Lipstick
I guess my first surprise here was how procedural and straight-faced this movie is. I read a brief summary of the plot prior to putting it on and couldn’t imagine anything but a generic Seventies exploitation thing doing its best to cover up the fact that it’s making a mockery of the severity of rape (okay, I’ll admit, following the last two movies I was probably just hoping to complete a perfect triple bill, lol). But dang … not only does this thing have a court room scene in it, but it also has Anne Bancroft as the DA looking at every moment like she wants to rip every penis in the room off with her bare hands.
Most of all, it reminds me of the movies Brian De Palma was making around the same time – most notably Blow Out – or things like Peeping Tom ... movies that really used the separate elements of sound and image in cinema to service the theme at hand. You get perfect opposites here like the accepted nude photography of its central character, a victim, a lipstick model vs. the photographs taken as evidence following her rape. Later, we see her even younger sister being groomed in the ways of glamour photography, preceeding an even more unwatchable sequence. We have the predator, an electronic composer, capturing sounds like those made by the birds on his windowsill, but also later, the very heartbeat of his victim. I love this kind of thing, it’s what cinema is all about for me.
Frankly I’d be happy watching Anne Bancroft shouting “Objection! Objection! Obbbbbbb-jection!” for 90 minutes, lol … it’s like the girl version of ... And Justice For All when she’s around. And Mariel Hemingway was supercute at this age.