Take a Girl Like You * (1970, Hayley Mills, Oliver Reed, Noel Harrison) – Classic Movie Review 8838

Director Jonathan Miller’s 1970 Take a Girl Like You is based on the novel by Kingsley Amis, and stars Hayley Mills, Oliver Reed and Noel Harrison, so there is plenty of guaranteed interest in the personnel involved.

Unfortunately, humorist/ columnist/ jazzman George Melly’s screenplay from Kingsley Amis’s good novel is not any better than the one he wrote for the failed swinging Sixties comedy Smashing Time. It has a similar theme. But this time Hayley Mills plays the innocent young woman who comes to corrupt London from the North of England. Jenny Bunn (Mills) is a school teacher who wants to stay a virgin till she is a bride, though naturally Oliver Reed’s local lad character Patrick Standish has other plans. Noel Harrison also stars as Julian Ormerod.

Take a Girl Like You is low on the very two commodities Melly is normally overflowing with – laughs and vigour. If the script is not good enough, neither unfortunately is the cast, while director Miller seems to have strayed a long way from his rightful territory. It is the film debut of Nerys Hughes (Sandra in TVs The Liver Birds).

Also in the cast are Sheila Hancock, John Bird, Aimi MacDonald, Ronald Lacey, Penelope Keith, Geraldine Sherman, Imogen Hassall, John Fortune, Pippa Steel, Nicholas Courtney and George Woodbridge.

It was remade in three parts for TV in 2000, with Sienna Guillory, Rupert Graves and Robert Daws.

John Bird and John Fortune later became a TV comedy team for Rory Bremner.

© Derek Winnert 2019 Classic Movie Review 8838

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