Strictly average movie

Good start, but then it gets ruined

From my favorite movies..

Strong acting helps the film overcome an uncertain premise and create characters that hold our attention absolutely.

First off IMDb's plot synopsis is all wrong! (as usual) Luci is a beautiful troubled teenagers from the wrong side of the tracks in London. Fortunately she comes home to find her mother with slit wrists in the bathtub.Luci is taken in by a wealthy family with an unknown connection to Luci's mother. Ironically what is denied that Luci's is Harry's illegitimate daughter he abandoned is pretty much confirmed to be the reason Harry takes Luci in.The sexy flirt soon lays the grounds for the solid incestuous seduction of her father Harry and her half brother Robert. YES! Get ready for a BIG let down! The only person to bed Luci is the middle aged stepmother! Hence the film really is a tease which does not deliver anything interesting.

BABY LOVE seems one of the most exciting of the '60s youth movies; not only it's thematically daring, but it's interesting, lively, thrilling, thanks in equal measures, I suppose, to real qualities of style and to a nymphet's nudity. It's such a lovable movie. The sulfurous story gets a slightly sleazy B treatment, wholly appropriate for a B subject. The girl in this movie stands out as one of the genuinely exciting realist portraits of women in the cinema.The tendency might look a bit misogynistic—not only is this girl, Luci, the acme of depravity—but look at her mother—and at her adoptive mother …. The one member of her new family who completely capitulates is the adoptive mother. By comparison, her new father and her new brother seem slightly more principled, anyway; though they're counterbalanced by guys like the ugly one who assaults the girl in the movie theater, and the family friend who does his best to seduce the girlie.Is the schoolgirl Luci merely naughty? Is she nasty? The movie suggests she's mentally disturbed.The mellower Shannon Tweed will also seduce a whole family—husband, wife and son—in A WOMAN SCORNED. But Shannon's was a thriller, meant to please more than to shock.Babe Hayden was, as known, 15 yrs old in BABY LOVE, her nude scenes are great and very rewarding; she went on to play in some defining B movies of the '70s, being perhaps the iconic '70s British cult actress. Nowadays she's 56.

This is a rarely seen and unjustly neglected gem from the "swinging London" period of British film-making. It's subject matter – a nubile, underage teenage girl is adopted by a middle class family and becomes the erotic focus of father, son and mother – was certainly ahead of its time, and its amoral stance towards this material make it even more surprising. It was cut by the BBFC for its original UK cinema release (it is surprising it was granted a certificate at all) and its unflinching approach to its underage protagonist's sexual allure and responsiveness would get it into as much if not more trouble with the moral guardians of today.The film begins with cross cutting Hayden's character Luci kissing a boy in front of a gaggle of her male and female schoolmates with the suicide of her mother (a debauched and distressing Diana Dors) in a hot bath with a razor. With her mother dead, Luci goes to live with her Mum's old flame Robert, played by Keith Barron, now a wealthy and successful London doctor. Luci's presence inflames both the teenage son of the doctor and his neglected wife, both of whom attempt to take advantage of Luci's disturbed state of mind (she is having nightmares and hallucinations featuring her dead mother) and Robert himself is also susceptible to the young nymphet's charms. But Luci is no innocent - she seems to know that sex is power and she plays the game for what its worth, hanging onto her position in the house through sheer female will and exploiting the desires of each member of the family when it suits her.This portrait of Luci as colluding with those who would pray on her is troubling, but psychologically acute. Luci is both powerless, disturbed and the off-spring of a Mother who clearly (we learn in flashbacks) was no sexual wallflower. Luci is very much the product of her background, one of financial and emotional poverty, and so is rather more sympathetic than the spoilt middle-class folk whose fantasy figure of attraction and repulsion she is forced by circumstance to be. The film ostensibly looks like one of those dramas in which a cuckoo comes in to disturb a nest, but in actuality the middle-class family was always already deeply divided and she but acts as a catalyst which brings the ruptures to the surface. There is a suggestion that Luci has been sexualised before we meet her – her mother's burly lover hangs around her house both before and after the suicide & the cruel laughter from mother and lover in the flashback where Luci catches them at it suggests that he was also involved with Luci, the mother rubbing her sexual competitiveness with her daughter in the poor child's face. This reading of the film makes sense of those moments where Luci responds to improper, aggressive advances in inappropriate situations – the black man in the nightclub, the groper in the cinema, the louts in the rowboat. She also flirts heavily with Robert's friend, a depressing old lecher played by Dick Emery who acts as a sort of Clare Quilty figure, embodying Robert's worst knowledge about himself.Baby Love is brilliantly put together, using a roaming camera which constantly prowls around the characters hoping to catch them as some sordid thing and fast editing offering us glimpses of impressionist moments from each situation. It seems extraordinary that the film was made over 40 years ago – it makes most teenage drama now look like punch-pulling chicken feed.

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.