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Keetje Tippel (Paul Verhoeven, 1975)
I saw this and Verhoeven's earlier Turkish Delight at the theatre in the mid-1970s and subsequently watched his epic Soldier of Orange at the art house. Turkish Delight was a self-imposed X rating here in the U.S. and this film got an R even though it has a shadow of a fully-erect penis seen on a wall right next to the face of the lead character who then proceeds to lose her virginity to the guy attached to said hard-on. Keetje Tippel is about an impoverished Dutch family who moves to Amsterdam in 1881 to try to find work and make a living. Keetje (Monique van de ven) is the family's beautiful, eldest daughter, and she proceeds to take several poor-paying jobs where she's always taken advantage of. Eventually she becomes a prostitute and her eyes are awakened as to the pitiful working conditions for almost the entire proletariat. So yes, although Verhoeven was always obsessed with sex and violence, he shows a political awareness in some of his Dutch films which is mostly lacking from his mainstream American entertainments. This film does feature Rutger Hauer as a man whom Keetje wants to grow old with and is gorgeously photographed (slums and all) by Verhoeven regular, Jan de Bont. What seems the most incredible of all is that Keetje Tippel is based on an autobiographical novel by Neel Doff who became a very popular socialist author and this film claims was nominated for a Nobel Prize in Literature although the veracity of that claim is open to question.
I saw this and Verhoeven's earlier Turkish Delight at the theatre in the mid-1970s and subsequently watched his epic Soldier of Orange at the art house. Turkish Delight was a self-imposed X rating here in the U.S. and this film got an R even though it has a shadow of a fully-erect penis seen on a wall right next to the face of the lead character who then proceeds to lose her virginity to the guy attached to said hard-on. Keetje Tippel is about an impoverished Dutch family who moves to Amsterdam in 1881 to try to find work and make a living. Keetje (Monique van de ven) is the family's beautiful, eldest daughter, and she proceeds to take several poor-paying jobs where she's always taken advantage of. Eventually she becomes a prostitute and her eyes are awakened as to the pitiful working conditions for almost the entire proletariat. So yes, although Verhoeven was always obsessed with sex and violence, he shows a political awareness in some of his Dutch films which is mostly lacking from his mainstream American entertainments. This film does feature Rutger Hauer as a man whom Keetje wants to grow old with and is gorgeously photographed (slums and all) by Verhoeven regular, Jan de Bont. What seems the most incredible of all is that Keetje Tippel is based on an autobiographical novel by Neel Doff who became a very popular socialist author and this film claims was nominated for a Nobel Prize in Literature although the veracity of that claim is open to question.