Manhattan 14 year old private school girls Val Boyd (Tippy Walker) and Marian Gilbert (Merrie Spaeth) become best friends. They run across egotistical famous avant-garde pianist Henry Orient (Peter Sellers) who is having an affair with married Stella Dunnworthy (Paula Prentiss). They keep running into him and starts stalking him. Orient becomes paranoid. Val is infatuated and writes in her diary. Val's absentee parents (Angela Lansbury, Tom Bosley) return home and her mother discovers the diary. There is trouble in the marriage. Her mother confronts Henry Orient and end up in an affair with him.The girls are adorable troublemakers and Peter Sellers has great reactions to them. Tippy Walker is absolutely winning. There is a fun lightness in the adolescent misadventure with a dash of impending adulthood. The movie is better staying with the girls. Peter Sellers is a great comedian but this is not his movie. It does get more serious but it never goes completely dark.

George Roy Hill directs "The World of Henry Orient", a once original now thoroughly tame film starring Peter Sellers as Henry Orient. Orient's a self-centred concert pianist who dates a series of married women. Unfortunately he's caught in the act by a pair of preteen boarding-school friends, played by Tippy Walker and Merrie Spaeth, both of whom worship Orient from afar. The girls' overworked imaginations result in them pursuing Orient and recording their fantasies in their diaries, a fact which irks one of their mothers, played by Angela Lansbury.Sellers' role isn't particularly well written, but Walker and Spaeth do good work. Much of the film consists of the duo engaging in flights of fancy or pulling pranks on unsuspecting adults. In this way, Hill finds an unusual tone; a playful perspective befitting zany adolescence. Think of "Orient" as a teen version of Hill's more popular "Sting" and "Butch Cassidy".6/10 - Worth one viewing.

In 1964, after the success of Lolita and The Pink Panther, British comedian Peter Sellers was suddenly very much in demand in Hollywood, and found himself being called upon to lend his comic talents to all manner of pictures. The World of Henry Orient, a coming-of-age comedy drama, is among his most unusual vehicles – for him at least.For one thing, The World of Henry Orient is not really anything much to do with Sellers or the titular character that he plays. Its central story about two free-spirited teenage girls was written by Nora Johnson, daughter of acclaimed screenwriter Nunnally, and is a rather charming and realistic portrait, if a little unfocused at times. Appropriately, the story gains maturity as it progresses, acquiring a little more meaning and even poignancy. The lead roles are played by unknowns Merrie Spaeth and Tippy Walker, both of whom give lively and very naturalistic performances, more than anything it seems enjoying themselves. Although Spaeth in particular shows a lot of promise, neither of them had lengthy careers on the screen.This was an early directorial assignment for George Roy Hill, who would later go on to make some very fine pictures indeed. He shows intelligence and sensitivity in his handling of scenes, often using long unbroken takes and wonderfully simple set-ups. A good example is a shot when Gil first comes round to Val's house, where Walker is lying on the bed and Spaeth is sitting on the floor. It's such a typical-looking way for two teenage friends to relax, and it allows both to face the camera while the scene simply plays out without the need for cutting or changing the angle. The only moment that really interrupts the flow is the street scene early on with lots of Dutch angles and slow motion. Funny how with the Henry Orient character this movie pokes fun at avant-garde music, because all this camera trickery comes dangerously close to the cinematic equivalent.Speaking of which, the Henry Orient character is a bit of a misfit here. Sellers acts funny and makes a decent comedy character out of Orient, but there simply isn't anything really very funny for him to say or do. This is right in a way, because you wouldn't want him to steal the movie, but it means his performance is rather frustrating to watch because he constantly seems on the verge of being hilarious, except he isn't. It's as if his parts of the story are out of step with the rest, and the picture is pulling in opposite directions. Even more bizarre (but mercifully short) is the business with Al Lewis as a crazy storekeeper, which looks like a bit of half-arsed comic relief from the 1940s. The World of Henry Orient is like a cobbling together of two different ideas, both of which – with a little development – could work very well on their own. The 1960s were a strange time in cinema, and produced many little oddities such as this.

I've been watching this film on television over many years and I'm still struck by the unusually frank take on the parent child relationship that's shown here. Instead of the claptrap that all mothers love their children, this film shows a mother who really considers her daughter to be an inconvenience who's hindering her social life. Moreover this film shows a girl facing a relatively tough situation and overcoming it quite well. That's not shown too often. While this film is easily seen as a cutesy early 1960s fluff piece, I really think its not-too extreme situation is a good lesson for adolescent kids, and especially for girls.