1976 brought us The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane, starring a very young Jodie Foster, in a performance that is required to carry the film. The 13 year old pulls it off with panache. Foster plays Rynn, who recently moved with her father to a village on the seaside east coast, probably somewhere in Massachusetts or Rhode Island. It opens on Halloween night and carries through the fall and winter.
Where is her father? That's the question. The property manager is a woman all too eager to know, but is belligerent about it, rude, and pushes Foster to ridiculous points of frustration. Her son, a reptilian Martin Sheen, fresh off of Badlands, is a good looking dude who the town knows is no good. As in perverted no-good, and has designs on young Rynn.
Little Girl was terribly mis-marketed as a horror film, like "anyone who goes into this little girl's home, DOESN'T COME OUT!!" type of thing. Suspenseful it is, and all the cast members raise the material to the next level. Rynn is uber-intelligent, but not so smart that she doesn't need someone to understand and even help her try to keep her life on the straight and narrow with dark happenings accumulating in the periphery. That's where Mario comes in; a terrific teenage Scott Jacoby, and the two lean on each other through a growing storm of incidents. You don't fear them as "homicidal" as some reviewers put it back in '76, you identify with them, and wish that those around them didn't have such negative intentions.
Little Girl is not a Halloween film. It's not even a horror film. It's a lightly suspenseful character study, that deserves re-assessment to a certain extent.
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