Baby Love (1969)

Genres - Drama  |   Sub-Genres - Melodrama  |   Run Time - 98 min.  |   Countries - United Kingdom  |   MPAA Rating - R
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Review by Robert Firsching

It may be hard to imagine that Alastair Reed, who directed the highly acclaimed Traffik and Tales of the City for television many years later, made his debut with this overwrought exploitation-melodrama. Baby Love was also the debut of cult horror starlet Linda Hayden (Taste the Blood of Dracula, Blood on Satan's Claw), who was 17 when she convincingly took the role of 15-year-old Luci, an illegitimate schoolgirl nymphet who is taken in by Robert (Keith Barron) when her mother (Diana Dors) commits suicide. Robert is a wealthy doctor who was once her mother's lover until he dumped her and married Amy (Ann Lynn). Luci predictably begins sleeping her way through the household, leaving the bathroom door open so Robert's son can see her naked, teasing the doctor himself (who might be her real father), and having a lesbian encounter with his wife. It's all supposedly Luci's revenge on Robert for walking out on her mother, but that doesn't explain the old man who gropes her in a movie theater or the black man she practically molests in the middle of a nightclub. Hayden is convincing in the role, and parts of the film are undeniably erotic, albeit in a most disturbing way. Patience Collier, Timothy Carlton, and Dick Emery co-star, and future action director John Glen -- who made several of the later James Bond movies -- handled the editing chores.