Beat Girl (1959) British B-Movie that found a 2nd life in 60s America (Review)

At the start of Ben Wilson’s 2007 history book Decency and Disorder, there are excerpts from letters written by French citizens who visited Britain and were horrified by the rudeness, salaciousness and drunkenness of life over here.  That was in the early nineteenth century.  One strict course of Victorian values later, and the tables had turned; the UK would spend most of the 20th century associating its nearest continental neighbour with all manner of forbidden and exciting things.  Edmond T. Gréville’s 1959 feature Beat Girl, reissued on Blu-Ray by BFI Flipside, starts off with a reversal of those now-embedded stereotypes, as the straight-laced French wife of a British architect struggles to understand her husband’s wild-child teenage daughter.  She’s rude, disobedient, talks about partying as though it were some sort of suicide cult (“You’ve got to live for the kicks!  It’s all you’ve got!”) and hangs out with other ne’er-do-wells played by Adam Faith and Shirley Anne Field.  Her friends can’t understand her new stepmother, partly because she’s from a different generation, but also because, well… “How can she be so square,” Field asks, “she’s French, isn’t she?”

And so, having felled the stereotype, Beat Girl props it back up again.  The confusion is not so surprising, since Gréville was a half-French, half-British director whose most notable film starred a mixed-race woman from Missouri who went to Paris and became a star with an image that drew equally from colonial fantasy and continental chic.  That film was Princess Tam Tam, and the star was Josephine Baker.  In Beat Girl, he cast a lead who would go on to have a similar dual career, Gillian Hills.  Hills’s later acting career included a lead role in the celebrated ITV adaptation of The Owl Service by Alan Garner and cameos for Kubrick and Antonioni, though her greatest successes came in – yes – France, as one of the wave of female pop stars cutely nicknamed yé-yé girls.  Her signature number, ‘Zou bisou bisou’, still turns up on soundtracks to this day.

In the delightful long interview included as an extra on this disc, Hills admits she didn’t really know how to act at this point, and feels she was rather outshone by Faith.  It’s true that defiance and rebellion seem to come more naturally to Faith than Hills, though they both suffer under Dail Ambler’s screenplay, which is – as his last name suggests – pedestrian.  There is some truly insane slang (“Straight from the fridge, daddy-o!”) and some passing references to the aftermath of World War II and the atom bomb, but otherwise Ambler seems unsure what’s motivating Britain’s youth to go so wild.  Hills’s Jennifer isn’t so much insurrectionary as reckless and irritable, making a heroine who’s hard to invest in.  As her friend Dave, Faith seems to have been the victim of some meddling from a studio or a censor’s board afraid of his smouldering, sneering presence.  Despite his James Dean stance (and one scene which directly references Rebel Without a Cause), Dave emerges as the most clean-living rebel outside of the straight-edge punk scene, damning drugs, alcohol and fighting as the preserve of “squares”.

If the threat to Jennifer isn’t reefer, liquor or violence, what is it?  It’s a career in strip-tease shows, an element which the film was originally going to focus on before the BBFC took a look over the script.  The change proves doubly fortuitous.  Compared to the lacklustre strip-tease scenes (one of which looks like a kind of interpretative-dance re-enactment of someone falling over and taking the shower curtain down with them), the music is brilliant, right from the brassy, blasting, maddeningly catchy opening number by a pre-James Bond John Barry.  In the script Jennifer seems to be more interested in jazz, but the casting of Faith necessitated a shift to rock ‘n’ roll.  The numbers he sings are good enough to silence any criticisms of trend-hopping.

The other reason to be grateful Beat Girl moved from being a stripping-subculture movie to a rock-subculture one is Jennifer’s age.  Every woman in Beat Girl frankly looks roughly the same age, but Hills was fourteen at the time of filming, and Ambler’s script is wilfully vague about her age.  When Beat Girl was made, the idea of teen rebellion was shocking in and of itself, whether the rebel was fourteen, sixteen or eighteen.  Nowadays, ageing Jennifer up four or five years would make a tremendous difference to how the story is received, particularly when she catches the eye of the sleazy strip club owner Kenny King.

King is played by a frankly underused Christopher Lee, who also stars in Cross-Roads, a crackingly inventive twenty-minute short included as an extra.  Lee starts Cross-Roads almost as a romantic, noirish hero but the narrative soon swerves into the supernatural horror he would become synonymous with, and the first of many eerie spotlights are shot into his piercing eyes.  The BFI have, as ever, gone the extra mile with their extras here, including two short strip-tease films that are a charming window into a completely vanished subgenre.  Apparently “winking at the camera in the last shot” was a vital genre convention in these films, in much the same way that every superhero movie must end with a city-destroying punch-up.

If Beat Girl isn’t a terribly good film it is a fascinating one, one which, like all other BFI Flipside releases, serves as a beguiling window into a changing nation.  As the film opens, Jennifer’s father is on the verge of his masterpiece, a perfectly planned modernist city centre which he claims can reduce the impact of wind and noise on its inhabitants.  It’s a sudden, bizarre moment of JG Ballard in an otherwise low-key B-movie, and like the guitar-twanging score, it gives a taste of how Britain would define itself in the decade after Beat Girl was released.  In 1960 it was released in America under the title Wild for Kicks – differentiating Jennifer from all those people who were wild out of a sense of dutiful sobriety, like Dave, maybe – with a telling tag-line: “Hop-Head U.K. Schoolgirls Get In Trouble!”.  The idea that a British connection would sell an exploitation film to Americans is evidence that things were slowly changing.  Soon, British youthsploitation films wouldn’t have to look over the channel for wild, uninhibited characters.  They could star people like the young British actor who turns up briefly in Beat Girl, dancing and flailing around with a wild look in his eyes.  It was a look – and a flail – that would become chillingly familiar to late-night talk show hosts across the land because that young man was Oliver Reed…

Thanks for reading our review of Beat Girl

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