Robert Ryan and Ida Lupino in "Beware My Lovely."
A bleak message surfaced this weekend watching three movies from two different eras which all deal with the same theme: the terrorizing of women. In 1952’s Beware My Lovely, Ida Lupino plays a war widow who runs a boarding house with good cheer and a strong work ethic. Preparing for the holidays, she hires Robert Ryan, a drifter with a penchant for tiny ties and blackouts, to do some odd jobs around the house. Lupino is lovely, with her shiny hair pulled up in an elaborate twist, and so demure in her long sleeves and long sweeping skirt, that she can barely bring herself to scream when Ryan starts freaking out on her. For that matter, in her confining clothes, she can barely run away from him. Ryan, it seems, suffers from severe psychological problems. An emotional meltdown is set in motion after Lupino’s boarder makes an innocent joke, and Lupino’s sassy niece makes things worse — a lot worse — when she derides Ryan’s masculinity after he rebuffs her overtures. Ryan certainly terrorizes Lupino, and fucks up her house, but keeps the physical harm to a relative minimum (see below) — a slap, an unwanted caress on the cheek, some rough handling – before she uses her wits to get him out of her house and, we can only hope, into the hands of some heavy duty psychiatry.
Leslie Uggams in "Poor Pretty Eddie."
Leslie Uggams is the victimized woman at the center of Poor Pretty Eddie, a real piece of crap from 1975. Uggams plays a celebrity songstress who tries to get away from it all and ends up having car trouble at the motel from hell, a dive run by Shelley Winters, Ted Cassidy (Lurch from The Addams Family), and the eponymous Eddie (Michael Christian). Christian mysteriously “fixes” her car so that “only he can start it,” and shows up shirtless in Uggams’s bed. When she objects, he brutally rapes her in a stomach-turning scene that is intercut with Cassidy and friends watching dogs mating. Over the ensuing days, Uggams tries to get away, only to find that the town officials (including Slim Pickens as the sheriff) are just as rotten as her captors. Cassidy seems to want to help, but his efforts are too wanly executed (inexplicably so) to do any good. It is Cassidy at the end who opens fire on the town citizens who show up at the motel at the “wedding” that is being forced upon Uggams by Christian, and when he is finally killed, Uggams takes up where he lefts off — right before the movie abruptly ends.
Margaux and Mariel Hemingway in "Lipstick."
In Lipstick (1976), the late Margaux Hemingway plays a model who lives with her squeaky-voiced little sister, Mariel Hemingway. Mariel has a crush on her teacher, Chris Sarandon, and gets Margaux to agree to listen to his music. As Margaux is not a musician, it’s unclear why, but it furthers the “plot.” Sarandon shows up at a seaside photo shoot clutching a tape player and eyeballing the semi-nude Margaux, who is alternately posing for the cameras and smooching boyfriend Perry King. She doesn’t have time to listen to Sarandon’s music, so she invites him over for the following day. When he arrives at her highrise, however, she’s forgotten about the appointment and is taking a shower, so she has him wait as she puts on a diaphanous robe and then sits with him and his tape player. His “music” turns out to be a nonsense cacaphony, and when the phone rings, she eagerly takes the call. What follows is Sarandon’s eruption of rage and a sickeningly drawn-out, graphic rape scene that sure as hell seems meant to titillate the viewer.
The remainder of the movie focuses on a humiliating trial for Margaux — in which nude photographs of her are entered as “evidence” — which sees Sarandon smirk his way to a “not guilty” verdict despite prosecuting attorney Anne Bancroft’s middling efforts. As the final fifteen minutes of the film draw to a close, Margaux finds herself at a photo shoot in the very same building where Sarandon tinkers with a composition, and ultimately chases and brutalizes the kid sister, Mariel. Margaux whips out a shotgun a la the proud Hemingway family name, and shoots Sarandon multiple times in the crotch, rendering him dead and finally, without a smirk on his face. Quickly, we see an insert of Margaux at trial as the jury acquits her; there’s a freeze frame and the credits roll. As revenge dramas go, this one is as offensively piss poor as Poor Pretty Eddie. Who’s revenge is it supposed to be, Margaux’s revenge against the crimes suffered by her and her sister, or some type of revenge against women? In one of my favorite revenge flicks, Death Wish, Charles Bronson’s family — his wife and daughter, notably — are brutalized in the beginning and Bronson spends the rest of the film bringing his A game against New York City’s criminal element.
Revenge is a dish best served Bronson.
What I see is that as women became more and more sexualized in the cinema, the violence inflicted upon them became more and more sadistic. Ida Lupino in Beware My Lovely, in her high-necked blouse and pulled-up hair, is psychologically terrorized for the most part, but eventually uses her wits to defeat her tormentor and ends up snuggled up in an armchair with her dog. Uggams, a strong, no-nonsense woman who is quite definite about her boundries, is raped and otherwise degraded and humiliated. And finally, the ultimate in a sexualized woman — Margaux Hemingway as a model who uses her body to sell lipstick at the behest of the men in her life (“I just do what I’m told,” she says on the stand, where she and her sexuality — not her rapist — are on trial). It’s as if the very fact that she is willing to pose nude warrants the despicable and graphic rape that is committed upon her. And in a “man’s” revenge film like Death Wish, the majority of the movie is dedicated to the avenging of Bronson’s loved ones via serious ass-kicking. In a “women’s” so-called revenge film, the majority of the film focuses on the acts of crime perpetuated on the woman in the first place. It’s a very sad commentary, a bleak message that has been delivered to movie audiences. Time to watch some movies that focus on the strength of women as a much-needed palate cleanser.
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