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That Kind of Girl
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| Year: |
1963
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Director: |
Gerry O'Hara
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| Stars: |
Margaret Rose Keil, David Weston, Linda Marlowe, Peter Burton, Frank Jarvis, Sylvia Kay, David Davenport, Steven Stocker, Charles Houston, Max Faulkner, Patricia Mort, Martin Wyldeck, John Wood
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| Genre: |
Drama |
| Rating: |
  5 (from 1 vote) |
| Review: |
Eva (Margaret Rose Keil) is an Austrian au pair in London who does not get away from her job to socialise very often, so when she strikes up a conversation with a young man handing out flyers in a bar, she is immediately interested in him. He is Max (Frank Jarvis), a student who happens to be a C.N.D. activist trying to recruit people to an upcoming march by way of demonstration, and the two of them agree to meet up later that week at a nightclub Eva invites him to. However, when they get there, she meets someone else: the unsavoury Elliot (Peter Burton)...
Not that naive Eva realises that he is a no-good type, as she does not even twig that she is the "that kind of girl" the title refers to in this curious mix of exploitation movie and educational warning film. Audiences of 1963 might have settled down to watch this in the belief that they were going to see a straight drama with added sauciness, but the moralistic tone might well have dampened any thoughts of titillation by the time the story had reached its close. This was the production of three moviemakers who would tend to look for the most prurient angles in their material, but at this stage in British censorship the only way you could do that was if it were purportedly educational.
So there was a lot of finger-wagging to sit through here, much of it to inform you of the dangers of venereal disease, as they used to call it. There's more to this, but the feeling of being lectured to by a bunch of people taking not an entirely healthy interest in their subject matter never quite leaves it, especially once it enters its second half. In truth, with a collection of characters assembled to represent various walks of life that would be coming into contact with the threat of STDs, it seemed as if they were trying to include a bit too much, and more focus on one aspect would have done their efforts no harm at all. Take the C.N.D. bit: not important to the theme, but gets a lot of space devoted to it.
This appears to have been because the producers had noticed there was a big march on nearby around the time they were filming, and wished to put a setpiece in that drew in those viewers interested in banning nuclear weapons. It could have been that they were trying to be trendy, but the effect is closer to leaving you uncertain as to which direction this is meant to be going. That direction is Eva's road to ruin, where she sleeps with the seedy and older Elliot, and contracts syphilis from him which she then passes on to Max, and later on a one night fling to student Keith (David Weston) who is frustrated his girlfriend Janet (Linda Marlowe) wishes to wait until they are married before any hanky panky.
So not only do you have Eva's damaged reputation, but you are supposed to muse over banning the bomb, then learn that contracting this kind of disease can happen to any sexually active person. The fact that Eva is foreign to Britain does make this look more like a warning to stay away from those free and easy continental types, who may or may not have existed in the minds of the filmmakers, but as well as that we see that Janet gets pregnant, and infected, on losing her virginity to Keith. So there's a moral about sex before marriage too, although at least by this time there was an acceptance that it did happen, but then you get Eva assaulted by Elliot, who goes on to continually phone her up with obscene calls that she has to get the police involved to counter. For a film that lasts an hour and a quarter, they packed a lot in, but now this strictly holds sociological value as it's not too entertaining otherwise. Music by Malcolm Mitchell.
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| Reviewer: |
Graeme Clark
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