Town Without Pity (1961)

I haven't watched it yet. But it's a rape movie.

In 1960, four American servicemen stationed in Germany rape a high school girl.

You know how, in Judgement at Nuremberg, Werner Klemperer (Hogan's Hero's Colenol Klink) played a Nazi war criminal? In this movie, one of the rapists is played by Frank Sutton who went on to play Sergeant Carter on Gomer Pyle, USMC.

Kirk Douglas plays their defense attorney. Four years earlier, he did the same thing in Kubrick's Paths of Glory. And E.G. Marshall played the prosecutor, like he was in Compulsion two years earlier.

I don't know if these things had anything to do with the casting.

Look at the progression of Jodie Foster's early career. First, she played Eddie's Peppermint Patty-like friend in The Courtship of Eddie's Father. Then (two years later) she played essentially the same character in Martin Scorcese's Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore which must be what led to her playing the child prostitute Iris in Scorcese's next movie, Taxi Driver. You don't think The Courtship Eddie's Father launched her on the path to success? It's a shame her brother, Buddy, didn't play a more distinctive character in Mayberry RFD.

I had watched the very beginning of Town Without Pity. The Army wants to smooth things over with the German town the military base is located near by getting the rapists sentenced to death. Death sentences for anything short of murder is a terrible idea. In this case, it would just give rapists a compelling reason to murder their victims since they're likely to be executed anyway and it would make them less likely to be caught.

Clarence Darrow, writing about the Leopold & Loeb case (you can see in Compulsion), noted that Illinois had made kidnapping punishable by death and the result was that every person kidnapped in the state during those years was murdered.

Look at The Onion Field. Two petty criminals somehow manage to take a couple of cops hostage. Thinking they'll be executed under the Lindbergh Law anyway, they murder one cop--the other gets away.

In the 1700's, Samuel Johnson suggested that Britain could save lives by ending the death penalty for highway robbery.