How sad is this?

Awesome Movie

As Good As It Gets

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

BEAT GIRL is another film to explore the then-popular craze for Beatnik culture. Like THE PARTY'S OVER, it features Oliver Reed strutting his stuff in various dated dance scenes, and is interspersed with dialogue which sounds incredibly cheesy thanks to the way in which it has dated.Unlike THE PARTY'S OVER, it's an attempt to provoke censors and audiences with plenty of 'sensation' drama, as in the American quickies. One of the main characters is a former stripper and indeed striptease sequences play a big part in the proceedings; one particular exotic dancer, all the way from Hawaii, perhaps one of the most explicit teases I've ever seen despite the lack of nudity. It must have been incredible for audiences back in 1960.BEAT GIRL is actually a pretty decent little story. The youthful - and extremely attractive - Gillian Hills plays the girl who discovers her dad's new flame used to be a stripper, while at the same time she immerses herself in Beatnik culture. Most of the film is shot and set around a club in which Nigel Green and Christopher Lee play various sleazy characters. There's plenty of music here too, some of it courtesy of pop sensation Adam Faith, and despite the dating of the cultural material, it's never less than an engrossing - and surprisingly sexy - piece of film-making.

Hard to believe that this tale of beat girls, beat boys and sundry strippers was once considered scandalous and had an 'X' certificate slapped on it when it first appeared. It's another warning on what can happen when you let your teenage daughter listen to jazz or worse still, jive music! Of course, it's mostly terrible but it has built up something of a reputation as a cult movie in recent years. (The club scenes and a chicken run stolen from "Rebel Without a Cause" are surprisingly good).David Farrar is the rich architect who remarries; his new wife is Noelle Adam and she has a shady past and newcomer Gillian Hills is his pouty teenage daughter who resents her. The cast also includes Christopher Lee, Adam Faith, (not at all bad), Peter McEnery and a young Oliver Reed, (billed here as Plaid Shirt). The director was Edmond T Greville who brought a middle-aged man's disapproving eye to bear on the proceedings.

"Beat Girl" (released in the United States as "Wild for Kicks") is a "Swinging Sixties" film made during the fifties. (Although it is listed on here as dating from 1960, the year it was released, the opening titles state "copyright MCMLIX"). It is one of the earliest British films to document the growth of youth culture, and is set against the background of the world of jazz clubs and coffee bars celebrated in Colin MacInnes's novel "Absolute Beginners", also from 1959. (The novel was itself to be made into a film, very different in style to this one, in the eighties). The teenagers we see here are described by the American term "beatnik", although they formed part of what was later to become the characteristically British "Mod" subculture. Two features of this subculture were preferences for jazz music over rock, which was associated with their hated "Rocker" rivals, and for coffee over alcohol. Although many teenagers would have been too young to drink legally, this latter preference owed less to a strict regard for the law than to an association of alcohol with an older generation they looked down upon. As one young man says here, "Drinking is for squares!" Scenes of young people listening to and dancing to music are set against a family melodrama. Paul Linden, a successful London architect, has recently remarried; his first marriage appears to have ended in divorce some time ago. His rebellious teenage daughter Jennifer, an art student, takes a strong dislike to her new French stepmother Nichole, who at 24 is much younger than her husband. Paul is a modernist in terms of his architectural practice, but in terms of just about everything else he appears to be highly conservative and disapproves of Jennifer hanging out with the local beatnik community. (From the viewpoint of 2015, Paul's designs for his pet project, "City 2000", seem almost ludicrously dystopian, but in the fifties and sixties we were probably supposed to take this sort of concrete brutalism seriously).Paul would be even more disapproving if he knew about some of Jennifer's other extra-curricular activities. The Soho coffee club where she and her friends meet is across the street from a strip club, something for which Soho was notorious around this period. She befriends Greta, one of the strippers at the club, who knew Nichole when they worked together in Paris. It turns out that Nichole was herself a stripper in her youth, a fact of which Paul is blissfully unaware, and Jennifer resolves to find some way to use this information against her stepmother. Her involvement with Greta brings her to the notice of Kenny, the sleazy manager of the strip club.Because of its adult themes, the film was highly controversial in its day. It is strongly implied that Nichole and Greta were not merely strippers in Paris but also prostitutes, although the dreaded P-word is never used. We actually see some of the performances in the strip joint, and although there is no nudity some of them are highly suggestive. It is therefore unsurprising that the film-makers had difficulty getting it accepted by the British Board of Film Censors. Delays in getting it certified explain why it was made in 1959 but not released until 1960; in the end it was given an X-certificate, meaning that it could only be seen by adults and thereby excluding many of the teenagers who must have been its intended audience.The film is notable for the remarkable performance of Gillian Hills as Jennifer. She was only 14 or 15 when the film was made, younger than her character who is supposed to be 16, but even at that age was able to project a disturbing mixture of innocence and sensuality, similar to that of Sue Lyon in "Lolita". Gillian possessed the looks of a young Brigitte Bardot, with a touch of Jane Fonda thrown in, and it has always surprised me that she never went on to have a bigger acting career, although she did become a successful singer in France. (Two actors seen here in smaller roles, Shirley Anne Field and Oliver Reed, did indeed go on to be major stars). The film's other attractive feature is John Barry's score, his first film commission. I had always associated Barry with the quasi-classical music he wrote for films like "Out of Africa" and some of the Bonds, but here he shows that he could also turn his hand to jazz, with a bit of rock thrown in.Despite the contributions of Hills and Barry, and David Farrar as Paul, "Beat Girl" is not a very good film. It can never decide whether it wants to be a youth musical (the X-certificate probably scuppered that ambition), or an adult film in the sense of a serious drama for grown- ups or an "adult" film in the sense of "as close to soft-core porn as the censors would allow in 1959". It might have worked as a teenage film had the sex content been toned down, or as a serious drama if more attention had been paid to the relationships within the Linden household and if we could believe in the too-decorous Noëlle Adam as a lady with a shady past. In the event, however, it tries to do all three, and ends up falling between three stools. 5/10A goof. When Jennifer and her friends travel from Soho to her home in Kensington we see their car travelling through open countryside. Both Soho and Kensington are in central London and no conceivable route would have taken them outside the London conurbation.

UK early rocknroll films at top of Netflix queue got me this incredible gem. The snide superior pans in other reviews here are dead wrong.1) the heavily repeated John Barry 7 theme song is so good, you still want to keep hearing it after the movie, a masterful extended loop.2) the ingénue lead is more sultry than Bardot at her best, super strong as BB was. BB could instinctually portray mischievous, but this lolita is the embodiment of scheming side glance, icon of teen noir in a single static medium shot with a patina of grainy chiaroscuro.Yes, Espresso Bongo had the provenance of the highly meritorious stage play it bowdlerized and film production values that gave dimly lit black & white a sheen, but EB characters were sitcom cartoons, no match for BG's tragic archetypes.Espresso Bongo and nearly all teen films were made years after Beat Girl, and parody a late 1950s Leave it to Beaver stereotype projected on modern settings. Beat Girl is earnest in its perspective of post WWII dregs trending towards a rat warren atomized future of 1984.3) the dialogue is infra dig, not hackneyed. Pay attention to the concise staccato phrasing. Rewind every time Adam Faith speaks and you too will be cooler than anybody else you will ever meet for parroting his existential bon mots, not least that real rebels don't fight; that's for squares.4) I have seen any number of rock and roll movies. None have as low a clinker quotient in their song roster as this. When Adam Faith singing near blue grass grade stripped down rockabilly is the least, your soundtrack is mighty strong.5) I've seen ink on the Teddyboy trend, but nowhere have I seen it portrayed on screen as much as in BG and as matter of fact therefore realistic.The only question for me is whether I surrender precious media shelf space and hard earned coin to own this treasure. From the fence, I lean toward yes.