Baby Love

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.

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.

Most of the films about "Swinging London' celebrated the joys and colors of the time. "Baby Love", while it was made during the heyday of "Swinging London", deals with the story of an adolescent girl called Luci, and London serves just a background for Luci and the other characters around her. The characters and their environment are portrayed with a documentary feel - they are shown in a realistic way.

Luci, one day, on returning home, finds her mother dead. A great shock! For Luci there are not many choices. Her future looms black. But her mother, before killing herself, had sent a letter to a doctor who in the past had been her lover, and where she asks him to take care of her daughter Luci. The doctor is now a married man with wife, son and maid - in short, a well-off family.

The doctor brings Luci (Linda Hayden, who was only 15 at the time) to his home. At first she seems just a bewildered, shy girl, but it won't take long till they discover other sides of Luci's personality.

Luci needs love and protection, and for her, love and sex are not very apart. She is manipulative (but not consciously so), yet she acts by instinct - she's a bundle of contradictions, a very complex character. She'll use her powers of seduction on all members of the family, everything is turned upside down and masks fall.

In some ways, "Baby Love" reminded me of "Teorema" by Pasolini, but while "Teorema" is a mystical-political parable, "Baby Love" has her feet on the ground.

The creativity linked to reality, the freedom of the camera, Luci's sensuality/sexuality (there are even some bits of nudity), the nonjudgemental way of showing the characters, make "Baby Love" a very interesting film. It's a pity though that (as far as I know) the only available copies have soft (a bit washed out) colors. Anyway the film is very watchable. Well worth checking out.

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.