Baby Love (1968)

Libidinous 15 year old English schoolgirl Lucy finds her single mother dead. They never had a good relationship, but this still unbalances her. She moves in with the family of her mother's old friend. She hates him and seduces his wife.

Director:

Alastair Reid

Writers:

Tina Chad Christian (novel), Alastair Reid (screenplay)

Stars:

Diana Dors, Linda Hayden, Troy Dante

Cast

Cast overview, first billed only:
Diana Dors	...	Liz, Luci's Mother
Linda Hayden	...	Luci
Troy Dante	...	The Lover
Ann Lynn	...	Amy Quayle (as Anne Lynn)
Sheila Steafel	...	Tessa Pearson
Dick Emery	...	Harry Pearson
Keith Barron	...	Doctor Robert Quayle
Lewis Wilson	...	Priest
Derek Lamden	...	Nick Quayle
Patience Collier	...	Mrs. Carmichael
Terence Brady	...	Man in Shop
Marianne Stone	...	Manageress
Christine Pryor	...	Shop Girl
Yvonne Horner	...	Shop Girl
Vernon Dobtcheff	...	Man in Cinema

Storyline

Poor Luci, she is a 15 year old English schoolgirl about to embark on a promising career as the high-school mattress when she 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 after a long unrewarding career as the town mattress. 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). Luci's new family (The Quayles) has a few issues. The father's libedo is on the wane and he has a stick permanently stuck up his butt. The mother was "convent schooled" and misses the good old days of snuggling up with a pretty young girl. The son is an amateur peeper without the libedo problem but also with a stick up his butt. Luci arrives in the midst of all this with her one suitcase, a bit unbalanced from her mother's recent suicide, and does everything she can to fit in with her new family - more or less. There isn't a ...

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Plot Keywords:

suicide | england | sex | rebuffed | sexual manipulation | 

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Taglines:

I am made for it.

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Genres:

Drama

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Certificate:

R

Details

Country:

UK

Language:

English

Release Date:

September 1968 (UK)

Also Known As:

Amor Perigoso

Filming Locations:

Hampton Court Palace, East Molesey, Surrey, England, UK

Company Credits

Production Co:

Avton Films

Technical Specs

Runtime:

93 min

Sound Mix:

Mono (RCA Sound System)

Color:

Color (Eastmancolor)

Did You Know?

Trivia

Another actor was first cast as Harry but dropped out.

User Reviews

The debut film of the incredible Linda Hayden

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.