Dis­cov­er the trou­bling eroti­cism of this twist­ed ​’70s thriller

The title of Stan­ley H Brassloff’s fol­low-up to 1968’s Two Girls for a Mad­man comes across as some­thing of a para­dox. After all, if toys are not for chil­dren, then who are they for, exact­ly? An answer of sorts is pro­vid­ed in the open­ing scene, as we see young Jamie Godard (Mar­cia Forbes) writhing about in a clear state of arousal with a toy sol­dier on her bed – before her moth­er bursts in and stops this ​“unnat­ur­al” play.

At age 20, Jamie is no longer tech­ni­cal­ly a child but, naïve and arrest­ed, she is cer­tain­ly child­like in her fail­ure to act like any adult. Con­verse­ly, the ted­dies and dolls to which she clings – gifts sent her by the father who left her when she was five and who has since remained a focus for all her ide­al­is­ing fix­a­tion – have tak­en on a fetishis­tic, sex­u­alised sta­tus even as Jamie’s body has devel­oped faster than her mind.

“Dad­dy” is the first word we hear in the film, uttered by Jamie in her mas­tur­ba­to­ry ecsta­sy with the toy sol­dier. Indeed, dad­dy issues are what define and dri­ve Jamie, even if her embit­tered, man-hat­ing moth­er Edna (Fran War­ren) has proven as much an influ­ence on Jamie’s strange behav­iour as her absent father Phillip (Peter Light­stone). ​“I’ve heard so many awful things,” Jamie tells her new hus­band Char­lie (Har­lan Cary Poe), a col­league from the toy store where she works, and her refusal to have sex with him is no doubt informed by the ugly pic­ture that Edna has paint­ed of men in gen­er­al and of Jamie’s father in particular.

Nonethe­less, Jamie’s frigid­i­ty serves to dri­ve Char­lie into the arms of var­i­ous oth­er women, becom­ing just like Phillip – while con­verse­ly Jamie’s pur­suit of her whor­ing father draws her to age­ing pros­ti­tute Pearl Val­di (Eve­lyn Kings­ley) and her sleazy pimp Eddie (Luis Arroyo), and to a pro­fes­sion where she aban­dons all sex­u­al timidity.

Toys Are Not for Chil­dren is a shrill melo­dra­ma in which a dis­turbed young woman’s psy­cho­log­i­cal hang-ups see her repeat­ed­ly reliv­ing child­hood trau­mas in more adult con­texts. Here Jer­ry Siegel’s per­cus­sive edit­ing inter­cuts the present and the past in a children’s rhyme, while Jamie par­rots the words of her moth­er while chas­ing her elu­sive father. The abuse hint­ed to lie at the heart of Jamie’s regres­sion is reen­act­ed with a series of father fig­ures, and then even­tu­al­ly, inevitably, with the father himself.

This is the cin­e­ma of exploita­tion and per­ver­sion, whose doll-like hero­ine becomes the will­ing play­thing of all com­ers – except her lov­ing hus­band – as part of a twist­ed lega­cy bequeathed to her by the deeply dys­func­tion­al home life of her ear­ly years. Need­less to say, Brassloff’s film is not for chil­dren. The way in which it depicts Jamie’s approach to illic­it sex­u­al com­merce with old­er men – as a kind of lit­tle girl’s game – is trou­bling, not least because the prop­er time to put away child­ish things has long since passed.

Toys Are Not for Chil­dren is released on Blu-ray by Arrow Films in a brand new 2K restora­tion from orig­i­nal film ele­ments on 7 October.