Login
If you kept most of the individual elements of The Amorous Adventures of Moll Flanders and just tweaked the script, you’d have something. I’m not sure if it would be very good, but I know it would be better than this. Moll Flanders comes out with heaving bosoms and ribald humor, then quickly settles into a shapeless mess of odd pacing and a limp central performance.
Not that star Kim Novak is given much to play for a good chunk of the film mind you, but most of her performance here rests upon her ample cleavage and red wig. She’s positively lovely here, carnal and ample bodied, but once again clearly uncomfortable playing the sex pot for a majority of the movie. Her Moll Flanders is a bit of a limp noodle, managing only to show some personality in scenes where she argues with Richard Johnson, becomes a thief and adopts a series of ridiculous disguises, or fends off the lecherous advances of Vittorio de Sica. After the prior year’s career high, and something a caper as it turns out, her work here is frustratingly limited.
Much better are a series of British thespians hamming it up with relish. Angela Lansbury, George Sanders, Lilli Palmer, and glorified cameos by Hugh Griffith and Roger Livesey liven things up routinely. They get the exaggerated and cartoon-like parts where they can play the smutty humor for its all of its artifice and kitsch value. The best performance though belongs to the great neo-realist Italian director, Vittorio de Sica. He’s deliciously camp here, bringing a similar quality that Charles Laughton brought to his lesser roles, seemingly playing as broadly as possible with poor material in effort to amuse himself.
But that’s the major problem with Moll Flanders, at two hours long and with a romance that’s indifferent at best, just boring at worst, there’s not enough story to justify the bloated running time. The first thirty minutes or so is a romp, a trashy glimpse into one woman’s quest of upward mobility through her sexuality and a series of opportunistic marriages. Yet there’s not enough bite to make the jokes sting, the stakes aren’t played seriously enough, and it quickly loses any semblance of personality or spirit before winding up as a distaff Tom Jones without the healthy dose of cynicism.
For all of its myriad of problems, Moll Flanders is vibrantly colored and lovely to look at. The score is pleasant, and there’s glimpses of a much better film lurking underneath it all. Novak’s wishy-washy performance could have been shaped into something better if the script gave her more to play with, and when Moll Flanders becomes a robber the film flirts with high-spirited adventure and interest just before realizing it has provided her too much agency and quickly wrapping up the story by sending everyone on a boat to America. It’s an ending alright, but like the film that preceded it, it’s more of a shrug than anything else.
