Georgy Girl

Throughout Georgy Girl, three girls sitting behind me sniffed into their kleenex and morosely ate chocolate kisses, one at a time. They clearly identified with Georgy (Lynn Redgrave), the dumpy 22-year-old virgin on the screen, and bawled sympathetically for 105 minutes.

When Georgy was forced out of her flat by her roommate Meredith's (Charlott Rampling) noisy lovemaking, the girls blubbered; when Georgy was seduced by Meredith's insatiable husband Jos (Alan Bates), the girls wept triumphantly; and they kept it up while Georgy in herited Meredith's unwanted baby and rode away with a millionaire husband of her own (James Mason). As one of them explained, on leaving the theater, it's all so "true-to-life, with a happy ending."

Georgy Girl is supposed to affect you like that. It's another one of those "literal dramas" the British are turning out, with arch jokes, easily identified London streets, pathetic but not particularly likeable characters, and a lot of inexplicable movement that is intended to pass for gaiety. All the rushing around is punctuated with blurted moralisms that are supposed to give the film some depth; as Jos tries to coax her back to bed, guiltstricken Georgy worries about her roommate's baby, born two hours earlier, and observes that "God always has a custard pie up his sleeve."

Georgy has other chances to moralize. She is, after all, the good-hearted fat girl badgered by a bunch of slick, corrupt elders: a bitchy nymphomanic roommate who deserts her own child and runs off with an anonymous sugar daddy; a ne'er-do-well lover who quits his job, ignores his baby, and calls Georgy "fat face;" and a butler father who pressures her to marry his leering middle-aged employer. Plain, put-upon, hugging her baby-care books to her ample front, Georgy is supposed to be a sympathetic figure; but what the director and the weeping girls behind me seemed to ignore is that she's as pitiful and reprehensible as the rest.

Several scenes in Georgy Girl have no point at all, but seem thrown in to keep up the banal gaiety and give the scriptwriters a chance to show off their whimsey. For no reason that can be fathomed from the plot, Georgy does a torrid parody of a vamp, swinging down a staircase and singing Mae West style. Equally irrelevant is a remark her father makes in another scene; he doesn't "know to what this world is coming -- to."

Lynn Redgrave, as Time-Life have incredulously noted, is an enormous, graceless young woman in real life; it is not surprising, then, that she plays enormous, graceless Georgy with superb skill. One is so awed by the mere presence of this creature that one forgets her only talent appears to be her bigness.

Charlotte Rampling is appropriately bitchy, brittle, and beautiful as the roommate; and Alan Bates, Georgy's initiator, gives the best performance in the film. As usual, James Mason is the ineffectual, lecherous old man, a familiar role for him these days and one he has never filled with distinction.

For all its faults (and there are many), Georgy Girl will probably draw large crowds. Every girl whose mother has ever assured her that she is a "late bloomer" will love the movie, and delight in seeing a girl with no waist and no style marry well. Fortunately for Georgy Girl's distributors, our numbers are legion.