A Matter of Innocence

The sexual awakening of an adolescent movie star has long been a profitable screen attraction. Hayley Mills, who got her first screen kiss at the age of 18 in The Truth About Spring, lost her virginity to holy wedlock last year in The Family Way. In A Matter of Innocence, the baby fat is really in the fire: she takes a lover, without even being in love with him.

This time Hayley plays a bespectacled ugly duckling who accompanies her rich and awful aunt (Brenda de Banzie) on a trip to the mysterious East. In Singapore, Auntie eats too much and sinks like a stone in the hotel swimming pool. Hayley wastes neither tears nor time in living and loving it up with a handsome Indian faker who wheels and deals in everything from hot cameras to cool chicks.

This shocks even her black-sheep Uncle Bob (Trevor Howard), especially after Lover Amaz (Shashi Kapoor) fits Hayley out with contact lenses and a hairdo piled up like frozen custard. But she has seen enough movies to know that Amaz Can Never Make Her Happy. So it's back to England and some bank clerk of a husband--with a fling in Hong Kong first on the proceeds from selling Auntie's jewelry.

Innocence is based on a 1964 story by Noel Coward, but Director Guy Green obviously hoped to create a younger Singapore version of Summertime, in which Katharine Hepburn found unhappiness in the arms of Rossano Brazzi. To that end, the action is clotted with well-photographed local color--teeming bazaars, sinful side streets, tourist-trap luxury. Unfortunately, though, no amount of lively scenery can make up for the scenario, and on-camera at least, the nubile Miss Mills is not much more plausible as a sex symbol than her unfortunate aunt.

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