Flashback: Little Darlings (1980)
A comedy about two teenaged girls who make a bet to see who can lose her virginity first turns out to be more mature than you might expect.
This is a bit off my beaten path, but hey.
A few weeks ago, Quentin Tarantino and Roger Avary discussed the 1980 movie Little Darlings on their Video Archives podcast, and for the first time ever I made a point of renting the film they were discussing before listening to their discussion of it. I found the film really interesting and posted some notes about it to my private Facebook page, and the film has stuck in my mind ever since, so I figured I’d re-post those thoughts here. Enjoy.
Today’s 1980s catch-up: Little Darlings (1980).
This film stars Kristy McNichol and Tatum O’Neal as two teenaged girls who make a bet to see who can lose her virginity at summer camp first. I remember hearing about this film circa 1981—maybe after it had come out on video—and I remember thinking it sounded like one of those dangerous scary sinful movies I should avoid. (I was 11 at the time.) I hadn’t really thought about this film at all since then, but Tarantino discusses it in his latest podcast, and I figured I’d give it a look before hearing his analysis of it.
And... it’s a lot better than I was expecting! For one thing, it’s a lot more restrained, maybe even mature, than the “tits and zits” movies that were all the rage in the early 1980s (when I was in junior high; I’m not sure the genre was quite as popular by the time I got to senior high in 1985). This was before 1981’s Porky’s, before 1982’s Fast Times at Ridgemont High... and, since the film takes place at a summer camp, I may as well mention that it even came out two months before the original Friday the 13th. If there was any profanity in this film, I missed it (which is a point I didn’t really think about until someone says “gosh” upon learning that one of the girls really did lose her virginity), and there is not one hint of nudity, either.
Well, let me rephrase that: There is no female nudity. One of the things I find really interesting about this film is how it dwells so much on the female gaze, rather than the male gaze—and so there is a scene where some of the girls spy on some kids from the nearby boys’ camp who are skinny-dipping across the lake. The boys are far off in the distance, so we don’t really see anything, but the point is, this film is very much told from the girls’ point of view. And that is true in other scenes too, like when McNichol meets Matt Dillon for the first time and the camera gives us a good close-up on his (clothed) butt, which McNichol is staring at; or, perhaps most significantly, when McNichol and Dillon meet to have sex for the first time and the evening does not go as planned, and Dillon spends a fair chunk of the scene stretched out on some hay, wearing nothing but his underwear, while McNichol, suddenly feeling very nervous about the whole thing, never once takes her shirt off. You can argue, if you want, that Dillon is treated a bit like a sex object in this film, but the film allows him to express his hurt at being used like a sex object—he is particularly upset when he learns that McNichol might have made money off of him, i.e. by sleeping with him to win the bet—so I think it’s fair to say that absolutely nobody is exploited by this film.
I was also really struck by the way McNichol’s character, a girl from the wrong side of the tracks who was raised by a single mother, comes to realize that sex is more than the “nothing” that her mother told her it was, but also not the “something” that she and her peers assumed it would be. McNichol feels different after she has had sex, but it’s not the radiant kind of “different” that she expected. “God, I feel so lonesome,” she says mere minutes after doing it, and I didn’t realize she had been crying until she moved her head and a little bit of light bounced off one of her tears.
Man, it’s weird to think that, of the two lead actresses in this film, Tatum O’Neal was the one who already had an Oscar (for 1973’s Paper Moon). Kristy McNichol owns this movie, easily.
Anyway, some other point-form stuff:
This film marks the movie debut of Cynthia Nixon (of Sex & the City fame)! This was eight years before she appeared in Tanner ’88, which is the earliest film or TV show of hers that I remember seeing. (Apparently she was also in 1984’s Amadeus, but I have not seen that film since long, long before I learned who she was.)
Nixon plays the floral-headband-wearing daughter of a couple of hippies, who goes around handing out Niacin to her peers, warning them about the dangers of eating meat (it’s full of male hormones! she knew a girl who grew a moustache after eating meat!), and telling them she’s reluctant to take part in archery lessons because her parents don’t want her to get into competitive sports. She also, like all good hippie-ish characters, gets a climactic moment in which she punches the movie’s most annoying character right in the face.
Nixon’s just a kid, of course. Two other actors who stand out now as being really young in this movie: Matt Dillon and Armand Assante, as the two male characters that the teenaged girls try to seduce.
Dillon had been in only one film before this—1979’s Over the Edge, which I don’t think I’d ever heard of before—and this movie came out four months before he played the bully in 1980’s My Bodyguard. He wouldn’t start doing the S.E. Hinton movies for another couple years (1982’s Tex, 1983’s The Outsiders and Rumble Fish).
As for Assante, he’d been working since the mid-1970s, but I think the earliest thing of his I’d seen prior to this was... Ridley Scott’s 1492: Conquest of Paradise, which came out in 1992, twelve years after this movie? And I’m not even sure I noticed who he was until, maybe, 1996’s Striptease. (I certainly knew who he was by 1997’s The Odyssey, a two-part TV-movie in which he played Odysseus.) Anyway: nothing I had ever seen him in before prepared me for seeing him as a camp counselor in a teenaged sex comedy.
Just so we know how old everyone is in this film: it came out in March 1980, but Wikipedia says it started filming in March 1979, and at that time, the main actors would have been...
Kristy McNichol, 16 (born September 1962)
Tatum O’Neal, 15 (born November 1963)
Cynthia Nixon, just about to turn 13 (born April 1966)
Jenn Thompson, 11 (born December 1967)
Matt Dillon, 15 (born February 1964)
Armand Assante, 29 (born October 1949)
The O’Neal character says she’s 15. I can’t recall if any of the other characters specified how old they are.
McNichol sets her eyes on Dillon, while O’Neal sets her eyes on Assante... and hoo, boy, the Assante character is, thankfully, mature enough to rebuff O’Neal, and to do so fairly gently—but he is, if anything, arguably too gentle. Consider the way he has his arm around her even as he tells her, “I’m not a prince, I’m a teacher.” Yes! I wanted to scream. You’re a teacher! Don’t be so close to her! (Like the Klingon Kruge, I wanted to yell, “GET OUT OF THERE!!!”)
It is hinted that Assante gets into trouble, professionally, after O’Neal lets everyone assume that she and Assante did the deed, but the movie doesn’t dwell on this. Except for love-object Assante, the adults are largely kept out-of-sight, out-of-mind, like the teacher in a Charlie Brown cartoon. (Speaking of which, the school-bus-going-to-summer-camp music in this film reminded me of the music in 1977’s Race for Your Life, Charlie Brown! at one point.)
The opening scene establishes that McNichol’s character is tough. A guy walks up to her, wolf-whistles or something like that, and she replies by kicking him in the balls—to the amusement of his friends, if I recall correctly. The only physical fight she gets into is with O’Neal’s character, who comes from a fairly wealthy family.
Yes, the other girls taunt McNichol with the idea that she might be a lesbian, given her tough attitude and her virginity.
I said above that the film privileges the female gaze, and I do believe that’s true. It’s worth noting that one of the more openly comedic shots highlights all the... how to put this... still-developing chests as the girls place their hands on their hearts while saying the Pledge of Allegiance. But this did not feel sexualized at all, not in the context of the film as a whole; it felt very of-a-piece with the other scenes in which girls stuff things into their bras or whatever.
The character played by Jenn Thompson, who was only 11 at the time, sneaks into a locked men’s bathroom to steal a condom dispenser (she’s the only camper young enough and small enough to fit through the window), and at one point she blows a condom up like a balloon. This was exactly four decades before another preteen blew up a condom like a balloon in 2020’s Cuties.
The girls in this film are very aware of the fact that the onus is on them to make sure they don’t get pregnant. When one of them asks about “protection”, another says, “The guy takes care of that,” to which someone replies, “Not since the pill.” Some time later, when McNichol meets Dillon for their first attempt at sex, she gives him a condom to use and he asks her, “How come you’re not on the pill?”
One of the girls—didn’t catch her name, the dark-haired one—really stands out as the character who keeps showing off how grown-up she is but, ultimately, she’s just as inexperienced as the others. The first time we meet her, she’s bragging that she’s seen 1972’s Last Tango in Paris ten times, and she starts quoting Hamlet while spying on the naked boy campers through her binoculars. But when O’Neal reports, falsely, that she slept with Assante but she never got a good look at him because he turned off the light, Last Tango Girl exclaims, “How cavalier!” Which... kind of makes sense in an archaic way, maybe, but doesn’t really align with the way that word is usually used nowadays.
Re: pop-culture references, I lost track of who was saying what on the school bus, but one character brags that she saw 1978’s Grease six times, while another asks if anyone has seen Cocteau’s Beauty & the Beast (!!!).
Fascinating to see how these characters try to make their own sexual experience a selling point to their potential partners, but end up undermining the moment romantically. After her first kiss with Dillon, McNichol says, “That was nice,” and he replies, “Yeah, I been around a little.” Oh-kay.
Prior to that, there was a quietly devastating moment where Dillon gets fed up with McNichol’s reluctance to have sex, so he pulls his clothes back on and prepares to leave, and McNichol gets a bit desperate and says, “I’m not sexy to you, huh?” and Dillon replies, “All girls are sexy to me.” Which... is an affirmation of sorts, but not the kind she’s looking for. It doesn’t exactly make her feel special. By that point, she’s afraid she’s blown her chance, so she says she’s ready to do it now... and he says he’s not interested any more.
When the girls make their bets at the beginning of the film, one of them, who apparently gets residuals from acting in a commercial, says she’s willing to put her $100 residual cheque into the pot, which someone says is “an awful lot of money”. An online inflation calculator I just checked says that would be about $335 today.
Another dialogue sample: The really irritating girl tells another girl, “Don’t be so bourgeois!” To which the other girl replies, “I am bourgeois! I can’t help it!” I don’t remember any of my peers talking quite like this when I was in junior high.
Music stuff: At one point the campers are rehearsing ‘What a Friend We Have in Jesus’. Is this a religious camp? There’s no other hint of that anywhere; the kids perform a song from The Pirates of Penzance, and the camp itself doesn’t have a religious name or anything like that. Meanwhile, the soundtrack has 1970s hits by Supertramp, Blondie, John Lennon, and maybe others.
I wrote all that before listening to Tarantino and Avary’s podcast on this movie, and I’m happy to say that their response to the film was just as positive and appreciative as mine. Avary makes one point that hadn’t occurred to me, regarding the taunting of McNichol as a possible lesbian: back in the ’80s, Avary notes, a tomboy was just a tomboy, but today the film would probably lean into the idea that McNichol was being pressured into having sex with the wrong kind of person, which is kind of horrifying in its own way. But given how the film does show McNichol looking at Dillon, I don’t think the film itself points in that direction. I also learned from the podcast that this film made a big impression on a certain generation of women, and I am struck by the way Avary’s daughter Gala says she wants to keep some of her feelings about the film to herself, out of a shared sense of privacy with the McNichol character.
Long story short: I’m glad I finally watched this film, more than 40 years after I first learned about it. I’ve written a few articles about the treatment of virginity and chastity in film—I even discussed the subject in a 2005 documentary on virginity, which is how I got my very own IMDb page—and suffice it to say I wish I had been familiar with this film back then.