Did the guy-on-guy action get cut out?

lisajohn:

Saving Private Ryan" is anti-Afro-American because they were not PC enough to show blacks (or Japanese-Americans) even though the US military was racially segregated in 1944. Revisionism is killing me.

The point is, black people fought in World War II also, but you can count on one hand the number of films that even acknowledge this (A SOLDIER'S STORY, RED TAILS, MIRACLE AT ST. ANNA,etc.)) Yes, they were segregated in World War II and there are were a lot of amazing stories about that (black American troops fighting for basic human rights that they didn't have, being treated like s*** all the time and less than in even uniform, and were still denied at the time when they came back home, even after dying for/serving their country in the war) but the thing is, that's no excuse for always making movies that completely ignore black Americans' contribution to World War II. There isn't a damn thing "PC" or revisionist about acknowledging that.

Tired of people throwing up the words "PC" or "revisionist" every time we as black Americans want to have our contributions to the war effort or anything else we're contributed to America (which is our country too, btw, not just the country of these crazy-a** white right-wing nuts who were hollering a few years ago about how they "want their country back"---exactly who the hell do they want it back from? And funny how they only started hollering all that stupid nonsense when a black President was finally elected. ) acknowledged in a film. As if there's something wrong with just wanting that. White Americans weren't the only Americans who fought in World War II, but you'd never guess that by the majority of World War II films, other than the few I just mentioned, or unless you watched Ken Burns' documentary about World War II. That's the issue here. Like it would have been cool if Clint Eastwood could have made a companion piece to FLAGS OF OUR FATHERS that was about black soldiers and their experiences (like he made that companion piece about the Japanese soldiers)---point being is, for most of American history, our experiences and contributions were always left out of the history books or completely ignored by racist white historians. That's why it's an issue for some of us.


Only just caught the last part of KING RAT (never been able to catch the whole thing from beginning to end) on the MOVIES channel (which shows it ever now and then) but what caught my eye about the film about was how stark and haunting the cinematography was, and how stripped down and de-glamourized everything about the film was---looked ore like a European film than a typical Hollywood production of that era. I'm thinking maybe it had to with the fact that a British director (Bryan Forbes) made it. It's comparable of another World War II film that came out same year as this one called THE HILL (directed by Sidney Lumet) which in filmed in a similar stark and harsh manner (you can actually almost feel the oppressiveness of the heat in the desert watching that film---that's how good it is.


And since films couldn't deal openly with homosexuality at that time, there were other ways of being covert about it. Just because dudes weren't rubbing up against each other dosen't mean there wasn't something going on---it was just more suggested than anything else.