Outrage (1950/I)

User Rating:

6.6/10   

Director:

Ida Lupino

Writers:

Collier Young (original screenplay) and
Malvin Wald (original screenplay) ...

Release Date:

27 April 1951 (Belgium)

Genre:

Crime | Drama | Horror

Plot:

A young woman who has just become engaged has her life completely shattered when she is raped while on her way home from work.

Plot Keywords:

Clergyman | Faith | Trauma | Ranch Hand | Religion

Cast

Mala Powers	...	Ann Walton
Tod Andrews	...	Rev. Bruce Ferguson
Robert Clarke	...	Jim Owens
Raymond Bond	...	Eric Walton
Lillian Hamilton	...	Mrs. Walton
Rita Lupino	...	Stella Carter
Hal March	...	Detective Sergeant Hendrix
Kenneth Patterson	...	Tom Harrison
Jerry Paris	...	Frank Marini, the masher
Angela Clarke	...	Madge Harrison
Roy Engel	...	Sheriff Charlie Hanlon
Lovyss Bradley	...	Mrs. Miller, police woman
Hamilton Camp	...	Shoeshine boy (as Robin Camp)
William Challee	...	Lee Wilkins, packing plant foreman
Tristram Coffin	...	Judge McKenzie

Runtime:

75 min

Country:

USA

Language:

English

Color:

Black and White

Aspect Ratio:

1.37 : 1

Sound Mix:

Mono

Certification:

USA:Approved (PCA #14437) | USA:Passed (National Board of Review)

Company:

Filmakers, The

Trivia:

American Film Institute Catalog of Feature Films 1941-1950 claims Tod Andrews made his screen debut in this film; actually, he has at least a dozen and a half previous credits while under contract to Warner Bros. as Michael Ames.

Movie Connections:

Featured in A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies (1995) (TV)

Soundtrack:

Didn't You Know

A courageous, if cautious and dated, attempt to start talking about rape and its aftermath

Ida Lupino was one of the few women to break through the directorial glass ceiling in Hollywood under the studio system. Not surprisingly, she also tackled proto-feminist themes that, when touched at all, were approached in so gingerly a manner that it was seldom quite clear what was being talked about. In Outrage, she treats rape and its aftermath, and though throughout the short movie it's referred to as `criminal assault,' she leaves, for once, no doubt about what happened.

Mala Powers (in her official debut) plays a secretary-bookkeeper at a big industrial plant; she lives with her parents but is engaged to a swell guy (Robert Clarke), who just got a raise and now makes $90 a week. Leaving the plant after working late one night, she finds herself being stalked. In the ensuing scene – the best in the movie – she tries to escape her pursuer in a forbidding maze of buildings and alleys but fails.

When she returns home, disheveled and in shock, the police can't get much out of her; she claims she never saw her attacker (who manned a snack truck outside the factory). Trying to pretend that nothing happened, she returns to her job but falls apart, thinking that everybody is staring at her, judging her. She goes into a fugue state, running away to Los Angeles on a bus but stumbling off at a rest stop.

Waking up in a strange ranch house, she learns that she's been rescued by Tod Andrews, a young minister in a California agricultural town. She lies about her identity and takes a job packing oranges. The two fall vaguely in love, but it's clear to Andrews that Powers is keeping dire secrets. When, at a company picnic, she seizes a wrench and cracks the skull of Jerry Paris, who was trying to steal a kiss, the truth about her past comes out....

It was a courageous movie to come out in 1950, and that may explain and excuse some of its shortcomings. Lupino never recaptures the verve of the early assault scene, and the movie wanders off into the bucolic and sentimental, ending up talky and didactic. Yes, Lupino had important information to impart, but she didn't trust the narrative to speak for itself. Her cast, pleasant but bland and generic, weren't much help, either, reverting to melodramatic postures or homespun reassurance. But Outrage was a breakthrough, blazing a trail for later discourse on what the crime of rape really is, and what it really means to its victims.