Outrage

“Events in crisis are laid out like cards on a table at the opening of a Lupino film,” wrote Action. This one opens with a signature telegraphed image—a coffee cup slides down a factory lunch counter, pushed by the hand of a rapist. In Outrage, Lupino dissects a rape and its aftereffects from the point of view both of the victim and her 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!”) After Ann Waldon (Mala Powers) is brutally attacked, Lupino follows her humiliation and her painful steps toward regeneration and assumption of power in relation to men—connected inextricably to her escape from home.