Film Deets:
Director: David Worth and Richard Robinson
Screenplay: B.W. Sandefur
Actresses: Leslie Uggams, Shelley Winters
Category: Systemic White Supremacy
Themes: Racism, Rape
Why do these screams matter?
Directed by David Worth and Richard Robinson, Poor Pretty Eddie (1975) is a difficult film to categorize. The story itself is relatively straightforward. While on vacation from her demanding tour schedule, singer Liz Wetherly (Leslie Uggams) breaks down in a forgotten southern town populated with racists. When Liz captures the attention of Eddie (Michael Christian), a wannabe country and western singer who is the kept paramour of aging burlesque queen Bertha (Shelley Winters), her life becomes a living nightmare as one abuse after another befalls her. And yet, the film’s frenetic tone which veers wildly from one subgenre to another – often within the same scene positions it as a unique outlier in the horror canon. While many reviews of the film refer to it as rape-revenge, this description is a bit of a misnomer. Liz neither gets the “bloody revenge” promised fans of the subgenre nor does she see her agency wholly restored even as she finally takes up arms against her oppressors. Instead, the film is arguably best categorized as exploitation. As Mark H. Harris notes in his review of the film, “This alternately hilarious and repugnant film drags in just about every type of exploitation there is: sexploitation, blaxploitation, hicksploitation, rape-and-revengesploitation, even a little bit of dogsploitation for good measure.” And certainly, those are components that fuel a majority of the film’s storytelling. But lurking beneath its lowbrow exploitative titillation is also an effective commentary on how systemic white supremacy creates explicitly unsafe spaces for women of color.
Admittedly, the line between exploitation flicks and auteur filmmaking is a blurry one (Hawkins 20). While no singular definition exists– indeed, there is even debate over whether exploitation is a genre of film or a label– these films frequently feature excessive images of sex and violence and taboo themes, all of which Poor Pretty Eddie has in abundance (Roche). Notable for its film festival premiere in which it earned “a standing booing ovation,” Poor Pretty Eddie is a strange hybrid of fetishization and experimental filmmaking, the tone of which leaves audiences discombobulated just as much as does the narrative (Myers). It is this state of imbalance that informs my reading of this film’s screams. While the 1970s saw strides made by feminist organizations toward gender equality, the movement overwhelmingly privileged white, middle-class voices (Craig 7). In the book The Injustices of Rape: How Activists Responded to Sexual Violence, 1950–1980, Catherine O. Jacquet notes that Black feminists worked to position rape “at the intersection of the black freedom and women’s liberation movements,” arguing that “true racial justice included an analysis of patriarchal oppression, while true gender justice included an analysis of racism and white supremacy” (2). It is this tension that the film both engages with and exploits.
Our first scream comes as Liz is savagely raped by Eddie. Upon finding him in her bed, Liz attempts to forcibly remove him from her bedroom as he responds with physical and sexual violence.
On its face, Liz’s scream is an instinctual response to being hit by Eddie. But it is also the only moment where Liz is provided a space of verbal autonomy to respond to the violence being perpetrated against her. This is important because the rest of the scene places the violence of the rape in conversation with seduction in some truly disturbing ways. Liz’s scream punctuates the moment when the film switches gears and adopts a hybrid exploitation/arthouse sensibility such that it becomes a marker not only of the film’s narrative shift but of Liz’s loss of agency. As the rape scene plays out, the violence is intercut with images of rednecks cheering on two dogs mating as the sounds in both scenes are drowned out by a stereotypical love song. Equally disturbing, we see Liz’s hands move slowly down Eddie’s back before she scratches him violently. This merging of seduction with rape is horrific because it suggests that while Liz actively resists, there is a part of her that is enjoying Eddie’s advances. Indeed, a version of the film, Heartbreak Motel, edits the rape to downplay the violence and makes Liz appear as an active participant in the encounter. Such a framing suggests Liz is not wholly deserving of audience sympathy which, in turn, contributes to a systemic devaluing of Black women’s experiences. This tension between violence and seduction arguably begins when Liz first finds Eddie in her bed but the dialogue between the two suggest that though he is unwanted, Liz is more annoyed than she is afraid. Her scream marks the moment when she realizes that Eddie is not just a buffoon and nuisance but an actual threat. It is also the last time that her response to Eddie regarding his abuse is audible.
And yet, it is not the rape that silences Liz but the reaction of another woman. In the aftermath of the assault, Liz confides in Bertha hoping that the older woman will help her escape Eddie. Instead, Bertha dismisses Liz’s pain and pulls no punches about where her loyalty resides saying, “If push comes to shove, honey, I’ll stand up in any courtroom and I’ll say how innocent poor little Eddie is and what a vicious Black little bitch you are” (40:19). Not only does this response revictimize Liz by completely dismissing her trauma, but its callous invocation of race reflects horrific truths about how Black rape victims have historically been treated. Accurate data concerning rape during the early 1970s is highly unreliable for reasons that include differences in how states defined the crime, reluctance to report, and cultural norms that privileged silence (Russell and Howell 693). But what is known is that for Black women, rape has many of its historical roots grounded in slavery where enslaved women had no legal recourse against their assailants (“Reconstruction in America”). This legislated lack of agency continued on in the Jim Crow era where some state laws regarding rape only applied to white women (Prather et. al, 254). And today, the National Black Women’s Justice Institute notes that Black women remain “disproportionately at risk for sexual violence” and estimate that “1 in 5 Black women are survivors of rape” (“Black Women, Sexual Assault”). Bertha’s comment highlights the privilege both women understand that she has as a white woman, particularly in relation to the justice system.
For Black women, the legal system has never been an equitable way to achieve justice, and this historical fact underscores our next scream. Having escaped Eddie, Liz tries to report the abuse she has endured to Sheriff Orville (Slim Pickens). After an inquisition in which she is forced to describe the sexual violence in minute detail, she is taken to a bar where a kangaroo court is convened under the watchful eye of Judge Floyd (Dub Taylor).
Dragged into the bar and forced– quite literally– to lay the scars of her abuse bare, Liz’s trauma is turned into a spectacle. Her vulnerability and isolation are highlighted as the camera pans to the sea of white faces, both leering (men) and emotionless (women), who surround her. As the Judge and Sheriff first salivate over the intimate details of the rapes she is forced to keep reliving, they then demand to see physical proof by ripping her shirt and leaving her exposed to the crowd. Liz’s scream represents a trauma reaction to these events but it also underscores her understanding that, for her, safety is an illusion. Despite her fame and economic privilege, she still lacks access to institutional structures of protection. But while certainly fueled by terror, her scream is also a reflection of shame she is actively forced to internalize. As her shirt is ripped and no one intervenes, Liz realizes that she is at the mercy of a group of people who don’t see her as human but as an object with which to toy. Even Eddie’s attempt to intervene and cover Liz stems less from his desire to help her than it does from his need to perform chivalrousness as part of the fictional script he has created for himself about his “relationship” with Liz. Her scream is an acknowledgement that no one in the room considers her an equal and suggests a deep regret at ever thinking her achievements and successes were a buffer to racism.
Though the scene is certainly objectively exploitative, it also mirrors the role race and gender play in the pursuit of justice. Not only are Black women more likely “to be victims of rape than are white women,” but they are also more likely to be “re-victimized by the judicial system” (Hale and Matt). Published the same year as Poor Pretty Eddie, Carol Bohmer and Audrey Blumberg’s examination of the treatment of rape victims within the courtroom reveals how misogyny and ignorance conspired at the time to nullify the experiences of rape survivors, noting that one judge refused to believe any rape allegations not accompanied by overt bruising saying, “a hostile vagina will not admit a penis” (398). Combine that with another judge dismissing the experiences of a Black female rape victim by saying, “With the Negro community, you really have to redefine rape. You never know about them,” and you get a fairly accurate look at the privileging of patriarchal whiteness within the justice system upon which the film seems to comment (Hale and Matt).
The film’s finale, which finds Liz forced to participate in a marriage ceremony with Eddie, further elucidates the racial and gender disparities Liz is navigating. While the ending has been described as revenge fulfillment, the moment lacks the overt agency that marks other rape-revenge narratives. Liz does not incite the bloodbath that occurs at the wedding, rather this honor belongs to Keno (Ted Cassidy) who is exacting revenge against Eddie for his murder of Keno’s dog, but she does profit from it. After the Sheriff, Judge, and Eddie are gunned down, Liz finally picks up a gun and shoots the dying Eddie as Bertha’s distorted screams play against Liz’s rendition of “Amazing Grace” that opened the film. That her earned moment of vengeance comes framed by the tears of a white woman and is only possible through the assistance of a white man is a tragic commentary on how justice is very rarely blind.
Works Cited
“Black Women, Sexual Assault, and Criminalization.” National Black Women’s Justice Institute, 12 Apr. 2021.
Bohmer, Carol, and Audrey Blumberg. “Twice Traumatized: The Rape Victim and the Court.” Judicature, vol. 58, no. 8, March 1975, p. 391-399. HeinOnline.
Craig, Maxine Leeds. Ain’t I a Beauty Queen?: Black Women, Beauty, and the Politics of Race. Oxford University Press, 2002.
Hale, Chelsea and Meghan Matt. “The Intersection of Race and Rape Viewed through the Prism of a Modern-Day Emmett Till.” American Bar Association, 16 July 2019.
Harris, Mark H. “Poor Pretty Eddie (AKA Black Vengeance AKA Redneck County) (1975).” Black Horror Movies, Accessed 27 October 2022.
Hawkins, Joan. “Sleaze Mania, Euro-Trash, and High Art.” Film Quarterly (ARCHIVE), vol. 53, no. 2, 2000, pp. 14-29.
Jacquet, Catherine O. The Injustices of Rape: How Activists Responded to Sexual Violence, 1950–1980. UNC Press Books, 2019.
Myers, Steven. “Poor Pretty Eddie Should Offend Local Residents.” Red and Black, May 27, 1975.
Prather, Cynthia, et al. “Racism, African American Women, and Their Sexual and Reproductive Health: A Review of Historical and Contemporary Evidence and Implications for Health Equity.” Health Equity. 2018 Sep 24;2(1):249-259.
“Reconstruction in America: Racial Violence after the Civil War, 1865-1876.” Equal Justice Initiative, Accessed 22 Oct. 2022.
Russell, Diana E. H. and Nancy Howell. “The Prevalence of Rape in the United States Revisited.” Signs, vol. 8, no. 4, 1983, pp. 688–95.
