Ginger In the Morning (1974)

Oh man, that early 70’s generation gap.

Ginger (Sissy Spacek in her first starring role) is an attractive young hitchhiker who shacks up with a lonely, middle-aged ad guy (Monte Markham, We Are Still Here) who just got divorced.

Can he learn from her free spirit? Will she break him out of his shell? Will his friends act like jerks? Yes. Yes. Yes.

Mark Miller from Please Don’t Eat the Daisies, David Doyle (Bosley from Charlie’s Angels) and Fred Ward — yes, Remo Williams — are all in this.

This is an early version of the manic pixie dream girl trope (there’s a great article-slideshow about 14, present-day, “manic pixie dream girl” movies at Refinery 29; and wouldn’t you know it: Wikipedia has a page dedicated to the, what they describe as a “trope” genre, as well). So watch Ginger in the Morning and think about 1974, a time when AIDS was a myth and the only pandemic we were worried about were killer bees.

You can watch this on Amazon Prime and YouTube.

So you’ve got a free movie — and you learned about the Manic Pixie Dream Girl (MPDG) stock character-trope in film. Hey, we do what we can to expand the film horizons at B&S.