As a Hayley Mills fan I was curious about the pairing of her with Oliver Reed. It's like putting a little lamb with a hungry wolf. Mills comes to town to take a teaching position. She moves into a boarding house run by a local boozy politician and his unhappy wife. She meets Oliver Reed who comes by to visit another young woman who lives in there. He takes Mills out to dinner and back to his place only to discover that she is a virgin. One of the few left. She tells him she wants to wait until she's in love. Reed delivers her back home. He's intrigued but is distracted by other more available women. Reed and Mills have an interesting chemistry, he's intense and slightly dangerous and she's innocent and inexperienced. The ending had a little twist that I found myself rooting against, before arriving at a more conventional finale. Worth a look.

Not many people seem to like this film and it maybe that Hayley Mills seemed rather young for her age at 24 because of course she had been a child actor. But also the film had been a book by Kingsley Amis ten years earlier and things were changing fast at the time. I still liked it though even if it is rather odd for Mills and Oliver Reed to be thinking of having sex as if they were not quite as young as they thought. Both are very good and even if some of those around her are really strange, like John Bird as a Labour MP and Sheila Hancock seems completely lost, although Rex Harrison's son Noel is rather splendid. Jonathan Miller had previously directed on TV the wonderful Alice in Wonderland (1966) and George Melly had written previously Smashing Time (1967) which would have been more appropriate for the time.

TAKE A GIRL LIKE YOU is a filmed adaptation of a Kingsley Amis novel, directed by theatre figurehead Jonatha Miller. It's a slight and unwieldy affair that I found rather appalling in terms of subject matter - as cold and unyielding as a film gets when it comes to a relationship drama. Only the activities of the youthful cast lift this above tedium, with Hayley Mills in particular lovely and deserving better. Elsewhere, taciturn Oliver Reed still feels like a heavy from one of his earlier Hammer films, Noel Harrison is a real creep and gets too much screen time, Ronald Lacey is loveable, Sheila Hancock negligible, and John Bird sleazy. The ending in particular is a big a gut punch as cinema gets without resorting to death or violence.