Twisted Nerve Movie Review

Hayley Mills was Walt Disney's top teen star in six films made between 1960 and 1965, but by 1968, she was scrambling to create a new cinematic identity for herself. It didn't help the fans who wanted her to stay a child forever that she was madly in love with 54-year-old director Roy Boulting. Her career choices from 1966–69 compounded the difficulty. Although Mills’ talents as an actress had not diminished, her roles during this crucial period were unshowy parts that were unlikely either to reveal range or to please the admirers who'd followed her career since she was 12. (Actually, Mills made her 1947 film debut as a BABY in her father's So Well Remembered, which also featured her sister Juliet, then five.) Boulting's Twisted Nerve is the best of this sorry bunch of career-scuttling flicks, but co-stars Hywel Bennett and Billie Whitelaw have the showy parts, not Mills. Moreover, the film is rarely shown, either in England or in the U.S., because of its X rating, its flash of Bennett's bare butt, and its tricky subject matter. Before the opening credits, we see a blank screen for 20 seconds while a plummy male voice intones on the soundtrack: “Ladies and gentleman, because of the controversy already aroused, the producers of this film wish to re-emphasize what is already stated in the film, that there is no established scientific connection between Mongolism and psychotic or criminal behavior.” Okay…so then we see Bennett acting like a psycho for the next couple of hours. The top-billed Mills tries hard, but she doesn't get the lines or the sequences to compete with Bennett. Anyone could have played her part and it would have made no difference to the finished film. In spite of the extraneous nature of her character and Twisted Nerve’s muddled psychological insights, it's still an intriguing film to watch today, with flashes of the controlled mania that Bennett would later convey so brilliantly in 1981's Malice Aforethought. By the time Mills and Bennet made their third picture together, in 1972's Endless Night by Agatha Christie, she had played just one small supporting role in three years (in the John Hurt film, Cry of the Penguins), and the Hayley Mills phenomenon was long over. Mills is the proud mother of Crispian MILLS (not Boulting), leader of the hot Brit rock band Kula Shaker.

1968 118m/C GB Hayley Mills, Hywel Bennett, Billie Whitelaw, Phyllis Calvert, Frank Finlay, Barry Foster, Salmaan Peer, Gretchen Franklin, Christian Roberts, Thorley Walters, Timothy West, Russell Napier, Robin Parkinson, Timothy Bateson, Brian Peck, Richard Davies, Basil Dignam, Mollie Maureen; D: Roy Boulting; W: Roy Boulting, Roger Marshall, Jeremy Scott, Leo Marks; C: Harry Waxman; M: Bernard Herrmann.