This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.
Babalugats’s review published on Letterboxd:
This review may contain spoilers.
This does not feel like a movie made in 1961. The movie opens with a rape. It is shot with a directness and frankness that I didn't think was possible under the Hays Code, and also with an a level of empathy and respect that is rare even today. This part of the film is almost completely silent. The woman doesn't scream. She let's out a little whimper as the man leaves, but that's all. Beyond that she plays it completely flat, deadend. We see her gather herself and walk home. She baths. She cuts up the clothes she was wearing and flushes the pieces down the toilet. She goes to bed. She never acknowledges the rape. There are no tears, no big speeches, no emotional breakthroughs, no quest for revenge. She goes on with her life, but she's changed. It hangs over her, and over the whole film. It informs every action she takes and every interaction she has. Everything is very minimalist, very modern. This is the first section of the movie and it ends when a man saves the woman from a semi-conscious suicide attempt.
The next section is much more heightened. There are dream sequences, and dream imagery. The passage of time becomes obscured. Everything begins to feel more metaphorical, even allegorical. The man takes the woman to his apartment to rest while he goes to work, and then refuses to let her leave. One night he comes home drunk and lunges at her, and she kicks his eye out. There is a shot with the woman terrified, clinging to the wall as the man writhes in pain on the floor beneath her, grasping his eye as black blood seeps through his fingers. If the first segment is a few decades ahead of it's time, this feels a few decades ahead of that. In the morning he doesn't remember what happened, later when he finds out, he isn't angry. The movie plays with our sympathies here in odd ways. The man is so pathetic, so pitiable, and the woman feels much more remorseful than he does. This is a trick of the movies, in the logic of the plot this man has kept this woman a prisoner for several weeks (months?) and intellectually we understand that he is a monster, but what we've actually seen and experienced is him keeping a woman prisoner for several minutes and losing an eye in the process, and the woman is far more regretful and guilt ridden than he is. It's disturbing, and challenging, and insightful. It's a deconstruction of story tropes that hadn't really been established yet. To put it in context, this movie was released a year after Psycho a full four years before William Wyler’s The Collector. The closest this era usually got to this sort of relationship was with something like Creature From The Black Lagoon, this degree of realism and empathy and honesty was virtually unheard of.
And then there's the ending. The woman escapes, and then returns and accepts the man’s marriage proposal. This isn't played as a happy ending, the final scene involves the couple visiting the woman’s mother as she seems to realize the scope of the tragedy her daughter has suffered through although no one is able to articulate anything or offer any comfort, but it's still such an odd choice that I can't really square it with the rest of the film. When Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down utilized a similar ending, it was a prank. A joke on genre conventions and moral sensibilities and a piece of transgressive cynicism at the end of a movie that was half comedy the whole way through. Here it follows a hard drama and feels heavy and cruel.
Carroll Baker plays the woman (she had previously starred in Baby Doll one of the most famous movies to challenge the Production Code) and it's an incredible performance. I described the character as flat and deadend, and that could easily suggest a wooden performance, but Baker manages to give her a complete inner life even as the character is unable emote. And she conveys a strong enough sense of her personality in the brief (I think fewer than two sentences) time before the rape that we understand the degree to which this woman has changed. Very impressive work, and completely holds the movie together.