Cinema
Mighty Penn
Ian Cameron
It would of course be an unpardonable oversimplification to suggest that Lipstick (Empire, X certificate) is anti-rape and proMurder. For a start, we are invited to drool a bit at the rape, and then the killing is Presented as justifiable, an allowable release rather than a positive pleasure. Behind the relentlessly cute visuals contrived by the director, Lamont Johnson, there lurks the strategy of propaganda, which has been removed from its more usual political context but is still designed to get us round to its way of thinking. Perhaps that is an overstatement : in spite of the presence of Anne Bancroft as a highly articulate attorney, thought is not the main reaction demanded here.
The rape victim is not just any Jane Doe or even Joan Little but a big-time model (Played by a real one, Margaux Hemingway). To discourage us from believing that She is therefore no stranger to promiscuity, She is supplied with a brother who is a priest and she reacts to her nasty experience with (*screen vomiting and onscreen prayer. She also files a complaint against the rapist, Who is her kid sister's music teacher and Whose electronic compositions are linked, for no reason other than effect, to the sexual Violence.
The court scenes concentrate on heroine and kid sister being got at by the defence and the rapist (Chris Sarandon) continuing to rrie across as a nice guy who was led on.
° stop us falling for the defence's line and to increase our indignation at the impending acquittal, we are treated to a spot of nude telephoning as the rapist tries improbably to Intimidate our girl with the sound of his
works in the night.
Suffering now from reverses in her career, the model does one last assignment before going off on holiday with her sister. While she is swirling a red dress in front of the camera, Sis is exploring the half-empty building and wandering in the direction of the electronic sounds. Her return with torn clothes and the music teacher's name on her lips is enough to send the heroine rushing to get her rifle, which is conveniently outside among the holiday luggage. In a rather desultory conclusion, it seems to take Anne Bancroft little more than a quote from Clarence Darrow to obtain a 'not guilty' verdict on the murder charge.
Were it not for the burgeoning foolishness of the proceedings, it would be actively pernicious. Starting from the perfectly decent idea of examining the legal problems of rape victims, Lipstick ends up in the same camp as the cycle of vigilante movies by endorsing the view that if the law fails to perform to your satisfaction, you can always do it yourself.
As I expected, The Missouri Breaks (Odeon, Leicester Square, and elsewhere, AA certificate) has been received with a marked lack of critical enthusiasm. At best, it has been treated as an instructive failure.
The area in which it fails, though, is a purely showbiz one: it does not come across with the spectacularly action-packed treatment which people might expect from a big western with big stars. But this is not incompetence, it is part of an intentional departure from the conventions of the genre. As soon as one starts looking beyond, for example, the shortage of big scenes between the two stars, it becomes evident that The Missouri Breaks is a rich and complex piece of work.
Above all, it has to be seen as an Arthur Penn movie, recognisably from the same hand as The Left-Handed Gun, The Chase and Bonnie and Clyde. In its subject matter, it returns to the themes of these early Penn films, particularly in the contrast between the community and its outlaws. Here, the fledgling community of Absaroka does not promise well : it seems to be as much the fief of its leading citizen, Braxton, as the modern town in The Chase was of its oil baron.
Penn is clearly no fan of the frontier spirit—it is the self-righteous Braxton who is behind the hanging of a youthful horse thief and the hiring of the regulator (Marlon Brando). Nevertheless, The Missouri Breaks does not have the pessimism of Bonnie and Clyde, in which the doomed and anarchic energy of the two protagonists was the only attractive force. Most of the members of the gang of horse thieves here belong less with Bonnie and Clyde than with Billy the Kid's subnormal bunch in The Left-Handed Gun.
The exceptions are the leader, Tom Logan (Jack Nicholson), and his lieutenant, Calvin (Harry Dean Stanton, who is even more memorable here than he was in Dillinger a year or two ago).
The positive side of the film is concerned with Logan, who becomes absorbed by the farm which he has taken on as cover for his illegal activities. In particular, it centres on his lively relationship with Braxton's daughter (played by a spirited newcomer, Kathleen Lloyd). Again, this echoes The Chase, in which the oil baron's son is in love with the escaped convict's wife. But now there is a robustness in the relationship which grows out of the independence of the couple and the growth of mutual understanding. There is little doubt at the end of the film that they will get together again although he has killed her father (albeit in self-defence). In building the film around this gutsy couple, Penn inevitably shifts the Brando character into a subsidiary part. This may not conform to expectations about the role to be played by the star with top billing, but it fits the conception of the regulator as a tool of society rather than a part of it, and Brando's eccentricity here is an expression of his isolation from those who employ him. Where a lesser director would be seduced by the eccentricity into lavishing an excess of screen time on the character, Penn is not deflected from his main concern, which is a celebration of behaviour conditioned by empirical reactions rather than enunciated principles. I suspect that in The Missouri Breaks Penn is seeking to define what amounts to a satisfactory basis for society.
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