1976's "Lipstick" seems a curious choice for Pittsburgh's Chiller Theater during its final year (bypassing any network airings for direct syndication), a brutal and sensational look at rape in which the act goes on for 7 interminable minutes, followed by a courtroom trial taking up over 20 minutes (where is Perry Mason when you really need him!). Real life sisters Margaux and Mariel Hemingway (granddaughters of author Ernest Hemingway) both made their screen debuts as siblings living together since the death of their parents, the elder Margaux as top fashion model Chris McCormick (her actual profession), 14 year old Mariel as Kathy, whose crush on music teacher Gordon Stuart (Chris Sarandon) allows for horrific repercussions when an invitation to their apartment to listen to his recordings brings unexpected tragedy. In appeasing her sister, Chris shows little interest in listening to something less than musical, taking a personal call into her bedroom to avoid Stuart, his pent up jealous rage erupting at seeing how many celebrities she knows, smashing picture frames and a bathroom mirror to terrorize then sodomize the barely conscious young woman. Kathy arrives home to hear his strange music emanating from her sister's bedroom, spying him lying on top of a bound Chris, quite helpless and immobile, learning afterwards that it was definitely not consensual. Anne Bancroft gets a chance for real dramatics as the prosecutor, but with the jury buying the defense's assertion that a pretty model apparently 'had it coming' in leading on her attacker, the 'not guilty' verdict is read aloud to a stunned Chris, whose modeling career is now in jeopardy as well. A short time later, she's outfitted in various gowns for one final blaze of glory before taking Kathy to a mountain retreat in Colorado, never realizing that the guilty rapist is in the same building and eager to get a closer look at Kathy now (fortunately, the camera cuts away once he starts ripping off her clothes). Obnoxious and distasteful yet never believable, critics mercilessly deriding poor Margaux's performance, not really given a character to play, merely portrayed as an object of desire without regard to feelings, Perry King's contribution so minor as her supposed boyfriend that we're not surprised to see him vanish after the trial. It's no stretch to admit that Mariel comes off best, the only one with some kind of character arc, though why she continues to obey the scumbag that defiled her sister is something only the screenwriter would know. Rather than a serious treatment of a sexual crime we merely get a bare bones expose with titillating nudity but no compassion (predictably going "Death Wish" vigilante only in the last 5 minutes), a far cry from Hammer's unsensational "Never Take Candy from a Stranger," whose all too human monster (Felix Aylmer) never speaks a word in stalking frightened prepubescent girls through the woods. The chic, vapid world of glamorous poses proved equally unflattering in Faye Dunaway's "Eyes of Laura Mars" (from a rewritten John Carpenter script) and Chris Sarandon's own "The Sentinel," featuring none other than John Carradine in the titular role though wasted with but a single line (Sarandon is best remembered as the neighborhood vampire opposite Roddy McDowall's Peter Vincent in "Fright Night").
Review of Lipstick
