D: Alastair Reid. S: Guido Coen, Michael Klinger, Alastair Reid. Novel: Tina Chad Christian. P: Guido Coen, Michael Klinger. Cast: Linda Hayden, Keith Barron, Ann Lynn, Diana Dors, Derek Lamden, Sheila Staefel, Marianne Stone, Dick Emery, Vernon Dobtcheff. UK dist (DVD): Network.

You know how it is: you’re a well-to-do middle-aged GP (looking not unlike Keith Barron), with a big house, an attractive wife (Ann Lynn) with whom you are on icily cordial terms, an insecure teenage son, and middle-class friends (e.g. Dick Emery) whom you invite round for parties, now and then, so they can try to get their leg over mini-skirted young ladies (to the quiet exasperation of wife and host) – when out of the blue you receive a letter informing you that a loopy ex-girlfriend (Diana Dors) has topped herself, leaving you with the clear moral duty to bring up her bereaved sexpot daughter (Linda Hayden, making her eye-opening screen debut, and looking all of thirteen and a half). Of course, you deny outright that she’s YOUR daughter, too; what an absurd suggestion, darling! No, you give her a roof over her head out of simple Christian charity (and a sense of nagging residual guilt over the way you treated her late mum); the fact that she is also a smoking hot volcano of pulchritude never enters your (very high) mind.

And what thanks do you get? First your son falls head-over-heels for her, after she lets him French-kiss her and grab an eyeful of her bits every chance she gets (then rebuffs him, just as he thinks he’s in like Flynn) – THEN the bloody missus gets in on the act, turning all Sappho-curious after seeing the little minx in the bath (not to mention sharing her bed, to comfort the poor girl’s night terrors). AND that bloody Dick Emery can’t keep his hands off her either, the filthy old sod (though at least he restricts himself to some “innocent” horseplay with her by the pool). On top of THAT, you begin to suspect that the girl actually has designs on YOU – well, you appreciate the position that puts you in, surely? Pretty soon your entire house is a simmering pressure-cooker of barely-contained lust, with perky Linda at the centre of it all. Where, I ask, will it all end?

With an unexpectedly ambiguous freeze-frame, that’s where. Easily the most red-hot title in the sizzling career of Keith (Phwoarr) Barron, Baby Love is a fascinating time-capsule of the Permissive Age: a time when British cinema was loosening its tie and gingerly, very gingerly, dipping its toe into the waters of Continental Smut. Baby Love belongs to a long tradition of cultural transgression, highly popular in theatre and cinema of the Sixties and Seventies, in which an irresistible sexy interloper upsets his/her bourgeois hosts by unbuttoning their hypocrisies and letting their desires flop out, all unsuppressed: from Orton’s The Ruffian on the Stairs and Entertaining Mr Sloane, through Pasolini’s Theorem, Radley Metzger’s The Lickerish Quartet, to Potter’s BBC TV play Brimstone and Treacle (itself filmed in 1982). With a racy plot obviously designed to exploit recently-relaxed BBFC guidelines, Baby Love was always going to flirt with the conventions of taste – and with Tony Tenser’s ex-partner Michael Klinger footing the bill, the boundary between flirtation and molestation becomes thinner than Ann Lynn’s nightie.

Given a deserved “X” certificate back in ’69, the film still warrants an “18” on home video to this day, not for any particularly explicit visuals (Hayden supplies a few token flashes of nudity) but for its insistently lascivious air of pervery. The film positively goads its audience to foam at the mouth whenever luscious Linda pulls a new stunt; times have certainly changed, as a film whose subtext essentially translates as “SCHOOLGIRLS: You Definitely Would” might expect to receive short shrift in today’s hypersensitive world. To be fair, the film is purposely designed to push middle-class buttons, and in that respect is not all that different from the modern provocations of Lars Von Trier or Catherine Breillat (just a lot less graphic). But it’s hard to crack an indulgent smile over the film’s near-rape sequence, where Linda eggs on a gang of toffee-nosed droogs during an idyllic excursion to a boating lake. (Though the message here is that she’s gone too far, it’s surely the filmmakers who are guilty of that.)

Performances are strong across the board, with the obvious honours going to Linda Hayden: just 15 when filming began, she projects the worldliness of a woman twice her age, and delivers an undeniably gutsy, powerhouse turn in a role which, for better or worse, would define the course of her entire future career. Stylistically, the film is a bit of a dog’s dinner; director Alastair Reid (whose later work includes the BBC’s unutterably bizarre answer to The Visitor, Artemis’ 81) mixes freewheeling Sixties libertarianism (represented by youths running, always running, through busy London streets, to hop on – what else? – a bright red bus), sub-Polanski psychodrama (Linda’s odd nightmare sequences, full of fish-eyed closeups of household ornaments, overlaid with alarmingly amplified sound effects) and fashionable boorjoyce-bashing à la Buñuel, producing a rather garbled effect. Yet despite this list of caveats, Baby Love is certainly worth a look, though well-to-do, middle-class viewers might be advised to keep their purchase wrapped in brown paper. After all, it’s not the sort of thing your wife or servants should see.

Network’s new DVD presents the film anamorphically enhanced at a ratio of 1.56:1; whether this is the original aspect ratio is hard to say, though it seems doubtful. (1.66:1, 1.75:1 or 1.85:1 were more common at the time.) Image quality is fine throughout, as sharp and detailed as DVD will allow, though the sound is another matter; while the track is free of hiss and crackle, dialogue seems rather low in the mix, with music correspondingly overloud when amplified. Expect some fiddling with the remote throughout. Overall, however, a solid release of a film that’s been hard to find on home video; beyond a VHS from Polygram in the early ‘90s, Baby Love has proven an elusive title for Hayden’s determined fanbase. This disc will doubtless scratch many an itch.