| Nate Logsdon |
Outrage plays at the Trylon Cinema from Sunday, December 8th, through Tuesday, December 10th. Visit trylon.org for tickets and more information.
“This is a true story. It was photographed where it happened.”
In two sentences, the onscreen statement before the opening credits of Ida Lupino’s Never Fear—the first picture produced by her production company The Filmakers—distills the ethos of independent cinema: truth over fiction, location over lot. Never Fear was also deeply personal; the story of an artist receiving a devastating polio diagnosis reflects an experience from the director’s own life. The Trylon’s month-long tribute to Lupino rightly recognizes her in the series title as a “Triple Threat: Director, Actor, Screenwriter.” Her additional role as a pioneer of independent film production is a fourth threat that encompasses the other three. The six films Lupino directed from 1949-1953, five of them under the aegis of The Filmakers, set a standard for how to treat serious, challenging subject matter using limited means, within Production Code bounds but outside the studio system. Lupino and her partner Collier Young approached The Filmakers’s works as “documentary movies”1 and, in a page-long mission statement printed in Variety, stated their determination to “explore new themes, try new ideas, discover new creative talent in all departments.”2
The turn toward independent film production came at a fortuitous moment in Hollywood history as well as a turning point in Lupino’s career. In 1947, she exited her contract with Warner Brothers, where she had been a major movie star appearing in classics like High Sierra, They Drive By Night, The Man I Love, and The Sea Wolf. The following year, the Supreme Court issued a historic decision in United States v. Paramount, an anti-trust ruling that broke up conglomerate monopolies (studios that controlled production, distribution, and exhibition of films) and effectively ended the studio system. As a result, the studios had less capital to invest in film production and were incentivized to purchase the distribution rights for movies made by independent companies, usually on a much smaller budget.3
But it wasn’t a given that independence would necessarily mean a turn toward “new themes” and “new ideas.” Those values are attributable to Lupino and her co-screenwriters and align with international developments in post-war film culture. The Filmakers’s commitment to a documentary-style approach matched evolving audience expectations of realism nurtured by years of on-the-ground newsreel footage during World War II. Meanwhile, the Italian neo-realist movement demonstrated the potential to use achievable means (location shooting, nonprofessional actors, low budgets) to produce extraordinary ends when directed toward pressing social concerns and vital moral conflicts.4 Neo-realism has a special connection to Lupino’s art. As her acting career at Warner was ending, but before her directorial career had begun, she had a conversation at a party with Roberto Rossellini—whose “War Trilogy” is a high point of Italian neo-realism—during which he criticized standard studio product and asked her, rhetorically, when Hollywood would start “to make pictures about ordinary people, in ordinary situations.”5
The people in Lupino’s films are ordinary. The situations are sometimes more ordinary than Hollywood would have had viewers believe. Two films stand out in this regard: Not Wanted and Outrage. Both depict circumstances that were (and are) not uncommon in reality but rarely treated by American cinema. Not Wanted, the first film written, produced, and directed by Lupino (she was uncredited as director) is a forthright portrayal of an unwanted pregnancy and the burden it places solely on the mother. Outrage (playing December 8-10 at the Trylon) is a still-disturbing, psychologically acute examination of rape and the burden it places solely on the victim. Of course, the Production Code Administration limited the specificity of what these films could depict and discuss. But both films cannily incorporate the unspoken into their thematics. The men are let off the hook through society-wide ignorance while women are pushed out of their communities by social stigma.
In Not Wanted, a woman named Sally (Sally Forrest) engages in a romance that she believes is based on mutual love and interest. But after she has sex with her boyfriend, he immediately leaves town. To obscure the sexual act the camera turns to a shot of the man’s cigarette butt floating down a creek, a premonition of his intention to discard her. When she discovers that she’s pregnant she seeks him out, still believing that they are in love, and he rejects her and flees again. Outrage sees a similar male behavior pattern. A woman named Ann (Mala Powers) ignores the advances of a man who serves her lunch. He waits for her to get off work and then stalks, ambushes, and assaults her in a dark alley. The camera looks away from the rape and up to a window where a potential witness fails to intervene. She goes to the police the next day to report the crime only to find out that the man has fled town. The consequences of the men’s actions are left to the women.
“Lupino is unique in the postwar American film industry for calling public attention to women’s traumas and their repercussions in a society unready and unwilling to address them openly,” according to film scholars Therese Grisham and Julie Grossman.6 Outrage is remarkable for its acute perception of post-traumatic stress in the aftermath of a violent sexual assault, and perhaps even more so because PTSD was not a recognized diagnosis until decades later. Yet numerous symptoms, from dissociation to depression to triggering flashbacks, are vividly rendered in the film. Watching Outrage today is a bit like watching John Huston’s stunning (and long-banned) WWII-era documentary Let There Be Light about veterans receiving psychiatric treatments for what was then called “shell shock.” The terminology and theory associated with trauma and post-traumatic stress are apparent to a viewer today but unavailable to the subjects profiled in the film. Outrage similarly touches profound insights into the psychology and behavior of post-traumatic stress without the benefit of an established conceptual framework and with scarce precedent in film. (Freud had earlier broken ground with his theories on hysteria and childhood sexual assault. Freudianism is a major undercurrent in American cinema of the 1950s.)
Both Outrage and Not Wanted pair their heroines with understanding World War II veterans. The connection is especially apt in Outrage. After fleeing her hometown, Ann settles in rural California and befriends a reverend haunted by memories of his time serving as a military chaplain in the war. The trust and perception between them imply a correlation between the traumatic experiences of war veterans and sexual assault survivors, an association later borne out by research and PTSD treatment methods.
But the reverend’s understanding goes only so far. Late in the film, he invites Ann to a dance where she’s harassed by a persistent creep named Frank. When Frank starts putting his hands on her she tells him to stop and tries to break away. He follows her and pins her down, obnoxiously attempting to wheedle her into kissing him. The film shifts into a view from her traumatized subjectivity as her attacker’s face is superimposed onto this new threatening man. In horror, she hits him over the head with a wrench and is later arrested. But when the reverend visits her in jail he immediately stands up for Frank, despite knowing that she is a rape survivor. “Why did you try to kill Frank?” he asks her. “I’ve known him for a long time, he meant you no harm.”
The scene precipitates a transition into institutional mansplaining. Ann finds herself sitting in silence while literally surrounded by a judge, a lawyer, and the reverend, who take turns explicating her mindset and its social meaning. The reverend makes a point of empathizing with Ann’s rapist who, he reveals, has just been caught. “This man, this criminal,” he says of the rapist, “has spent half of his life…in reform schools or prisons for acts of violence. He was always punished but he was never treated as a neurotic individual. Never treated as a sick man. So he was released uncured.” He goes on to contextualize the assault within a society-wide malaise. “Our generation has produced too many neuroses, too many mentally displaced people right here at home. We need more hospitals, more clinics, more trained men to turn human scrap back into useful human beings.”
This type of reassuring end-of-film rationalization was the bread and butter of the Production Code. And the sudden shift from a woman’s perspective into male speechifying dates the material as well. Or does it? Seventy-five years later, the image of incessantly talking men dominating a discussion of a woman’s body is hardly quaint. We are still in a world rife with attacks against women which are regularly rationalized, often dismissed, rarely prosecuted, and even openly celebrated by president-elects. Ida Lupino was an early silence-breaker, but by working within the bounds delimited by the Hollywood of her era she inadvertently said more than we might like to hear about ours.
Footnotes
1 William Donati, Ida Lupino: A Biography (Lexington, University Press of Kentucky, 1996),156.
2 Therese Grisham and Julie Grossman, Ida Lupino, Director: Her Art and Resilience in Times of Transition (New Brunswick, Rutgers University Press, 2017), 9.
3 Grisham and Grossman, 38-39.
4 Grisham and Grossman, 49-51.
5 Donati, 146.
6 Grisham and Grossman, 65.
Edited by Olga Tchepikova-Treon