The Smashing Bird I Used to Know

This is a rather odd movie, appearing after the JD/reform school movies of the late 50's and early 60's, but before the sleazy WIP films of the 1970's. It's also British, so all bets are off. The British are famous for being the most repressed and prudish of the European countries, but they also might be the most perverted. This film is fairly tame. It is less enjoyably trashy than similar films like "Baby Love" with Linda Hayden, the early Pete Walker effort "School for Sex", or the more violent "In the Devil's Garden", and it is definitely much less sleazy than Italian co-productions like "What Have You Done to Solange?" Still the film does contain flashes of full-frontal nudity and a completely gratuitous scene where the heroine (who looks to be about twenty five)dresses up in her school girl uniform even though she's not going to school (one for the perverts, I guess).

The protagonist is mentally unbalanced due to the bizarre merry-go-round related death of her father and she has some strange fear and fascination with horses. She's sent to the reformatory/mental institution because she stabs her mother's loutish boyfriend after he tries to rape her. This seems like a perfectly normal reaction to me, but the school psychiatrist insists on delving into her troubled psyche to get at the root of her neurosis, thus there's a lot of Freudian psychobabble (the filmmakers had obviously seen "Marnie" a few too many times). The other girls at the institution seem somewhat less than troubled as well. It's intimated that one was a prostitute, one simply won't take a shower, and couple others are lesbians. There's a few fights, some tame sapphic foreplay,and a lot gratuitous dancing in towels and teddies, but anybody expecting a sleazy WIP film is going to be bitterly disappointed. The only recognizable star is Lesley-Ann Down but she's not prominently featured and doesn't participate in any of the lesbian or nude scenes as she really was a teenager at the time. I recommend this film, but more as a curiosity than for any sordid subject matter it may contain.

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.

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.

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)'

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.