By Richard Winters
My Rating: 1 out of 10
4-Word Review: Spinster teacher is raped.
Evelyn Wyckoff (Anne Heywood) is a middle-aged single woman who teaches high school in a small town in Kansas. She has never married and is showing signs of severe depression, which alarms her best friend Beth (Carolyn Jones) as well as the older couple (R.G. Armstrong, Joycelyn Brando) whom she’s living with. Both her doctor (Robert Vaughan) and her psychiatrist (Donald Pleasance) believe it’s because she is not in a relationship or having any sex and that she needs to get out more and meet people. She attempts at starting something with fellow teacher Chester (J. Patrick McNamara) but finds him to be too shy and embattled with his own problems to be able to recognize her interests. She also considers friendly bus driver Ed (Earl Holliman) only to call it off when she learns he’s married. Left alone after school one evening she comes into contact with Rafe (John Lafayette), a black man who works as the janitor, who sees her loneliness as a weakness that he can exploit. He comes onto her strongly and abrasively eventually forcing her to submit to his sexual demands, but she doesn’t go to the authorities and instead starts to enjoy the degradation and continues to come back for more until the rest of the students and teachers find out about it putting her job and reputation in peril.
The story is based on the 1970 novel of the same name written by William Inge. The film rights were sold in 1971 but sat on the shelf for many years until producer Raymond Stross found it and felt it would be a good vehicle for his actress wife Heywood who had already made a name for herself in tackling controversial, edgy material and even sought it out, so this was considered a perfect next project. While she had received critical accolades for her earlier work, The Fox, where she played a lesbian in a relationship with Sandy Dennis, which was envelope pushing for its era, this one did not go over as well and was genuinely lambasted causing her career to take a downfall from which it couldn’t recover and she ended up retiring from acting just a decade later.
On a surface level it’s okay. The recreation of the 1950’s Kansas, while shot in Stockton, California, is still effective and the personalities of the people isn’t as cliched. There are those that show prejudices and oppressive mind sets, but there’s a healthy balance that don’t, which helps make it feel more realistic. The supporting cast is full of familiar faces though most of them are wasted in small roles that don’t add much and Carolyn Jones, in her last feature film appearance, stands out best albeit with an awful hairstyle.
The biggest detriment, besides the flat direction and booming music score, is Heywood who doesn’t offer enough nuance to her part. I’ll commend her for taking on a very difficult role that required at age 48 to be fully nude and allowing herself to be put into some very vulnerable and demeaning positions, but her facial expressions and responses are one-note. Her constant crying for no reason, which alarms those around her, and unexplained impulsive behavior, like smashing a mirror during a party, is too dramatic. Instead of using this to reveal that she’s unhappy it makes her seem more like a complete mental case that has far worse issues than just being lonely and I felt more sympathy for her friends trying to put up with her erraticism than I did with the main character who for the most part is rather whiny and annoying.
There’s never any explanation for why she’s unable to get into a relationship. She’s attractive, so you’d expect there would be eligible suitors who’d ask her out. All we see is a bus driver who’s already married, but what about other single men who would have to be out there? Why don’t we ever see one of them make a move and if so, how would she respond to them, which would be far more revealing than anything she says to her shrink, which amounts to talky pseudo-science.
The rape scene isn’t either shocking or effective and seems to come out of nowhere. It occurs in the middle of the second act, but before then we see the Rafe character only once while cleaning the chalk boards for a few seconds, so we have no idea what makes him tick, or why he chooses to prey on this woman and none of the others. Had she made the first move in an attempt to connect with someone and relieve her of her isolation, and this then inadvertently incited some inner aggression with him it might’ve made more sense and worked with the flow of the story, but the way it gets handled here makes it seem like two different movies: one dealing with the pain of being alone and the other about a man who enjoys exploiting women.
Ultimately nothing comes together. We don’t learn much about the protagonist. Yes, she’s sexually repressed, but the root cause is never made clear. The fact that she accepts her degradation at the hands of Rafe makes her even more confusing. When her friend Beth says that she feels like she didn’t really know her at all I the viewer felt like saying the same thing. The result is shallow using shock elements that are no longer effective causing the film to be both forgettable and boring.
My Rating: 1 out of 10
Released: April 13, 1979
Runtime: 1 Hour 46 Minutes
Rated R
Director: Marvin J. Chomsky
Studio: Bel Air/Gradison Productions
Available: DVD, Blu-ray, Tubi
Scopophilia 