Take a Girl Like You

Already out of its time when it was released, 'Take a Girl Like You' focuses mainly on Jenny Bunn (Hayley Mills), a young teacher hanging onto her virtue in pursuit of love, and Patrick Standish (Oliver Reed), a flash bohemian trying to break through her resolve. With a swinging soundtrack from the likes of the Foundations and Ram John Holder, this tale is slight but watchable.

A good supporting cast - Ronald Lacey, Aimi Macdonald, Sheila Hancock, Noel Harrison, plus an early teaming for Johns Bird and Fortune, foreshadowing their head to head skits for Rory Bremner - helps this film to stay afloat, while Reed is the perfect charmer for the rather wet Mills.

Not bad, but perhaps too hopelessly dated to work even as a quirky original. From a novel by Kingsley Amis, adapted by George Melly, and directed by Jonathan Miller.

Based on Kingsley Amis's 1960 novel, everything about this travesty is rendered hideously dated by it having actually been made at the wrong end of the sixties during that fleeting era when Hayley Mills & Noel Harrison were considered bankable stars; and well and truly put Jonathan Miller off ever getting involved with the film industry again.

Amis's contempt both for the permissive society and for women in general, alas, comes through loud and clear. And why Oliver Reed is so charmlessly set on bedding the virginal Hayley when the lovely Aimi MacDonald is all over him is one of several uninteresting mysteries the film presents us with, such as how - with the possible exception of Sheila Hancock - such a good cast is ill-used.

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

Being the same age and lifelong fan of Hayley Mills I just had to watch this film when it showed up recently on TV. Sadly, I'm unable to recommend it to anyone above the age of about 16 as this is about the age that all of the adult actors seem to be in this mess. The fault is with the script, by jazz singer George Melly who adapted it from the Kingsley Amis novel. It's so badly written with such dire dialogue that it's almost unwatchable. Jonathan Miller directed and he should have known better than to take this turkey on. The entire script calls for Oliver Reed to attempt to bed Hayley. That's it. Nearly two hours going over the same trite dialogue of teenage sex talk. It becomes a triangle when Noel Harrison also gets involved which doesn't help. The only sane adult performance comes from Sheila Hancock as the increasingly frustrated wife of idiot Labour prospective candidate, John Wells who tries desperately to inject some of that missing comedy ingredient. Even the normally reliable Ronald Lacey is miscast with the strangest accent. Very of it's time but there were far better, although now dated, sex comedies made, although they didn't really have much of that either. The Me Too movement now would be justifiably horrified by all the groping on display here that makes all the male actors look like randy manics. All very embarrassing and one I'm sure Hayley Mills would rather forget.

Exceptionally slight and meandering comedy has Hayley Mills portraying a twenty-ish girl from Northern England who relocates to London to teach school, taking a room in a boarding house and getting pawed at by various randy men. Of course, being a determined virgin until true love sets in, our heroine keeps all the beggars at bay. Adapted from a novel by Kingsley Amis, this a sex comedy with no sex in it. The Swinging Sixties having passed, what we get here is a rather staid and starchy London, and one quickly loses interest in the character's predicament since her rigid stance fails to propel the slim plot (even though Mills herself is a lovely screen presence). Best performance is given by Oliver Reed as a confirmed bachelor eager to deflower the pretty lass--even if it be on her terms. A few funny moments, but lazily put together and nearly crippled by a terrible finish. *1/2 from ****