Katie Tippel
Short description
Set in the late nineteenth century, Katie Tippel follows a poor farming family who leave their village for the city in search of a better life. The move brings continued hardship rather than relief, and teenage Katie finds herself treated as an object by the men around her. When her father loses his job and her older sister turns to drink, her mother arranges for Katie to sell herself rather than see the household starve. What begins as a means of survival in Amsterdam's shadowy underworld becomes, through Katie's resilience, a path into respectable society, though the men who exploit her leave their mark along the way. The film draws on the autobiographical writing of Neel Doff.
Paul Verhoeven directed the film, the second of the sixteen features listed for him, arriving between Turkish Delight in 1973 and Soldier of Orange in 1977. Gerard Soeteman wrote the screenplay and Rob Houwer produced; Monique van de Ven plays Katie, with Rutger Hauer as Hugo, Andrea Domburg as Katie's mother, Hannah de Leeuwe as her sister Mina, Jan Blaaser as her father and Eddie Brugman as Andre, among a credited cast of twenty-three.
On IMDb the film holds a rating of 6.7 from around 2,900 votes, while on TMDB it stands at 6.3 from roughly 58 votes, suggesting a modest but durable reputation among viewers. It runs 102 minutes.
What's left behind the scenes
- A more accurate translation of the title is "Ketie, the Streetwalker".
- Director Paul Verhoeven agreed to direct the film after reading only a detailed synopsis, which told the story of the main character alongside a description of the social and political climate in the country during the period depicted. When pre-production was already in full swing, Verhoeven and producer Gerard Soeteman reworked the synopsis into a screenplay, but producer Rob Houwer refused to give it the green light, considering it too expensive. Houwer instructed Verhoeven and Soeteman to focus on the heroine's personal problems and remove almost all social issues from the script, including scenes of rebellion, which were, in fact, the reason Verhoeven had agreed to take on the project.
- Problems during filming arose not only from the script. Cinematographer Jan de Bont and actress Monique van de Ven had met on the set of Verhoeven's drama *Turkish Delight* (1973). De Bont had a very ambiguous attitude towards filming nude scenes with van de Ven, so the atmosphere on the set of *The Fourth Man* was quite tense. They even hired a local prostitute to film the nude scenes instead of van de Ven, and at one point, Verhoeven's wife, Martine, a psychologist by profession, had to be invited to the set to help defuse the atmosphere.
- The film was shot in The Hague, Utrecht, Amsterdam, Leiden, and Brussels due to the abundance of old buildings there. Even so, during filming, props like a baker's cart or basket weavers had to be placed on the set to hide attributes of the twentieth century from the viewers – antennas, parking meters, supermarkets.
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