The World of Henry Orient

Two fourteen-year-old girls become friends in New York. Valerie and Marian skip school, roam the parks and invent their own games. Then at a concert they fix on a pianist called Henry Orient. Following him becomes their greatest entertainment. Henry, meanwhile, is trying to conceal an affair with a married woman and cannot work out who these two girls are. The subject is not obsession but the friendship between the girls. The pianist is a pretext; the real story is built on the difference between Valerie's inattentive parents and the warmth of Marian's house. In its second half the film stops being a comedy. The form was shot in the streets of New York and the city is real. The passages of the girls running about are close to improvisation; the camera follows them and the scenes run long. The source is Nora Johnson's novel. Her father, Nunnally Johnson, co-wrote the screenplay, and the book draws on her own adolescence. Peter Sellers plays the pianist and builds him as a wholly ridiculous figure. Tippy Walker and Merrie Spaeth, who play the girls, were unknown at the time. George Roy Hill directs. Who it is for: viewers who like sixties American comedy and stories of adolescent friendship. Who it is not for: anyone expecting Sellers to dominate; the film is really the girls' story and he appears less.