Le prix de la luxure

this film brings back memories because the first part of the film was made in the village i lived in, and my friend and i was extras on the bus taking the main character out of the valley. I got the princely sum of one pound. The bus belonged to my friends uncle and we had to do the scene about twenty times to get it right we also had a fire engine spraying water for it to look like rain. Iwould love to see this film but don't know where to purchase it from. Is the one Patsey Kensitt making the same film i seem to have seen a film with the same title with her starring in it, I was surprised to see that Terence Alexander was not the main star as i only remembered him and Janet Munro at the time.

Of course this film is dated. Why else watch it? The story is too ugly today. This is glossy and the characters and clothes lovely.

This film has a long beginning, no middle and a short ending. It is still well worth watching.

Jennie is a young pretty girl from a working class family. She lives in Wales which is made to look like the dreariest place on earth. She is dying to get to London. Eventually she does but it is not under the best circumstances.

Jennie lucks out. She meets caring and decent Bob, who goes to protect her. She lies and claims to be pregnant to garner more sympathy.

Janet Munroe was quite lovely and a very good actress. John Stride does a good job as the kind and patient man who falls in love with her,

How does it turn out? Does Jennie build a life with this devoted young man or does she risk it all for a chance at the limelight?

This road-to-ruin melodrama is surprisingly watchable if you don't expect too much. The storyline is totally predictable, the characters little more than cliches, the colour lurid and I thought I detected some heavy-handed editing as 3rd-billed Alan Badell has only a few lines in a couple of scenes while uncredited Thora Hird (fresh from her triumph in "A Kind of Loving") has much more screentime as a grasping landlady.

The stunning Eastmancolor photography of Ernest Steward, Acker Bilk's swanky Jackie Gleason like score, (particularly the lush main theme) and location shooting in London, do much to distinguish this cautionary tale of a young woman treading down the well worn primrose path.

Janet Munro convinces as a the naive Welsh rustic, ("Jennie Jones") after La Dolce Vita, to which end she tosses decency aside, and heads to the big city, in her pursuit of a theatrical career. That her career is only to be that of "kept woman" is the discovery leading to the titular harvest.

Performances are all very apt, (particulary Francis Matthews, who nails the characterization of a louche libertine)and Director Peter Graham Scott certainly keeps our interest.

But just when one is most absorbed, most ready to watch Jennie's world unravel, the film ends, and one comes away feeling slightly cheated, with the sense that this MIGHT have been a great film, with a running time of 30 more minutes.

Still, it invites and deserves consideration alongside "Darling," and "Taste of Honey," as films that were also exploring unsavoury misfits in swinging 60's Great Britain.

A morality tale for the early sixties by the ever-enterprising Allied Filmmakers anticipating the journey taken by that year's headliner Christine Keeler and Julie Christie in 'Darling'.

This glossy Eastmancolor adaptation of the book by Patrick Hamilton is usually overlooked, but it provides a chance to savour the youthful beauty of the late lamented Janet Munro, who sadly like the heroine of this fable never lived to experience the fate she so feared of losing her youthful lustre as Miss Keeler certainly did.

Miss Munro might have found have found lasting happiness had she not unwisely favoured louche bounder Alan Badel over nice young John Stride, last seen courting good girl Anne Cunningham.