This "Girls! Girls! Girls!" has no connection with the Elvis Presley musical of the same name from the following year. This is a short documentary made by Michael Winner, later to become one of Britain's best-known, and most controversial, film directors. It is in colour, which suggests that it was made for the cinema rather than television, as British cinemas still showed documentary shorts in the early sixties and colour TV did not arrive in Britain until several years later.
The film is about three young women, Tania, Primrose and Sandra, who share a London flat together. When it was recently shown on the Sky Arts channel it was advertised as showing us "pre-Pill, pre-Beatles" London, a description which is technically correct but irrelevant as the film has nothing to do with popular music and very little to do with sex. We are briefly introduced to the girls' boyfriends, but there is no real discussion of their sex lives, a topic which would have been far riskier in 1961 than it would have been only a few years later. What the film does do is to follow the girls in their careers; Tania and Primrose are aspiring models and Sandra a dancer. (As Tania Mallet, Tania was later to become one of Britain's best-known models. She also appeared as a Bond Girl in "Goldfinger", her only feature film).
Winner reveals himself as a feature-film director in the making. He has a good eye for a striking image and knows how to compose a shot, often by emphasising a brightly-coloured object in the foreground against a background of more muted colour. This object is more often than not one of the girls' dresses, which serves to keep them in the forefront, visually speaking.
With a film like this, made fifty-three years ago, one's normal instinct today would be to watch it for evidence of how things have changed, but apart from the old-fashioned vehicles in the streets and the absence of high-rise skyscrapers on the skyline, the London we see here looks oddly familiar- far more so, I suspect, than the London of fifty-three years previously (i.e. of 1908) would have done to people in 1961. The girls and their boyfriends all dress smartly but conservatively, which means (paradoxically) that today they look far less dated than they would have done if they had worn the hip, trendy fashions of the sixties, all of which had ceased to be hip and trendy by the end of the seventies. (And some of them by the end of the sixties).
Some things, however, have changed between 1961 and 2014. The commentary, to modern ears, sounds horribly smarmy and patronising, and although this is supposed to be a "fly on the wall" documentary some of the scenes are quite obviously faked. (Yes, I know that modern documentarists are quite capable of faking things, but they generally do so in a less obvious manner). The scene which particularly struck me as staged was the one where Tania goes for her audition as a model and is then held up to the other girls as an example of how not to dress. Would such an attractive and stylish young woman really have dressed in such a frumpish way for a modelling audition? And would the head of the agency really have subjected her to such a public humiliation?
I won't give this film a mark out of ten; I generally reserve those for feature films, and it is difficult to compare them to short documentaries like this one. "Girls! Girls! Girls!" , however, does have some interest for the modern viewer, if only for its insights into how documentaries used to be made.
The film is about three young women, Tania, Primrose and Sandra, who share a London flat together. When it was recently shown on the Sky Arts channel it was advertised as showing us "pre-Pill, pre-Beatles" London, a description which is technically correct but irrelevant as the film has nothing to do with popular music and very little to do with sex. We are briefly introduced to the girls' boyfriends, but there is no real discussion of their sex lives, a topic which would have been far riskier in 1961 than it would have been only a few years later. What the film does do is to follow the girls in their careers; Tania and Primrose are aspiring models and Sandra a dancer. (As Tania Mallet, Tania was later to become one of Britain's best-known models. She also appeared as a Bond Girl in "Goldfinger", her only feature film).
Winner reveals himself as a feature-film director in the making. He has a good eye for a striking image and knows how to compose a shot, often by emphasising a brightly-coloured object in the foreground against a background of more muted colour. This object is more often than not one of the girls' dresses, which serves to keep them in the forefront, visually speaking.
With a film like this, made fifty-three years ago, one's normal instinct today would be to watch it for evidence of how things have changed, but apart from the old-fashioned vehicles in the streets and the absence of high-rise skyscrapers on the skyline, the London we see here looks oddly familiar- far more so, I suspect, than the London of fifty-three years previously (i.e. of 1908) would have done to people in 1961. The girls and their boyfriends all dress smartly but conservatively, which means (paradoxically) that today they look far less dated than they would have done if they had worn the hip, trendy fashions of the sixties, all of which had ceased to be hip and trendy by the end of the seventies. (And some of them by the end of the sixties).
Some things, however, have changed between 1961 and 2014. The commentary, to modern ears, sounds horribly smarmy and patronising, and although this is supposed to be a "fly on the wall" documentary some of the scenes are quite obviously faked. (Yes, I know that modern documentarists are quite capable of faking things, but they generally do so in a less obvious manner). The scene which particularly struck me as staged was the one where Tania goes for her audition as a model and is then held up to the other girls as an example of how not to dress. Would such an attractive and stylish young woman really have dressed in such a frumpish way for a modelling audition? And would the head of the agency really have subjected her to such a public humiliation?
I won't give this film a mark out of ten; I generally reserve those for feature films, and it is difficult to compare them to short documentaries like this one. "Girls! Girls! Girls!" , however, does have some interest for the modern viewer, if only for its insights into how documentaries used to be made.