Handgun

A young teacher who has just moved to Dallas is raped at gunpoint by a lawyer she meets. She goes to the police, who are sympathetic but talk her out of pursuing the case, and finding the law closed to her she decides to settle the account herself. Tony Garnett wrote and directed the hundred and one minute film, and he frames the road she takes not as a revenge adventure but as a question about the gun itself. Garnett conceived the project after John Lennon was killed, travelling from England to Texas to see the abundance of firearms in America and the way that abundance is celebrated, and he wrote the script there. Karen Young and Clayton Day star, and the film was released in 1983.