Diane Lane in Lady Beware (1987). She was 21 when this film was lensed. The quality of the linked clip is mediocre at best, but I have never seen a better one. For reasons unknown to me, there doesn’t seem to be a good quality version of this film available on consumer video.
I guess it’s a crap movie, although I haven’t seen it. It was filmed in Pittsburgh and Lane’s co-stars are a whole bunch of people you never heard of. And the plot sounds awful, “A Pittsburgh window dresser gets tough with a deranged lab technician who bugs her.” The reviewer for the not-yet-failing New York Times said, “Karen Arthur, the director, seems to have given up trying to understand what is going on, for which you can’t blame her.”
But gimme a break – crap, schmap! It’s Diane Lane topless at 21 in good light! (Sample below). The pre-failing New York Times, in dissing the film, also gave the best reason to watch it: “Much of this movie is devoted to stalking Miss Lane. He talks dirty to her on the telephone, breaks into her mailbox, peeps at her taking a bath (a sight worth the peeping, not only for Miss Lane’s endowments but also because she bathes by candlelight and sips champagne between scrubs) and at her lovemaking, and commits other nuisances.”
No! Not the dreaded “other nuisances”!
Wow, Creepy Dolf Lungrin is a lucky dude!
Watching PBS in the early eighties. An adaptation of an Edith Wharton short story whose title now escapes me. Young Diane Lane is seduced and abandoned after becoming pregnant. A topless scene of Miss Lane still lives in my memory, though now locked away forever as she was around 15 at the time.
From Wikipedia:
“Arthur did not approve of the film’s final cut, which she said was re-edited by the producers to appeal to the exploitation crowd. “[Some distributors asked for] more sex, so they took outtakes of Diane Lane standing there naked and incorporated them into the film,” she told The Los Angeles Times ahead of the film’s release. “To me, that’s exploitative. They printed up negatives where I never said print. I, as a female director, would never exploit a woman’s body and use it as a turn-on.” Arthur added that she did not remove her name from the film because she thought it would be unfair to the actors, who can’t remove their names from the final product.”
We haven’t heard the other side of the story. Best guess: they approved a script and she delivered something very different. They considered it unmarketable, so they assembled something piecemeal on the fly. That’s only a guess. It would be interesting to see the script they finally approved in 1986 versus the film she actually turned in.
Either way, that’s certainly a sad tale for her, because she spent seven or eight years working on that film. It was originally slated to start shooting in September of 1979. After all that time, it was not the film she fought for.
The sad things about her complaint:
(1) If you think about it, the NY Times basically said that the extensive Diane Lane nudity was the only sight worth seeing in the film – and she wanted less of it in there!
(2) It was the exact opposite reaction that she had to the critical reception to The Mafu Cage, where the feminists complained about her portrayal of women, and she basically responded, “Hey, I’m making an exploitation film here.” I wonder if, based on that, she was bending over backwards NOT to make Lady Beware an exploitation film, in which case it’s even sadder that they took the picture away from her and made it one.
Whatever the reason, Lady Beware was her last theatrical film, and it has been 32 years now, so the Hollywood money boys obviously have long memories. It didn’t seem to affect her ability to get TV work. She went on to work steadily for decades on the small screen.