Perfectly adorable

i know i wasted 90 mins of my life.

Absolutely brilliant

The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.

Behind the sensationalistic title lies an earnest social drama of the sort one would already expect of director Ida Lupino, which follows a similar plot arc to the same year's 'On Dangerous Ground', in which a human being damaged by the Big Bad City finds peace of a sort out in the country. (Although was it really possible in 1950 for a stranger to walk straight into a job - especially one involving handling money - without any sort of references or proof of identity?)The assault on Mala Powers is never described more explicitly than as a "vicious criminal attack", and it COULD simply have been a violent mugging - which would have been bad enough; but the morbid obsession with her on the part of her attacker makes it clear what the full nature of the assault was. A religious component in the script - caring hunk Tod Andrews who provides Powers with a strong shoulder to lean on is revealed to be a clergyman - is one of many potentially provocative issues left unexplored; and there are various other loose ends. Her attacker is revealed to be not just an average guy who turned nasty, but a messed-up serial offender who progresses from sexual assault to armed robbery. The would-be suitor whose brusque advances prove she's still not safe from such unwanted attentions even in the Garden of Eden she seems to have found is introduced very abruptly - and despatched even more abruptly with a blow from a monkey wrench. The ending is emotional but highly equivocal; although we have been explicitly told that it will probably take years of therapy and guidance to grant her eventual peace of mind.

... and a fairly accurate depiction of how people in 1950 would have reacted to her. Too many people - then and now - believe in "the just world syndrome " in which they believe that a completely innocent person going about their business could never be victim of such a brutal crime, because if they did believe this was possible, then it could happen to them, and that is just too upsetting to people who think they have a good bead on the world and how it runs.It's interesting that director Ida Lupino tackled this difficult subject with as much reality as was possible with the production code in force, and that she also picked as the protagonist of the film a girl that looked very much like herself as a young woman - Mala Powers, only 19 when this film was made.The basic framework is that Mala's character, Ann Walton, is attacked by a complete stranger late at night in a small town while walking home from work. The whole town thus knows what happened to her, she is subject to staring and whispering, and then her boyfriend thinks the answer is to get married right away. But Ann feels dirty and doesn't want any man to touch her, and halfway thinks her beau is proposing - and wanting a quick wedding out of town - out of pity for her and to make an honest woman of her, but without the curiosity seekers that a big wedding might attract.A real telling scene is when she goes around her house, touching objects, as though she is a ghost of herself trying to remember what things were like before, and comes across a picture of herself at her first communion all decked out in white and smashes the picture, as though any purity in her died with the rape.She runs away from home - she is a grown woman so she is missing more than she is truant - and tries to pick up the pieces of her life, but still with the image of the man who attacked her haunting her. Big doses of Christianity are injected as to the cure to everything - after all this is 1950 - but I also objected to the implication of all of society's ills as being psychiatric in nature. The preacher at the end is basically saying that Ann is as mentally sick as the rapist! This was decades before society had to admit that some people are just evil and want what they want when they want it and we just need to throw away the key for the sake of the rest of us.No, I don't agree with every little thing Lupino said here, or maybe was forced to say due to the times, but it is worth watching and not that far off, at least from what victims go through in this kind of crime.

R.K.O. second-feature about a small town working girl, living with her folks and about to be married, who is the victim of a "criminal assault" (i.e., rape). After reporting her attack to the police, the girl and her parents attract stares and whispers from the curious locals. In a benumbed fog, the girl boards a bus for Los Angeles, getting off in a rural town and meeting a well-meaning pastor. Interesting film, co-written and directed by Hollywood pioneer Ida Lupino, has a tight pace but it isn't well cast. Newcomer Mala Powers spends most of her time staring wide-eyed into faces, running and looking back, running and looking back, while all the men are lookalike-bland, and seem awkward with their ineffectual characters. Not-bad programmer has amusing parallels to Carroll Baker's 1961 film "Something Wild", but there isn't much outrage in this scrubbed scenario--just a stunned quiet. **1/2 from ****

I saw this little (only an hour and 15 minutes) movie last night, remarkable for it's subject matter (rape and its aftermath) and notable because it's director is Ida Lupino. It was interesting because rape is not a subject that was often depicted in dramatic features, albeit a B-level feature in the early 50's. The story was told in an honest way, and after I got used to the avoidance of the term "rape", substituted for "criminally attacked" (hey, this was the 50's and it did have to get an MPAA rating) I was kept interested for the rest of the film.