The Smashing Bird I Used to Know (1969) Online

Despite it's hothouse retitling as School For Unclaimed Girls, this film is a fairly easygoing tale of a girl gone ever so slightly bad and the lesbians she meets in the aforementioned school. There is a fair amount of full frontal nudity, some rather chaste lesbian kisses, and a little bid of bloodshed. It all adds up to not very much, though fans of late 60s British quota quickies will definitely want to catch it. Producer Peter Newbrook went on to direct the horror fave The Asphyx, director Robert Hartford-Davis was also responsible for Incense For the Damned and The Fiend, and scribe John Peacock went on to pen Hammer's To the Devil A Daughter.

A fairly forgotten film from Corruption and Incense for the Damned man Robert Hartford-Davis, The Smashing Bird I Used to Know certainly sees the director trying to cover all the exploitation bases here. Its part horror film, part portrait of a cracked piece of jailbait, part women in prison film, with unlikely origins in a piece of Hollywood Babylon type gossip. While the script is officially credited to Hammer writer John Peacock (Straight on Till Morning, To the Devil A Daughter) it would appear Derek Ford also had an uncredited hand in writing this. In Ford and Hartford-Davis 'torn from today's headlines' manner the storyline is a play on the Stompanato murder case from the late Fifties, in which Lana Turner's daughter stabbed her mothers gangster boyfriend Johnny Stompanato to death, claiming self-defense. The story given a Sixties make-over and anglicized features Patrick Mower in the Stompanato role, here "Harry Spenton", a gigolo with hordes of elderly female admirers who welcome him with open cheque book. His latest mark, Anne Johnson (Renee Asherson, made up to look like Turner), is being romanced into buying him a launderette, which he thinks will make him his millions (ok, its an unusual scheme). While at the same time Harry has an amorous eye towards her school age daughter, played by Madeline Hinde from Incense for the Damned. Presumably Del Boy Ford and Hartford-Davis were thinking of a reprise of their jailbait theme from The Yellow Teddybears, but the very un-school age looking Hinde isn't very convincing in her school uniform, and when a character remarks she is "late for school", its temping to quip "yeah, by about six years". Poor Hinde is also plagued by psychedelic flashbacks to her fathers death (a freak accident on a fairground ride) and to use money/terminology of the time isn't a full shilling. As Mower (who to be honest isn't very good here) finds out when he tries it on with her and get stabbed for his troubles. As a result Hinde is sent to the sort of women's dentition centre where prisoners are allowed to dance to pop music in mini-skirts and inmates include a black hooker, a pregnant teenage girl, and a young Maureen Lipman as a tough lesbian. Actually Lipman's not bad, and perhaps sensing she was one of the better actresses they had, the script deserves credit for making her character a bit more three dimensional than just your standard bullying prison lesbian stereotype, how often do you hear that said about WIP films?

The Smashing Bird I Used to Know seems to equally represent what is captivating/infuriating about Hartford-Davis as a filmmaker. Like Incense for the Damned, much of it is filmed in a journeyman ITC episode fashion, but now and again comes up with sequences that explode like a firecracker. A punch up between Hinde's boyfriend and his sleazy, would be rapist friend for instance, and the climax which maybe a huge cop-out in narrative terms but is still a spectacular set piece. It does tend to be the sleazier incidents that animate Hartford-Davis the most however, an almighty catfight between the women is played for all its worth, with topless extras drafted in for good measure, as the "treatment" dished out to one of the girls who is stripped, dragged into a shower and beaten with brooms. The central stabbing of Mower, which happens early on in the film but gets flashbacked to several times, comes across almost like a gender reverse of the infamous European version murder scene in Corruption. With Mower and scantily-clad Hinde throwing each other around a room, a quick flash of a knife later and suddenly we have "The Blood Splattered Mower". As with the murders in his horror films, Hartford-Davis uses lots of manic hand held camera work for the scene to suggest hysteria, like a more professional take on Andy Milligan's "swirl camera" effect. It honestly looks like Hartford-Davis directed it while having a seizure (he was by all accounts actually prone to having on-set panic attacks). The supporting cast who generally provoke a response of "isn't that a young…" include Dennis Waterman, Derek Fowlds, Leslie-Ann Down, plus Corruption's Valerie Van Ost (who gets to keep her head this time) and David Lodge as the dead dad, well, you know Hartford-Davis had to put Dave Lodge in there somewhere. In a self-congratulatory moment, Hartford Davis even has Mower meeting one of his girlfriends outside a cinema showing Corruption. The original British title seems a bit misleading though, suggesting a swinging Sixties romp a la Smashing Time, or perhaps to the really naïve/literal minded audience member a film about ornithology. The American title was "School for Unclaimed Girls" which at least nails one aspect of the film, as well clueing audiences up to its exploitation content, with the film's fixations with the younger set, lesbianism and cat fights this is certainly a case of 'hornythology' than ornithology (sorry, that was a dreadful pun!) . Pity that Hartford-Davis' most colourful and lurid works like this and Corruption appear to be in distribution limbo, leaving him to be represented on DVD by Gonks Go Beat, and compromised releases of The Fiend and Incense for the Damned. The poor man must be rolling in his grave.

This is a rather odd movie, appearing after the JD/reform school movies of the late 50's and early 60's, but before the sleazy WIP films of the 1970's. It's also British, so all bets are off. The British are famous for being the most repressed and prudish of the European countries, but they also might be the most perverted. This film is fairly tame. It is less enjoyably trashy than similar films like "Baby Love" with Linda Hayden, the early Pete Walker effort "School for Sex", or the more violent "In the Devil's Garden", and it is definitely much less sleazy than Italian co-productions like "What Have You Done to Solange?" Still the film does contain flashes of full-frontal nudity and a completely gratuitous scene where the heroine (who looks to be about twenty five)dresses up in her school girl uniform even though she's not going to school (one for the perverts, I guess).

The protagonist is mentally unbalanced due to the bizarre merry-go-round related death of her father and she has some strange fear and fascination with horses. She's sent to the reformatory/mental institution because she stabs her mother's loutish boyfriend after he tries to rape her. This seems like a perfectly normal reaction to me, but the school psychiatrist insists on delving into her troubled psyche to get at the root of her neurosis, thus there's a lot of Freudian psychobabble (the filmmakers had obviously seen "Marnie" a few too many times). The other girls at the institution seem somewhat less than troubled as well. It's intimated that one was a prostitute, one simply won't take a shower, and couple others are lesbians. There's a few fights, some tame sapphic foreplay,and a lot gratuitous dancing in towels and teddies, but anybody expecting a sleazy WIP film is going to be bitterly disappointed. The only recognizable star is Lesley-Ann Down but she's not prominently featured and doesn't participate in any of the lesbian or nude scenes as she really was a teenager at the time. I recommend this film, but more as a curiosity than for any sordid subject matter it may contain.

British cinema discovered sex late in the 1960s and "The Smashing Bird I Used To Know" took advantage of the more liberal censorship although it only shows one girl topless for a few seconds and a few other quick flashes. (There were no full frontals in the cinema print or in the UK DVD release.) It arrived in Glasgow on 5th October 1969, getting a run on the ABC circuit. Here's what I wrote about it in my book "What We Watched In The 1960s (In The Cinema)".

There was more sex in "The Smashing Bird I Used To Know", but it consisted of a couple of semi-nude scenes used to illustrate life in a school for bad girls, one of whom is Madeleine Hinde who shouldn't really be there as she was merely defending herself against an assault by her mother's horrible boyfriend. It's cheap exploitation with nothing going for it, and in his autobiography, Patrick Mower says when he and co-star Dennis Waterman went to see it in the cinema together, they came out with their heads down hoping that no one would realize they had been in it. With it at the ABC 1 and Bedford was "Mission Batangas", a routine war film with Dennis Weaver.

Jim Doyle is the author of 'What We Watched In The 1960s (In The Cinema)', 'What We Watched In The 1970s (In The Cinema)" and 'What We Watched In The 1980s (In The Cinema And On Video)'