Rating : - A Moral Whore
The Respectful Prostitute is a great short film based on Sartre's play that was published in America in the late 1940's. It is a brutal satirical social commentary about how our society considered blacks as sub-humans.
Lizzy travels on a train to the Deep South and is harassed by a white man, so she runs away to the colored section of the train to get away. The blacks do not want any trouble, but she is callous and stubborn and in a way prejudice herself by disregarding the fact that she is putting them in jeopardy by being a white woman. The white man comes to the colored section to harass the white whore and ends up killing a black person.
The white murderer turns out to be the senator's nephew, and the senator's son tries to get Lizzy to sign a statement that it was in self-defense to clear his name, but she refuses even though he sleeps with her.
However, the senator himself uses a more fatherly type approach and manipulates Lizzy by talking about his poor old mother's feelings, and what a great citizen his son is because he is an accomplished white man.
He even goes as far as to mention what would Uncle Sam would think if she had to make a choice between these two men's lives, one being a white and the other a dirty poor black person. In the book (play), but not in the movie there are some references about whether she is patriotic or not. He asks her if she is a communist, and that he needs his son even though he is a killer because he is anti-communist, anti-labor union, and hates Jews.
The senator manages to get Lizzy to sign the papers, and pays her off although she feels some guilt nevertheless she still prostituted herself. She does manage however to help the other witness to the crime escape who happens to be black
before he is lynched.
Subconsciously, Lizzy claiming to be from the "North" where there was not as much racism as in the Deep South, was just as racist and hypocritical. As much as she was trying to exercise her "free will", her ill-fated circumstances trapped her into a hellish nightmare.