some Hammer horror movies and sex romp films.

If you saw Pretty Poison, you know the plot of this movie. They are roughly the same film, only Dew Barrymore isn't as attractive.

Frankly, I would have rather seen Taste the Blood of Dracula than this one.

Even at only 15 years old, Linda Hayden ably illustrated her skills as an actress in 'Baby love.' Luci is roundly conniving and manipulative - and troubled - and Hayden possesses the poise, nuance, and intensity to portray her most ably, but also the capable range to reflect the character's garbled emotional state. This is hardly to count out her costars, though, particularly Ann Lynn and Keith Barron - steady and believable as adoptive parents Amy and Robert, responding to the turmoil of Luci's coming with their own strong feelings.

The movie is by all means a portrait of Luci, with her compartmentalized vulnerabilities and deviousness. But to the same extent it's a depiction of the widening fractures her behavior exposes and deepens in the Quayle's - and the iniquities she brings out in all those around her. There is definite plot, tracing the progression of the tumult, yet the way the film is structured quite centers Luci as more than just a character. In the same way that, for example, Michael Myers in the 'Halloween' franchise comes across as a brutal force of nature, Luci seems to be the unfettered embodiment of discord, bringing strife with her wherever she goes. And even still, Luci is only human - struggling with the trauma she has experienced, and the unwelcome overtures from those she unwittingly summons to her, set against the willfulness she represents. Though never fully engaging, it's a tack that certainly kept my attention.

On the other hand - that's the movie we get, but even without being familiar with the novel of the same name by Tina Chad Christian, I kind of get the impression that this wasn't necessarily the intention of the screenplay. Luci, in the film, also somewhat reflects a diluted interpretation of the vamp archetype, seen in her carefree flirtations amidst a disordered mentality that sows still greater chaos. But the narrative and scene writing never truly brings this aspect of the character to fruition, and with this notion lodged in our minds, the entertainment factor is weakened with a hodgepodge of half-realized tableaus. I'm of the mind that if one approaches 'Baby love' with the expectation borne out in common synopses, of a young seductress rending a family atwain, you're primed for disappointment. Why, given the varied ways that characters respond to Luci over time, the loftier assessment is the one that makes the movie work, and in general, only in broadening one's horizons to encompass a more esoteric reading does the movie become more engrossing, and satisfying.

With all that said, I think 'Baby love' is an imperfect happy accident. We've all seen movies that were so regrettably untidy in their execution that their purpose is subverted, becoming a delightful outright comedy instead of a drama or serious thriller. 'Baby love' also suffers a similar difficulty, except instead of totally upending the picture as we see it, the perspective is simply altered, like a different filter used in capturing an image. The writing isn't strong enough to cement the cinematic telling of a story, but in its faults it gives way to something even better. Other details in the feature are quite fine - I love the care given to wardrobe, hair, and makeup, and the filmmakers put together a solid soundtrack. Instances of camerawork emphasizing small details in a scene, or subtleties of a performance, are most appreciated. Again keeping in mind the dependence on one's analysis, I think scenes are put together quite well.

'Baby love' is a bit of an oddity. The suggested subject matter is lurid, and the story as written is direct. But the execution is a little less unseemly than we'd anticipate, and the plot becomes something more amorphous. There are a lot of points here that may be a turn-off for some viewers, including not least of all how rough it is around the edges - again, that I think the movie comes off well appears to be lucky happenstance. Of course it also goes without saying that there's a content warning for sexual content involving a minor. But the performances are great, and there's a lot of value here if you can pick up on the more illustrious overarching ideas that the incomplete writing fortuitously conjured in its wake. Recommended most of all for fans of Linda Hayden, one needn't necessarily go out of their way for 'Baby love,' but it's peculiarly enjoyable if you come across it.

This nifty, late-60's British thriller is about a scheming teenage girl (Linda Hayden) who after her mother's suicide moves in with the family of her mother's married lover and proceeds to seduce all three of them (father, mother, teenage son)--two of whom may be blood relatives! If this sounds vaguely familiar, it's because it was the subject of an uncredited, near-remake by Hollywood in the early 1990's called "Poison Ivy", which spawned three increasingly trashy sequels and revived the career of Drew Barrymore. Hayden is actually much better here than Barrymore was in "Poison Ivy", but this movie is very hard to find today, no doubt because Hayden has several brief nude scenes and was about the same age at the time as her fifteen-year-old character. This is monumentally silly more than forty years later--half the adult population (women) have seen a girl that age naked, and the other half (let's just be honest here) probably have at some point in their lives. But we live in a society today where if a teenage girl sends nude photos of herself to her teenage boyfriend, instead of considering it a "teachable moment", we're more likely to charge them both with distributing child pornography!

Anyway, whatever else she was, Linda Hayden was a criminally underrated actress. She got some attention for her appearances in Hammer's "Taste the Blood of Dracula" and as another sexy, evil vixen in "Blood on Satan's Claw" (where, incidentally, she has even more graphic and still-underage nude scenes as well). She had more bad luck after that though. She reunited with the director here (Alistair Reid) as well Peter Finch and Shelly Winters in another very solid thriller called "Something to Hide" that has been all hacked up and never released on DVD for no good reason I can tell. Her best performance perhaps though was in "The House on Straw Hill" (which makes it's likely inspiration, Sam Peckinpah's "Straw Dogs", look like a Disney film), but that entertaining but uber-sleazy venture became the only British-made film to be labeled a "video nasty" in Britain and it was banned there for many years. As a somewhat ironic result, it's considered a minor cult film there today(and was even remade in 2009), but was little seen outside of the UK. As for Hayden, she eventually took her considerable charms to dumb British sex comedies like the "Confessions of" series and "Queen Kong" (starring her then paramour Robin Askwith) before ending her career with a cameo role (mostly nude, of course) in "The Boys of Brazil".

There's nothing much to say about the rest of the cast as this is Linda Hayden's show all the way. But there is a good cameo at the beginning by ill-fated, former glamor actress Diana Dors as the Hayden character's mother. As for the director, Alistair Reid, he's no doubt now written off as a "dirty old man" in some quarters for having directed this, but his "Something to Hide" and "Deadly Strangers" (with Hayley Mills and Sterling Hayden)were equally good British thrillers. I'd certainly recommend this.

After her impoverished, cancer-ridden mother (Diana Dors) commits suicide, schoolgirl Luci (Linda Hayden) is adopted by her mother's ex-lover Robert (Keith Barron), now a wealthy, married doctor living the high-life in London. Once in her new home, the deeply-disturbed girl gradually spirals out of control, teasing teenage son Nick (Derek Lamden), flirting with sleazy family friend Harry (comedian Dick Emery), allowing herself to get felt up in a cinema, taunting local lads by the river (and risking being raped for her trouble), whilst driving a wedge between her adoptive parents by awakening latent lesbian urges in her new mother! Phew!

I found out about Baby Love while searching for films starring my favourite Hammer horror babe, the lovely Linda Hayden, and, boy, is it an eye-opener, the film undoubtedly exploiting the 15-year-old actress's burgeoning sexuality for all its worth, even having her stripping off for the part. But Baby Love is so much more than an opportunity to ogle jail-bait Linda in the altogether: part kitchen-sink drama, part psychological study, it's a skilfully told and ultimately tragic tale of an emotionally damaged, self-destructive soul who, due to her troubled upbringing, is unable to relate to kindness, instead exerting control the only way she knows how—through seduction; in doing so, she tears apart the already fractured lives of those who have tried to help her.

Made in the late 60s, when movies deliberately challenged the establishment, Baby Love is about as subversive as it gets—a controversial piece of film-making that dares to push the boundaries in all directions, while deliberately making the audience feel just a little uneasy about what they are watching. As such, I found it extremely compelling viewing, and highly recommend it to fans of intelligent, provocative drama, as well as to those who find the idea of Linda Hayden as a naughty nymphet simply too tempting to resist.

7.5 out of 10, rounded up to 8 for IMDb.