Take a Girl Like You

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

Not many people seem to like this film and it maybe that Hayley Mills seemed rather young for her age at 24 because of course she had been a child actor. But also the film had been a book by Kingsley Amis ten years earlier and things were changing fast at the time. I still liked it though even if it is rather odd for Mills and Oliver Reed to be thinking of having sex as if they were not quite as young as they thought. Both are very good and even if some of those around her are really strange, like John Bird as a Labour MP and Sheila Hancock seems completely lost, although Rex Harrison's son Noel is rather splendid. Jonathan Miller had previously directed on TV the wonderful Alice in Wonderland (1966) and George Melly had written previously Smashing Time (1967) which would have been more appropriate for the time.

The opening titles (in funky 1970 font) are accompanied by the Foundations singing the title song, the hook of which sounds a lot like "Fly Me To The Moon" (aka "In Other Words"). If this film were set when Kingsley Amis, the novelist, set it, and when "Fly Me To The Moon" had its first success (mid-1950s) it might work better. Transposing the action to the dog-end of the swinging 60s is an awkward fit for a story about a young woman who comes from the North of England to a dull Southern town, and is determined to cling to her virginity, rings slightly false, but that's not the only problem. It's a curiously lifeless mix of sketch-comedy turns and a soapy boy-meets-girl sequences which never quite gels. Oliver Reed seems to be on automatic, Sheila Hancock is wasted, Noel Harrison is creepy, but Hayley Mills, despite being slightly too old for the central role of the girl is such a positive force, that every time she's on screen she almost saves this plod. She is a brilliant actress and an inspirational human being - at least that's the vibe I get from her performance in this pale adaptation of a very funny novel.

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.

As a Hayley Mills fan I was curious about the pairing of her with Oliver Reed. It's like putting a little lamb with a hungry wolf. Mills comes to town to take a teaching position. She moves into a boarding house run by a local boozy politician and his unhappy wife. She meets Oliver Reed who comes by to visit another young woman who lives in there. He takes Mills out to dinner and back to his place only to discover that she is a virgin. One of the few left. She tells him she wants to wait until she's in love. Reed delivers her back home. He's intrigued but is distracted by other more available women. Reed and Mills have an interesting chemistry, he's intense and slightly dangerous and she's innocent and inexperienced. The ending had a little twist that I found myself rooting against, before arriving at a more conventional finale. Worth a look.