This comes up especially with exploitation films — movies which by their nature are provocative and cross lines in an attempt to sell more tickets. Foster has mostly disowned the film due to a short and gratuitous nude scene that she felt pushed the exploitation too far. Foster, in her early teens at the time, was very obviously doubled by her much older sister which makes the nudity even more jarring and inconsistent within the otherwise grounded story. All these come together to give Foster a role that stretches her acting chops even further than Taxi Driver did in the same year. In the film Jodie Foster plays Rynn Jacobs, a young teen in small town Maine who finds herself beset upon by nosy neighbours seeking to upend her bohemian lifestyle as they become curious about her absent poet father. Both Martin Sheen and Jodie Foster had yet to have their career-defining roles, but both get a chance to flex their acting abilities tremendously in the film. Rynn is almost a polar opposite to Iris, the ingenue role in Taxi Driver which earned Foster her first Oscar nomination. Rynn is cold, determined and absolutely capable of taking care of herself. It takes other characters, even those on her side, a while to even begin to break her walls down.
Contribute to This Page
The Controversial and Provocative Exploitation Thriller The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane
Rynn Jacobs Foster is a 13 year-old girl who has just moved to a small Maine town with her poet father — except her father is never seen, always working behind a locked study door or sleeping upstairs. I was aware heading into the film that Koenig had originally wanted to adapt his novel as a play, and that intention is very obvious from the end result. Aside from a few brief scenes of Rynn headed down the main street, making a withdrawal from a bank, and so on, the overwhelming bulk of the action takes place in the two story house that her father has rented on the outskirts of town. In many films this would make the action feel static and frustrating; here it aids in creating a claustrophobic sense of dread.
Navigation menu
Sign In. Showing all 53 items. Jump to: Cameo 1 Spoilers First top-billed lead role in a major motion picture for actress Jodie Foster. In interviews, Jodie Foster usually refrains from saying which of her films are her least favorites, but she has let it slip that this movie isn't particularly one she is fond of, explaining, "When people are there to simply do a job they don't have any passion for, those are nearly always bad films.
The movie opens with Rynn lighting candles on her birthday cake, alone in her living room. The doorbell rings. She lights a cigarette, blows smoke around the room, and lets in Frank Hallet Martin Sheen , out trick-or-treating with his two little kids on Halloween. Martin Sheen has never been oilier. Foster is a preternaturally good kid actor. She plays Rynn as a brilliant loner, home-schooled by her father, taught to trust no one.
