Baby Love (1969)

Overrated and overhyped

I don't have all the words right now but this film is a work of art.

Admirable film.

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

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.

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.

Warning: Explicit nudity, lesbianism and all-around bad behavior make this a very poor choice for showing your kids or your 80 year-old mother.Wow. This is one sleazy movie and it's a shame, as a really good film seemed like it was hiding within and could have resulted had the direction and script been a little more clever and a little less sensationalistic. The disturbed relationships of all concerned did have the possibility of making a fine film.The movie starts with a middle-aged woman (Diana Dors) committing suicide. Her 15 year-old daughter inexplicably goes to live with her old lover and his new family. This really doesn't make much sense--you'd think there'd be SOMEONE related to her or a foster home instead of this person who she'd never even met. This is very contrived, but so be it. Once in this home, you are never sure how much this girl connives or just happens to fall into bizarre sexual relationships with the son, wife and tries desperately to have sex with the father!! In many ways, she appears to seek emotional love and support in the only way she understood--with her body. All in all, a surprisingly dark and twisted series of events that is rather hard to believe--especially in the end of the film when she is revealed to be a bit less naive than in the rest of the film.Sadly, had this movie taken more of the high road it actually could have been quite challenging but good entertainment. The Freudian aspects as well as as the idea of a sick family whose dynamics are thrown for a loop with the introduction of this troubled teen is fascinating. Think about it--because of their own inadequacies and unfulfilling relationships they each, in turn, seek it out in the girl. This could have been an interesting film that was less exploitation and more psychological. But, instead with glimpses here and there of the girl's body and lots of innuendo, the film just seemed more like soft-core porn than anything else.By the way, the 15 year-old in the film really was 15--making you feel, perhaps, a bit dirty for watching it. I just assumed she was of consenting age and was surprised when I looked it up on IMDb to see that somehow they got away with making a skin flick with an underage girl. That's rather sad.

This extremely rare British film of the late 1960s features the debut of Linda Hayden, who went on to appear in a succession of horror films and the 'Confessions' sex comedies, and an early appearance of Keith Barron, known to British audiences as a prolific character actor to this day.The story, of a sexually-precocious and beautiful 15-year old who takes revenge for her mother's suicide by using her body to seduce not only her mother's former lover, but also is wife and son, is probably unlikely to be shown again in today's paedophile-aware society. Scenes where she lets a disgusting lecher in a cinema start touching her up, and on another occasion seemingly consents to gang rape, are both unlikely and perverted. The film does however have a lot going for it - a relentlessly downbeat yet gritty storyline, an illuminating probe behind the outward respectability of an ordinary middle-class family, and the physical assets of Linda herself, who reveals everything but full-frontal.On the negative side, the ending is an anti-climax and suggests a loss of interest in the story by this point. Linda whilst undeniably sexy, sports a very variable northern England accent and variable acting talents - excellent in some scenes, less so in others. It's clear that subsequent casting directors saw more in her physical assets than her acting skills, considering the low-budget and fairly dire movies she went on to appear in. The lesbian scenes between her and the relative unknown playing Keith Barron's wife are probably the most memorable. All in all, an interesting combination of a 'kitchen-sink', very British, family drama, with sexual situations which would not be allowed in a film today - especially considering Linda herself was only 15 when she made it.Another viewing may bring out some hidden depths, but on first sight this was disappointing. A better-developed story and more care over the acting could have made this a classic of its day.