If nothing else, Town Without Pity is an interesting cultural or historical document, as much of what happens in this film could clearly not happen today. Indeed, it works as an effective and somewhat reassuring moral assessment tool which shows us how far we have come in our respect for women from the year it was made in 1961. It is also chilling in that it reveals how terrible things were just a short time ago. It should also help us question how much farther we still have to go, and challenge us to keep pushing for 100% gender respect and equality.
The film was a US/Swiss/West German co-production, directed by Gottfried Reinhardt and starring Kirk Douglas, who coaxed the hyper-liberal Dalton Trumbo to do the screenplay.
In this film four US soldiers (played by Frank Sutton, Richard Jaekel, Mal Sondok and Robert Blake), stationed in a small German town, get rip-roaring drunk one Saturday night and rape a young German girl about to bathe in a stream in a nearby forest.
(Yes, Frank Sutton later became Sergeant Vince Carter, the mentor and tormentor of Private Gomer Pyle, USMC. Fun fact: despite the gruff characters he played, Sutton was a graduate of Columbia University in the City of New York.)
US military law allowed the death penalty for rape, and the US Army seeks this against their soldiers primarily because the German town demands that these “foreign occupiers” be punished to the most severe degree possible. From the top levels of the US Army, it becomes the wish to demonstrate that this type of behavior will not be tolerated. Negative publicity throughout Germany starts to escalate and only the executions of these four men will seemingly suffice to quell the growing outrage.
Kirk Douglas plays the working-class gritty but well-educated Army lawyer (BA, Wisconsin; JD, Columbia) who has to defend the accused (while holding his nose). These are like the guys he grew up with but distanced himself from through formal education.
Despite the open contempt he shows the soldiers who are his clients, he is driven by a sense of professionalism and his anti-death penalty belief system. He discovers that the death penalty cannot be imposed, under Army rules, unless the victim provides full and complete testimony in the trial. So, you guessed it, he digs around town for as much dirt as he can find on the girl in order to make it emotionally impossible for her to testify in court. He finds a lot of dirt.
Indeed, he finds that in this conservative and somewhat prudish town, there are many people who wish to cooperate with him because many view the victim as a “loose”, unprincipled and indecent young woman. So an alleged man of integrity engages in a slimy, low-class process, unworthy of himself, to present the victim as someone who “was asking for it”.
Ultimately, this affects him adversely, and he suffers greatly, but one has to wonder how many lawyers in the past also lowered themselves to this level of slime, and might still have debased and demeaned themselves by doing this if cultural standards had not changed. Yet, the film also shows how slowly these cultural standards changed. The first “rape shield” law, limiting the defendant’s ability to introduce the accuser’s sexual history as evidence, was not passed until 1974 in the state of Michigan.
So, of course, lawyers are not allowed to do this anymore. The Army has changed its code to conform with Federal rape shield law. The accused does have the right to a fair trial, and this still includes the ability to challenge an accuser’s credibility. Yet, this right is more properly balanced with the accuser’s rights – such as privacy and protection from intimidation.
So it is interesting (and shocking) to observe someone like the lawyer in this film, who, from the start, seems to empathize with the victim and is openly repulsed by the behavior of his clients. Yet, due to his anti-death penalty stance and sense of dedication to representing his clients, he feels compelled to go after the victim he pities.
Indeed, one has to assume that Dalton Trumbo was highlighting a significant flaw in our legal system which favored rapists over victimized women. This seems to have been the first film, in fact, to directly bring this issue to the attention of the public.
At one point, while drinking his guilt away, the Kirk Douglas character says, “The law is like a deep river, once you step in it you just get pulled in and swept toward one direction.” Of course, all of this has tragic consequences as, despite everything, the girl testifies and is destroyed during cross-examination by salacious stories about herself told by townspeople. She then drowns herself. The four soldiers are spared execution but given long sentences of hard labor.
We can also see that the attitude of the soldiers who raped the girl is now, thankfully, also outdated. When they explain why they raped her, one says, “She was just standing there naked, something came over me, I couldn’t control myself.” So, again, we can see there has been significant social progress through a film like this – lawyers cannot intimidate or attempt to destroy the reputations of rape victims in this manner anymore, and men just can no longer claim that they are incapable of exercising self-control and restraint.
Town Without Pity is one of those great films that began to call for social change while there was still great resistance toward that change. It is a moral period piece that shows us just how bad things used to be not that long ago while challenging us to be aware of what might still need to be changed.
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This Post is republished on Medium.
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Photo credit: iStock