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. ( An evil chain reaction. ) 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. ( An evil chain reaction. ) 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.
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