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Sometimes I feel as if the whole world was upside-down
Ida Lupino's Outrage (1950) is one of the great American movies about rape and rape culture—sensitive, furious, and deeply noir, because noir is the genre where the world drops out from underneath you. One day you have an office job and a fiancé, a future as ticky-tackily rosy as the decade of prosperity assembling itself around you. The next it's as empty and threatening as the miles of highway under the wheels of the all-night bus you bought a ticket out of town for, unable any longer to bear being touched or even looked at by strangers or family. What has happened to change your state is a literally unspeakable crime, the euphemism of the title which yet has its own truthful force. This movie is not an exercise in pity. It should disturb the viewer that they live in the world it observes so acutely. It still works. We still do.
A disheveled, dark-haired young woman runs under the credits, through deserted night streets seen from a steep-craned angle as remote and disinterested as a God who marks a sparrow's fall but doesn't feel the need to do very much about it. She's Ann Walton (Mala Powers), whom it may take us a moment to recognize as the movie proper opens, bright-faced, carefree, and eager in the rollback of time. She keeps the books for the Bradshaw Mill Company in the Midwestern anytown of Capitol City and lives with her parents, not having gone to college despite her intelligence and especially her aptitude for math; her boyfriend Jim Owens (Robert Clarke) has just gotten the ten-dollar raise that will, he confidently assures her over half-sandwiches in the park where a carousel tootles and a neighboring matron does her impolite but kindly best to eavesdrop, enable Ann to quit her job and marry him. Rapturously, she invites him to dinner to tell her parents: "We're going to have fried chicken—and I'm going to make the gravy." Her father frets again that she's marrying so young, but her prospective husband reaffirms his love while Ann herself kneels at her mother's feet, a skein of yarn unwinding between her hands. It's all just a beat away from parody, except that Ann is so vulnerable and shining, so happy to be offered what she's been socialized to want. The next morning at work, she accepts congratulations from her coworkers in the form of a hug from her female best friend, a heartfelt pat on the hand from her male deskmate. She's making plans and why shouldn't she? She's not tempting fate. The film is very precise on this point. One of its working titles was Nice Girl. The other was Nobody's Safe.
In the first of many fidelities to the reality rather than the fiction of sexual assault, it's not stranger rape. Ann's not close to her assailant (Albert Mellen), but he's the counterman of the lunch stand where she buys coffee for herself and slices of chocolate cake to share with her boyfriend; he flirts aggressively with her, but she responds only with the pained, mechanical patience that's a rebuff to anyone with boundaries, a plausible deniability to anyone without. The hot, sticky night she works late, he's closing up the stand as she exits the company offices, jauntily whistling a child's tune—"Do You Know the Muffin Man?" He shouts his usual greeting after her: "Hey, beautiful!" When she doesn't react, he begins to follow her through the industrial maze of trucks and pallets of lumber and loading docks, all deceptively mercury-lit and unnervingly silent except for the sharp overlapping sounds of footsteps in alleys plastered with torn circus posters, the drum of Ann's fists on a lighted window that doesn't let her in. By now his steps have become purposeful, his wolf-whistles no longer to attract her attention but to signal, like malevolent radar, that she's got his; cornered at last behind a warehouse, she sets off the blare of a horn that should summon even annoyed, inadvertent help, but as her stalker closes in—she slipped and went down hard on concrete steps, hit her head so that her vision swims and she sees more clearly than his face the heavy scar behind the open collar of his shirt—all that happens is an elderly neighbor in a bathrobe slams his window to keep the noise out, the perfect forerunner of Kitty Genovese's mythical, indifferent neighbors. It's an excruciating scene to watch, not because it goes further than the camera retreating to its God's-eye perspective again, but because it runs nearly five minutes and there is nothing aesthetic in Ann's rising hopeless terror and it is impossible to tell at what point the counterman decides to rape rather than just harass her, except that the longer he chases her, the more unavoidable it feels. She didn't answer him, after all. He was just paying her a compliment.
The word "rape" is never uttered in the film. The omission is almost certainly Code-mandated, but Lupino and co-writers Collier Young and Malvin Wald turn it to their advantage: in its place, characters speak of "the attack" or "the assault," muffling, desexualized, minimizing language that leaves Ann no way of naming honestly what's been done to her. She's swaddled in silence just when she needs to speak out and everything, everything hurts. Just because Outrage doesn't use the modern terminology of trauma doesn't mean it can't accurately record its effects—or the compounding failures of society. Reporting the rape is exhausting, invasive: she can't describe her rapist beyond his scar and his leather jacket and is reduced to animalistic screaming when pressed for details in her half-drugged, shocky state. A lineup of suspects is assembled, but the detective who looms over her with all his male urgency, weight, and aggression ("Try to concentrate, Miss Walton. Try to remember. We don't want this man on the streets tonight!") is just as unendurable as the sight of so many men with scarred throats, her rapist multiplied to universality, no one she can point to, no way to rule any man out. Worse than the heedless blunt force of the law is the sympathy of her community, where every gesture of concern, sometimes a nervously proffered compliment, sometimes a hand on her elbow, sometimes just more careful silence, is as intolerable as if they were touches of fire. The rhythm of one coworker rubber-stamping a pile of forms becomes the clattering of her own footsteps down a dead-end street, the bored drumming of another's fingers her terrified heartbeat. She screams for the office to "take a good look"—everyone wants to see what a ruined woman looks like. But some people refuse to see even when she's dissociating right in front of them: the worst is Jim's deep and loving obliviousness, forging ahead with his marital plans for a woman who can't even share his car without shrinking away beneath her skin. "We're not like other people," Ann snarls finally at her stunned ex-fiancé, freeze and flight both exhausted and nothing but fight left. "I don't want to get married, ever. I don't want you to touch me. Everything's dirty, filthy and dirty . . . And you'd always be thinking about what happened. You'd never forget." The night of their engagement, she looked like a pretty kitten, batting at a ball of yarn; now she's a cat in a corner with her ears laid back, claws out and ripping. Jim's hands gripping her shoulders are the classic gesture of the forceful man shaking sense into the hysterical woman, which would admittedly play better if he were not also shouting, even more wildly, "Shut up!" She looks at his hands on her flesh with such loathing and horrified contempt that he has to let her go. She leaves town the next day.
Outrage is so attentive to the nuances of its easily sensationalized material that it does not surprise me that it finds an ending without either saccharine or tragedy, but I particularly enjoy that it does not use romance to do it. There will be a man in Ann's life once she fetches up among the orange groves of Santa Paula, but he will not become her lover and the part he will play in her healing is low-key, unpatronizing, and a lovely demonstration of non-toxic masculinity, which Lupino could not have named any more than rape culture but which she depicts with equal accuracy. We meet him first as the unknown motorist scooping Ann's unconscious body from the side of the road where she fled after hearing her own description broadcast on a diner's radio; the movie does not make us feel alarmist for fearing him, especially the suddenness with which he appears in the doorway of the late-night bedroom she wakes in, but he keeps his distance after she recoils once from his touch and he describes her afterward to the married couple whose guest bedroom she's occupying as "a frightened kid." He's not that old himself, with a dark, diffident, not quite pretty face and a soft-spoken gravity that at first feels disingenuous and is revealed to be hard-won; he's a preacher's kid returned to his father's ministry after twenty-five years and a hard war—PTSD, lost a lung to TB, I swear I don't go looking for these people. He sketches, plays the piano, doesn't even pretend to smoke the pipe he chews on. His name is Bruce Ferguson (Tod Andrews) and his congregation calls him "Doc." Over the weeks and then months that Ann remains in Santa Paula, first on the production line and later in the offices of an orange-packing plant, he wins her trust though nothing more extraordinary than casual gentleness and never once threatening her with either sexual interest or special treatment; he will be her advocate when the triggering of her trauma during a company picnic leads to violence in a scene as precise and harrowing as the initial rape. I have some issues with the psychiatric language of the third act, but not with its import: it is as remarkable as it is rewarding to see a movie from 1950 state so frankly that a survivor of sexual assault should get therapy rather than just get over it or die. The script is similarly refreshing about the ways in which damage begets damage and the institutions of society accelerate rather than address the problems. "That's my point. She is innocent of criminal intent and we are guilty of criminal negligence. It's our fault. All of us." It does not, however, confuse social reform with making excuses. The rapist has his own history of trauma, but there is at least one other damaged man in this plot and he understands quite well how boundaries work.
I had intended to watch this movie last week after it aired on TCM, but since their on-demand service skipped it and it does not appear to exist on DVD, I had to settle for a somewhat blown-out version on YouTube; I still recommend it. What with the centenary year and all that, now would be a magnificent time for Criterion or Kino Lorber to bring out a box set of the collected Lupino, writer-director-producer-actor that she was. The title card for Outrage reads "The Filmakers Present An Ida Lupino Production." No ambiguity there. She wasn't just a curiosity, the first female Hollywood filmmaker since Dorothy Arzner; she was a major American director and there are scenes here that prove it without strain, like a dance floor full of waltzing couples through which Archie Stout's camera travels like Ann's skeptical, envious, immutably separate gaze, or a flirtation shot like a monster movie to show just how much the normative, socially encouraged interactions of men with women exist on the same continuum as street harassment and rape. Like the pre-Code movies it satisfyingly resembles, Outrage stands with Caught (1949) and The Blue Gardenia (1953) as powerful correctives to the idea that the past was naturally, serenely sexist and no one until those second-wave bra-burners ever raised a fuss. This reality check brought to you by my nice backers at Patreon.
A disheveled, dark-haired young woman runs under the credits, through deserted night streets seen from a steep-craned angle as remote and disinterested as a God who marks a sparrow's fall but doesn't feel the need to do very much about it. She's Ann Walton (Mala Powers), whom it may take us a moment to recognize as the movie proper opens, bright-faced, carefree, and eager in the rollback of time. She keeps the books for the Bradshaw Mill Company in the Midwestern anytown of Capitol City and lives with her parents, not having gone to college despite her intelligence and especially her aptitude for math; her boyfriend Jim Owens (Robert Clarke) has just gotten the ten-dollar raise that will, he confidently assures her over half-sandwiches in the park where a carousel tootles and a neighboring matron does her impolite but kindly best to eavesdrop, enable Ann to quit her job and marry him. Rapturously, she invites him to dinner to tell her parents: "We're going to have fried chicken—and I'm going to make the gravy." Her father frets again that she's marrying so young, but her prospective husband reaffirms his love while Ann herself kneels at her mother's feet, a skein of yarn unwinding between her hands. It's all just a beat away from parody, except that Ann is so vulnerable and shining, so happy to be offered what she's been socialized to want. The next morning at work, she accepts congratulations from her coworkers in the form of a hug from her female best friend, a heartfelt pat on the hand from her male deskmate. She's making plans and why shouldn't she? She's not tempting fate. The film is very precise on this point. One of its working titles was Nice Girl. The other was Nobody's Safe.
In the first of many fidelities to the reality rather than the fiction of sexual assault, it's not stranger rape. Ann's not close to her assailant (Albert Mellen), but he's the counterman of the lunch stand where she buys coffee for herself and slices of chocolate cake to share with her boyfriend; he flirts aggressively with her, but she responds only with the pained, mechanical patience that's a rebuff to anyone with boundaries, a plausible deniability to anyone without. The hot, sticky night she works late, he's closing up the stand as she exits the company offices, jauntily whistling a child's tune—"Do You Know the Muffin Man?" He shouts his usual greeting after her: "Hey, beautiful!" When she doesn't react, he begins to follow her through the industrial maze of trucks and pallets of lumber and loading docks, all deceptively mercury-lit and unnervingly silent except for the sharp overlapping sounds of footsteps in alleys plastered with torn circus posters, the drum of Ann's fists on a lighted window that doesn't let her in. By now his steps have become purposeful, his wolf-whistles no longer to attract her attention but to signal, like malevolent radar, that she's got his; cornered at last behind a warehouse, she sets off the blare of a horn that should summon even annoyed, inadvertent help, but as her stalker closes in—she slipped and went down hard on concrete steps, hit her head so that her vision swims and she sees more clearly than his face the heavy scar behind the open collar of his shirt—all that happens is an elderly neighbor in a bathrobe slams his window to keep the noise out, the perfect forerunner of Kitty Genovese's mythical, indifferent neighbors. It's an excruciating scene to watch, not because it goes further than the camera retreating to its God's-eye perspective again, but because it runs nearly five minutes and there is nothing aesthetic in Ann's rising hopeless terror and it is impossible to tell at what point the counterman decides to rape rather than just harass her, except that the longer he chases her, the more unavoidable it feels. She didn't answer him, after all. He was just paying her a compliment.
The word "rape" is never uttered in the film. The omission is almost certainly Code-mandated, but Lupino and co-writers Collier Young and Malvin Wald turn it to their advantage: in its place, characters speak of "the attack" or "the assault," muffling, desexualized, minimizing language that leaves Ann no way of naming honestly what's been done to her. She's swaddled in silence just when she needs to speak out and everything, everything hurts. Just because Outrage doesn't use the modern terminology of trauma doesn't mean it can't accurately record its effects—or the compounding failures of society. Reporting the rape is exhausting, invasive: she can't describe her rapist beyond his scar and his leather jacket and is reduced to animalistic screaming when pressed for details in her half-drugged, shocky state. A lineup of suspects is assembled, but the detective who looms over her with all his male urgency, weight, and aggression ("Try to concentrate, Miss Walton. Try to remember. We don't want this man on the streets tonight!") is just as unendurable as the sight of so many men with scarred throats, her rapist multiplied to universality, no one she can point to, no way to rule any man out. Worse than the heedless blunt force of the law is the sympathy of her community, where every gesture of concern, sometimes a nervously proffered compliment, sometimes a hand on her elbow, sometimes just more careful silence, is as intolerable as if they were touches of fire. The rhythm of one coworker rubber-stamping a pile of forms becomes the clattering of her own footsteps down a dead-end street, the bored drumming of another's fingers her terrified heartbeat. She screams for the office to "take a good look"—everyone wants to see what a ruined woman looks like. But some people refuse to see even when she's dissociating right in front of them: the worst is Jim's deep and loving obliviousness, forging ahead with his marital plans for a woman who can't even share his car without shrinking away beneath her skin. "We're not like other people," Ann snarls finally at her stunned ex-fiancé, freeze and flight both exhausted and nothing but fight left. "I don't want to get married, ever. I don't want you to touch me. Everything's dirty, filthy and dirty . . . And you'd always be thinking about what happened. You'd never forget." The night of their engagement, she looked like a pretty kitten, batting at a ball of yarn; now she's a cat in a corner with her ears laid back, claws out and ripping. Jim's hands gripping her shoulders are the classic gesture of the forceful man shaking sense into the hysterical woman, which would admittedly play better if he were not also shouting, even more wildly, "Shut up!" She looks at his hands on her flesh with such loathing and horrified contempt that he has to let her go. She leaves town the next day.
Outrage is so attentive to the nuances of its easily sensationalized material that it does not surprise me that it finds an ending without either saccharine or tragedy, but I particularly enjoy that it does not use romance to do it. There will be a man in Ann's life once she fetches up among the orange groves of Santa Paula, but he will not become her lover and the part he will play in her healing is low-key, unpatronizing, and a lovely demonstration of non-toxic masculinity, which Lupino could not have named any more than rape culture but which she depicts with equal accuracy. We meet him first as the unknown motorist scooping Ann's unconscious body from the side of the road where she fled after hearing her own description broadcast on a diner's radio; the movie does not make us feel alarmist for fearing him, especially the suddenness with which he appears in the doorway of the late-night bedroom she wakes in, but he keeps his distance after she recoils once from his touch and he describes her afterward to the married couple whose guest bedroom she's occupying as "a frightened kid." He's not that old himself, with a dark, diffident, not quite pretty face and a soft-spoken gravity that at first feels disingenuous and is revealed to be hard-won; he's a preacher's kid returned to his father's ministry after twenty-five years and a hard war—PTSD, lost a lung to TB, I swear I don't go looking for these people. He sketches, plays the piano, doesn't even pretend to smoke the pipe he chews on. His name is Bruce Ferguson (Tod Andrews) and his congregation calls him "Doc." Over the weeks and then months that Ann remains in Santa Paula, first on the production line and later in the offices of an orange-packing plant, he wins her trust though nothing more extraordinary than casual gentleness and never once threatening her with either sexual interest or special treatment; he will be her advocate when the triggering of her trauma during a company picnic leads to violence in a scene as precise and harrowing as the initial rape. I have some issues with the psychiatric language of the third act, but not with its import: it is as remarkable as it is rewarding to see a movie from 1950 state so frankly that a survivor of sexual assault should get therapy rather than just get over it or die. The script is similarly refreshing about the ways in which damage begets damage and the institutions of society accelerate rather than address the problems. "That's my point. She is innocent of criminal intent and we are guilty of criminal negligence. It's our fault. All of us." It does not, however, confuse social reform with making excuses. The rapist has his own history of trauma, but there is at least one other damaged man in this plot and he understands quite well how boundaries work.
I had intended to watch this movie last week after it aired on TCM, but since their on-demand service skipped it and it does not appear to exist on DVD, I had to settle for a somewhat blown-out version on YouTube; I still recommend it. What with the centenary year and all that, now would be a magnificent time for Criterion or Kino Lorber to bring out a box set of the collected Lupino, writer-director-producer-actor that she was. The title card for Outrage reads "The Filmakers Present An Ida Lupino Production." No ambiguity there. She wasn't just a curiosity, the first female Hollywood filmmaker since Dorothy Arzner; she was a major American director and there are scenes here that prove it without strain, like a dance floor full of waltzing couples through which Archie Stout's camera travels like Ann's skeptical, envious, immutably separate gaze, or a flirtation shot like a monster movie to show just how much the normative, socially encouraged interactions of men with women exist on the same continuum as street harassment and rape. Like the pre-Code movies it satisfyingly resembles, Outrage stands with Caught (1949) and The Blue Gardenia (1953) as powerful correctives to the idea that the past was naturally, serenely sexist and no one until those second-wave bra-burners ever raised a fuss. This reality check brought to you by my nice backers at Patreon.
no subject
The script is similarly refreshing about the ways in which damage begets damage and the institutions of society accelerate rather than address the problems. "That's my point. She is innocent of criminal intent and we are guilty of criminal negligence. It's our fault. All of us." It does not, however, confuse social reform with making excuses. The rapist has his own history of trauma, but there is at least one other damaged man in this plot and he understands quite well how boundaries work.
Since it's YouTube, I'll be able to watch it.
no subject
Thank you. This movie impressed me so much. And it's right there in its decade, saying the things it says and saying them well. I want people to notice.
Since it's YouTube, I'll be able to watch it.
Enjoy! Which, since it's not a grimdark story, I believe can be done.
no subject
Tangentially, I also really loved seeing the inside of an orange packing plant, and the outdoor stage set up for dancing at the company party, etc. Nice window into a different world.
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I have to assume Jim did some growing up while Ann was gone—they had more than a year apart, which gives him time and the audience hope. I agree with you about Bruce, though. I find him a believably good character who is not boring, which are still rarer than they should be.
Tangentially, I also really loved seeing the inside of an orange packing plant, and the outdoor stage set up for dancing at the company party, etc. Nice window into a different world.
I'm so glad you enjoyed it!
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I have yet to see either of those! I've got The Hitch-Hiker on order from the library. I suspect I will have to rely on the kindness of YouTube for the rest. I hadn't gone looking before now, but I was so annoyed about TCM that I'm settling for greymarket.
(Box set, please, now, please.)
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I wish I had a good biography of her. She co-founded the company with her then-husband Collier Young, but the it survived the breakup of their marriage; she made her most famous film, The Hitch-Hiker (1953), two years after they'd divorced and at least two of their succeeding productions—The Bigamist (1953) and Private Hell 36 (1954)—involved their respective other partners, so I have trouble imagining that the company shuttered in 1955 due to incompatibility. She kept on directing in TV, but she didn't direct another feature until 1965 and then she was done. "Brief but influential" is better than "blip on the radar," but "veteran director Ida Lupino" would have been even better.