Jerry Lewis' Most Controversial Film May Finally See the Light of Day This Year
Jerry Lewis' Most Controversial Film May Finally See the Light of Day This Year
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Jerry Lewis' Most Controversial Film May Finally See the Light of Day This Year
Holy shit! I honestly thought it was gone forever. His son claimed the negatives were lost a while back.
Meanwhile, who knows if we'll ever see Batgirl, Scoob and Coyote vs. Acme, all shelved by WB after or near completion.
And then Netflix shelved the nearly-complete Halle Berry film The Mothership.
How many modern films will suffer the same fate as The Day the Clown Cried and not even run the risk of being offensive like Jerry Lewis feared?
In a similar vein. My son watched Blazing Saddles over the weekend. It startled me how overtly racist the movie was, but in a mocking way. There’s a lesson to be learned there for today’s media. I think Americans have forgotten how to laugh at themselves.
Edit: I didn’t mean the movie itself was racist, but how it depicted racism.
Then you must not have known anything about it beforehand, lol. That's like saying you watched Spaceballs and were startled by how referential it was to other sci-fi movies, but in a mocking way. Like, yeah, that's literally the whole point of the movie.
I think Blazing Saddles is an unusual case because it was written by Richard Pryor, who was funny enough to write something that contained overt racism but still be extremely funny since it was a mockery of it.
But I can think of more recent movies that are similar. It's not that new, but still within the proper time frame I think, but Spike Lee's Bamboozled comes to mind. I also think Get Out could have been turned into a really racist film if done by a white person.
All three of these films have a commonality which has nothing to do with the era in which they are made. The commonality is that they are movies that have highly offensive racism in them, which would be scandalous in the wrong hands, but since they are movies made by black people looking at the idea of racism, it works.
I wouldn't say Blazing Saddles itself was overtly racist, but it did depict the overt racism of the day. It is even coded in the movie that racism is bad. The villains are all racist with some forms of self awareness of the situation. The redemption of all white hero characters require that they try to stop being racist.
I felt like Django Unchained did the same thing, but as a straight up action movie. All the heroes believe in equality while dealing with an unequal system; all the villains defend the institution of slavery.
A lot of people focused on the movie saying the N-word without thinking of who said it in the movie and what it says about them.