Anybody else happy when Jim died?

lol :-D

well his dad did drive his mom to the insane asylum ;)

Yes!!! Kirk Douglas' character of a brutal cop actually suited him well. His father must have done a real job on him when he was a kid. He was mean and had no sympathy for anything or anyone. If I were his wife I would have dumped him and run away with Gerald Mohr who played Tammy Jacopetti. Mohr was gorgeous and so nice to her. I could just picture Douglas beating his wife in the future so it was best that he got shot.

I'm surprised nobody mentioned the fact that he considered his father a hoodlum. he kept saying "I know the criminal mind" like a mantra. i like to recommend this film to younger viewers when they say some snide remark about the saccharine '50s, when nothing ever happened. let's see, you got yer organized crime lord, George McCready running both an abortion clinic and baby factory, a crazed cop whom a shrink these days could write a thesis about- not to mention the junkie thief. Wiseman did the best "jonesing" act I think I've ever seen.

I have no idea what movie the OP is watching. My goodness, Jim was NEVER, EVER, considered the hero of the movie. The entire movie is a character study about him. It wasn't about right or wrong. The movie has nothing to do with right or wrong. It's about a man who is struggling to find himself.

I wouldn't say we're suppose to hate him, but we really weren't supposed to like him either. I say pity is the right word we're suppose to feel for Jim. He's a guy that's driven by moral ethics and ambition to prove he's not a man like his father. His high moral code became very nauseating and nearly impossible to be with. He wasn't a bad guy by any means, just a very troubled one. We can't fault him for wanting to do what is right, but he's a guy that is very flawed on his view points in life. His view points on what's right and wrong were so misguided, miscalculated that he couldn't recognize the many wrongs that he represented.

At a moral point he was honest and sincere, but just simply misguided. It's easy to assume he views himself as some sort of elitist, but that's far from it. He held himself to the same standards he expected out of others.

He's bottled up with a lot of rage inside and lacks much empathy for anything that's remotely against his point of views. His entire world is viewed as black and white and he is struggling throughout the entire movie to understand how to compromise, bend, and see past any human flaws in anyone. It's not that he doesn't want to, it is that he doesn't know how!

Not just with anyone, but his own self!

The shoplifter, to the butcher, to even his OWN wife all demonstrate his own demons he's fighting against. That there's no black and white in this world. He can't see that. He doesn't understand it. Not everyone and thing is pure good and innocent like he wants them to be, and not everyone is pure evil either.

When he realized he became the man he hated and loathed all his life, it was a breaking point for him. Then when he even empathized a bit with his father he finally got it. Not everyone is just put on this earth to be bad, pure evil, and do terrible things. There's not this light switch that turns on and says "do bad things to people". Circumstances and situations can lead someone down that path.

He basically had lost everything and anything he thought he had. He himself was a vindictive man without any realization of it. He couldn't deal with it or make any sense of any of it anymore. He felt he failed. At the end we're suppose to feel sadness for the guy even if we don't like him. It shows he has a conscience, and that he was just shelled off from reality. At the very last moment there's a small amount of redemption on his part. Forgiveness and compassion was finally found when he was finally able to empathize and see his own faults and wrong doings. He was blinded by them the entire movie. It's not easy for someone to come to the conclusion that your actions are wrong, vicious, and just flat out cruel.

He wasn't a bad man at all. He was neither bad nor good. He was a flawed guy with the right mind to want to do good, and represent something clean and noble in the world. However, he was bottled up anger, resentment, and lack of compassion and sympathy that caused him to be rather destructive and volatile with others. Which all pinned from his childhood. He was just emotionally abused and scarred as child that clearly had a very unhealthy effect on him as he developed as a grown man.

The movie is about a man fighting against himself, more so than anyone in the movie. Just different people and situations represented what he was fighting against at a moral standpoint. Jim had no idea what he was doing until he did it to the very person he loved the most. When he realized the destructive effect it had on others it caused him to self destruct. When you see it that way it is easier to empathize with Jim, and not mark him as a villain.

That's what I love about this movie. It's very deep, real, raw, and really way ahead of its time. I think a lot of people don't quite get it, which probably explains why it wasn't as big as it should have been back then.