The Lady in Red (1979 film)

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.

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.

Plot
Polly Franklin is a farm girl in the midwest. She witnesses a bank robbery and is taken hostage. Then she is conned into sleeping with a sleazy journalist, Jake Lingle. Her religious father hears about this and hits Polly, prompting Polly to run away.

Polly goes to work at a sweatshop run by the vicious Patek, and befriends a Jewish communist, Rose Shimkus. Then Polly works as a taxi dancer, where she is arrested for prostitution. In prison, Polly meets up with Rose again, and fights with a vicious guard, Tiny Alice.

Tiny Alice arranges for Polly to work at a brothel run by Anna Sage, where she befriends a prostitute and pianist, Pinetop. The brothel's customers include sadistic gangster, Frognose, and a nicer gangster, Turk. Polly has her first satisfactory sexual experience with Turk. Polly befriends a young boy, Eddie, and gets him a job at the brothel. Polly witnesses a shoot out at a party and refuses to betray Turk to the police.

In prison, Tiny Alice stabs Rose to death, and is killed in turn by the other inmates. Frognose stabs Polly's prostitute friend to death. The police shut down Anna's brothel, so she and Polly go to work as waitresses at a diner.

At the diner Polly meets a nice man who she falls in love with. Anna Sage recognises the man as gangster John Dillinger. She does not tell Polly this but informs Melvin Purvis of the FBI, trying to use this information to avoid being deported.

Polly and Anna go to the movies with Dillinger, with Anna having tipped off the FBI. The FBI shoot Dillinger in cold blood after he comes out of the cinema. Jake writes articles falsely blaming Polly for betraying Dillinger.

Polly decides to get revenge. She gathers her friends - Eddie, the pianist Pinetop, Pops - for an important job. Pinetop shoots Frognose dead out of revenge for killing the prostitute. Then Polly and her friends rob a bank. The heist is successful but Eddie and Pops are killed. Turk shoots Jake dead as a favour to Polly.

Polly manages to escape.

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)
 * Mary Woronov
 * Chip Fields as Satin

Production
Sayles had previously written Piranha for producer Roger Corman which had done very well. He said Corman told Sayles the producer wanted "a female Godfather story about the woman who was with John Dillinger when he was shot” and that was all.

Corman had previously made a successful female-orientated gangster film set in the 1930s, Big Bad Mama and asked Sayles for a treatmet. According to Sayles: "I wanted to do more than I knew Roger Corman wanted to do with that script. He basically wanted Bloody Mama Part Three; I wanted to get into other things about the Thirties. So I said, “Roger, I will not write you a treatment, I’ll write you a full draft.” And that way I was able to show him things that, if I had just said, “I wanna go into this area, I wanna take her to jail, take her to a sweatshop,” he’d say, “Oh no, that’s beside the point”; whereas when I put it in the script he sort of got to liking the story. So I was able to campaign for the script that I wanted, and get him to agree that he liked that, too." Sayles wrote a full screenplay which he called "one of the best scripts I've written. Sayles said the film "tried to be about" was: "Why Dillinger and the FBI were shooting each other. To me, Dillinger was just a PR job. J. Edgar Hoover made stars out of the guys he knew he could catch. He never got anybody from the Mafia. In other words, to me that movie was about why Dillinger became Public Enemy No. 1 at a time when one-third of the women in Chicago between the ages of 15 and 35 were working as prostitutes." The job of directing went to Lewis Teague, who had worked at New World for a number of years as an editor. He 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."

The film was produced by Corman's wife Julie who said "I passionately believed in Lady in Red... and I believed in the political and moral issues at the center of the story."

According to Sayles, Teague had "no voice in casting the first four leads." The writer says that even though the lead character is aged from 17 to 21, the first actressed offered the lead was Angie Dickinson who "almost took it... It would have taken a total rewrite to make it make any sense at all. Angie Dickinson, luckily, realized that, and realized that a total rewrite probably wasn’t going to happen and there she would be, making a picture about an 18-year-old woman, and she’s over 40."

Instead the lead role when to Pamela Sue Martin, best known at the time for playing Nancy Drew on television.

According to Sayles the original draft was 135 pages and he had to cut it down during filming as there was not enough time or money to film the script as written. He said "Originally there were four scenes between when the main character’s friend in the factory dies and her friend who’s a prostitute dies, but those four scenes didn’t get shot so now there’s only five minutes between two best friends getting killed. It really got squeezed out as a 90-minute movie from a 135-page script. I probably got it down to about 100 pages."

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."

Sayles added " all the scenes where the people machine-gun other people are left in the movie and the ones that explain why the people are machine-gunning other people are gone — they didn't use them. Half the time, you don't even know why these people are shooting each other."

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.

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
The Los Angeles Times liked the photography but thought "the film is corrupt and offensive because it sensationalises racism and sexism."

The Observer called it "a feminist, sex, sadism and socialism picture".

Quentin Tarantino called it: "My candidate for most ambitious film ever made at Roger Corman’s New World Pictures... Not only do I think this thirties era epic... is Sayles best screenplay, I also think it’s the best script ever written for an exploitation movie... John Sayles wrote a big screen big budget gangster epic, with one of the best female characters of any movie of the second half of the seventies. And while Teague and Corman pull it off, they do it by hanging on for dear life. Sayles’ script deserved a much bigger canvas, a much, much bigger budget, and a much, much, much longer shooting schedule. With all the limitations imposed on them, Teague’s film is a miracle... it’s like five thirties set female-led features rolled into one huge Russian novel of a movie (shot on a shoestring in four weeks)." On Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an aggregated score of 83% based on 5 positive and 1 negative reviews.

In 1984 Sayles said Lady in Red was "the only movie" he wrote for Roger Corman "that I wish I had been given the chance of directing. It was a very ambitious script and it has become very popular in Europe but has fared hopelessly in the U.S. where it has had two title changes Bullets, Sin and Bathtub Gin and Kiss Me and Die. It has never caught on properly because the gangster genre is as dead as a doornail." Sayles did say the film "just broke even."

Although Sayles disliked the final film he later said it "still has some feeling and substance."

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.

Teague enjoyed working with Sayles and asked for Sayles to rewrite Alligator.