The Racism?


Just finished watching this film and have to say I thought it was decent.

However there was one scene that stopped me from fully enjoying it and left a sour taste and I just wanted to see if anyone else noticed it.

It was during the scene between Ginley and the girls black bodyguard when he returns home to find him in his flat.

Ginley calls him 'Mighty Joe Young' asks him 'When did you come down from the trees' and tells him to 'get back to his banana's'. Ginley also refers to him later as 'King Kong.'

Yes I know it was 1971 and times were different but it still didn't sit right with me.

Seems like the scriptwriter was trying to pass off racist remarks as noir-esque wisecracks and it seemed to spoil my enjoyment of the rest of the film, anyone else feel the same?

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I watched it last night too, and had forgotten that bit - it did grate a little bit to be honest.

Mind you, when I was growing up I heard people say things like this every day - the early seventies seem a million miles away now. I know what you mean though, it did seem a little bit gratuitous even for 1971.

Don't let it spoil the film for you...

AndyG

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Of course the remark was racist, but this was Liverpool in the early seventies, and no doubt people talked like that, and the film reflects that (in the same way that the dialogue in many films is little more than four letter words strung together, and justified on the grounds that it is the language poeople use).

To be fair, the riposte, "When did you crawl out from under your stone" might be held to be equally racist and abusive.

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If somebody broke into my flat I don't know what I'd say to them !
I wouldn't be holding much back that is for sure..........

It's a pity Ginley wasn't ready for that punch !

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What I took out of that scene, was that he was trying to act like a tough gumshoe...he was trying to be tough like the characters he was emulating throughout the whole movie. I didn't see his character as racist...but I can see how you might looking back 40 years.

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He also calls him a spade throughout the film.

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That was the point:

he's being threatened..enough of the niceties !

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I live in Liverpool in 2011 and I hear worse things at work every day. Mind you, I never hear anything worse than Frank Finlay's scouse accent.

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Its a film of its time and that parlance was rather common in life and television etc.


Its that man again!!

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To the opening poster.

The film is a document from 1971, and therefore an accurate portryal of language used at the time. If you get so easily offended it may be wise for you not to watch films pre mid-eighties.

That is how things were before the minority PC brigade started enforcing their morals on the majority.

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"The film is a document from 1971, and therefore an accurate portryal of language used at the time. If you get so easily offended it may be wise for you not to watch films pre mid-eighties."

Agree, either that or perhaps the OP should petition for it to be censored. That's what seems to happen so much now, the ideological 'liberal' elite, airbrushing out the past if it no longer fits with their present day socio-political views, or inserting a fake one that does, as if they were party officials from a former Soviet Eastern Bloc state. Or perhaps North Korea.



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Come off it, racism has alays been reprellent, which is why only fools and cowards are racist. Pretending that it was different back then is a cop-out, racism has always been despised by decent people.

Marlon, Claudia and Dimby the cats 1989-2005, 2007 and 2010.

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+1, Squeeth

"Someone has been tampering with Hank's memories."

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It was jarring and unnecessary. I notice in a lot of British portrayals of Americans they are more blunt, more rude, and much less concerned with social niceties in making their point. They holler "shut up!" say "goddamned" and mutter in bad dry-as-gravel accents of old westerns, and detective and gangster films. Maybe Ginley, in affecting a tough guy, tries to emulate that manly, take-charge "American-ness" and says a bunch of racist remarks to prove himself as being that hard-boiled detective of old films. But, those films may have racist assumptions but seldom have a character (the protagonist, no less) hurling off-color, racist remarks to sound tough. Maybe, though it's not addressed, the act is a way for Ginley to overcome or confront his fears, phobias (women, people of color) through his interpretation of a gumshoe detective. His affected character is a way for him to be blunt and say the things he wouldn't dare to speak otherwise. Just a thought.

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No one sees a parallel between Hammett's tough-guy characters and their verbal treatment of homosexuals and Ginley's verbal treatment of the black bodyguard? Just an update. Same old smearing, different group.

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I suspect it's as simple as the film having its tongue firmly in cheek. You and the film are supposed to both know and agree this is bad behavior, but they're going to do it anyway. That's the joke.

As a rule when you mix genres in a movie you're in trouble. --William Goldman

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