The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane - 1976

Jodie Foster man! Jodie Foster is critically underrated. We knew from Silence of the Lambs that she was incredibly talented, and oddly enough she is not in a ton of movies, but this one is insane! So good.

Little Girl I will refer to as TLG in this blog. TLG is a slow burn, intensely written, simplistic story based on a story by Laird Koenig. Given how fucking great the dialogue in this, Laird Koenig should have been given a blank check to write any future screenplay about ANYTHING. I see he has a few credits on IMDB, and I'm going to see if the library has any of his other works.

TLG begins and we see a young, but extremely adult Jodie Foster as Rynn Jacobs. She lives in a small house with her father, a poet, and she is secret and secluded. In the beginning, we see the landlady coming by and her and Rynn have a contentious, haughty relationship. It is clear Rynn is hiding something, and they get in a spat leading to Rynn asking her to leave. When amateur magician Mario befriends Rynn, he begins to uncover some dark, mysterious secrets Rynn has, and one of them being the reason why Rynn's father hasn't been seen by anyone...

Yeah, so this is awesome. We are led into the story with an unreliable narrator, with mysterious and bizarre interactions, with secrets, with lies, with macabre darkness. Rynn is extremely well acted, extremely mature, and it is unfathomable that Jodie Foster was 12 turning 13 at the time of this filming. She is intense, layered, brilliant, talented, secretive, volumous. She is given a fantastic foil in Martin Sheen, a criminal with sadistic and perverted intent towards her. Then there's Mario, a friendly, slightly off-kilter weirdo with great nuance and a friendly, helpful character. The dialogue, as I said before, is so fantastically written that any of these guys are believable in full.

It's incredible to think that this was made, and it does feature some strong sexual themes for a 13 year old girl to go through. Martin Sheen straight up wants to rape her, and she has a sex scene with Mario, in which her nude breasts and butt are seen. That is a weird, disjointed part in the film, something which definitely did not need to be in the film and which was added on to try to appeal to the whole "exploitation" movement of the times. It's weird, and it didn't belong.

But the movie does belong. To the five star club.