Season of the Flicks - Lipstick

LIPSTICK
By Sally Wright

It's apparent the producers of "Lipstick" are capitalizing on a sensitive and misunderstood area of crime: rape and its effects on the involved parties. Instead of giving us an in-depth study of the attacker and victim, and the way both are treated by society and the judicial system, we are given a 90-minute glossed-over version of America's favorite model as a rape victim, and her resulting revenge against her attacker.

The plot is simple and predictable. Margaux Hemingway plays Chris, a cover girl, who invites her young sister's teacher, Gordon Stewart (Chris Sarandon), to her fashionable penthouse apartment for an informal discussion about music. He finds the occasion an opportunity to rape and sodomize her. The case is brought to trial and Stewart is acquitted. He later has an opportunity to rape the sister, who reacts to this last degradation by killing Stewart.

Surprisingly, in her debut, Ms. Hemingway successfully comes across as the unassuming, beloved cover girl who takes the law into her own hands. Unfortunately, the screenwriter tries to turn her into a "white" Pam Grier. Anne Bancroft delivers the most noticeable performance, as the prosecuting attorney. l'm afraid, though, that Chris Sarandon, as the attacker, is doomed to play roles of male sex outcasts (he played a homosexual in Dog Day Afternoon"). This movie doesn't give him a chance to show his stuff.

Might we take this moment to suggest to the producers that they research a "typical" case of rape and revenge, preferably the Inez García case, to understand a woman's humiliation and outrage at being singled out as a rape victim. They may discover that such women are not Annie Oakleys, as the film leads us to believe.