Word: raping
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...beginning of his 53 film career. Blackmail (1929) the first British talkie, dealt with the problem of an innocent man suspected of a murder he, of course, did not commit. Frenzy too, has a nabbed innocent--only by 1973 the crimes shown had grown more lurid and gruesome: rape and strangling (with neckties). Hitchcock seems to be leaning more and more to overt comedy in his second half-century of film directing; the gourmet scenes in Frenzy will make you grateful for the central kitchen at Harvard...
...POINT of all this is presumably to show that, in addition to the illegal abuse that women suffer in the form of rape, they also suffer completely legal abuse in the courtroom--where rape victims are rarely presumed innocent. No argument there. Since this is by now a truism, director Lamont Johnson has the courage to make this one point unequivocally. The rest is pure, dumb contrivance: Stuart rapes Chris's little sister, Chris shoots him on the spot, and a contrite, now-sympathetic jury acquits her for her own crime of passion...
They would have us believe that they have a serious cautionary interest in rape, its causes and consequences, but whenever there is a choice between the sober and the merely slick they opt for the easy and popular thing. To play the victim they have chosen that chic curiosity, Margaux Hemingway. With her flat voice and her tuned-out manner there is no hope of her playing anything like a typical American woman-or victim. She can only be what she is, a high-fashion model, a glamorous exotic. But that's all right. Her work gives...
...offender, a street punk making his way up from petty theft to murder. No, he is Margaux's kid sister's music teacher, soliciting her influence to gain a hearing for his electronic compositions. Nor is his attack a brutish lunge out of the dark. The rape is strictly high fashion - a handsome bedroom setting, the victim tied prettily with silk scarves while he sodomizes her, the whole busi ness staged and photographed with stylish prurience...
...clever by half, and glibness is the one approach that it is totally disastrous to take toward this subject. The film manages to treat the act of rape as if it were just another kind of S-M turn-on. One wearily concludes that like the psychopath Margaux dispatches, the pack of moral morons responsible for Lipstick probably could not stop themselves...