Switchblade Sisters
USA 1975
Reviewed by Charlotte O'Sullivan
Synopsis
Our synopses give away the plot in full, including surprise twists.
Lace is the leader of all-female LA gang the Dagger Debs. Boyfriend Dom leads the all-male Silver Daggers. New girl Maggie joins the Debs after proving her strength by humiliating Lace's best friend Patch. Maggie and Lace become firm friends. Dom is also intrigued, and goes to Maggie's house, where he rapes her.
Dom's arch rival is Crabs. When Crabs shoots Dom's brother Guido and rapes Guido's girlfriend, Maggie devises a plan to ambush him. Meanwhile, a jealous Patch has been turning Lace against Maggie. Lace tells Dom she is pregnant and he tells her to get an abortion. Lace tips off Crabs about the ambush, making him promise to kill Maggie, not Dom. Crabs kills Dom and Lace gets punched in the stomach, losing the baby.
Maggie wants to avenge Dom's death, and hooks up with old friend Muff, leader of a black feminist movement. Together the two groups ambush Crabs in the street. Maggie wants him alive so she can find out who betrayed the ambush. Patch kills Crabs before he can talk. Maggie is now suspicious. She and Lace have a stand-off. Lace is killed. The police arrest the gang but Maggie promises she and the Jezebels will be back.
Review
In Switchblade Sisters director Jack Hill - best known for the blaxploitation classic Foxy Brown - gives us fighting females (all young, slim, pretty and given to baring a breast or two), lesbian wardens (old, fat and ugly) and two rapes which barely cause a stir in the narrative pond. What's astonishing is that by the film's end Hill has presented us with something so fresh that such cartoon titillation seems irrelevant.
Through Lace and Maggie Hill provides us with two models of femininity. Lace is tied to the past: sadistic and bitchy with women (she's happy for the Debs to be sexually exploited), masochistic with males. Maggie treats all the girls as equals, calls into question the gang's satellite status and puts female friendship before romance. While Maggie and Lace fight to the death, the film itself doesn't pit them against each other. For all her faults, we feel closest to Lace - as angelic as Margaret O'Brien, as immaculately dressed as The Great Rock n' Roll Swindle's Cat Woman. Her squirmy, honey-and-lemon voice zigzags between spite, panic and self-doubt and when she loses her baby it's genuinely gut-wrenching. Everything about her is regressive and weak, but also human.
Maggie is the uber-femme, one of a new bright, beautiful and political breed determined to revamp (quite literally). She painstakingly explains that her new name for the gang - The Jezebels - comes "from the dictionary". A cut to the sneering Patch says it all - what kind of person reads a dictionary! We never find out. We never get inside Maggie - never see her home, never see where she comes from. She's one step ahead of us all.
In allowing us two very different but equally appealing heroines, Hill avoids the polarisation we've come to expect from indie teen-girl movies, setting 'good' rebellious girls against 'bad', old-fashioned bitches (Babymother and Girls Town being recent examples). Another difference is that in such films success is measured in terms of creative fulfilment. Maggie has nothing to show except her violent acts, performed on behalf of the group. The 80s taught feminists to value individual, artistic expression above all else. Switchblade Sisters has dated horribly, which is what makes it so refreshing. This is a film with all the itchily sweet passion of a Shangri-Las anthem, cranked up to full volume.
Credits
- Producer
- John Prizer
- Screenplay
- F.X. Maier
- Based on a story by
- Jack Hill
- John Prizer
- F.X. Maier
- Director of Photography
- Stephen Katz
- Editor
- Mort Tubor
- Production Designers
- Robinson Royce
- B.B. Neel
- Music
- Medusa
- ©Centaur Pictures Inc
- Production Company
- a Centaur Releasing presentation
- Executive Producers
- Frank Moreno
- Jeff Begun
- Production Manager
- Don Heitzer
- Location Manager
- Nicole Scott
- Assistant Directors
- Don Heitzer
- Charles Walker
- Script Supervisor
- Tina Hirsch
- Casting Director
- Geno Havens
- 2nd Unit Photography
- Tak Fujimoto
- Camera Operator
- Tak Fujimoto
- Special Effects
- Greg Auer
- Costume Designer
- Jodie Tillen
- Wardrobe
- Linda Serijan
- Make-up
- Jerry Soucie
- Title Design
- Bill Levey
- Opticals
- Cinefx
- Songs Written by
- Chuck Day
- Richard Person
- Songs Performed by
- Melanie Clark
- Jesse Gomez
- Music Editor
- Milt Lustig
- Sound Mixer
- Don Jones
- Sound Effects
- Larry Tubor
- Stunt Co-ordinator
- Bob Minor
- Cast
- Robbie Lee
- Lace
- Joanne Nail
- Maggie
Monica Gayle- Patch
- Asher Brauner
- Dominic
- Chase Newhart
- Crabs
- Marlene Clark
- Muff
- Kitty Bruce
- Donut
- Janice Karman
- Bunny
- Don Stark
- Hook
- Don Marino
- Guido
- Helene Nelson
- Cherry
- Bill Adler
- Fingers
- Paul Lichtman
- Mr Clutch
- J.S. Johnson
- Principal Weasel
- Kate Murtagh
- Mom Smackley
- Bob Minor
- Parker
- Clint Young
- Rizzo
- Frances Williams
- Haiti
- Michael Miller
- Hammer
- Roy Engel
- Jobo
- Jerii Woods
- Toby
- Georgia Lee
- Lace's mother
- Betty McGuire
- Tonic
- Jack Lukes
- Fred
- Jeannie Epper
- May Boss
- matrons
- John Voldstad
- Runt
- Robert Bryan Berger
- Einstein
- Roger Richman
- gang guy 1
- Ninette Bravo
- Ginny
- Gay Guldstrand
- Gay
- Jane Darbyshire
- Sherri Brussa
- Charlotte De Orlow
- Tina Christine
- Patti A. Nolton
- Debby Insinger
- The Jezebels
- Certificate
- 18
- Distributor
- Downtown Pictures
- tbc feet
- 86 minutes 5 seconds
- Colour by
- CFI