Weekend with the Babysitter (1970)

Weekend with the Babysitter is a 1970 Crown International release and it’s not quite the movie that the title would suggest. They had had a success the previous year with The Babysitter (which is the better movie and is worth seeing) so in this case the choice of title may have been an attempt to make it look like a sequel. Both movies were written and directed by Don Anderson and both starred George E. Carey but the two movies are rather different.

Jim Carlton (George E. Carey) is a successful but slightly disillusioned film director. He has a much younger wife, Mona (Luanne Roberts), but the marriage is not a notable success.

Candy Wilson (Susan Romen) arrives to babysit their kid but the dates got mixed up. They don’t need her. Mona is going to her mother’s for the weekend and the kid is going with her.

Logically Jim should now drive Candy home but instead they decide to have a few drinks. Candy reads his latest script, a youth culture movie, and she tells him that it gets the youth culture of today totally wrong. Candy offers to give Jim a look at the real world of these crazy far-out kids today. She takes him to a coffee shop, he meets her friends, he gets stoned with them. Jim thinks this is all groovy.

Mona isn’t really staying with her mother. She’s gone to see her dealer. Mona is a junkie but she’s a rich middle-class junkie and she has no problems paying for her drugs. She’s pretty good at hiding her drug habit. Jim thinks she’s become a bit strange and distant but he has no idea that she’s on the needle.

Mona’s dealer forces her to allow him to borrow her husband’s cabin cruiser to make a drug pickup.

Meanwhile Jim is making the scene with Candy, in and out of the bedroom. Jim is falling for Candy in a big way. And she seems to dig him as well. They have a joyous weekend of sex and fun.

Candy’s friends turn out to be really nice kids. They’re into motorcycles but they’re not outlaw bikers on Harleys. They’re into motocross and they ride Japanese bikes. They’re just kids having fun. And they just love hanging with conservative middle-aged guys in suits.

There are then two plots going on, a romance plot and a crime thriller plot about drug smuggling. Both plots are rather on the thin side.

There are a couple of brief action scenes. There’s a moderate amount of nudity, with brief frontal nudity. There are very tame sex scenes.

The big problem is Jim. It’s hard to believe that a film director in 1970 could be quite so innocent and strait-laced. George E. Carey isn’t a terrible actor but he would have been more convincing playing a real estate agent or a banker.

There’s a slight credibility problem with the romance. It’s not inconceivable for a girl to fall for an older man, but it is hard to believe that Candy would fall for this particular older man. He’s just too boring.

There is however a reason that Jim is portrayed as very conservative and dull. This is not really a movie about a romance between a young woman and an older man. What the movie is really all about is the clash of cultures, the clash between the culture of Eisenhower-era America represented by Jim and the America of sex, drugs and rock’n’roll and peace and love.

What makes it slightly more interesting is that neither culture is demonised. Jim is not such a bad guy. The kids are not dangerous hippie psychos. Candy isn’t scheming or manipulative. They’re all doing their best. Except for the drug dealer and he’s the only unsympathetic character.

One thing that should be pointed out is that Candy is clearly a grown woman. She’s no schoolgirl. She’s probably around 20 so the movie is much less sleazy than you might expect.

This is more drugsploitation than sexploitation. It could be described as an attempt at hippiesploitation. It was made a year after the Manson murders so there was plenty of paranoia about hippies at that time. This movie was clearly hoping to cash in on that hippie paranoia although in fact it takes a remarkably sympathetic view of youth culture.

One of the amusing things about this movie is that early on we have Candy complaining that Jim’s movies are totally out of touch with actual youth culture but Weekend with the Babysitter isn’t exactly an authentic look at that culture either.

Weekend with the Babysitter probably wouldn’t be worth buying on its own but it’s mildly entertaining and if you’re going to buy the excellent 32-movie Drive-In Cult Classics DVD boxed set (and you definitely should buy it) you might as well give it a watch.

Weekend with the Babysitter gets a good anamorphic transfer. The set includes some great drive-in movies - Trip With the Teacher (1975), The Babysitter (1969), Cindy and Donna (1970), The Pom Pom Girls (1976), the wonderful Malibu High (1979), Van Nuys Blvd. (1979) and Pick-up (1975). All of which are very much worth watching. Even the lesser movies in this set like The Teacher (1974) and Hot Target (1985) are worth a spin.