The Lady in Red (1979 film)


The Lady in Red is a 1979 American action-drama romantic film directed by Lewis Teague and starring Pamela Sue Martin and Robert Conrad. It is an early writing effort of John Sayles who became better known as a director in the 1980s and 1990s.
Quentin Tarantino called it "my candidate for most ambitious film ever made at Roger Corman’s New World Pictures... Not only do I think this thirties era epic... is Sayles best screenplay, I also think it’s the best script ever written for an exploitation movie."

Premise

The film tells a 1930s' crime story of a poor farmer's daughter who leaves for Chicago, where she is sent to prison, serves as prostitute, falls in love with notorious criminal John Dillinger and finally tries bank robbery.

Cast

The soundtrack of this film is notable as the first film score composed by James Horner, who became one of the best known film score composers in Hollywood.
Teague recalls, "I was given that script and told to go with it. I didn't really have a chance to mold or change it. It was very socially conscious for an action picture about the Great Depression. I had 20 days to shoot it, and three to edit and a budget of less than a million."
John Sayles later said the film "didn't turn out the way I wanted because they just didn't have the budget to make the movie right. I wanted that to be a real breathless, '30s, Jimmy Cagney everybody-talking-fast type movie. It turned out a little more like Louis Malle. Different movies have different speeds."

Release

The film was not a big success at the box office. Roger Corman re-released it in 1980 under the title Guns, Sin and Bathtub Gin, but it did not fare much better.
On December 17, 2010, Shout! Factory released the title on DVD, packaged as a double feature with Crazy Mama as part of the Roger Corman Cult Classics collection.