Age of Consent (1969)

I like the storyline of this show,it attract me so much

A brilliant film that helped define a genre

This story has more twists and turns than a second-rate soap opera.

The tone of this movie is interesting -- the stakes are both dramatic and high, but it's balanced with a lot of fun, tongue and cheek dialogue.

Not for the first time and probably not the last I find myself watching a different film from the majority who have posted comments here. Apparently this was Michael Powell's last film, I have no idea what prevented him making more movies but if it wasn't natural causes that ended his career this turkey would have accomplished it in spades. It's difficult to ascertain what audience it is targeting beside pubescent schoolboys the world over who would derive as much titillation from the likes of Naked, As Nature Intended. Mason, normally a fine actor, walks through it, rather strange as he also co-produced, whilst Jack McGowran is a joke and Helen Mirren shows no sign of the fine actress she was to become.

Whilst this is not a masterpiece of film making, I found it an enjoyable piece of entertainment. Who could not enjoy watching a young Helen Mirren spending much of the time naked? The story is about an artist(James Mason) going to live on an Island in the Great Barrier Reef where he meets young Cora(Mirren)who lives with her horrid granny. He gets Cora to pose naked for him on many occasions. There is some drama along the way and also some comedy mainly from Jack MacGowran, (especially when being pursued by a man mad woman) plus some lovely scenic shots of the island. But by far the best scenery on show is the lovely Helen. Just sit back and enjoy!!

This is a quirky and highly eccentric film. 'Over the top' is an inadequate description. The sight of James Mason with a beard and a deep tan doing an Australian accent is eerie and unsettling. He does not sustain the accent very well, but he tries mightily. And once he even convincingly says: 'It's byute!' He is meant to be a famous Australian artist, and to convince us that he is in the correct milieu, he sits in front of a book about Sidney Nolan, and just to rub it in even further, 'Sid' and Arthur Boyd are mentioned on television. So the scene is set. But what Nolan and Boyd probably never did was go and live alone in a run-down shack on an island at the Great Barrier Reef in North Queensland, and paint a naked nymph. Not that they didn't fancy naked nymphs, it's just that, well, the Great Barrier Reef??? A hut??? Alone??? This may be what drew Mason to the project, since he and Michael Powell jointly produced it, and that means they were serious. Mason must have wanted a jolly good holiday in the sun, far from his austere Switzerland where he lived, and a naked girl cavorting around him also must have seemed just the thing. That naked girl is none other than Miss Mironov, better known as Helen Mirren, and she was aged 24 at the time. Over the years I have become exasperated at hearing all my male friends gasp with lust about Mironov. She never did anything for me, but I am in the extreme minority, indeed have often been met with expostulations of disbelief when I confessed my indifference. What was wrong with me? That is a question many people have speculated about, without coming to any sound conclusions. If being turned off by Mironov is a sign of something, then I plead guilty. But apart from that, she is of course a superb actress, and she even does very well in this role which could easily have been silly. Instead, she manages to be convincing. And that was not easy, as the story is in so many ways ridiculous. This was Michael Powell's last effort at directing, after which he passed beyond the Great Barrier Reef. The film may be feeble in countless ways, but it is genuinely amusing and its affectionate sending-up of the Ossies by portraying wildly caricatured Ossie types was very funny. Mason's friend Nat, played by Jack MacGowran, is as outré as a character actor can get, but nevertheless believable. He overacts so emphatically that he is simply hilarious. Yes, the film is engrossing in its own bizarre fashion. For the time it was meant to be highly erotic, and doubtless was, but in those days, things were simpler. Even the phrase 'age of consent' is no longer used. After all, now that girls of ten are routinely pregnant, what is the 'age of consent' any longer but a fig leaf to mask the hypocrisy of the older people who insist on believing that young people are still demure? Today, the idea of a 24 year-old girl running around naked on a beach would not be a bit unusual, or even a 17 year-old, which is the supposed age of Mironov's character. There is no use taking this film seriously, instead it should be viewed as a comedy which was never intended to be anything but a romp. There is also a very clever dog star named Godfrey who gets a whole single screen credit to himself. (That is how whimsical this film really is!) His best trick is to rush back to the hut and slip his neck back into his collar which is tied up so that when James Mason arrives home, he does not know that Godfrey has been running along the beach playing for hours and, like all the people in this film, romping like mad.

To get another Powell movie, I had to purchase this film, which is not in the Maltin guide. I've long been a James Mason film, and have admired Helen Mirrin's many appearances in more recent years on PBS and in such excellent films as "When the Whales Came." I was stunned to see before me a certified turkey.The whole point of the movie, it appears, was to show 23-year-old Mirrin in the buff. It takes an hour to get to that point, and when it arrives it's quite embarrassing. Ms. Mirrin was one of that rare species of starlets who looked better in clothes than without them. And so she prances about and swims and....but what is a film like this doing in 1969? A decade earlier it might have seemed oh-so-exciting, but not smack in the middle of a deluge of post-censorship porn and near porn flicks.The Australian scenery is nice and well photographed. Mason knows how to act. And that's it! The script is particularly awful. And wait until you see the villain grandma. Perhaps this will become a cult classic. It's certainly bad enough.