Handgun

Garnett's first American movie, set in Dallas, is a curious amalgam of 'concerned' docudrama and Lipstick-style exploitation. Kathleen (Young), a nice Irish Catholic girl from Boston, squares up to the cowboy charmer (Day) who dates her and then rapes her at gunpoint. Unfortunately for the film's sexual politics, Kathleen opts for rough justice the Charles Bronson way, arming herself with a new 'masculinised' image (cropped hair, combat gear), a handgun and sharpshooting skills, before luring the baddie out to a midnight face-off and dumping him symbolically outside the County Courthouse. Garnett is clearly as seduced as his heroine by Wild West frontier mythology and life in the Lone Star state. Misfiring as serious social commentary, this ends up, beneath its veneer of casual naturalism, as a pseudo-feminist vigilante movie that celebrates the attitudes it affects to deplore.