D2D entry #42: Abduction (1975, Joseph Zito)
(Featured in Dusk to Dawn #9.)
Abduction is a plainly scummy little hostage feature that would barely rate a footnote in exploitation-film history if not for that it kicked off the career of Joseph Zito, a guy who came to represent ’80s exploitation filmmaking in all its glory as perfectly as anyone this side of Sean Cunningham and George P. Cosmatos.
Well, that and the fact that its makers were the first to get their grubby mitts on the Patricia Hearst story. Consequently, it’s crafted with all the grace and urgency of a low-end made-for-TV potboiler, but with rape and boobs thrown in so that the 42nd-Street crowd doesn’t get too restless. Aside from the immediate vileness of using a tale of true-life debasement as impetus for sleazoid entertainment, there’s really nothing special about this. The leftist in me sees a quick flash of the jabbering reactionary streak that would later inform Zito’s Missing in Action and Invasion U.S.A. - not so much in the depiction of the surrogate SLA (a reactionary stance seems the only appropriate way to make this film, as a more sympathetic stance would look sad and foolish) but in the intimation that same-sex relations are somehow more debasing than rape.
Judith Marie-Bergan looks good out of her clothes and bears more than a passing resemblance to the real Hearst, but her performance (like the film) is all surface-level, and her conversion to her captor’s politics never convinces; if anything, her turnaround is symptomatic of the most unusual Magical Negro iteration I’ve seen in some time. Morgan Freeman will just fix your life and smile benignly, but one forced dose of dick from David Pendleton and you’re an instant smash-the-state radical. The shotgun Bergan wields at film’s end might as well be a big black cock.
Still, even the worst of films often has something to recommend it. The penultimate sequence of Abduction features the local police force converging on the hideout of the kidnappers intercut with Marie-Bergan and Pendleton fucking (consensually this time around, in what I think is supposed to qualify as a political epiphany). As the sequence spun on, cutting from the assembling police force to the rumpy-pumpy and back, I realized that I was essentially watching an embryonic version of the rising action at the finale of The Silence of the Lambs. Punchline’s the same, too. I know it’s not much, but it amused me all the same, and I’d be surprised if Demme (who certainly logged his time in the gutters of cinema) wasn’t at least aware of this film prior to his Lambs gig.
