Originally titled “Handgun,” Deep in the Heart is a disturbing new feature by Tony Garnett that was received with a mixture of praise and alarm on its brief New York opening. The plot involves a young woman, Kathleen (Karen Young), Boston-born, Catholic and new to Dallas, Texas where she teaches high school American history. When she is raped at gunpoint by a gun-collecting date, then instructed by the police in the humiliation she can expect from pursuing the case, she joins a rifle club and proves herself remarkably adept in the weaponry of her oppressors. Writer-director Garnett notes, “This ironic film draws on the images of American popular culture, referring in particular to the Hollywood hero who solves problems alone, with a gun.... Deep in the Heart uses the terror of sexual violence as the key to a wider political metaphor.” Village Voice critic Amy Taubin calls the film “a small, careful film relying on accurate observation and fairly subtle ideas.... Garnett has shown how the gun is central to the myth and reality of male dominance.... (When) Kathleen embraces the weapon...we respond with some ambivalence; and ambivalence, intellectual and emotional, is rarely engendered by the internal structure of Hollywood films. It is a state much to be valued because it often leads to thought.”