MovieChat Forums > The Member of the Wedding (1953) Discussion > I read the book, too....what a dangerous...

I read the book, too....what a dangerous place!


....and it was much as I expected. That town! Like another planet! How hard life must have been during the war in a place like that, so hot and muggy and...well, kind of primitive. No air conditioning, no TV, no computers, kids had to find their own amusement with no hovering parents driving them to the mall, etc. No social workers, no organized sports, though "The Law" figured prominently.

The kids in that town certainly had a lot of freedom, and certainly faced a lot of dangers, too! Guns and knives lying around; strange soldiers all over; kids walking the streets at night (can you imagine a John Henry toddling home at night on his own today???). And unhealthy, all that heat, humidity, and dust. Racial tensions just under the surface. Not to mention medicine, poor John Henry died a horrible death, no antibiotics available yet.

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I reckon I would've had a swell time in a town like that in those days.

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Inoft97, you may want to put a spoiler warning in your post, because you gave away a major one.


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This is similar to how I grew up in the 1960's. We ran around all day on our bikes-playing until time to go home for supper. It was a different world back then. Kids had been taught to not mess with things like guns and knives or taught how to use them properly.It was a great way to grow up. So much safer than today when a kid can get stolen right from their own yard.

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Yeah, dust, no computers and no social workers. Makes for a really dangerous world. ;)

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I don't believe the world is any more dangerous today than it was 60 years ago. The media is just more adept at scaring people, and with repetition, making people believe things are scarier.

Ever notice when the temps. get over 90 degrees(f) or there's 2 inches of snow on the ground, there's incessant blather from your local news station's X-TREME WEATHER TEAM? Or every August during beach-season, they run stories about how sharks are damn near running up on the sidewalks to bite people's legs off.

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