The Smashing Bird I Used to Know

There is not much in terms of nudity in this film. Unlike most exploitation prison or reform school movies, we just get a confused teenager who gets shunted from place to place because she does not fit in.

The lead character is played by Madeline Hinde, who had a short career in films. The lead guy is played by Dennis Waterman, who had a very long career. He was famous as Jerry Standing from the New Tricks detective series. In 1969, when this movie came out, he was 21 years old.

He tries to be a good boyfriend and friend to Madeline, but she is too traumatized by a previous sexual assault. She is acting out fantasies that she killed her attacker, but in fact he recovered. So it is all about her mental health issues and the creepy guys who linger in her life. If you find that kind of stuff boring, this is full of it. There is some light sexual stuff for a few minutes, but it is mostly left to the imagination.

Eccentric mod drama with several silly plot points and archetypes for characters. It is part psychological thriller, part soap opera, part women-in-prison film, part romantic drama, part nudie flick.

The highly-strung Nicki (Madeleine Hinde) is haunted by guilt over the bloody accidental death of her father years before. Her mother now romances gigolo Harry (Patrick Mower). His attempted sexual assault of Nicki leads to violence then her being thrown into a cushy-looking remand home for attractive young dolly birds. (Nicki has gone into another trance and won't tell anyone what really happened). Nicki encounters some topless inmates in the shower, a full-frontal flash, lesbian kissing, and probing sessions with the governess (Faith Brook) who is trying to reach the truth. Still haunted by violent visions and fearful of being blamed for a huge brawl in the dorm room, Nicki is easily convinced by Sarah (Maureen Lipman), who has a romantic interest in her, into joining a planned escape.

The violent imagery contrasts with fun swinging 60s mod paraphernalia. Ridiculous and entertaining.

Despite it's hothouse retitling as School For Unclaimed Girls, this film is a fairly easygoing tale of a girl gone ever so slightly bad and the lesbians she meets in the aforementioned school. There is a fair amount of full frontal nudity, some rather chaste lesbian kisses, and a little bid of bloodshed. It all adds up to not very much, though fans of late 60s British quota quickies will definitely want to catch it. Producer Peter Newbrook went on to direct the horror fave The Asphyx, director Robert Hartford-Davis was also responsible for Incense For the Damned and The Fiend, and scribe John Peacock went on to pen Hammer's To the Devil A Daughter.

British cinema discovered sex late in the 1960s and "The Smashing Bird I Used To Know" took advantage of the more liberal censorship although it only shows one girl topless for a few seconds and a few other quick flashes. (There were no full frontals in the cinema print or in the UK DVD release.) It arrived in Glasgow on 5th October 1969, getting a run on the ABC circuit. Here's what I wrote about it in my book "What We Watched In The 1960s (In The Cinema)".

There was more sex in "The Smashing Bird I Used To Know", but it consisted of a couple of semi-nude scenes used to illustrate life in a school for bad girls, one of whom is Madeleine Hinde who shouldn't really be there as she was merely defending herself against an assault by her mother's horrible boyfriend. It's cheap exploitation with nothing going for it, and in his autobiography, Patrick Mower says when he and co-star Dennis Waterman went to see it in the cinema together, they came out with their heads down hoping that no one would realize they had been in it. With it at the ABC 1 and Bedford was "Mission Batangas", a routine war film with Dennis Weaver.

Jim Doyle is the author of 'What We Watched In The 1960s (In The Cinema)', 'What We Watched In The 1970s (In The Cinema)" and 'What We Watched In The 1980s (In The Cinema And On Video)'

Perhaps this was considering daring by 1969, but it is very tame. The nudity, at least in the version I streamed, were a few breast shots and some covered bottoms. As a young girl, Nicki was at a fair riding the merry-go-round across from her father. She got frightened, and when her father reached over to comfort her, he fell and was killed by the hooves of the carousal horses. She was meant to believe she killed him, at least in her own mind. As she was approaching college age, her mother was hooking up with Harry, a total con man and a real sleazy character. One day, he assaults her, she fights back and stabs him. For that, she is sent to a remand home, not really a prison and not a detention center. A place for the courts to then decide what to do with her. It then becomes a very tame women-in-prison type of movie. And of course a pillow fight when they are all in their nighties. Feathers all over the place. Rated R, today this would probably get a PG-13 rating easily.