The life and times of Dawn Davenport, showing her progress from loving schoolgirl to crazed mass murderer - all of which stems from her parents' refusal to buy her cha-cha heels for Christmas. She runs away from home, is raped, becomes a single mother, criminal and glamorous model before her inevitable rendezvous with the electric chair...
Written by
Michael Brooke
Plot Synopsis:
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Dawn Davenport (Divine) is a rebellious bad-girl teenager who smokes cigarettes, uses hairspray, and doesn't care about school. Dawn and her two best friends, Chicklette (Susan Walsh) and Concetta (Cookie Mueller), discuss the upcoming Christmas holiday. All three of them intend on using Christmas simply for financial gain, but Dawn has something particular in mind; she has requested "cha cha heels", and she assures her two friends that there will be trouble if her parents let her down.
Christmas morning, Dawn's very square parents wake her up to open presents, and Dawn makes a beeline for a certain package the size of a shoebox; it does contain shoes, but not cha-cha heels. "Nice girls don't wear cha-cha heels!" exclaims Dawn's father, but Dawn is furious. She stomps on the rest of the Christmas presents, hurls her mother into the Christmas tree, and curses her parents, running away from home.
Outside in her nightgown, coat and slippers on Christmas morning, she is picked up by a sleazy-looking man named Earl Peterson (also played by Divine). Earl takes her to a dump and has sex with her on a dirty mattress, and Dawn steals his wallet. Nine months later, Dawn is living in a cheap hotel and very pregnant. She phones Earl at work and demands money, but he hangs up on her. Dawn stumbles back into the hotel and immediately gives birth to a baby girl she names Taffy, cutting the umbilical cord with her own teeth.
Years later, Taffy is an obnoxious preteen girl, and Dawn is working in a number of jobs, including a waitress, a stripper, and a prostitute. She also is a petty thief, working together with Chicklette and Concetta. After Taffy erupts with some particularly annoying behavior, the frustrated Dawn gets Chicklette and Concetta to help chain the child to her bed in the attic. Dawn is despondent about the pressures of being a mother, and Chicklette and Concetta encourage her to pamper herself by getting her hair done at The Lipstick Beauty Salon, where patrons must audition for an appointment.
Dawn is immediately favored by the snobbish owners of The Lipstick, Donald and Donna Dasher (David Lochary and Mary Vivian Pearce). She also gets her hair done by Gator Nelson (Michael Potter), who proposes marriage the same day. Gator just happens to be Dawn's next-door neighbor, where he lives with his Aunt Ida (Edith Massey), an obese, elderly woman who dresses outrageously and encourages her nephew to be gay. Aunt Ida is heartbroken when Dawn and Gator get married, and she clashes with Dawn repeatedly thereafter.
Dawn and Gator are married for five years before things start to fall apart. Gator cheats on her with various women, while Ida harasses her by doing things like dumping garbage in her back yard. Taffy grows into a strange teenager who likes to play "car accident", where she re-enacts fatal car crashes using props. One day, after a bad fight with Gator (he places a carrot in Dawn's mouth during sexual climax), Dawn goes to get her hair done and is called into the private quarters of the Dashers, who inform her that they want her to be a model for them. The Dashers are obsessed with crime and feel that it is connected to beauty, and they ask that Dawn be their "crime model". In return, she gets special treatment and they immediately honor her request to fire Gator.
Gator becomes enraged and decides to leave Baltimore for Detroit, so that he can become part of the auto industry. Aunt Ida, who is still trying to fix Gator up with other men, becomes insane with sadness. Before Gator leaves, he punches Dawn in the face and gives her a black eye. The Dashers join her at her home for dinner that evening and are thrilled by her black eye, photographing it. Taffy embarasses Dawn by starting an argument, and Dawn smashes a chair over her back, rendering her unconscious. The Dashers are thrilled, photographing the fight, but they are even more excited when Aunt Ida forces her way into the house and hurls acid in Dawn's face, scarring her for life.
After Dawn recovers from her wounds, her face is horribly mutilated, but the Dashers convince her that her wounds are 'beauty marks', and she refuses plastic surgery. They also redecorate her home and buy her new clothes. Dawn's final treat is Ida herself, kidnapped and imprisoned in a bird cage for Dawn's amusement.
Taffy enrages Dawn by insisting that Dawn tell her the whereabouts of her father, Earl, but when Taffy finds him, he makes drunken sexual advances towards her. As a result, Taffy stabs him to death and runs from the scene.
The Dashers escalate their experiment with Dawn, injecting her with liquid eyeliner and telling her it is like drugs. Dawn is so influenced by them that she no longer knows what is real and what isn't. They design a stage show for her, and on opening night she is visited backstage by Taffy, who has converted to a hare krishna. Dawn strangles her to death in front of the Dashers and her friends, who cheer her on. On stage, Dawn fires a gun into the crowd, killing an audience member. A riot breaks out, with several more audience members killed in the melee. The Dashers are arrested, but Dawn escapse and hides out in the woods. She isn't a fugitive for long; she is found and brought back to Baltimore for trial.
Dawn feels no remorse for her crime, considering the trial the highest reward for her 'career', but she is outraged when the Dashers turn tail and try to deny their involvement in everything. For their testimony they are granted immunity, and Dawn gets the death sentence. Her stint in jail leads her to believe she is a superstar, and her criminal celebrity will endure after she is dead. As they strap Dawn into the electric chair, she launches into a speech where she thanks everybody for this crowning moment, and they throw the switch, killing her.
This film marks the last time that John Waters would work with his friend and regular David Lochary. Lochary bled to death while under the influence of PCP before he could appear in Waters' next picture, Desperate Living (1977).
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As they had done in Pink Flamingos, John Waters filmed a scene of Divine from his car, hoping to get double-takes to Dawn Davenport striding down the street, but no-one seemed fazed at all. Waters believes this was because they saw the scars and assumed Divine was a mentally ill woman. The man who pops out his glass eye was a friend of Waters'.
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John Waters says that as a child he used to play 'car accident', had his own stage at home to put on shows for family members and often would put a coat hanger up his sleeve in order to pretend he had a hook for a hand.
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Years after making the film, John Waters was contacted by divorce lawyers on behalf of a woman who claimed that her ex-husband (who had been a church official) had received a substantial sum of money for allowing a 'pornographic movie' to be filmed in his church. Waters informed them that Female Trouble was most definitely not a porno and that he hadn't paid the man a nickel for using the church to film its wedding scene.
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It was November when John Waters filmed Divine camping in the woods and it was sleeting when he jumped into the river in full drag. Despite the swift water he hit his mark upon reaching the opposite shore and didn't lose his wig.
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Divine was injected with a real needle in the liquid eyeliner scene. Divine also took a dose of vomit-inducing medicine, but this had no effect at first so Earl's vomiting on Taffy had to be faked. A nurse was on the set to supervise both scenes.
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John Waters still has the "lectric' chair" and keeps it in his Baltimore home.
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Susan Lowe played the receptionist at the beauty salon while near the end of the term of her pregnancy. She agreed to her newborn baby being used for the birth scene. John Waters claims that Susan's mother-in-law (who was visiting from England) was on the set and this was her first time seeing her grandchild.
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John Waters had Divine take trampoline lessons at a local YMCA; Divine was terrified about breaking his neck but managed to do the trampoline scene in one take.
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Although released in 1974 the copyright date at the end of the credits is MCMXCIX or 1999.
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Many of the principal actors' and crews' parents played the jurors in the final courtroom scene, including the mother and brother of David Lochary (Donald Dasher) and the mother of set designer Vincent Peranio.
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Sally Turner, the actress who played the customer in the beauty salon with the line about making a wish, also played Divine's body double in the Christmas sex scene.
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The scenes in the Dashers' residence were filmed in John Waters' own apartment at the time, with many of his own belongings. Another corner of his apartment was used for the part of the salon where the Dashers first interview Dawn Davenport.
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John Waters says an early working title was 'Rotten Mind, Rotten Face' but he feared this would only encourage critics to respond by calling it a 'rotten movie.'
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Dawn Davenport's stage performance is based upon an act performed by Divine at San Francisco's Palace Theatre. Divine would wheel a shopping cart full of mackerel on stage and hurl them into the audience while claiming responsibility for various high-profile crimes.
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The movie critic Rex Reed hated the film, to the point that in his review he had asked, "Where do these people come from? Where do they go when the sun goes down? Isn't there a law or something?" The quote was posted on the Waverly Theater poster, and in Village Voice ads for the film. When Female Trouble was released on DVD, this quote was on the front of its box.
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The female prisoner kissing Dawn in her cell at the end of the movie previously appeared in Pink Flamingos (1972) as "Chick with a Dick." The actress is a male-to-female transsexual.
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At the time that the electric chair scene was filmed, the death penalty had been banned in the State of Maryland. The day before John Waters had his "sneak world premiere" at a prison, Maryland reinstated the death penalty.
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A scene was filmed in which Concetta (Cookie Mueller) burst into the courtroom in an attempt to rescue Dawn Davenport ('Divine'). According to John Waters, the scene was "technically bad" (visible boom mic, light poles, etc.) and not included in any released version.
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When Dawn, Concetta, and Chicklette are in the school bathroom complaining about school and Christmas, both Concetta and Chicklette hold up a can of hair spray to apply to their hairdos, but it is obvious no spray is coming out of the can nor does the can make a spraying sound.
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When Dawn returns home from hospital with the Dashers and unwraps the birdcage containing Aunt Ida, Donald instructs her to, 'Cut off the hand that threw the acid!' Dawn then chops off Ida's left hand. Ida, however, threw the acid with her right hand.
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When Taffy throws a tantrum and is taken to the bed in the attic, she reaches for the manacles although she is being restrained against her will.
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The word "chaplain" is misspelled "chaplin" in the closing credits.
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absurd violence|absurd humor|kidnapping|disfigurement|male frontal nudity|dysfunctional family|electric chair|adult actress playing teenage girl|pabst blue ribbon beer|male nudity|pubic hair|black comedy|satire|absurdism|dark comedy|female nudity|hare krishna|death by strangulation|amputation|bird cage|female frontal nudity|nudity|murder|severed hand|juvenile delinquent|mother daughter relationship|vanity|independent film|christmas|cha cha|beautician|leather|old woman|car accident|self rape|childbirth|transvestite|high school|low budget film|cult film|porn magazine|male pubic hair|reference to abbie hoffman|single parent|woman played by man|punched in the face|obesity|insanity|crotch shot|violence|incest|disfigured face|child abuse|trash|attempted rape|campy|rivalry|acid|leg spreading|reference to richard speck|reference to charles manson|midnight movie|surrealism|prostitution|patricide|cunnilingus|trampoline|public murder|prosthetic limb|lesbian sex|jail cell sex|hook for hand|filicide|fellatio|false confession|dressing room|double cross|disappointed child|christmas tree|richard speck|hitchhiking|hitchhiker|cult director|dual role|rebellion|problem child|nightclub|mother in law|homosexual|beauty salon|gay slur|hairdresser|
Argentina: Problemas femeninos
Brazil: Problemas Femininos
Spain: Cosa de hembras
Greece (transliterated ISO-LATIN-1 title): Thilykoi belades
Hungary: Csajos bajok
Soviet Union (Russian title): –енкие п€облем‹
USA (working title): Rotten Mind, Rotten Face
Movie Details:
MOVIE
