What A Mind Blower


I was born the year Suddenly was released. If our Ellen Benson was antigun then why was there a loaded pistol in the unlocked top drawer of the chest of drawers in the bedroom? And why would Hollywood release such a progun movie? I mean around 2010 there was a list of antigun actors and it was substantial. I should have realized that the anticommie mindset in Hollywood was still pretty active so Americans wanted their guns! Suddenly had all the elemements of current gun control arguments. I heard that they deny firearm sales to any U.S. military who has been in combat.

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I probably shouldn't dignify your post with a response, something that IMDB members in their collective wisdom have managed to do since you posted in 2013, but I feel that your distortion of the movie and its message bears responding to rather than risk someone think you might have a point. You don't. In fact your assessment is a complete perversion of the film's actual message.

The movie is far from anti-gun. In fact this movie is about as anti-gun as Birth of a Nation is pro-civil rights.

Just because you have a character who airs objections about guns and their use does not mean she's anti-gun, it's a personal decision not a political one. In fact the movie goes out of her way to make her a pariah for her views with the primary male characters, Sheriff Shaw and Pop Benson, her father, giving her lectures. By the end of the film she is forced to use a gun herself, thus completing her transformation from well-meaning-but-naive single mother to agent of justice in typical Hollywood fashion.

The entire movie, for better or worse, is a cold war era morality tale; its morality is clearly black-and-white, good versus evil. The typical kind of Hollywood pablum you would expect from the period.

It amazes me that you gun fetishists (for lack of a better word, because you aren't just pro-gun rights you worship guns and you worship the perceived power they give you, to the detriment of all else) can see a film like this and walk away with anything but that its pro-gun.

Despite the Right's constant claims that Hollywood has been a safe haven for communists and political enemies of the United States, according to your own twisted ideology, on the contrary, Hollywood has been the single most proponent and promulgator of right wing values in the history of the country.

The near-constant glorification of war, of modern-day American manifest destiny, of expedient characters and their Will to Power, of guns as the ultimate arbiter of conflict, of promoting racism / sexism / xenophobia to suit the tastes of the audience. Hollywood has done this all and few have blinked an eye.

But gun fetishists will never be satisfied short of Leni Riefenstahl glorification. That you attack this film is proof of that. It just goes to show you: when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail - but when it comes to NRA-types like yourself - it might be more apt to say: when all you have is a gun, everything is a target.

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The simple answer is IT WASN'T HER HOUSE.

It was her father-in-law's house. He was a retired federal agent. She was living in his house with her son under his largesse. A 1950s woman with minimal veteran's benefits wasn't about to put her foot down about an empty gun hidden in a drawer with the bullets/cartridge elsewhere.

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She had no leverage....Pops line-"quit being a woman" seems to be the atmosphere in the house

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In 1954 many people had a gun in the house, in a drawer rather than a safe. Lots of men and their sons had rifles and shotguns for recreational target shooting and hunting. It was perfectly common and normal, and wasn't a social stigma. Guns were as easy to obtain as fishing rods are today, yet mass shooting incidents were extremely rare, compared to today when firearms are closely regulated.

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It was made before the time when lunatics shot up schools, movie theaters, nightclubs, concerts and any other public place where people congregate.

Guns weren't an issue then. Most people didn't have guns. Not like now, where people buy guns to protect themselves from other people with guns.

"Stop being a woman" is one of the most obnoxious lines of dialogue, ever.

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In proportion, it looks like the murder rate is pretty close to the same now as when this movie came out. Mass shootings get the headlines, but robberies, assaults, rape, and home invasions are the main reason for defense.

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