The Smashing Bird I Used to Know (1969): The British Reform-School Thriller America Renamed School for Unclaimed Girls

Some films vanish under one title. This one vanished under three. Released in Britain as The Smashing Bird I Used to Know, sold in the United States as School for Unclaimed Girls, and also circulated as Hell House Girls, Robert Hartford-Davis's 1969 thriller has spent more than half a century hiding in plain sight — too notorious to be forgotten entirely, and too oddly distributed ever to become easy to find. That is why it belongs here.

The Film

Hartford-Davis sets his story inside a female reformatory, and he treats the institution as a pressure cooker rather than a backdrop. Madeleine Hinde leads the cast as the young inmate around whom the drama turns, inside a regime of strict authority, simmering resentments, and relationships the film was unusually frank about for British cinema of its moment. The catalog description for this title does not soften the contents — it promises lesbianism and blood-letting in a female reformatory — and the film itself is best understood as a collision between the earnest British social-problem picture and the exploitation film: part institutional drama, part shock, played straight by a cast who treat the material as drama throughout.

That cast is a large part of the film's interest today. Renée Asherson, whose screen career stretched back to the 1940s, brings real gravitas to the adult side of the institution. Around Hinde are several faces British audiences would soon know well: Dennis Waterman, later a fixture of The Sweeney and Minder; Maureen Lipman, who became one of Britain's best-loved stage and television performers; and a very young Lesley-Anne Down, years before Upstairs, Downstairs and international fame. Peter Newbrook and Janina Faye complete the credited ensemble.

Hartford-Davis himself was one of the most interesting journeymen of British low-budget cinema, a director who moved between horror, crime, and exploitation without ever quite joining the mainstream. He had already made the Gothic horror The Black Torment (1964) and Corruption (1968), starring Peter Cushing,. The Smashing Bird I Used to Know sits squarely in that run of work.

Why It's Rare

Start with the names. A film listed in references under its British title, sold to American audiences under a far more lurid one, and reissued under a third title altogether is a film that filmographies, catalogs, and collectors' lists routinely split into pieces — searches miss it and credits scatter. The American retitling, School for Unclaimed Girls, tells you how it was marketed in the United States: as pure exploitation, which guaranteed it a life on the margins rather than in repertory revival.

It also belongs to no comfortable category. It is not quite a horror film, not quite a crime film, and too sensational to be filed with the respectable social dramas it partly resembles. Films that fall between categories are the ones home-video eras pass over first, and this one never received the kind of sustained, widely distributed revival that rescued so many of its British contemporaries.

Our Edition

Our listing is in English, and the visual quality of this print is rated A- in our catalog — a strong rating for a film of this age and distribution history. Like every title at Gotta See DVDs, it is a DVD-R copy produced from the master print in our library, clearly labeled as a copy. If you have been chasing this film under any of its three names, this is where the chase ends.

Get The Smashing Bird I Used to Know (School for Unclaimed Girls) on DVD — $19.99, and remember: every third movie in your cart is free.