Rip-Off (film)

Director Donald Shebib recounted in a 2013 interview how the distributor of his first feature, Goin' Down the Road, "wanted to make a film about teenagers, so I just sat down and started to write it. It was very rushed."[9]

The film's working title was Mike and Sue.[2] In an interview which took place prior to the release of his later film, Between Friends, Shebib was asked if he was consciously posing "socially-loaded questions", Shebib answered: "Partially, yeah. Rip-Off was one case where it was stronger."[10] In the same interview, Shebib remarked: "Bill Fruet writes dreadful women", and that he had to "fight" with him to make Sue more "sensitive".[10]

Wyndham Wise says the film was made on a strict budget with a "skeleton crew" of nine.[7] Cinematographer Richard Leiterman said the film was a little over budget, but stayed on schedule.[11] Leiterman originally made documentary films.[11] He made the switch to dramatic films when he shot Shebib's previous film, the seminal Goin' Down the Road; dramatic films were now his "primary professional domain",[12] though since both he and Shebib had documentary backgrounds, this was reflected in how their first two feature films were made, more so with Goin' Down the Road than Rip-Off, a film where they were both trying to do something neither of them had much experience with: a formal feature set-up: "I think we both learned a lot, I certainly did. And I'm anxious to correct the mistakes I made on that one."[11]

The film was shot on 35mm (Kodak 5254), mainly in Toronto.[2] Michael (Dunky)'s home is in the North York suburb of Don Mills, while the plot of land left him by his grandfather is near Timmins.[7] All the locations were real, something Leiterman did not care for because of the tendency to want to rush.[11] Technical problems associated with location shooting involved whether and how to light scenes, particularly for those filmed with a high speed camera for slow motion in a gymnasium: "There just wasn't enough light to shoot high speed, without putting in some fill light." Leiterman said he learned a lot making Rip-Off and he would never do it all the way he had done it again.[11]

Murray McLauchlan in 2009

Around the time of composing the score for Rip-Off with Gene Martynec, composer Murray McLauchlan released his first album, Songs from the Street (True North Records) in the summer of 1971.[13][14]

Rip-Off was released on VHS in the United States under the title Virgin Territory.[15]

The film was a commercial failure.[16]

John Hofsess faulted the film for being less funny than a comedy is supposed to be, and "while some good-natured spoofing of the intense, humorless youth scene is needed, the fault here is that acting as comic foils the characters seem even dumber than usual. ... The film is so uneven — annoyingly cute and predictable in one scene, genuinely funny and original the next — that it seems slapdash."[3] He praises the twenty-year-old Susan Petrie, who makes a "smashing debut" and steals scenes from every other actor, and proceeds to analyse both what works in the film and the contemporary audience response to similar films:

Over a period of about five years Shebib evolved a documentary style suffused with a wry, ironic humanism. It's a superb style for needling the sacred cows of the establishment and the sanctimonious bull of counter-culture groups. The best scenes in Rip-Off are done in that style. Parents aren't depicted as shrill, neurotic harpies and young people aren't given a self-congratulatory snow job. But Rip-Off is engaged in a thankless task. Audiences at the recent Canadian Film Awards guffawed every time a screen character said "groovy," "far out" or "out of sight" (nine of the 13 features shown had such a character, usually the film's token pothead). They weren't laughing with discernment at bad scripting. It was the hypocritical laughter of people who found only the quaintness of yesterday's slanguage ridiculous. It illustrates the danger to any film maker who bows to trendy things: Exploit the public's infirmities and the public will revenge itself.[3]

Wyndham Wise described the film as "a light, inoffensive comedy", the first half of which "holds together fairly well and has some fine comic scenes," but then it "becomes very episodic, almost to the point of boredom towards the end; it doesn't have much depth and if there is a point, it gets lost somewhere in the middle."[7]

Shebib himself thought the film "didn't work" at least in terms of asking social questions "because the vehicle I used wasn't right."[10] Leiterman conceded that the film was not flawless, "in either direction or in script. Or in cinematography. It's not a mind blowing film. It wasn't intended to be. It was dealing with many problems very lightly, but leaving a lot up to the audience's imagination to carry it on further. It was presenting a lot of problems that kids are up against now, and I think we did that fairly well.[11]

Rip-Off has been rated by Geoff Pevere among English Canada's "most visually impressive features" of the 1970s and 1980s.[12] Ralph Lucas, publisher of Northern Stars - Canadian Movie Database, suggests that the film "works better now" as a piece of nostalgia than at the time of its release: "Back then, some of the scenes were almost unwatchable, probably due to the embarrassment of the audience recognizing themselves up there on the screen."[6] Justin Decloux agrees, calling it "a before it's time film", a "high minded" Porky's which may be "a little too earnest at times".[17] TV Guide gives the film 3 stars out of 5: "A good understanding of teenagers' problems is displayed as the film documents their search to find something with which to identify and their dissatisfaction at discovering they're really not so different from everyone else."[18] It features as one of Greg Klymkiw's 101 best Canadian films.[19]