Outrage

Ann Walton is engaged, employed and settled. Walking home from work one night she is attacked. The film is not about the attack but about what follows: the police questioning, the way the neighbours look at her, her fiancé's behaviour, and her leaving town to start again under another name. Ida Lupino directs and co-wrote it. Mala Powers plays Ann. It was made by The Filmakers, the company Lupino founded. This is one of the first American films to take rape as its subject. But the Production Code did not permit the word; the crime is never named once and the event is conveyed entirely by implication. Telling the story in a place where the word is forbidden determines the whole form of the film. Lupino's interest is not in the attacker either. He is barely on screen. The narrative sits entirely on Ann and on what the community does to her, and the town's conduct produces the second injury. With her own company Lupino made films on subjects nobody else would touch at the time: pregnancy outside marriage, polio, bigamy. Outrage is the hardest of them. Who it is for: viewers curious about Ida Lupino as a director and about early American independent film. Who it is not for: censorship makes the telling indirect, and the resolution at the end is too optimistic to hold up now.