Home | Movies By Year | Movies from 1979
The Lady in Red (1979 film)
Buy The Lady in Red (1979 film) now from AmazonFirst, read the Wikipedia article. Then, scroll down to see what other TopShelfReviews readers thought about the movie. And once you've experienced the movie, tell everyone what you thought about it.
Wikipedia article
'The Lady in Red' (also known as 'Guns, Sin and Bathtub Gin') is a 1979 American crime drama film directed by Lewis Teague and starring Pamela Sue Martin and Robert Conrad. It is an early writing effort of John Sayles who became better known as a director in the 1980s and 1990s.
Premise
The film tells a 1930s' crime story of a poor farmer's daughter who leaves for Chicago, where she is sent to prison, works as a prostitute, falls in love with notorious criminal John Dillinger, witnesses his death, and finally tries bank robbery.
Cast
* Pamela Sue Martin as Polly Franklin
* Robert Conrad as John Dillinger
* Louise Fletcher as Anna Sage
* Robert Hogan as Jake Lingle
* Laurie Heineman as Rose Shimkus
* Glenn Withrow as Eddie
* Rod Gist as Pinetop
* Peter Hobbs as Pops Geissler
* Christopher Lloyd as Frognose
* Dick Miller as Patek
* Nancy Parsons as Tiny Alice
* Alan Vint as Melvin Purvis
* Robert Forster as Turk (uncredited)
Production
The soundtrack of this film is notable as the first film score composed by James Horner, who went on to a multiple Oscar, Golden Globe and Grammy-winning career.
Teague recalls, "I was given that script and told to go with it. I didn't really have a chance to mold or change it. It was very socially conscious for an action picture about the Great Depression. I had 20 days to shoot it, and three to edit and a budget of less than a million."
John Sayles later said the film "didn't turn out the way I wanted because they just didn't have the budget to make the movie right. I wanted that to be a real breathless, '30s, Jimmy Cagney everybody-talking-fast type movie. It turned out a little more like Louis Malle. Different movies have different speeds."
Release
The film was not a big success at the box office. Roger Corman re-released it in 1980 under the title 'Guns, Sin and Bathtub Gin', but it did not fare much better.
On December 17, 2010, Shout! Factory released the title on DVD, packaged as a double feature with 'Crazy Mama' as part of the Roger Corman Cult Classics collection.
Reception
Quentin Tarantino called it "my candidate for most ambitious film ever made at Roger Cormans New World Pictures... Not only do I think this thirties era epic... is Sayles best screenplay, I also think its the best script ever written for an exploitation movie." On Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an aggregated score of 83% based on 5 positive and 1 negative reviews.
In popular culture
In Quentin Tarantino's novel 'Once Upon a Time in Hollywood', in an alternate history, he himself had released a remake of the film in 1999.
References
Buy The Lady in Red (1979 film) now from Amazon
<-- Return to movies from 1979