'Baby Love' Lacks Story

By EMERSON BATDORFF

"Baby Love" shows some of the perils of trying to make a movie without having a valid story. It churns around and gets nowhere in spite of vivid characterization.

It is a curious picture. The underplaying is splendid. The dialog is convincing for the sort of film that it is. But it gets bogged down in psychiatric plumbing and winds up at a loss.

IT IS set in England. It concerns a girl about 15 who comes to her middleclass home one day to find that her mother has killed herself in the bathtub.

Linda Hayden plays the girl in a way surprisingly convincing for the peculiar burden of the part, namely a lust for males, a lust for females and a reversion to childhood that makes her suck her thumb occasionally as she gazes moonfaced at the world.

It's as though she's compelled to test her new found womanhood on all comers, but really is a kid at heart.

An old boyfriend of her mother's, now a wealthy doctor, takes the poor little time-bomb home. She immediately sets out to tease his 16-year-old son to distraction by refusing to him what she allows the man

'Baby Love'

Tawdry little excursion into peculiar sexuality. Excellent characterization and dialog. No story worth the telling. Adult. 95 minutes.

Directed by Alistair Reld. Written by him, Michael Klinger and Guido Coen. Produced by Coen. Avco Embassy.

Amy Robert

LUCI Nick

Ann Lynn Keith Barron Linda Hayden Derek Lamden

who sits next to her in the movies.

SHE CHARMS the doctor's wife into a lesbian relationship.

She charms a middle-aged male friend of the family, although he apparently does nothing much physical about it, and she stirs up passing males as much as possible. The only man she can't get is the doctor.

He knew her mother and is not about to be trapped again.

If the generally sordid story ever got anywhere a man might have a better opinion of it. But it comes to what I can only call a non-end and then just quits.

stages

KARAMU (Arena)-THE DUTCHMAN AND THE NEIGHBORS, 8:30 p.m. LAKEWOOD LITTLE THEATREDON'T DRINK THE WATER, 8:30

2.M.

PLAY HO U SE (Euclid-77)—UNITED STATES VS. JULIUS AND ETHEL ROSENBERG, 8:30 p.m.

music

SEVERANCE HALL-CLEVELAND ORCHESTRA, 8:30 n.m.