ok. Sorry.
Thanks, I appreciate it. I’m on your side in this one, by the way. If there’s another thread about that film, I’ll be defending it too.
According to this IMDB list, if it’s accurate, it looks like the movie is Frankenstein Conquers the World (1965), as it is typically titled in the US. If that’s the case, the monster is Baragon. This movie would give birth to a “sequel” some years later *“War of the Gargantuas,” although there’s really no obvious connection. “War of the Gargantuas” was proposed as a sequel, but somewhere that idea was dropped, and there aren’t any references to the earlier movie.
Great movie, I’ll have top watch it again now! In 1976 I rode a Greyhound bus from Pittsburgh to Sacramento. My ticket was good for 1 month and cost $76 (promo special with the bicentennial). When I got to Sacramento I was using the bus station bathroom. A homeless guy had just vomited in the sink. A cop came in and saw the mess. He told the guy that he had been warned to stay out earlier that day. Then the cop hit the guy across the front of his knees. Hard. I was shocked, and mosied on out.
The first porn movie to hit the big screens in a meaningful way was Boys in the Sand, which debuted almost a year before Deep Throat.
For exceptionally different values of “meaningful” I guess…
But as Argent requested this is a thread about Midnight Cowboy.
Rapist gets raped by mad scientists in order to condition him to feel if not remorse, pain for his impure thoughts? The end result is the violation of the one thing that brought him solace and happiness, the violation of his holiest of holies, Ludwig Van. Are you sure I need to watch it again and that I am characterizing it incorrectly?
I don’t remember this at all. Nor do I remember the rape flashbacks. And I just saw the movie a few months ago. Weird. The library must have given me a censored version or something. WTF?
I dunno. I thought it was sweet. I definitely got an “end of his worries” vibe from it. Plus he got to die in the arms of probably the only person who ever cared for him. (Although I think the homosexuality angle is ludicrous, personally.)
I don’t think it’s ludicrous. I’m not saying they were gay for each other. Not at all. But that’s what subtext is. And any text that has so much anxiety about homosexuality (or anything) pretty much welcomes that sort of reading, because the text is routinely drawing the audience’s attention to the possibility. “I’m not gay! I’m not gay! I’m not gay! I’m not gay! I’m really not gay! GAY! GAY! GAY!” In order for the protests to have any meaning, the possibility must exist. So every time the anxiety surfaces, the reader (viewer) is invited to think about it, and subtext is created. Ratzo and Joe might not have been having sex (or wanted to have sex), but the subtext exists, and it’s so obvious to me that I would be beyond shocked if it was just an accident.
Plus, it’s clearly a love story between the two men. Except, in most of popular entertainment, a love story must be a romance, and romance generally includes sexual tension–even though clearly other types of love exists. It’s difficult to view a love story and not make the leap to sexual tension. That doesn’t mean the creator intended the viewer to make the leap, of course. But at the same time, the creator has absolutely no power on whether or not the leap is made. So subtext is introduced to the movie that way, too.
ETA: I watched this movie for the first time last night because of this thread. I really enjoyed it, though I was pretty bummed out at the end, too. Still, glad I finally saw it.
The subtext is in YOUR head - not in the movie.
That’s why it’s called subtext. It was in my head too.
I see MC as more about friendship and loyalty. Joe Buck come to NYC-and winds up broke, and ignored. He is adopted by ratzo, who gives him a place to stay-he (Ratzo) also shows Joe how to survive, and helps him. In the end, Joe tries to get Ratzo to Florida, but he dies. So in the end, Joe shows he could be loyal to his friends. the scenes where Joe is preyed upon by the pedophiles is terrifying, but true-it is like Odyssius passing through the underworld, being persued by demons.
“The scene where Joe is preyed upon by the pedophiles”? What? If you’re talking about that rape scene in the flashback, Joe is at least 16 years old.
The screenplay does not indicate that Joe kills the man, Towny (short for Townsend):
It’s a symbolic response to the man’s implied desire for oral sex and of Joe’s impatience with the man’s long telephone call with his mother.
Barnard Hughes was in his early 50s when that movie was made, and as I remember him, he already looked as though he were in his 80s.
Who was the crazed evangelist nut that Ratzo tied Joe up with? That was one of the funniest scenes in an otherwise grim movie-Joe Buck on his knees raying to a electrically illuminated jesus, on the bathroom door!
I thought they were Joe’s friends. They were all chasing the girl around together, throughout the flashbacks, and then Joe actually got to know her.
You’ve got a point there.
Fair enough, but the story reminded me most of all of myself and my close friend/ex-roommate, with whom I would have been completely platonic even if we were gay or of opposite genders.