Weekend with the Babysitter (1970) in the PNW

Details: Written by: Mortado; Category: The 1970s in Northwest Cinemas

This is a collection of media from the initial runs of "Weekend with the Babysitter" (1970) in the Pacific Northwest.

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Weekend with the Babysitter (1970)
“Weekend with the Babysitter” is one of those limp late-era exploitation curios where you can practically smell the cigarette smoke of the producers hovering over every frame. It pretends to be a cautionary tale about suburban rot, but it's really just an excuse to parade a middle-aged man’s midlife fantasies under the guise of moral inquiry. The film follows a drifting father who seems bored with his own life, bored with his wife, bored with the dull rituals of domesticity, and the babysitter becomes the convenient spark that lets him imagine he is still capable of rebellion. What passes for plot is mostly an excuse to shove him into situations where he can feel dangerous again, though the danger is always sanitized, safe, and designed to flatter him rather than expose anything real.

The movie gestures toward counterculture anxieties, but it never commits. It wants the thrill of youth culture without the bite, so everything feels like a staged reenactment of rebellion rather than the thing itself. The babysitter is less a character than a prop, a symbol of freedom that the film never bothers to understand. She drifts through scenes with the kind of vague innocence exploitation films love to pretend is subversive. The father’s crisis, meanwhile, is treated with a straight face, as though his self-pity were profound rather than tedious. The film keeps insisting he is trapped by society, but it is obvious he is only trapped by his own vanity.

What makes “Weekend with the Babysitter” interesting, if at all, is the accidental honesty that leaks through its cheap surfaces. You see a culture terrified of aging, terrified of irrelevance, terrified of the youth it claims to celebrate. The film wants to be daring, but it is too timid to confront the ugliness of its own premise. Instead, it settles for a soft-focus fantasy where consequences never land, and desire is treated like a harmless hobby. It is a relic of a moment when Hollywood tried to cash in on counterculture without understanding it, and the result is a movie that feels both sleazy and strangely hollow, a rebellion performed by people who never actually left the suburbs.

Director: Don Henderson
Writers: James E. McLarty, George E. Carey, Don Henderson
Stars: George E. Carey, Susan Romen, James Almanzar
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September 29, 1970 ad (Portland)