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Mar 29, 2024 Web Exclusive By Austin Trunick

Kathleen Sullivan (Karen Young) is settling into her new world, having left her old life and Irish Catholic parents back in Boston for a job in Dallas. Home feels far away for the high school teacher, who now finds herself giving lessons on the many lawmen and folk heroes who populate the Lone Star State’s knotted history. A friendly colleague attempts to set her up with an eligible bachelor — a handsome young lawyer named Larry (Clayton Day) — who is obsessed with Texas’ gun-centric legacy. When Kathleen reiterates that she’s not interested in a relationship with him, Larry uses the threat of a gun to take what he wants by force.

Like Michael Winner with Death Wish (1974), Tony Garnett was a Brit who used the revenge film as commentary on a facet of American society, but from the opposite side of the political spectrum. Like Bronson’s Paul Kersey, Kathleen finds herself empowered with a gun in her hand, and it becomes a tool to exact justice where the legal authorities have come up short. Where Winner’s film glorifies a fantasy where the armed vigilante was an effective preventative measure against violent crime, Garnett’s Deep in the Heart (1983) has a much more skeptical attitude toward American gun culture.

In the aftermath of Kathleen’s assault, the police wave a white flag in their investigation: Larry is a respected lawyer, and the two of them had gone on dates, after all. (In court, the matter of consent would boil down to her word versus his.) The priest she turns to for spiritual support insists that she accept the attack as part of God’s unknowable plans — and suggests that the ordeal which Larry is about to face by being accused of rape is just as bad as what she went through. Under the weight of her trauma and the ludicrously insufficient response to the incident, Kathleen snaps, latching onto the object of Larry’s fascination: the handgun. She goes from being afraid of guns to being enrolled in the same gun club as Larry, where she trains in marksmanship and combat-style range exercises.

Like the hero of Death Wish, Kathleen begins the film as firearm-averse; where Paul Kersey had been a conscientious objector, she nervously admits to having never been near such a weapon before meeting Larry. But rather than use her first firearm to rid the streets of muggers, she uses her mastery of it to torment her attacker — first to emasculate Larry by showing him up on the range, and finally to put him in a situation where he feels as powerless as she was during his assault. She makes him fear what he loves the most.

While writer-director Tony Garnett stops short of outright condemning the American infatuation with firearms, the juxtapositions he presents paint the situation in an absurd light. Children applaud as a trick shooter juggles loaded revolvers amid a thick crowd at the State Fair; two salesmen openly demonstrate the killing qualities of various survival knives while seated in a fast food restaurant. A bowling ball of a man squats, tumbles, and repeatedly quick-draws his pistol from a holster tucked under an enormous pot belly, like he’s Roscoe Arbuckle playing the Axel Foley role in Beverly Hills Cop. A cover of “Gods, Guts and Guns” plays as the camera pans over an uncountable number of weapons on sale at a local gun shop. Photos of Texas’ most famous cowboys hang on the wall behind Kathleen as she lectures to her (racially diverse) classroom about the murder of the territory’s indigenous communities. When our heroine sets her final revenge plot into motion, her outfit first evokes a feminine, cowgirl style reminiscent of Doris Day’s Calamity Jane (1953) or Joan Crawford in Johnny Guitar (1954)—she soon unties the bandana about her neck and re-fashions it around her forehead like Rambo.

Everything about Deep in the Heart feels deliberate, and suggests that extra level of care from its writer-director. While sometimes it does come off as heavy-handed — close-ups of cheerleaders’ panties suggest Larry’s lust, but aren’t as gratuitous as the film’s original disco track “Make Me Come With You Tonight” (penned by Garnett himself) — there are numerous moments where the director lets scenes play out, not to advance the plot, but to establish a vibe. A sweet, inconsequential call between Kathleen and her parents; quiet lessons with various marksmanship instructors; an uninterrupted scene in which she shops for the ideal revolver, feeling their weight and listening to salesmen explain the virtues of different grip materials. This is not a long film at roughly 100 minutes, but it pauses to show the lead-in to and entirety of a 60-second “foxy boxing” match om a scene which doesn’t even involve our lead character. When Kathleen has her hair (Young’s actual locks) chopped off, we watch as the scissors slowly and methodically hack through her thick ponytail. Moments like these never feel like filler, however; they give Deep in the Heart an especially naturalistic feel.

Despite excellent performances from its two leads, Deep in the Heart more or less vanished on release in the early 1980s — but given how little has changed in the four decades that have passed since, the film still lands with full impact in 2024. Deep in the Heart joins an ever-growing list of overlooked films that have received a well-deserved second life from Fun City Editions, with strong picture and sound and a generous selection of extra features. Bonus materials include a new commentary by Erica Shultz and Chris O’Neill, an archival interview with the director, and a great essay by film scholar Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, who wrote the definitive book on this genre.

(www.funcityeditions.com/films/deepintheheart)