Watching old movies, you cannot help but find that things were definitely different. Sometimes, it's the outfits, other times it's realizing how difficult information was to gather and then there's the amazement at how anyone really ever got by without cell phones. Those are the quaint times.
And then there are the things that would be ending careers and bringing out organizational leaders to denounce anyone involved in a film. There are times where even I'm going, "at least one person on this film set had to have said something!"
Take Judge Priest. I would call the film racist, but there needs to be a new word that means racist, but not in that old-fashioned grandpa-doesn't-know-better way and definitely not in that is-C. Thomas ever going to apologize for Soul Man kind of way. I realize I'm going after a film by the great John Ford starring Will Rodgers. For a guy with a long-running "Follies" show, I certainly expected something better. Not that I've ever seen said Follies, nor am I sure what the Follies are so follie-ful about when I come to think of it.
Either way, it's most certainly about stereotyping that makes "I don't know nothin' about birthin' no babies!" from Gone with the Wind look like the highest order of intellectual fare. Not to worry too much, because Hattie McDaniel is in Judge Priest as well. Instead of playing personal maid to a spoiled brat, she's working for Judge Priest in between singing spirituals with the other neighborhood maids. Worse yet is Judge Priest's maybe-kinda-worker we first meet on trial for stealing chickens - he sleeps through his trial, only wants to sit and fish and speaks in a manner that would leave even Johnny Chochran going, "yeah, he talks 'black.'" I realize that Judge Priest was made in 1934, but I guarantee you that at least one person on the film was going, "I know this is Will Rogers and all, but someone is going to realize we're a bunch of racists, aren't they?"
Judge Priest makes the list mostly because of John Ford and because Will Rodgers was basically the Will Ferrell of his time - put him in a movie no matter how thin the script and hope to make a ton of cash.
Fast forward 25 years. Guess what the awful thing is in Ride Lonesome! No, not the fact that good and evil are often in relative shades. Behind a great story where our Bounty Hunter brings in one wanted man only to flush out another while fending off wanna-bes only interested in the bounty to absolve their own lesser crimes is one of the most sexist film I believe I've ever seen. This includes porn.
The men come to an outpost manned by a lone woman waiting for her husband to return. Seeing as how she's been there for an undetermined amount of time and has survived despite trapping her breasts in the height of gravity-defying 50's bra technology, the men immediately assume she's incapable of caring for herself. And by "the men," I mean that the bounty hunter, the wanted man and the petty criminals all feel the need to tell her how she's in need of protecting. The plot rolls around as you're never quite sure who is on the up-and-up and who is really doing the right thing, but you know that Carrie is just a girl in need of constant protecting. The men go over this approximately every 4 minutes. It made me long for the reasonableness of the Little Rascal's He-Man-Woman-Haters Club.
I don't expect that everything will hold up over the years, but there are things that even floor me from time to time.
0 comments:
Post a Comment