USA,
1984, 94 min
Shown in 1984
CREDITS
- dir
-
Tony Garnett
- prod
-
Tony Garnett
- scr
-
Tony Garnett
- cam
-
Charles Stewart
- editor
-
Bill Shapter
- cast
-
Karen Young, Clayton Day
Deep in the Heart is a startling, controversial movie. Potential patrons should be warned about its material and its disconcerting tone. Originally called Handgun (blunter but far more appropriate), it has had only a brief New York opening which appears to have alarmed audiences not unaccustomed to violence and sexual outrage. Kathleen Sullivan is a Boston-born teacher working in Dallas. She invites Larry Keeler, a young lawyer, to visit one of her classes to talk about his collection of guns and the influence of such weapons on American history. Keeler makes a play for Kathleen. She rebuffs him once, but then a few days later she agrees to have dinner with him. That night he rapes her at gunpoint, without malice but calmly, as if the gun is the only way to make her admit his attractiveness and her sexual need. When Kathleen goes to the police, they tell her legal action would be slow and humiliating, and might not succeed. The woman shrinks in on herself and only emerges from trauma as someone determined to master guns herself. She joins Keeler’s rifle club and begins to train.The conclusion is a nightmare of revenge, odious yet horribly logical, and totally compromised by the film’s powerful, schematic melodrama. Written and directed by Englishman Tony Garrett, Deep in the Heart has a simple-minded anti-Americanness that sits strangely with its narrative skill and suspense and its moral confusion. Ostensibly feminist and horrified by rape, does it degenerate into a Charles Bronson movie for women? The problems of how to respond are compounded by the strong performances of Clayton Day as the handsome, arrogant Keeler and of Karen Young as the violated woman who turns herself into an enforcer.
—David Thomson
FACTOID #85
In 1996, Harvey Keitel was the first recipient of the Peter J. Owens Award, honoring “brilliance, independence and honesty” in acting. Honest he was. During the clip show at his tribute Keitel, unhappy with one of the clips, began waving his arms and shouting until the screen went black. The screen lit up with a new clip and the tribute continued.
