Cinema: Easy Was a Lady

The Amorous Adventures of Moll Flanders, a telescoped, tidied-up version of Daniel Defoe's bawdy 18th century classic, brazenly tilts its skirts toward Tom Jones. It begins with a cheeky protestation that "any similarity between this film and any other film is purely coincidental."

Moll Flanders has the high spirits and Hogarthian texture of its ribald predecessor, but lacks Tony Richardson's slashing satire and bold cinematic style. Nonetheless, Director Terence Young (Dr. No, From Russia with Love) proves that the beast in men brings out the best in him—and in Kim Novak as Moll. Her performance as an easy-to-bed beauty for whom the flower of virtue lies ever beyond a thicket of thorny vices is not so much well played as well endowed, but it does reveal untapped energy in one of Hollywood's most marketable natural resources.

Sporting a pepper-red wig, a low English accent, and the ever-ready air of a lass who welcomes surprise, Kim is pinched, pursued, manhandled, and upended at regular intervals. She excels in barroom brawls and petticoat larceny: popping a gentleman's ring onto her tongue, she kisses him until he has to surface, then drops the gem into her decolletage.

Moll's pals are as colorful a lot of rogues, ruffians and lairdly wenchers as an ambitious servant girl could wish. In the country, after her master's elder son (Daniel Massey) has blithely ruined her, she marries his foolish brother and is promptly widowed. En route to London, she outwits a dashing highwayman (Richard Johnson) and meets her husband-to-be, George Sanders, who steals the show as a passionate Puritan debilitated by the labors of love. The comedy reaches a peak of unbuttoned ribaldry in a shipboard rendezvous between Moll and her beloved highwayman, interrupted abed by the bandit's aide-de-camp (Leo McKern), who keeps tumbling upon them via doors and portholes and through the woodwork.

The film is flawed by a scenario that often strives to make raciness respectable. Defoe's Moll was a hardheaded tart who used her ill-gotten lovers for gain. Novak's Moll uses her ill-gotten gains for her lover, and too soon comes to too good an end as a conventional romantic heroine. Appropriately, in Moll's real-life postscript, Actress Novak and Leading Man Johnson became husband and wife, which makes their wide-screen hanky-panky seem unimpeachably legitimate.