Writer: Tom Topor – Director: Martin Ritt
Actors: Barbara Streisand, Richard Dreyfus, Maureen Stapleton, Karl Malden, Eli Wallach, et al.
Topor puts the victim on trial. Draper, the main character, murdered a "john", she is the focus of the film, the reason this courtroom drama is going on and it becomes her therapy. In rape and molestation cases the perpetrator and proving his or her guilt is the focus, not the victim or what they have suffered. At least in this film, the victim gets to be seen and heard although some wish to toss this film out as a feminist ploy against men. Would it have been more effective if the john's wife had shown up near the end of the movie, thanking her on all counts? There are lots of Claudia Drapers out there who are not high class hookers or even hookers at all, who kill their abusers, or desire to kill their abusers. Are they insane? When can killing be determined to be a rational act of survival? And consider that maybe on some level the "john" and her father both wanted her to kill them, symbolically. They wanted to be stopped and they were making her responsible and she dutifully accepted it, just as her father made her sexually responsible as his lover at a young age, because the mother was not there to intervene or to take up her wifely duty to her husband. Did Claudia want to kill her father? Even some of the viewing audience want all abusers killed, symbolically, but in order to be able to do that and make it work, Claudia has to be deemed sane, otherwise the pedophiles and rapists and johns all get off the hook for any accountability or responsibility for their behavior. If you continue to analyze this you can see how it all fits together in a nice neat little package. Lots of men harbor thoughts (thoughts lead to actions) that women are nothing but whores anyway, even though they repress it (wasn't Neilson's character living a double life (standard)) and at one point in their struggling in the film, Neilson calls her a “dirty whore", “you’re all dirty whores”. Wasn't he and her father whoring around, the john acting out his own anger and guilt at himself onto Claudia nearly killing her, still another role of the prostitute that rarely gets talked about, a punching bag for the shame and guilt of their weaknesses and the rage of overworked and over stressed executives. At least Claudia was true to herself, she was being what she had become, why one would tend to think she was not homicidal at the time of the incident. This of course didn't work for Aileen Wournos?
I thought this was an excellent film throughout, superb acting by all.
