The Smashing Bird I Used to Know is a 1969 British drama/sexploitation film, directed by Robert Hartford-Davis and starring Renée Asherson, Patrick Mower, Dennis Waterman, Madeleine Hinde and Maureen Lipman.

Seven years on and Nicki is a troubled and confused teenager living with her mother, plagued by flashback nightmares and with an obsession with horses and riding stemming from the merry-go-round horror.

Her latest boyfriend Harry, who Nicki detests, is a sleazy con-artist who makes his living out of latching on to wealthy older women and fleecing them financially before moving on.

Coming from a middle-class background, Nicki is overwhelmed by her new environment among a large group of tough, delinquent and maladjusted girls, where bullying and violence is the norm.

[citation needed] The Monthly Film Bulletin said "A preposterous blend of cheap melodrama and pat psychology, with a large slice of life after lights out in a girls remand home thrown in for good measure.

Robert Hartford-Davis' bludgeoning direction combines a frenzied excess of tricksiness (monochrome filters, repeated flashbacks in negative, a ludicrous jigsaw of superimposed flash shots) with a tasteless relish for gory detail, like the recurring close-ups of poor Nicki's father's head being mangled by the iron hoof of a mechanical horse; and one is not surprised to find him working in a shot of a poster advertising his last film.

The story is trite, the dialogue almost unbelievably banal, and the acting generally feeble, with the possible exception of Maureen Lipman as one of the less unlikely remand home inmates.