Between 1949 and 1954, in addition to starring in seven films directed by others, Ida Lupino wrote and directed six features for Filmakers, the production company she founded along with her husband, Collier Young. In a recent article on Lupino in the Village Voice, Carrie Rickey writes, “(Lupino) is unique in Hollywood...because she treated delicate subjects unsensationally, with a restraint and intelligence requisite to showing rape, bigamy, unwed motherhood et al. as social problems rather than personality disorders. In no other American movies during Lupino's directorial heyday is the lower-middle-class nonheroine the focus of attention. As her movies are unique thematically, they also are unique visually.... Lupino's sets were ad hoc, drive-by-night, like the lives of her characters. She was at home shooting in bus stations, diners, small-town thoroughfares...(all filmed with a) lack of condescension.... Lupino's characters call it home.... All (her films were) made for less than $160,000...without stars, without studio (Lupino ironically recalls, ‘I suppose we were the New Wave at that time'), and, astonishingly, without liberal piety....”
In Outrage, Lupino dissects a rape and its after-effects, both from the point of view of the (unwitting) victimizers - the morbid, voyeuristic, “guilty” members of a suburban Midwest community (the victim's father complains, with a characteristic Lupino double-edge, “They look at me as though I had done something!”) - and of the rape victim herself, an office worker (all of Lupino's women are working women) recently, happily engaged to her boyfriend before being brutally attacked. Lupino follows her humiliation and her complex, painful steps toward regeneration and assumption of power in relation to men, connected inextricably to her escape from home, community and beau to the road. (JB)

(See Women Directors series)