Watching 'Lord Love a Duck' I had a very hard time getting a grasp on the tone of the thing, it's not what I thought it would be, maybe I should have watched the trailer first. On the surface a satire of 1960's California youth culture, beach party movies, high school education (probably my favorite joke in the thing is the botany class being renamed as 'Plant Skills for Life'), organized religion, therapy, class distinction and more, it is a deeply cynical and at times unpleasant film.
However I have to respect the guts it took to make it. Directed and adapted for the screen by George Alexrod, one of the most successful and respected screen writers of the time ('Breakfast at Tiffany's', 'The Manchurian Candidate') from the 1961 novel 'The Innocent Infidels' by Al Hurt. I was so perplexed and intrigued by this film that I tried to hunt down a copy of Hurt's book, which turns out is difficult to find. Further research also showed that this is apparently a rather lose adaptation of the source material, and that Hurt himself would spend much of his career writing tie-in books to popular TV series like 'Bewitched' or doing the novelizations of films such as 'Promise her Anything' or 'In Like Flint'.
The plot concerns brilliant high school senior Alan "Mollymauk" Musgrave (Roddy McDowell) promising the beautiful girl from the wrong side of the tracks Barbra Ann Green (Tuesday Weld) that he will get her anything she wants in life, and he does too, regardless of what it takes to get it. Needles to say things do not turn out as planed for either of them. The two leads work well enough together, the chemstry is a little odd but so is their relationship. About half way through the movie Barbara Ann asks Alan "I don't understand, what do you get out of this?" I had the same question.
The movie is filmed in black and white, I think in part to try and hide some the 15 year age difference between the leads, with Roddy at 37 playing 17. Boasting some good gages, and a catchy theme song, the film is so sharp, biting, envelope pushing and at times sexually uncomfortable, I'm not sure who exactly Axelrod made it for other then himself. I just don't see much of the supposed teen audience getting it, and the film did fail at the box office. In the trailer they use the catch phrase 'An Act of Pure Aggression' and that pretty well captures it. **1/2
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