Racist?
I was quite shocked at the Dumb n----- stereotype.
You wouldn't get away with it these days.
I don't see why not. The man who said it was clearly not a good guy. It was something he said while getting ready to commit a crime.
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MovieChat Forums > The Killing (1956) Discussion > Racist?
Agree with the Admiral --- when you add up the mayhem and the corpses this gang was the cause of...of course they would use the N-word. Racismm is just one of their many sins.
shareExactly. The film established that he was a racist character by having him say something racist. Seems pretty straight-forward to me, so I'm not sure why the OP put a question mark in the title.
Unless of course, he/she thought it would help start a debate.
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Killing a Race Horse: Animal Cruelty?
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Please - its not like the movie is saying "What a great guy this is, how admirable"! He's a crook, and obnoxious as the word may be, this would be called realism.
shareAre you *beep* retarded? Show me one scene where they established he was racist.
The shooter just needed to say something he knew would get the lot attendant away from him. (Notice how he tried a couple of different things first, this was his last straw.)
Think before you type.
Saying something racist =/= being racist
No need to resort to insults, SW. He could have easily said, "Look -- get lost, stupid" or "Take a hike, creep", or whatever else they said in the 50s. The guy would have gotten the hint.
The writers used the racial slur for a reason. Perhaps to show that, in addition to being a cheap crook, he was also a racist a-hole.
Here's how your post should have read:
Show me one scene where they established he was racist.See, that wouldn't have been too difficult...right?
The shooter just needed to say something he knew would get the lot attendant away from him. (Notice how he tried a couple of different things first, this was his last straw.)
Saying something racist =/= being racist
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Remember this was the 50s. The n word was a regular occurrence.
shareRight on. The rifleman was doing what he had to do. There was no visible race issue with the attendant, as he treated him well at first. The attendant misjudged the shooter, who claimed to be a parapalegic war veteran, and nothing would have come of it if he hadn't brought the horseshoe for good luck. That was bad timing, but there's no way he could have known that. That entire sequence in the film was a kind of mini-tragedy of errors, with fortunately the shooter getting shot, not the basically decent attendant. I thought the horshoe's nail piercing the tire was a bad idea, though, and wish they hadn't gone that way. Too obviously ironic in an otherwise perfect film.
shareThis. Plus it set up the horse shoe in the tire, meaning the "racist" couldn't get away.
shareI didn't think the portrayal of the parking attendant was bad at all. At first Timothy Carey is trying to take advantage of him by lying about being a paraplegic and the guy stands his ground, but then he relents and because of what he thinks is their shared experience in the war he starts bonding with him. When Carey insults the man, he responds with mature anger rather than blowing up at him. I never got the impression he was dumb or anything of the like.
shareOh, sure - you don't "get away" with much of anything these days. But firstly, Tim Carey's character didn't even need to be racist as he was running out of time and had to resort to any means in order to get the black guy to leave so he could take his shot. A racial slur pretty much guaranteed he wouldn't be coming back. Secondly - what "dumb nig-er stereotype"? The guy seemed cultured and well spoken.
"facts are stupid things" - Ronald Reagan
It is scripted. The actor said it to make the man leave him so he can be free to shoot the horse as he is contracted to do.
He said a hurtful thing to the man to get him to go away. H called him a hurtful name. Its pretty easy to see.
It was an insincere weapon to say that to get the guy to go away... Unfortunately, he threw the horseshoe down behind the tyre...
Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right.
Unfortunately, he threw the horseshoe down behind the tyre...How the karmic wheel turns! BTW that beat cop was on the scene smartly.🐭
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This is a question on every bloody board on this site, I'm beginning to wonder if it's automatically generated by bots.
sharePeople making them may as well be bots for all intelligence they show in their OPs anyway.
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Applied Science? All science is applied. Eventually.
I actually was referring to the scene described by DF Dalton about the obsequious parking attendant. That sort of stereotype was banished decades ago.
shareHow do you think a black man interacted with white people in 1956? He tries to do his job according to the book and then shows compassion for a handicapped man, is treated poorly by an awful man and then does his job in quelling a bad dude.
I think he is painted in a good light living in a bad time.
Of course he is a racist: he specializes in shooting racing horses ridden by racing jockeys.
Seriously: somebody in this thread mentioned that there might be a racism bot set up in all IMdB discussion boards. And a very poorly designed one at that: not being able to identify genuine racism and tell it apart from a mere, objective portraying of a society at a given past point in the spatio-temporal continuum with different standards used in different social contexts.
The shooter/accomplice is a prejudiced, racist USA Caucasian just like a quite large fraction of the average low-educated American population was in the '50s. No more, no less, and certainly not in an atypical way. The situation here, including the amicable, open-minded black attendant, was not presented as a cliché.
I really don't understand how one would even imagine that Kubrick would depict a scene that would be the ultimate cliché and use it as a vehicle for his way of thinking. This reeks of a very poor familiarity with SK's work. There is simply no ground at all for such an assertion, and perhaps the OP would benefict in taking a few steps back and revisit the whole scene. And stop taking everything at its first degree. Especially because this is Kubrick, a director who had an extremely profunf understanding of human nature and who never just presents things in a plain, simple way. I know it may sound strange, but SK was not the cold, totally emotionless taxidermist who portrayed characters in a minimalist view, focusing instead on the power of images rather than human psychology. Rather on the contrary: Kubrick had an all-encompassing grasp of our human nature, which led in fact to a very dark and often extremely pessimistic portrayal of how humans behave, with our delusions, our lies and our self-destructing pursuits. War (Paths of Glory, Dr. Strangelove, Full Metal Jacket), sexual passion (Lolita, Eyes wide Shut), ambition (Barry Lyndon), violence as an end in itself (A Clockwork Orange), psychosis/neurosis as a way to extract ourselves from an unbearable reality (The Shining - and EWS?), petty crimes to evade from a petty life with the inescapable collision with the harsh reality of this world (The Killing) and, assuming that it had become his own film, the Savior Syndrome as a way to find a higher meaning to this life (Spartacus): virtually all of SK's movies show us metaphysical despair and/or the absurdity of life when dissected with the tools that show us the naked truth. Only with his magnum opus, 2001: A Space Odyssey does SK finally reveal to us his most enlightening and comforting view of the universe: mankind is not an isolated physicochemical experiment in a haphazard solar system in the Milky Way: we are connected with considerably more advanced civilizations from somewhere else. This is enough to open our eyes to a whole different view of our actual position in the order of things. And if the knowledge can be passed from them to us, a whole new species can emerge from ourselves, just like David Bowman appears to have accomplished via the Monolith.
But back to the OP's question: obviously, some people just don't seem capable of relativizing people's behavior from another time and use their limited standards of today to interpret social realities in a historical perspective. There is another name for this: sheer ignorance.
"The shooter/accomplice is a prejudiced, racist USA Caucasian just like a quite large fraction of the average low-educated American population was in the '50s."
I grew up among many blue-collar white people in the U.S.A. of the 1950s, those you would probably refer to as "low-educated". It was made clear to me by every adult guiding me in my young life that calling any black person by that epithet, or even thinking of them in that way, was wrong. Characterizing "a quite large fraction" of American Caucasians in the 1950s as racists is specious, simple-minded, revisionist history.