Handgun

Handgun (1983)

She said no...and she meant it!

Shortly after moving to Dallas, a young woman is raped at gunpoint. Her intense anger drives her to seek revenge, and she becomes a hunter on a vengeance mission.

Date of release
1983-05-12
TMDB
5.8 / 10 (18)
Runtime
1h 41m
Genres
Drama, Action, Crime
Director
Tony Garnett

Casting

Interesting facts

Handgun is a 1983 American vigilante film starring Karen Young, Clayton Day, and Suzie Humphreys. It was written and directed by Tony Garnett.

Production

After a successful career in British television, Tony Garnett moved to the United States in 1980, wanting a new challenge. He was assisted in the move by a development deal from the Ladd Company. Garnett wanted to make a film about gun violence, inspired as he was by the murder of John Lennon. He went to Dallas, Texas, to research and write the film.

Garnett found Karen Young in New York City, and the actors who played her parents in Boston. The rest of the cast were from Dallas. He used techniques he had developed in British drama, rehearsing and improvising with the actors for several months. "I didn't come here to make pat judgements about American culture", said Garnett. "I came to try to understand." Filming took place in 1981 in Dallas.

Karen Young said she was never given a script, and worked through improvisation. She called it "a personally gruelling experience but one I would not want to have missed. The rape scene took 14 hours to film in one day and it took me a long time to recover from it."

Garnett said EMI were "hands-off" until the final edit, but that changed once they saw the film. "The problem was that I had made a slow, thoughtful, and I hope considered character study, and they were expecting a commercial hit—an action movie with some sexy rape scenes. I hadn't delivered.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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