(1996) Decades ago I watched Kim Novak in The Amorous Adventures of Moll Flanders (1965): After taking her thumps and lumps at the hands and glands of Lord Humpty-Dumpty and getting dumped back on the street, this sassy hussy employs her lovely plump bumps, her alluring rump, and her picture-pretty painted face (a tender peak amid sparkling lake-blue eyes and red-petaled lips), playing her trump cards just right, romping through the aristocracy, to triumph, leaving stumps where trees once stood. Or so my memory recalls the saucy film. (I won't revisit it for fear of spoiling another fantasy of adolescence.)

Director Pen Densham's film (not particularly bawdy, rated PG-13) from his own screenplay, adapting Daniel Defoe's 18th-century picaresque novel, contains more social realism (note the visual details) than its predecessor, which attempted to be full of fun and frivolity like Tom Jones.

After a nine-year search, Hibble (Morgan Freeman) finds Moll's daughter Flora (Aisling Corcoran) in an orphanage. Taking the sassy, impertinent "scullery hellcat" in hand (providing comic relief) before setting sail for America, he begins to read the child her mother's memoirs as moral instruction (though he comments that ethics lie beyond the grave).

Moll (Robin Wright, pre-Penn) had been conceived from a prison guard's union with her mother, who after giving birth was hanged as a thief. Removed from an orphanage to a nunnery, she pierces the hand of a priest with a knitting needle inside a confession box before fleeing (after receiving a sign during a prayer) to be taken in by charitable Mrs Mazzawatti as a maid servant. Her exemplary, brave behavior toward a small-pox victim in a prison results in the Mazzawatti daughters (who had initially attempted to use their "superior culture" to intimidate their feral competition for their mother's and others' affections) trying desperately to demonstrate even greater conscientiousness toward the disadvantaged but instead getting raped in the slums of London.

Next Moll enters the house of the formidable Mrs Allworthy (Stockard Channing, who resembles Elizabeth Taylor in her middle-age) - "Here was the home of my dreams" - a bordello for high-society gentlemen, where first she meets Hibble (bound to his former mistress by his having been branded as a thief) and learns to take advantage of men, all of whom, Mrs Allworthy instructs, are themselves fortune hunters.

Still a virgin, Moll is auctioned (reminiscent of Fanny Hill's introduction to sexual relations with men) - "All the mysteries of Eve waiting to be unraveled" - to the highest bidder (an elderly geezer with 100 guineas) for "a taste of innocence."

Narrating of her having to kiss frogs in her search for a prince, Mrs Allworthy's fine trollop descends into wretchedness with gin and whiskey after Edna (covertly Hibble's lover, who had recommended the sex act "for a feeling in your body if it's done right" to Moll before she'd become a courtesan) is sold off. Hibble says to Flora: "If you reject her, throw away the crucifix," the only possession the girl has from her mother.

Chosen because she's become the cheapest of Mrs Allworthy's whores, an aspiring artist (John Lynch) pays her to be his model: he bares his soul to her while she her bosoms. For the first time in her life after having lain with so many other men, she finally experiences love; but when he introduces her to his wealthy family (beneficiaries of a brewery), they attempt to buy her off.

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