Ramble on
Exciting things in my life:
- My hair is a brighter purple than it's ever been
- I have honeycomb
- After a week and a half of minimal human contact, I finally got back out into the world yesterday
- Probably as a direct result of the above statement,I'm feeling lots better about things...not so depressed as I was. Still not awesome, but way better than this weekend.
It's a well done movie, no doubt about that. Very suspenseful, great acting of course (once again fueling my undying love for Gregory Peck), good story. And it actually dealt with some pretty dark stuff for the 60's...Robert Mitchum (whose character is named Max Cady) was put in jail for assaulting a woman, and spends most of the movie trying to rape Gregory Peck's wife and daughter. Seriously. No one ever says it straight out, of course, but it's obvious that's what he intends. And there are two scenes that were really unnerving and dealt with the same subject...Cady sexually assaults a woman who's described as a "drifter" (which I think is a sneaky term for prostitute) and she tells police that she can't testify against him because she can't face having to give the details of the assault. Later Gregory Peck and his wife have a similar conversation about what would happen to their daughter if Cady raped her. Gregory Peck was saying that they wouldn't put her through testifying because she'd have to give details, and she'd have to describe what had happened to the court. It was dead unnerving to hear that stuff, especially in the context of the time the movie was made. From the way they were talking, it sounded like the movie was taking a fairly bold stance on rape and sexual assault. I think it was implied that women were still partially blamed for their assault...at least, the way Gregory Peck's character (whose name is Sam Bowden) made it sound, it was still something to be hidden rather than reported. Weird.
The other thing that kind of got to me was Cady's treatment. It was weird. For the first ten minutes of the movie, Cady is just a stalker. Now I realize that's totally creepy/illegal, but I don't think there were stalking laws in 1961 or else the movie would've been over by the middle. Anyway, by the standards of the time he doesn't do anything illegal until he poisons the family dog about 15 minutes in. And yet before that point, Bowden gets the chief of police to basically harass the shit out of Cady on false charges. They even try to arrest him for "lewd acts" when he's in bed with a woman, which is nothing if not bizarre. So on the one hand, the good guys in this film are morally reprehensible for a lot of the movie. Bowden hires a bunch of thugs to beat Cady up when he realizes he can't get Cady arrested, and later he formulates a plan to murder Cady (with the police chief's help?!). On the other hand, Cady is, well, a bad guy, and by film noir rules, he deserves everything he gets. Now I realize it's only a movie, and it's a film noir at that, so there's going to be a lot of moral ambiguity. But no one even questions harrassing Cady in the beginning of the film, when he's done nothing illegal. He hires a lawyer who's portrayed as fussy and overly liberal, but who I think has a point when he says that the police are unfairly trying to run Cady out of town. I get the impression that the filmmakers didn't realize anything was wrong with the way Cady is treated in the first 10-15 minutes.
I've started really analyzing the hell out of every movie I see nowadays. It's kind of fun and interesting, and I like thinking about social ramifications, artistic choices, how the story could have been better. It's why I love looking at the director's commentary. It's kind of funny though, I can't just watch a movie anymore without analyzing it, and now my el-jay is becoming a movie blawg. This has got to be more interesting than me whining about my life though (I hope).