La pelle giovane

Most of the films about "Swinging London' celebrated the joys and colors of the time. "Baby Love", while it was made during the heyday of "Swinging London", deals with the story of an adolescent girl called Luci, and London serves just a background for Luci and the other characters around her. The characters and their environment are portrayed with a documentary feel - they are shown in a realistic way.

Luci, one day, on returning home, finds her mother dead. A great shock! For Luci there are not many choices. Her future looms black. But her mother, before killing herself, had sent a letter to a doctor who in the past had been her lover, and where she asks him to take care of her daughter Luci. The doctor is now a married man with wife, son and maid - in short, a well-off family.

The doctor brings Luci (Linda Hayden, who was only 15 at the time) to his home. At first she seems just a bewildered, shy girl, but it won't take long till they discover other sides of Luci's personality.

Luci needs love and protection, and for her, love and sex are not very apart. She is manipulative (but not consciously so), yet she acts by instinct - she's a bundle of contradictions, a very complex character. She'll use her powers of seduction on all members of the family, everything is turned upside down and masks fall.

In some ways, "Baby Love" reminded me of "Teorema" by Pasolini, but while "Teorema" is a mystical-political parable, "Baby Love" has her feet on the ground.

The creativity linked to reality, the freedom of the camera, Luci's sensuality/sexuality (there are even some bits of nudity), the nonjudgemental way of showing the characters, make "Baby Love" a very interesting film. It's a pity though that (as far as I know) the only available copies have soft (a bit washed out) colors. Anyway the film is very watchable. Well worth checking out.

This nifty, late-60's British thriller is about a scheming teenage girl (Linda Hayden) who after her mother's suicide moves in with the family of her mother's married lover and proceeds to seduce all three of them (father, mother, teenage son)--two of whom may be blood relatives! If this sounds vaguely familiar, it's because it was the subject of an uncredited, near-remake by Hollywood in the early 1990's called "Poison Ivy", which spawned three increasingly trashy sequels and revived the career of Drew Barrymore. Hayden is actually much better here than Barrymore was in "Poison Ivy", but this movie is very hard to find today, no doubt because Hayden has several brief nude scenes and was about the same age at the time as her fifteen-year-old character. This is monumentally silly more than forty years later--half the adult population (women) have seen a girl that age naked, and the other half (let's just be honest here) probably have at some point in their lives. But we live in a society today where if a teenage girl sends nude photos of herself to her teenage boyfriend, instead of considering it a "teachable moment", we're more likely to charge them both with distributing child pornography!

Anyway, whatever else she was, Linda Hayden was a criminally underrated actress. She got some attention for her appearances in Hammer's "Taste the Blood of Dracula" and as another sexy, evil vixen in "Blood on Satan's Claw" (where, incidentally, she has even more graphic and still-underage nude scenes as well). She had more bad luck after that though. She reunited with the director here (Alistair Reid) as well Peter Finch and Shelly Winters in another very solid thriller called "Something to Hide" that has been all hacked up and never released on DVD for no good reason I can tell. Her best performance perhaps though was in "The House on Straw Hill" (which makes it's likely inspiration, Sam Peckinpah's "Straw Dogs", look like a Disney film), but that entertaining but uber-sleazy venture became the only British-made film to be labeled a "video nasty" in Britain and it was banned there for many years. As a somewhat ironic result, it's considered a minor cult film there today(and was even remade in 2009), but was little seen outside of the UK. As for Hayden, she eventually took her considerable charms to dumb British sex comedies like the "Confessions of" series and "Queen Kong" (starring her then paramour Robin Askwith) before ending her career with a cameo role (mostly nude, of course) in "The Boys of Brazil".

There's nothing much to say about the rest of the cast as this is Linda Hayden's show all the way. But there is a good cameo at the beginning by ill-fated, former glamor actress Diana Dors as the Hayden character's mother. As for the director, Alistair Reid, he's no doubt now written off as a "dirty old man" in some quarters for having directed this, but his "Something to Hide" and "Deadly Strangers" (with Hayley Mills and Sterling Hayden)were equally good British thrillers. I'd certainly recommend this.

Essentially this is the British version of LOLITA, and just as moderately shocking as it must have been upon first release. I've always been a fan of Linda Hayden for her work in the horror field and she's every bit as good here, really investing her character with a sympathy that exists even in devilish turns like her one in BLOOD ON SATAN'S CLAW. The film explores burgeoning teenage sexuality in a stark and sometimes provocative way, also looking at trauma, marriage and lust at times; the focus on characte relationships is what makes it engrossing. It's well acted and well shot too. Seen today it's a fitting portrait of the predatory nature of the era.

Baby Love emerges as a curiously uneven psychological drama that attempts to navigate the treacherous waters of adolescent trauma and sexual awakening, yet struggles to find its footing between exploitation and genuine character study. The film's 1969 sensibilities feel both dated and strangely prescient, capturing the moral ambiguity of late-60s Britain while grappling with themes that remain uncomfortable decades later.

The cinematography exhibits a workmanlike competence without ever ascending to true artistry. Reid employs conventional framing and lighting that serves the narrative adequately but lacks the visual poetry one might expect from a film dealing with such psychologically complex material. The domestic interiors feel authentically middle-class and suffocating, which works in the film's favor, though the exterior shots possess a pedestrian quality that undermines the film's dramatic tension. The color palette remains muted and uninspired, reflecting the emotional restraint of the characters but offering little visual intrigue for the viewer.

Linda Hayden delivers a committed performance as the troubled teenage protagonist, managing to convey both vulnerability and manipulative cunning without veering into caricature. Her portrayal captures the genuine confusion and rage of a young woman processing grief and displacement, though the script occasionally forces her into situations that feel more exploitative than psychologically authentic. Diana Dors provides solid support as the conflicted mother figure, bringing a world-weary gravitas to her role that elevates the material around her. The supporting cast, including Keith Barron and Ann Lynn, inhabits their roles with professional competence, though none manage to transcend the somewhat schematic nature of their characters.

The film's atmosphere oscillates between genuine psychological insight and uncomfortable voyeurism. Reid demonstrates moments of directorial sensitivity, particularly in scenes depicting the protagonist's internal struggles, but these instances are undermined by sequences that feel designed primarily to titillate rather than illuminate. The pacing suffers from this tonal inconsistency, with the narrative momentum frequently interrupted by extended sequences that add little to our understanding of the characters or their motivations. The dialogue occasionally achieves naturalistic authenticity but too often descends into melodramatic territory that weakens the film's credibility.

While Baby Love tackles genuinely challenging subject matter about trauma, class dynamics, and sexual awakening, it lacks the courage of its convictions. The film hints at deeper psychological truths but rarely commits to exploring them fully, instead settling for surface-level provocations that feel hollow upon reflection. The ending arrives without the emotional catharsis that the preceding drama seems to promise, leaving viewers with a sense of incompleteness rather than resolution.

After her impoverished, cancer-ridden mother (Diana Dors) commits suicide, schoolgirl Luci (Linda Hayden) is adopted by her mother's ex-lover Robert (Keith Barron), now a wealthy, married doctor living the high-life in London. Once in her new home, the deeply-disturbed girl gradually spirals out of control, teasing teenage son Nick (Derek Lamden), flirting with sleazy family friend Harry (comedian Dick Emery), allowing herself to get felt up in a cinema, taunting local lads by the river (and risking being raped for her trouble), whilst driving a wedge between her adoptive parents by awakening latent lesbian urges in her new mother! Phew!

I found out about Baby Love while searching for films starring my favourite Hammer horror babe, the lovely Linda Hayden, and, boy, is it an eye-opener, the film undoubtedly exploiting the 15-year-old actress's burgeoning sexuality for all its worth, even having her stripping off for the part. But Baby Love is so much more than an opportunity to ogle jail-bait Linda in the altogether: part kitchen-sink drama, part psychological study, it's a skilfully told and ultimately tragic tale of an emotionally damaged, self-destructive soul who, due to her troubled upbringing, is unable to relate to kindness, instead exerting control the only way she knows how—through seduction; in doing so, she tears apart the already fractured lives of those who have tried to help her.

Made in the late 60s, when movies deliberately challenged the establishment, Baby Love is about as subversive as it gets—a controversial piece of film-making that dares to push the boundaries in all directions, while deliberately making the audience feel just a little uneasy about what they are watching. As such, I found it extremely compelling viewing, and highly recommend it to fans of intelligent, provocative drama, as well as to those who find the idea of Linda Hayden as a naughty nymphet simply too tempting to resist.

7.5 out of 10, rounded up to 8 for IMDb.