Ida Lupino’s Prescient “Outrage” in The New Yorker posted by Richard Brody.

[RiffRandell]

Has anyone seen this movie? I've never heard of this woman or the movie until today.

“Outrage,” a Hollywood movie from 1950, looks intimately, painfully, and analytically at what we now know to call rape culture. It’s one of the crucial movies of the era, and it’s not easy to find. It was directed by Ida Lupino, who is familiar as one of the hard-edged and worldly-wise actresses of the forties and fifties (I’d especially recommend “The Man I Love,” “On Dangerous Ground,” “While the City Sleeps,” and “The Big Knife”), but she was also one of the great directors of the time.

But “Outrage” is a special artistic achievement. Lupino approaches the subject of rape with a wide view of the societal tributaries that it involves. She integrates an inward, deeply compassionate depiction of a woman who is the victim of rape with an incisive view of the many societal failures that contribute to the crime, including legal failure to face the prevalence of rape, and the over-all prudishness and sexual censoriousness that make the crime unspeakable in the literal sense and end up shaming the victim. Above all, she reveals a profound understanding of the widespread and unquestioned male aggression that women face in ordinary and ostensibly non-violent and consensual courtship. Her movie is about the experiences of one young woman and, yes, about the experience of all women.

The movie isn’t available on DVD or via the usual streaming services; it was broadcast on TCM last Thursday and can be viewed, until this Thursday, on the Watch TCM app, for cable subscribers whose providers make the service available.

The emotional power and political vision of “Outrage” arise as much from Lupino’s inspired images as from the wise and insightful script and the delicately controlled yet freely expressive performances—not the work of great actors but of attentive and sensitive ones who have the benefit of Lupino’s discerning direction. It’s a haunting, infuriating movie—and it’s not available on DVD or, to the best of my knowledge, on streaming services.

Link: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/movies/2014/06/an-early-important-film-about-rape-culture.html?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter