She is a mute seamstress in the New York garment district. In a single day she is attacked twice. Then she takes the gun.

MS. 45 (1981) is Abel Ferrara's revenge film, and it does something the genre rarely manages: it makes the rage articulate. Thana cannot speak a word the whole picture, yet she becomes the loudest person in any room she walks into. Her vengeance starts narrow, aimed at the men who hurt her, then widens until it takes in every leering, grabbing, condescending man on the block.

The Halloween party finale, Thana in a nun's habit, is one of the great closing sequences in low-budget American film.

It was shot guerilla-style around New York for roughly $62,000, often without permits, and the city it captures is grimy and gone.

The film is inseparable from its star. Zoë Lund, credited then as Zoë Tamerlis, was seventeen during filming and holds the screen with a stillness most veterans never find.

She went on to co-write Ferrara's Bad Lieutenant before her death at thirty-seven. Ms. 45 is the clearest record of what was lost.