"Beat Girl" (released in the United States as "Wild for Kicks") is a "Swinging Sixties" film made during the fifties. (Although it is listed on here as dating from 1960, the year it was released, the opening titles state "copyright MCMLIX"). It is one of the earliest British films to document the growth of youth culture, and is set against the background of the world of jazz clubs and coffee bars celebrated in Colin MacInnes's novel "Absolute Beginners", also from 1959. (The novel was itself to be made into a film, very different in style to this one, in the eighties). The teenagers we see here are described by the American term "beatnik", although they formed part of what was later to become the characteristically British "Mod" subculture. Two features of this subculture were preferences for jazz music over rock, which was associated with their hated "Rocker" rivals, and for coffee over alcohol. Although many teenagers would have been too young to drink legally, this latter preference owed less to a strict regard for the law than to an association of alcohol with an older generation they looked down upon. As one young man says here, "Drinking is for squares!"
Scenes of young people listening to and dancing to music are set against a family melodrama. Paul Linden, a successful London architect, has recently remarried; his first marriage appears to have ended in divorce some time ago. His rebellious teenage daughter Jennifer, an art student, takes a strong dislike to her new French stepmother Nichole, who at 24 is much younger than her husband. Paul is a modernist in terms of his architectural practice, but in terms of just about everything else he appears to be highly conservative and disapproves of Jennifer hanging out with the local beatnik community. (From the viewpoint of 2015, Paul's designs for his pet project, "City 2000", seem almost ludicrously dystopian, but in the fifties and sixties we were probably supposed to take this sort of concrete brutalism seriously).
Paul would be even more disapproving if he knew about some of Jennifer's other extra-curricular activities. The Soho coffee club where she and her friends meet is across the street from a strip club, something for which Soho was notorious around this period. She befriends Greta, one of the strippers at the club, who knew Nichole when they worked together in Paris. It turns out that Nichole was herself a stripper in her youth, a fact of which Paul is blissfully unaware, and Jennifer resolves to find some way to use this information against her stepmother. Her involvement with Greta brings her to the notice of Kenny, the sleazy manager of the strip club.
Because of its adult themes, the film was highly controversial in its day. It is strongly implied that Nichole and Greta were not merely strippers in Paris but also prostitutes, although the dreaded P-word is never used. We actually see some of the performances in the strip joint, and although there is no nudity some of them are highly suggestive. It is therefore unsurprising that the film-makers had difficulty getting it accepted by the British Board of Film Censors. Delays in getting it certified explain why it was made in 1959 but not released until 1960; in the end it was given an X-certificate, meaning that it could only be seen by adults and thereby excluding many of the teenagers who must have been its intended audience.
The film is notable for the remarkable performance of Gillian Hills as Jennifer. She was only 14 or 15 when the film was made, younger than her character who is supposed to be 16, but even at that age was able to project a disturbing mixture of innocence and sensuality, similar to that of Sue Lyon in "Lolita". Gillian possessed the looks of a young Brigitte Bardot, with a touch of Jane Fonda thrown in, and it has always surprised me that she never went on to have a bigger acting career, although she did become a successful singer in France. (Two actors seen here in smaller roles, Shirley Anne Field and Oliver Reed, did indeed go on to be major stars). The film's other attractive feature is John Barry's score, his first film commission. I had always associated Barry with the quasi-classical music he wrote for films like "Out of Africa" and some of the Bonds, but here he shows that he could also turn his hand to jazz, with a bit of rock thrown in.
Despite the contributions of Hills and Barry, and David Farrar as Paul, "Beat Girl" is not a very good film. It can never decide whether it wants to be a youth musical (the X-certificate probably scuppered that ambition), or an adult film in the sense of a serious drama for grown- ups or an "adult" film in the sense of "as close to soft-core porn as the censors would allow in 1959". It might have worked as a teenage film had the sex content been toned down, or as a serious drama if more attention had been paid to the relationships within the Linden household and if we could believe in the too-decorous Noëlle Adam as a lady with a shady past. In the event, however, it tries to do all three, and ends up falling between three stools. 5/10
A goof. When Jennifer and her friends travel from Soho to her home in Kensington we see their car travelling through open countryside. Both Soho and Kensington are in central London and no conceivable route would have taken them outside the London conurbation.
Scenes of young people listening to and dancing to music are set against a family melodrama. Paul Linden, a successful London architect, has recently remarried; his first marriage appears to have ended in divorce some time ago. His rebellious teenage daughter Jennifer, an art student, takes a strong dislike to her new French stepmother Nichole, who at 24 is much younger than her husband. Paul is a modernist in terms of his architectural practice, but in terms of just about everything else he appears to be highly conservative and disapproves of Jennifer hanging out with the local beatnik community. (From the viewpoint of 2015, Paul's designs for his pet project, "City 2000", seem almost ludicrously dystopian, but in the fifties and sixties we were probably supposed to take this sort of concrete brutalism seriously).
Paul would be even more disapproving if he knew about some of Jennifer's other extra-curricular activities. The Soho coffee club where she and her friends meet is across the street from a strip club, something for which Soho was notorious around this period. She befriends Greta, one of the strippers at the club, who knew Nichole when they worked together in Paris. It turns out that Nichole was herself a stripper in her youth, a fact of which Paul is blissfully unaware, and Jennifer resolves to find some way to use this information against her stepmother. Her involvement with Greta brings her to the notice of Kenny, the sleazy manager of the strip club.
Because of its adult themes, the film was highly controversial in its day. It is strongly implied that Nichole and Greta were not merely strippers in Paris but also prostitutes, although the dreaded P-word is never used. We actually see some of the performances in the strip joint, and although there is no nudity some of them are highly suggestive. It is therefore unsurprising that the film-makers had difficulty getting it accepted by the British Board of Film Censors. Delays in getting it certified explain why it was made in 1959 but not released until 1960; in the end it was given an X-certificate, meaning that it could only be seen by adults and thereby excluding many of the teenagers who must have been its intended audience.
The film is notable for the remarkable performance of Gillian Hills as Jennifer. She was only 14 or 15 when the film was made, younger than her character who is supposed to be 16, but even at that age was able to project a disturbing mixture of innocence and sensuality, similar to that of Sue Lyon in "Lolita". Gillian possessed the looks of a young Brigitte Bardot, with a touch of Jane Fonda thrown in, and it has always surprised me that she never went on to have a bigger acting career, although she did become a successful singer in France. (Two actors seen here in smaller roles, Shirley Anne Field and Oliver Reed, did indeed go on to be major stars). The film's other attractive feature is John Barry's score, his first film commission. I had always associated Barry with the quasi-classical music he wrote for films like "Out of Africa" and some of the Bonds, but here he shows that he could also turn his hand to jazz, with a bit of rock thrown in.
Despite the contributions of Hills and Barry, and David Farrar as Paul, "Beat Girl" is not a very good film. It can never decide whether it wants to be a youth musical (the X-certificate probably scuppered that ambition), or an adult film in the sense of a serious drama for grown- ups or an "adult" film in the sense of "as close to soft-core porn as the censors would allow in 1959". It might have worked as a teenage film had the sex content been toned down, or as a serious drama if more attention had been paid to the relationships within the Linden household and if we could believe in the too-decorous Noëlle Adam as a lady with a shady past. In the event, however, it tries to do all three, and ends up falling between three stools. 5/10
A goof. When Jennifer and her friends travel from Soho to her home in Kensington we see their car travelling through open countryside. Both Soho and Kensington are in central London and no conceivable route would have taken them outside the London conurbation.