Take a girl like Hayley Mills, Britain's professional virgin for much of her career, and so who better to play the part of Jenny Bunn, the new girl in town who has yet to have her cherry popped. Barely has she got out of the taxi before she's accosted by local lothario Patrick (Oliver Reed), slavering at the chops at the prospect of fresh meat. He's as slimy as slime can be but you wonder if the (male) writers see him this way, or whether they regard him as a kindred spirit. The narrative proceeds along a familiar will-she, won't-she path, with less than hilarious consequences.
You don't really expect Dr Jonathan Miller, Kingsley Amis and George Melly to come up with a feminist tract, but you'd think they would be capable of producing better dialogue rather than the terrible twaddle they peddle here; e.g. "don't blow your cool over Patrick, dinner will be groovy". To add to the grief there's the usual line-up of British 'character actors' hamming it up like mad, turning it into a kind of Carry On Chastity, but without the laughs. The source novel by Amis was written in the 50s but the film, made in 1970, updates this only stylistically. It didn't seem to occur to anyone that this would make it seem even more anachronistic than it was when the story was first published
