Outrage

A psychological study of a rape victim. Ann is a young accountant working for a warehouse. She just got engaged. Her father had hopes for her academic career and wanted her to follow in his footsteps to become a math teacher, but when a boy offers to marry her, it sounds like another form of employment. One day, after a late shift, Ann is attacked by a rapist. A realistic social drama gets tinted here with horror – a feature Lupino owes to German Expressionist cinema, in the vein of Fritz Lang’s M. After that evening, for Ann, even in the light of day, reality becomes a constantly relived nightmare. Regular and neutral acts turn into brutal intrusions: she cannot stand a friendly pat by a colleague at work, a passing touch on a crowded bus, or a repeated invitation to dance. Nobody seemed to see the rape but now everybody seems to see nothing but her ‘disgrace’. Ann runs away from home. Outrage was one of the first American movies dealing with the subject of rape. The word is not uttered here though, rape is referred to as a ‘brutal attack’ as if it was not sexual. “In my opinion, we needed a movie about that. After all, it was not the girl’s fault,” claimed Lupino, then.