ASSAULT

The only reason I watched this 1971 British thriller was that it gets the thumbs up from 'The Sunday Times Guide to Movies on TV' by Elkan and Angela Allen, but for once my ‘bible’ badly let me down because this is a quite dreadful film.

It starts with the rape of a teenage schoolgirl in some woods near her school, which leaves her so traumatised that she can’t speak and therefore cannot help the police.

And the police in the form of DCS Velyan (Frank Finlay) certainly needs help because he goes through the film displaying less interest than if he was dealing with a motoring offence.

Two months later (and very implausibly) another schoolgirl goes to the same woods after school for no apparent reason, and is raped and murdered.  Her art teacher Julie West (Suzy Kendall) goes into the woods searching for the girl and manages to catch a glimpse of the killer but not sufficiently to be of much help.

However Miss West has the bright idea of making herself bait by planting a story in the local newspaper hinting that she can identify the killer, which is the sort of idea that Velyan might have come up with if he was taking the case seriously.

Unfortunately this cunning plan comes to nothing other than an abortive attack on Miss West.

In the real world the killer would be an anonymous member of the public but this is the sort of film where we know that the killer just has to be one of the several odd male characters that keep cropping up.  

Could the killer be Velyan himself, which would at least explain his general doziness? Or maybe it's his quiet sergeant who hovers in the background?

Or there’s the husband of the headmistress of the school, who is certainly sex starved and attracted to all the nubile young schoolgirls that pervade the place.

Or an irritating journalist?

Or Dr Lomax who is responsible for the care of the first victim and seems to act as a consultant to the police.  

In possibly the most absurd scene in this farrago (a high bar) Dr Lomax spends the night in the same house as Miss West despite at this point being a suspect.  When the officer assigned to protect Miss West checks with Velyan if this is OK, Velyan thinks about it for a couple of seconds and then shrugs his shoulders (metaphorically) and says it is fine. To be fair to Velyan he does bother to ring Miss West in the morning and is mildly relieved to learn that she is still alive.  Whew!

The identity of the killer is no great surprise.  He’s the principal of the hospital where Dr Lomax works and he pops up enough times for no good reason to make him the prime suspect as far as I was concerned.  

There’s a very contrived climax involving an unnecessary gas explosion at a chemist’s shop before the killer dies electrocuted on the top of an electricity pylon (which might or might not be an intentional phallic symbol).

This film’s attitude to women and girls is hard to stomach even for a film of this period.  The male gaze is very prominent in the rape scenes, and Miss West is treated more like a child than an adult, especially by the patronising Dr Lomax.  Naturally we are supposed to believe that she rapidly falls in love with him.

The cinematography is very basic, and all I need to say about the score is that it was written by someone most famous for writing the scores for over twenty Carry On films.

There is precious little by way of characterisation (bar the headmistress and her husband) and the film can’t be bothered to give the killer any backstory or make him remotely believable.  

The director Sidney Hayers is a new name to me.  According to Wikipedia some people (who?) reckon he is the most underrated British director of the period.  Not by me he isn’t.