By Erin Free
FilmInk salutes the work of creatives who have never truly received the credit they deserve. In this installment: director Karen Arthur, who helmed Legacy, The Mafu Cage and Lady Beware.
The near obscene under-representation of women when it comes to film directing is constantly staggering, as is everything that grows unfortunately out of that, such as the paltry number of women to be nominated for Oscars in the Best Director category, the miniscule number of females that have helmed big-budget studio pictures, and the number of female members in, for instance, The Directors Guild Of America. This is, of course, slowly, surely starting to change, and not a minute too soon. But considering how relatively few female directors there are, it is even more staggering when you consider how many of them are under-celebrated and never really paid their appropriate due. For every Sofia Coppola, Greta Gerwig, Lina Wertmuller or Patty Jenkins, there are scores of female directors deserving of equal fame and appreciation. We have featured several of these gifted, under-celebrated female directors (and writers too) in the Unsung Auteurs column (check the list at the bottom of this page), and we would now like to add the fascinating Karen Arthur to this esteemed but criminally unheralded list.
If you’re looking for a feminist icon in the American film industry, you’d be hard-pressed to find a better one than Karen Arthur. Though now aged 82 and retired from the film industry, Arthur was incredibly active from the mid-seventies right up to her final screen credit in 2008, and was in fact only the third woman (after Dorothy Arzner and Ida Lupino) to become a member of The Directors Guild Of America, a true feat in itself, and one which should see Arthur held up for far greater admiration whenever talk turns to female pioneers in filmmaking.
Born in 1941 in Omaha, Nebraska, Karen Arthur (born Karen Jensen) eventually moved to Hollywood where she first pursued a career in dancing, which then led to film and television acting. Arthur made her acting debut on the TV series The Monkees in 1966, and then fulfilled something of an eventually broken dream when she appeared in the 1967 feature film A Guide For The Married Man, which was directed by her dance idol, Gene Kelly. “He was a miserable prick who treated everybody terribly,” Arthur revealed to Melbourne-based journalist Alexandra Heller-Nicholas in Filmint earlier this year. “He just broke my heart because of course I was a dancer, and oh my God, to work with Gene Kelly! Well, he was disgusting.”
Despite the sourness of her debut feature performance, Karen Arthur was far from deterred, and the young actress scored a number of roles afterward, both on TV (on shows like The Wild, Wild West, The Big Valley, That Girl, Get Smart, Mannix, Ironside, and The Streets Of San Francisco) and in film (1969’s Winning, 1970’s Like It Is). Karen Arthur made her directorial debut in 1975 with the low-budget drama Legacy, which was adapted from a one-woman stage play written by and starring playwright and groundbreaking feminist performance artist Joan Hotchkis. The film happened after Arthur met focus puller (and eventual cinematographer) John Bailey and his wife and editor Carol Littleton while she was working as a DGA trainee on Arthur Penn’s Night Moves, with the three approaching Hotchkis about adapting her play for the screen. Reprising her stage role, Hotchkis literally unravels before the audience’s eyes as Bissie Hapgood, a wealthy Texas woman who slowly, tragically deteriorates into madness over the course of one long day, devolving into both shocking bigotry and surprising sexual behaviour. Intimate and strikingly confrontational, the film remains wholly obscure and difficult to see to this day, but it set Karen Arthur up for a truly original and highly idiosyncratic filmmaking career.
From the decidedly underground work that was Legacy, Arthur made her initial move into directing for television (which would eventually form the bedrock of her career) by helming an episode of the high-profile TV mini-series sequel Rich Man, Poor Man Book II in 1976. This, however, was no indication of what would come next, with Arthur taking the reins on 1978’s The Mafu Cage, one of the strangest and most arresting (and now largely forgotten) films of the decade. In an acting head-to-head that should have seen Karen Arthur forever lionised for her inspired casting, Lee Grant and Carol Kane (yes, Lee Grant and Carol Kane!) play sisters (yes, sisters!) in this wacked out psychodrama adapted from Eric Wesphel’s play. Grant is the stable, reliable older sister Ellen, who is charged with looking after Kane’s artist Cissy, the younger sister dealing with a raft of mental health issues. Stuck together in the large, sprawling house of their late, Africa-obsessed anthropologist father with a series of simians (yes, simians), the sisters battle and rumble hard, especially when Ellen begins a new romance.
“I saw the play that The Mafu Cage is based on, which was called You And Your Clouds by Eric Westphal, in Cambridge, England,” Arthur told Alexandra Heller-Nicholas. “At the time, I was looking for a horror film to make because I had made Legacy, and it was such an art film that I felt I had to try to move into a commercial world, and at the time horror seemed to work. When I saw You And Your Clouds, I was really struck by it because of course it was small enough and close enough that I felt I could make a very hermetically erotic piece.”
Though not really a horror film per se, The Mafu Cage is certainly a stunning treatise on madness and family dysfunction, and it comes with a rare sense of unease, unsettling the viewer at every turn, as Kane’s Cissy becomes increasingly unhinged, particularly with regards to the simians left by her father and some profoundly disturbing but non-graphic moments of (depicted) animal cruelty. The performances by Lee Grant and Carol Kane are unsurprisingly full-bodied and uncompromised, and Arthur crafts and creates a hypnotic swathe of bizarre imagery that should have seen the film far more widely discussed, especially with regards to the fact that a large proportion of the crew that Arthur assembled was female. The Mafu Cage is nothing less than a vital feminist cinematic landmark, and it should be considered and celebrated as such.
After The Mafu Cage, Karen Arthur moved curiously and with far greater frequency into television, a seemingly unlikely move considering the profound daring and complete lack of compromise inherent in her first two films. That said, Arthur’s output in television – like many other directors featured in the Unsung Auteurs column – has been quite extraordinary. As well as directing much episodic television (including the like of Hart To Hart, Remington Steele, Judging Amy, 7th Heaven and many more), Arthur also made a huge collection of telemovies throughout her career, a selection of which deserve to be singled out for their quality, daring and social significance.
Maintaining her strong feminist stance, Arthur directed 1985’s exemplary A Bunny’s Tale, which stars Kirstie Alley as Gloria Steinem, and documents the feminist icon’s undercover crusade as a Playboy Bunny in one of Hugh Hefner’s Playboy clubs. Ever unafraid to tackle difficult material, Arthur’s 1985 effort The Rape Of Richard Beck stars Richard Crenna in a very bold, brave performance as a tough, insensitive, misogynist cop who gets brutally raped by two thugs while on duty, and begins a tragic descent into depression and rage in the horrific event’s aftermath. 1984’s Victims For Victims: The Theresa Saldana Story, meanwhile, starred the eponymous Raging Bull actress and infamous stalking victim as herself, and detailed both the dreadful attack on Saldana, and her later work as a victims’ rights advocate.
These three are merely the boldest of a terrific slate of TV movies, which also include 1989’s Bridge To Silence (starring Marlee Matlin and Lee Remick), 1990’s Fall From Grace (with Kevin Spacey and Bernadette Peters as Jim and Tammy Bakker), 1995’s Love And Betrayal: The Mia Farrow Story (with Patsy Kensit in the title role), 1997’s True Women (featuring Angelina Jolie, and detailing America’s female pioneers), 1998’s The Staircase with Barbara Hershey and William Petersen, and many more. Karen Arthur even has a very strong and surprising connection to Australia, with the director helming the infamous and hugely popular 1983 TV mini-series Return To Eden, which featured Rebecca Gilling getting attacked by a crocodile and James Reyne in a rare acting role.
In 1985, Karen Arthur became the first woman to win an Emmy for outstanding directing for a drama series (“We did it! It’s a beginning,” Arthur proclaimed when she collected her award) for “Heat”, a fourth-season episode of the groundbreaking, female-led cop show Cagney & Lacey. “I was up against the big dogs, men,” Karen Arthur recalled on The 80s TV Ladies podcast in 2023. “The big guys who always win. And so the fact that I got that over them said something also, which would have helped break the glass ceiling at that point.”
In amongst this impressive range of telemovies and episodic work, Arthur also directed what would ultimately be her final feature film with 1987’s Lady Beware, a project that she had been working on since the late 1970s. Profoundly intriguing and frequently startling, this erotic thriller stars Diane Lane as a controversial, highly provocative department store window dresser whose divisive displays garner not just media attention, but also the attentions of two very different men: Cotter Smith’s nice guy and Michael Woods’ dangerous psychopath stalker. Though tense, stylishly designed, thematically fascinating, keenly sensual, and boasting a great central female character (and an excellent performance from Diane Lane), Lady Beware is also prone to more than a few gaps in logic, and isn’t quite as on-point as Arthur’s previous works. The reasons for that, however, have very little to do with the gifted filmmaker herself.
After Arthur’s post-The Mafu Cage four-picture deal with major studio Universal fell apart, Lady Beware ended up having “100 homes, seventeen drafts, and eight writers,” Arthur told The Los Angeles Times in 1986 ahead of the film’s release. “The purse-holders are men, and they attempted to make Lady Beware into a violent picture. I’m not interested in making a picture where a woman gets beat up. I want to show how a lady deals with this kind of insidious violence. A policeman can’t help. The film’s distributors asked for more sex, so they took outtakes of Diane Lane standing there naked and incorporated them into the film. To me, that’s exploitative. They printed up negatives where I never said print. I, as a female director, would never exploit a woman’s body and use it as a turn-on.”
Perhaps scarred by her experience on Lady Beware, Karen Arthur didn’t make another feature film, but did close out her filmmaking career with the 2008 documentary Artists Of The Bahamas, which explores the lives and art of the visual artists in the Bahamas, and was co-directed by Arthur’s husband, cinematographer Thomas Neuwirth. The couple lived in the Bahamas for many years, but Arthur is now back in the US, directing theatre at the age of 82. A true pioneer who has always stayed true to her vision, even while working in the often soul-sucking world of television, Karen Arthur is a truly vital figure in the American arts community.
If you liked this story, check out our features on other unsung auteurs Larry Peerce, Tony Goldwyn, Brian G. Hutton, Shelley Duvall, Robert Towne, David Giler, William D. Wittliff, Tom DeSimone, Ulu Grosbard, Denis Sanders, Daryl Duke, Jack McCoy, James William Guercio, James Goldstone, Daniel Nettheim, Goran Stolevski, Jared & Jerusha Hess, William Richert, Michael Jenkins, Robert M. Young, Robert Thom, Graeme Clifford, Frank Howson, Oliver Hermanus, Jennings Lang, Matthew Saville, Sophie Hyde, John Curran, Jesse Peretz, Anthony Hayes, Stuart Blumberg, Stewart Copeland, Harriet Frank Jr & Irving Ravetch, Angelo Pizzo, John & Joyce Corrington, Robert Dillon, Irene Kamp, Albert Maltz, Nancy Dowd, Barry Michael Cooper, Gladys Hill, Walon Green, Eleanor Bergstein, William W. Norton, Helen Childress, Bill Lancaster, Lucinda Coxon, Ernest Tidyman, Shauna Cross, Troy Kennedy Martin, Kelly Marcel, Alan Sharp, Leslie Dixon, Jeremy Podeswa, Ferd & Beverly Sebastian, Anthony Page, Julie Gavras, Ted Post, Sarah Jacobson, Anton Corbijn, Gillian Robespierre, Brandon Cronenberg, Laszlo Nemes, Ayelat Menahemi, Ivan Tors, Amanda King & Fabio Cavadini, Cathy Henkel, Colin Higgins, Paul McGuigan, Rose Bosch, Dan Gilroy, Tanya Wexler, Clio Barnard, Robert Aldrich, Maya Forbes, Steven Kastrissios, Talya Lavie, Michael Rowe, Rebecca Cremona, Stephen Hopkins, Tony Bill, Sarah Gavron, Martin Davidson, Fran Rubel Kuzui, Elliot Silverstein, Liz Garbus, Victor Fleming, Barbara Peeters, Robert Benton, Lynn Shelton, Tom Gries, Randa Haines, Leslie H. Martinson, Nancy Kelly, Paul Newman, Brett Haley, Lynne Ramsay, Vernon Zimmerman, Lisa Cholodenko, Robert Greenwald, Phyllida Lloyd, Milton Katselas, Karyn Kusama, Seijun Suzuki, Albert Pyun, Cherie Nowlan, Steve Binder, Jack Cardiff, Anne Fletcher ,Bobcat Goldthwait, Donna Deitch, Frank Pierson, Ann Turner, Jerry Schatzberg, Antonia Bird, Jack Smight, Marielle Heller, James Glickenhaus, Euzhan Palcy, Bill L. Norton, Larysa Kondracki, Mel Stuart, Nanette Burstein, George Armitage, Mary Lambert, James Foley, Lewis John Carlino, Debra Granik, Taylor Sheridan, Laurie Collyer, Jay Roach, Barbara Kopple, John D. Hancock, Sara Colangelo, Michael Lindsay-Hogg, Joyce Chopra, Mike Newell, Gina Prince-Bythewood, John Lee Hancock, Allison Anders, Daniel Petrie Sr., Katt Shea, Frank Perry, Amy Holden Jones, Stuart Rosenberg, Penelope Spheeris, Charles B. Pierce, Tamra Davis, Norman Taurog, Jennifer Lee, Paul Wendkos, Marisa Silver, John Mackenzie, Ida Lupino, John V. Soto, Martha Coolidge, Peter Hyams, Tim Hunter, Stephanie Rothman, Betty Thomas, John Flynn, Lizzie Borden, Lionel Jeffries, Lexi Alexander, Alkinos Tsilimidos, Stewart Raffill, Lamont Johnson, Maggie Greenwald and Tamara Jenkins.
