The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane (1976) on Netflix
PG19761h 31mDramaMysteryThriller
Rynn Jacobs, thirteen, lives alone in a seaside town and says her father is away. Frank Hallet, her landlady's grown son, will not leave her alone. A neighbor, Mario, becomes her ally.
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- Netflix4.1/5
- IMDb7.0/1020,463 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes93%
Trailer
Plot summary
Thirteen-year-old Rynn Jacobs and her father, a poet, have lately come from England to a house in a New England seaside town. She lives there mostly by herself and tells her landlady that her father is with his publisher in New York. On Halloween night, her birthday, Frank Hallet, the landlady's adult son, arrives to find her alone and makes advances toward her. The next day the landlady, Cora Hallet, inspects the garden and the house and asks Rynn about herself and her father; she also wants the jelly glasses she left in the cellar, and Rynn blocks her from going down. Mario, a teenager whose uncle is the village policeman, gets to know Rynn.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane (1976)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- A producer's demand for "sex and violence" led to a nude scene being added to the film; Jodie Foster objected and walked off the set, and her 21-year-old sister Connie, suggested by their mother, served as the nude double.
SPOILER
For the scene in which Frank Hallet kills the hamster Gordon, Martin Sheen handled a dead, frozen rodent and tried to make it look alive; the dead animal came from a hospital that did animal research, and the live hamster was given to the costume designer.- Martin Sheen was contacted personally by director Nicolas Gessner to play Frank Hallet, but Sheen was first more interested in the teenage role of Mario until Gessner told him he was too old for it.
SPOILER
Financiers disliked the novel's version in which Rynn murdered landlady Cora Hallet with poisonous gas, so the scene was rewritten to make her death accidental.- According to Variety, Beachfront Properties won a temporary restraining order giving it ownership of the film under a September 1976 contract; the order barred new sales but did not change the American International Pictures release.
- Mort Shuman, who played Officer Miglioriti, was meant to write the score too, but his arranger Christian Gaubert wrote most of the music, took the composer credit, and Shuman was listed only as music supervisor.
SPOILER
For the scene in which a falling cellar door kills landlady Cora Hallet, the crew built a false trapdoor, though director Nicolas Gessner said actress Alexis Smith was nervous about the effect.
