No…How the West was Won
And,
Many, if not all of Wayne’s early movies were sprinkled with racism and misogyny.
No…How the West was Won
And,
Many, if not all of Wayne’s early movies were sprinkled with racism and misogyny.
Did they do their script review in a bar?
funny
I just watched The Devil and Daniel Webster (1941), where the devil’s name is also Scratch. It could be they didn’t want to say Satan or Devil, but the word Devil is in the movie’s title! Maybe it’s OK because the devil loses.
From the original story, set in New England:
She wasn’t the only one - wasn’t there a whole “white slavery” multi-episode thing? And I can recall at least 2 other rape plots (schoolmarm, and farmer’s daughter). Rape (and men killing to avenge rape) seems to have been a frequent plot point. I guess Blazing Saddles was right about the West…
Old Scratch is an old expression for the devil.
TV was a weird wacky place back then.
You could tell a guy to “get his ass outta here”, but only if a donkey was present in the scene.
And of course the old classic of pop music:
Miss Susie had a steamboat,
The steamboat had a bell.
Miss Susie went to heaven,
The steamboat went to Hell-o operator,
Or Harry Chapin, embarrassingly (or embarrdonkeyingly)
I git a tire round my gut
from sittin on my [thump]But it never gonna go away
See how cleverly they said HELL and BUTT. Oh heavens I might have got the vapors if it weren’t for the double meaning!
This predated TV. Movies took on the restrictive production code in the 30s; portrayals of rape was specifically banned.
Even before the code was adopted, movies sometimes avoided bad words. The pre-code The Front Page, used the final line of the play (“That son of a bitch stole my watch!”), but Walter Burns pounds on a typewriter as he says “bitch”, drowning it out.
This carried over to television when it was starting out.
A couple months back, one of my games served up an ad for one of those “we’ll let you read a chapter of this truly awfully-written story, in exchange for watching a lot of ads or paying far more than the cost of a paperback” apps.
The preview in the ad had “bad” words edited to replace them with something less offensive.
It took me a few minutes to figure out what “bbottominet”: was (“ass” replaced with “bottom”, so it was a “bassinet”).
In To Kill A Mockingbird, the “rape victim” uses some other phrase. “He tampered with me” or some such. It’s been a while since I saw it, so I don’t recall what she said, but the implication was unmistakeable.
Heh, when I was a kid a bunch of the books I read had various “offensive” words replaced with “unprintable”. Being a kid I just assumed that the characters were actually saying that and it was some weird swear word.
Yep. And had already permeated radio.
“He took advantage of me”.
God damn you. I was patiently scrolling to the end of the thread, just so I could say, “they’re not hard to find. I hear the walk into bars all the time.”
There was an amusing scene in the movie version of The Ghost and Mrs. Muir In order to help Mrs. Muir make some money the ghost, played by Rex Harrison, is dictating his memoirs as a sea captain. She balks at typing something he said and he tells her to write it as he said it. Angrily she goes TAP TAP TAP TAP into the typewriter.
Along these lines, I watched episode 16 of season 1 of Alfred Hitchcock last night (from Jan. 1956.) In it John Cassavetes (!) played an escaped con on the run. It was a classic home invasion story - he was lurking outside a house, heard the husband say he was leaving until 8 pm, then burst in with a knife.
At the beginning he said that he had been in stir a long time, that the wife was beautiful, and that since he was serving 3 life sentences in a state without a death penalty, he had nothing to lose. The implication was there, but then it was dropped.
Great surprise ending which I will not spoil.
And also along those lines, consider the very first episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, where Hitchcock himself directs Vera Miles as the victim of an unnamed assault, assumed to be a rape. It’s one of my favorite episodes of the series (in spite of the horrible sound). I liked the ending, very Hitchcockian.
Umm, see the OP.
See, it was a really good episode! (I remembered it, but not the OP)
It was done twice. It was also the first episode of a reboot of the series they did long after Hitch died. The remake was an hour long.
I’m watching it on the Roku channel, and it is pretty good.