Born Innocent (1974)

[StevePulaski]

Born Innocent (1974)
Directed by: Donald Wrye

Moments before the controversial rape scene in Born Innocent.

Rating: ★★½

Like most made-for-TV films, Born Innocent might have faded into complete obscurity, but after controversy following its depiction of a teenage girl being raped by fellow teenage girls, the film picked up strong traction nationwide. NBC, the original network that aired the film, eventually edited it, removing the rape-scene entirely during rebroadcasts, but that didn't stop a lawsuit against the network following a copycat-incident with a nine-year-old girl and a soda bottle.

This whirlwind of controversy and tragic, real-life rape worked to establish the "Family Viewing" and "safe harbor" hours in the United States in the 1970s, which involved airing risque or more adult material after the hour of 10:00pm by before 6:00am. I write this still in shock not necessarily because of all the trouble this film wound up causing, but because somebody tried to make a "women in prison" film on TV networks for reasons I still can't unearth.

The film revolves around Linda Blair's Chris Parker, a fourteen-year-old runaway who is eventually sentenced to a girls' juvenile detention center, which also serves as a reformed school for young deviants. While never explicitly revealed, it's a bit-more than hinted at that Chris comes from an physically and verbally abusive household because of her father (Richard Jaeckel). In the detention center, however, Chris tries to operate in a quiet manner, which proves difficult given how frequently the other girls want to harass her. There's a lot of lesbian hookups in the prison, but few so violent and disgraceful as when Chris is manhandled onto the ground by a group of her peers and raped with the handle of a plunger.

The entire incident causes Chris to withdraw more, with her social worker Emma Lasko (Allyn Ann McLerie) not aiding her in trying to discern her family situation or the rape that occurred on the detention center's grounds. What screenwriter Gerald Di Pego gets very right about his portrayal of a young girl, who not only loses her innocence but is trapped in an ugly, dangerous environment, and that is how hopeless the entire situation is for her. Though Born Innocent is unmistakably not even close to being on the same plain as those classic, vicious "women in prison" films from the 1970s, by TV-movie standards, it is indeed a graphic and occasionally daunting look at a seldom explored facet of the population.

Linda Blair, who couldn't have been a hotter commodity than when this film was released, barely a year after The Exorcist, shows how much she can do with so little, and how effective she can act when a film is largely reliant on her abilities and convictions. She nails her role in a sea of other, admittedly lesser roles that aren't granted half as much time as her's.

Born Innocent still feels like it's a bit too tasteful in some of its sequences, which is almost inevitable when it comes to a TV movie with a potentially graphic premise. Outside of the rape scene, which is remarkably effective in how horrifying it is, much of the film feels like a shadow of its potential had this not been confined to a two-hour timeslot on NBC in the mid-seventies, and had it not been for that particular scene and its subsequent impact, there's little to believe this film could've beared the longevity it currently has on its own merits.

Starring: Linda Blair, Richard Jaeckel, Kim Hunter, and Allyn Ann McLerie. Directed by: Donald Wrye.