Finding FOXES (1980)

 Is that all there is to a fire

 I'm only human. The concept of a "lost" Adrian Lyne film is exciting to me, doubly so when it's implied that the reason why it became lost is because of controversial, scandalous content. Anyways, Adrian Lyne's first film is 1980's "Foxes", a coming of age story that kind of, sort of, aspires to be this scandalous *thing* about teenage girls in the way that most Adrian Lyne films sit on the border of good taste. Frankly, the film stops itself quite short of that line, and several miles short of the high bar for a modern viewer's sense of scandal (the incumbent here is, I suppose, 1995's "Kids" from Larry Clark and Harmony Korine). So here's a few thoughts, which might seem contradictory but all make sense together in my head. 

"Foxes" is a fine-to-good movie. It might even be Lyne's best, I say as someone who doesn't hold his work in high regard at all. 

 Also... almost nothing in "Foxes" is controversial. I wish it were! The most taste-threatening subplot, where the virgin girl of the friend group bullies herself into hooking up with an older man who is blatantly a predator, is probably the second best thing the film has going for it (a terrifically compelling turn from young Jodie Foster as the most level-headed of the girls is the best). That was frightening. That was watchable. There's a scene in the last third of a film where the girls have to own up to trashing the older man's house, and his carefully controlling language is exactly as menacing as I'm sure everyone on set hoped it would be. The subplot about the erratic liability friend of the group is often not. A 21 year old Cherie Curry of The Runaways fame playing a teenage drug addict should be compelling. It's not. Both the drug and the addict part are treated with such vagueness in the script that the character, Annie, never becomes more than an outline of a first draft of a PSA. Her father beats her, so she gets hooked on drugs. Cool. What else? Screenwriter Gerald Ayres has no else. She exists to do drugs and die, with no attempt to delve into the why of any of it. She's a spectacle, to be watched and learned from without getting emotionally involved in. For the character who is largely presented as the second most important in a film, that's bad! And wow, is her death scene an absurd sequence of events coldly calculated to make her a victim of circumstances: someone who is at fault for the situation she gets herself into, but someone who's death is not at all caused by her own actions. 

 Also... it's an extreme shame, bordering on a tragedy, that this movie is as hard to find as it is. With Foster and Lyne you have an extremely well-known star's and a reasonably well-known director's early work, with an original theme song from Donna Summer, and the result is basically unobtainable outside of a stray viewing on the Turner Classic Movies channel. It's not available to stream anywhere, or digitally rent anywhere, and as far as I can tell it never has been. I can't find a compelling reason why it is the way it is; "Foxes" was distributed in 1980 by United Artists, a company that still exists today (as a division of  Amazon) and whose other notable 1980 releases include "Cruising", "Fame", and "Raging Bull", which are all movies quite easy to track down. Production company PolyGram Films is now defunct but their other UA collab, Wes Craven's "Deadly Blessing", can be rented from anywhere. There's no reason to believe that music rights are an issue because, again, original theme song. The whole soundtrack is original. Few reviews are more awkward to explain than thinking a movie is fine enough and pretending that it's a must-see for the sake of film preservation.