Gun crazy
Abel Ferrara on his gender-busting cult movie Ms .45

by MATTHEW HAYS

Over the phone from his New York office, cult director Abel Ferrara sounds, well, he sounds much like a character in an Abel Ferrara movie.

"Hey bro, what's up?" he asks. I ask him how his legendary cult movie, Ms .45, which involves a rape victim hell bent on revenge against all misogynist men, came about. "I got a script in the mail, y'know what I mean?" he says, through a thick New York accent. "Everyone who read it loved it, so I was like, 'Yeah, let's go.'"

I've called Ferrara to talk about the film, which garnered generally positive reviews during its initial '81 release but became a landmark in subsequent years, when it ran extensively as a midnight movie. "Yeah, I guess it took a while," says Ferrara. "But the cream always rises to the top, y'know what I'm saying?"

At the centre of Ms .45 is Zoë Tamerlis (then a wee 17 years old), a seamstress who works in New York's garment district. While heading home from her gruelling job, Tamerlis is raped in an alley. As she stumbles to her apartment, she finds it is being robbed, and the culprit overpowers her and rapes her too. This time, however, she manages to fight back, smacking him over the head with an iron, killing him. Traumatized by the events, Tamerlis then becomes a vigilante, dressing up in alluring outfits and baiting men on New York's mean streets. When men make sleazy passes at her, her response is simple: she kills them.

Radical chic

Ms .45 still holds up today as a radical film, in part because of its content but also because of Ferrara's solid and stylish direction. But Ferrara says the film wasn't entirely shocking to audiences when it first came out, perhaps an indication of how banal and homogenized cinema has become over the past 20 years. "Back in those days," says Ferrara, "you had The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Last House on the Left. There were a lot of gory and violent movies."

What was different, for many critics and the filmmaker alike, was the film's gender politics. But that element of the film became eclipsed, as John Cassavetes had also just released a gal-with-gun movie, Gloria, the Oedipal gangster movie that starred his wife Gena Rowlands (who earned an Oscar nomination for her performance). "Don't get me wrong," says Ferrara, "I loved Gloria. But I thought we did more with the theme of women taking revenge than they did."

Ferrara says one of his main influences has always been Roman Polanski. And he acknowledges that much of the success of Ms .45 came about because of its star, Tamerlis. "I was surprised at the time, one critic said that we made her mute in the script because she couldn't act. That was crazy."

The director's impostor

Ferrara and Tamerlis had a strained relationship after the success of Ms .45. "She always acted like she wrote, directed and did the whole thing herself," he says. Confusion followed, as Tamerlis, then romantically involved with a man in his 70s, headed to Los Angeles to try and get some work out of her newfound notoriety. "They would wander around in a school bus, with a sign on it that said 'Ms .45,'" says Ferrara. "They would go around meeting with all these people, asking them for money for their new project. They met with Coppola and Warren Beatty, among others. And he kept claiming that he was me! She turned off a lot of people that way. For me, it was really strange, because when I went out to Hollywood later a lot of people thought that they'd already met me."

Ferrara and Tamerlis did collaborate again, however, on his '92 film Bad Lieutenant. Tamerlis wrote the script and played a nun who is brutally raped [no: Tamerlis played the Lieutenant's heroin connection and guide. - RL]. But Tamerlis found a sad end, dying after years of substance abuse. "That's what happens when you burn the candle at both ends and up the middle," says a philosophical Ferrara. "She didn't get the healthy breakfast and the vacation. She died in Paris. Frankly, she lived a long life considering how she lived."

As for Ferrara, he's now in preproduction on his latest, a prequel to his '90 gangster film King of New York. And typically, he's already giving me a sales pitch about the movie. "This is going to be amazing," he says. "Just wait. This'll be my greatest movie ever!"

Ms .45 plays this weekend at the Cinéma du Parc. See repertory listings for showtimes.