Word: molls
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...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...
...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...
...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...
More than 20,000 odometered miles later, the Rolls turns up in Genoa. Climbing aboard are a U.S. gangster (George C. Scott) and his moll (Shirley MacLaine), both battling Scenarist Terence Rattigan's notion of dialogue for ugly Americans. "So it leans," cracks Shirley at the tower of Pisa. The fun picks up when Scott returns to the States to eradicate a business associate, leaving his two snazzy chassis in the care of Bodyguard Art Carney. On a swimming expedition, Shirley and the Rolls are left unguarded just long enough to entertain Alain Delon, utterly persuasive as a gigolo...