Following an unhappy love affair, Jenny Bunn, a pretty twenty-year-old, moves from her home town in the North of England to work as a primary school teacher in a Home Counties dormitory town near London in order. Most of the plot revolves around Jenny's relationship with her 30-something boyfriend Patrick Standish, and around their contrasting moral values. Jenny holds firmly to the traditional view that a girl should remain a virgin until marriage. Patrick takes a much more permissive view of love and sex. The central issue is essentially whether Patrick will be able to get Jenny into bed with him, and whether he will be able to do so without having to marry her. (He has no interest in getting married, to Jenny or anyone else, but he is very interested in having sex with her).
Kingsley Amis' novel was published in 1960, a few years before it became fashionable to talk about the "permissive society". Nevertheless, there was already a feeling in certain quarters that society ought to become a good deal more permissive, at least where sex was concerned, than it already was, and that values like Jenny's were becoming increasingly old-fashioned and outdated. Patrick was the main representative of this viewpoint in the novel, but he was far from being the only one. Jenny's good looks meant that she had to fend off attempted seductions not only from Patrick but also from her sleazy middle-aged landlord Dick Thompson, from Patrick's Scottish flatmate and teaching colleague Graham, from Julian Ormerod, another friend of Patrick, and even from her own female flatmate Anna Le Page.
The film makes a few differences to Amis's plot. Patrick, a master at a public school in the original, here becomes a lecturer at the local technical college. Graham and Anna play less important roles here than they did in the book, and Julian a more important one. Julian is clearly wealthy, and tries to live the lifestyle of a country gentleman, but the source of his wealth remains a mystery, and there is a hint that it may not be entirely above board. In the book he is older than Patrick, but here they are around the same age.
The film transfers the action from the early sixties to the end of the decade. Several other reviewers make the point that the British moral climate had changed considerably between 1960 and 1970 and complain that the film did not really reflect this change. There may be some truth in that, but there wouldn't have been much of a film if there was no more to it than "Patrick wants to sleep with Jenny. Jenny is happy to sleep with Patrick. The End". In any case, there were probably still plenty of girls in 1970 who wanted to save their virginity until their wedding night, even if not quite as many as there had been in 1960.
Amis's novel does not have a great deal of plot, being more concerned to draw a social-realist picture of a particular place at a particular time, a small town in the South of England in the early sixties. This makes it a difficult novel to adapt for the screen, and George Melly's script is not a very interesting one. The cast features some well-known figures from the British acting profession, but none of them make much impression, except perhaps for Sheila Hancock as Dick's cynical, long-suffering and sharp-tongued wife Martha.
Oliver Reed as Patrick is too crude; Amis's character may have been a cad, but he was also handsome, intelligent and charming enough to persuade Jenny to stick with him despite his obvious lack of principles. Reed is charmless enough to make her run a mile. Hayley Mills as Jenny is rather dull; she was never to have as much success in adult roles as she had had as a child or as a teenager. And Ronald Lacey as Graham should have won a special BAFTA for "Worst Attempt at a Scottish Accent"; if they couldn't have found a Scottish actor to take the part, they should have rewritten the script to make Graham English.
This was the only feature film to be directed by Jonathan Miller. Miller had already become known for directing television dramas such as a version of "Alice in Wonderland" and the M R James adaptation "Whistle and I'll Come to You", and was later to direct many theatrical and operatic productions, so I was surprised to learn that "Take a Girl Like You" was his only excursion into the world of the cinema. Perhaps he was dissuaded from any further such ventures by the film's lack of success; it flopped both with the critics and at the box office. Having seen it, I can well understand why. 4/10.
