Reflections on ... Toys Are Not For Children (1972)

Toys are Not for Children (1972). I’m using this period of enforced social isolation to explore the weirder corners of YouTube for long forgotten and obscure movies. (My boyfriend Pal is accompanying me only semi-willingly).

Most directors of late sixties and early seventies sexploitation flicks opted to sensitively and tastefully explore the genuine psychological condition of nymphomania. (Only kidding!). The ultra-tawdry Toys Are Not for Children, meanwhile, focuses on dysfunctional family dynamics and one troubled young woman’s arrested emotional development. Can you say: “daddy issues”? (Actually, Toys would make a great double bill with my earlier recommendation, the thematically similar Love Me Deadly). 

Our creepily child-like heroine is waif-like Jamie Godard, who still plays with toys at the age of twenty and is unhealthily fixated on her long-absent father. (Actress Marcia Forbes is clever casting as Jamie, considering she resembles a doll herself). She’s also sexually frigid (much to the blue-balled frustration of her handsome new husband). When Jamie befriends middle-aged prostitute Pearl (who resembles an escapee from a Jacqueline Susann novel with her waterfall of teased hair and Pucci-print dresses), her life takes an unexpected turn … 

Toys is voyeuristic, perverse, disturbing and incredibly distasteful, but also undeniably strangely compelling. Director Stanley H Brasloff takes unexpected detours (for example, the “cold opening” is so long the credits are about 15-minutes into the film). The storytelling is fragmented, jagged and nonlinear. Are the confusingly non-signposted dream sequences and flashbacks a result of directorial incompetence or is Brasloff deliberately going for challenging art cinema-style inscrutability? (Sometimes you only know you’re watching a flashback by the characters’ hairstyles). One genuine highlight: the opening credits ballad "Lonely Am I" (crooned by someone called T L Davis) is adult contemporary loungecore bliss. So many of these exploitation movies had great introductory songs (i.e. "What Does a Bird Do?" by Jerry Kane in Sins of Rachel. The dramatic faux Shirley Bassey / James Bond number that opens Love Me Deadly). Ideally someone would issue a digitally remastered, lovingly restored CD box set of all this fabulous obscure music with lavish sleeve notes! 

Finally: I don't know what it says about me, but I found abusive Puerto Rican pimp Eddie (played by Luis Arroyo with superb nonchalance and contempt) quite sexy. He possesses definite sleaze appeal and magnificent greased-back hair and sideburns!!

/ I mean ... come on! And I love that shirt! Via /

The version of Toys on YouTube is obviously via Something Weird and contains a good ten-minutes of fabulous exploitation trailers before the main feature starts. Link. 

Further reading:

Read the essential Dreams Are What Le Cinema is For blog post on Toys are Not for Children here.