BABY LOVE
UK, 1968, 98 minutes, Colour.
Keith Barron, Vernon Dobtcheffl, Diana Dors, Dick Emery, Patience Collier, Linda Hayden, Bernard Miles.
Directed by Alistair Reid.
Baby Love is a rarely-seen British film of the late 1960s. It is quite striking – even shocking – when looked at in later decades. There is a greater consciousness about relationships of adults with teenagers, especially under-age.
The film focuses on a young girl, Lucy, played by Linda Hayden (who appeared in a number of the Confessions sex comedies in the UK). The lead is character actor, Keith Barron. There is a British supporting cast which includes such actors as Dick Emery and Bernard Miles.
The focus is on a fifteen-year-old who lives in inner London, whose mother commits suicide. When she is taken in by the former lover of her mother and his family, she infiltrates herself into the confidence of each of the members of the family, seducing them, father, mother, son.
The film is fairly explicit in its presentation of this theme.
At this time, there were a number of films about strangers who entered into families and disrupted them, especially by sexual seduction: Joe Orton’s Entertaining Mr Sloane, Harold Prince’s Something For Everyone and Pier Paulo Pasolini’s Teorema.
Director Alastair Reid made such feature films as The Night Digger and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1981). However, his main work over several decades was in television including the miniseries Traffik and two of the Inspector Morse films.
1. What genre of film was this? Human drama, thriller? How real was its presentation? How symbolic the characters and their behaviour?
2. The importance of the English background, atmosphere and style, locations, the minor characters? Did this add to the meaning of the film?
3. The impact of the opening, the build-up of the mother, her suicide? The importance of this initial impact for her re-appearances and influences on Luci?
4. The film's focussing on Luci? The significance of the title? Luci as a schoolgirl, the scene with kissing the boys, her relationship with her mother, the hold of the mother over her, her later wanting her mother to have loved her? How responsible was her mother for Luci's strange behaviour?
5. The film's filling in the background of the mother and her character? Her letter to Quayle?
6. How were the Quayles presented as an ordinary English couple? Their style, wealth, home, their son, the quality of their marriage, their social life etc.? The impact of Luci in this life?
7. How well did the film present Luci as a complex character? Her strange dreams, imagining of her mother, locking herself in etc.? The childlike nature of Luci as grateful, buying the clothes, the outings? The strange impact on her of the change of lifestyle, class etc.?
8. Luci as an adolescent girl, the growing sexuality? Was her character credible, the nature of her obsession with her mother?
9. The film's illustrating her hold over the family, her flirting with Nick, approaching him in the shower and injuring him? Her enticing of Amy and the lesbian response? Her toying with Robert, wanting his approval? Slashing him with the fork, forcing his hand to own his infatuation? Did this hold that she had over the family make sense? How sinister?
10. What was the audience left with as Luci illustrated her power, dressed herself up in evening dress and makeup, her close-ups and the film ending with her face? Was this an interesting exploration of human values?
