In occupied West Germany, 16-year-old Karin Steinhof (Christine Kaufmann) lies by the river with her boyfriend, Frank Borgmann (Gerhart Lippert). They hold each other and kiss. Then they quarrel because his mother doesn’t approve. She swims across the river. She removes her bikini to change into her street clothes. Before she can get dressed, four drunk American soldiers drag her into the bushes and rape her.
Buy Town Without Pity Blu-rayThey are quickly caught, and there seems to be little doubt about their guilt. To appease the townspeople, who are filled with righteous anger, the commanding officer agrees to hold a public trial in the high school gymnasium. Major Steve Garrett (Kirk Douglas) is assigned to defend the soldiers.
Town Without Pity is a well-made but sometimes confounding and difficult movie. It is an unfortunate fact that rape victims are often put on public trial before, during, and after the actual trial takes place. The media and the public judge the victim for being in the wrong place, for wearing the wrong clothes, and for being the wrong type of person. This reality is often depicted on television and in the movies, and so it is here.
What I found difficult about this film is that our hero – that would be the movie star Kirk Douglas, whom the audience can’t help but sympathize with – is defending the rapists. Throughout the trial, he’s bringing in character witnesses to indicate that Karin was a slut. She went away with Frank for a weekend once. She paraded in her room naked with her curtains open. Furthermore, she made out with Frank there on the river side wearing nothing but a skimpy bikini, then she took that off in full view of those soliders. Etc. In other words, she was asking for it, she wanted to be raped. She deserved it.
When he gets her on the stand, he rakes her over the coals. He calls her a liar; he shouts at her. He practically demands that she admit it was all her fault. This sort of thing isn’t new. We see similar things in movies and television series all the time. What I found off putting about Town Without Pity is that we are on the side of Major Garrett, not the victim.
In his (and the film’s) defense, he doesn’t want to do this. He tries to settle without a trial. He asks the defense attorney to not seek the death penalty. If he just seeks a prison sentence, then Karin will not have to take the stand. She can be spared that humiliation. But in a death-penalty trial, she will be forced to take the stand, and she may only step down once Major Garrett releases her. If that happens, Major Garrett will be forced to break her, for it is his duty to defend those four men. He is determined that they will not receive the death penalty. But the defense counsel and Karin’s father insist on seeking the death penalty; thus, she goes on the stand and is humiliated.
The film does a good job of demonstrating the difficulties of such a trial. I believe Major Garrett is conflicted but ultimately will do his job. But because Douglas was such a star, and because the film follows him as a protagonist, we are constantly on his side. I was reminded of Anatomy of a Murder, which was made just two years prior to this and has a similar plot. But its perspective is very much on the side of the victim, and thus much more palatable to my sensitivities.
It doesn’t help that after his death, Kirk Douglas was accused of raping Natalie Wood when she was just a teenager. Watching him in this fictional story defending rapists was a little hard to swallow.
As the credits rolled I realized, too, that Karin was a secondary character in the story of her own rape. She is given very little agency of her own. Throughout the film, others are doing things to her, making decisions for her. They are raping her or forcing her to take the stand. The only time she is able to make her own decisions is when she leaves Frank at the beginning of the film (and is raped because of it) and decides to leave town for good at the end of the film (I won’t spoil what happens because of that decision, but it isn’t happy).
I don’t want to to go far here. This is not a bad film. It is well made. The acting, especially by Douglas and Kaufmann, is quite good. The black and white cinematography is gorgeous. It is a very well-made film and digs into a difficult subject, something that wasn’t often touched upon in 1960s cinema.
It is well worth watching, but with eyes wide open.
