Sam Wilkinson
According to a faithful reader, I'm Ordinary Times's "least thoughtful writer." So I've got that going for me, which is nice.
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on Mass Shootings, Rampages, And Cascades of FailureA thing that fascinates me about the idea of red flag laws is that, after being told that gun rights are so ba…
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ICYMI
Does it strike anybody that the music in the first click is very like Montage from Team America: World Police?Report
Tony acknowledged how “dirty” the life he was engaged in was, & didn’t want Gina to end up deep in it. Bankrolling her salon was one thing, but being with Manolo put her too far in. Manolo corrupted her in his eyes.
Not saying there absolutely wasn’t the above mentioned ick factor, just that it ain’t necessarily reason #1 for that ending.Report
BTW: I always found his comment about capitalism interesting in context.Report
There are people in the world who are attracted to members of their own family through no fault of their own. It’s one thing to discourage them from acting on it due to the elevated risk from recessive genetic disorders, but there’s no need to be gratuitously mean about it. They have it tough enough as it is. You wouldn’t say that homosexuality makes a character especially gross, because that’s offensive to real homosexuals. Same deal here.Report
Brandon,
There are those people in the real world. This was in a movie. There’s no particular reason for Tony’s sexual attraction to his sister; it’s just oddly there, never specifically address, but just hinted at throughout until that final moment of exposure. That the film’s fans rarely comment upon its obvious presence only makes it all the stranger.Report
Remember that Scarface was a remake.
The dynamic you spoke of came from the 1932 movie, but was made a little more explicit, for its era. If you want to blame anyone, blame Howard Hawks.Report
There’s a similar dynamic in Sweet Smell of Success, where most of the dirty tricks the Walter Winchell character (played by Burt Lancaster) orders Tony Curtis to perform have the aim of getting his sister away from her boyfriend (Martin Milner as a jazz musician. Seriously.)Report
So, I guess we’re supposed to then see this as some attempt to reference earlier historical works in which family members sleep with one another? Was it something specific to these individual characters or the individuals they were based on?Report
Apparently the 1932 one is based on a book, has anyone read it? Maybe it’s originally from there.Report
This has turned from a Friday afternoon snark off into a genuine interest: does anybody know the answer to Glyph’s question?Report
The sister romance angle first appears in the ’32 film. It’s not in the book.Report
For the record, Hawks and Ben Hecht, the writer, sought to tell the story of the Borgias in a Warner Brothers “modern,” “urban” context. Reportedly the orginal (1932) script was considerably more explicit in this them than the resulting movie, but Hawks was rather uncomfortable with how it all played out–all explicit references were removed.Report