Nicolas Gessner’s The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane (1976) is a genre-crossing oddity: part low-key thriller, part macabre fable, part coming-of-age romance, and even part PSA on children's rights. It also features an overlooked early leading role for Jodie Foster, who carries the movie and foreshadows the quality of her career in the years ahead.
Based on the 1974 novel of the same name by Laird Koenig, who also wrote the screenplay, the film follows a 13-year-old girl named Rynn (Jodie Foster) who begins renting a house in a small seaside town, allegedly with her poet father. Everyone in town is curious about her, mostly because they never see her father, who is always conveniently sleeping or busy writing and not to be disturbed when visitors drop in. In actuality, the precocious Rynn is hiding the fact that she is an orphan with a dark backstory, living on her own and just trying to lay low and get through adolescence without the skeletons in her closet being uncovered, especially the ones she keeps locked in the basement. The biggest threats to her freedom and wellbeing are her racist landlady Mrs. Hallet (Alexis Smith), who has the whole town in her back pocket (for some real old-fashioned WASP bigotry look no further than this woman’s hatred of Italians), and her pedophile son Frank (a particularly slimy Martin Sheen), a known creep who makes lecherous advances toward Rynn almost immediately. However, Rynn finds a friend and confidante in an earnest local boy named Mario (Scott Jacoby), who tries to help her protect her secret and her independence.
Despite being eclipsed by her now-iconic role as Iris in Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976)–released only three months before The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane–Foster’s performance has a depth that makes the entire film work. A role like this requires a display of intellect and confidence for one to believe that Rynn is capable of living on her own, while also just enough vulnerability to remind the viewer that she is, indeed, still a child. Foster is quite impressive at this; every time she succeeds in convincing a snooping, suspicious adult that her homelife is normal there’s just enough under the surface of her expression to suggest that she’s also struggling to convince herself of her safety. There is a version of such a story in which a character like Rynn is a bad seed, callous, and conniving. Foster, rather, portrays her as a sympathetic survivor of circumstance, forced to dodge predators that make up adult society, from child abusers (both outside and inside one’s family) to landlords that exploit people’s precarity and hold domestic safety hostage.
The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane screens tonight, October 16, at Alamo Drafthouse Downtown Brooklyn on 35mm as part of the series “Weird Wednesday” and as an encore to our “Kill Yr Landlords” program.
