It's interesting on viewing this movie, how raw the 4 'teens' leading this movie are. After years seeing the smooth talking/acting plethora of Movies and TV shows with the young/teen casts of the last 3 decades, it is almost jarring to see a set of teen characters, who actually sound like either the teens you were, or actually overhear in real life.
Chatty, scatty, ignorant yet pompously covering that up, they veer between talking over one another in rapid verbal torrents one moment and then long awkward, nervous pauses. They feel utterly unpolished, and, as it goes on, all the more real because of it.
Betsy Slade (Muffy) and Pamela Sue Martin (Abby) make convincing and touching good friends (and given that Pamela Sue Martin asserts that Betsy didn't actually like her, you have to give extra kudos to the actors), and while it's a familiar tale of the Pretty and the Plain, the close friendship between the two really adds to what happens. It's also nice to see a story where the handsome All American Captain of the team (Parker Stevenson) actually turns out to be a genuinely nice guy who both loves his girlfriend and is supportive of her friend too. Ditto the lovelorn Malcolm, who pines after Muffy but abides by her decisions, both not to marry him and to abort the pregnancy.
Ultimately though, set in the stultifying, double standard filled, moral trap of hypocrisy that was the 50s, it remains a cautionary tale of what happens when sex is shunted into the shadows, both turning it into a dirty little secret *and* increasing curiosity around it; and when a woman can't freely and safely make choices about what happens to her own body. The latter, sadly, rearing it's head again in U. S. society, making the movie all too relevant almost 50 years later.
Chatty, scatty, ignorant yet pompously covering that up, they veer between talking over one another in rapid verbal torrents one moment and then long awkward, nervous pauses. They feel utterly unpolished, and, as it goes on, all the more real because of it.
Betsy Slade (Muffy) and Pamela Sue Martin (Abby) make convincing and touching good friends (and given that Pamela Sue Martin asserts that Betsy didn't actually like her, you have to give extra kudos to the actors), and while it's a familiar tale of the Pretty and the Plain, the close friendship between the two really adds to what happens. It's also nice to see a story where the handsome All American Captain of the team (Parker Stevenson) actually turns out to be a genuinely nice guy who both loves his girlfriend and is supportive of her friend too. Ditto the lovelorn Malcolm, who pines after Muffy but abides by her decisions, both not to marry him and to abort the pregnancy.
Ultimately though, set in the stultifying, double standard filled, moral trap of hypocrisy that was the 50s, it remains a cautionary tale of what happens when sex is shunted into the shadows, both turning it into a dirty little secret *and* increasing curiosity around it; and when a woman can't freely and safely make choices about what happens to her own body. The latter, sadly, rearing it's head again in U. S. society, making the movie all too relevant almost 50 years later.