User Reviews

My summary line is from one scene when Moll was newly in a house, not knowing where the bedroom was, and the suitor says, "Then let us reconnoiter." You don't see that word used often anymore.

I am a Kim Novak fan, have been since I was a teenager. Until recently I didn't even know she was in a 'Moll Flanders' movie. I was able to watch this one on Netflix streaming.

Truthfully I think this is overall a dreadful movie, a British farce that is overly silly and tedious to watch most of the time. For me, the only redeeming values are Kim Novak, in her early 30s here and 5 to 10 years after her most famous roles but still lovely, and native Brit Angela Lansbury, nearing 40 and lovely, many years before 'Murder She Wrote'.

I don't know the original Moll Flanders story, but I did see the 1996 movie with Robin Wright as Flanders. That one differs quite a lot from this one, but in each Flanders ends up on a ship to the New World after getting out of prison.

The basic story is followed in both, as a young child Moll Flanders ends up in an orphanage and, growing up to be a strong young woman wants to make something of herself. She ends up working as she can to survive in a difficult time, 18th century England.

It is evident from the very beginning of this very colorful costume romp that everybody is having a blast being silly and over the top. This is a chance for them to really play act, taking their childhood games and putting it to good use on the big screen. The film is all about Kim Novak, quite striking in a red wig and setting all the men a flutter with her alluring personality. She obviously enjoys it too, knowing that with the older ones there will be gifts and fine dining, and with the younger ones such as highway bandit Richard Johnson romance and adventure. Novak makes her character believable in spite of having no trace of any British dialect.

An early marriage to a wealthy fool ends quickly much to her delight, but it leaves her with nothing so she goes to work for the broke but prominent aristocrat Angela Lansbury, a woman whose wardrobe provides Novak the opportunity to dress up. Amazingly they are the same size! Johnson early in the film robbed the coach she was traveling in with George Sanders who gets a feastful night with Kim, discovered by Angela and her husband Vittorio De Sica and barely surviving pneumonia while going home.

But most of Moll Flanders adventures come with highwayman Johnson, always surrounded by his assistant Leo mckern in a showy part and the loose living Lili Palmer. The action scenes with Johnson are fast, frenetic and noisy, somewhat cartoonish and too quickly paced to make any sense. A lot of other popular British character actors pop up in smaller roles, either sticking their nose up at Molly or envying her for her fabulous life or trying to get into her world.

Of all the "Tom Jones" knockoffs, this is probably the best that I have seen, certainly a lot better than "Joseph Andrews" and "Yellowbeard" from a decade later. I would have liked to have seen more of Sanders and Lansbury, reunited from several melodramas from the 1940's, but this is meant to be a showcase for the sultry Novak. I also live the bouncy musical harpsichord score, especially in a lively moment of dance. It is interesting to see a story set in Dickens era England that Dickens himself could never write. This is quite different than the 1990's movie, "Moll Flanders", decent in its own way but lacking the frenetic pacing of this film.

Few people predicted that a British-made adaptation of a bawdy eighteenth century comic novel would end up as one of the great cinematic successes of 1963, but "Tom Jones" was a big hit at the box office and with the critics. It was nominated for ten Oscars and won four, including "Best Picture". The hunt was therefore on for another bawdy eighteenth century comic novel to adapt, and "The Amorous Adventures of Moll Flanders" was the result.

It is based on "Moll Flanders", generally presumed to be by Daniel Defoe, although it was never published under his name during his lifetime. Although the novel was published in 1722, it purports to be the autobiography of an elderly, and now deceased, lady, so the action is to be imagined as taking place in the seventeenth century. This film, however, shifts the action to the eighteenth, apparently because of difficulty in finding enough authentic filming locations dating from the seventeenth century or earlier.

When I say the film is "based on" the novel, I should perhaps say "loosely based on", because it makes substantial changes to the plot. Moll is rather less promiscuous than she was in the original, and her unwitting marriage to her own half-brother is omitted. These may have been the Swinging Sixties, but there was a limit on how far they would swing, and incest, even accidental incest, was still beyond the pale.

Moll, a beautiful redhead, is a servant in a wealthy household. She loses her "virtue" when she is seduced by the elder son of the family, but ends up marrying his younger brother who turns out to be a drunken fool. He dies young, drowning after falling into a pond, leaving her a widow. After more adventures, including another marriage to a wealthy London banker, Moll meets her true love, a gentleman highwayman named Jemmy, who leads her into a life of crime, and she ends up in jail under sentence of death. Of course, this being a comedy, we know that the sentence will never actually be carried out.

Some have argued that Kim Novak, in her early thirties at the time the film was made, was too old for the title role, but this argument strikes me as misconceived. Although the film does not cover as long a period of time as the original novel, the action clearly stretches over a number of years, and by the end Moll is an adult woman rather than the innocent teenage girl of the opening scenes. Novak makes an excellent heroine, always loveable even after she has strayed away from the straight and narrow, exploiting her gift for comedy and even managing a creditable English accent. I just wish she had been allowed to keep her natural ash-blonde colouring instead of having to don a red wig. There are creditable supporting performances from Richard Johnson as the handsome rogue Jemmy and George Sanders as Moll's second husband. (Novak and Johnson were married in real life soon after filming ended).

I will not attempt any direct comparison between this film and "Tom Jones" because it is many years since I last saw that film, but "The Amorous Adventures..." did not arouse quite the same excitement and was not nominated for any Oscars. Nevertheless, I found it well-made and very amusing, having held up much better over the intervening fifty-odd years than many sixties comedies with a contemporary theme. Perhaps period comedies are more timeless and do not date in the same way as comedies which seek to laugh at or satirise the now-forgotten foibles of the age in which they were made. 8/10