Female Trouble

Delinquent high-school student Dawn Davenport goes berserk when her parents refuse to buy her the shoes she wants for Christmas because "nice girls don't wear cha-cha heels": she destroys presents, topples a Christmas tree on her mother, and flees the house. Dawn hitchhikes a ride with a lecherous man, Earl Peterson, who drives her to a dump where they have sex on a discarded mattress. Dawn becomes pregnant, but Earl refuses to support her. She gives birth to a daughter, Taffy, a brattish child who she often beats and severely punishes. Dawn works various jobs and engages in criminal activities such as burglary and street prostitution with former high-school friends Chiclette and Concetta.

Dawn begins frequenting the Lipstick Beauty Salon and marries Gater Nelson, her hair stylist and next-door neighbor. Donald and Donna Dasher, the owners of the beauty salon, recruit Dawn in a scheme to prove "crime and beauty are the same". They entice Dawn to commit crimes by promising her fame, supplying her with drugs and money, and photographing her crimes to stoke her vanity.

Gater's aunt, Ida Nelson, is distraught over her nephew's marriage because she hopes he will "turn nelly" and take a male lover. When the marriage fails, Dawn persuades the Dashers to fire Gater, who moves to Detroit to work in the auto industry. Blaming Dawn for driving Gater away, Ida exacts revenge by throwing acid in her face, leaving Dawn hideously disfigured. The Dashers discourage Dawn from having corrective cosmetic surgery and use her as a grotesquely made-up model. After they kidnap Ida and imprison her in a large birdcage, they give Dawn an axe to chop off her hand as revenge for the acid attack.

Taffy, now a teenager, is distressed by her mother's criminal lifestyle and convinces her to reveal the identity of her father. Taffy finds her father living in squalor and drinking excessively. She stabs him to death with a chef's knife after he tries to sexually assault her. Taffy returns home, falsely claims she was unable to locate her father, and announces she is joining the Hare Krishna movement. Dawn warns her she will kill her if she does.

Dawn, now with bizarre hair, make-up and outfits provided by the Dashers, mounts a nightclub act. When Taffy appears backstage in religious attire, Dawn fulfills her threat and strangles her to death. Dawn brandishes a gun onstage during her nightclub act and begins firing into the crowd, wounding and killing several audience members. When police arrive to ostensibly subdue the crowd, they shoot several audience members themselves but allow the Dashers to leave when they claim to be upright citizens. Dawn flees into a forest, but is soon arrested by the police and put on trial for murder.

At the trial, the judge grants the Dashers immunity from prosecution for testifying against Dawn. The Dashers feign innocence and completely blame Dawn for the crimes she committed at their behest; they also pay Ida to lie on the witness stand. Although Dawn pleads not guilty by reason of insanity, the jury finds her guilty and sentences her to die in the electric chair. As a priest says a prayer and Dawn is strapped to the chair, she thanks her fans for her notoriety before being executed.

• Divine as Dawn Davenport / Earl Peterson
• David Lochary as Donald Dasher
• Mary Vivian Pearce as Donna Dasher
• Mink Stole as Taffy Davenport
• Hilary Taylor as Young Taffy
• Edith Massey as Ida Nelson
• Cookie Mueller as Concetta
• Susan Walsh as Chiclette Friar
• Michael Potter as Gater Nelson
• Ed Peranio as Wink
• Paul Swift as Butterfly
• George Figgs as Dribbles
• Susan Lowe as Vikki
• Channing Wilroy as Prosecutor
• Elizabeth Coffey as Earnestine

The lyrics to the title song, sung by Divine, were written by Waters and set to a pre-existing piece of music.

• The unique production design is by Dreamlander Vincent Peranio, who created Dawn's apartment in a condemned suite above a friend's store.
• Waters explained in a 2015 interview[1] that Dawn Davenport's look was based on the woman in the famous 1966 Diane Arbus photograph of a young Brooklyn family on a Sunday outing.[2]
• Divine chose to perform his own stunts, the most difficult of which involved doing flips on a trampoline during his nightclub act. Waters took Divine to a YMCA, where he took lessons until the act was perfected. Divine also nailed a difficult outdoor stunt involving sleet and rain, to the point where he did the athletic stunt without his wig being dislodged.
• The birth scene was saved until the end of shooting, when Dreamlander Susan Lowe gave birth to a son and agreed to Waters' request that they film her son as Dawn's baby. The umbilical cord was fashioned out of prophylactics filled with liver, while the baby (Ramsey McLean) was doused in fake blood. The scene created quite a scandal for Lowe's mother-in-law, who arrived on the set in a state of confusion.[3]
• Although Dawn Davenport was executed at the end of the film, US capital punishment was suspended from 1972 to 1976 due to the Supreme Court's ruling in the case of Furman v. Georgia. Maryland did not formally reinstate capital punishment until July 1, 1975 (coincidentally, just 24 hours before John Waters had a "special sneak preview" of the film at a state prison where he did volunteer creative writing classes for inmates) and its constitutionality was not affirmed until 1976. Furthermore, asphyxiation in the gas chamber was the authorized method of execution, not electrocution. In the film, the jury pronounces Dawn's sentence, an act typically performed by a judge in actual court cases.
• On the 2004 DVD Director's Special Comments, Waters states that the original working title of the film was "Rotten Mind, Rotten Face".[3] He changed it because he did not want to risk having hostile film critics refer to his film as "rotten".

The film has an 88% "Fresh" rating on review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes based on 24 reviews, with an average rating of 6.98/10.[4]

Where do these people come from? Where do they go when the sun goes down? Isn't there a law or something?
— Rex Reed[3]

The initial 16mm release of the film which was shown at colleges ran 92 minutes. However, when the film was blown up to 35mm and shown theatrically, it was cut to 89 minutes. This version was the only version seen in the United States for many years. However, a recent restoration was done of the original cut, which runs 97 minutes; it has played at this 97-minute length in Europe, however, since its initial release.

The 97-minute version was shown only in select theaters and was included in an out-of-print DVD set paired with Pink Flamingos (Female Trouble is still available on DVD as a single disc and as part of a DVD box set, Very Crudely Yours, John Waters). This version also has a soundtrack remixed in stereo surround. The 97-minute version contains some additional scenes, including the chase through the woods, as well as an appearance by Sally Turner, the Elizabeth Taylor look-alike customer in the Lipstick Beauty Salon (Turner served as Divine's double in the junkyard sex scene between Dawn Davenport and Earl Peterson).

The film was shown in the 89-minute cut when re-released in 2002.

The 97-minute version is now available on DVD and includes an audio commentary by Waters.

The Criterion Collection released a restored version of the film in 4K on DVD and Blu-ray on June 26, 2018.

• List of American films of 1974

Wikiquote has quotations related to: Female Trouble

• Female Trouble at IMDb
• Female Trouble at Metacritic
• Official trailer on YouTube
• Female Trouble: Spare Me Your Morals an essay by Ed Halter at the Criterion Collection