Director: Otto Preminger
Year Released: 1965
Rating: 1.0
A young mother (Carol Lynley) and her brother (Keir Dullea, 'gone tomorrow!'), with the assistance of the police (led by Laurence Olivier) investigate the disappearance of the title little girl from a school in London - but evidence of the girl's actual existence is in short supply, and people suspect she's a non-entity. Plays like a run-on sentence until the ludicrous third act - rolling out red herring after red herring, like the pervy landlord (the great Noël Coward), the trippy schoolmaster or the German cook - where it loses every shred of credibility it could have possibly earned, raising more questions than it can answer with its banal child-adult psychology (requiring Dullea to act like a zombie might not have been the wisest of moves). Instead of saying "A-ha!" I was completely baffled as to the extent of the main characters' long-term relationship, why Lynley's character would continue to associate with such a deranged individual, why the main character is not in a psychiatric ward, and so on and so forth.
