Only a handful of vintage films handle the ugliness of rape, a subject repellent to 20th Century viewers.
During the early and mid-years of the 20th Century, movie audiences enjoyed laughing at shenanigans of Chaplin, Keaton, and the Marx brothers. They hummed along with musical numbers in Footlight Parade, Forty-Second Street, The Bandwagon and Singin’ in the Rain. They even enjoyed shrieking with fright at Dracula, Frankenstein, and the 1950s horror films of Vincent Price and Christopher Lee.
But audiences drew the line when it came to depictions of sexual assault. Due to audience predilections and strict guidelines of censorship laid down in 1934, movies from the first fifty years of the century almost never dealt with rape.
Two films are bold exceptions. The Story of Temple Drake from 1933 and Outrage from 1950. So potent were the plots of these two movies that they were off-putting to audiences and chopped up or banned by city and state censorship boards. For decades, these films were difficult to see. And now an HD restoration of Outrage has just been released by Kino Lorber. In December 2019, Criterion released an HD restoration of The Story of Temple Drake.
The Story of Temple Drake is based on a controversial novel by William Faulkner called Sanctuary in which a woman is raped by an impotent bootlegger with a corn cob. In the movie, Temple is a flirtatious Southern belle and what we used to call a “C.T.” She fires men up and then… poof. She slams the door in their faces. She knows she’s a bad girl; it’s something to do with her DNA. Temple is played by Miriam Hopkins, a talented movie star whose filmography is impressive. She plays Temple to the hilt, and the viewers get close to the inner workings of Temple’s mind.
The rapist in the film is an evil gangster played by the actor Jack La Rue. While he usually played bad guys on stage and screen, his character in Temple Drake crosses lines that movie gangsters such as Cagney and Robinson refused to cross. George Raft turned down the role. Even though the rape is depicted with expressionist images and a monstrous scream, The Story of Temple Drake is extraordinarily powerful. Cinematography by the legendary Karl Struss helps make The Story of Temple Drake a film that you will carry with you for a long time.
Outrage is a very different story of sexual assault. The victim is a virginal girl from a moralistic mid-Century American family that you might see in such TV series as Father Knows Best or Leave It to Beaver. The film stars Mala Powers as Ann the victim, but—most significantly, it is directed, co-produced, and co-written by Ida Lupino for her and Collier Young’s independent film company.
Before the rape, Ann is sheltered, engaged to be married. After the rape, which is absolutely frightening even though no details are shown, Ann is ruined. She is mentally unhinged. The character’s reactions to her rape are upsetting. She has no defenses, little control. Mala Powers, new to film, may be overplaying. I’m confused by this character. The actions of Ann may be more typical of a mid-century young woman than in more recent years. She will not be touched by a man; she cries like a child. Is this character believable or a weak point in an otherwise well-developed noir drama? Who am I, who is anyone, to imagine or judge how a rape victim will react? Outrage is quite a film, and special also because it was one of the only Hollywood films directed by a woman at that time.
Audrey Kupferberg is a film and video archivist and retired appraiser. She is lecturer emeritus and the former director of Film Studies at the University at Albany and co-authored several entertainment biographies with her late husband and creative partner, Rob Edelman.
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