Worth Mentioning - Never Shall Harbor an Unclean Thought

We watch several movies a week. Every Friday, we'll talk a little about some of the movies we watched that we felt were Worth Mentioning.

Bad behavior in the 1930s and '60s.

THE LADY IN RED (1979)

Legendary producer Roger Corman was looking to make “a female Godfather story about the woman (known as The Lady in Red) who was with (gangster) John Dillinger when he was shot (in 1934),” so he turned to screenwriter John Sayles, who had just done impressive work on Corman’s killer fish production Piranha. Of course, what Corman had in mind would have been a simple, straightforward exploitation movie that would be packed with blood and nudity. Sayles had something else in mind, turning in a 135 page script for what he envisioned as being a 1930s epic digging into the life of a hard-luck woman of the time.

If Sayles had written about the actual lady in red, the lead character would have been a Romanian immigrant brothel owner called Anna Sage, but instead he made Sage a supporting character (she’s played by Louise Fletcher) and chose to focus on a fictional character, farm girl Polly Franklin (Pamela Sue Martin). Polly gets caught up in an armed robbery at the beginning of the film, and soon after she’s talked into losing her virginity to a sleazy reporter (Robert Hogan). When her ultra-religious father realizes she’s no longer a virgin, Polly gets a beating... So she runs off to the big city, where she gets a job in a sweatshop. When that doesn’t work out, thanks to a sleazy boss played by Dick Miller, she decides to pursue her job of being a dancer. She gets a job working in a place where a man can come in and pay ten cents a dance to hit the dance floor with the girls who work there. But they have a darkened back room where they provide happy endings to these dances, so Polly ends up being arrested and sent to jail. There, she has to deal with a nightmare of a prison matron called Tiny Alice (Nancy Parsons), who ends up agreeing to let Polly out of the jail as long as she works in a brothel, run by Anna Sage, and sends money back to her.

But none of that is what brings Polly into the life of gangster John Dillinger (Robert Conrad). She doesn’t meet him until she’s working as a waitress, and he doesn’t show up until almost an hour into the movie. He doesn’t stick around long, either. While several movies have been made about Dillinger, he’s a relatively minor character here. He gets shot while on a date with Polly, during which she’s wearing red, and even though Polly did not betray him to the authorities (Anna Sage did), she gets accused of doing it. Which is not good for her.

A lot of the epic Sayles wrote didn’t make it to the screen. Director Lewis Teague only had a budget of $900,000 and a shooting schedule of twenty days to work with, so the script had to be trimmed down in a major way. There’s so much going on and so many ups and downs in the life of Polly, it still feels like an epic, but it manages to pack all of that stuff into a 93 minute running time. And yes, Corman did get the bloodshed and nudity he was looking for along the way.

The Lady in Red is a good movie that has some high-profile fans – like Quentin Tarantino, who calls it the most ambitious movie made at Roger Corman’s New World Pictures, with the best script ever written for an exploitation movie – but it has never been very popular. Corman tried to boost its box office haul by re-releasing it under two different titles, Bullets, Sin and Bathtub Gin and Kiss Me and Die, but even then it only broke even. Whatever you want to call it, if you like gangster movies and are interested in what life was like for some in the ‘30s, you should watch this movie.

THE LORDS OF DISCIPLINE (1983)

In 1980, author Pat Conroy wrote a novel called The Lords of Discipline, which was partially based on his own experiences at The Citadel, a military college in South Carolina, and a story that began in 1907, when a group of military cadets at a military college formed a secret society. To say The Citadel was not pleased with Conroy’s book, despite the fact that he replaced the real college with a fictional South Carolina college called The Institute, would be putting it mildly. He was banned from the campus for decades. But the book got attention and good reviews, so a few years later, it got a film adaptation, with Franc Roddam directing from a script by Lloyd Fonvielle and Thomas Pope that had to pare down the substance of Conroy’s 499 page novel.

None of the American military academies would allow the filmmakers to make the Lords of Discipline movie on their grounds, so it had to be filmed at a college in England... it’s not difficult to understand why American military schools would be so against the project, because the cadets at The Institute are not good examples of American military boys.

David Keith stars in the film as Will McLean, a cadet in his senior year in the 1960s. There are some intense hazing rituals at this school, which has just welcomed in its first black cadet, Tom Pearce (Mark Breland). Lieutenant Colonel "Bear" Berrineau is racist, but he believes all cadets should get an even break, so he asks McLean to watch out for Pearce – and McLean is the right person for the job, being the most sympathetic character around. While trying to keep Pearce, as well as fellow newbie Poteete (Malcolm Danare), safe from his fellow cadets, McLean is not only appalled by the hazing practices, but he also starts to unearth information on a secret society called The Ten. Which the most intense hazers, like the ones played by Michael Biehn and “Wild” Bill Paxton, might be a part of.

The Ten or not, these guys go way over-the-top in their attempts to force students they believe should leave The Institute out of the place. This includes sticking a cadet on a high ledge, putting razors blades in somebody’s shoes, or outright torturing people if necessary.

The Lords of Discipline feels like a movie that’s not quite reaching its full potential, but it tells an interesting story and I enjoyed my viewing of it. The film seems to have mostly faded into obscurity, but it’s worth checking out if you can dig it up.