The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane (1976)

Director: Nicholas Gessner
Writer: Laird Koenig, based on his novel
Stars: Jodie Foster, Martin Sheen, Alexis Smith, Mort Shuman and Scott Jacoby

Index: The First Thirty.

As of Smile Jenny, You’re Dead, it increasingly became clear that if Hollywood ever needed a precocious child actor in a non-children’s film, Jodie Foster was who they should hire. Echoes of a Summer was a statement of intent and Taxi Driver (and its Oscar nod) was a guarantee. She lives up to all that promise here by leading a psychological thriller over actors as worthy as Alexis Smith and Martin Sheen.

“Happy birthday,” she tells her reflection in the mirror. She’s turning thirteen and she’s on her own, dressed in a robe that looks ritual but which we later learn is Moroccan. She’s hardly a typical new teen. She listens to Chopin, reads Emily Dickinson and is studying Hebrew on LP records. She doesn’t go to school, but she has a joint account at the bank to cover her costs.

She’s Rynn Jacobs and she theoretically has a father, the published poet Lester Jacobs. He’s in his study translating or he’s in New York to see his publisher or he’s upstairs resting. If we don’t think that’s suspicious the first time, it’s not going to take us long to get there. Visitors bump into that immediately. They come to see Lester but he’s unavailable so they see Rynn.

Mostly it’s a problem for them. Rynn’s in a rental house, leased from Cora Hallet for three years, but her landlord breezes in just like she owns the place—which for once she does—and reshuffles the furniture while she waits to talk with Lester. It’s hard to tell which she dislikes most: that Lester never appears or that Rynn’s willing and able to stand up to her as if she’s an adult. That’s why Foster was cast.

Sometimes, though, it’s a problem for Rynn, like when Cora’s son Frank walks in, tramping mud all over her floor on Hallowe’en night, as uninvited and unwelcome as his mother a day later. He’s instantly creepy but gets creepier, touching her arms as she hands over birthday cake, asking personal questions and pointing out how pretty she is. She sees right through him, even before he slaps her ass.

This is the base dynamic for a while, until a fourth principal joins the story. Rynn is a new teenager thriving on her own, for reasons not yet explained, facing powerful and dangerous adults able to mess with that. Foster is exactly right, bitingly and believably capable.

It doesn’t help that everyone seems to want to warn her about Frank Hallet, from his mum to a local policeman, Officer Miglioriti. It looks like the whole town knows that he’s a pervert but Cora’s sway inside this local community is able to protect him and she chose to do that.

So we wonder where this will go. Will it turn into a battle of wills between Rynn and Cora, a precocious thirteen year old fresh name facing off against a Hollywood legend with thirty-five years of experience? Or will this become Frank pursuing a new victim in a psychosexual take on Home Alone? Either way, that’s Alexis Smith as a powerfully bitchy Cora and Martin Sheen as a dangerously creepy Frank, both opposite a burgeoning talent in Jodie Foster.

Well, Cora wants the jelly glasses that she’d left in the cellar, Rynn is very clear she doesn’t want her down there but Cora forces her way in, hauling up a door in the floor and holding it open with a prop. They’ve been sparring for control verbally all this time, so we might see this a physical manifestation of that.

Except that Cora screams and tries to climb out in horror, accidentally knocking away the prop. The cellar door thunders down on top of her head and suddenly she’s at the bottom of the cellar steps, as dead as a doornail. So that’s where we’re going.

I won’t spoil anything else, even though this happens less than half an hour in, except that there is a fourth character yet to arrive. That’s Mario Podesta, Officer Miglioriti’s nephew and amateur magician, who’s cycling past after the death of Cora Hallet and stops to help her with Cora’s car. He’s not complicit in this death, not that Rynn did anything wrong either, but they both dig themselves deeper and deeper.

The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane started out as a novel rather than a play, but it feels a lot like the latter, because of its small cast and few locations. Most of the movie unfolds in the house the Hallets let to the Jacobs and the core of the cast is only five actors deep. Everything else could have been dealt with off screen.

Surprising nobody at the time, this is clearly Jodie Foster’s show. Through her, Rynn is able to hold her own against both Cora and Frank (and Officer Miglioriti), in different ways, even if, once in a while, she needs a little help from Mario the Magician. She did an excellent job in Echoes of a Summer but that was little seen. This was released more widely, debuting in Cannes and rolling to theatres worldwide, so between it and Taxi Driver, she must have been able to choose her own roles going forward.

While it’s her show, she was working with a strong cast. Alexis Smith was a stage actress at this point with a Tony to her name but, before that, she’d acted with Bogart, Gable and Grant. Martin Sheen had only acted for a decade, but he had Badlands behind him, as well as a string of impactful TV movies, not least That Certain Summer and The Execution of Private Slovik.

Scott Jacoby, who plays Mario here, was also in That Certain Summer, playing the unknowing son of Sheen’s gay lover, so they already knew each other. He also led the cast in Bad Ronald, a further impactful TV movie. That leaves Mort Shuman, Officer Miglioriti, who was far better known as a songwriter than an actor. With his writing partner, Doc Pomus, they wrote many rock ’n’ roll hits you know by heart: A Teenager in Love, This Magic Moment, even Viva Las Vegas.

With such talent behind it, the script, by the author of the source novel, Laird Koenig, gains depth. It’s a drama talking up the capability of children to be independent. I haven’t told you a lot about the back story, but it’s a scenario to spark a discussion on children’s rights. It’s also a horror movie, the body in the cellar going all the way back to Edgar Allan Poe.

Above all, it’s a psychological thriller, with an adult predator, one who’s predilections are known to his community, honing in on a fresh victim as she’s becoming sexually aware. The later scene with Mario is ripe for debate, given he knows that she’s thirteen too, even if he’s not much older. The nude scene isn’t Foster, I should add; it’s her older sister Connie again.

All of that hinges on five actors and a script, most of all Jodie Foster. They all do it justice, all the way to Rynn’s calmness at the very end. While this is clearly a seventies movie, it holds up very well half a century on.