Rapunzel Let Down Your Hair (film: UK, 1978), a feminist discourse on the images of female enslavement created by cinema and television. Using the Grimms' tale as a jumping‐off point, it starts with a plain acting‐out of the original text, as read by a mother to a child. A woodsman's daughter, Rapunzel, has for years been imprisoned by a witch in a room at the top of a high tower in which there are no stairs. A passing prince, attracted by her singing, gets up by climbing her long hair. When the witch finds out, she strikes the prince blind and exiles him, but her triumph is cut short when Rapunzel bears twins. Exiled herself, Rapunzel takes her babies, seeks the prince, finds him, and cures his blindness with her tears.
The film then goes on to present four different perceptions of what the tale could be about in relation to the 1970s. The first, from the child's point of view, shows Rapunzel as the princess‐heroine of a Disney animated feature. In the second, shot in film noir style, the prince sees himself as a detective, and Rapunzel as a good girl needing to be rescued from a lesbian protector who has turned her into a junkie living at the top of a tower block. Prefacing the third viewpoint is a dissertation on the evolution of witches, arguing that the idea of witchcraft derives from patriarchal societies in which women endowed with exceptional skills or insights were stigmatized and persecuted. Following this the witch casts herself as a gynaecologist in a television melodrama; in this script, Rapunzel is her wayward teenage daughter. Finally, the fifth section offers Rapunzel's own reading of the situation: she begins as a singer forced to earn her living by working in a supermarket as a check‐out girl. Falling in with a group of like‐minded female performers, she finds fulfilment doing gigs which attract women of all persuasions. As the film ends she is singing a song called ‘Let Down Your Hair’, which she has written to express the joy she feels in her discovery of female solidarity. The naturalist style in which the last scenario is shot emphasizes that, for the women's cooperative that made the film, this interpretation is reality.
— Terry Staples
