Review of The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane (1976) by Edith N — 19 Aug 2012

Not So Little a Girl As All That.

It always makes me sad when great actors' only movies together aren't good. I am giving this movie a marginally positive review because of the great performances of its stars, but I really wish I could see them in a better movie. This movie is silly and improbable, and it was a waste of Jodie Foster's talents even in 1976. Apparently, she is not inclined to badmouth her own movies, but she has implied a great deal of distaste for this one. That's even leaving aside the fact that director Nicolas Gessner was so determined to have a nude scene in the movie that he used Foster's own older sister, Connie, as her body double--for the second time that year. However, whereas the nudity in [i]Taxi Driver[/i] was essential to the development of the story, the nudity here is prurient. But that seems almost beside the point, because the whole of the movie is prurient, more intending to shock than intrigue.

Rynn (Foster) is thirteen. Frank Hallet (Martin Sheen) comes over and basically forces his way into the house. She pushes aside his questions about her father, and eventually, he leaves. The next day, his mother (Alexis Smith) comes by. She turns out to own the house, which Rynn's father, a poet, leased for three years--paid in advance. Mrs. Hallet makes all sorts of snarly suggestions, prowling around the house no matter how often Rynn asks her to leave. Rynn finally gets her out by making dark implications about Frank. A local cop, Miglioriti (Mort Shuman), also comes around looking for Rynn's father. One day, Mrs. Hallet comes over and cannot be put aside. She forces her way into the basement, and she is so shocked at what she sees there that she hits her head on the trap door hard enough to kill her. Rynn is trying to move Mrs. Hallet's conspicuous Rolls when Mario (Scott Jacoby) comes by. There is a connection between the two, but Rynn has so many dark secrets that she might not be able to overcome them.

I'm not sure I believe Rynn when she says that she did not at first know what the powder her father gave her was. Indeed, I'm fairly sure I do not. For one thing, Rynn is a compulsive researcher. For another, she isn't innocent enough to believe her father's claim that it's just something to calm her mother down. What good would calming her mother down do? Her mother would never be convinced by what Rynn had to say--frankly, she shouldn't have been. Despite her belief on the subject, Rynn is not all that mature. She's smart--scary smart. However, I was just this weekend discussing that you simply can't ignore what everyone thinks about you. Oh, you can't please everyone and shouldn't try, but what other people think about you [i]does[/i] matter, and not just creepy pedophiles like Frank Hallet. Rynn doesn't understand how the world works, as evidenced by her yelling at the woman who owns her house to get out of it. She's in the right, since they've leased it, but it won't work.

Indeed, what she does not seem to realize is that she could have gotten away with things until she covered up Mrs. Hallet's death. The only people who suspected much of her were the Hallets, and there were ways around that. Indeed, what she ended up doing with Mrs. Hallet's body made more sense, though I suppose she needed a second person to help with the heavy lifting. But of course, that's all going back to what's so unsettling about Rynn. The idea that she might need other people comes as a total shock to her. She was raised to believe that she was better and more special than everyone around her, and that's a dangerous sense of entitlement to have. Perhaps Rynn's best advantage is that, since she is thirteen and it is 1976, she will be tried as a minor. She only has to win over one person, and that one person is likely to be of above average intelligence and certain to be of above average education.

I have not, of course, read the book. Perhaps the Rynn in the book is more interesting and less ominous. Perhaps her personality is more carefully drawn. However, I suspect it's just as much an exploitation novel as this was an exploitation film. It was a more experimental era, and not all those experiments were successful. This movie could have been so much better had it stepped back a little. We don't need the sexual issues. Heck, I was waiting for the cop to start hitting on Rynn, because it seems obvious that the movie is more fascinated with her and her sexuality than with the facts of her life. Maybe it's the era; sexuality was not new in the 1970s, but people of the time seemed to think it was. Oh, it was new that people considered that someone of her age was already a truly sexual being, but that's because people have always been good at denying their own experiences in favour of what they want to be true. The story of a young woman with Rynn's secret could be a truly interesting movie. This wasn't it.