A NICE GIRL LIKE ME
UK, 1964, 92 minutes, Colour.
Barbara Ferris, Harry Andrews, Gladys Cooper, Joyce Carey, James Villiers.
Directed by Desmond Davis.
A Nice Girl Like Me was intended as a main feature film, but emerges more as an above average supporting feature. Desmond Davis has made two interesting features about girls: Girl with Green Eyes (1963) and I Was Happy Here (1966). This film is not considered nearly as good as those. However, it tells the story of a neglected English rich girl who longs for fulfilment, becomes involved in casual sexual liaisons, but finds fulfilment in children, home and an elderly widower who protects her. There are many girls like the heroine of this film who will never make her mistakes, and the film helps us to understand them. The film seems to be designed for a feminine audience: pastel colours, hazy photography and a girlish heroine who might be interesting to men in real life but whose capers might annoy them on the screen. Well acted, with an interesting and different kind of performance by Harry Andrews.
1. Was the heroine typical of modern girls or an exception?
2. What was the effect of the parental lack of interest. boarding school life and the attention of spinster aunts on her maturity and outlook?
3. What had she been deprived of?
4. Why did the heroine have an incomplete moral sense? ? especially when she was abroad, away from her normal environment?
5. What effect did babies have on her? How did they change her? Settle her? Give her a sense of responsibility?
6. Why was Savage good to her? What kind of a man was he? Did you like him?
7. How could the heroine be attracted to the irresponsible draft-dodger in Venice? Explain why she fell in love with him?
8. How did the Italian mother's giving her baby away show the naivety of the heroine?
9. Why did she think she should marry her cousin?
10. Do you think she would have been happy ever after with Savage? Why?
11. Comment on the effect of the frequent use of the screen filled with pastelcoloured flowers?
12. Someone has called the film a happy-ever-after fairy-tale for irresponsible and lazy girls. Is this correct?
