1 - Me Tarzan, You Junk

Summary

This was published in 1978 by the Canadian film magazine Take One. It was written at the height of the Hollywood Renaissance (mid-1960s to late '70s) when nobody knew it would be called that; it just seemed that there were a great number of powerful new films that commanded attention. What bothered me was not that there was more sex and violence in the movies but that violence was being endorsed in preference to other solutions and in a notably sexist context. Over the years I came to terms with A Clockwork Orange and some of the other films in this article (and lost my enthusiasm for the Billy Jack pictures), but I still agree with what it says about how certain movies set out to manipulate audiences and reinforce systems of values. Although the majority of violent films today are not as sexist as they used to be, they continue to take violent solutions for granted. I regret that I forgot to describe the final gunfight in High Noon, where the wife claws at the villain to free herself and to allow her husband to shoot him. While the points of the last two gunfight scenes are similar (she is again responsible for a death and is again working with her husband), she grows in the audience's estimation because this time she attacks a man in the face with her hands instead of shooting a man in the back.