MAGNET contributing editor Jud Cost is sharing some of the wealth of classic films he’s been lucky enough to see over the past 40 years. Trolling the backwaters of cinema, he has worked up a list of more than 100 titles—from the ’30s through the ’70s—that you may have missed. A new selection, all currently available on DVD, appears every Friday.
The World Of Henry Orient (1964, 107 minutes)
As a shower of homework papers is blown into the Hudson River from the esplanade of Battery Park, two teenage girls meet while frantically trying to retrieve the runaway schoolwork. Both about 14, Valerie Boyd (Tippy Walker) is a fast-talking, extroverted brunette, and Marian Gilbert (Merrie Spaeth) is a soft-spoken, pigtailed blond who spouts epithets more appropriate to her grandmother, like “For gosh sakes!” and “Golly Moses!” Both are newly enrolled at an exclusive girls’ school in Manhattan and friendless. The bonding is complete when they compare their orthodontic hardware.
This delightful tale of blooming female adolescence, directed by George Roy Hill (The Sting, Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid), is a loving snapshot of New York City in 1964, now also gone with the wind. “I’m unmanageable,” confesses Boyd as she tells Gilbert about her weekly visits to a psychiatrist. Laying low in Central Park on Saturday morning, pretending to be chased by Chinese bandits, the pair hears the sound of heavy breathing from just beyond their hiding place. It’s Henry Orient (Peter Sellers), a second-rate, pencil-mustached concert pianist, trying to put the make on Stella Dunnworthy (Paula Prentiss), a reluctant (and married) potential conquest.
Boyd immediately falls in love with the patent-leather-haired Lothario, whose fake Spanish accent can’t conceal his Brooklyn roots. “You can tell the whole world that Valerie Campbell Boyd loves and completely adores the great and beautiful Henry Orient, world without end, amen,” she tells Gilbert. The two prick their forefingers with a geometry protractor and swear a blood oath to follow the object of their newfound devotion, night and day.
Dressed in straw coolie hats and calling themselves Cherry Blossom and Golden Bells, Val and Gil spend all their spare time stalking a jumpy Orient, constantly on the lookout for jealous husbands. After eyeballing their man from the front window of a restaurant, Boyd falls into a mock love-sick swoon, attracting a crowd of passersby. A doctor (Fred Stewart) offering his services gets surly when the pair admits it was only a joke. “A joke, huh? You know what doctors do with people who make jokes like that? We take ’em to the hospital and have their stomachs pumped out.”
Fresh from his breakthrough American film role as Clare Quilty, the man who stole a teenage Lolita from obsessive, middle-aged professor Humbert Humbert in Stanley Kubrick’s Lolita, Sellers was an obvious choice as Orient. But the real scene-stealers here are the irresistible pairing of Walker and Spaeth. Like Elle Fanning in Sophia Coppola’s Somewhere, these two were caught at exactly the right age, down to the month. When you find adolescent talent like this, you’d better shoot fast, because these kids will grow up right before your eyes.
