Beat Girl (1960)

Fantastic!

Excellent, Without a doubt!!

Don't listen to the negative reviews

Absolutely the worst movie.

Beat Girl. When a middle aged architect brings home to England his new, young French wife his beatnik teenage daughter takes an instant dislike to her and attempts to wreck the marriage. To be honest this is not the type of film that I usually watch but I did so because it stars Christopher Lee (as a seedy strip club owner) and a very young Oliver Reed, two of my favourite actors. This British film is pretty much a tale of teenage rebellion against the older, stiff upper lipped generation & the then current popular music scene also plays a key part (Adam Faith stars). Much of the action takes plays in a strip club and features some very erotic dances with topless nudity, I guess pretty strong for 1960 and no doubt partly why it gained an X certificate. The real star of this movie for me was Gillian Hills, the incredibly stunning teenage daughter, who was only around 16 when she made this. Much of the dialogue - words such as jiving, teds, squares etc - do date this film and it is plodding at times but it's an interesting piece for it's time.

***SPOILERS*** Troubled youth movie taking place in London with confused and mixed up Jennifer Linden, Gillian Hills, getting in with the local cool or beatnik crowd just to have her feel wanted in a world that offers her nothing but pain and hardships. It's Jennifer's dad architect Paul Liden, David Farrar, who just came back from his three month trip to France that makes thing far more difficult for her then they already are. Paul had married former strip tease artist Nichole, Nichole Adams, who had kept her secret life from him which Jennfier was to soon discover. It's at the local Les Girls strip Club that Martha, Margot Bryant,the top attraction ran into Nichole and in a flash her cover as an upstanding citizen in the community was blown out off the water.It was Jennifer in finding out about her step-mothers shady past as a strip tease artist as well as her and Martha doing a little hooking on the side that had her blackmail her and try to break up her marriage to her dad Paul Linden. While doing that Jennifer herself got stung with the strip tease bug and tried to get a job strip teasing at the Las Girls Club where Martha is working in. It's the sleazy owner of Les Girls Club Kenny King known as Double "K" to his friends, Christopher Lee, who has plans for the under-aged Jennifer in taking her along with him to Paris and breaking her in, if you know what I mean, for the job of taking her clothes off in front of dozens of wild and aroused men before giving her a job at his strip club.***SPOILERS*** Everything falls apart at the end of the movie with Nichole attempting to save her step-daughter Jennifer from Kenny King's clutches with her husband Ralph taking on her drugged up and drunken beatnik friends who made themselves at home in his house and refuse to leave. Jennifer for her part got trapped in Kings office where he makes his move on her with Ralph Nichole and the police trying to come to her rescue.The surprise ending has Kenny King get all that's coming to him but the person that he gets it from makes no attempt to escape the law. Since he or she knows that no jury on earth would ever convict him just for taking out the garbage and trash, Kenny King, out of the neighborhood and making it a much better to live in.

Here's an odd little number. The title suggests that this is one of those 50's JD films focusing on "beatniks". There were any number of films like this in America, none of which gave an especially accurate depiction of the "Beat Generation" (as represented by individuals like Jack Kerouac, Alan Ginsberg, and William Burroughs). Well, this is a kind of British version of one of those, and it turns out that lines like, "I'm over and out dadd-i-o," manage to sound even more ridiculous when delivered in a crisp British accent.But aside from hanging out in coffee houses and dancing to jazz-style music, there's nothing particularly "beat" about the characters in this movie. Rather than a wild rebel, the lead girl (Gillian Hills) is more of a childish, bratty daddy's girl who is less than thrilled when her globe-trotting architect father brings home a much younger new bride from France. When she finds out her new stepmother was once acquainted with a stripper who works across the street from a coffee shop where she and her friends hang out, the younger girl decides to expose the French woman, but instead she gets HERSELF mixed up with the slimy owner of the strip club (played by Christopher Lee). By modern standards, of course, this is not very racy (even compared to similar movies in late 60's and 70's like "Daddy, Darling" and "So Young, So Lovely, So Vicious" where jealous teenage girls deal with unwanted stepmothers by seducing them into lesbian affairs!). But it was no doubt quite risqué for its time.It's odd to see Christopher Lee in a role like this since he had just hit it big with "The Curse of Frankenstein" and "Horror of Dracula", but those were still pretty disreputable items back then too. And he's good as always. Gillian Hill was kind of like the British Tuesday Weld in that she managed to play a teenager for about fifteen years. Her most famous role though was as one of a pair of young models who shag David Hemmings rotten in "Blow Up". She's not bad either. And in the supporting cast are a young Oliver Reed and Shirley Ann Field, who later appeared together as brother and sister delinquents in the interesting Hammer sci-fi film "These Are the Damned". This is certainly worth seeing.

We don't have a television. We live better without the invading stream of swill. But there are times when I have a few free moments and my brain feels like jello and I just want to get passive and watch something stupid. It is when I want to watch something stupid that I miss the television just a little. Enter LikeTelevision.com – it streams old drivel from T.V.for free – and this morning I was really in need of some old drivel and even though I knew it was going to be stupid and frustrate me with its vapidness, I clicked on Beat Girl.Oh man, you can see this one coming from a mile away – from the very first shot of the lovely Gillian Hill, who plays Jennifer, wayward adolescent, you can see the "cautionary tale of the bad sixteen year old girl who gets in trouble because of sex" steaming your way like a rusty old tank. But, well, like I said, the brain is shot this morning (only got three hours of sleep – silly me) and I had nothing better to do and so I stayed with it. Part of what kept me with it is the fact the Gillian Hill is quite the beautiful young lady and I believe she is in every scene of this movie, it being the story of a rebellious adolescent.But please, even though this movie is from 1960, and about rebellious teens, do not confuse it as being anything like Rebel Without A Cause – which manages to hold up under the ravages of time. Beat Girl just manages to get sillier and sillier. I do not believe for one moment that a girl in the basement of a jazz club ever quipped to her boyfriend, "Oh, fade out." Hearing it actually made me laugh. It is exactly the kind of thing that a very stupid screenwriter from say, 1960, would include in a movie about rebellious teens. If there is any pleasure in this movie, it is in listening to these forced quips the kids make to one another. Some may have actually been genuine slang like "cool, man" but others like, "he's the hotdog daddy-o" I just don't buy. What we get from this movie is not what kids were actually like in 1960, but what a few creepy adult filmmakers thought they were like. Or perhaps the filmmakers knew they were not "actually" like this and they portrayed them like this to titillate the audience. Does that sound likely? Yes. Very.So, there I was, enjoying some of the little quips in the jazz club and the coffee bar when Beat Girl's hideous attempt at a plot rears its horrible head. Watch out, spoiler coming. I'm going to wreck the ending. Avert your eyes. You never would have guessed this: Beat Girl Jeniffer's rich architect daddy brings home a new twenty-four year old, dignified, French wife that Jennifer immediately despises. Attempting to connect with her new step daughter the new French mom, Nicole, intrudes into the coffee bar & jazz club scene. Jennifer is outraged and digs up this French woman's past which includes... yes... stretch for this... come on... prostitution! Oooh, daddy is not going to stand it. He married a whore.Yes... it really is that bad.The only face you might recognize in this movie is the face of a very young Christopher Lee, who plays a strip club owner who would like nothing more than to corrupt our lovely Gillian Hill and lead her into a good decade of stripping on stage before dumping her like used trash. If you don't know who Christopher Lee is then you never saw many great and creepy Dracula movies from the 1970s.So... hmmm... let me recap: crummy acting, no script, ridiculous characterization, no plot... what's left? Ahh Cinematography... um, think Ed Wood. How about the score and soundtrack? How about not. Stupid. Maybe there were a couple rockabilly knockoffs in there but at that point in the movie I was shoving my cat into my ear to stop the pain of listening.Dumbest gag in the movie: a kid falls asleep while drumming "to set the world record" and the last girl watching him walks off, quipping, "Well, not this time." What? Everything about this movie is stupid. Oh, and here's the ending I promised to wreck: It's a happy ending in which Jennifer is hugging the French woman and daddy and they are all one big happy family after the wicked Christopher Lee gets stabbed by some tramp.I am pleased to be recording my thoughts about this movie because in five minutes I will have no recollection of it.The history in my web browser will show trace signs that I watched it. I did a Google search for Gillian Hill and found out that she labored in the shadow of Bridgette Bardot but never achieved real stardom. Gillian made five albums that are remembered by French websites. No hits. In the 80s she disappeared due to an illness and when she reappeared she was married to the manager of the Scorpions. There is no Wikipedia entry for her and I believe there should be because she is a stunning little vixen in Beat Girl—and the only good thing about this movie—and I do NOT mean her acting.